‘NIGHTINGALE’ SINGS TO SOME GOOD N.Y. REVIEWS

Ray Stricklyn’s one-man tribute to Tennessee Williams, “Confessions of a Nightingale,” appears to have landed safely in New York.

First seen last year at the Beverly Hills Playhouse, Stricklyn’s solo portrait of the playwright opened last week Off-Broadway to mostly good reviews.

Variety’s reviewer was huffy, calling the show “an exercise in exploitation and celebrity-mongering, unredeemed by its star.”

Other critics were disarmed--partly by Stricklyn’s performance, partly, perhaps, by their personal memories of the late playwright.

Mel Gussow of the New York Times seemed tickled to have the old crocodile back and looking so well. “This is not a portrait of an artist in extremis so much as 90 minutes spent in the company of a born dramatist ineluctably drawn to tell tales out of school.”

Time magazine’s William A. Henry III complimented Stricklyn for evoking Williams’ gossipy persona, and then getting underneath it. “Stricklyn gives poignant life to Williams’ yearning for the world to look on him, and also for it to look away.”

Gloria Cole of UPI: “Stricklyn’s Williams defines loneliness as ‘not having anyone to laugh with’--the kind of apt statement that fills this poignant, moving, funny and self-mocking revelation.”

In a happy irony, the play is being presented at the theater named for the woman who discovered and nurtured Williams through the best part of his career, agent Audrey Wood.

The talk of the Amsterdam theater is “Going to the Dogs.” Conceived and directed by avant-garde theater-maker Wim Schippers, it is a four-act family drama in which a daughter introduces her new boyfriend to the family.

What’s avant-garde about that? Well, the cast is entirely composed of German shepherds.

They are steered through their paces with the help of meat and cookies thrown from the wings, and Amsterdam’s animal protectionists think the whole idea is disgusting.

Schippers thinks it’s fascinating. He told Reuters that he’s intrigued by the truth of his canine performers (“the difference between people on the stage and dogs, is that people act while dogs remain normal”) and by the fact that audiences will actually show up to watch this sort of thing.

Maybe it’s a slow month in Amsterdam theater.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK. Sir Robert Helpmann (1909-1986), after seeing “Oh! Calcutta!”: “The trouble with nude dancing is that not everything stops after the music stops.”