Broadway has in recent years taken to bunching up its openings in April and early May to qualify at the last minute for the Tony Awards and to allure the summer influx of hit-hungry tourists. Broadway thus combines the twin Hollywood habits of releasing action and juvenile movies in early summer to get the kids and of releasing serious stories in December to get Oscars. These increasingly rigid practices have much in common with the Aztec custom of ripping out the hearts of captives and virgins to please the war god Huitzilopochtli. All combine maximum to-do with maximum irrationality.

One effect of this April crowding is that the months leading up to it are barren of Broadway openings. In the last weeks, I’ve seen only a revival of the Fifties musical Damn Yankees. Musical revivals are now, of course, the staple, the raison d’être, the mother’s milk of commercial Midtown theater. I have had kind words for the Gershwin pastiche Crazy for You and the current Guys and Dolls production. But the damn thing is out of hand. There’s a dingy, bus-and-truck My Fair Lady already running with a succession of TV personalities as Henry Higgins. Also on the boards is Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream-coat, boasting “two Sunday matinees [at 1 and 5:30] so your family can see Joseph and still be home by 8!” Coming up are a much-touted London “rethinking” of the Rodgers and Hammerstein