The Best plays of ..

II ISBN D-3^b-DflEMD-fl FPT >$E7-^S

THE BURNS MANTLE YEARBOOK

THE

BEST PLAYS

1982-1983

Editedby OTIS L. GUERNSEY JR.

Illustrated with drawings by

AL HIRSCHFELD

and photographs of all

1982-83 highlights

Here in the 1982-83 Best Plays volume are presented all those features which have made this series the outstanding reference book on the American theater. Familiar features include the listings of all plays produced in New York (on and off Broadway and off off Broadway), annual awards and vital statistics of productions, prizes, people and publications. Here also are the editor's choices of the ten Best Plays, represented with excerpts from scripts. Additional photographs throughout the book record visually the season's highlights, and the index of performers and all other persons mentioned in the book makes this an even more valuable volume for reference purposes.

Once again Ella Malin has compiled a Directory of Professional Regional Theater especially for this book, which gives the vital statistics of every professional regional theater production from coast to coast.

BOSTON PUBLIC UBl^RY o o o

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THE

BURNS MANTLE

YEARBOOK oooooooooooooooooo o THE o

3 BEST PLAYS g o o

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EDITED BY OTIS L. GUERNSEY JR.

Illustrated with photographs and with drawings by HIRSCHFELD oooooo

DODD, MEAD & COMPANY NEW YORK our* 1984 CODMAiM SQUARE

Copyright © 1983 by Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 20-21432

Printed in the United States of America

"Closely Related": by Bruce MacDonald. Copyright ©1983 by Bruce MacDonald. Reprinted by permission of the Helen Merrill Agency. See caution notice below. All inquiries should be addressed to the author's representative: Helen Merrill, 337 West 22nd Street, New York, N.Y. 10011.

"Good": by C. P. Taylor. Copyright ©1982 by C. P. Taylor. Reprinted by permission of Michael Imison Playwrights, Ltd. See caution notice below. All inquiries concerning amateur production rights should be addressed to: Dramatic Publishing Company, 164 Main Street, Westport, Connecticut 06880. All inquiries concerning other rights should be addressed to: Michael Imison Playwrights, Ltd., Somerset House, 150 West 47th Street, Apt. 5F, New York, N.Y. 10036.

"Cats": based on Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot. Excerpts from Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot are reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.; copyright 1939 by T. S. Eliot, renewed 1967 by Esme Valerie Eliot. "Memory" incorporates lines from Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1936 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., copyright © 1963, 1964 by T. S. Eliot, which are reprinted by permission of the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to: Permissions, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 757 Third Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10017.

"Angels Fall": by Lanford Wilson. Copyright ©1983 by Lanford Wilson. Reprinted by permission of Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. See caution notice below. All inquiries concerning amateur production rights should be addressed to: Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 440 Park Avenue South, New York, N.Y. 10016. All inquiries concerning other rights should be addressed to the author's representative: Bridget Aschenberg, International Creative Management, 40 West 57th Street, New York, N.Y. 10019.

"Plenty": by David Hare. Copyright ©1978 by David Hare. Reprinted by permission of The New American Library, Inc. See caution notice below. All inquiries concerning amateur production rights should be addressed to: Samuel French, Inc., 25 West 45th Street, New York, N.Y. 10036. All other inquiries should be addressed to: The New American Library, Inc., 1633 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10019.

"Foxfire": by Susan Cooper and Hume Cronyn. Copyright ©1979, 1983 by Susan Cooper and Hume Cronyn. Reprinted by permission of the authors. See caution notice below. All inquiries concerning stock and amateur production rights should be addressed to: Samuel French, Inc., 25 West 45th Street, New York, N.Y. 10036. All inquiries concerning other rights should be addressed to: Bridget Aschenberg, International Creative Management, 40 West 57th Street, New York, N.Y. 10019.

"Extremities": by William Mastrosimone. Copyright ©1983 by William Mastrosimone. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of William Morris Agency, Inc. on behalf of the author. See CAUTION notice below. All inquiries should be addressed to: William Morris Agency, Inc., Attention: George Lane, 1350 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10019.

