Finish Line

Broadway had had a fairly healthy and not too hackneyed season. If no dazzling new plays emerged during 1945-46, no very dreadful ones prospered. If business fluctuated, it generally flourished. Entertainment, as always, fared much the best; but earnestness got a hearing, and art fared very well.

Art, indeed, made the biggest splash--when, at season's end, England's famed Old Vic grandly invaded Broadway. After advancing with Shakespeare and being repulsed with Chekhov, the Old Vic swept on to triumph with Sophocles' Oedipus the King, giving Broadway its greatest theatrical experience in years.

Many Happy Returns. Broadway had been the brighter for revivals. The newly organized Theatre, Inc. (which played host to the Old Vic) had started Shaw's Pygmalion on its longest run; and Katharine Cornell had for the fourth time shined up Shaw's Candida. There was a double scoop of Shakespeare, too: Maurice Evans' brisk G.I. Hamlet and an agreeable Winter's Tale.

Earnestness got a hearing during 1945-46, but not much of a hand. Only one new serious play, Deep Are the Roots, really clicked. When Broadway looked back (not too searchingly) at the war, it found that nowhere was the war so dead as at the box office. When Broadway looked at the disturbing in U.S. life, it showed more social conscience than skill. But a social conscience was alive in the theater, and even slick comedy smashes like Born Yesterday and the Pulitzer-Prizewinning State of the Union took pot shots at political and social targets.

Diadems & Dunce Caps. Oscar Hammerstein II was almost mythically affluent, with a producer's or librettist's haul from five smash hits: Oklahoma!, Carousel, I

Remember Mama, Show Boat, Annie Get Your Gun. Highest acting honors were foreign and male: Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson for their Old Vic Oedipus and Falstaff. Nimblest female performance: Betty Field in Dream Girl.

P: Biggest box office: the revived Show Boat.

P: Worst purse-denter; the musicalamity Nellie Ely (an estimated $300,000).

P: Most unforeseen hit: Victor Herbert's 40-year-old Red Mill.

P: Pleasantest surprise: the quondam-G.I. musical Call Me Mister.

P: Greatest disappointment: Robert E. Sherwood's The Rugged Path.

P:Most piquant sauce for the gander: the playwrights' season-long pummeling of the critics.

Hollywood, which during 1944-45 went on a $4 million buying spree on Broadway, cut back to a more normal $2 million worth of orders. Fanciest merchandise: State of the Union and Dream Girl, $300,000 each; The Late George Apley, $275,000. Most shopworn item: Lulu Belle (produced on Broadway in 1926), $50,000.

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