Arts and Manners

What Do Our Playwrights Read?

Soon, one Broadway opening will outbore another, and this department will be crowded with terse battle reports. No less than sixty new shows are rapidly moving in on us. The public is game, more so than ever. There is, for instance, a certain musical being prepared starring Ethel Merman, of which no one knows more than the title; yet mail orders for tickets already have piled up in the aggregate sum of close to a million dollars. This, of course, is far more than the whole nation’s total annual expenditure on poetry—but I must not prejudge Miss Merman’s vehicle which, who knows?, might outsing Robert Frost and Dylan Thomas.

WS

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William S. Schlamm

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What Do Our Playwrights Read?

Soon, one Broadway opening will outbore another, and this department will be crowded with terse battle reports. No less than sixty new shows are rapidly moving in on us. The public is game, more so than ever. There is, for instance, a certain musical being prepared starring Ethel Merman, of which no one knows more than the title; yet mail orders for tickets already have piled up in the aggregate sum of close to a million dollars. This, of course, is far more than the whole nation’s total annual expenditure on poetry—but I must not prejudge Miss Merman’s vehicle which, who knows?, might outsing Robert Frost and Dylan Thomas.