"K2": by Patrick Meyers. Copyright ©1980, 1982, 1983 by Patrick Meyers. Reprinted by permission of the Helen Merrill Agency. See caution notice below. All inquiries should be addressed to the author's representative: Helen Merrill, 337 West 22nd Street, New York, N.Y. 10011.

" 'night, Mother": by Marsha Norman. Copyright ©1983 by Marsha Norman. Reprinted by permission of Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. See caution notice below. All inquiries concerning stock and amateur production rights should be addressed to: Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 440 Park Avenue South, New York, N.Y. 10016. All inquiries concerning other rights should be addressed to the author's agent: William Morris Agency, Inc., Attention: Samuel Liff, 1350 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10019.

"My One and Only": by Peter Stone and Timothy S. Mayer. Copyright ©1983 by Peter Stone and Timothy S. Mayer. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of International Creative Management. See CAUTION notice below. All inquires should be addressed to the author's representative: International Creative Management, Attention: Sam Cohn, 40 West 57th Street, New York, N.Y. 10019.

CAUTION: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that the above-mentioned plays, being fully protected under the Copyright Law of the United States of America, the British Commonwealth, including the Dominion of Canada, and all other countries of the Copyright Union, the Berne Convention, the Pan-American Copyright Convention and the Universal Copyright Convention, are subject to license and royalty. All rights including, but not limited to, reproduction in whole or in part by any process or method, professional use, amateur use, film, recitation, lecturing, public reading, recording, taping, radio and television broadcasting, and the rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved. Particular emphasis is laid on the matter of readings, permission for which must be obtained in writing from the author's representative or publisher, as the case may be with the instructions set forth above.

Al Hirschfeld is represented exclusively by The Margo Feiden Galleries, New York.

EDITOR'S NOTE

DURING the past year, Dodd, Mead & Company, publisher of this series of Best Plays theater yearbooks since it began with the season of 1919-20, became a part of the larger corporate entity of Thomas Nelson Publishers. This has not changed the shape or direction of the series started by the late Burns Mantle and carried forward under the editorship of John Chapman, Louis Kronenberger, Henry Hewes and the incumbent. The Best Plays of 1982-83 has the same devoted contributors in its various departments, the same diligent assistance by the editor's wife in striving for accuracy, the same careful supervision by Jonathan Dodd of Dodd, Mead, with the aim of putting out a superlatively informative and inspirited record of a year of American theater activity.

This 64th volume in the series contains complete factual details of every production on the professional New York stage in our listings of 1982-83 productions on and ofT Broadway, plus the most broadly comprehensive collection of program information about off off Broadway by Camille Croce and about regional theater transcontinentally acquired by Ella A. Malin. Rue Canvin keeps our record of necrology and publications; Stanley Green records the year's major cast replacements in New York shows at home, on tour and abroad; Henry Hewes provides details of the New York Drama Critics Circle voting, and William Schelble does the same for the Tonys. Additional and indispensable assistance with the facts is generously provided by scores of members of the theater's public relations departments, while others who have helped us keep the record broad and straight include Hobe Morrison of Variety, Ralph Newman of the Drama Book Shop, Robert Nahas of Theater Arts Book Shop, Alan Hewitt, Thomas T. Foose and Alfred Simon.

Significant developments for better or for worse within this wealth of data about 1982-83 are pointed out by the editor in his report on The Season in New York, while Mel Gussow, distinguished New York Times drama critic, does the same for the off-off-Broadway year. Al Hirschfeld's incomparable drawings enhance these pages as they do the pages of the Times during the season, and we are proud of his long and continuing participation in our project. On behalf of our readers, we extend our gratitude for the stage design sketches illustrative of the year's best work in this field (provided for us by Patricia Zipprodt, John Napier and Rita Ryack), as well as for the expressive photos which freeze the "look" of our theater in New York and across the country in the excellent work of Martha Swope, Bert Andrews, Mark Avery, Robert Burroughs, Jack Buxbaum, William B. Carter, Peter Cunningham, Zoe Dominic, Kenn Duncan, Anita Feldman-Shevett, Richard Feldman, David Friedman, Gerry Goodstein, Henry Grossman, James Hamilton, Andy Hanson, Barry Holniker, David Jiranek, Kenneth Kauffman, Joan Marcus, Mike Martin, Inge Morath, Lanny Nagler, Bill Pierce, Charles Rafshoon, Carol Rosegg, Jeff A. Slotnick, Ron M. Stone, Jay Thompson, Sandy Underwood and VMT Photo.

