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JACQUES BREL IS ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN PARIS while his bold songs are sung nightly in Manhattan. Furious at life yet madly in love with it, Brel challenges it with bold imagery, sighs over it in sad verse, embellishes it with melodic observations of sly humor.
THE BOYS IN THE BAND. Mart Crowley's uncompromising drama deals coolly and honestly with homosexuality, lancing bitchy merriment with desolating insight. Kenneth Nelson and Leonard Frey play the host and guest of honor at a homosexual's birthday party with skill and grace.
YOUR OWN THING. Shakespeare again proves himself to be a most congenial coauthor as Twelfth Night provides the plot and cast of characters for an inventive rock musical about confusion of the sexes.
SCUBA DUBA is a flagellatingly funny first play by Novelist Bruce Jay Friedman about an American screwball whose wife runs off with a Negro during a Riviera holiday. The playwright sprays comic vitriol at countless pet hates.
RECORDS
Opera
RIGOLETTO (Angel; 3 LPs). Rigoletto, the hunchbacked jester, is frequently overshadowed by Gilda and the Duke of Mantua with their respective arias—Coronome and La donna è mobile. Not so here. Cornell MacNeil is a consummate actor, and the opera belongs wholly to him; each line is subtly molded and colored by his rich baritone. Reri Grist as Gilda is vocally excellent and traverses the high passages with ease. Nicolai Gedda as the Duke is robust and sure. Conductor Molinari-Pradelli allowed no "concert version" of the opera, with singers crowding the microphones. Instead, they moved about the studio as in a stage production, making the most of stereo recording techniques.
DAS RHEINGOLD (Deutsche Grammophon; 3 LPs). The second part of Conductor Herbert von Karajan's proposed Ring cycle faithfully continues his individual and highly esthetic interpretation set down in the initial Die Walkure recording. His approach to Wagner's music is lyric, avoiding the solemn weightiness of many other conductors. Instead of striving for volume, he emphasizes nuance. The casting of the opera is also unique. Since the orchestral sound is on a smaller than usual scale, the less than Wagnerian voices of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Josephine Veasey can portray Wotan and Fricka with unusual beauty and subtlety. But those who want their Wagner larger than life will fall back on Conductor Georg Solti's dynamic Das Rheingold (London), whose Wotan and Fricka are the monumental-voiced George London and Kirsten Flagstad.
DIE MEISTERSINGER VON NÜRNBERG (Seraphim; 5 LPs). Seraphim, the budget label of Angel recordings, has brought back a very special package that has been off the shelves for more than a decade. This performance of Die Meistersinger took place at the Bayreuth Festival in 1951. It offers Herbert von Karajan as conductor, plus an outstanding cast that includes Otto Edelmann, Erich Kunz, Hans Hopf and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf at her lyric, full-throated best. The recording faithfully captures the spontaneous onstage interplay and excitement that is rarely achieved in a studio.