The Theatre: The Bard and the Box Office

The Shakespeare open season for 1939-40 started last week* when Maurice Evans reopened on Broadway in his last season’s hit, an uncut Hamlet. It proved once again a much more tumultuous and exciting play than the usual cut version. Interesting minor change: This season Polonius wears spectacles, a detail which caused a great to-do among anachronism-chasers until they ascertained that glasses were worn in Shakespeare’s day. Nobody seemed to care whether they were wtirn in Hamlet’s.

Never long absent from it, the Bard has his ups & downs on Broadway. He starts off with the box-office liability of being highbrow, with the box-office asset of commanding a small but steady audience made up largely of: 1) cultists —the kind of people who (depending on their age) have seen every Hamlet from Booth’s, or Forbes-Robertson’s, or Barrymore’s, to Maurice Evans’; 2) seekers after the “worthwhile,” who dutifully imbibe Shakespeare as they swallow Beethoven and spinach; 3) school children, offspring of 1) and 2).

This nucleus cannot, however, keep any Shakespeare play on Broadway for long; the rest is a matter of showmanship. Among Shakespeare’s works, Hamlet clearly has an edge because its hero’s fascinating, elusive character interests many more people than Shakespeare does. But in general—as Shakespeare productions of the past few seasons bear out—neither a play’s fame, nor its subject-matter, nor its length, nor its cast proves very much.

A tabloid Julius Caesar is a hit; so is a marathon Hamlet. A romantic play—Romeo and Juliet—starring Katharine Cornell, does well enough; a largely rhetorical one—King Richard II—starring a then not well-known Maurice Evans, does far better. Hamlet, with John Gielgud, then no name on Broadway, goes over big; with Leslie Howard, a big Broadway name, flops. Tallulah Bankhead cannot last a week in Antony and Cleopatra, Walter Huston cannot last a month in Othello. The simplest answer is almost certainly right: Shakespeare is as popular as his performance.

*Swingin’ the Dream, a jitterbug version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, opened a week earlier; but no self-respecting Bard-hunter would stalk such mongrel prey.