A War of Words Takes Spotlight on Broadway : Stage: Producer David Merrick attacks New York Times critic Frank Rich after his latest extravaganza is panned in a review.

Autumn in New York

why does it seem so exciting?

--Vernon Duke This slow-starting Broadway season is giving theatergoers more theatricks off stage than on. The current spectacle-in-the-wings is the “war” declared by producer David Merrick on New York Times theater critic Frank Rich for the trashing Rich gave Merrick’s latest musical extravaganza, “Oh, Kay!”

“It’s the biggest laugh of the year on Broadway,” said New York Post Page Six columnist Timothy McDarrah of the flap that began when the veteran Broadway showman Merrick took out an ad in Monday’s New York Times. It poked fun at Rich and Times theater columnist Alex Witchel.

“At last, people are holding hands in the theatre again!” shouted the banner at the top of the ad. Then, inside a drawing of a heart, Merrick placed negative quotes from Rich’s review and Witchel’s column, both of which were published Friday.

Outside the heart, Merrick signed the ad, “To Frank and Alex--all my love,” a reference most theater insiders are taking to suggest that Rich and Witchel--a woman--are not only colleagues, but romantically involved.

The Merrick-Rich conflict was so widely talked about this week that rumors raged in Broadway circles that Rich had resigned as critic. One insider described Rich as “agitated.” Neither Rich nor Witchel nor Times cultural editor Paul Goldberger returned calls to The Los Angeles Times for comment.

Merrick’s ad, however, didn’t see much light of day--it was published in only one early New York Times edition and then was pulled by the newspaper and substituted with an in-house ad. But copies of Merrick’s ad found their way through the maze of the Great White Way’s fax machines and a reproduction popped up in the Post’s Page Six column Tuesday.

“Since the ad ran, Mr. Merrick’s office has been deluged with calls of congratulations from producers, actors, designers. Even members of the press have been calling with congratulations,” said Josh Ellis, the publicist for “Oh, Kay!” Ellis added, however, that “no one wants to go on record with their comments for fear of alienating Rich,” who is widely viewed as the nation’s most powerful theater critic.

Late last year, Rich found himself embroiled in a media battle with playwright David Hare, who accused Rich of wanting to be “emperor” of New York theater after a negative review of Hare’s play “The Secret Rapture.” Rich’s response at the time was that his only duty was to tell the truth.

Merrick, of course, is no stranger to Broadway wars, either. His reputation for big musicals like “Hello, Dolly!” and “Gypsy” is rivaled by his attacks on critics who have panned his shows. One of his most legendary pranks was for the musical “Subways Are for Sleeping.” In that episode, he took out an ad with rave comments and attributed the quotes to people whose names were the same as New York’s leading critics of the day.

In Rich’s review of “Oh, Kay!” he “credits” Merrick for a string of “flops . . . as fabled as his hits.” The musical is a revival of a 1926 show by George and Ira Gershwin about bootlegging in the Roaring ‘20s that has been rewritten for an all-black cast and set in Harlem. But Rich said the production struck him as a “minstrel show” and the adaptation was “clumsily” handled. Rich called the leading lady “ice cold” and the leading man “robotic.”

On the same day the review appeared, an item in Witchel’s stage column revealed that Merrick would not allow “Oh, Kay!” cast member Mark Kenneth Smaltz to take a curtain call. Witchel quoted Smaltz, who plays a policeman trying to stop the bootleggers, as saying no one in the company would come to his aid for fear of incurring Merrick’s wrath. The issue now rests with the Actors Equity union where a spokeswoman said it would be arbitrated.

Merrick’s position, said Ellis, is that Merrick and director-choreographer Dan Siretta “do not want the villain (the cop in this case) to take a curtain call. The good people live happily ever after and the bad people are never heard from again.”

Merrick’s latest salvo is a current ad for the show quoting the New York Times as saying: “The distinction of ‘Oh, Kay!’ is its excellent blending of all the creative arts of musical entertainment.”

The kicker is that the quote is from a review that ran Nov. 9, 1926.