Good Pickings

The choosy New York Drama Critics Circle, which has been known to hold on to its annual awards when no recipient was considered deserving, met last week to name the season's best productions. The vote:

P: Best American play: Ketti Frings's adaptation of Thomas Wolfe's novel, Look Homeward, Angel.

P: Best foreign play: John Osborne's Look Back in Anger.

P: Best musical: Meredith Willson's The Music Man.*

When the results were announced, no man in Manhattan walked on lighter feet than portly, grey-haired Kermit Bloomgarden, 53, the first producer (The Music Man; Look Homeward, Angel] to win two Critics Circle awards in one season. He was also a walking contradiction to his own observation that "any man who becomes a producer is a damned fool." Two Bloomgarden hits of 1955 and 1956, The Diary of Anne Frank and The Most Happy Fella--also Critics Circle award winners--still have road companies going strong. "Together, the four shows net over $40,000 a week," grins Bloomgarden, "but, of course, I don't get it all."

How much Bloomgarden pockets each week is his secret. But it is no secret that he did a hard sell to get co-backers for both current hits. With Angel, he had so much trouble that he finally had to give co-producer billing to a syndicate of 200 individual investors who put up $46,425 of the $125,000 cost. CBS, which put up the $400,000 for My Fair Lady, brushed off a $300,000 chance to finance The Music Man, missed a deal for 40% of the profits. Collecting modest sums from many angels, Bloomgarden got Music Man to Broadway on his own.

A practicing C.P.A. until 1933, Producer Bloomgarden has a good record for picking hits (The Lark, Death of a Sales man, Command Decision), but he has had his flops too. His basic criterion for picking: "I have to like it. It's a terrible thing to do a show just because you think it's going to make a million bucks."

Bloomgarden sometimes snaps up a show the first time he hears it. "When Meredith Willson telephoned and asked me to produce The Music Man," he recalls, "I said to myself, 'Who the hell is Willson?' It had been so long since I'd heard him on the radio I'd forgotten all about him. He played the show through for me the next day, and we signed a contract that night."

Bloomgarden's knack of spotting a good property has built up a roster of backers who will put up cash for anything he picks. Should an investor have more confidence in a producer than in a director or actor? "Definitely," says Bloomgarden. "A director looks at a script and says, 'Boy, what I can do with this!' An actor says, 'How good I'll be in this part.' A producer has more integrity. He has to--he has more people to worry about."

* Which this week also got the Antoinette Perry award as the season's outstanding musical, collected four additional "Tonys": for most outstanding male star (Robert Preston), supporting musical players (David Burns, Barbara Cook) and musical conductor (Herbert Greene).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.