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money on condition he brings his show into a Shubert house. The Shuberts have backed such disparate enterprises as the Group Theatre production of Success Story and a jaialai tournament at the late Hippodrome. They supplied most of the money for The Children's Hour and Shadow and Substance, both earnest plays that the public would consider out of the Shubert line. Several years ago Mr. Lee backed Olsen and Johnson, a pair of vaudeville comedians, in expanding their seventyminute unit show into a knockabout entertainment called Hellz a Poppin, which is still keeping the Shuberts' Winter Garden comfortably filled. When the Messrs. were sounded out on the production of a musical comedy for the World's Fair, Mr. Lee's reply—“Why should I make competition for my own houses?”—was typical. His creative instincts are weighed down by several thousand tons of concrete and twenty longterm leases. Inevitably the Shuberts make more bad bets than good ones. This does not mean that they lose money. “If we could hit one out of three,” Mr. J.J. says very reasonably, “we would be doing fine.”

When the Shuberts produce shows on their own account, they are likely to fall back on formulas that have served them well in the past. The Student Prince is typical of the Shubert tradition—the darling of the firm in retrospect and its present ideal. It made more money than any other show the Shuberts ever produced. When, in the season of 192526, there were nearly a dozen road companies of The Student Prince out, covering North America and Australia, the production sometimes grossed as much as $250,000 a week. Yet The Student Prince was only a musical adaptation of a German play that had already served the Shuberts well. On the first occasion, in 1903, they produced the play done into English and called Old Heidelberg, at the Princess Theatre. It was not conspicuously successful. Then they changed the name of the show to Prince Karl, got Richard Mansfield to play the title role, and put it into the Lyric, where it became a very remunerative hit. After the war a musical version of the original play appeared in Germany. The Shuberts commissioned Sigmund Romberg to write another score for the American edition. The late Dorothy Donnelly did the American book. Even today The Student Prince is not dead; he merely slumbers. The costumes for ten complete Prince companies hang in the Shubert storerooms at 3 West Sixtyfirst Street. In the Shuberts' opinion, The Student Prince is still a great show. Lee thinks it is not yet quite the time for a revival. He says that the time has to be right for any kind of show and that if the time is right for it, any kind of show is likely to catch on. “The trouble with a lot of producers,” he has been known to explain, “is they have a couple of hits because the time is ripe for that sort of a show, and then they think they are geniuses, so they do the same sort of a show right over again, and it flops.” A piece like Hellz a Poppin, for example, is not so much an innovation as a type of fast, unsubtle comedy which had been absent from Broadway so long that by 1938 it was new to a whole generation of playgoers. The Shuberts, true to form, followed through by having Olsen and Johnson more or less repeat themselves by working out gags for The Streets of Paris. If the brothers accept Mr. Lee's own advice, however, they won't attempt the same thing again—at least not right away.

The Shubert cliches are like an assortment of dry flies on which they try the public periodically. They don't expect a strike every time. J.J. is strongly committed to operettas, even though, as a concession to modernity, he will accept Cole Porter lyrics and an interpolated dance by the Hartmans now and then. Lee is more susceptible than his brother to current influences, because he gets around more. He takes advice from Harry Kaufman, a blocky, Broadway sort of chap with a wide, shining face, who began in the cloakandsuit business and progressed into ticket brokerage. Kaufman, now in his middle forties, is active in the Tyson and Sullivan theaterticket