Word: broadway
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Financially, the books of Broadway musicals cannot afford to be irresponsible. Soaring overhead costs have shot the tab for a new musical up to a minimum of $300,000, compared to $180,000 for Kiss Me, Kate in 1948. Since it takes a solid run of some six months in one of the big theaters to get back the big money, a musical producer knows he must have a solid hit or strike out. A prime casualty of Broadway overhead is the intimate revue that needs a small theater to catch on. Shoestring '57, a fresh, 30-skit production...
...large and enthusiastic. Twelve backers, including NBC, coughed up $450,000 to provide Merman with Happy Hunting. As anticipated, she drove her sputtering vehicle to solvency before the first-night curtain. The advance sale: $1,500,000. Part of this take came from theater parties, a growing force on Broadway, which trade tickets for contributions to charity. (Happy Hunting drew 74 sellout parties plus 50 others that partially filled the theater.) Another force that sweeps up tickets in wholesale lots: the expense-account economy, in which advertising agencies and public-relations men pass out good seats to good clients...
Knowing Manhattan critics do not consider this a distinguished season in Broadway's musical houses. But it is lively and colorful and booming. And the box-office run of theatergoers has to be as persistent and patient as ever to get seats for the show they want to see when they want...
Until last week Lillian Hellman's adaptation of Jean Anouilh's The Lark was chiefly a Broadway bird. In Hallmark Hall of Fame's skillful TV version, wispy Actress Julie Harris embraced the difficult role of St. Joan like the old friend it has been and, in striking closeup, breathed her special humor and humanity into a rare historic abstraction. As the play opens, Joan is seated on a crude stool, her head bowed, before her judges. In a series of subtly conceived flashbacks, she plays out her great scenes: from the meeting with...
...Lark was seen by some 26 million viewers, roughly 125 times the number who saw Actress Harris' 208 Broadway performances, and probably many more than have seen all the Joans (including Winifred Lenihan, Katharine Cornell, Ingrid Bergman. Uta Hagen. Siobhan McKenna) of the American stage combined...