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PHILADELPHIA, HERE I COME! Playwright Brian Friel, recognizing that each man carries within him both his severest critic and "his most appreciative fan, converts his insight into a striking dramatic device. Two Dublin actors—Patrick Bedford and Donal Donnelly—capture our fancy and sympathy as the public and private selves of a young man forsaking his Irish village for an American metropolis.
SWEET CHARITY. The electric performance of Dancer Gwen Verdon and the kinetic choreography of Director Bob Fosse spark Neil Simon's blown-out fuse of a book about a dance-hall hostess' futile search for a lifetime partner.
INADMISSIBLE EVIDENCE is a compulsively fascinating dramatic typhoon in which John Osborne's voice—splenetic, grieving and caustically humorous—is heard with more furious personal intensity than at any time since Look Back in Anger. As a defeated solicitor for whom life has become a playing field of pain, Nicol Williamson gives a performance of epic dimensions and phenomenal resourcefulness.
CACTUS FLOWER. Sex farces are to the French what fairy tales are to children. In this version, the dour duckling (Lauren Bacall) becomes a swan just in time to tame a big bad wolf (Barry Nelson). With all the laughs, no one seems to care whether or not they live happily ever after.
RECORDS
Spoken
THE PERSECUTION AND ASSASSINATION OF MARAT AS PERFORMED BY THE INMATES OF THE ASYLUM OF CHARENTON UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE (Caedmon) is a powerful distillation in sound of the most sustained assault on the senses that Broadway theatergoers have experienced in years. While the mind's eye must do some of the listener's work, the sensation of being imprisoned in a limbo of mad souls is fearsomely convincing. Patrick Magee as Sade, Glenda Jackson as Charlotte Corday, Ian Richardson as Marat, and the disciplined ensemble players of the Royal Shakespeare Company are, in this recording, precisely what they have been onstage—perfect.
THE MASTER BUILDER (Caedmon). No single drama of Ibsen's is more Freudian, and hence accessible to the modern mind. The play is a situation tragedy, and the symbols bleed. Solness, the artist-builder-husband, is vile in his self-absorption, and pitiable as he watches the tide of his creativity ebb. His wife is stifling and stifled. The young girl Hilde Wangel is Solness' mirage of the second chance, lost youth, lost inspiration, lost love recovered. But life is a role that man cannot rehearse or reverse. Sir Michael Redgrave as Solness thunders, hisses and froths like a wave crashing on a steep beach. Celia Johnson, as his wife, is as bleakly crisp as burnt bacon. However, Maggie Smith as Hilde is too much the calculating minx, seemingly unaware that the sliest seductive weapon of the young is youth.
THE HOSTAGE (Columbia). Whether through providential design or evolutionary quirk, an Irishman's tongue is the nimblest portion of his anatomy. The late Brendan Behan's tongue was rough, racy, tender and tart. His play, if it can be called that, is a cross between a magnificent barroom brawl and every vaudeville turn in the book of yesterday. Julie Harris and an intoxicatingly zestful company offer this bawdy, irreverent toast to the world of man.