CHAPTER ONE
The Great Parade of 1963-64
From 1946-47 to 1976-77, every volume of Theatre World had the same cover design.
The annual that chronicled the previous theatrical season from June 1 to May 31 displayed on its dust jacket the headshots of six of the semester's most illustrious performers.
In 1963-64, editor Daniel Blum opted for:
- Carol Channing (Hello, Dolly!)
- Richard Burton (Hamlet)
- Albert Finney (Luther)
- Carol Burnett (Fade Out-Fade In)
- Beatrice Lillie (High Spirits)
- Alec Guinness (Dylan)
They were all fine choices. But no Barbra Streisand, who officially became a bona fide star thanks to Funny Girl? On April 10, Streisand made the cover of Time; a mere forty-two days later, on May 22, she was on the cover ofLife.
And she wasn't good enough for Blum's dust jacket?
(Maybe Blum had a crystal ball that told him Streisand would never-ever-ever come back to Broadway-and that made him decide not to make a big deal of her.)
Two of the performers Blum did choose also made the cover of Life that season. Burton was seen in the middle of Hamlet's "To be, or not to be" soliloquy. Channing, who was shown snuggling up to Horace Vandergelder's cash register, wound up there before making the cover of Look, too.
The other Broadway Life cover girl was also overlooked by Blum: Elizabeth Ashley, who played the irrepressible newlywed in Barefoot in the Park. (The editors at Life were apparently more impressed with Ashley than with her co-star: Robert Redford.)
Did Blum choose Finney solely for his Tony-nominated stint as the title character in Luther? One could suspect that the Theatre World editor was influenced by Finney's suddenly hot Hollywood profile, thanks to his Oscar nomination for playing the title character of Tom Jones.
On the other hand, Blum had six previous Oscar winners from which to choose: Claudette Colbert, José Ferrer, Alec Guinness, Helen Hayes, Van Heflin, and Joanne Woodward. Aside from Guinness, the rest had to be satisfied with seeing their pictures inside the book.
That season, Woodward co-starred in a comedy with her husband, who didn't have an Oscar-not yet-but was arguably more famous: Paul Newman. He was already Hollywood royalty, along with three other movie stars who could have been blessed by Blum: Kirk Douglas, Charles Boyer, and Lee Remick.
Today we have plenty of movie stars who visit Broadway, but almost always in limited engagements. Some film luminaries think, "Hey, I'll give up three months of Hollywood millions for a mere hundred thousand or so a week on Broadway, where I'll win a Tony that will look nice next to my other awards." (That worked out well for Geoffrey Rush and Denzel Washington. Not as successful was Tom Hanks, who at least received a nomination, unlike Julia Roberts, who didn't.)
But in 1963-64, Burton, Newman, and Woodward were the only ones who'd demanded limited engagements; the others signed for the long haul, ranging from a year's commitment to a run-of-the-play contract. Even Streisand honored her two-year pact.
Besides, no one expected that even Burton would do enough business to run more than four months; none ofHamlet's fifty-nine Broadway productions dating back to 1761 had ever run longer.
Blum might have eliminated Douglas, Boyer, and Remick because each had appeared in a flop-as had Mary Martin. She'd become the First Lady of the American Musical Theater now that Ethel Merman had officially retired from Broadway (again). Despite Martin's three Tony wins (and a special one for taking Annie Get Your Gun on the road), she couldn't keep Jennie running.
Julie Harris of Marathon '33 and Helen Hayes of The White House had each already won two Tonys, but 1963-64 did not give them their greatest vehicles. Hayes would have a bigger beef with T. E. Kalem of Time magazine than with Blum. In A. E. Hotchner's historical pageant, she portrayed the wives of eleven presidents from Abigail Adams to Edith Wilson as well as nineteenth-century gossip columnist Leonora Clayton. Kalem didn't like the play ("Presidential snipshots," he called it), but he didn't even mention Hayes by name. What a slap in the face for the star whose forty Broadway appearances had made her the First Lady of the entire American Theater.
