¶ Crowds queued up last week along Manhattan's West 52nd Street in front of the ANTA Theater, which houses neither a fluffy comedy nor a roaring musical, but a somber, free-verse reworking of the Book of Job. Poet Archibald MacLeish's J.B. (TIME, Dec. 22) was booked onto Broadway with scant attention from theater-party givers and a skimpy advance sale of $46,000. On top of that it ran into the truly Jobian trial of New York's newspaper strike, which muffled the critics' unanimous raves. Yet when news about J.B. did spread, via TV, radio and word of mouth, its theme of...
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