Cinema: May 10, 1963

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On Broadway

She Loves Me is head over heels in love with love. The musical's springtime sweethearts are Barbara Cook and Daniel Massey, son of Raymond, Carol Haney's dance spoofs and the Sheldon Harnick-Jerry Bock score keep this romantic fairy tale spinning gaily.

Rattle of a Simple Man, by Charles Dyer, locks a London floozy and a virginal Manchester clerk in a bedroom and then busily prevents them from going to bed. Stalemated between farce and pathos, the play does not go anywhere either, but Tammy Grimes is a beguiling imp and Edward Woodward a touchingly vulnerable bumpkin.

Mother Courage, by Bertolt Brecht, is intellectual TNT by Broadway standards. In the title role, Anne Bancroft pulls her canteen wagon across the face of Europe during the Thirty Years War and tragically loses her three children. Brecht's reflections on peace and war are deeply ironic, but Anne Bancroft lacks the depth for her part.

Strange Interlude, by Eugene O'Neill, puts its characters on a kind of verbal couch for 4½ hours, but all of the amateur psychoanalyzing currently seems both comic and a trifle freudulent. Nevertheless, Star Geraldine Page rings as true as 14 carats.

Enter Laughing, by Joseph Stein. There is an improvisational air to this play that lends freshness to a stalely familiar genre, the Jewish family comedy. As a youngster with a yen to act, Alan Arkin is rib-splittingly funny.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, by Edward Albee. Winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle award as the best play of the year, Virginia Woolf detonates a shattering three-act marital explosion that, for savage wit and skill, is unparalleled in the recent annals of the U.S. stage. As the embattled couple, Arthur Hill and Uta Hagen enact their roles with magnificent ferocity.

Off Broadway

The Boys from Syracuse. This can't be fluff because it unreels so well­even if it has been 24 years since Abbott, Rodgers and Hart opened it on Broadway, after purloining the mistaken-identity story line from William Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors. Song and skin­but no sobs, no sorrows, no sighs.

To the Water Tower. The Second City troupe is unequaled among U.S. revue groups for its acting skill, imaginative verve and satiric intrepidity. It lives up to its own reputation, in this tart hit-and-run raid on Cuba, bomb shelter salesmen, and the fantasy life of after-hour private club cutups.

Six Characters in Search of an Author is quite possibly the best thought-out and most excitingly executed revival of the Pirandello classic ever to be seen in the U.S. Under William Ball's exceptional direction, a topnotch cast responds seis-mographically to the dramatic shifts between illusion and reality.

RECORDS

Back in Bean's Bag (Coleman Hawkins, Clark Terry; Columbia) was intended as an epochal encounter between Hawkins' tenor sax and Terry's virtuoso trumpet. Then something went wrong; the true soloist turns out to be Tommy Flanagan on piano. During Hawk's flights of fancy, a wildly distorted recording balance hides the horn behind the accompaniment.