The Theater: Boom off Broadway

Anybody who intends to produce a Broadway show needs his overhead examined. If he has a musical like Wonderful Town, he needs $225,000 to start with, has to pay out more than $44,000 a week and charge a $7.20 top. If he is lucky enough to have such a rare hit as Wonderful Town, he can net more than $5,000 a week. But even though fearless angels are easy to find (178 contributed $300,000 to the forthcoming Shirley Booth musical, By the Beautiful Sea), the risks are still great. This week there are fresh signs of a challenging movement that may yet check Broadway's stranglehold on its box office.

Create Away from Pressures. At the Phoenix Theater on Manhattan's Second Avenue, a couple of miles below Times Square, an inventive musical play called The Golden Apple (TIME, March 22) is playing to full houses. The Phoenix, according to Founders Norris Houghton and T. Edward Hambleton, was organized last fall so that established show people could occasionally get away "from the frenzied tailoring process that must turn every undertaking into a 'smash hit.' " For its first production, Madam, Will You Walk, the Phoenix hired Broadway's Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, paid them $100 a week apiece. The play ran successfully for six weeks, after a capital outlay of $15,000. Next, Houghton and Hambleton put on Shakespeare's Coriolanus, with Cinemactor Robert Ryan (salary: $100 a week). Again, for $15,000, the Phoenix had a fine run. Golden Apple is a more ambitious show. It cost $75,000, but a similar production on Broadway would have run to $250,000. The Phoenix still pays its top people only $100, gets along with a seven-man stagehand crew (v. 33 for Wonderful Town). Top ticket price: $4.80. Meanwhile, the producers have decided to cash in on Golden Apple's popularity by bringing it to Broadway.

Take It Seriously. Other off-Broadway theaters scattered around lower Manhat tan and Greenwich Village are serving as useful a purpose as the Phoenix. Like summer-stock houses, they are the training ground for a vast number of young actors, artists and designers.

Circle in the Square (capacity 200) two years ago produced Tennessee Williams' Summer and Smoke and made a star out of Geraldine Page. The theater is now playing Alfred Hayes's Girl on the Via Flaminia at an initial cost of $3,500 and is grossing $2,700 a week.

Theater de Lys (capacity 299) recently hit its stride with Leslie Stevens' $10,000 hit production, Bullfight, with a three man stage crew and $25-a-week actors. Current tenant: The Threepenny Opera.

The Cherry Lane Theater (capacity 200) has a mildly successful play in Paul Vincent Carroll's The Wise Have Not Spoken. "Business is 100% over last year's," says one Cherry Laner. "They have begun to take off-Broadway seriously."