Report from the Road

In tryout towns a sleeper jump from, Manhattan, curtains rose last week on. the new theater season. With only 32 Broadway theaters available, and more than 100 productions hopefully scheduled for the big time, everyone, from financial angel to hemmed-in playwright tried to read the future from the first returns.

The Miracle Worker. The very first scene of William (Two for the Seesaw) Gibson's play about the early education of Helen Keller pulses with the vitality of success. Patricia Neal, stage mother of the deaf, mute and blind little girl, discovers her baby's infirmities, and galvanizes the audience with an eerie scream of despair. The rest of the show maintains much of that tension--the frustrating sessions with doctors, the spoiled and rebellious child matching wills with her inexperienced but determined teacher, the excitement as the afflicted youngster begins to show some curiosity about her world. Anne Bancroft, the earthy, Bronx-accented star of Seesaw, plays the teacher, Annie Sullivan; ten-year-old Patty ($64,000 Challenge) Duke is the young Helen Keller. "A superb team," the Philadelphia Bulletin called them. "It has been a long time since such an ovation . . . has been so honestly earned," wrote the Inquirer critic after the eight curtain calls of opening night. "Since all its moments are precious, one doesn't realize until it is over that The Miracle Worker is a long play."

Take Me Along. With Jackie Gleason. Walter Pidgeon. Una Merkel, and half a dozen lighthearted tunes to brighten the familiar story of teen-age growing pains, Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness has been turned into a promising musical. "A high-powered product, successfully designed for theatergoers with a taste for unabashed razzmatazz and schmaltz," said the Christian Science Monitor after the show opened in Boston. As the alcoholic, irrepressible visitor who disturbs a New

England couple already distressed by their son's peccadilloes, Gleason sparkles with the skill of an old vaudevillian. When Pidgeon joins him in an old-style soft-shoe number, Take Me Along has the look and sound of a hit.

The Golden Fleecing. Last season, this show got as far as a Broadway rehearsal before it was withdrawn "for revision." This season, it got a new ending between New Haven and Boston. Director Abe Burrows claims to be confident that he has it licked. The story of Navy officers on shore leave in Venice, using the fleet's top-secret computer in a try at beating a casino roulette wheel, has most of the elements of a successful farce. Said the Boston Globe: "Uneven, but often wildly amusing fun."

The Gang's All Here. Although the authors (Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee) insist that they have not confined their history to the seamy politics of Warren Gamaliel Harding, no one who remembers the Teapot Dome scandal will feel obliged to believe them. Not that telling the truth is bad theater, but in this case it does not seem to pay. Melvyn Douglas does nobly as the ash-flaked, unbuttoned ex-Senator trying to forget the presidency, an office he neither understands nor is fitted for, and veteran Comedian Bert Wheeler is a natural as his poker-playing sidekick. But, reported the Philadelphia Bulletin, it is "a curiously unfocused play." Authors Lawrence and Lee were still hopefully rewriting.

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