Box-Office Box

Getting up from the dinner table one evening last week, a family in suburban Toronto could break out the Remy Martin, drop three fifty-cent pieces into a coin box and watch Menotti's opera The Consul. It was a superb production, prepared especially by a Broadway company with Patricia Neway in her original role.

On Easter Sunday, the same family (one of 5,820 subscribers) can watch Carol Channing in Broadway's musical Show Girl, to be fo)1-" ,,ed later in the season by ten other top productions.

While Toronto's 13-month-old pay-TV experiment was thus moving from movies and sports to more ambitious programs, "fee-vee" was ready to pick up the coin elsewhere. The Federal Communications Commission has approved a three-year test of pay TV in Hartford, Conn., where subscribers will get 40 hours a week of first-run Hollywood films, Broadway plays, live opera and sports. Other tests are scheduled for Liberal, Kans., Little Rock, the New York area and Hawaii.

Hollywood is already worrying about wall-sized home screens for big Ben and all the little Hurs. Broadway is rejoicing in the promise of touring without leaving town--and paying off the nut on opening night. "If free television reformed and cut its commercials, it could hurt us," said one cautious pay-TV executive. But that will be the day after never.

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