Television, Theater, Records, Cinema, Books: Mar. 18, 1966

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CACTUS FLOWER is a French farce successfully transplanted to the U.S. by Director Abe Burrows. Handling dialogue like a bone-dry martini, Nurse Lauren Bacall is all efficiency in the office, but predictably cuts loose on the dance floor with some torso twisting that causes Dentist Barry Nelson to drop his dentures.

Off Broadway

THE MAD SHOW. Styled after the sappy smile of Mad magazine's trademark moron, Alfred E. Neuman, this revue tickles where it might have stung. But its cast still reaches the funny bone, satirizing everything from soap-flake operas to hi-fi nuts.

HOGAN'S GOAT. The dialogue is blather and brogue, but the important thing is Playwright William Alfred's unvarnished view of priest and politician campaigning for authority over the Irish electorate in the Brooklyn of 1890.

RECORDS

Pop Hits

RUBBER SOUL (Capitol). Ringo playing an organ? George plunking a sitar? Paul crooning in French? George Martin rattling off baroque piano riffs? The Beatles are becoming more sophisticated as they concentrate on soul music, and their eleventh album is selling even better than the other ten.

SOUNDS OF SILENCE (Columbia) is Simon and Garfunkel's biggest single, and the title of their second current hit album. Low-keyed and harmonious folk singers who teamed up for the first time in sixth grade, the newly successful duo offers ten of Paul Simon's songs with their occasionally enigmatic and slightly ominous lyrics ("The people bowed and prayed,/ To the neon god they made").

JUST LIKE US! (Columbia) might well be called Just Like Them!, because Paul Revere and the Raiders put one in mind of so many other rock-'n'-roll groups, along with a dash of Dylan and a roll of Stones. But Paul, who comes from Portland, Ore., plays a rocking, rollicking organ, and the colonially clad quintet (seen on Where the Action Is) may make whole regiments of fans waver from their British alignments.

DECEMBER'S CHILDREN (London), which includes the hit single Get Off of My Cloud, is another Rolling Stones foray into rhythm and blues. There are signs no bigger than an LP's band that the Stones are softening. As Tears Go By is a weeper that Bobby Vinton might sing, though not so well as Mick Jagger, who is actually accompanied by violins.

GOING TO A GO-GO (Tamla). "Smokey" Robinson and the Miracles are consistent top runners in rhythm and blues. The fascination of their music lies in the way their voices chase each other and intertwine in fleeting harmonies to a comparatively muffled but hypnotic beat.

THE SUPREMES AT THE COPA (Motown). In songs like Baby Love and Stop! In the Name of Love, Florence, Diana and Mary show why they are perhaps the best-known evangels of the Detroit Sound (TIME, March 4). But the Sound is frequently abandoned as the girls adopt some Broadway airs (I Am Woman, Make Someone Happy).