We can forgive Blum for omitting such luminaries as Tallulah Bankhead, Tom Bosley, Colleen Dewhurst, Peter Falk, Angela Lansbury, Christopher Plummer, Robert Preston, and Cyril Ritchard, all of whom saw their shows prematurely close. So did Bert Lahr, despite winning the Best Actor in a Musical Tony for Foxy. But what about Jason Robards Jr. or Barbara Loden in Arthur Miller's After the Fall? He was already a star, and she became the Tony-winning toast of the town for her homage to Miller's second wife, Marilyn Monroe. That even got her the cover of the Saturday Evening Post.
While we're talking Tonys, Hume Cronyn, who wasn't even halfway through his sixty-two-year Broadway career, won for his Polonius in Hamlet. What's more, Cronyn was the first actor honored for a Shakespearean role in the thirty-seven revivals of the Bard's works since the Tonys had begun in 1946-47. And what of Cronyn's castmate Alfred Drake, already the recipient of a brace of Tonys? Both men were Theatre World cover-worthy .
Blum may have chosen Carol Burnett just to entice book buyers; she was, after all, well known to the nation from her prolific appearances on the highly rated Garry Moore Show. By the time Blum's book went to press, however, the dire handwriting was on the wall for Burnett's Fade Out-Fade In: handwriting that was distinctively in her penmanship. (More on that later.)
By the time Blum had submitted his manuscript, Lillie's High Spirits must have closed, too. But wasn't Tammy Grimes at least as valuable to the show, given that she appeared in seven songs (in a substantially larger role) to Lillie's four? Certainly The Saturday Evening Post thought so; she, not Lillie, got the cover when High Spirits was featured.
We could go on. Blum might have chosen Sandy Dennis, who was given the Best Actress in a Play Tony for Any Wednesday; pop star Steve Lawrence, who'd surprised everyone with his strong acting in What Makes Sammy Run?; Emlyn Williams, who dared to play the much-accused Pope Pius XII in The Deputy, the season's most controversial play; international star Josephine Baker, who brought in her revue for a couple of weeks in February and did so well that she did three more in April. Blum's awarding Baker the cover would have been a nice type of Lifetime Achievement Award.
Let's face it. No matter which six performers Blum chose, he would have endured criticism for the ones he'd left out. It was that strong a season for performers. To paraphrase one of the lines Burton said as Hamlet for his then-record 137 performances, we shall not look upon its like again.
The Tony Awards reveal how impressive a season it was. Let's look at the stats: As the 1963-64 season began, the Tonys had in their seventeen years of existence dispensed a total of 135 performance awards. Actors and actresses representing thirty-six of those wins opened shows in 1963-64-meaning that a theatergoer could have seen more than a quarter of all Tony-winning performers (26.66 percent) in new productions this one season. This doesn't even count Special Tony winner John Gielgud, who was heard but not seen as the Ghost in his own staging of Hamlet.
In fact, if one adds in shows from other seasons still playing in 1963-64, a theatergoer could have seen fourteen more Tony-winning performers. That ups the percentage to 37.03 percent. Make that 37.77 percent if you count Jack Cassidy, who two days before opening in Fade Out-Fade In won a Tony for his featured role in the previous season's She Loves Me. And had Stanley Holloway's musical Cool Off! come to Broadway instead of coming off after playing all of five days in Philadelphia, the percentage would have been 38.52 percent-close to two out of every five Tony winners-in just one season.
While Hello, Dolly! dominated the final 1963-64 tally with ten Tony Awards, a closer look proves what a solid year it was, for the eight performance winners came from eight different shows: Foxy, Dolly, She Loves Me, and The Girl Who Came to Supper were the musicals that sported Tony winners, while Dylan, Any Wednesday, Hamlet, andAfter the Fall were the plays.
Truth to tell, however, the Tony Awards weren't then what they are now, for they were only broadcast in New York. Kinescopes of the early ceremonies show them to be sedate affairs that were unconcerned with glitz or appealing to a more youthful market. Hosting the 1963-64 Tonys was Sidney Blackmer, only seven weeks away from his sixty-fifth birthday. By 2009, Neil Patrick Harris got the job partly because he was a youth-appealing thirty-five.
The issue of youth brings us to a question:
Q: What Broadway producer had the most plastic surgery?
A: Leonard Sillman. He had seven new faces.
