Watch and Wait

Cast and crew fight for a play

The ads say it is "the miracle on 45th Street," and, as miracles are measured on Broadway, it just may be. Whatever it is called, the struggle against the odds of Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine is proof that if enough people care about a play, they can sometimes combat negative reviews.

Watch on the Rhine, which was voted best play of the year by the critics in 1940-41, is a strong anti-Nazi tract, half drama, half propaganda. The 1943 movie version, with Bette Davis and, Paul Lukas, can still evoke tears and anger on the late show. New Haven's Long Wharf Theater put it on the boards last year, and Producer Lester Osterman, who was in the audience, decided to bring it to Broadway: "The audience there was enthusiastic. I was crying." With three co-producers he raised $225,000 and opened the play Jan. 3 at the John Golden Theater on West 45th Street.

Most of the reviews were respectful, but one--Walter Kerr's in the New York Times--was not. Since Kerr's is the most influential New York critic's voice, a closing notice was posted for the distraught cast, who thought they had a hit. But like Fred Astaire, who rallied everybody to save a show in the movie musical The Bandwagon (1953), Harris Yulin, who plays the villain, made an impassioned speech. "I think if we can stay around long enough," he said, "we can get some word of mouth going."

They did. New backers came to the rescue, all the actors voted to take the Equity minimum, and the stagehands volunteered to take big pay cuts. Says one prop man: "We figured they got a bad shot from that guy Kerr." Some help may have come too from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which suddenly made Watch seem disquietingly relevant. Says Jan Miner, who portrays the Washington matriarch who discovers that even her comfortable home is not safe from the fascist menace: "This play means as much in 1980 as it did in 1941."

Though Kerr had serious reservations about the production, complaining that the actors looked as if they had been positioned for an oldtime theatrical poster, Hellman was annoyed when he called her play dated. "I don't think the audience is crying just because a man is leaving his wife and children," she says. "It's because he's going back to fight for something he believes in. Very few people do that today."

The show is still far from a hit, but it is surviving. Says Osterman: "We are now breaking even. If we can get $10,000 a week more, then that will do it."

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