The name Ward Morehouse carries a special cachet. For years he was a renowned Broadway columnist. He is now gone, but his son, Ward Morehouse III, has been carrying on the family tradition. Now he has a book out that is the kind of memory lane journey his dad probably would have liked, a compilation of his father’s writing combined with his own. Called “Broadway after Dark” (Bear Mountain Media), it has a joint byline and is subtitled “A Father & Son Cover 100 Years of Broadway.”
The big names are swimming in the volume-- Katharine Cornell, Gloria Swanson, Ruth Gordon, Helen Hayes, Eugene O’Neill, Katharine Hepburn. It’s a veritable treasure trove of who’s who, with interviews galore. The material might be better organized, but it is generously all there. Notes Ward III in his preface:
“You’ll find a vast difference between my father’s columns and mine. To his immense credit, his are basically the coverage of an insider, someone who sometimes—but not always—was a personal friend of those he was writing about, like the Lunts and Katharine Hepburn…My columns are largely an outsider’s view of the New York theater, where today Off Broadway has become sometimes even brighter than the Great White Way—but will never shine as brightly as it did when a Broadway show was the pinnacle of the American theater.”