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A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE. Arthur Miller's ten-year-old tragedy of a Brooklyn longshoreman with an incestuous fixation for his niece may be more Freudian than Greek, but it pulses with the fury, pity and seeming inevitability of obsessive self-destruction.
WAR AND PEACE. Tolstoy's genius grips the Phoenix stage in an alternate offering with Man and Superman. Allowing for the preposterous difficulty of shrinking an oak back into an acorn, the result is surprisingly dramatic. Rosemary Harris as Natasha and Sidney Walker as old Prince Bolkonski inspire the cast with performances of finesse and authority.
TARTUFFE. Lincoln Center's interpretation of Moliére's comedy has too much bounce and not enough bite, but Michael O'Sullivan's Tartuffe is a surrealistic and fantastic acting creation.
BABES IN THE WOOD. The Globe never saw anything like Rick Besoyan's loose musical adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Its good-natured brashness provides a pleasant evening for lovers of light, spoofy theater.
THE SLAVE and THE TOILET. The color scheme is black and white, and Negro Playwright LeRoi Jones whiplashes both races in his studies of interracial love and hate.
RECORDS
Jazz
Jazz is a language, and a number of Broadway and Hollywood scores have recently been translated into it, or at least rephrased with a jazz accent. The results, while not always pleasing the jazz clique, have made a running start toward the pop charts, where André Previn's My Fair Lady and Louis Armstrong's Hello, Dolly! led the way. Some new pop-jazz releases:
DUKE ELLINGTON: MARY POPPINS (Reprise). The Duke leaves all the Hollywood sugar in these twelve pieces from the Disney movie and adds some corn (a growling trumpet, a wah-wah trombone). But there is deftness in most of his gentle transformations, and he seems to enjoy playing with the little pieces. The virtuosos of his big band step forward solemnly to play the songs of Mr. Banks, the children and the chimney sweep, and Saxophonist Paul Gonsalves scampers through Mary Poppins' exultant solo faster than one can say supercalifragilistic-expialidocious.
DIZZY GOES HOLLYWOOD (Philips) could more properly be called Hollywood Goes Dizzy, and what a way to go. Gillespie's trumpet throws flames octaves high while it sears eleven songs and movie themes, including those from Caesar and Cleopatra, Never on Sunday and Lawrence of Arabia. Walk on the Wild Side gets the most extended and exploratory treatment along the lines of its title.
ART BLAKEY AND THE JAZZ MESSENGERS: GOLDEN BOY (Colpix). Blakey doubled the length and breadth of five pieces from this musical (Lorna's Here, I Want to Be with You) and added Yes, I Can, which was cut out of the Broadway production, but makes a showpiece for Wayne Shorter's quicksilver tenor sax. The ten-member band, backed by Drummer Blakey, works such solid changes on the textures and rhythms of the score that it seems to come from Birdland rather than Broadway.