Joan Marlowe, 88, Published Theater Bulletin
Joan Marlowe, who died Thursday at 88, was the co-publisher of the Theatre Information Bulletin, Broadway's version of an industrial newsletter.
The Theatre Information Bulletin was a mimeographed weekly number filled with facts and figures about openings, closings, casts, credits, and attendance in the New York theater world.
According to the self-appointed "Voice of Broadway," columnist Jack O'Brian, Marlowe and her partner, Betty Blake, knew more about theater that George Jean Nathan, Brooks Atkinson, John Golden, and Lee Schubert.
An aspiring actress herself, Marlowe dropped out of Cornell University at age 19 to pursue acting. She appeared in regional productions and in 1941 was on Broadway in a small role in "Mr. and Mrs. North."
She had a future in theater, but not as an actor. Also in 1941, she married Ward Morehouse, then a drama critic and columnist for the old New York Sun.
She worked briefly at Newsweek before reviving the Theater Information Bulletin in 1944 with Blake, also a Newsweek reporter. The publication had been a sideline for Sam Zolotow, a New York Times drama reporter. Marlowe and Blake invested their savings — $35, according to O'Brian — and went to work. The publication continued until the early 1990s.
Marlowe's experiences pounding the pavement for acting jobs also became fodder for "The Keys to Broadway" (1951), an instructional guide for fresh talent. It included suggestions for scraping by during fallow periods: babysitting, crocheting, greeting card artist.
Marlowe and Blake also published New York Theater Critics' Reviews, a reference work that was sold to Playbill in the early 1970s.
She served as the president of the Outer Critics' Circle and New Drama Forum, an offshoot of the Drama Desk organization of reporters and columnists.
Marlowe was raised in Ithaca, N.Y., the daughter of the editor of the city editor of the Ithaca Journal. Her mother had appeared in silent films.
A bon vivant who loved to dine with the theater crowd at Sardi's and 21, Marlowe was also known as a hard worker who insisted on getting each detail right. The story was told that she worked until midnight one Friday putting the final touches on an issue, then gave birth the following morning.
Joan Marlowe Rahe
Marlowe was born January 7, 1920, in Ithaca, N.Y.; died March 6 in a nursing home in Darien, Conn.; married Ward Morehouse in 1941, divorced in 1948, remarried, to Roderic Warren Rahe, a chemist, in 1952; survived by her husband, her sons Roderic Warren Rahe, Jr., and Ward Morehouse III, an author who has written about theater for The New York Sun, and four grandchildren.