All right, it's a joke. To get it, you'd have to know that Sillman periodically (but hardly annually) presented revues called New Faces of ... that were linked to the year of the opening.
Sillman mounted neither a New Faces of 1963 nor a New Faces of 1964. Had he done so, he would have had hundreds of rookies from which to choose. In addition to Finney, Loden, and O'Shea, newcomers who landed solid roles included Susan Browning, John Davidson, Dom DeLuise, Micki Grant, David Hartman, Tina Louise, Peter Masterson, Martin Sheen, Lesley (Ann) Warren, Sam Waterston, and Gene Wilder. Meanwhile, in the everyone-has-to-start-somewhere department, walk-ons or ensemble members included Gretchen Cryer, Graciela Daniele, Olympia Dukakis, and Ralph Waite, not to mention James Rado and Gerome Ragni, the future auteurs of Hair, in two different shows.
And then there was that cast member of Luther who played one of four backup singers to a church soloist. None of us has access to Albert Finney's bankbook, but this performer may well have wound up the wealthiest of anyone in the cast, for twenty-two years later, Dan Goggin moved his attention from male members of the clergy to female ones when he wrote Nunsense and started a veritable franchise.
If Blum's practice had been to put playwrights on his cover, he would have easily found six blue-chippers: Edward Albee, Paddy Chayefsky, Arthur Miller, John Osborne, Terence Rattigan, and Tennessee Williams. Then theater lovers would have complained that he'd omitted Jean Anouilh, James Baldwin, Enid Bagnold, Bertolt Brecht, and that rising star Neil Simon.
Should Blum have opted for the creators of musicals, his sextet might have been Noël Coward, Betty Comden, Adolph Green, Johnny Mercer, Meredith Willson, and Jule Styne. Styne had had a particularly busy season: He composed both Funny Girl and Fade Out-Fade In, as well as the incidental music for Arturo Ui-and had invested in Anyone Can Whistle, a musical by Stephen Sondheim.
No question that Sondheim would never have been a Blum choice, for his satirical musical had been a spectacular flop. George S. Kaufman's famous statement "Satire is what closes on Saturday night" turned out to be true, forAnyone Can Whistle closed on the first Saturday night after opening.
Today, of course, satire is what closes on Sunday afternoon. In 1963-64, Broadway was still observing what Christians called the Lord's Day. Today the lucrative Sunday matinee has replaced the lightly attended Monday performance. Only shows that have been running for years if not decades-Phantom, Chicago-play on Monday to avoid the heavy competition from the new productions that routinely take off that night.
The 1963-64 season also had Al Hirschfeld to caricature it. Shortly after the 1946 birth of his daughter, Nina, Hirschfeld began putting her name into each of his drawings. Lucky for him that he and his wife chose a name that could be drawn with Zorro-like single strokes.
For decades, Hirschfeld allowed theater fans to have the fun of finding a "Nina" or two (or many more) in each drawing. This season, a "Nina" could be found on Colleen Dewhurst's sleeve, Christopher Plummer's coat, Alec Guinness's trousers, Barbra Streisand's pettipants, Tammy Grimes's hair, Josephine Baker's headdress, Mary Martin's bodice, Julie Harris's skirt, Janis Paige's dress, and Florence Henderson's gown.
Little did Hirschfeld know that the Martin Beck Theatre, where he went to caricature Dewhurst in The Ballad of the Sad Café, would one day be renamed for him. And he would not be the only representative from 1963-64 who would eventually find his name on a Broadway theater. Joining Helen Hayes, who already had one, would be Neil Simon, Stephen Sondheim, and Samuel J. Friedman.
The first two names are familiar to you; the third probably isn't. Friedman was a press agent who in 1963-64 represented Fair Game for Lovers-a comedy about a father's insisting that his teenage daughter live with her boyfriend under his roof-for eight poorly attended performances.
Such a credit doesn't get your name on a theater; Friedman's family paid to have the house renamed in his honor. But in 1963-64, no one remotely saw "naming rights" on the horizon. Today, theater owners are so desperate (or greedy) for money that we may one day be seeing plays in the Kaopectate Theatre.
