GIVE OUR DISREGARDS TO BROADWAY.....A FAMOUS SCREENWRITER ENDURES "THE SEASON" OF HIS DISCONTENT....

THE SEASON, by William Goldman remains, 46 years after its initial publication, a biting, intoxicatingly funny, bitchy read. Novelist Goldman had just begun to make his reputation as a star-quality screenwriter with his "Butch Cassidy And the Sundance Kid.'  He grew up loving theater and devoted "The Season" to an exhaustive, incisive look at both the art and business of Broadway plays and musicals. And what better way to do this than sit through every Broadway show that hit the footlights in the theater season of l967-1968.

As he enjoyed, endured and sometimes painfully grimaced through all the shows presented, Goldman, possessed of a withering wit and a rabid gossip's love of dirt, examined every aspect(and every personality type)  of what and who it takes to mount a Broadway show, He casts a sharp unforgiving eye on preening actors,struggling playwrights, hapless directors, power mad producers and all the peripheral hangers on (ticket scalpers, theater party bookers) who make up the New York theater food chain. Very few of them get away unscathed in Goldman's overview.

And why does Goldman take such great effort to apply his breezy vitriol to Broadway?  His book makes a devastating point.....while the country and its culture were enduring monumental upheavals during the mid to late 1960's, Broadway and its shows remained stagnantly mired in decades gone by, presenting the same sort of plays and musicals that had graced the Great White Way since the l940's. While 60's cinema was bursting with bright new diversive talent and a dazzling variety of subject matter, Broadway theater still trudged through written-in-stone imitations of Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals and hoary, arthritic comedies afflicted with stale gags and washed up Hollywood actors seeking refuge from their long gone film careers.

Not a pretty picture.....but Goldman, as he later does in his subsequent, equally sardonic books about his screenwriting career, sugar coats his impassioned rants with the chatty sarcasm of a brilliant raconteur. We loved the way he dished out scorn and a theater buff's loving enthusiasm in equal measure, sometimes in the same sentence. . He's not above punching up his observations with gleeful, show-bizzy exaggeration......movie directors often complained his screenplays included impossibly over the top descriptions for them to follow, like,...."when they kiss, it's the greatest kiss ever in all movie history...."  Goldman finds a perfect subject for this kind of hyperbole in describing the embarrassing foibles of the '67/'68 theater offerings, such as the worthy, but ultimately star-crossed musical "Mata Hari". That show, a legendary flop, cemented its notorious status when Marisa Mell, the movie Euro-starlet playing Mata Hari. absent-mindedly wiped her nose after she'd been shot dead by a firing squad. Yikes, you might think....but you'd be surprised at the wise generosity with which Goldman treats the show itself and its creators, another reason we love this book and return to it again and again.

Since Beached Quill can't afford to take out a second mortgage to buy "Hamilton" tickets, we simply take "The Season" off our shelf for a re-read.....and it has everything you'd want in a hit show....laughter, drama, and thoughtful insight. We rate it a FIND OF FINDS...with a full 5 bright footlights.