Report from the Road

In tryout towns from San Francisco to Boston, new shows were primping, polishing and rehearsing last week for Broadway. Whatever their merits, none seemed more certain to turn into a hot ticket than the new Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, The Sound of Music. A sentimental evening with the famous Trapp family of singers, the show tells the story of Maria Rainer (Mary Martin), the young postulant from an Austrian convent, whose love for a widower, Captain Georg von Trapp (Theodore Bikel), and his seven children displaces her desire to become a nun. As one theatergoer summed it up: "Nellie Forbush in The Nun's Story." The advance sale has already passed $2,000,000.

Other shows, not quite so prosperous, are moving to Manhattan with equal enthusiasm. Among the more promising: P: Fiorello!, with newcomer Tom Bosley an accurate re-creation of New York's "Little Flower" La Guardia, is filled with warmth, schmalz and a lively choreography that amounts to expertly organized pandemonium. Directed by George Abbott, boasting a bouncy score (by Jerry Bock) and urbane lyrics (by Sheldon Harnick), Fiorello! moves from Manhattan's garment district to Washington's Capitol Hill to New York's City Hall at a breathless pace. Crowed the Philadelphia Inquirer: "The new champion!" P: A Loss of Roses has Shirley Booth as the listed star, but until the Booth part gets beefed up, the show belongs to Carol (Pajama Game) Haney. Latest of Playwright William Inge's lost characters, Haney's Lila Green is a high-spirited, Class-D showgirl who left home to search for the bright lights, but who has come back beaten, wanting "to crawl inside a man's shirt and stay there." Survivor of a disastrous marriage and a tour in a mental hospital, Lila moves in on Old Friend

Helen Baird (Shirley Booth), has an affair with Helen's son, is driven to a suicide attempt when the boy discards her. Having found "four successive hit plays in corners of the commonplace overlooked by his fellow playwrights," wrote the Washington Evening Star, "Inge goes for a fifth in A Loss of Roses." P: Goodbye Charlie, bought for the movies while it was still rolling out of George (Seven Year Itch) Axelrod's typewriter, was a moneymaker before it went into rehearsal. All it needs now, as Author Axelrod sees it, is a new finish. Boasting the most improbable plot since the satyrical heyday of Thorne Smith, Charlie tells the story of a $3,000-a-week Hollywood writer (Charlie Sorell) who spent most of his time in bed with other men's wives and is brought back after death--in the body of Lauren Bacall. "In some sort of jazzy, Old Testament way," says his best friend (Sydney Chaplin), "you're being punished." The show had one ending when it opened in Pittsburgh, another by the time it got to Detroit, will probably have several more before it finishes its two months on the road. The Detroit Times found the "situations and dialogue so uniformly funny . . . that even the most racy moments are disarming." P: Saratoga has been dressed up by Designer Cecil Beaton, but Morton DaCosta's musical version of Edna Ferber's Saratoga Trunk does not yet live up to its magnificent settings. With a $1,500,000 advance sale, Saratoga is sure of a long Broadway run, but Harold Arlen's music needs all the help it can get from Singer Carol (West Side Story) Lawrence and Howard (Kiss Me Kate) Keel. The 19th century high jinks between a New Orleans mulatto and a Montana buccaneer bent on robbing some robber barons is "rich in production," reported the Philadelphia Inquirer, "fortunate in its leads, thin in story." The Bulletin was briefer: "Moby Dick in a bathtub."

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