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On Broadway HAIR. Now that the hippie notion is fading away, a slickly packaged version of hippiedom has swung onto Broadway. The songs rock, the expletives explode and the energetic cast exuberates—but so quickly does U.S. society shift that the play's style of dissent is already dated. Director Tom O'Horgan achieves startling production effects even though distraction is certainly no substitute for destination.
JOE EGG. Humor is one way to meet an insoluble obstacle and ease insupportable pain. Peter Nichols' tender play tells of a shaky marriage held together by a spastic daughter. Donal Donnelly and Zena Walker deftly balance laughter and pain.
ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD is this season's winner of the Drama Critics' Circle Award and the Tony. From Shakespeare's clay, Tom Stoppard has fashioned two contemporary characters of existentialist angst, Beckettian apprehensions and undergraduate wit.
Off Broadway
THE MEMORANDUM. Director Joseph Papp introduces Czech Playwright Vaclav Havel to the U.S. with this wacky and pointed satire on bureaucracy and its bombast. Robert Ronan is pluperfect as the prissy pedant of Ptydepe, an artificial office language in which "ah" becomes "zukybaj," "ouch" becomes "bykur," "oh" becomes "hayf dy doretob."
MUZEEKA has as its hero Jack Argue. He composes rapturous songs from the words on a penny and dreams of being an ancient Etruscan, but he spends his life as an employee of a piped-in music firm and dies in Viet Nam with a unit assigned to fight before NBC cameras exclusively. John Guare's debut as a playwright displays a store of rich imagery and imagination.
THE BOYS IN THE BAND. Mart Crowley s comedy makes no apologia for the homosexual society, but uses it as a frame within which to hang the skeins of diverse lives, while unraveling some of the knots in which human beings tie themselves. Leonard Frey, Kenneth Nelson and Cliff Gorman lead an exemplary ensemble through assaults of sharp-edged humor and barrages of put-down gags.
JACQUES BREL IS ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN PARIS and—one hopes—writing more of the poetic and potent songs that are transmitted by a quartet of empathetic interpreters.
RECORDS
Soul
LADY SOUL (Atlantic). When ex-Gospel Singer Aretha Franklin sings the blues, they are likely to pour forth wild, bright and triumphant. Aretha's big voice soars and loops and knifes through a swinging rock combo as she sings her own hit, Since You've Been Gone, and her sister