The Theater: Trade School

An empty little church around the corner from Broadway got a new congregation last week: 415 prewar show people. All had come home from the wars with stage fright. To help them over it, the American Theater Wing, which ran the Stage Door Canteen, had rented the church, set up a theater school for ex-servicemen & women—professional show people only.

Ex-Sailor Paul King, prewar light operatic baritone, had almost wrecked his voice in the Carolines, where it was his job to holler at incoming ships. He was studying singing again. Ex-Sailor James Truex, son of Actor Ernest Truex, was learning to fence. Ex-G.I. Leon Janney, once-famed child cinemactor, was studying makeup.

The Theater Wing had lined up a topflight faculty: Producers Oscar Hammerstein and Brock Pemberton, Director Margaret Webster, Choreographers Agnes de Mille and Jerome Robbins, Designer Donald Oenslager, Theatrical Pressagent Richard Maney, CBS’s Worthington Miner, some 100 other theater and radio names. Most of them would take part in the most popular course: the theater symposium, a big bull session designed to brief students on developments in their business during the last four years.

Under the G.I. Bill of Rights, the U.S. pays the tuition ($35 to $325 a course). Most professionals hope that the school will become a fixture. Said one last week: “Broadway always needed a real trade school. It took a war to get it.”