Word: broadway
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Among plays, many are copyrighted, but few are chosen. Of close to 5,000 registered with the Copyright Office each year, possibly 2,000 go the Broadway rounds, 500 receive serious consideration, 300 land their authors a contract. Of 100 to 200 that are produced, more than 75% flop, less than 10% become smash hits, two or three run into their second year, one wins a Pulitzer Prize...
...premiere in a shabby downtown Manhattan theatre. At its conclusion, a Left Wing audience put on the kind of demonstration that What Price Glory? had known, uptown, ten years before. The play was Waiting for Lefty, by Clifford Odets. Two months later. Lefty was running full blast in one Broadway theatre, Odets' Awake and Sing! in another, and critics were writing elaborate Sunday articles about the author. The Left theatre had become an exciting reality for people in no wise Left-minded, and when 28-year-old Odets was not being hailed as the Boy Wonder...
Odets does not encase this eternal situation in the snug, tight frame of the well-made Broadway "domestic drama.'' Heaving, racked, volcanic, the play belches the hot subterranean lava of its characters' anger, helplessness, pain. It draws back their skin to leave every nerve exposed. In its best scenes Rocket to the Moon is blisteringly real, its dialogue forks and spits like lightning from a scornful...
...next day no repentant Group directors fell prostrate before Odets. The directorate was still thumbs down on him. Pressure from the Group's actors was necessary to get them to produce Awake and Sing! After Awake and Sing! clicked, the Group rushed Lefty uptown, and Odets became Broadway's man-of-the-year...
...play and the Group going. Again, in the summer of 1937. when the Group existed in name only-its leading actors and its one remaining director were all in Hollywood-Odets came through with the script of Golden Boy, and like a Pied Piper led everybody back to Broadway...