vii viii EDITOR'S NOTE

The inspirited part of our coverage annually reaches its climax in the synopses of New York's ten Best Plays and of the outstanding cross-country script. The former are selected solely by the editor, the latter by a committee of the American Theater Critics Association, headed by Ann Holmes of the Houston Chronicle, for inclusion in the Best Plays volume as an introduction to our section on The Theater Around the United States (together with brief reviews by critics around the country of other outstanding works nominated in this process, providing a panoramic view of the peaks of 1982-83 theater in the U.S.). These synopses of the Best Plays, prepared by the editor and two contemporary playwrights — Jeffrey Sweet and Sally Dixon Wiener — are like reflections on the wall of Plato's cave, as close an approximation of the real thing as possible within the limits of the medium. At the very least, they document the existence and personality of that reahty: a vibrantly expressive theater, long predating Plato and long to outlast our reflective homage, capably tended by a large group of modern dramatists which, like our Best Plays yearbook, refreshes and renews itself year after year.

OTIS L. GUERNSEY Jr.

July 1, 1983

CONTENTS editor's note vii

SUMMARIES OF THE SEASONS 1

One-page Summary of the Broadway Season 13

One-page Summary of the Off-Broadway Season 25

Closely Related 47

A Directory of Professional Regional Theater 68

THE TEN BEST PLAYS 121

Good 123

Cats 138

Quartermaine's Terms 229

A GRAPHIC GLANCE BY HIRSCHFELD 273

PLAYS PRODUCED IN NEW YORK 327

Plays Which Closed Prior to Broadway Opening 365

FACTS AND FIGURES 451

Long Runs on Broadway 453

Long Runs Off Broadway 456

New York Critics Awards 457

ix

X CONTENTS

New York Drama Critics Circle Voting 458

Pulitzer Prize Winners 460

The Tony Awards 461

The Obie Awards 464

Additional Prizes and Awards 465

1982-1983 Publication of Recently Produced Plays 467

Musical and Dramatic Recordings of New York Shows 469

INDEX 495

Drawings by HIRSCHFELD

Tommy Tune in My One and Only 274

Charles "Honi" Coles in My One and Only 275

Dana Ivey and Remak Ramsay in Quartermaine's Terms 276

John Rubinstein and Michael Moriarty in the revival of The Caine

Mutiny Court-Martial 111

Edmund Lyndeck, Betsy Joslyn, Barbara Lang, Peter Gallagher and

George Hearn in A DolVs Life 278-279

Betty Buckley in Cats 280

Stephen Hanan in Cats 281

James Russo and Far rah Fawcett in Extremities 282

Jeffrey De Munn in K2 283

Doug Henning, Chita Rivera, Rebecca Wright and Nathan Lane in

Lara Teeter and Natalia Makarova in the revival of On Your Toes 286

Dina Merrill in the revival of On Your Toes 287

Al Green in Your Arms Too Short to Box With God 288

Fritz Weaver and Barnard Hughes in Angels Fall 289

Reed Jones, Anna McNeely, Timothy Scott, Kenneth Ard, Terrence V. Mann, Stephen Hanan, Christine Langner, Rene Clemente and Ken Page in Cats 290-291

