The Season

"This book is an exhaustively researched assessment of a single Broadway season in 1967-68. He interviewed pretty much everyone involved with every show. The book is useful even today, because it analyses every production that opened that season and uses each to illustrate a different point about Broadway, the various forms of theatre, and the economics of putting on a show. He also shows how difficult it is to make money. Most Broadway shows never turn a profit, which makes it a very strange business but for the fact that a lot of people make money on shows that don’t return the investment of their producers. Some of what Goldman has to say is dated. For instance, he puts forward the notion that William Inge, Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee – who were all gay – didn’t do a good job of writing about relationships between men and women, which is absurd. But aside from the anachronistic attitudes that crop up, the writing is frank, funny and entertaining. You get a sense of what was going on backstage. It’s really compelling. It was written at a time when the influence of Broadway on American culture had already begun to wane. In an early chapter he notes that the movie The Graduate , which opened during this period, out-grossed all of Broadway theatre during that season. Through the 50s, the theatre maintained its importance in American culture. But by the late 60s, the culture was being upended. Producers and writers were desperately trying to figure out how to either find new audiences or keep the audience they had left. Some of the shows produced during that season – comedies about counterculture and the generation gap – reflect that desperation. Jean Arthur, an old-time film actress, appeared in one show called The Freaking Out of Stephanie Blake , about a spinster from the sticks who comes to New York to rescue her niece from hippies. Apparently, it was as shockingly bad as it sounds. I think it never even opened. But there were a few shows like it that season. Plays were already in danger, they were already having shorter runs. The long runs of successful musicals was a phenomenon that was just starting with Fiddler on the Roof , Hello Dolly and Man of La Mancha . A decade or two before, a long-running musical like Oklahoma! only lasted for a few hundred performances. These days, musicals run for five, eight, 10 years."