The Theater: New Season in Manhattan?

Broadway stirred last week in the first chill of autumn and looked around for the start of a new season. It was hard to find. At the end of a muggy summer, only 15 shows still ran in its 30 playhouses (half as many as were running in London), and all of September promised only one new arrival. Symptomatically, it was not even the product of a Broadway rehearsal stage, but Los Angeles’ long-running revue, Ken Murray’s Blackouts.

Shy Angels. As usual, canny old (74) Lee Shubert, whose theatrical real-estate empire controls half of Manhattan’s playhouses, was trying to keep ahead of the game. In 1948-49, he knew, radio and television had taken over five legitimate theaters. To keep his houses from gathering cobwebs, “Mister Lee” planned to import at least four plays from London and possibly produce some himself.

The hard fact seemed to be that Broadway’s production roster, which had shrunk from 224 in 1928-29 to an alltime low of 70 last season, was going to shrink further still. The modest wartime boom was really over, but high production costs remained. Producers looked in vain for the freehanded angels who had gone with the boom. Reported Variety last week: “Nearly all [producers] have to … flail the underbrush for money.”

Old Hands. Producers also moaned about the scarcity of good scripts. It was an old lament, but this time it rang true. Many established playwrights seemed to be between plays. Of shows hopefully announced for production so far, only a handful involved old hands: Terence Rattigan’s Double Bill (a London import); a Maxwell Anderson-Kurt Weill dramatization of the novel Cry, the Beloved Country; Marc Blitzstein’s musical version of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes; an S. N. Behrman adaptation called I Know My Love (with Alfred Lunt & Lynn Fontanne); a new Cole Porter musical, Heaven and Earth; Garson Kanin’s The Rat Race.

With all its chronic ailments, Broadway was also suffering from the city’s investigation into the black market in tickets to hit shows. Twenty-four of the town’s ticket brokers had lost their licenses, six more were under charges, and one box-office man had been suspended. The theater’s reputable citizens spoke bravely of reform.

Was there any hope for more activity as the season grew older? Optimistic producers thought that the first few hits to come along would spread the old fever of investment among the angels. That was the way things usually worked out, but in last week’s gloom, they were working in reverse. One producer, plugging away at raising money for a new musical, reported that one man turned him down “because he said it wasn’t as good as South Pacific,” the biggest hit in town.