In this survey, we'll encounter six people who would never have made Blum's cover although their names will come up more often than any of the other luminaries: Howard Taubman, Walter Kerr, John Chapman, Richard Watts Jr., John McClain, and Norman Nadel.
These were the daily critics who served the entire 1963-64 season. Taubman wrote for The New York Times, while Kerr worked in that capacity for the New York Herald Tribune. By virtue of his newspaper's circulation and prestige, Taubman was the more powerful. Kerr, however, was considered to have theatrical savvy and was the most respected of the half dozen (which is why he eventually had a theater named after him, too).
Kerr was a master of the "lede," which is journalism-speak for "lead," a writer's opening line(s). Among Kerr's 1963-64 ledes were "A memorial service for Café Crown was held at the Martin Beck last night" and "Tambourines to Glory is almost a musical and almost a straight play-and 'almost' is the worst word I know." For Double Dublin, it was "Wit has been the principal export of Ireland since the dawn of time, and I am deeply distressed to report that twilight approaches." What's more, Kerr wasn't above using a one-word paragraph to succinctly express his feelings. For Jennie: "Drat." For Baby Want a Kiss: "Stop." If Kerr sounds insensitive, he could also write a lede that would turn theatergoers into sprinters so that they could be first in line at the box office. All the critics raved for Hello, Dolly!, but Kerr expressed it best with "Don't bother holding on to your hats, because you won't be needing them. You'll only be throwing them into the air anyway."
As for Chapman (New York Daily News) and Watts (New York Post), they spoke to occasional theatergoers who could only afford to sit in the first balcony (as the mezzanine was then called) or the second (which is now simply called "the balcony," so that it seems less far away). McClain (New York Journal-American) and Nadel (New York World-Telegram & Sun) brought up the rear. A good notice from them was at best useful and at worst better than nothing.
Actually, when the season officially started on June 1, there were seven daily critics. Little did Robert Coleman of the New York Daily Mirror know that he had only fourteen more Broadway reviews in his future; his paper would fold on October 16, the day before the opening of Jennie. (At least he was spared seeing that.) As a result, Coleman's name won't show up here nearly as often as his brother wizards.
Still, six different voices offering appraisals sounds very good to us now. If these half-dozen reviewers didn't provide great literature, they clearly did their best when attending opening nights that began circa 6:30 P.M., seeing the show, taking their notes, rushing up the aisles during curtain calls, returning to their offices, writing what they could think of then and there-on typewriters, yet-while overhearing editors mutter "Where is it?" so that the review could make the morning edition.
No wonder that they made mistakes. McClain in his review of Have I Got a Girl for You! mentioned that one character reminded him of "Duke Masterson in Guys and Dolls" and that a Jewish mother summoned up memories of "Molly Bergen."
Taubman admitted in his pan of Café Crown that "I chose to attend a preview for a change of pace-and to see a new work apart from the tension of a first night." Yes, and it gave him an extra day to write his review.
Today, reviewing a preview is standard practice. Not only does a critic have far more time to collect his thoughts, he winds up writing better prose because he has more time thanks to having a computer rather than a Smith-Corona.
Producers' concern for the critics is not the reason that the front-line press is now invited to previews instead of opening nights. Today a show has so many producers and backers who want to attend the gala premiere that seats are needed for them. The dozens of critics are relegated to less glamorous performances.
That's just one of the differences between then and now. By investigating 1963-64, we're returning to a time when the sign over the Winter Garden Theatre extended all the way to Fiftieth Street; that it's since been truncated to accommodate an Applebee's restaurant is an apt metaphor for how Broadway has shrunk. The 1963-64 season offered seventy-five attractions, including Martha Graham and her Dance Company, making their ninth visit in twenty years.
Fifty years later, the 2013-14 semester could boast only forty-three attractions.
In 1963-64, a couple who wanted to see a musical would go up to the box office and hand over a $20 bill in exchange for two orchestra seats as well as two dimes in change. But that steep-sounding $9.90 was only germane to musicals; a play's top ticket price was more than 30 percent lower at $6.90.
$6.90 for Burton's Hamlet.
$9.90 for Streisand's Fanny Brice.
