Broadway: The Line-Up

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If only turnabout made fair plays, the coming Broadway season would be a sizable cut above its predecessors. Reversing the East-West brain drain in a migration unprecedented since movies broke the sound barrier, Hollywood writers and composers have turned out so many plays and musicals this year that they threaten to outnumber old Broadway hands in the coming 1964-65 playbills.

For all the new names on the marquees, however, more productions than ever will feature old ones. The prevalence of adaptations reflects the theater's stagnation, and there is a deep reluctance to grapple with controversial, contemporary issues. And the new season's crop of sniggering bedroom comedies argues that Broadway cannot even deal maturely with sex.

MUSICALS

As Ben Franklin in Paris, Robert Preston outfoxes French diplomats only to be bowled over by their women, notably one played by the lovely Swedish import Ulla Sallert. Book and lyrics are by prolific Sidney Michaels, who adapted Tchin-Tchin. Sherlock Holmes would hardly have approved, but he and Watson become song-and-dance men in the long-postponed Baker Street, now Broadway-bound with Fritz Weaver under the deerstalker. Fiddler on the Roof is nominally based on Sholom Aleichem's moralistic tales of Jewish life in pre-revolutionary Russia, with irrepressible Zero Mostel in the leading role. The season's most technically ambitious adaptation will be a Broadway version of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, with book and lyrics by Frank Lacey, who was one of the word men behind The Music Man.

Audrey Hepburn's Oscar-winning movie Roman Holiday will be revisited by Playwright Robert Anderson, who wrote Tea and Sympathy, Composer-Lyricist Richard Adler (Damn Yankees) and Director Joe Layton (No Strings). A Katharine Hepburn movie, Summertime, which was adapted from a Shirley Booth play, The Time of the Cuckoo, is being re-adapted for the theater by Richard Rodgers and his new collaborator, Stephen Sondheim, the lyricist for Gypsy and West Side Story. Another Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance play will be the musical of Clifford Odets' durable Golden Boy, which opened in 1937, became a movie in 1939, was revived on Broadway in 1952, and is still on its feet after out-of-town troubles with direction and script. Sammy Davis—he has dropped the Jr.—plays the violinist who quits the fiddle for the fight racket.

Only two scheduled shows are not based on anybody's biography, novel, play, magazine piece, film or war. In I Had a Ball, Buddy Hackett will play a Freudian fortune teller on Coney Island. Clairvoyance looms large in the other original, the long-awaited Alan Jay Lerner-Burton Lane collaboration, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. Barbara Harris, who was the sensation of Oh Dad, Poor Dad . . ., plays a girl with extrasensory perception.

Chita Rivera plays another 20/20 visionary in Bajour, which has been woven from Joseph Mitchell's New Yorker look at the city's swindling gypsies. The season's only imported musical will be Oh What a Lovely War, a savage but moving World War I satire directed by London's Joan Littlewood.

COMEDIES