Stage:

...the marvelous Morris, with the spirited help of Bolcom's A MORE INTERESTING first production was that of The Trans- piano, managed to still the beasts at the bar...

...Arthur Yorinks's book closely follows the tale of the of raveled nerve of the bedroom...

...Square, where the performers had to fight the self-absorbed But his vows of obedience and nonviolence cannot outlast the buzz of the bar's regular Yuppie clientele...

...and co-stars as diverse as Dan Berrigan, stalwarts of the fused with exciting narrative...

...It will always produce junk films in several genres...

...The the flashpaper air The minute-hand other performers were less commanding and the music, West- to hurt her...

...In an interview in a festival effect of the many productions was testimony to the imporpublicity newspaper, Taymor comments on "the ironic view tance that the American Musical Theater Festival has achieved of Thomas Mann...

...De Niro never set out to cover the festival, I managed to sample quite a deserves an Oscar nomination for facial acting, concentrating few of the works...

...As an epigraph about current Jesuit activities among the Indians T HE MISSION, winner of this year's Best Picture award at notes, the issue of violence in defense of the powerless is still Cannes, attains interiority, and a kind of solemn grandeur, painfully relevant...

...A companion, adept heart of the libretto was the old show-business cliche about the at psycho-mythic interpretation, explained that the good star who had to choose between fame and happiness...

...He (The Killing Fields) and his cinematographer Chris Menges...

...The Harlem scenes are essentially satiric, mocking Ennio Morricone, which mixes liturgical and primitive motifs, beauty contests, excessive hair styles, and publicity-induced especially powerful in a final counterpoint of high-pitched celebrity, but they also want to celebrate Harlem in its heyday...

...Despite the Ellington music, however, it was a lumposition to another without appropriate dramatic buildup or pish show the night I saw it...

...Migraine voice and movement, particularly when she dropped her dis- scars across tancing story-teller's tone to become the goddess Kali...

...screenwriter Robert Bolt (A Man for All Seasons...

...the affection, wit, and clarity already familiar from their records...

...de Niro's resort to "just war" avoids a simple judgment...

...chant and genocidal Armageddon...

...to enter and kiss eaten by his father, re-emerge as a bird from the juniper tree And every event the amazing storm and drop a millstone on the woman's head...

...Puri aside, the success of the piece lay in its the afternoon light and the limp, pink gown puppets, both the caricatured holy men and the unarticulated and my mother lies that smells of Sick Mother, but oddly expressive doll that represented the child of the behind the blank door...

...funny idea that they cannot regain their ability to dance (their Nevertheless, the end raises the issue of violent resistance tonatural rhythm...

...Irons pleted its third season in Philadelphia...

...The to the Comic Mass scrambling eggs music by Philip Glass and Robert Moran has the familiar of the person...

...Rajika Puri, who was trained in classical Indian dance, played the part barefoot and wearing a man's formal morning dress (a mixture Dan Liebert screen-door slam, of East and West...

...Color of Money, from those who assume filmgoers can't leading actors Jeremy Irons and Oscar-winning Robert de handle moral questions, or assume moral questions can't be Niro...

...Unfortunately, the choreography through flying rocking chair, and at the end - as the single-parent most of the show was leaden, and the funny idea remained an family settles down to a more conventional dinner - she joins idea, unrealized either visually or musically...

...and burning bread - throbbing repetition/variation sound of Glass under more con- but an exact needle a fellow exile ventional recitative and song which occasionally suggest dragging a thread from the drowned, silent city Menotti...

...The use of light, projections, mechanical devices, imaginary prince is really her partner, Lit Daddy, the dramatic and all manner of theatrical niceties made the show more line is a case of the Masterbuilder meets the bluebird of impressive visually than it was musically or mythically, but happiness in your own backyard...

...The Mission provides both...

...tion is that the real mother hovers around the action, in the person not only of the performer but of a life-sized doll riding a 21 November 1986: 633...

...She was impressive in harking dog...

...the pain and irony of his position into eyes and cheek muscles...

...Both the sentimental and the the elements mixed comfortably in The Juniper Tree as they satiric elements demand a light touch which the show certainly did not in The Transposed Heads and Queenie Pie...

...Almost everyone connected with Puttnam has recently been named head of Columbia Picthe movie brings impressive credentials: director Roland Joffe tures, tempting some to believe he will liberate Hollywood...

...Understatement is 'JUNIPER', 'HEADS', & 'QUEENIE PIE' unusual for Bolt, a master of the apt quip , as in his unforgettable Thomas More...

...it lets the boy, chopped stitching her And later I am allowed up and stewed in a sour broth by the wicked stepmother and to the air...

...Still, there should have The dream tries to continue the comedy by allowing Queerfie been more climactic focus on what the Indians, not merely the Pie to impose Harlem values on the island people, and it is a Jesuits were thinking...

...stunning on-location photog- sequence in which Queenie Pie is transported to a mystical raphy, especially of the mammoth Iguaza Falls...

...Teamwork here at least counts, since all involved seem to have put ego in the service of a moral question: what use is violence...

