Word: caedmon
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LYSISTRATA (Caedmon). Disgusted with the 20-year-old Peloponnesian War, Aristophanes attacked the Greek "hawks" with volleys of ribaldry. In the celebrated tale of how women ended the war with a sex strike, Hermione Gingold slyly makes double entendres sound quadruple as the Athenian matron who urges the ladies to stay out of the bedrooms until their men get off the battlefields...
...CHERRY ORCHARD (Caedmon). The Minnesota Theater Company, under the direction of Tyrone Guthrie, gives a balanced rendition of Chekhov's complex last play. The playwright set out to write a comedy about the social types in a changing Russia, but his characters, while absurd in their inflexibility, are also elegiac in their ineffectuality. Jessica Tandy plays an aristocratic Ranevskaya, as flowery as her beloved orchard and just as fruitless. As the arriviste, Lee Richardson is believably ambivalent as he reluctantly reaps triumph over his former employers. Hume Cronyn, however, sounds too nasally shrewd to be the bumbling clerk...
YEVGENY YEVTUSHENKO, BABII YAR AND OTHER POEMS (Caedmon). Russia's most prominent licensed nonconformist renders his role as rebellious poet in wax, and the impression is not flattering. A listener with no knowledge of Russian can have only an approximate sense of the quality of the original language in Yevtushenko's reading. The contents of the verses, however, can be judged in Alan Bates's English translation, and they do not seem to burn with artistic flame-they itch like inflammations. Except for the famous piece Babii Yar, which is more an emphatic speech than a poem...
CARL SANDBURG READS FROM HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY "ALWAYS THE YOUNG STRANGERS" (Caedmon). In heartfelt tones, the ancient recorder of Americana shares his remembrances of a Midwestern childhood, school days, the neighborhood circus coming to the empty lot down the street, the daily pumping for water in the backyard, the parade marking the death of Ulysses S. Grant...
...THAT WALKED BY HERSELF read by Boris Karloff (Caedmon). One painless way to break the comic-book habit and get the kids back to Kipling is to let this gentle old Frankenstein do it for you. All about the cave dwellers, and how the lady of the house domesticates a dog, a horse, a cow-and finally a cat, which proves a match for her wits...