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A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN. The ghost of the past haunts this Eugene O'Neill drama, upsetting the appetite of anyone who hopes to partake of the feast of life. Three emotionally starved characters hunger for a love that is denied them.
THE BOYS IN THE BAND. Mart Crowley's play deals with homosexuality coolly and honestly, lancing bitchy merriment with desolating insight. Kenneth Nelson and Leonard Frey play the host and guest of honor at a homosexual birthday party with skill and grace.
SCUBA DUBA is a flagellatingly funny first play by Novelist Bruce Jay Friedman about an American screwball whose wife runs off with a Negro during a Riviera holiday. The playwright sprays comic vitriol at countless pet hates.
RECORDINGS
Bargain Basement
There are four new low-priced LPs ($2.50 apiece) that even the extravagant will want to acquire, for they display some of the century's finest performers at their peak:
THE ART OF ALEXANDER KIPNIS (Seraphim). Kipnis began singing in Europe's opera houses and concert halls at a time when his Russian compatriot Chaliapin was the international rage; Kipnis never quite escaped the eclipse. Yet, as this group of songs and operatic arias proves, he had one of the greatest natural bass voices of all time—clear, penetrating, full of steel in its low range, all coppery and burnished higher up. Moreover, he had an elegance and impeccability of style that Chaliapin did not always display. And whereas Chaliapin confined himself largely to the music of his native land, Kipnis did not disdain the operas and songs of the West. These recordings—arias by Mozart, Rossini, Verdi and Wagner, and songs by Schubert, Brahms and Wolf—were made between 1930 and 1936. Most are released now for the first time on LP.
GUIDO CANTELLI: Debussy's La Mer, Nuages, Fêtes and Prélude à I'Aprés-Midi d'un Faune. The Philharmonia Orchestra (Seraphim). "Now here is a conductor, a good conductor." So spoke Arturo Toscanini after having heard his protégé Guido Cantelli rehearse the NBC Symphony for the first time in 1949. Like Toscanini, Cantelli possessed a sense of large-scale structure as well as a gift for illuminating orchestral detail. But while the older man's performances were charged with tension, Cantelli's were relaxed, songful and uncommonly graceful. These interpretations are a sobering reminder of music's loss: at 36, Cantelli was killed in a plane crash in 1956.
ATAULFO ARGENTA: Debussy's linages pour Orchestre—Gigues, Iberia, Rondes de Printemps. L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande (London Stereo Treasury). Another conductor whose career ended violently was Spain's Ataulfo Argenta, killed at 44 in an auto accident in 1958. Argenta was a musician in the Toscanini-Cantelli tradition; his Tchaikovsky, Berlioz and Ravel were outstanding. In this collection, he proved his mastery of the subtle colors, treacherous rhythms, and delicate contrapuntal lines that fashioned Debussy's impressionistic soundscapes.