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A KURT WEILL CABARET (MGM) faithfully captures the spirit of the year's best tribute to Weill and his collaborators. Folksinger Will Holt is passable, but Soprano Martha Schlamme (TIME, June 21) is passionately aware of each song's message, and her singing is a dulcet expression of irony, grief and joy.
SINATRA'S SINATRA (Reprise) is supposed to be "a collection of Frank's favorites," and turns out to be a bland bouquet of his hits.
THE DREAM DUET (RCA Victor) is not Flagstad and Melchior any more but Anna Moffo and Sergio Franchi. No kidding. Here they sing a syrupy selection (Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life, Sweethearts) and, but for the bad repertory, all but live up to their brazen billing.
BRANDENBURG GATE: REVISITED (Columbia) is a noble effort on the part of the Dave Brubeck Quartet to co-exist with an orchestra in tunes from the quartet's standard repertory—In Your Own Sweet Way, Summer Song, and the opus magnus, Brandenburg Gate. An E for effort and a gentleman's C for middling success.
THE CLANCY BROTHERS AND TOMMY MAKEM (Columbia) in live performance at Carnegie Hall. Lively, cheerful and as Irish as the moon over Galway Bay.
THEATER
On Broadway
THE BALLAD OF THE SAD CAFE is a wan retracing by Playwright Edward Albee of Carson McCullers' dark fable about the strange and obsessive attractions of love. Colleen Dewhurst, Lou Antonio and Michael Dunn, a malapert actor-dwarf, are locked in this luckless triangle of yearning and rejection.
BAREFOOT IN THE PARK should probably insure its audiences with Lloyd's of London, just in case anyone dies laughing. Playwright Neil Simon's unpredictable wit, Mike Nichols' spry direction, and Robert Redford and Elizabeth Ashley's comic finesse as a pair of blissfully wacky newlyweds provide incessant merriment.
THE PRIVATE EAR and THE PUBLIC EYE, two tenderly playful one-acters, examine the love of a sensitive lad fumbling toward a misconceived joy and a drowning May-September marriage that needs artificial respiration to bring it back to life.
CHIPS WITH EVERYTHING, by Arnold Wesker, strafes, bombs and generally demolishes U and non-U types at an R.A.F. training base. The chief weapon is laughter as Wesker admonishes the proles to stop kowtowing to their superiors as if they were superior.
THE REHEARSAL. Neither their witty words nor the 18th century costumes they wear for a play within this Anouilh play can hide the motives of aristocrats intent on destroying a pure — and classless — love.
LUTHER, by John Osborne, seethes with the inner violence of a religious passion, but stutters rather than stirs when it comes to theological insights. As Luther, Albert Finney struggles tortuously and awesome ly for his truth.
Off Broadway
CORRUPTION IN THE PALACE OF JUSTICE, by Ugo Betti, relentlessly builds to an unheard scream of conscience that resonates in the soul of an evil justice until he takes the first unsteady steps toward repentance.
THE ESTABLISHMENT. Nothing is sacrosanct to this sextet of deceptively urbane Britons except their right to boil big names and bigger isms in a cauldron of laughter.