We’re told the revival at the Biltmore will close on Sunday if business doesn’t dramatically improve. But can that be expected to happen in this – here’s that word you’ve been hearing in every recent conversation – economy?

Okay, so it isn’t the quintessential revival of the David Mamet play. Sure, Cedric the Entertainer and Haley Joel Osment seem inexperienced, and should have got their on-the-job stage training somewhere other than Broadway. John Leguizamo passes muster, but who can be impressed with the term “passes muster” when describing a Broadway performance? Robert Falls’ direction is underwhelming, with precious little snap-crackle-or-pop, so his production just sits there -- which makes us just sit there, watch, and go home.

But you’d think that American Buffalo’s 19 (!) producers would keep it open at least through the Thanksgiving weekend, always a good one for business. They still might, but a Sunday closing and an eight performance run seems more likely.

Is this the biggest-ever Broadway failure of a play revival? All three performers, not to mention Mamet, have some fame and an award or nomination somewhere along the line. So let’s take a look at other play revivals and see.

We’re interested in commercial revivals that planned to run now and forever – so we’ll eliminate troupes that visited City Center or even a conventional Broadway house for a planned weekend stop or a limited engagement. No old-world classics, a la Shakespeare or Ibsen, too; one expects a 100-or-so run at best when you’re producing them, even with stars. So-called “return engagements” don’t count, either.

No, I’m talking about a famous modern play – which American Buffalo is. So I can’t include Topaze, a Marcel Pagnol play that was a 215-performance hit when first produced in 1930, and lasted one performance in 1947. That, despite a cast that sounds good if the theatrical history books can be believed: Helen Bonfils, Clarence Derwent, Tilly Losch, and Roy Rogers. Yes, that same Roy Rogers who rode a horse named Trigger (until the beast died; then Rogers had him stuffed and mounted) and the same Roy Rogers who started the chain that provides you with fast-food every now and then.

There was a six-performance Waiting for Godot revival in 1957, only six months after the original closed. Michael Mayerberg produced both, but the revival was even more of an experiment than the original – for it was played by an all-black cast. Pretty progressive for 1957, no? But if theatergoers wouldn’t go see Bert Lahr as Estragon, they sure wouldn’t come to see Mantan Moreland in the role.

Present Laughter was revived in 1958, and lasted but six performances – but this was a very strange desperation move by Noel Coward. He put the play in repertory with Nude with Violin, his then-new comedy that was dying. The hope that the old hit would drum up interest in the current play didn’t work, and Nude with Violin and Present Laughter closed the same Saturday.

The first revival of The Ritz – you may remember we had a second last season – lasted one performance in 1983. But it was barely a Broadway affair, for it was at Xenon, which is what the Henry Miller was called then, when it was uses as a disco. The house had been stripped of its seats, and we all sat in folding chairs -- watching, as Googie Gomez, Holly Woodlawn (nee Howard Danhaki) and, as Michael Brick, Casey Donovan, whose Broadway career started on a lofty note (Captain Brassbound’s Conversion; The Merchant of Venice) and devolved quickly thereafter (Tubstrip and a few porno flics).

The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window was Lorraine Hansberry’s next Broadway effort after her landmark A Raisin in the Sun. It opened at the Longacre in 1964, when she was suffering from cancer, and the play struggled to survive just as its author did. In fact, the day she died, her producer and one-time husband Robert Nemiroff closed it after 99 performances. But in 1972, the sign for The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window was back up at the Longacre. To be fair, though, this wasn’t quite a revival of the original. This was “a play with music,” with songs by Gary William Friedkin and Ray Errol Fox. So its five-performance run can’t count as a true revival of the play.

The first production of The Goodbye People in 1968 only lasted seven performances, so the 1979 revival was less a revival than a second chance. I attended the revival’s first preview, and laughed like a seal for two straight hours – so I was astonished when it closed on opening night. One of its press agents later told me, “I remember that first preview, and every one they did for the next two weeks before opening. I don’t know why they were never again, even once, able to recapture the magic of that first time.”

