Curtain Going Up

For six months after Pearl Harbor, Broadway took a beating: playwrights slithered, box office slumped. Then in June, when things usually stop in the theater, they suddenly started moving. A couple of new musicals jiggled their tunes and jammed their houses; July brought Irving Berlin's great This Is The Army and show business, leftovers and all, swung through the dog days as it hadn't done in years.

Going into the fall, producers seem as happy as clams at high tide. With a big summer behind them, they see an even bigger winter ahead; they have got back their nerve and are certain that the war, which was last season's bogey, will be this season's benefactor. They are, to be sure, playing safe, with arms outstretched toward musicals, comedies, romantic period pieces, anything labeled Escape; and thumbs pretty well down on drama. Last season's eight war-themed flops have taught them a lesson.

A round dozen musicals--mentioning such headliners as Ethel Merman and Jimmy Durance, and ranging from Cole Porter tunes to an all-Negro Carmen--are already set, scheduled, or signed for. There will be more vaudeville. There will be comedies by Lindsay & Grouse (the adapters of Life With Father), John Van Druten, Philip Barry (starring Katharine Hepburn), S. N. Behrman (starring Lunt & Fontanne). But Comedy-Writers Kaufman & Hart, Clare Boothe, Rachel Crothers, Noel Coward have nothing announced; nor have Eugene O'Neill, John Steinbeck, Lillian Hellman, Clifford Odets. Katharine Cornell plans to revive Chekhov's The Three Sisters and Paul Robeson may go to Broadway with Othello (TIME, Aug. 24). Only serious plays definitely set for fall--both deal with the war--are Maxwell Anderson's The Eve of St. Mark, Emlyn Williams' The Morning Star.

However blithe about box office, Broadway has its fears about manpower. Though it has lost fewer big names to the armed services than Hollywood, gone or going are Playwrights Sidney Kingsley (Dead End), Thornton Wilder (Our Town), William Saroyan, Jerome Chodorov (My Sister Eileen), Irwin Shaw (Bury the Dead); Actors Maurice Evans, Burgess Meredith, Lee J. Cobb; top Scene Designers Jo Mielziner, Donald Oenslager. Worse, Actors' Equity has been drained of a good fourth of its male rank & file. Casting takes longer and has to be warier: many an actor still here today may be gone tomorrow. Most available chorus men have either hairless cheeks or hairless heads. Already an all-girl revue, Femme-Mania, is on its way.

Productions may soon have to be less fancy--priorities constitute one threat, transportation another. Lavish musicals, such as used to travel in several baggage cars, will either have to go lighter on trousseaux or give up tours and tryouts.

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