Christine Lahti in the revival of Present Laughter 292

George C. Scott in the revival of Present Laughter 293

Lynn Milgrim in Talking With 294

David Rounds in Herringbone 294

CONTENTS xi

Polly Pen in Charlotte Sweet 295 John Neville, Kevin Spacey and Liv Ullmann in the revival of Ghosts 296-297 Gary Sinise and John Malkovich in True West 298 Liz Robertson, George Rose and Len Cariou in Dance a Little Closer 299 Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in the revival of Private Lives 300-301 Roxanne Hart in Passion 302 Trey Wilson in Foxfire 303 Mandy Ingber, Joyce Van Patten, Elizabeth Franz, Matthew Broderick, Jodi Thelen, Peter Michael Goetz and Zeljko Ivanek in Brighton Beach Memoirs 304-305 Mary Beth Hurt in The Misanthrope 306 Thuli Dumakude in Poppie Nongena 306 Kevin Bacon in Slab Boys 307 Lonette McKee, Avril Gentles, Bruce Hubbard, Donald O'Connor, Karla Burns, Sheryl Woods and Ron Raines in the revival of Show Boat 308-309 George Martin in Plenty 310 Edward Herrmann in Plenty 311 Jane Alexander, Karen Allen and William Converse-Roberts in Monday After the Miracle 312-313 James Coco in the revival of You Can't Take It With You 314 Nancy Marchand in Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You 314 Mark Hamill in Amadeus 315 Naomi Moody, Larry Marshall and Michael V. Smartt in the revival

of Porgy and Bess 3 1 6-3 1 7

Debbie Reynolds in Woman of the Year 318

Raquel Welch in Woman of the Year 319 Mark Linn-Baker, Robert Joy, Bob Gunton and John Vickery in The

Death of Von Richtofen as Witnessed From Earth 320-321

Ellen Greene in Little Shop of Horrors 322

Joseph Maher in 84 Charing Cross Road 322

Julie Hagerty in Wild Life 323

Hume Cronyn, Keith Carradine and Jessica Tandy in Foxfire 324-325

Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson in Twice Around the Park 326

I

SUMMARIES

OF THE

SEASONS

T

MUSICAL HIGHLIGHTS OF \9S2-S3— Above, Twiggy (center) with aqua chorus (Jill Cook, Susan Hartley, Niki Harris, Nana Visitor, Stephanie Eley, Karen Tamburrelli) in My One and Only; below, a scene from Cats with Rene Ceballos, Bonnie Simmons and Donna King o o o

O By Otis L. Guernsey Jr.

O O

FOR the second season in a row, British playwrights dominated the New York stages. In 1981-82 they did it by standing especially tall with the towering, multi-award-winning The Life <&. Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. In 1982-83 they did it with the force of numbers, pervading every production area with new scripts of major distinction.

The Best Plays list for 1982-83 records this transatlantic triumph with five of the ten from British dramatists: the musical Cats and the plays Good and Foxfire on Broadway, Quartermaine's Terms off Broadway and Plenty both off and on. And behind these loomed a backup contingent of strong 1982-83 British offerings in all shapes and sizes: Slab Boys, Top Girls, Passion, Whodunnit, Steaming, Skirmishes, plus the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of All's Well That Ends Well, in a humbling display of energy and virtuosity.

It's some consolation that the season's best-of-bests was the stark 'night, Mother, Marsha Norman's piteously detailed study of suicidal despair; and that the American musical stage finally — finally — provided My One and Only to share the limelight with Cats, but it took a Gershwin score, Peter Stone co-authorship of the book and Tommy Tune dances to do it. Other American dramatists who made this year's Best Plays list were William Mastrosimone, in whose Extremities a victim of an attempted rape turns on her attacker; Patrick Meyers with his implacably cliff-hanging K2; and Lanford Wilson exposing various strong-minded individuals to a possible nuclear accident in Angels Fall.

So our American authors managed at last to occupy half the places on the Best Plays list. The other five were preempted by their British counterparts, as noted above: Andrew Lloyd Webber, Trevor Nunn and the late Anglicized American T.S. Eliot with their celebration of felinity in Cats; Susan Cooper and the Americanized Canadian Hume Cronyn with their Blue Ridge ballad, Foxfire; the late C.P. Taylor with a terrifying outline of creeping Nazism in Good; David Hare with a despairing view of what his Britain may have become in Plenty; and Simon Gray with still another closeup of self-destructive alienation in Quartermaine's Terms (and John Byrne's abrasive comedy of industrial underdogs. Slab Boys, came very close to making the list).

