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LUV. Mike Nichols, a matchless director of comedy, contributes mightily to Schisgal's lie-down-on-my-couch-and-let-me-tell-you-all-about-myself farce. EH Wallach, Anne Jackson and Alan Arkin keep the humor quotient high.
Off Broadway WAR AND PEACE. The life force of a great novel surges through this APA at the Phoenix rendering of the Tolstoy classic. The tone and thematic intent of the work have been preserved, and the performances of Sydney Walker as old Prince Bolkonski and Rosemary Harris as Natasha are supremely good.
TARTUFFE. While Moliére has suffered a slight miscarriage of esthetic justice in this broad and bouncy Lincoln Center presentation of his biting and bitter comedy, the performance of Michael O'Sullivan in the title role is a splendidly surrealistic wedding of malice and humor.
BABES IN THE WOOD. Rick Besoyan's vaudevillian version of A Midsummer Night's Dream is more akin to Minsky than Shakespeare. The humor is broad, the music is gay," the mood is light. The groundlings would have loved it.
THE SLAVE and THE TOILET caters to the white mentality that masochistically enjoys being reviled for injustice to Negroes. With painful intensity, LeRoi Jones dramatizes both naked hate and the interracial love that dare not speak its name.
RECORDS
Opera
BIZET: CARMEN (3 LPs; Angel). Three reigning sopranos have now recorded the rich mezzo role with distinction and distinct differences. The newest Carmen, Maria Callas, lacks the heavenly beauty of Victoria de los Angeles and the earthy sensuousness of Leontyne Price. She is a hellcat, the most devilish and ruthless gypsy of the three. With Nicolai Gedda as an earnest and poetic Don José, Callas leads a French cast of no great distinction, but Georges Prétre, conducting the orchestra of the Paris Opéra, deserves the Légíon d'honneur. He makes the light, bright passages sparkle with Gallic esprit, and is still able to sound the tocsins of destiny.
RICHARD STRAUSS: THE WOMAN WITHOUT A SHADOW (4 LPs; Deutsche Grammophon). The complex, symbol-studded story is about an empress who tries to buy the shadow of a poor dyer's wife. If she gives up her shadow, the symbol of fertility, the dyer's wife must forgo motherhood; the dilemma causes her unborn children to plead with her in one of the eeriest passages in all opera. The technically and emotionally harrowing soprano roles are marvelously sung by Ingrid Bjoner (the empress) and Inge Borkh (the dyer's wife) while Baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau is impressive as the saintly dyer. Recorded during a performance, the voices sometimes overwhelm the orchestra of the Bavarian State Opera, but Conductor Joseph Keilberth still whips plenty of excitement into the lavish score.
MAUREEN FORRESTER SINGS OPERATIC ARIAS AND SONGS (Westminster). Forrester grandly pours her lustrous contralto into the heroic and tragic molds of Handel, Gluck and Purcell. She is capable of subtle shadings and is especially expressive in the superb threnody of the queen in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. The accompaniment, with its darkly descending chromatic passages, is played by the Vienna State Opera Orchestra, conducted by Robert Zeller.