... Some Americans Abroad NEW YORK THE AMERICANS who entertained audiences at The Pit last year, as portrayed by British actors in Richard Nelson's Some Americans Abroad, are not quite as entertaining at Lincoln Center's Mitzi Newhouse Theatre. Maybe the British satirise Americans more effectively, maybe they were just better actors, and certainly local jokes about the National Theatre, Stratford- ...

... Rambert Dance Company SADLER'S WELLS--Second Programme SOMETHING seems to have gone seriously awry with Rambert Dance's marketing policy. For of all our British companies Rambert is the one with the strongest identity--you know that you will see beautifully trained, very professional dancers in modernist and post-modernist works; you know that all may not be out and out successes, but that ...

... Government spending laws put squeeze on top theatre EAST Anglia could lose one of its largest theatres because government rules designed to stop local authority overspending have threatened to put a block on urgent repairs. The Spa Pavilion in relixstowe must have a new roof soon, say its suppor ters, or it will soon be unusable. Local authority, Suffolk Coastal dis trict council has agreed ...

... In The Ruins ROYAL COURT NICK DEAR'S new play, brought in from the Bristol Old Vic, provides a virtuoso role for Patrick Malahide as the sick George III, who ruminates for 90 minutes in 1817 in his room of confinement at Windsor Castle, diagnosed as mad by his doctors-who were wrong then as they as often are now, and who did not understand the nature of the rare disease from which he ...

... PETER HEPPLE on the emptiness of power LYRIC Vanilla VANILLA is one of those plays that looks as if it may well end up as a Hollywood film with good roles for half a dozen stars. Expertly crafted, glossily designed and with more than a few good one-liners, it is, however, ultimately empty, for all that, under the guise of a black comedy, it is endeavouring to put across an impor tant point ...

... Don Pasquale QEH UNDER Peter Knapp's expert direction, Travelling Opera has updated Donizetti's fizzy masterpiece to contemporary Tuscany, better known as Chiantishire. If Knapp s revised and updated libretto is ingenious, the orchestral arrangement by Richard Balcombe, conducting from the piano his nine piece band, preserves the intricate fun and brilliant detail of the original. Don Pasquale ...

... FRANK GRANVILLE BARKER sees the ladies steal the show COLISEUM Ariadne on Naxos THE REVIVAL of ENO's production of Ariadne on Naxos, much more successful than some of the company's more recent productions, brought a strong team of ladies to Richard Strauss' opera within an opera. Rita Cullis, as the Composer whose opera has to be presented simultaneously with a comedy given Dy a troupe oi ...

... The Bad Bohemian LATCHMERE PRESENTED by the company Practical Cats Theatre, Paul Cahill's one-man show about Jaroslay Hasek, the author of The Good Soldier Svejk, makes an interesting and intermittently fascinating evening. Part of the interest lies in seeing how Cahill, as writer and performer, selects from this picaresque novel, and how he sustains interest in a 90 minute monologue, aided ...

... Wallflowering SYDNEY THIS production by the year-old Canberra Theatre Company as part of the Sydney Festival is better than Peta Murray's play deserves but only just. For Murray has cleverly caught the but that was most successfully flying about Australia last year, whos prime symptom was the need to see Willv Russell's Shirley Valentine. Two productions of the solo vehicle criss-crossed ...

... Brush strokes GERARD VAN WERSON on the politics of paint ALMEIDA Scenes From An Execution HOWARD Barker's remarkable dense short play sizzles and crackles with an almost Shavian energy, and is alive from beginning to end with his characteristic explosive force. Barker writes here, as always, like a vivacious tractor. Cast as the painter Galactia, Glenda Jackson succeeds in conveying the power ...

... BROADWAY WITH music by Cy Coleman, book by Larry Gelbart, and direction by Michael Blakemore, has a lot going for it. This new musical at Broadway's Virginia Theatre is yet another send-up of Hollywood, its B-pictures and the way in which scriptwriters are allegedly prostituted by producers. Many people evidently find this a perennially fascinating topic, and quite a lot will enjoy ...

... The Nutcracker CYPRUS SEVEN performances have just been given in Cyprus' of an amazingly ambitious production of The Nutcracker by Tchaikovsky. Three of these were in Nicosia and four in Limassoi. The ballet was mounted by the International Theatre Institute-a worldwide organisation under the spices of UNESCO. It was the very first time Cyprus audiences have seen a full-length clas sical ...