PLAYS: Fairyland delight
By MIKE SHEARER
Arts & Reviews Editor
Being a fairy is no easy matter. In fact, if one is a fairy only down to one's waist and a mortal for the remainder of one's being . . . well, the effect can be delightful entertainment.
"Iolanthe," with the satire of W, S. Gilbert and the melodies of Arthur Sullivan, opened at KU last night and delighted the responsive audience with the dilemma faced by the son of "Iolanthe," who once cross-bred with a mortal and bore this son-of-a-delightful-situation.
The cast, led by Scott Holmes, was Gilbert & Sullivan front to back, start to finish, curtain to curtain calls.
Holmes was utterly charming as the lofty, lovely Lord Chancellor, whose delight in his work caught the audience with ever well-timed line, note and flit.
Steve Goodman and James Rigler were particularly exciting in an Act II number with the worried Lord Chancellor.
"We were boys together," one says to the other in one scene. "At least I was."
The boys weren't all that kept "Iolanthe" brisk and lively. Linda Slezak plays the object of everyone's affection and adds a singularly beautiful voice to the production.
Beth Carr as queen of the fairies, Russ Gard as Strephon, Rick Daniels as the train bearer, Sharon K. F. Zongker as Iolanthe, the splendid supporting cast members playing the fairies and the "dignified and stately" statesmen and the other direction chiefs . . . all were superb.
The music to "Iolanthe" has been acclaimed as both a better effort of Sullivan and as one of his more complex. The music was handled expertly by the orchestra, conducted by Lynn Schornick.
Among the many other tributes which must be paid to the surprising production is one essential bravo—to John Bush Jones, stage director and innovator of the Gilbert & Sullivan Company here at KU. Few people have ever given KU such a gift as the gift Jones has given.
In other words, this is a part of KU that is so worthwhile.
"Iolanthe" plays again tonight and Saturday night at 8:30 in the Kansas Union Ballroom, with 2:30 p.m. performances Saturday and Sunday.
To be totally fair to television, in other words to try to give an accurate picture of the media which has most distorted the American picture, I should admit I skipped over the informative shows and the few shows critically acclaimed as good entertainment. I concentrated on the Doris Day type "entertainment" show, colloquially called, by a humorless viewing audience, "situation comedies."
Two weeks ago I leafed through the pages of a "TV Guide." I mean things had been going just a little too well and I had a sort of masochistic urge to make myself utterly sick.
By MIKE SHEARER Arts & Reviews Editor
blacks don't like bad black-
blacks.
Rumor has it (I wouldn't admit I'd watched the show even if I had) that the Beverly Hillbillies have returned to the real hills because the ratings had been slipping steadily. However, the tragic fact remains that the top-rated shows (with a few exceptions) are sick misrepresentations of the way things are.
Television has a lot of potential, or so I've heard it said many times. Television's greatest critic even saw a potential when he called it the great wasteland.
Television, kiddies, is dead
BOOKS
Few people, with some Mass-Mediaists as noteworthy exceptions, have yet dared to say that television does not have all that much potential.
It cannot have any potential which is not also in its viewing audience. For most part, the television viewing audience (and a poll shows that the average home has the television on six hours a day) does not have the potential to demand more out of this media
spotlight
I am reminded of a Norman Mailer quote from one of his old books: "God has always wanted more from man than man has wished to give him."
NOBODY'S PERFECT, CHARLIE BROWN, by Charles M. Schulz (Crest, 50 cents)—A new collection of Peanuts cartoons.
MAKE YOUR MAGIC MIND POWER WORK FOR YOU, by Leslie M. LeCreon (Gold Medal, 75 cents)—How to use your mental powers to run the world. The author gives instructions on use of the subconscious to cope with daily problems, the use of autosuggestion, communication with your inner mind, gaining self-confidence through faith, understanding other people and all that jazz.
THE MARTIAN WAY, AND OTHER STORIES, by Isaac Asimov (Crest, 60 cents) Ten science fiction stories that range far into the future. The subject matter is such things as mining the skies for water, building a new world beneath the surface of a planet, making pets out of alien explorers, and putting your life in the hands of a teen-age human computer (ugh).
Debbie Reynolds, television's rather nebulous answer to Susan Sontag, was marrying her television husband legally that week! It seems, for those of you who missed the plot ten years ago on "I Love Lucy," "The Cara William Shows," etc., that there was a flaw in the marriage license! The humor, i.e. canned laughter, comes when Debbie decides on a big wedding and hubby argues.
That same week, if I can believe "TV Guide," Sally Fields, the bobby-sox nun, found a baby in a basket on a doorstep, Hogan's sadistic Heroes had fun with suicide squads, Nazis and concentration camps (what could be more fun?); and Ann, THAT Girl, was
The tragedy of television, the dead media, is that man has never wanted more from it than it has wished to give.
Paperbacks
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE WELL-MADE PLAY, by John Russell Taylor (Hill and Wang Dramabooks, $1.95)—A history of a dramatic concept that once was extremely admired but that passed into disrepute to the point where "well-made play" was almost an insult. Taylor examines the dramatic movement in Britain, from Tom Robertson in the 1870s to Terence Rattigan in recent years. Taylor's approach is refreshing: he argues that there is such a thing as plot in drama, and that it is important, and maybe even that it makes for good plays. He even observes that well-made plays are maybe what such people as Harold Pinter are writing.
Reassuring to the social-conscientious television viewer must be "Julia," the story of Permanent Press, slightly-black woman and her non-ghetto black son. Week to week, Julia assures whites not only that blacks are EXACTLY like whites (just a little tainted on the surface, kid-dies) but also that good slightly-
chosen Miss Chicken Big and went from store to store wearing a chicken suit and cackling.