Curtain Going Up

Broadway this week is as expectant as a darkened theater just before curtain time. In loft buildings and on sceneryless stages, a dozen casts are rehearsing for the coming season. At straw-hat theaters across the U.S., more than 50 other plays have already made bids for Broadway. Veteran showmen, scanning the theatrical horizon, counted the biggest batch of new shows in many a year:

P: Though not yet in rehearsal, Joshua Logan's production of Norman Krasna's Kind Sir is tabbed as a likely hit on the strength of its costars, Mary Martin and Charles Boyer. A comedy-romance about an actress and a State Department official, Kind Sir is due on Broadway in December, is already sold out to theater parties for the first three months.

P: The Playwrights' Company will offer Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy, starring Deborah Kerr and telling of a schoolboy falsely accused of homosexuality; Elmer Rice's The Winner; and Samuel Taylor's Sabrina Fair (already sold to the movies as a vehicle for Audrey Hepburn), featuring Barbara Bel Geddes as an American girl readjusting to life at home after three years in Paris.

P: The London stage will send its usual handful of hopefuls: The Little Hut, a quadrangle play about a husband, his wife and her lover, shipwrecked on a desert island with an amorous and bogus native; and two mysteries, A Pin to See the Peep Show and Gently Does It, both hoping to duplicate the Broadway success of London's Dial M for Murder.

P: Billy Rose returns to producing with a brace of French plays: the musical, Orpheus in the Underworld, based on Jacques Offenbach's score and with a new book by Ben Hecht (see Music) ; and a dramatization of Andre Gide's The Immoralist, starring Geraldine Page and directed by Herman Shumlin. Other French entries: The Strong Are Lonely, with Victor Francen and Margaret Webster; and a Louis Kronenberger adaptation of Jean Anouilh's bitter Colombe, a starring vehicle for talented Julie Harris.

P: From the summer circuit come George Batson's mystery drama, Celia, with Jessie Royce Landis; The Frogs of Spring, a Manhattan comedy based on Nathaniel Benchley's New Yorker stories; and Eva Gabor in Sailor's Delight.

P: Producer Leland Hayward is devoting his considerable energies to the Lindsay & Crouse drama, The Prescott Proposals, starring Katharine Cornell and telling of the tribulations of a U.S. woman delegate to the United Nations.

P: Producer Jed Harris may put on the long-promised Thornton Wilder play, Emporium, a story of a symbolic department store; Harris will also direct Paddy Chayefsky's prize ring drama, Fifth from Garibaldi.

P: Playwright F. Hugh Herbert aims at equaling the smash success of his The Moon Is Blue with A Girl Can Tell, a new comedy about a teen-ager and her mother. George Axelrod, who wrote last season's hit, The Seven-Year Itch, will be back with another comedy called Pffft, which he describes as "the heart-warming chronicle of a happy divorce." Sidney (Detective Story) Kingsley is hard at work on a comedy about "sex and laughter" called Satyr's Dance.

P: Betty Field and Edna Best will co-star in The Ladies of the Corridor, a drama of lonely women in metropolitan hotels by Dorothy Parker and Arnaud D'Usseau; George S. Kaufman collaborates with Howard Teichmann in The Solid Gold Cadillac, starring Josephine Hull; and the U.S. occupation of Okinawa gets a good-humored going-over in Maurice Evans' production of The Tea House of the August Moon, based on Vern Sneider's bestselling novel.

The list of musicals is surprisingly slim: Shirley Booth will top the list in Herbert & Dorothy Fields's By the Beautiful Sea, whose locale is Coney Island at the turn of the century; Carnival in Flanders (based on the French film La Kermesse Heroique), starring Dolores Gray, is touring the West Coast and may make it back to Broadway. Also promised: British Comedienne Hermione Gingold in John Murray Anderson's Almanac, Anna Russell and Her Little Show, At Home with Ethel Waters, and a Palm Beach musical based on Cleveland Amory's The Last Resorts.

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