The Once & Future show

To Shubert Alley cats, it would seem likelier for a baseball World Series to be held in Calcutta than for a Broadway show to try out in Toronto. But the New York season's biggest and most awaited musical has done just that, pitching the tents of Camelot on the edge of Lake Ontario.

The explanation had more to do with business than show. Toronto's O'Keefe Brewing Co.. having just completed a $12 million civic center for the performing arts, was willing to offer a sizable (exact amount undisclosed) slice of Cana dian bacon to get the right show for the center's dedication. Camelot, the 1960 reunion of My Fair Lady's family (Librettist Alan Jay Lerner, Composer Frederick Loewe, Director Moss Hart, Star Julie Andrews), was the obvious choice.

Both the show and the playhouse are massive. Built of granite, marble and glass, partly sheathed in bronze, the theater has a 3,200-seat auditorium that suggests a modern Met. The orchestra pit is wide enough for 76 trombones in slide-out profile, and the actors all but use roller skates to move about the 7,650-sq.-ft. stage, which cozily holds Camelot's 17 brilliant sets.

Before undergoing first cuts last week, the show ran for nearly four hours. On-opening night, the white-tied, tiara-heavy audience saw the first-act curtain go down just before 11. the final curtain at 12:25. Reviewers on Toronto's three daily newspapers commented with cautious approval, making the traditional road-critic observation that the musical--drawn from T. H.

White's superb novel. The Once and Future King--"needs work." According to the Globe & Mail's Herbert Whittaker, Camelot-cutting had become the newest Toronto parlor game. "If I followed everybody's advice," said Hart, "Act I would consist of exactly one song."

Betting on considerably more than one song, customers, long before the scheduled, late fall Manhattan opening, have already spent more than $3,000,000 on tickets, the biggest advance sale in Broadway history. Producers L. and L. hesitate to advertise, fearing a further deluge of money. Other troubles beset the Camelot team. In the midst of his cutting and rewriting chores. Alan Jay Lerner went to the hospital with a bleeding ulcer,* and Director Hart learned of the death of his 97-year-old father in Miami, retired to his hotel room for three days with nervous fatigue. As for the show itself. Composer Loewe had armored himself in a metaphor. "When you see it." he warned visitors just before curtain time, "remember that when a baby is born, its face is all wrinkled, it looks like a prune. It is red and ugly and you say, Ts that my baby? No. Never.' But six weeks later, the baby has smooth, soft skin. Six weeks from now, Camelot will be the most beautiful infant ever."

* Other wear and tear on the road last week: Tammy Grimes, as The Unsinkable Molly Brown, sank out of two performances because of laryngitis, while Judy Holliday indefinitely delayed the opening of Laurcttc because she needed corrective surgery for a throat condition. At week's end the show, which had drawn boos in a preview performance in Philadelphia, was abandoned altogether.

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