Broadway is currently hosting no fewer than three – Red Buttons, Jackie Mason and Rob Becker – in acts which make economic, but not theatrical, sense. Producers are going for short-term gains at the expense of long-term audiences, who are being given smaller and smaller experiences for higher and higher prices. Here, Eileen Atkins’s symbolic battle with Kathleen Turner becomes less that of Cocteau’s Order versus Disorder than that of a great actress versus an overstretched star.The British have been much in evidence this year. This year’s representatives are Tom Stoppard’s masterpiece, Arcadia – whose acclaim has been muted by a sense that the American cast fails to capture the intricacies of Stoppard’s text – and Sean Ma- thias’s sparkling National Theatre production of Les Parents Terribles (renamed Indiscretions, presumably on the premise that some audiences still think Les Miserables is in French). It also has the male nudity that’s become the trademark of the 1995 season.The other Broadway staple is the snob success, generally from England. Author Terence McNally serves up the camp one-liners, musical-comedy references, chiselled bodies and intimations of mortality that constitutes so much of contem- porary gay drama.

Of the three new plays now on, one, Having Our Say, is about a pair of 100-year-old black sisters, while Love! Valour! Compassion! features nine gay men. The all-powerful musicians’ union has decreed that every straight play has to pay four musicians’ salaries, on the grounds that they are being performed in theatres that might house musicals and are therefore costing their members jobs. Likewise, the stagehands hold managements to ransom, ensuring, for instance, that the “curtain man” earns a ludicrously high salary for doing no more than raising and lowering the curtain once during a show.The few plays that do arrive on Broadway, whatever their artistic merits, are carefully aimed at a core audience, usually black, Jew- ish or gay. Off-Broadway is also hosting the premieres of plays by Edward Albee, AR Gurney and a triple bill of Woody Allen, David Mamet and Elaine May.The two major reasons for Broadway’s dearth of new plays are, first, that the vast auditoria alienate those raised on the intimate drama of cinema and television screens, and, second, that restrictive union practices make for inflated production costs. Many consider the most significant event of the 1995 season to be the decision by Neil Simon, the most successful American playwright of the past 30 years, to open his new comedy, London Suite (four playlets in the proven Plaza Suite formula) off-Broadway, while the Broadway theatre that bears his name remains dark. Broadway wags may have dubbed it Slowboat, but, with his grainy photographic backdrops, cinematic fades and vast 70-strong cast, Prince has turned a notoriously broken-backed book into a full-scale American epic, while giving due weight to the glorious Kern-Hammerstein songs.If new musicals are an endangered species on Broadway, new plays are virtually extinct.

Des McAnuff’s charm-wrapped production features an extremely accomplished Matthew Broderick hoofing and goofing his way to the top (and the Tony) within some vertiginous state-of-the-art graphic sets.The sets for Harold Prince’s revival of Showboat are even more spectacular, and go some way towards justifying the record $75 seat price. Moreover, this year, there have been only three musical revivals, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and Showboat, which were both hits, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which wasn’t.How to Succeed, which is long overdue for a British revival, boasts a score as seductive as composer/lyricist Frank Loesser’s more celebrated Guys and Dolls. And, although all was smiles on awards night, relations between the actress and the composer have been less than cordial after a very public row about the all-important box-office figures, which were inflated to the tune of $150,000 a week during Ms Close’s two-week holiday.Broadway is synonymous with musicals and a season in which there are no more than two (or, to be more accurate, one-and-a-half) new ones can hardly be described as healthy. This must have been a tribute to her stellar power rather than her singing ability since, to be frank, she cannot hit the notes.