Know the play? Max is an octogenarian hot dog vendor who will not accept retirement and sitting home with his wife. He plans to open a new stand, albeit in the dead of winter in Coney Island. The reason, we later infer, is that he knows he’s dying, and wants to do something productive before he goes.

What both productions had in common was the very funny Sammy Smith, best known from the How to Succeed stage show or film as Twimble, the company way man, and Wally Womper, the CEO. In this Herb Gardner play, he portrayed the 72-year-old Marcus Soloway, Max’s former business partner. How wonderful he was -- which made his losing the part to Gene Saks in the film version very hard for him and us. Saks was ho-hum in delivering one of the great unknown speeches in recent theater history, in which Marcus pooh-poohs Max’s goal to start again: “Be an old man, you’ll live longer,” he tells him. “This year, I started doing old-man things. I tell stories for a second time, just like an old man. Sometimes for a third time. It’s coming out of my mouth about how I got a good buy on my new car, I’m telling it to my daughter and husband, I know it’s the third time, but I go right on, it doesn’t bother me -- just like an old man.”

So why is he acting this way? “I finally figured it out. The reason I’m behaving like an old man is became I am an old man … I was not a top businessman, good but not first-class; I was on okay husband, and as a father, not a knockout. But Max, I’m a great old man. I do that the best. I’m 72, Max, and I got one interest in life: 73.”

No, there are really only two revivals that can be compared to American Buffalo’s projected eight: First, the Tobacco Road revival in 1950 ran seven performances -- 3,175 shorter than the original -- but it offered no one with the name recognition of Leguizamo, Osment, and, uh, Entertainer. The other one, though, boasted a Tony-winning director helming two Tony-winning performers. That director was Jose Quintero, those stars Elizabeth Ashley and Alfred Drake, but they couldn’t make it past seven performances. Then again, Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth has never been an easy sell. Still, you’d expect it to last longer than a week – just as you would American Buffalo.

You may e-mail Peter at pfilichia@aol.com

“Barcelona” (Company) – Had anyone made the-morning-after-the-night-before the subject of a song? And if so, was there as imaginative an approach as the conversational one that Sondheim took? When Arthur Laurents famously said that “Sondheim’s songs are often little one-act plays,” this had to be what he had first and foremost in mind. 

 “Bits and Pieces” (Goodtime Charley) – Joan (as in “of Arc”) is the soldier, while Charley, the would-be royal for whom she’s working, isn’t. Here she dresses him for battle, as he comments on each piece of unfamiliar armor. So essential is the uniform in this number that this summer at Musicals-in-Mufti – which eschews costumes – included armor during this song. 

“Colorful” (Golden Boy) – When a hot-shot reporter asks hotter-shot boxer Joe Wellington about his being black, Joe minimizes and neutralizes the question by citing all the colors he’s been in his life: Green when he was naïve, blue when sad, and yellow when afraid. “But,” he decides, “black suits me best.” 

 “Echo Song” (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) – This almost didn’t make the list – not because it wasn’t clever enough, but because it’s only appeared in the 1971 revival. Good enough – especially for a song where Philia believes that the gods will provide answers through echoes – though Hero will do the echoing for them.

“Hey, There” (The Pajama Game) – Long before Patricia Routledge sang a “Duet for One,” John Raitt was doing just that, thanks to a dictaphone. How modern that must have seemed in 1954! And what a beautiful countermelody, no? 

“Hurry! It’s Lovely Up Here” (On a Clear Day You Can See Forever) – Daisy Gamble is the type of lass who loves her flowers so much that she talks to them. Better for us: She sings to them, and gets some nifty floral imagery, courtesy of Alan Jay Lerner. 

“The Lees of Old Virginia” (1776) – John Adams loathes Richard Henry Lee. Because he’s one of those guys who insists on using three names? No, it’s because he’s so egocentric – as is proved by his incessant use of adverbs, because they incorporate his last name. 

