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Part Four Another important show which helped usher out this decade was Olsen and Johnson's Hellzapoppin. Though most of the critics were indifferent to the show, the feel-good quality of this madcap insane revue kept it alive for over 1400 performances, and it was produced as an equally popular movie in 1941. Thornton Wilder's quiet minimalist play Our Town wasn't as popular (with only 336 performances), but there is something about the universal themes that are hidden within it that make it a ubiquitous classic. Wilder was also responsible for The Merchant of Yonkers, which played only 39 performances at the Guild Theater during December and January of the 1938-39 season. The show had a much more successful future in the Fifties and Sixties, when it was re-written as The Matchmaker. It was then adapted into a musical by Jerry Herman, Hello Dolly. In 1935, as a response to their disgruntlement over the Pulitzer committee's choices in drama, New York theater critics joined forces as "The New York Drama Critics Circle". It was a time when the voices of theater critics still carried great weight. Besides the Times, The Daily News and The Post, The World Telegram, The Herald-Tribune and several other daily papers were being published in New York. Critics with varying degrees of capability and responsibility could sway the potential audience of any play. Critics such as George Jean Nathan, who wrote satiric and often vicious articles, and Brooks Atkinson, who honestly loved the theater, had loyal and responsive followings. In 1936, the Drama Critics Circle issued its own awards to their choices for outstanding theater. The year that Robert Sherwood's Idiot's Delight won the Pulitzer, the Critics Circle awarded their prize to Maxwell Anderson's Winterset, and another of Broadway's great institutions was born. In spite of the Depression, or maybe because of it, the decade of the Thirties proved to be a rich experience for Broadway. While many of the theaters remained dark and many actors migrated to the Golden Coast of Hollywood, Broadway managed to grow, experiment and mature. Though the number of productions declined, the quality of offerings was ever brighter, more polished and thought-provoking. Through the efforts of its most accomplished practitioners, the Thirties was the decade that ended the overblown and heavy emoting on stage. The lessons of Madame Modjeska, Eleanora Duse, Mrs. Fiske, Sarah Bernhardt, Alla Nazimova, Eva Le Gallienne and others were internalized by a whole generation of actors and actresses. The cry for dramatic realism of the previous forty or fifty years was finally realized. The Thirties was the decade that saw the Theater Guild realize itself as a commercial production company. With 58 productions from 1930 to 1939, it could no longer deny that it differed from the likes of the Shuberts or Harris except, perhaps, in its choices and its belief in the intelligence of its public. Guild productions ranged from Shakespeare to Chekhov and Turgenev to Eugene O'Neill, Stefan Zweig, William Saroyan, Ben Hecht, Thornton Wilder, and Lynn Riggs. It was the decade that pushed the federal government into a recognition of responsibility to the arts, though the nature of that responsibility was as controversial then as it is now. The controversy with respect to government's role in the arts had gained a new dimension. The ancient dilemma of sex versus art was further complicated by this new dilemma of politics versus art, and the issue of the balance of the states of humanity vis-a-vis "the body politic" now had a national face. Shrunken perhaps by the vicissitudes and exigencies of the times, Broadway presented itself admirably throughout the Thirties. It not only managed to preserve the best, but also nurtured and expanded them. At the brink of the new decade, Broadway stood smaller but brighter. A better way of putting it may be that Broadway emerged stronger and purer than ever and was ready to face and share - for the second time - the experience of a world at war.
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