BOX OFFICE: Poets' Corner

• Share

¶ Crowds queued up last week along Manhattan's West 52nd Street in front of the ANTA Theater, which houses neither a fluffy comedy nor a roaring musical, but a somber, free-verse reworking of the Book of Job. Poet Archibald MacLeish's J.B. (TIME, Dec. 22) was booked onto Broadway with scant attention from theater-party givers and a skimpy advance sale of $46,000. On top of that it ran into the truly Jobian trial of New York's newspaper strike, which muffled the critics' unanimous raves. Yet when news about J.B. did spread, via TV, radio and word of mouth, its theme of modern man's agony must have touched responsive chords. By last week J.B. was one of the hottest tickets in town, and requests for seats are pouring in by mail at a rate of nearly 500 a day. Advance sales have zoomed to $250,000, and weekly profits top $10,000; the play will earn back its $125,000 production cost in about three months.

¶ Another poet, William Shakespeare, was packing them in just as tightly. London's Old Vic, in its first New York appearance since 1956, performed to near capacity crowds every night (Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Henry V). The troupe expects to wind up its 25-week U.S. tour next month with total grosses of $1,200,000. And British Actor Sir John Gielgud, in a one-man tour de force (see THEATER), nearly filled the 1,300-seat 46th Street Theater nightly with recitations from Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, grossed $30,000 his first week.