Broadway: The Line-Up

If only turnabout made fair plays, the coming Broadway season would be a sizable cut above its predecessors. Reversing the East-West brain drain in a migration unprecedented since movies broke the sound barrier, Hollywood writers and composers have turned out so many plays and musicals this year that they threaten to outnumber old Broadway hands in the coming 1964-65 playbills.

For all the new names on the marquees, however, more productions than ever will feature old ones. The prevalence of adaptations reflects the theater’s stagnation, and there is a deep reluctance to grapple with controversial, contemporary issues. And the new season’s crop of sniggering bedroom comedies argues that Broadway cannot even deal maturely with sex.

MUSICALS

As Ben Franklin in Paris, Robert Preston outfoxes French diplomats only to be bowled over by their women, notably one played by the lovely Swedish import Ulla Sallert. Book and lyrics are by prolific Sidney Michaels, who adapted Tchin-Tchin. Sherlock Holmes would hardly have approved, but he and Watson become song-and-dance men in the long-postponed Baker Street, now Broadway-bound with Fritz Weaver under the deerstalker. Fiddler on the Roof is nominally based on Sholom Aleichem’s moralistic tales of Jewish life in pre-revolutionary Russia, with irrepressible Zero Mostel in the leading role. The season’s most technically ambitious adaptation will be a Broadway version of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, with book and lyrics by Frank Lacey, who was one of the word men behind The Music Man.

Audrey Hepburn’s Oscar-winning movie Roman Holiday will be revisited by Playwright Robert Anderson, who wrote Tea and Sympathy, Composer-Lyricist Richard Adler (Damn Yankees) and Director Joe Layton (No Strings). A Katharine Hepburn movie, Summertime, which was adapted from a Shirley Booth play, The Time of the Cuckoo, is being re-adapted for the theater by Richard Rodgers and his new collaborator, Stephen Sondheim, the lyricist for Gypsy and West Side Story. Another Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance play will be the musical of Clifford Odets’ durable Golden Boy, which opened in 1937, became a movie in 1939, was revived on Broadway in 1952, and is still on its feet after out-of-town troubles with direction and script. Sammy Davis—he has dropped the Jr.—plays the violinist who quits the fiddle for the fight racket.

Only two scheduled shows are not based on anybody’s biography, novel, play, magazine piece, film or war. In I Had a Ball, Buddy Hackett will play a Freudian fortune teller on Coney Island. Clairvoyance looms large in the other original, the long-awaited Alan Jay Lerner-Burton Lane collaboration, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. Barbara Harris, who was the sensation of Oh Dad, Poor Dad . . ., plays a girl with extrasensory perception.

Chita Rivera plays another 20/20 visionary in Bajour, which has been woven from Joseph Mitchell’s New Yorker look at the city’s swindling gypsies. The season’s only imported musical will be Oh What a Lovely War, a savage but moving World War I satire directed by London’s Joan Littlewood.

COMEDIES

Most at least are original scripts, even if the dominant theme—sex played for laughs—is hardly novel. The Wayward Stork gets its fun from artificial insemination, stars Hal March as a husband who is cuckolded by a test tube. Leslie Stevens, who wrote The Champagne Complex, plays the Oedipus complex for yucks in The Mother Image. The Iris Murdoch-J. B. Priestley farce A Severed Head, is a game of fast sex tennis from London; the players will include Joan Fontaine, Lee Grant and Jessica Walter. Divorce, American style, is viewed from the male standpoint in The Odd Couple, by Neil Simon, who scored heavily with last season’s Barefoot in the Park; Mike Nichols will direct.

In Samuel Taylor’s Beekman Place, French Actor Fernand Gravet plays a violin virtuoso with a string of women (Madeleine Carroll, Arlene Francis, Melinda Dillon). Britain’s Terence Stamp comes to Broadway as Alfie, a Jack-of-all-trades with Jill troubles. Onetime Moppet Margaret O’Brien will star in One in a Row, about an author who writes a bestseller and decides to quit while he is ahead. Jean Kerr, who has been far ahead since Mary, Mary, has completed Poor Richard, a play about a visiting British poet which was originally due last year.

Novelist Saul Bellow’s first play, The Last Analysis, is about a top comedian (Sam Levene) who is slipping past prime time. Ruth Gordon has written A Very Rich Woman for herself to star in and Husband Garson Kanin to direct. Luv is about what it sounds, and stars Anne Jackson, Eli Wallach and Alan Arkin. A typist and a taxi driver, played by Betty Garrett and Pat Hingle, have a hectic courtship in Don Appell’s A Girl Could Get Lucky. The Owl and the Pussycat marks a milestone of sorts by casting Negro Actress Diana Sands in a part that has nothing to do with race. Julie Harris, 38, who portrayed 15-year-old June Havoc in Marathon ’33, will have another rejuvenating role in Ready When You Are, C.B.

DRAMAS

The Physicists, an excellent play by Friedrich Duerrenmatt (The Visit), is set in a lunatic asylum. Peter Brook directs the “black comedy,” which stars Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Martyn Green, Robert Shaw and George Voscovec. The Diamond Orchid spans the last 37 months in the life of an Eva Perón. Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, her first play since Raisin in the Sun, is about a Greenwich Village newspaper publisher, played by Mort Sahl in his first straight Broadway role.

France’s Jean Anouilh will have two plays on Broadway. Poor Bitos, which was a hit in London, stars Donald (The Caretaker) Pleasence. Traveller Without Luggage is a tragicomedy about an amnesia victim. The Plaster Bambino, Sidney Michaels’ second entry (with Ben Franklin), is one of the season’s most intriguing dramas. The script, about a con man’s production of the Passion Play, combines vaudeville, burlesque, music and a speaking chorus.

Most bizarre entry to date is Writer-Director Dore Schary’s One by One, the love story of two paraplegics. All Honorable Men is a drama about Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr by Pulitzer Prizewinner Joseph Kramm (The Shrike), with George Grizzard as Hamilton. Edwin O’Connor has dramatized his new novel, I Was Dancing, about an ex-vaudeville hoofer.

New York’s Lincoln Center Repertory Theater enters its second season without Leading Light Jason Robards Jr. But it has scheduled another Arthur Miller play: Incident at Vichy. Set in a French police station, it has an all-male cast and nary a line about Marilyn.