Two musicals and eight plays; six Broadway productions (Cats, Good, Foxfire; 'night, Mother; My One and Only, K2), two off Broadway {Extremities, Quartermaine's Terms) and two transferred from off to on (Plenty, Angels Fall); four from London (Cats, Good, Quarter maine's Terms, Plenty), four from previous exposure in regional theater (Foxfire; 'night, Mother; Extremities, K2), one produced directly for Broadway via Boston tryout (My One and

Only) and one directly for off Broadway (Angels Fall), with only one of the ten (as far as we know) ever having used OOB as a stepping stone along the way (Extremities); two professional playwriting debuts (Susan Cooper and Timothy S. Mayer, co-author of My One and Only) four repeat Best Play authors (Marsha Norman, Simon Gray, Peter Stone and Lanford Wilson), six if we count T.S. Eliot and the Gershwins — such was the composition of the 1982-83 Best Plays Hst.

Other best-challenging 1982-83 American works were, on Broadway, Twice Around the Park by Murray Schisgal; and, off Broadway, Talking With by "Jane Martin," the pseudonymous author of last season's ATCA selection brought to New York by Manhattan Theater Club; Edmond by David Mamet; The Middle Ages by A.R. Gurney Jr., and the musical Little Shop of Horrors by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, which won this year's Critics Award for best musical. On the other side of the coin, our theater's need for a continuous supply of new authorship is strongly suggested by the unhappy 1982-83 showing of such "established" dramatists as Edward Albee, William Gibson, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Jay Presson Allen, Alan Jay Lerner, Beth Henley and even Neil Simon, whose latest work Brighton Beach Memoirs fell far below his usual, unrivaled comic standard, the Critics Award for best-of-bests to the contrary notwithstanding.

A funny thing happened to the Broadway theater on the way to seemingly infinite riches: the price of a ticket was rising steadily toward the impossible dream of $50, with the $45 musical becoming a commonplace and Cats determined to go higher at the turn of the year, when the whole hydraulically inflationary process ran out of power. Cats never did make it to $50, at least not as of the end of the 1982-83 theater season on May 31. According to Variety estimate, the average paid Broadway admission had risen during the twelve months to $27.69 from $23.08 (which it had reached from $19.72 the year before); even so, the total overall Broadway gross fell off, failing to establish a new record for the first time in many seasons. It fell from $221 million last year to $203,126,127 in 1982-83, while the road receipts dropped from a record $249 million to $184,- 321,475. These were still the second-highest New York and third-highest road grosses in theater history; but with production costs finding it possible to reach $4 million for a full-scale musical and $ 1 million for a straight play, these receding totals put the Broadway theater right in the middle of the 1980s recession along with everything else. Its most vital statistic — total paid attendance — fell off from about 10.7 million in 1981-82 to 8,102,262 in 1982-83, or about 73 per cent of capacity on the average, a level at which few Broadway productions could even hold their own, let alone ever make it into the black. This may account for the fact that of the 1982-83 Broadway offerings, only Plenty had paid off its investment as of the end of the season, according to Variety.

Now for the good news: production activity held up pretty well during the past year, both on and off Broadway. Not counting specialties, Broadway housed 49 new productions as compared with only 45 in 1981-82, 51 the year before that and 58 at a 1979-80 peak. This year's 49 included 14 revivals, so that the total number of new Broadway plays, musicals and revues amounted to 35, two more than last year, including three transfers and a return engagement. Musicals held

BRITISH COMEDlES^Above, Bob Gunton, Cathryn Damon, E. Katherine Kerr and Frank Langella in Peter Nichols's Passion; at right, Sean Penn, Kevin Bacon and Jackie Earle Haley in John Byrne's Slab Boys their level of ten new shows (plus three important, full-scale revival productions), and while new American plays fell off a bit, British imports took up the slack. The bad activity news was the continuing drop in Broadway playing weeks (if ten shows play ten weeks, that's 100 playing weeks) from the record 1,545 in 1980-81 to 1,461 in 1981-82 to 1,259 in 1982-83.

