The New Season

Every Broadway season looks in prospect like an ingenue in a bridal gown, and in retrospect like a naked iguana. Somehow, the paper promises --the mere names, titles and themes -- are always unbearably alluring; but it is much easier to develop a good idea for a show than to develop a good show, and Broadway never looks better than it does in August, just before it starts down the aisle.

The coming season proportionally contains much the same elements as its predecessors. There will be a strong transfusion from Britain, a wad of adaptations, a spare and frangible offering of original work, and a lot of music.

Undoubtedly beginning a trend, Meredith Willson's Here's Love (Oct. 3) --a musical adaptation of the 1947 20th Century-Fox department story called Miracle on 34th Street -- has a cast that is about 10% Negro. They are Macy's shoppers, spectators, secretaries -- everything but Santa Claus -- and do not play the roles of Negroes as such.

sbOTHER MUSICALS: Everything but the Congressional Record seems to be turning into a musical this season, even Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, which becomes a musical revue featuring four actors in 70 roles (Sept. 29). Three Conan Doyle stories are being staged by Joshua Logan as Baker Street, with Fritz Weaver as Sherlock Holmes, turning the first private eye into the first private throat (April 23). Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit becomes High Spirits, with Coward directing and Edward Woodward, Tammy Grimes and Beatrice Lillie carrying the tunes (March 31). Coward has also done the music and lyrics for The Girl Who Came to Supper, a musical version of Terence Rattigan's The Sleeping Prince, starring Jose Ferrer (Nov. 28). N. Richard Nash's The Rainmaker will reseed the money cloud as 110 in the Shade, with Inga Swenson, Robert Horton and Stephen Douglass (Oct. 24). A musical version of Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker is called Dolly: A Damned Exasperating Woman, starring Carol Channing (Jan. 16).

The Prisoner of Zenda has been made into four movies, but not a Broadway musical until this season, when Alfred Drake will star in Zenda, which takes some liberties with the original novel: the English gentleman hero is now a song and dance man on tour (Nov. 26). Budd Schulberg has turned his novel What Makes Sammy Run? into a musical (Feb. 4). And Negro Novelist Langston Hughes has adapted his Tambourines to Glory for musical presentation as well, wherein two Negro women establish a church in Harlem (Oct. 26). Before his death, Clifford Odets completed the book-adaptation of his Golden Boy.

Jennie is a slice of biography dealing with seven months in the life of Actress Laurette Taylor just after the turn of the century. The show opens on a scene that includes a 20-ft. waterfall, a whip-cracking villain, a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman tied to a tree, and the heroine (Mary Martin) fighting off savage coolies with a baby in her arms (Oct. 17). The life of Fanny Brice has also been turned into a musical called Funny Girl, starring Barbra Streisand singing a score by Jule Styne (Feb. 13).

Robert Goldman and Glenn Paxton, who four seasons ago adapted Pride and Prejudice into First Impressions, have completed an original musical, Hurrah, Boys, Hurrah! Austro-Hungarian soldiers, oddly enough, took part in the American Civil War, and the show centers around a Union soldier and the daughter of a Hungarian officer, garrisoned in St. Louis in 1861 (spring). Another original musical is A Girl to Remember, starring Carol Burnett as a Hollywood script girl in the '30s, book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green (May 26).

Rugantino is something that Producer Alexander H. Cohen found in Rome--an Italian musical smash about a Roman ne'er-do-well of the early 19th century who is unjustly accused of murder. Untranslated, the production will feature subtitles under the stage (Feb. 8). Another bit of musical miscellany is the long-postponed Broadway debut of Rick Besoyan, who wrote Little Mary Sunshine, the Oklahoma! of off Broadway. Another spoof of the operettas of the '20s, this one is called The Student Gypsy, or The Prince of Liederkranz, starring Eileen Brennan, who was Little Mary (Sept. 30).

sbCOMEDIES: British humor sometimes fails to function cisatlantically, but five British comedies are having a go at Broadway this season. Semi-Detached (Oct. 7) is a mad knitting of woolly middle-class values in English suburbia. Enid Bagnold's The Chinese Prime Minister, not yet produced in London, is about an old actress facing assorted personal problems, including a husband who turns up after a 29-year absence, and stars Margaret Leighton (January). Greatly popular on the West End last year were The Private Ear and The Public Eye--two thematically related one-acters by Peter Shaffer, author of Five Finger Exercise (Oct. 9). Eric Portman stars in a British sex comedy called All in Good Time (Nov. 23). And Claudette Colbert and Cyril Ritchard open Sept. 18 in The Irregular Verb to Love, about a sweet London lady who keeps blowing up furrier shops because she loves animals.

