Broadway producers are tiring of the traditional tryout towns; they are, after all, so close to New York. When a heavy wind blows south from Boston or New Haven, it too often carries to Manhattan an unpleasant odor that bodes ill for the play heading for Broadway. Moreover, in the super-envious world of the theater, too many good old friends from around 44th Street like to flock to the nearby roadshows in gleeful hopes of bottling the last gasp.
Accordingly, some 1962-63 shows have been holding their tryouts pretty far afield. The Perfect Set-Up, a comedy by Jack Sher about a Manhattan businessman whose wife and mistress are both contented girls, opens next month in Phoenix and will skip around among cities in the middle, mountain and far western states before opening on Broadway Oct. 24. All sorts of shows will be pussyfooting through the recently discovered Cleveland, Detroit, Toronto belt. Oliver!, English Composer-Lyricist Lionel Bart's musical based on Oliver Twist, has already begun its U.S. tryout in Los Angeles; it opens in Manhattan Dec. 27. Of course, this way-out-of-townsmanship can be carried to extremes. Something called Foxy, getting ready for Broadway, recently opened in the Yukon.
Tested hither or yon, the shows that will actually finish the trip give promise of an unusual season:
∙ MUSICALS: The hero of Mr. President, by Irving Berlin, Howard Lindsay and Russel Grouse, is a U.S. Chief Executive in his second term and after retirement. Speculations are running up and down Shubert Alley about who the real life model must be. The answer to that is all of them—the recent ones anyway—a sort of Harry Fitzgerald Troovenhower, as played by Robert Ryan (Oct. 20). Richard Rodgers and Alan Jay Lerner have a date (March 14) but no title for their first collaborative musical, about which they are keeping mum. Rick Be-soyan, who wrote Off Broadway's phenomenally successful Little Mary Sunshine, has done another parody of the schmalzerettas of the '20s called The Student Gypsy, or The Prince of Lieder-krcmz. Starring Eileen (Little Mary) Brennan, this one is for Broadway (Jan. 31). England's red-brick musical, Stop The World—I Want to Get Off, is a rags-to-Establishment story (Oct. 3). Sid Caesar has eight roles—four husbands, four lovers—in Little Me, based on Patrick (Auntie Mame) Dennis' book (Nov. 17).
∙ REVUES : Writers Eric Bentley and S. J. Perelman have contributed presumably literate material to Cut Loose! (Sept. 13), which has dipped elsewhere for its lyricists—to James (From Here to Eternity} Jones, for example. Beyond the Fringe, which has had London round the bend with laughter for two seasons, has been only lightly red-white-and-bluepenciled for American ears (Oct. 27).