Off Broadway, the production of new plays and musicals (routinely at a $14-16 top but rising above $20 on occasion) also held steady, reaching 59 in 1982-83 after 60 last year. The pinch was felt most strongly off Broadway in the demise of the Phoenix Theater, which called it quits after 30 years of distinguished contribution to the New York stage; and in the wavering of some groups moving their productions up and down across the boundary between off and off off Broadway, with their differing commitments, at the mercy of the ebb and flow of financial tides. Only Manhattan Theater Club and Circle Repertory Company seemed to strengthen in 1982-83, the former bringing all of its Upstage offerings (previously OOB) up to off-Broadway status equal to its Downstage productions, and the latter mounting a remarkable parade of new scripts by American dramatists.

Financial data on individual shows didn't seem to be disseminated as freely as in past seasons, but there were inklings of both triumph and disaster in what few press reports were available. In these random Variety citations of recent figures on a series of hit musicals, note the rising production costs: Company (1970), $245,000 profit on an original investment of $530,000; Nine (1982), $546,000 profit on $2,750,000; A DolVs Life (1982), a clean loss at $4 million; My One and Only (1983), capitalized at $2,750,000 but reported to have cost over $4 million. And the March 1983 West Coast production of Dreamgirls cost almost as much to put on ($3 milhon) as the original 1981 Broadway version ($3.6 million) — but Dreamgirls paid off its huge nut in 34 weeks, by August 1982, something of a modern record.

Under such conditions, it can come as a surprise to few that producing shows in the New York theater of 1982-83 has evolved from an impresario to a team effort, with numbers that rival a baseball aggregation, the bench included (i.e., it took nine producers to put on the musical Nine a year ago, and five organizations plus four producers for AlFs Well That Ends Well this season). As a corollary, an active producing unit was apt to make the team of a goodly number of shows (gone were the days when one impresario laid one egg, golden or otherwise, or nursed one chicken to maturity). By our count — and it's possible that we've overlooked one or more at bats — Kennedy Center and/or Roger L. Stevens were most active, participating in ten (Ghosts, Twice Around the Park, Monday After the Miracle, Angels Fall, On Your Toes, Dance a Little Closer, Show Boat, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial and the two Broadwaybound plays that closed out of town. Outrage and Make and Break). Slightly less active but even more conspicuous was The Shubert Organization with eight, four of them Best Plays (Cats, Good, Angels Fall; 'night. Mother; Marcel Marceau and AlFs Well That Ends Well on Broadway and The Middle Ages and Little Shop of Horrors off). James M. Nederlander got into the game with six (Ghosts, A DolVs Life, Merlin, Dance a Little Closer, Teaneck Tanzi: The Venus Flytrap and Show Boat), two of them very costly and very short-lived musicals.

Claire Nichtern's Warner Theater Productions also backed six (A DolVs LifCy Good, Foxfire, The Wake of Jamey Foster, A Little Family Business and Twice Around the Park), two of them Best Plays. David Geffen's name was on Cats, Good and Little Shop of Horrors — two Best Plays and a Critics Award winner. Elizabeth I. McCann and Nelle Nugent continued their class act with Good and AlTs Well That Ends Well but suffered a setback with Total Abandon . Paramount Theater Productions covered itself with the glory of M>' One and Only and Slab Boys; CBS Broadcast Group put its money on Ghosts; Radio City put on Porgy and Bess and then went outside the Music Hall and put its toe in the water of Brighton Beach Memoirs; Columbia Pictures Stage Productions gave us Merlin, while ABC and M-G-M participated in AlFs Well That Ends Well.

The year's most flamboyant direction was Trevor Nunn's of Cats, for which he won the best-musical-direction Tony; and he also staged the visiting AlTs Well That Ends Well and was nominated for the best-play-direction Tony. The most beguiling was Tommy Tune's and Thommie Walsh's of .Vfy One and Only. Robert Allan Ackerman had an outstanding season with the Best Play Extremities and Slab Boys, as did Marshall W. Mason with the Best Play Angels Fall and Passion, not forgetting David Trainer (Foxfire), Terry Schreiber (K2), Tom Moore Cnight, Mother), Howard Davies (Good), Arvin Brown (A View From the Bridge) and nonagenarian George Abbott revitalizing his own musical On Your Toes. Other authors who staged their own work this season with either marked success or marked absence of it were Howard Ashman (Little Shop of Horrors), James Roose-Evans (84 Charing Cross Road), Eva Le Gallienne (Alice in Wonderland), Edward Albee (The Man Who Had Three Arms), David Hare (Plenty) and Alan Jay Lerner (Dance a Little Closer).

