Boom on Broadway

"There's a hum on this street," says Sandy Dennis, looking down a line of lighted marquees in the heart of Broadway, "a feeling of encouragement that hasn't been around for a long, long time." Dennis is starring in Absurd Person Singular, her first Broadway hit in ten years. Her success, along with the return of several other top actors, marks an unexpected renaissance of Broadway. After years of frustration over a Great White Way beset by urban squalor, rocketing costs and deserting audiences, Broadway is enjoying the kind of lively season that seemed to have disappeared permanently. Grosses have been of record proportions. Advance sales for Bette

Midler's Clams on the Halfshell Revue set a new one-day record (more than $200,000), and Bob Fosse's $650,000 musical Chicago has not even come in yet.

The excitement is not just box office. This season Broadway has offered something for everyone. Oscar Winner Ellen Burstyn is back in the hit comedy Same Time, Next Year, Rex Harrison and Julie Harris star in In Praise of Love, and Ingrid Bergman is in The Constant Wife. Cleavon Little escaped Mel Brooks' clutches long enough to run off with the notices in Murray Schisgal's flip farce All Over Town, and Elizabeth Ashley returned triumphantly in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The British sent over a generation of stars, including Alec McCowen and Diana Rigg playing together with the finesse of the Lunts in The Misanthrope, John Wood portraying a rapier-sharp Sherlock Holmes, Anthony Hopkins and Peter Firth in the psychological tour de force Equus. Even Liv Ullmann turned up, though in a disappointing production of A Doll's House; her presence gave the season an extra glow.

Hottest Ticket. At the end of last season only three plays had even made their money back. Yet this season began with hit after hit. Playwright Neil Simon credits the British invasion with supplying the spark. "I think there are better plays here because of what London sent us the first half of the season. It got us going." Sure enough, no sooner had Peter Shaffer's Equus and the Royal Shakespeare Company's Sherlock Holmes settled in as enduring successes than Americans hit back with All Over Town and what has turned out to be the season's hottest ticket, Bernard Slade's exercise in extra-conjugal domesticity, Same Time, Next Year. But the sleepers of the season--indeed, the main reason the season itself was a sleeper--were the revivals. Pirandello's The Rules of the Game and Congreve's Love for Love drew enthusiastic audiences; so did Cat and then Gypsy with Angela Lansbury. It was their success that signaled how theater audiences have changed.

Elizabeth Ashley felt it directly.

Away from Broadway since 1964, she remembers audiences "looking as if they were hijacked--at the theater under duress." But when she opened in Cat, she was stunned. "You could feel the audience breathe--they were moved." They were also younger than they used to be. Says Producer Hal Prince: "Young people have begun to be exposed to serious regional theater. The idea of theater as serious entertainment, not just sitcoms, has rubbed off."

Black Blockbuster. Broadway has begun wooing new audiences and shedding some of the commercialism that made it primarily entertainment for the expense-account crowd. In 1967 a group of producers, with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, private foundations and individuals, set up the Theater Development Fund to encourage serious plays on Broadway and develop audiences for them. The fund invests in plays like Cat and Equus by buying up blocks of seats for resale to students, union members and teachers.

Another innovation of the fund is the Times Square ticket booth, which sells tickets at half-price to a variety of shows on the day of performance only. Its influence has extended beyond ticket sales. Notes Prince: "There is an informal, impulsive audience who go to the theater as they go to the movies." The booth has also sustained many new shows; it bolstered The Wiz with a take of $10,000 a week during the first month's run of the all-black musical version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Now, after substantial TV advertising, The Wiz has become Broadway's first black blockbuster.

Not that a hit means what it used to. Producers no longer pretend that their shows are sold out every night. Credit cards and phone orders are accepted. Seats are usually available at the last minute, and Ticketron, a computerized box-office system, has some 90 outlets in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey. Theatergoing in Manhattan is now almost as relaxed and spontaneous as in London.

But changing ways of selling tickets and encouraging new audiences are less important than what Broadway has to offer. The major problem is still a lack of American plays. "In the '20s and '30s, 15 or 20 American playwrights were on Broadway," says Joseph Papp, head of the New York Shakespeare Festival. "It was our national theater. Now it's mostly imports." Supported mainly by federal and state grants, Papp has tried for the past two years to correct the imbalance by presenting new American plays at his Broadway house, the Vivian Beaumont Theater. Audiences have so far rejected his choices, such as David Rabe's raunchy Boom Boom Room and Anne Burr's grim Mert & Phil. "They're too strong, too powerful and too revealing," charges Papp. Bernard B. Jacobs, executive director of the Shubert organization, offers a different explanation: "This is a time of terrible confusion," he says. "It is hard to write about contemporary subjects, perhaps because everything becomes old hat so quickly."

Nevertheless, Jacobs is backing Papp's efforts; this season the Shubert organization gave Papp's off-off-Broadway Public Theater $150,000 to present ten new playwrights. The grants reflect the change in Shubert, the multimillion-dollar real-estate empire. As landlord of 16% Broadway houses, it was for decades a powerful and increasingly neglectful influence. In 1972, Broadway's blackest year, Shubert was hit hard. It even seemed likely that many Broadway houses would be replaced by office buildings but for the kind of chance known as "actor's luck"; the theater slump had coincided with the office-building slump. Since then, the organization has been among the leaders in trying to revitalize theater, pouring more than $2 million seed money into nonprofit companies and urging greater cooperation between all kinds of theater.

Good times. For despite the season's financial success, nothing basic has changed. There is no way to increase the productivity of live performances, nor is there any way theater can compete for any more than a fraction of the huge audiences enjoyed by TV and movies.

Almost every producer believes some form of government help is necessary. Papp and Producer David Merrick opt for straight subsidies. Gerald Schoenfeld, co-executive director of Shubert, thinks that angels should be allowed to deduct investments from their taxes and that the taxes paid by the Broadway area should be pumped back into it. Subsidies from public and private sources already support the flourishing nonprofit theaters that now feed Broadway. The most promising young playwrights have come from them too. Terrence McNally (Bad Habits, The Ritz) got his start at the Manhattan Theater Club. So did Mark Medoff (The Wager, When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder?). It was New Haven's Long Wharf Theater that introduced the best young British playwrights. Sam Shepard, perhaps the most promising young playwright, had his first success, The Tooth of Crime, at Princeton's McCarter Theater. Joe Papp is right when he says, "When you talk about good times in the theater, you are talking about business being good. There are never really up times if you are serious, because the theater must fight tradition constantly."

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