The New Season

Broadway producers are tiring of the traditional tryout towns; they are, after all, so close to New York. When a heavy wind blows south from Boston or New Haven, it too often carries to Manhattan an unpleasant odor that bodes ill for the play heading for Broadway. Moreover, in the super-envious world of the theater, too many good old friends from around 44th Street like to flock to the nearby roadshows in gleeful hopes of bottling the last gasp.

Accordingly, some 1962-63 shows have been holding their tryouts pretty far afield. The Perfect Set-Up, a comedy by Jack Sher about a Manhattan businessman whose wife and mistress are both contented girls, opens next month in Phoenix and will skip around among cities in the middle, mountain and far western states before opening on Broadway Oct. 24. All sorts of shows will be pussyfooting through the recently discovered Cleveland, Detroit, Toronto belt. Oliver!, English Composer-Lyricist Lionel Bart's musical based on Oliver Twist, has already begun its U.S. tryout in Los Angeles; it opens in Manhattan Dec. 27. Of course, this way-out-of-townsmanship can be carried to extremes. Something called Foxy, getting ready for Broadway, recently opened in the Yukon.

Tested hither or yon, the shows that will actually finish the trip give promise of an unusual season:

sb MUSICALS: The hero of Mr. President, by Irving Berlin, Howard Lindsay and Russel Grouse, is a U.S. Chief Executive in his second term and after retirement. Speculations are running up and down Shubert Alley about who the real life model must be. The answer to that is all of them--the recent ones anyway--a sort of Harry Fitzgerald Troovenhower, as played by Robert Ryan (Oct. 20). Richard Rodgers and Alan Jay Lerner have a date (March 14) but no title for their first collaborative musical, about which they are keeping mum. Rick Be-soyan, who wrote Off Broadway's phenomenally successful Little Mary Sunshine, has done another parody of the schmalzerettas of the '20s called The Student Gypsy, or The Prince of Lieder-krcmz. Starring Eileen (Little Mary) Brennan, this one is for Broadway (Jan. 31). England's red-brick musical, Stop The World--I Want to Get Off, is a rags-to-Establishment story (Oct. 3). Sid Caesar has eight roles--four husbands, four lovers--in Little Me, based on Patrick (Auntie Mame) Dennis' book (Nov. 17).

sb REVUES : Writers Eric Bentley and S. J. Perelman have contributed presumably literate material to Cut Loose! (Sept. 13), which has dipped elsewhere for its lyricists--to James (From Here to Eternity} Jones, for example. Beyond the Fringe, which has had London round the bend with laughter for two seasons, has been only lightly red-white-and-bluepenciled for American ears (Oct. 27).

sb COMEDIES: Elaine May (TIME, Sept. 26, 1960) has finally finished her long-fermented play. If it contains her own wild and uncommon brilliance, it will be superb. Called A Matter of Position, it is vaguely described as a protest against society. The star is her comic partner, Mike Nichols (Oct. 25). S. N. Behrman's Lord Pengo (Nov. 11) is an adaptation of his biography of Art Dealer Joseph Duveen, played by Charles Boyer. Anita Loos (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes} has been tinkling with a French play about the wedding night of Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves. Sidestepping Ladies Prefer Beards, she kept the French title, The King's Mare (January). The Beauty Part, S. J. Perelman's mad satire on culture-crazed Americans, is finally moving toward Broadway (Dec. 26) after trying out at Pennsylvania's Bucks County Playhouse in the summer of 1961. Opposite Carroll (Baby Doll) Baker, Van Johnson will play an actor who is also a LIFE photographer in Garson Kanin's Come On Strong (Oct. 4).

sb DRAMAS: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is the what-big-fears-you-have title of Edward Albee's first full-length play, dealing with a marriage problem (Oct. 13). Author of The Zoo Story, The American Dream, and The Death of Bessie Smith, Albee is the most talked-about young American playwright. The most promising young American playwright is probably Jack Richardson (The Prodigal, Gallows Humor), whose new play Lorenzo will star Alfred Drake in the story of a roving actor who finds himself involved in a blood feud between two towns and discovers that he cannot remain morally uncommitted (February). Novelist C. P.

Snow's The Affair, which had a good run last season as adapted for the London stage by Ronald Millar, now comes to New York (Sept. 20). How Much? is Lillian Hellman's new play, an adaptation of a novel about an old woman whose family is energetically trying to ship her off to a nursing home forever (February).

Everybody in Hollywood will soon be claiming that he is this or that character in Banderol, since the play centers around a studio production boss and was written by Dore Schary, ex-production boss at M-G-M (Oct. 9). Anthony Quinn and Margaret Leighton star in an adaptation of Franc,ois Billetdoux's Tchin-Tchin (the word equals hello or goodbye, like ciao in Italian), a tale about lovers who meet as a result of a love affair between his wife and her husband (Oct. 18) A limited-run production of Sheridan's The School for Scandal opens on Broadway Jan. 21, starring Sir Ralph Richardson and Sir John Gielgud, who will also direct. Sidney Kingsley's first play in eight years is called Night Life (Oct. 23). It takes place in a key club, has 28 people onstage throughout, and is written in what Kingsley calls "a free and new use of verbal imagery and a new use of the stream-of-consciousness technique."

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