On Broadway

The first rule of Anticipatory Theater is not to look for hits and masterpieces, but for what might whet somebody's appetite or stir up a little talk. After all, Oh! Calcutta! has done more for the cocktail party than for the stage. Clothes will be the talk of the season as far as Coco is concerned. This musical, based on the life of famed 86-year-old Fashion Designer Coco Chanel, brings Katharine Hepburn back to the Broadway after a lapse of 17 years. Haute couture will be served with 253 costume changes, and the approaching theater-party ladies can be heard with the clarity of an elephant stampede.

Another musical, Jimmy, profiles the last really Fun Mayor of Fun City, Jimmy Walker. Broadway's unceasing penchant for self-celebration will provide a whole clutch of musicals, among them Hocus-Pocus (Harry Houdini) and W.C. (Fields could have thought of a better title). The Girls Upstairs is a tale of Ziegfeld Girls who have passed their prime, and Shubert Alley is about the three brothers who gave Broadway some of its more pungent history.

Under such categories as "Loosely Based On" and "Freely Adapted From," Broadway goes on musically robbing Peter to pay Paul. Alice will take Lewis Carroll's little girl on a drug trip. Cherry sets William Inge's Bus Stop to music, and Yellow Drum, based on Truman Capote's The Grass Harp, reiterates Broadway's faith that a weak play sounds better set to music. Robert Shaw will star in the hymnbook version of Elmer Gantry, Sinclair Lewis' novel about a corrupt evangelist. Fellini's film La Strada is being unspooled, as is All About Eve (stage title: Applause, Applause!), starring Lauren Bacall as Adam's fetching rib.

Among the serious plays, Arthur Kopit's Indians traces the indignities, betrayals and expropriation of the red man by the white man, with Stacey Keach playing a not quite credible liberal Buffalo Bill. John Osborne has delved into spy lore of the early 20th century for his A Patriot for Me; his hero, played by Maximilian Schell, is a homosexual secret-service officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army who is blackmailed into spying for the Russians. The "drag ball" scene that opens the second act has been a titillating conversation piece ever since the play premiered in London in 1965. Murderous Angels probes the motives and characters of Patrice Lumumba and Dag Hammarskjold as seen by Conor Cruise O'Brien, who was himself in the Congo as head of U.N. operations in Katanga.

In a trend toward revivals, The Front Page is reopening this fall and will be joined by Harvey (James Stewart) and Our Town (Henry Fonda). An all-American series at Lincoln Center's repertory theater includes The Time of Your Life, Camino Real, Beggar on Horseback, plus Sam Shepard's new play, Operation Sidewinder, a wild satire of the contemporary U.S. scene, featuring an Air Force computer in the form of a sidewinder rattlesnake. Comedy is in short supply, but Mike Nichols is directing The Memorandum, a French farce about a determined bachelor and the girl who upsets his ordered life. Neil Simon's The Last of the Red Hot Lovers brings three women into the life of a paunchy seafood restaurateur (James Coco). After six hits in a row, the tantalizing question about Simon is: Can he ever write a flop?

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