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JIMMY SHINE is an attempt at an inner journey by Playwright Murray Schisgal. The trouble is that the trip leads to nowhere. Jimmy Shine is a transparent character. What makes him a winning loser is Dustin Hoffman's bravura performance. Hoffman takes thimblefuls of humor, absurdity, poignance, honesty, desire and passion and drains them as if they were foaming goblets of dramatic life.
KING LEAR. Lee J. Cobb plays the almost inhumanly difficult title role with an all-involving humanity in this revival by the Lincoln Center Repertory Company.
ZORBÁ is a sleek and synthetic musical version of the Kazantzakis novel in which Herschel Bernardi clodhops through the role of Zorba. The songs and dances, possessing neither virility nor ethnic veracity, hardly ever evoke the characteristic tone of Levantine lament.
THE APA REPERTORY COMPANY races through Richard Wilbur's lithe translation of Moliere's The Misanthrope with a light touch. The best thing about the play is Brian Bedford's smug Acaste.
Off Broadway
BIG TIME BUCK WHITE starts as a genial put-on with five officers of a Black Power group ricocheting around the stage in an orgy of black humor. It becomes a cold put-down with the arrival at the lectern of Dick Williams as Buck White. Answering questions from the audience that are designed to give Whitey the message about Black Power, he is more of a bore than a bombshell after the antics of the five clowns. The entire cast has been with the play since the beginning—including a four-month run in Los Angeles' embattled Watts district. Their three years together have paid off in the fine, comic ensemble playing that all but counteracts the soporific effect of big Buck White and his preachment.
AMERICANA PASTORAL. The citizens of a deprived South Carolina town find that the savior who will revive their cotton mill is black. The town's rejection of prosperity on these terms, and the explosion that results, might have provided the occasion for a dramatic exploration of attitudes and tensions. But Playwright Yabo Yablonsky's formalistic approach to his story keeps the action in chiaroscuro.
RECORDINGS
More Mahler
Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), one of the most popular conductors of his day, saw to it that his Faustian symphonies and yearning song cycles were performed as often as possible. But he knew as well as anyone that his music was way ahead of its day. "My time will come," he said. And now it has. Today the record companies lavish the kind of attention on him that they used to reserve for Beethoven and Brahms. Some choice items from a recent batch of LPs:
SYMPHONY NO. 4, BRUNO WALTER AND THE NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC (Odyssey); RAFAEL KUBELIK AND THE BAVARIAN RADIO SYMPHONY (Deutsche Grammophon); DAVID OISTRAKH AND THE MOSCOW PHILHARMONIC (Angel/Melodiya). This seraphic, fairy-tale score is the best introduction to Mahler. Bruno Walter's 23-year-old classic recording is rechanneled for stereo, with less bass than the original mono, but more polish in the middles and highs. Those who want a modern recording will like Kubelik's lithe and luminous version. The interpretation by Violinist-turned-Conductor Oistrakh is, unfortunately, unsympathetic and at times eccentric.