| Magazines like Time, Newsweek, and The Saturday Review used to cover every Broadway opening and some off-Broadway. National magazines used to do that, in the 1960s. That's why a national TV audience could, for example, be expected to get the joke in a title like The Dangerous Christmas of Red Riding-Hood, or, Oh Wolf, Poor Wolf. Then my own parents subscribed to the "West Coast edition" of the New York Times when it began in 1962, and shifted over to the regular Times when they folded the West Coast edition in 1964. Before that, my parents also bought the annual World Almanac from the mid-50s on, and the annual supplement to the Encyclopedia Americana from 1953 on. Those annual publications, which both covered the previous Broadway year extensively, gave me my first statistical documentation of Broadway history. I discovered Theater World and the Best Plays series too, years later, in high school. |