...But he's "dumping...

...like paper...

...GERALD WEALES achieve Mann's kind of irony, but it is one of the elements, along with a sense of menage, embodied in the narrator...

...The most finished and rewarding production that I saw was At night my father comes The Juniper Tree, but it had the advantage of coming to This pain is not with hands like blocks of Philadelphia after having played at the American Repertory a slapstick blow wood...

...and in the staging in front of and within a triangular the sound of blood and then the brutal sound enclosure, which became the shrine of Kali and echoes the tearing in her eyes of retching...

...commissioned for television but never produced, about a conThe Mission also has the common weakness of all films test to choose the leading hairdresser in Harlem...

...For five weeks in - who studied his role as Father Gabriel, principal missionary September and October, there were productions in among the Guarani Indians, with Berrigan's help acts theaters and other performing spaces all across the city, rangsublimely restrained, suggesting either a mad stoic or perfect ing from the expensively produced premier of Duke Elsaint...

...returned to the wrong bodies - a fable about the convergence Although not every event was a triumph, the cumulative and conflict of mind and body...

...If it can shake off its heaviness as it goes Of the cabaret performances I saw, William Bolcom and on to Washington - and perhaps to New York - it may turn Joan Morris were predictably fine, performing their songs with into the show the Ellington name deserves...

...dips and ascends, ern but using Eastern instruments for occasional effects, was the drawn shades hush I glimpse her thin shoulders somewhat bland...

...The film is based on efforts of who dismiss liberation theology, or ignore the murder of Latin eighteenth-century Jesuits to protect their South American American archbishops and nuns when, committed by rightjungle missions and Indian converts from liquidation by wing fanatics...

...Ellington later about the third world: undue attention to the outsiders...

...colonial Portugal and Spain...

...lacked when I saw it...

...Joffe's cool Newman gets by on gusto and bravura, striking smart poses as...

...But producers David Puttnam (Chariots of Fire) and Fernando perhaps he can reclaim the "sophisticated" film, like The Ghia...

...sexual triangle of the story...

...The Mission will not be comforting to those despite taking some large risks...

...De Niro is even better as Mendoza, first a slave trader, lington's Queenie Pie in the huge Zellerbach Theater at the and then, after gruesome penance for killing his brother in a Annenberg Center to late-night cabaret at the Top of Centre love quarrel, a Jesuit who works as Irons's principal assistant...

...Duke Ellington's name assured that Queenie Pie would Understatement fails, however, with Irish actor Ray McAn- attract wide press attention in and out of the city...

...until she brings the curl back to their Commonweal: 632 straightened hair...

...THE American Musical Theater Festival recently comBut the actors here, at least to me, justify the strategy...

...which was co-sponsored by Lincoln Center Theater (where it She struggled gamely against the noise in the room, nor was played briefly...

...The show could hardly be expected to in its short life...

...Authen- tried to expand it into a full-length "street opera" (quotation ticity has been achieved, however, through fine ensemble marks from the program) by inserting an extended dream acting by the Wuanana Indians...

...of male and female...

...Since mother and the evil mother had to merge to free the boy from Queenie Pie, who has won the contest for years, is challenged his crippling complex, but I found myself beguiled by the way by a younger woman from New Orleans (Cafe O'Lay), and Jungian necessity looked like old-fashioned show-business since she gives up success for love when she discovers that her schmaltz...

...slipping to the bathroom menage...

...An unnaly as the key papal envoy who must decide whether to finished work, it was put into a shape of sorts by Maurice support the Jesuits or the colonial powers...

...McAnnaly is sup- Peress (musical adaptation) and George C. Wolfe (libretto), posed to be caught between loyalty to conscience and reasons presumably with the blessing and cooperation of Mercer Elof state...

...Brothers Grimm on which itt is based...

...Theater in Cambridge and the Houston Grand Opera...

...camera style and evenhanded treatment of Irons's pacifism and needed...

...Royal Shakespeare Company, and South American Indian- TOM O'BRIEN rights activists...

...The sentimental hands with the now hovering stepmother...

...The opera's addi- of dropped pot-lid, of her forehead...

...It began as a one-act opera, semblance of conflict...

...can't...

...A collaboration of Julie Taymor (direction, she helped by Kirk Nurock's musical settings of Parker's puppets, masks), Sidney Goldfarb (book, lyrics) and Elliot verse, which were sometimes soft, sometimes blues-y and Goldenthal (music), it is the retelling of an Indian legend about consistently wrong for Parker's small repertory of satiric deSita and her two husbands and how their heads are severed and vices...

...That was not the posed Heads, an adaptation of Thomas Mann's novella, case with Bertilla Baker as The Incurable Dorothy Parker...

...and music by island...

...For someone who threat of genocide to the Indians he has come to love...

...Stage Indeed, if the film has a weakness, it derives from its reticence, its eschewal of propaganda, its willingness to let history speak for itself - almost, one is, tempted to say, its FESTIVAL IN PHILLY willingness to let historical characters act out their conflicts without talking modernistically about them...

...But he is opaquely enigmatic, swerving from one lington...