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1776 presents a stereotypical version of the key signers of the Declaration of Independence and their sometimes abrasive, sometimes soporific deliberations at the Second Continental Congress. The musical succeeds only in bringing the heroic, tempestuous birth of a people and a polity down to a feeble vaudevillian jape.
HAMLET. Everything about Ellis Rabb's APA production is peculiarly wrong, including Rabb's portrayal of Hamlet as if the Prince of Denmark were in desperate need of geriatric drugs.
IN THE MATTER OF J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER. Heinar Kipphardt's version of the 1954 Atomic Energy Commission hearings on Oppenheimer is more dissertation than drama; the play is as inert as stone and a cruel test of audience patience.
CELEBRATION is a musical fairy tale by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, co-creators of The Fantasticks. With a straight melodic line and unpretentiously apt lyrics, the show is intimate and beguiling.
PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM. Woody Allen is the hero of his own play about a neurotic young man, rejected by girls even in his dreams, who is finally coached into bed with his best friend's wife by his fantasy hero, Humphrey Bogart.
FORTY CARATS is a comedy of new marital modes and manners featuring a lovely Julie Harris as a middle-aged lady wooed and won by a 22-year-old lad.
HADRIAN VII. Alec McCowen exhibits an outstanding command of technique as Frederick William Rolfe in this deft dramatization of Rolfe's novel of wish fulfillment, Hadrian the Seventh.
Off Broadway
INVITATION TO A BEHEADING. As a play Russell McGrath's adaptation of the Vladimir Nabokov novel is less than successful, but Ming Cho Lee's set is elegant, Gerald Freedman's direction is deft, and the acting is high-styled and full of flair.
STOP, YOU'RE KILLING ME is an evening of three slightly savage and humorous one-act plays by Novelist James Leo Herlihy, performed ably by the Theater Company of Boston.
ADAPTATION—NEXT. Elaine May directs both her own play, Adaptation and Terrence McNally's Next in an evening of perceptive and richly comic one-acters.
DAMES AT SEA. A delightful spoof of the movie musicals of the '30s, with an enthusiastic and gifted minicast of six, including Bernadette Peters as Ruby, who taps her way to stardom in one day.
TO BE YOUNG, GIFTED AND BLACK is a loving tribute to Negro Playwright Lorraine Hansberry presented by a talented interracial cast in which whites as well as blacks speak for her.
CINEMA
GOODBYE, COLUMBUS is a slick adaptation of Philip Roth's novella about being young, in love and Jewish. Director Larry Peerce is a canny craftsman, and if his film is a little too glossy, his actors—especially beautiful newcomer Ali MacGraw—all perform with warm and endearing conviction.
THE ASSASSINATION BUREAU. This is the one to take the family to see on the next rainy Saturday afternoon. Oliver Reed and Diana Rigg battle bad guys all across, and sometimes above, Europe in an unceasing repertory of derring-do that will keep the kids enthralled and their parents amused.
STOLEN KISSES. Francois Truffaut continues his cinematic autobiography in this lyrical souvenir of a young man's adolescence and sometimes reluctant journey into manhood.