Cinema: Aug. 18, 1961

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Warwick, R.I., Musical Theater: Broadway's 1944 blitzGrieg, Song of Norway.

Stratford, Conn., American Shakespeare Festival: As You Like It, Macbeth and Troilus and Cressida, the last in a pointless Civil War setting.

New York City, Central Park: Joseph Papp's excellent free Shakespeare Festival with A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Danville, Ky., Pioneer Theater: And All Men Kill, a new play by Albert Brenner.

Hillside, Ill., Melody Top Theater: Gordon and Sheila MacRae in Bloomer Girl.

Chicago, Drury Lane Theater: Thornton Wilder's Our Town, with Mr. & Mrs. Pat O'Brien.

Los Angeles, U.C.L.A. Theater: The West Coast premiere of Felicien Marceau's ironic comedy, The Egg.

Monterey, Calif., Wharf Theater and Opera House: Dame Judith Anderson in Woman Against the Gods.

Vancouver, B.C., Queen Elizabeth Theater: The International Festival presents the North American premiere of Giraudoux's Men, Women and Angels, with Uta Hagen.

Stratford, Ont., Stratford Festival: Love's Labour's Lost, Henry VIII, Coriolanus, The Pirates of Penzance and a new play, The Canvas Barricade, by Donald La-mount Jack.

Broadway

In midsummer Manhattan, when the humidity could float the Queen Mary up to the side entrance of the Waldorf, a Broadway production has to be exceedingly durable to survive, and, although the list of running plays has atrophied, summer visitors still have some good choices. Among the best from the past season, Jean Kerr's Mary, Mary continues with sellout houses, and Shelagh Delaney's raw and powerful A Taste of Honey is still on the boards, as are the musicals Camelot (Arthur and the Round Table), Carnival! (a Broadway version of the film Lili), and Irma La Douce (Parisian underworld). From the Pleistocene epoch: Fiorello!, a musical replanting of New York's Little Flower; The Sound of Music, the last and most sentimental work of Rodgers & Hammerstein; and, of course, My Fair Lady, by George Lerner and Bernard Loewe.

BOOKS

Best Reading The Way to Colonos, by Kay Cicellis. A young Greek writer has borrowed characters and situations loosely from Sophocles, and the result is a trio of remarkably good short stories, touched by tragedy.

The Judges of the Secret Court, by David Stacton. The author, a historical novelist (On a Balcony) of rare skill, writes a bitter account of the death of Assassin John Wilkes Booth and the trial and execution of the forlorn set of dupes and fools named as his fellow conspirators.

Household Ghosts, by James Kennaway. A sourly comic triangulation by a Scots author of the way men and women hurt each other; the wife is pretty, the husband admits that sex is not "my strong subject," and the other man is a brilliant, caddish scientist.

Jimmy Riddle, by Ian Brook. In a masterful spoof on the mess in Africa, chiefly at the expense of the retreating British Empire, the author proves himself a Tarzan of the japes.

The Making of the President 1960, by Theodore H. White. A superb job of reporting the last presidential campaign.

The Death of Tragedy, by George Steiner. Well equipped with caustic wit as well as learning, the author ably follows his subject from Aeschylus to Brecht.