Design achievement, like beauty, is very much in the eye of the beholder, and Ming Cho Lee certainly knocked it out with his representation of a Himalayan 20,000-footer in K2. So did John Napier with set and Tony-winning costumes of Cats. John Lee Beatty had a phenomenally prolific and effective season of set design with The Middle Ages, Monday After the Miracle, Alice in Wonderland, Angels Fall, What I Did Last Summer and Passion. Other shows that in the eye of this beholder seemed unusually well served by their scenery were Foxfire (David Mitchell, who also did Brighton Beach Memoirs, Dance a Little Closer and Private Lives), Steaming (Marjorie Bradley Kellogg, who also did Extremities, Wild Life, Present Laughter, The Misanthrope and the short-lived Moose Murders), My One and Only (Adrianne Lobel), Slab Boys (by its author, John Byrne), 84 Charing Cross Road (Oliver Smith) and Whodunnit (Andrew Jackness), the latter play enjoying the standout costume designs of Patricia Zipprodt, who also costumed Alice in Wonderland (after the Tenniel drawings), Brighton Beach Memoirs and Don Juan.

Busiest this season among the costume creators was Theoni V. Aldredge with Ghosts, A Little Family Business, Merlin, Hamlet, Private Lives and Buried Inside Extra. Jennifer Von Mayrhauser costumed The Wake of Jamey Foster, Steaming, Angels Fall, What I Did Last Summer and Passion. And John Byrne's costumes for his own Slab Boys, Pearl Somner's for 84 Charing Cross Road, Jane Greenwood's for Plenty and Rita Ryack's for My One and Only

*v

I

S' V

Pictured above are examples of Patricia Zipprodt's costume design sketches for Anthony Shaffer's comedy thriller Whodunnit, for the characters Lady Tremurrain (A Dotty Aristocrat) at left and Lavinia Hargreaves (A Sweet Young Thing) at right

seemed particularly well adapted to the mood and content of their productions. Annually, the saddest tale we have to tell is of gifted actors and actresses left stranded in the glare of public attention by the collapse of flimsy vehicles. In 1982-83, this bitter experience was shared by the likes of Jane Alexander, Leslie Uggams, Angela Lansbury, John McMartin, Robert Drivas, Kevin O'Connor, Richard Dreyfuss, Georgia Engel, George Rose, Peter Falk and Len Cariou. In heavy counterbalance, there were the major 1982-83 achievements of the New York acting community: Jessica Tandy with Hume Cronyn in Foxfire and Kathy Bates with Anne Pitoniak in 'night. Mother . . . Alan Howard becoming a Nazi in Good . . . Tommy Tune as a tall, bashful, 1920s aviator who can also tap-dance up a storm in My One and Only, in partnership with the soulful Twiggy . . . Jeffrey De Munn clinging to the ice wall in K2 . . . Susan Sarandon hoisting James Russo on his own petard in Extremities . . . The calculated repulsiveness of Nicol Williamson in The Entertainer, John Malkovich in True West and Kate Nelligan in Plenty . . . The subtle magnetism of Joseph Maher and Ellen Bursty n in 84 Charing Cross Road and of Remak Ramsay in Quarter maine's Terms . . . The special star quality of Sean Penn in Slab Boys, Judith Ivey in Steaming, George C. Scott in Present Laughter, Tony Lo Bianco in A View From the Bridge, Matthew Broderick in Brighton Beach Memoirs and Harvey Fierstein repeating his Torch Song Trilogy for Broadway audiences . . . The comic personae of Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson in Twice Around the Park, and of Frank Langella and Bob Gunton in pursuit of Roxanne

Hart in Passion . . . Jason Robards at the head of a star-studded cast in the latest return of You Can't Take It With You . . . Betty Buckley, Timothy Scott and company in Cats . . . The ensembles of Talking With and Top Girls (both British and American casts). Such were the 1982-83 performance impressions foremost in memory and likely to be the last to fade from it.