A sold-out week would mean $58,000 for 110 in the Shade. $71,200 for Here's Love. $73,300 for Hello, Dolly!$81,600 for Funny Girl. $82,600 for Rugantino. $84,900 for Fade Out-Fade In. $91,700 for Jennie. $97,000 forThe Girl Who Came to Supper and Foxy.
Today, producers who see their musicals gross $97,000 for one performance would soon be reluctantly making plans for a closing-night party.
Inflation charts say that yesterday's $6.90 has ballooned to today's $51.11 and $9.90 to $73.33; still, that's less than half of what tickets now cost for a Broadway entertainment.
Back then, performances on New Year's Eve cost a few bucks extra. Today all eight performances during Christmas week have inflated prices.
Not that producers in 1963-64 were unaware that this was the busiest week of the year. During Christmas week 1963, Oliver! doubled its gross. Hell, even the China Institute of America, which planned to do eight performances of the Foo Hsing Theatre's opera The Beautiful Bait, knew enough to come to town between December 24 and January 5.
Tickets to plays might have even cost less if their producers hadn't had to pay musicians at each performance. Plays, mind you-not musicals, and not even plays that used incidental music. Plays that didn't offer theatergoers a note of music had four musicians on the payroll getting a nice check every week. The union's rationale was that if a play was playing at a theater, a musical couldn't play there, and that penalized as many as twenty-five musicians.
One 1963-64 play, S. N. Behrman's But for Whom Charlie, actually addressed the issue. The title character said to one such musician, "You sit below the stage in a theatre, not playing, not performing any service, pure parasitism, and you have no embarrassment, evidently, at taking pay for doing nothing."
A novelist in the play noted, "Now why can't writers have a union like that?"
Why couldn't theatergoers? Had this practice not been in place, they might have paid $6.50 or even $6 for the best seats.
At whatever price, if you wanted to buy a ticket you had a few options. You could write a check or money order, lick five-cent stamps for two envelopes-one addressed to the theater, one self-addressed-and pray that the second envelope would soon return with tickets. But a few days might pass before the missive arrived, and even more time might go by until a box office treasurer got around to opening and processing it. Avid theatergoers feared that in the meantime, thousands of tickets would have been sold at the window.
Going to ticket brokers was another option. These ranged from Golden/Leblang, the most famous, to desks and counters devoted to ticket selling in hotels. The former got the far better seats, although every agency charged the same $1.50 extra.
And finally, there were scalpers. Some 1963-64 theatergoers were still grumbling about the $50 they'd paid seven years earlier for a pair to see Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews in My Fair Lady. Today, of course, it sounds like a steal.
Most theatergoers chose the most obvious option: going to the box office at a time when "buying tickets on line" meant something very different from what it does now.
For smash hits, that meant patrons had to wait and wait and wait for tickets that could be any color of the sixty-four found in the deluxe Crayola box. Today your ticket to Broadway will always be cream and white if you're patronizing a Nederlander theater and pink and red if you're seeing a show at a Jujamcyn house. Most likely, however, your ticket will be blue and gold, for the Shubert Organization owns more theaters-seventeen-than both Nederlander (nine) and Jujamcyn (five) put together. (The other nine Broadway theaters operate under different ownerships.)
No ticket today will be for the Morosco, Bijou, or Helen Hayes on Forty-sixth Street; the playhouse emblazoned with her name on Forty-fourth Street is the second theater to commemorate her. Her previous house and the other two were razed in 1982 in favor of the Marriott Hotel and the Marquis Theatre. The ANTA Washington Square, 54th Street, and Ziegfeld no longer exist. The Hudson is a hotel ballroom. The Mark Hellinger is now a church where you can go and pray that it someday returns to use as a legitimate theater.
Back then, even if you went to a musical comparatively early in its run, you might not see the absolute "original cast." This was still the era of the gypsy-the nickname given an ensemble member who became bored rather quickly and moved to another show and then another. From 110 in the Shade, Carolyn Kemp left to join Fade Out-Fade In; Paula Lloyd and Loren Hightower bolted to be in Anyone Can Whistle (weren't they sorry!), and Jerry Dodge moved over to Hello, Dolly! To be sure, Dodge was bookwriter Michael Stewart's boyfriend, but the others were just searching for new adventures.