Jean Kerr's Poor Richard opens after Christmas, soon after the arrival of her sixth child. It is set in New York and concerns a British poet and an American girl. The Time of the Barracudas stars Elaine Stritch and Laurence Harvey as a pair of murderers who are married and are trying to bump each other off (November). Eddie Mayehoff and Dody Goodman are a union leader and a lady manufacturer in Howard Teichmann's A Rainy Day in Newark (Oct. 22). Dore Schary will direct Larry Parks in Love and Kisses, about teenage marriage (Dec. 16). And Mike Nichols will stage Barefoot in the Park, Neil (Come Blow Your Horn) Simon's new comedy about a young couple in Greenwich Village (Oct. 23).

Novelist Saul Bellow's first play Upper Depths is a comedy about a celebrated TV comedian who has serious aspirations (no date set). Chester Morris and Signe Hasso are in something called The Tender Heel--about a modern Achilles, of course, set in a Florida fishing village (Oct. 21). Man on Ice confronts an anthropologist with a Neanderthal in a cave. Director John Gerstad (The Seven Year Itch) has yet to pick an actor for either role, but the latter should be a snap (February). One half-cast comedy is The Owl and the Pussycat, by Wilton Manhoff. The pussycat goes in for acting, modeling and prostitution. A snoopy neighbor reports her to the police. Pussycat seeks the neighbor out and seduces him. Kim Stanley is the pussycat. They're still looking for the owl (Oct. 31).

sbDRAMAS. Luther arrives from Britain, with Albert Finney continuing as Martin Luther in John Osborne's verse play, directed by Tony Richardson (Sept. 25). Jean Anouilh's The Rehearsal, is about a count who democratically seduces a young nursemaid only to encounter the rage of both his wife and mistress for betraying his class (Sept. 23). British Playwright Terence Rattigan's Man and Boy stars Charles Boyer as a Wall Street operator who creeps off to Greenwich Village to live in the pad of his apostate son during the Depression (Nov. 12). Arnold Wesker's Chips with Everything, hugely successful in London, deals with the operation of the class system in the R.A.F. (Oct. 1). Sidney Michael's Dylan, starring Alec Guinness, is based on Dylan Thomas' visits to America (Jan. 21). And Hugh Leonard's Stephen D., an adaptation--successful in London--of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, will open in late autumn. Bertolt Brecht's Arturo Ui, which parodies the rise of Hitler, stars Christopher Plummer (Nov. 4). The ANTA-Washington Square Theater, preparing to become the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center, will present Arthur Miller's new play After the Fall, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Jason Robards Jr. (Jan. 23). The ANTA group will also do Eugene O'Neill's Marco Millions, directed by Jose Quintero (Feb. 20), and S. N. Behrman's new But for Whom Charlie, directed by Kazan (March 12).

Jerome Weidman, who wrote Fiorello!, has written a courtroom play called The Ivory Tower about a poet like Ezra Pound who is tried for treason for making wartime broadcasts telling American troops to lay down their arms (November). Franchot Tone stars in Bicycle Ride to Nevada, an adaptation of Barnaby Conrad's novel Dangerfield, which deals with a Nobel prizewinner novelist who has slid down his 50s into alcoholism (Sept. 26). Conrad was once literary secretary to Sinclair Lewis. Edward Albee has adapted The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, Carson McCullers' dark-visionary study of human grotesques (Oct. 30). Paddy Chayefsky, shrewdly going for new ground every time out, has written The Passion of Josef D., a view of Joseph Stalin from 1917 to 1924, from the Revolution to the death of Lenin (Nov. 11).

Libel! stars Van Heflin as Louis Nizer in an adaptation of the part of the lawyer's book that treats the suit by Quentin Reynolds against Westbrook Pegler (Oct. 10). Kirk Douglas plays a hospitalized psycho gambler in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Nov. 14). And The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window is a new play by Negro Playwright Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun), which deals with a young Jewish intellectual and his wife. Only one Negro is in the cast, and the integration theme is not central (December).

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