Show Business: The Fabulous Invalid's New Symptoms

A THEATER season is spoken of as an entity, but it nourishes some 100 unique possibilities, not excluding a happening like Jesus Christ Superstar. Here are some of the other 99 that will make up the 1971-72 record.

MUSICALS: The musical is peculiarly evocative of the U.S. spirit. With the popular yearning for a simpler past, the appetite for nostalgia came into being. It is represented this year by the revival of the 1944 show On the Town, with book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, music by Leonard Bernstein. No one can guess how anyone will react to the lyrics: "New York, New York, it's a wonderful town!"

David Merrick will weigh in with Nobody's Perfect, an adaptation of the Billy Wilder movie, Some Like It Hot, in which Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe costarred. Elaine Joyce will play the Monroe part and Bobby Morse will fill the Lemmon role. Jule Styne supplies the music, Bob Merrill the lyrics, and Gower Champion will direct. The team that put together Stop the World —I Want to Get Off, Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley, will be back with another marquee-macerating title, It's a Funny Old World We Live In, but the World's Not Entirely to Blame. Newley will play Everyman, as is his wont. Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death is a musical "of the street with street people" that takes an all-black look at the Promised Land called America.

From the original Promised Land this week comes the first Israeli musical, To Live Another Summer—To Pass Another Winter, a lighthearted treatment of the generation gap as well as the struggle with the Arabs. The forthcoming F. Jasmine Addams is Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding set to music, and Truman Capote's The Grass Harp will come twanging back on the scene with Barbara Cook as the star. Still another musical revival is Candide, of 1956 vintage, with music by Leonard Bernstein and the totally ingenuous hero courtesy of Voltaire.

DRAMA: This is not a time of powerful playwrights with bold convictions. Audiences must settle for privacy of vision and a distinctively personal voice. England's Harold Pinter has both. His famous pauses are elusive in meaning and menacing in their silence, which perhaps befits an age of uncertainty. In Old Times, he returns to his favorite human geometry, the triangle (in this case, two women and a man), and examines the tricks that life plays on memory and memory plays on itself. The trio will be acted by Robert Shaw, Mary Ure and Rosemary Harris. From the front rank of American playwrights, only Arthur Miller is currently scheduled for production, with a new work titled The Creation of the World and Other Business. Miller calls it a "catastrophic comedy." He also has a revival coming up when the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center does The Crucible, the parable of the Joe McCarthy era told in terms of the Salem witch hunts.