Today, ensemble members keep their jobs as long as they can, for choruses are smaller and competition is keener. There were then no conservatories or universities that offered degrees in musical theater; today, there are more than five dozen.
Theatergoers who wanted liquor during intermission had to leave the theater and find a nearby bar. Not until October 1, 1964-four months after this season concluded-did theaters get the right and the licenses to serve something other than the carefully named "orange drink."
Back in 1963-64, if you couldn't get to Broadway, it would vicariously come to you, either from Life or the reviews that Time and Newsweek printed most every week. From this season alone, sixteen new plays and five new musicals would be published in hardcover (or cloth, to use the then-preferred description). Of them, only Barefoot in the Park, Dylan, Funny Girl, The Subject Was Roses, Any Wednesday, Luther, and Hello, Dolly! were hits; two-thirds of them were not-and yet still publishers brought them out. The last three even became mass-market paperbacks, along with the money-losing After the Fall, Blues for Mister Charlie, and The Deputy.
Most playwrights were grateful that the page devoted to a show's cast list mentioned the opening but not the closing date. Paddy Chayefsky was mighty happy that the statement "The Passion of Josef D. opened on February 11, 1964" wasn't followed by "and closed eleven days later on February 22, 1964."
Each month, the Fireside Theatre Book Club would offer a hardcover copy of a play or musical to its members. As much as it and other publishers kept theater in the public eye, television was now helping more. Johnny Carson, just starting the second year of what would be thirty years of late-night TV dominance, was still broadcasting from New York. Thus, he could bring on Iggie Wolfington, who was then appearing in Marathon '33, June Havoc's play about marathon dancers. Here's a guarantee that anyone who's on The Tonight Show tonight will have a higher Q Score than Wolfington.
Better still was The Ed Sullivan Show, whose host wasn't good to Broadway simply because Bye Bye Birdie had honored him in song. (Frankly, he was a little embarrassed that it had.) Among Sullivan's guests on his first broadcast in 1948 were Rodgers and Hammerstein. Very few weeks went by without Sullivan's showing either a scene from a current Broadway show or a personality who was appearing in one.
Yes, much has changed in fifty years.
And Spoon River Anthology is Exhibit A as proof.
* * *
Edgar Lee Masters's 1915 collection of 244 poems had people speaking from their graves in a cemetery in a fictitious midwestern town.
Charles Aidman, who had recently co-founded a Los Angeles group called Theatre West with Joyce Van Patten, adapted it. He, Van Patten, and Robert Elston were joined by what had to be their biggest name: Betty Garrett, who'd starred in the musical films of On the Town and My Sister Eileen.
Most nights, the forty-two seats at Theatre West were filled. Playgoers met Lucius Atherton (Elston), who recalled when he was once young, handsome, and "a knave of hearts who took every trick." Then he aged and was mocked by young girls who saw him as nothing more than a dirty old man.
Many a play and musical uses mistaken identity as a plot device, and Masters even used it in one of his poems. Aidman, using a thick Jewish accent, played Barney Hainsfeather, who was burned beyond recognition in a train wreck. So was John Allen, who was taken for Hainsfeather and was buried in a Jewish cemetery, while Hainsfeather was unhappily buried among a bunch of WASPs.
Spoon River suggested that a small town can breed small-mindedness. It also had quite a bit to say about marriage. Margaret Fuller Slack (Van Patten) wanted to be a writer and was promised by the town's wealthy druggist that if she married him she'd have all the time in the world to write. Instead, she spent her life tending to their eight children. Ollie McGee (Garrett) told of how her husband and marriage "robbed me of my youth and my beauty." Mrs. Charles Bliss (Van Patten) talked about the "preachers and judges" who encouraged her and Charles to stay married "for the children," resulting in two kids siding with her, the two others with him, and no one being happy at all.
Music leavened the proceedings, although musical comedy star Garrett didn't sing any of it. Naomi Caryl Hirshhorn and Hal Lynch sang twelve folk standards ("He's Gone Away"; "Skip to My Lou") and wrote four, including a lovely little waltz, "Spoon River."
If it sounds a little too scholarly, it was right at home at UCLA, where it moved for a six-week run. Perhaps many audience members related to the husbands and wives who spoke about all the disappointments delivered by wedlock (with an accent on the second syllable). Have you ever witnessed an antimarriage remark in any theater getting anything less than a knowing laugh or a resigned grunt?
