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INADMISSIBLE EVIDENCE. John Osborne has orchestrated the plight of a man out of tune with his time, working in themes of frustration and painful self-recognition, building to a crescendo of despair. Actor Nicol Williamson is the commanding virtuoso.
CACTUS FLOWER. Barry Nelson as a playboy dentist who must persuade his spinsterish nurse (Lauren Bacall) to fill in as his "wife" because his mistress (Brenda Vaccaro) won't agree to marry him until she meets his supposed spouse. Daft farce, deftly directed by Abe Burrows.
YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU. High spirits and high jinks are the household gods of the blithe Sycamore family. The 29-year-old play is an American comedy classic, though its zaniness is now less remarkable than its nostalgic evocation of an age of innocence.
THE ROYAL HUNT OF THE SUN is a dazzling theatrical spectacle but fails to touch the nerve center of drama. Still, Christopher Plummer gives a forceful interpretation of the stormy Conquistador Pizarro in Peru.
RECORDS
Choral & Song
LEONARD BERNSTEIN: CHICHESTER PSALMS (Columbia). For last summer's music festival in Chichester, England, Bernstein set to melody half a dozen Psalms, to be sung in Hebrew. The composition (TIME, July 23) is both literal and theatrical. "Make a joyful noise unto the Lord" calls forth a jazzy outburst. After a boy alto sings, "The Lord is my shepherd," a men's chorus, heavy with percussion, crashes in to ask "Why do the nations rage?" The 18-minute work is less tortured musically than Bernstein's Kaddish of 1963 and is well performed by the Camerata Singers and the New York Philharmonic, Bernstein conducting.
MONTEVERDI: IL BALLO DELLE INGRATE (Nonesuch). This musical play of 1608 taught the ladies of the Duke of Mantua's court a moral: Make love or you will go to Hades. As horrible examples, Pluto brings up from his dark kingdom an eternally damned bevy of pale beauties who, when on earth, "ungrateful, held every lover at a distance." Edwin Loehrer and the chorus and orchestra of the Società Cameristica di Lugano give the embryonic opera a convincing performance.
SONGS OF SCANDINAVIA (London). Birgit Nilsson, the Swedish farmer's daughter, puts aside the superhuman passions of Wagner's Valhalla to sing most expressively some quiet love songs and mystic reveries about the fir forests, mists and dripping rocks of Scandinavia. Seven songs are by Sibelius, three by Grieg, and four by the little-known Swedish songwriter and symphonist, Ture Rangström.
BRITTEN: CANTATA MISERICORDIUM (London). Written for the 1963 centenary of the founding of the Red Cross, the cantata retells, in Latin, the parable of the good Samaritan. Shorter and less dramatic than Britten's widely performed War Requiem, it is nevertheless eloquent as performed by the London Symphony orchestra and chorus, conducted by Britten, with Peter Pears as the Samaritan and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as the Jewish traveler.