... 1965 was an unusually poor year for musicals: the now defunct Passion Flower Hotel was the only new one, and several others- including the apparently successful Camelot and Maggie May- closed. Then, last month, it seemed as though re vitalization was imminent; three musicals opened in as many weeks. But the stiff reception accorded Hello Dolly! the patronizing sneers that greeted Charlie Girl, ...

... BooKs A selection from the books to be published in the coming week Getting a book accepted for publication should be easy for a publisher's wife, but Wendy Owen, wife of pub lisher Peter Owen, whose first book, There Goes Davey Cohen, will be published by Hutchinson on 17 January, is far from blase about it. Both she and her husband were convinced that they did not want him to publish it. ...

... BULLET Were we cheated on that last night? Some of us thought we were. The curtain dropped on The Nutcracker excerpts, and that was that-literally. The Kirov Ballet season at Covent Garden just petered out to a shameless shambles of mostly inept diver tissements. The curtain went up again on that last performance of 1 October, revealing Sergeyev, Dudinskaya and the whole com pany. The national ...

... HEHTRE FIRST FIVE 1 Funny Girl. 2 Incident at Vichy. 3 How's the World Treating You? 4 Hello Dolly! 5 Man Superman. the coming weeks two ctive young actresses of derable talent will be in the West End-June hie and Barbara Ferris, in new comedies. This be a cheerful prospect for like myself who in the days of spring suddenly se that pretty young act- es are in short supply. rictly speaking this ...

... nuns FIRST FIVE: 1 Viva Maria. 2 Jules et Jim. 3 Alphaville. 4 Alfie. 5 Morgan- A Suitable Case for Treatment. Cannibalism in the arts is a deeply entrenched tradition. The tendency of the commer cial cinema towards devouring its young is exemplified by union restrictions and the con tempt in which the amateur is held. The system (if such it can oe canea; anows no pos sibility of a natural ...

... FIRST FIVE: 1 The Better Half by Andrew Sinclair. 2 Quant by Quant. 3 Economic Growth in Britain ed by P D Henderson. 4 The Crystal World by J. G. Ballard. 5 It Won't Get You Anywhere by Desmond Skirow. In each month, there seems to be one outstanding week, crammed full of interesting new books-and this is the week for April. To start with, two feminist books: Mary Quant's cheerful, anecdotal ...

... III 1111 MICHAEL AYRTON MATTHIESEN GALLERY THE DIFFICULTY ABOUT REVIEWING AN EXHIBITION of Michael Ayrton's work is that Mr. Ayrton has usually said, and said brilliantly, all there is to say about it long before the critic can get a look in. During the past six years, in which he has interpreted the legend of Daedalus and Icarus in terms of painting, drawing, sculpture, prose and poetry, he ...

... nmn @sb LE COQ D'OR COVENT GARDEN (RERI GRIST, KENNETH MACDONALD, FORBES ROBINSON) THE MIKADO SADLER'S WELLS (JOHN HARGREAVES, MARION STUDHOLME, DAVID HILLMAN) IT MUST BE QUITE A HARD-BITTEN OPERA-GOER who can resist completely the allure of Rimsky-Korsakov's Le Coq D'Or. There are a number of points to cavil at in the production at Covent Garden, but there is an overall glamour in the music ...

... Elizabeth Betven TO-MORROW IS ALREADY HERE, by Robert Jungle (Hart-Davis; 16s.), is sub-titled Scenes from a Man made World, and is, in my view, as grim a book as we are likely to have for many a season. For here is a picture, not of swift mass-extinction under atomic warfare, but of the slow subjugation of humanity by inhuman forces now taking place in atomic peacetime. Man, stated Shelley ...

... 1 Oliver Warner/ A book which any civilized man, any connoisseur of people, letters and fine furnishings would be proud to have written is Mario Praz's The House of Life (Methuen 50s.) It is a kind of autobiographical disquisition centring round the author's collection of Empire and Regency furniture, and the thoughts and recollections that the objects and pictures evoke are always memorable. ...

... J. Roger Baker/ With new productions of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, Covent Garden's new realiza tion of Wagner's tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen is now complete. If there were a number of first-performance imperfections in these two operas, so many splendours were revealed it seems that the Royal Opera House has justifi able cause for pride. Chief splendour is the orches tra: during his ...

... 1RLIET It's nearly five months since the Royal Ballet's resident company last danced at Covent Garden; but now, two tours and a month's acation later, they're back, fight ing fit well, they would have to be with The Rite of Spring on their opening-night bill on 15 November. Yet funnily enough, the whole company so oozed and slithered and stamped their way through Herr MacMillan's ...