Advance From Broadway
ADVANCE FROM BROADWAY $3.00 By HARCOURT, BRACE
THE itinerant author of the best survey of the Soviet theatre, Moscow Rehearsals, has done as much for the American stage. Realizing that a nation of 130 million people must be supplied by other streams than the trickle from Broadway, he has traveled the length and breadth of the country. He has found evidence that it is being nourished by countless summer and community theatres, regional troupes, union hall theatricals, and extensive dramatics in schools and universities. He has even uncovered, in the South and West, signs of a vivid folk theatre in the form of historical festivals and of crossroad performances and harlequinades, called Toby Shows. His review is somewhat disheartening in view of the patent imitation of Broadway in many communities and their failure to promote a people’s theatre. But his account of constantly mounting activity in universities and his evidence of a lively artistic impulse in unexpected places are reassuring.
The accuracy of the author’s observations is supported by the fact that the annual meeting of the National Theatre Conference has just passed resolutions intended to rectify the mistakes noted in Advance from Broadway. It is, in fact, one of the merits of the book that its critical passages are as interesting as its travelogue. His recommendation of theatricalism as a means of enlivening the stage is astute. His praise of popular musical shows reveals a wholesome respect for entertainment, while his appraisal of imaginative productions like Our Town and of the defunct Federal Theatre’s ‘ living newspapers ‘ makes it clear that a lively theatre can also be an important one — a fact invariably taken for granted in the theatre’s great ages.
J.G.