SUBWAYS ARE FOR SLEEPING A musical comedy in 2 acts, 18 scenes: Libretto by Betty Comden and Adolph Green; suggested by the novel Subways Are For Sleeping by Edmund G. Love: Music by Jule Styne; St James Theatre, New York - 27 December, 1961 (205 perfs) SYNOPSIS Act I begins early one winter morning on a deserted mid-Manhattan street. An alarm clock rings and four nattily attired characters enter through a board fence around a construction project and from an open manhole. Cheerfully, they hymn the joys of the carefree life in which the most pressing problem is to find an out-of-theway place to sleep. Fire escapes, lofts, museums, subways - it doesn't need to be comfortable, just free. A fellow refugee from today's tensions and complexes, Tom Bailey enters and joins them in their exuberant declarations of independence from the world of dull, "solid folk". The scene changes to the executive office of Madame Magazine, elegantly decorated for the Christmas holidays. Pert, sophisticated Angie McKay, a staff writer for the magazine, has been planning a European vacation. Her boss, Myra Blake, however, reminds her that she must first complete a feature story describing the ways and means of a special breed of New York's bums, the well-dressed drifter. Preliminary research has revealed that Tom Bailey, a one-man employment agency who finds other drifters odd jobs and sleeping quarters (for a ten-cent fee), is the man to contact in his "office," a waiting room bench at Grand Central Station. Angie must cancel her Bon Voyage dinner at the Twenty One Club to interview him. Disappointed, she agrees to man her station, but ruefully adds: "We should do a story on career girls like us. Emotionally, we're charity cases, too. We go home to empty hours". Like a herd of lemmings headed for the sea, heads buried in their newspapers, hands clutching brief-cases, commuters arrive at Grand Central Station to be shunted to their offices and their deadening routines. Tom Bailey strolls in, carrying a newspaper and that universal sign of bourgeois propriety, an attaché case. Tom's office, however, is less conventional - a bench where he recommends jobs to his clients. One of them is Charlie Smith, a likeable sponger who survives chiefly on dinner invitations wangled from old school chums. He tells Tom of the Bon Voyage dinner he will attend that evening in honour of a magazine writer. In fact, Charlie is on his way to another friend's hotel room to borrow a dinner jacket for the occasion. Angie comes in and goes to Tom's "private" bench. To get her story, she is masquerading as a stranded girl from out-oftown in need of a place to spend the night. Tom gives her some important tips on how to avoid police detection in waiting rooms: always seem to be on your way somewhere - he has carried the same train ticket to Buffalo every day for three years; always read a newspaper, but never a book - you can sit there all day so long as you look as if you're about to leap to your feet any minute to catch your train. So much for the daytime, unless you want to vary the routine by visiting museums. The reward for his elaborate design for living, Tom tells Angie, is that he is responsible to no one but himself. In a corridor of the Brunswick Arms, a shabbily genteel hotel, Charlie Smith disgustedly tells his friend Max that he won't need his dinner jacket. He went to the Twenty One Club, but found the dinner had been canceled. Max, a shy type, asks Charlie to go to the hotel room of a girl he sees every night across the court and tell her Max would like to meet her. In her sparsely furnished room in the Brunswick Arms, shapely, blonde Martha Vail sits unconcernedly buffing her nails, scantily clad in a bath towel - she's "sick," she tells the manager through the locked door, and thus avoids, temporarily at least, forcible eviction. Charlie knocks at Martha's door; she invites him in and Charlie meets his match in meal-mooching. Martha's "system" is to invite a gentleman caller to her room on the pretext of a date, order food over the telephone
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