Broadway: The New Season

Every Broadway season looks in prospect like an ingenue in a bridal gown, and in retrospect like a naked iguana. Somehow, the paper promises —the mere names, titles and themes — are always unbearably alluring; but it is much easier to develop a good idea for a show than to develop a good show, and Broadway never looks better than it does in August, just before it starts down the aisle.

The coming season proportionally contains much the same elements as its predecessors. There will be a strong transfusion from Britain, a wad of adaptations, a spare and frangible offering of original work, and a lot of music.

Undoubtedly beginning a trend, Meredith Willson's Here's Love (Oct. 3) —a musical adaptation of the 1947 20th Century-Fox department story called Miracle on 34th Street — has a cast that is about 10% Negro. They are Macy's shoppers, spectators, secretaries — everything but Santa Claus — and do not play the roles of Negroes as such.

∙OTHER MUSICALS: Everything but the Congressional Record seems to be turning into a musical this season, even Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, which becomes a musical revue featuring four actors in 70 roles (Sept. 29). Three Conan Doyle stories are being staged by Joshua Logan as Baker Street, with Fritz Weaver as Sherlock Holmes, turning the first private eye into the first private throat (April 23). Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit becomes High Spirits, with Coward directing and Edward Woodward, Tammy Grimes and Beatrice Lillie carrying the tunes (March 31). Coward has also done the music and lyrics for The Girl Who Came to Supper, a musical version of Terence Rattigan's The Sleeping Prince, starring José Ferrer (Nov. 28). N. Richard Nash's The Rainmaker will reseed the money cloud as 110 in the Shade, with Inga Swenson, Robert Horton and Stephen Douglass (Oct. 24). A musical version of Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker is called Dolly: A Damned Exasperating Woman, starring Carol Channing (Jan. 16).

The Prisoner of Zenda has been made into four movies, but not a Broadway musical until this season, when Alfred Drake will star in Zenda, which takes some liberties with the original novel: the English gentleman hero is now a song and dance man on tour (Nov. 26). Budd Schulberg has turned his novel What Makes Sammy Run? into a musical (Feb. 4). And Negro Novelist Langston Hughes has adapted his Tambourines to Glory for musical presentation as well, wherein two Negro women establish a church in Harlem (Oct. 26). Before his death, Clifford Odets completed the book-adaptation of his Golden Boy.

Jennie is a slice of biography dealing with seven months in the life of Actress Laurette Taylor just after the turn of the century. The show opens on a scene that includes a 20-ft. waterfall, a whip-cracking villain, a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman tied to a tree, and the heroine (Mary Martin) fighting off savage coolies with a baby in her arms (Oct. 17). The life of Fanny Brice has also been turned into a musical called Funny Girl, starring Barbra Streisand singing a score by Jule Styne (Feb. 13).