Theatre: Best Guesser

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A racetrack tipster who spotted winning horses with 75% success would be the greatest tipster in history. But a drama critic who forecasts with 75% correctness the financial result of Broadway plays, is only a mediocre seer. Last week Variety published its annual box score of Manhattan theatre critics. Seven of twelve men from the leading dailies made scores of .75 or better.

E. W. Osborn of the Evening World was low man. He saw 86 plays during the past season, guessed right only four times more than he guessed wrong, expressed no opinion twelve times, scored .453. Just above him was large Percy Hammond of the Herald Tribune, purveyor of false pomp and true drollery, who scored .616. Walter Winchell, Broadway slangman and gossiper, until last week of the tabloid Graphic (see p. 18) scored .790. He was just below dignified, grammatical J. Brooks Atkinson of the Times (.798) who, in turn, ran second to the winner, baldish, bespectacled Robert Littell of the Evening Post (.809).* Prognosticating a play's financial luck has but little to do with that synthesis of taste, dogma and analysis which is dramatic criticism. It is a question of audience psychology, of knowing what will make the playgoing mass guffaw, snivel, clap its hands. Thus Critic Littell's victory may have surprised friends who knew that the 1928-29 season had been his first as a daily critic (with the public duty to pronounce on a play's likelihood of "success''). Hitherto he has concerned himself with "dramaturgy" rather than "show business," as would befit the son of Author Philip Littell (onetime editor of the New Republic) and the product of well-mannered Groton School (Groton, Mass.), where boys who read Shelley and play Mozart are often encouraged. Now 33, Robert Littell's youth included Harvard and the U. S. army of occupation in Russia and book reviews for the New Republic and many a big talk with famed Walter Lippmann, philosopher-editor of the New York World. In addition to his Post position. Broadway's Best Guesser also reviews plays, profoundly, for Theatre Arts Monthly. He is married to Anita Elaine Damrosch, daughter of Musician Walter Johannes Damrosch, granddaughter of the late great James ("Man from Maine") Blaine.