Word: macdermot
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Divine Hair-Mass in F, by Gait MacDermot (RCA, $5.98). Lackluster settings of the Sanctus, Benedictus, Agnus Dei, Kyrie, Gloria, even the Lord's Prayer, combed into hits from MacDermot's Hair, just as they were in the original presentation last year at Manhattan's Cathedral of St. John the Divine...
Flaws v. Foreign. For next season, Papp has scheduled two plays by off-Broadway Negro Playwright Adrienne Kennedy, and has commissioned Negro Actor Ossie Davis and Composer Gait MacDermot to do a contemporary musical on the race question. "I also have," says Papp, "an adaptation of Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading. But what I'm really looking for is American plays. I'd rather do flawed American plays than outstanding foreign plays...
What holds Hair together is the score, which pulses with an insistent, primitive beat. With gleeful impertinence, the music by Gait MacDermot and the lyrics of Gerome Ragni and James Rado manage to release the pent-up yelps of the sons and daughters of the affluent society. A song like Ain't Got No ("Ain't got no class,/Ain't got no mother,/Ain't got no father,/Ain't got no culture") telegraphs the credo of the self-proclaimed have-nots of the '60s. Satire with a playful nip makes a treat...
...punks in The Incident (TIME, Nov. 10), brings to the title role an imaginative boisterousness not unlike his superior work in that film; Ralph Waite is a dashingly demagogic Claudius. Anita Dangler is a fluttery flibbertigibbet of a Gertrude, while April Shawhan is a sexy, miniskirted Ophelia. Gait MacDermot's pounding rock background seems at least as appropriate to this version of the play as the gentle pleasing of a lute might have been in a 17th century production. Papp's new Hamlet will not crowd traditional stagings off the board, but it deserves credit for trying...
...Laborites, cock-a-hoop with the victory, had won with 1) a more attractive candidate (capable Barrister Niall MacDermot), 2) a solid, close-to-the-pocketbook issue in a proposed Tory bill to relax rent controls, 3) a much better political machine. The Tories were inclined to blame most of their troubles on a third candidate, a Junoesque, right-wing independent named Leslie Greene, 31, who campaigned on "I have no faith in the U.S." She siphoned off 1,487 votes, the majority of them presumably from the Tories. But Candidate Greene was not the whole explanation; since the last...