David Merrick recently took his annual physical examination at Boston's Lahey Clinic, and his friends may be relieved to learn that he does not have a long red pointy tail. In other respects, however, David is a devil of a fellow.
Not since Belasco and Ziegfeld has the theater produced such a successful and spectacular producer-star. To the millions who follow his exclamatory career on the front pages and the late shows, he gleefully presents himself as the meanest man in town-as "the Abominable Showman," a bold, bad Broadway producer with a rubber leer, a big black Groucho Marx mustache and a tongue that can tirelessly slice baloney and burble ballyhoo about such Merrick productions as Look Back in Anger, La Plume de Ma Tante, Gypsy and Luther. To publicize his shows, Merrick with truly hippopotamic cheek has sent sandwich-board men into the streets of Manhattan encased in portable placarded pissoirs; persuaded President Johnson to accept the title tune of Hello, Dolly! (a Merrick show) as his campaign song; and conducted a hilarious war of words with the theater crit ics that recently came to a headline-grabbing climax when he canceled an entire preview performance and bought back or exchanged about 1,100 tickets -just to keep New York Times Reviewer Stanley Kauffmann from seeing the show.
Crocodiles & Bluebirds. To the trade, on the other hand, David Merrick is no mere figure of fun. He is a monster of rapacity, a genius of publicity, a wizard of organization who over the last decade has personified U.S. theater as no other man, not even Charles Frohman or Jake Shubert, has ever done before. In the 1965-66 season, his supremacy has been absolute. Out of 44 new shows presented on Broadway, Merrick produced only five. But of the season's dozen hits he came up with four: Marat/Sade, Inadmissible Evidence, Cactus Flower, Philadelphia, Here 1 Come! And he also has Dolly!, now in its third winter and still running strong. Without Merrick's contributions the dying season, in which plays by Edward Albee (Malcolm), Tennessee Williams (Slapstick Tragedy), and William Inge (Where's Daddy?) succumbed in swift succession, could fairly be declared a calamity and Broadway a disaster area. With Merrick's offerings, 1965-66 will be recorded as a minor sinking spell in the long decline of legit.
The decline began in the '20s. Forty years ago there were more than 70 theaters on Broadway and about 250 plays were presented every season. Now there are only 30 theaters and in an average season fewer than 60 openings. Over the same period, costs have bloated until a hit ticket is worth up to $50 in the scalping shops, and Broadway has become an economic jungle where the crocodiles eat the bluebirds. On the other hand, a good play can still keep the seats warm for a couple of years-but where are the good plays? Good musicals come along once in a while, and sprightly comedies intermittently pop up, but the right plays-and the playwrights-are vanishing American commodities. Many writers have been devoured in the threshers of television, while many others have run off to greener pastures outside literature.