What Price Culture?

When George Bernard Shaw and Giacomo Puccini brightened TV screens last week, the countinghouse critics scoffed; CULTURE GETS TRENDEX SHELLACKING headlined Variety. Indeed, the 90-minute live Hallmark Hall of Fame production of Shaw's Man and Superman, starring Maurice Evans and Joan Greenwood, ran behind its opposition with a Trendex rating of 12. And the Ed Sullivan Show fell off eight points to 33 as it featured Prima Donna Maria Meneghini Callas and Baritone George London in an 18-minute scene from Tosca.

But the figures were misleading. Sullivan's 33 was still imposing enough to keep him well up among the top ten shows: his previous week's score had been freakishly high because he had shown clips from an Elvis Presley movie. Estimated audience for the Tosca scene: 40 million --enough to keep Manhattan's Met filled for almost 20 years. Sullivan's deal with the Met calls for four more operatic scenes starring such performers as Mario del Monaco, Renata Tebaldi and Dorothy Kirsten. Said he: "We certainly have no plans to change our opera dates. This was just the shot in the arm our show needed because you can always put on the Rosemary Clooneys, the Julius La Rosas and the acrobats."

Man and Superman was played with all the high style of Actor-Manager Evans' Broadway hit production of 1947--and seen by perhaps 15 million viewers, roughly 45 times the paying customers who attended all 150 performances. Said Sponsor Joyce C. Hall: "I would rather have a satisfied 8 million in the audience than a dissatisfied 24 million."

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