Producer Joseph Cates saw it at UCLA and decided to bring it to Broadway with a little help from his brother, Gilbert, who would later be greatly associated with Hollywood's Academy Awards.
Cherry-picking shows from the hinterlands is now standard procedure, but back then most producers operated differently. If they were to import a play, it would be from London; otherwise, they found their shows the hard way by actually sitting down and reading scripts. Dropping into a theater on a college campus would seem to be a waste of time.
Not for Cates, who decided to bring Spoon River Anthology to Broadway. It wouldn't be a costly enterprise. Some of the budget of $35,000 (!) was spent on four benches, two chairs, a lectern, and six actors. Whoever suggested that approach has been lost to the ages; no set designer was ever credited. There was a lighting designer, however, but he was a rank beginner: Jules Fisher, long before he'd win nine Tonys.
Cates booked the Booth from the Shubert Organization, but the landlords were already looking for another tenant; how long could a show called Spoon River Anthology last, anyway? They were certain that it would easily endure two losing weeks in a row-which was enough to allow landlords the right to invoke the stop clause and evict their current tenant in favor of a new one.
Taubman called the show "A glowing theater experience." Kerr: "Excellent." Chapman: "Quite an inspiration." Watts: "Moving and beautiful." McClain: "Enormously warm and compelling." Nadel: "A powerful evocation of life." Coleman: "Absorbing theater."
With quotations that were more respectful than exciting, business wasn't hot. River wasn't drowning, but, yes, there were soon two weeks in a row that the show didn't meet expenses, and the Shuberts took advantage of the lapse in business. They signed a contract with the producers of Once for the Asking, which would come to town on November 20-a few scant weeks away.
Like Spoon River-as the show was soon officially renamed to make it sound less literary and more entertaining-Once for the Asking was written by a first-time Broadway playwright and mounted by two first-time producers. But at least it was a comedy, and while it didn't have box office stars either, its leads were all solid pros: Russell (Call Me Madam) Nype, Jan Sterling, and Scott McKay. Spoon River would have to leave or close by November 16 after a mere forty-nine days to make room for Asking's November 20 opening.
To everyone's surprise, Cates decided to move, despite the fact that the best theater he could get was the Belasco. What a comedown to relocate from Forty-fifth Street between Broadway and Eighth-the block with the most legitimate theaters (eight) and the best walk-in business-to a section of Forty-fourth Street on the "wrong" side of Broadway, where no other theater resided. Theatrical foot traffic seldom ventured that far east, so walk-in business and impulse buying simply wouldn't happen.
And wouldn't you know that Once for the Asking lasted all of one night? How irked Cates and company must have been that they had to endure a costly move to accommodate a comedy that had already received unanimously negative reviews from the five Boston critics during the tryout. Couldn't it have just closed there?
Cates kept Spoon River alive at the Belasco for forty-seven days for a total of 111 performances. That may not be a long run, but in 1963-64 it outdistanced Mary Martin's musical, Terence Rattigan's drama, and Kirk Douglas's vehicle.
One reason was that Hugh Downs, then host of The Today Show, came to see it, loved it, and offered to put it on his morning broadcast. Not only that, he arranged for the cast to do a half-hour cutting.
A half-hour! Could that happen today? For that matter, would Sony now make an original cast album, as its forebear Columbia Records, then the most prestigious label for Broadway, did?
The result? Spoon River was a hit-which on Broadway is solely defined by a producer's returning an investment and delivering a profit. Only eleven of the season's productions would eventually be able to brag that they made money, but Spoon River was one of them.
A low-tech evening of people reciting doleful poetry in a production that endured a money-sucking move nevertheless made a profit? Perhaps even more miraculous was that in 1963-64, a troupe known as the Obratzov Russian Puppet Theatre could bring to town a double bill featuring Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp, book what was then Broadway's biggest theater-the one called the Broadway- and stay for seventy-six performances, longer than forty-three other 1963-64 entries.
Does anybody see this happening today?
We'll visit a season when it could.
Copyright © 2015 by Peter Filichia
