Remember September

A Broadway season is never brighter than on the billboards of September; by May, it may seem like just another of the impossible years. This season, no fewer than 40 new shows are aimed for Broadway. Among the more notable:

DRAMAS

The season's first opening, on Sept. 22, will be Edward Albee's fifth annual Broadway entry, A Delicate Balance. The author calls it a "naturalistic comedy," akin to Virginia Woolf, about a disturbed suburban couple (Hume Cronyn and his wife, Jessica Tandy). Playwright Hugh Wheeler (Big Fish, Little Fish) has a stage version of the Shirley Jackson novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, a disturbing mystery about two sisters in Vermont. Actor Stephen Levi has turned out a first play, Daphne in Cottage D about the widow (Sandy Dennis) of a famous movie star.

From Britain, the Royal Shakespeare Company is bringing Harold Pinter's success, The Homecoming, and Peter Weiss's The Investigation, a courtroom documentary about Nazi war crimes. Dinner at Eight, the 1932 collaboration of George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber, will be served once again, this time with so many stars (Robert Burr, Ruth Ford, Arlene Francis, June Havoc, Walter Pidgeon, among others) that the cast is to be billed alphabetically and refereed by Sir Tyrone Guthrie. (Explaining his first Broadway directing job since he left for the Minnesota Theater Company in 1960, Guthrie says: "No one is averse to making money.") Meanwhile, the itinerant Association of Producing Artists, which established its Broadway beachhead last fall with a successful revival of You Can't Take It With You, will be around for the whole season. The APA company, adorned by Helen Hayes, Ellis Rabb and Rosemary Harris, will range from Shakespeare and Sheridan to Ibsen and Pirandello.

COMEDIES

The most promising comedies, on paper anyway, will be black, British or both. One, by Peter Shaffer (The Royal Hunt of the Sun), is actually called Black Comedy. Noel Coward will play in Suite in Three Keys, a triple bill of his own works, and Sir Ralph Richardson will be seen either in Shaw's You Never Can Tell, Sheridan's The Rivals, or both. Additional foreign works include the 1966 London critics' prize-winning The Killing of Sister George, the tale of a disturbed soap-opera star with an unsavory private life; The Loves of Cass McGuire, by Brian Friel (who wrote Philadelphia, Here I Come!), about a Bowery barmaid's return to her native Ireland; and Help Stamp Out Marriage!, by Billy Liar Authors Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall.

Marriage represents Director George Abbott's 107th show on Broadway, and before the season is out, Abbott, 79, will bring in No. 108, a bedroom comedy called Agatha Sue, I Love You. Shelley Winters will play in Under the Weather, a trilogy by Novelist Saul Bellow; Shelley will be disturbed in all three. Neil Simon (Odd Couple) will be on deck for the third straight season with The Star Spangled Girl, who is an ex-Olympic swimmer, while Comic Woody Allen has turned playwright with Don't Drink the Water, a comedy that laughs at the cold war. Gertrude Berg will play a theater-party agent in The Play Girls, and Alfred Drake and Joan Greenwood will star in a comedy about Hamlet's strolling players.

MUSICALS

David Merrick describes the season as "another year of Merrick." Among the ten shows he is producing are two musicals: / Do! I Do!, based on Jan de Hartog's The Fourposter, starring Mary Martin and Robert Preston; and Breakfast at Tiffany's, which boasts Composer-Lyricist Bob Merrill (Funny Girl), Director Abe Burrows (Cactus Flower) and, as Holly Golightly, Mary Tyler Moore from TV's Dick Van Dyke Show.

Other 1966-67 marquee names that will ring a bell and, as the producers calculate, the cash registers: John Raitt in A Joyful Noise; Vivien Leigh in Love and Other Games; Melina Mercouri in Never on Sunday; and Menasha Skulnik and Molly Picon in Chu Chem, a cynically commercial concoction billed as "a Zen Buddhist--Hebrew musical."

Also rehearsing is The Apple Tree, the first musical directed by Mike Nichols; it is a triple bill loosely lifted from the writings of Mark Twain, Frank Stockton and Cartoonist Jules Feiffer. The unifying forces are the theme "man, woman and the devil," and score and lyrics by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, who did Fiddler on the Roof. A final derivative musical is Cabaret, which in earlier incarnations was Christopher Isherwood's The Berlin Stories and the John van Druten drama I Am a Camera. With Jill Haworth in the old Julie Harris role, it is already one of the season's hottest tickets, not to mention the highest: $12 orchestra.

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