 “Love in a New Tempo” (New Faces of 1968) – Don’t know this one? It’s worth the price of the original cast album (even though the song has a lousy ending). Then-New-Face Robert Klein told of not wanting to sing yet another song of unrequited love in a moony, self-pitying lyric OR melody. Instead he decides to sing, “I love you; why don’t you love me, too?” – not to a waltz or a ballad – but to a march worthy of John Philip Sousa. Hilarious – until that ending. 

 “Opening Doors” (Merrily We Roll Along) – Three nobodies in New York doin’ what they can to change that status. Nice how Charley’s typewriter clicks along to the melody that Frank is creating. But nicer still is Sondheim’s taking the pair through a fruitless audition for a big producer all the way to their auditioning actresses for their own revue. Best line comes from that fat-cat producer: “Maybe it’s me,” he says when turning down their show. Yeah, but if it’s your mistake, Mr. Producer, we’re the ones who are gonna suffer. 

 “The Seven Deadly Virtues” (Camelot) – The hardest task for any composer and lyricist is to write a song for a bad guy – because these people don’t readily sing. Who’d think that Mordred could or would – and could do so brilliantly? But then again, he had Lerner and Loewe to help him express himself. 

 “Sing” (A Chorus Line) -- One of the great clichés of couples deeply in love is that each finishes the other’s sentences. Edward Kleban decided to show a just-married, still-in-love Kristine and Al doing just that. 

“Someone in a Tree” (Pacific Overtures) – We’d already had one Japanese Rashomon on stage and film, but here was a completely different one. By the way, when Sondheim was once asked that his favorite composition was, he named this – though he later conceded that it was the first thing that came to mind when the writer asked him.

 “Sons” (The Rothschilds) – “Well,” you say, “it’s a good number, for we see a couple go from childless to a family of seven, but I wouldn’t say it was especially clever.” Granted – but it makes the list for a specific moment: Mayer Rothschild tells his son Nathan, “You don’t listen. You’re impatient.” The kid admits it, too, so Mayer advises, “Listen!” Then he sings “When a shopper says” and the lad immediately follows in song, “When a shopper says” – which we accept it as a musical round. But then Mayer says, “Nathan – listen!” -- showing us it wasn’t a musical convention, but a sheer interruption by the kid who talks more than listens. 

“So What Else Is New?” (Woman of the Year) – Okay, I’ll admit that in the 1945 film Anchors Aweigh, Gene Kelly danced with an animated mouse – but still, Fred Ebb was pretty clever 35 years later to have cartoonist Sam Craig converse with Katz, his feline creation, to collaborate and come up with their new character, Tessie Cat, with all the worst qualities of Lauren Bacall – er, Tess Harding. 

“Sunday” (Sunday in the Park with George) – All those people on the Island of the Grand Jatte from whom we’ve been hearing in bits and pieces for one full act finally come together as a unit – and an immortal painting. 

“Talent” (Smile) – What happens when contestants in a beauty pageant vie for superiority? A talent competition, of course – and Howard Ashman and Marvin Hamlisch took us through the inevitable Country Christian singer, the ventriloquist, and even a chef to move us through the first rounf of the Young American Miss showdown. 

 “The Telephone Hour” (Bye Bye Birdie) – A most ironic title, for in 1960 when it debuted, The Bell Telephone Hour was one of the mlst civilized and erudite programs on television. It bore no relationship to the cacophony (however tuneful) that Charles Strouse and Lee Adams created. 

“They Both Reached for the Gun” (Chicago) – The show prided itself on using vaudeville conventions, but none was as smart as this one – where Billy Flynn became the ventriloquist and Roxie Hart the dummy. 

 “Words! Words! Words!” (Bajour) – For years, there’d been in vogue that “word association” game -- where a shrink fed a subject a certain word in hope of getting an answer that would disclose some psychologically buried information. Walter Marks, though, was the one who set it to music, and did a helluva lot of plot advancing in the process.

On Monday, we’ll see what you had to nominate as the most clever musical moments in Broadway history. (If I can assemble them all; my, a number of you wrote in!)

You may write Peter at pfilichia@aol.com