BROADWAY: THE PERMANENT CRAP SHOOT

“Watch the red, not the black,” says the card shark at 7th Avenue and 45th Street. “Black, black, do you see the red?” Suddenly, he kicks his cardboard box stand into the gutter and vanishes into the crowd. A cop!

Twenty minutes later, he’s back on the corner. In the same way, the Broadway theater is both fly-by-night and an institution. It’s a crap shoot, as any producer will tell you. But it’s a permanent crap shoot, in business at Times Square since the 1920s and still largely housed by the Shuberts.

The players change; business is good or (as in the last few seasons) not so good; Broadway sails on. The American theater could exist without it, but America at large seems to need it. If we’ve lost faith in Detroit, we can still boast that Broadway builds the biggest and best musicals in the world. “42nd Street” plays Tokyo, but what was the last Japanese show you saw?

New York needs Broadway even more than the nation does. It sustains the city’s image as the place where the ultimate prizes are handed out, to those who bring a like excellence to their work. It also provides a revealing model of success as it actually is pursued in the big city. Broadway does care about craft and art. But what it is most centrally concerned with is winning--having a hit.

The bad side of that is an insensitivity to anything beyond instant results--that which will work, because it worked the last time. Graciela Daniele, choreographer of the season’s best new musical, “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” was talking about that at a symposium sponsored by the American Theatre Critics’ Assn. the other day. “Two weeks into rehearsals, they’re asking you, ‘Where’s the second-act show stopper?’ When I work for Joe Papp, we do the show, and then we look at what we’ve got.”

Yet Broadway has a real-world toughness that it’s hard not to respond to--especially since it’s no longer in a position to swallow the rest of the American theater. Every right-thinking theater person is in favor of subsidy, of subscription audiences, of “the right to fail,” of all the safety nets of resident theater. These complement our notion of theater as an art, which it is.

But theater is show business as well. And it’s healthy that we have a sector where a show has to come out and conquer the customers, or shortly find that it has no customers. It’s a reminder that, in the long run, theater exists to serve the public, not the other way around.

Broadway also offers a theatricality of its own, entirely unrelated to the quality of what’s on its stages. The hit/flop polarity may be unhealthy, but it generates a definite electricity on opening night, when the crowd is busy deciding which category this one is going to fit into. I sometimes suspect that Broadway’s second-favorite kind of show is an out-and-out bomb, all the better to heighten the tension at the next opening.

In lesser form, the excitement is there every night, even in the dead of January. A visitor reflects that Broadway’s architects knew what they were doing. They built their theaters close to each other, creating what is virtually a theater mall (it would be interesting if 44th and 45th streets literally became that), and they built them with cramped and uncomfortable lobbies.

This last was strictly to save money, but it adds a drama to the experience of seeing a Broadway show, especially for the tourist. Clutching his pair of $35 tickets (or $40 tickets, or $45 tickets), he pushes himself into the jammed lobby with the gratifying sense that he has chosen the right show, or else why would everyone else in New York be shoving so hard to get in as well? That the theater may hold only 1,000 people (rarely more than 1,500) escapes him.

Once inside, he drops into his seat (not much room there, either) with a sense of achievement. Thus far, anyway, he and his wife are definitely having an Experience. Whatever transpires on the stage thereafter, he is also pretty sure--even if seated well up in the balcony--to understand most of the words and to perceive the actors as more-or-less life-size beings, something that may not apply in the theaters he is used to at home.

The show, alas, may be a shuck. The biggest one in some seasons is “Song & Dance” at the Royale. The first act (“Song”) pits poor Bernadette Peters against some simple-minded songs by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Don Black. Bernadette plays Emma, who has come to New York from England to find success and love. She doesn’t have very good luck, especially with love, but she’s determined not to get cynical, like New York girls.

The second act (“Dance,” choreographed by Peter Martins) sends Victor Barbee and some Broadway gypsies (including Gregg Burge) through an extended dance routine that looks like a clumsy homage to Gene Kelly in “An American in Paris” but is set in New York. The music is Webber’s none-too-catchy variations on the Paganini A-Minor “Caprice.” It ends with Barbee giving Peters his old basketball jacket. “Well, they all worked very hard,” said the woman behind me as she put on her coat.

“Song & Dance” is Broadway at its most crass--a package without a show. Yet Lily Tomlin belongs on Broadway as well, and she’s terrific. Tomlin’s “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe” at the Plymouth (script by Jane Wagner) touches intelligent life in its audience as well. This isn’t just a run-through of Tomlin characters with some slight attempt at continuity. Tomlin’s people (hooker, ERA activist, tough teen-ager, zonked-out bag lady, etc.) appear and disappear like characters in a long, funny, surprisingly affecting novel and, in the end, we see that a whole has been made.

The second half contains the evening’s most effective set-piece, in which the ERA woman stumbles from the holistic 1970s to the have-it-all ‘80s, missing not a cliche, but--thanks to her creator--keeping her self-respect. Tomlin has too much class to demean any of her characters: it’s more of a challenge to observe them, to differentiate them, to honor them. Especially the bag lady, who may be in touch with outer space. In this show, Tomlin makes you see that we all live there.

The best new musical of the season is “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” at the Imperial. This is a charmer. In some ways, it’s the show that “Sweeney Todd” would have been if Stephen Sondheim had told it with a wink instead of asking us to believe in it. But the melodrama doesn’t get too spoofy, and something of the kinkiness of Dickens’ characters comes through, without tainting the general good-time air of the proceedings.

Here, too, the second act is the stronger. That’s when George Rose, our interlocutor, stops the show and allows the audience to vote on several important matters, including who killed Edwin Drood? (Edwin is essayed by Betty Buckley--one of those “trouser parts” dear to Victorian audiences.) We voted for the Mysterious Sister from Ceylon (Jana Schneider), but there are seven possible villains, including the rowdy Cleo Laine as the Opium Lady.

This is not a show for the ages, but it’s capital entertainment, of the same general weight as “The Pirates of Penzance.” Rupert Holmes not only had the original idea, he did the libretto, the lyrics, the score and the musical arrangements--which not even Sondheim tries to do. We’ll be hearing more from him.

Michael Frayn’s “Benefactors” at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre fills the slot on every Broadway season for a literate, serious, intelligent, decent English play. It is all of these, but it is a somewhat powerless-feeling drama, as befits its characters. Sam Waterston is an idealistic young architect, Glenn Close his generous, outgoing wife, and the play describes the process by which they learn to stop trying to be their neighbor’s keepers--it tends to land one in the soup.

As with Tomlin’s show, Frayn’s play offers some of the long-range satisfactions of a novel. But we’ve almost lost interest in his characters before the plot (involving the architect’s plan for a skyscraper housing development) starts to move. “Benefactors” is a play that better suits the ambiance of a resident theater than it does Broadway’s hurly-burly. It would be good to have it at the Mark Taper Forum.

The freak hit of the season--it may be too soon to call it a hit--is “Tango Argentino” at the superbly renovated Mark Hellinger Theatre. (The renovation was for the film version of “A Chorus Line.”) This is a musical revue built around the the tango, which may be the most sullen dance form ever invented--like quarreling to music. Most of the couples in the show are middle-aged, all dance with extraordinary invention, and the beat eventually wears you down.

That is, unless you’re a dance person. Over on the next aisle, I saw Tommy Tune taking it all in and probably wishing he could give notes. It’s certain that he went backstage after the show. Card sharks and all, Broadway is a very small town.