(3 of 4)
ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD. British Playwright Tom Stoppard has chosen Hamlet's scapegoats to get across his metaphysical message regarding the futility of many lives and the inevitability of death. He is well served~by the adept acting of Brian Murray and John Wood and the dynamic direction of Derek Goldby.
THE APA has three offerings thus far this season: Pantagleize, a fantastic farce by the Belgian Michel de Ghelderode; Exit the King, lonesco's stark philosophical play about death; and The Show Off, George Kelly's soft-spoken domestic drama of 1924. They make a bright dramatic palette.
Off Broadway
YOUR OWN THING adds beat to the Bard as it madly mixes media and mischievously juxtaposes Elizabethan and modern attitudes for a groovy replay of Twelfth Night.
¶I NEMATHE SECRET WAR OF HARRY FRIGG. Paul Newman plays a buck private who is suddenly promoted to two-star general on a World War II assignment so far behind the lines that he almost comes out on the other side.
THE TWO OF US. Writer-Director Claude Berri has made a funny and charming film about, of all things, antiSemitism; he owes his success largely to two outstanding character actors, Michel Simon, 73, and Alain Cohen, 9.
POOR COW. Carol White plays slob and sexpot, worried mum and girl in love, in this saga of life in a scruffy London slum, a first film by 30-year-old TV Director Kenneth Loach.
THE GRADUATE. Mike Nichols' second screen effort begins as genuine comedy, soon degenerates into spurious melodrama, although Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft and Katharine Ross do an excellent job as victims of a sophomoric love triangle.
IN COLD BLOOD. Capote's nonfiction novel has, in the hands of Director Richard Brooks, become a first-rate movie although it suffers, ironically, from self-conscious filmishness.
THE PRODUCERS. Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder play two Broadway producers in this disjointed and inconsistent movie, which, in spite of its many faults, occasionally rises to classic comic heights.
PLANET OF THE APES. This science-fiction film represents the expenditure of $1.000,000 to make Maurice Evans look like an orangutan, Kim Hunter and Roddy Mc-Dowall look like chimpanzees, a large cast look like other assorted members of the monkey family, and Charlton Heston look like an astronaut.
BOOKS
Best Reading
THE RETURN OF THE VANISHING AMERICAN, by Leslie A. Fiedler. Ever the academic gadfly, Fiedler now argues that the Indian is the central figure in American mythology and that his spiritual heir is today's hippie.
THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE, by Arthur Koestler. A reasoned diatribe against the hubris of the scientific establishment, whose horizons, says the author, have outstretched its vision.
COCKSURE, by Mordecai Richler. Satirist Richler's basic weapon is seductio ad absitrdum in this stylish spoof of the communications industry and pop culture.
THE HOLOCAUST, by Nora Levin; and WHILE SIX MILLION DIED, by Arthur D. Morse. More grim evidence that the Allies wrote off the Jews as war casualties after having failed to face their plight in the '30s. The U.S. Congress, F.D.R., and especially the State Department come in for some scalding rebukes.