The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 55

CALENDAR Cos Angeles (Timco Television Listings Sjitunlay, September 25, 1982 I'iin I'KNNY (ll.AnNTONK Ua Aum-lni TiniM AFTER 14-YEAR STRUGGLE, KDOC TO GO ON AIR FRIDAY j. potential. Our uun in to give the urea Us long overdue (television) identity." Simon, former FBI chief speciiil agent in I is Angeles, is an old hand at television licensing buttles. At one time he was attorney for a Voice of Ios Angeles Inc. attempt to challenge the reluensing of KNIIC Channel 4.

He and his l-os Angeles law firm partner, Thomas Sheridan (also a KDOC investor), arc part of the Fidelity Television Inc. group that has sought to wrest control of KIIJ-TV Channel 9 from RKO General since 19G5. (That marathon fight, wholly separate from KDOC, faces yet another round of Federal Communications Commission hearings and court appeals. Simon and Boone who is still president of and chief shareholder in Golden Orange Broadcasting KDOC's parent have been in the Channel 56 quest from the beginning. Other investors then included Jimmy Durante.

Fess Parker and several former law inforccmcnt of- Please see KDOC, Page 2 By HERMAN WONG, Timen Stall Writer For a brand-new television station that expects to go on the air Friday. KDOC Channel 56 in Orange County has been keeping its debut hype rather mild. For example, Jack Latham, the onetime anchorman star of Los Angeles television who is KDOC's general manager, is the very model of cautious optimism. "It's going to be tough. We're going to have growing pains and we; have to start off well.

Will we succeed? I think so; I think people need us in Orange County." Initial programming for the Anaheim-based UHF station is not exactly blockbuster. There will be the old sitcoms Van Dyke old game shows My old not-so-famous movies Maverick Queen," "Cauldron of Hut KDOC promises full schedule of Cul State Fullerton and Cal Stale Ixng Beach football and two daily Orange County -focused news shows the kind of localized programming that KDOC hopes will lift it out of the also-ran class in the Greater Los Angeles ratings wars. And just being on the air will be something of an achievement. KDOC, which first applied for a federal license 14 years ago and won approval seven years ago, will be the first commercial television station in Orange County, a consumer-affluent area that KDOC and others say has been grandly ignored by Los Angeles television. KDOC attorney William Simon, whose partners in the station venture include singer Pat Boone and producers David Levy and Richard Shepherd, put it this way: "That area (Orange County) is blessed with tremendous (television) VST fjr i KDOC General Manager Jack Latham, right, chief engineer Bill Welty.

WT'4 ft I 1 POP BEAT GOODMAN: APOSTLE OF THE KEYBOARD GOSPEL CRITIC AT LARGE HOT SEAT ON A REVIEWING STAND By CHARLES CIIAMPL1N. Times Arts Editor A friend who moved from the top ranks of Ixxik publishing in New York to the upper-middle ranks of a film studio once told how, until he created an authentic box office hit. he felt as if he went about Hollywood wearing a leper's bell and preceded by a bearer crying, "Unclean! on grounds that lack of success may be contagious. In trying times I have occasionally thought I traveled with a sort of inverse leper's bell, preceded by small persons crying, "Clean! Clean!" or "Fair!" or, unkindest cut of all, damaging accusations leveled in print by non-critics and, with, only one exception who comes to mind, by graceless writers who could not safely be trusted to compose a laundry list. The latest charge is that I managed to review films for 17 years without angering Hollywood, which is on the fatuous slope of nonsensical.

Who will forget the day Adolph Zukor tried to trip me as I passed his table in the Paramount commissary? Or the time Jack L. Warner sought to bar me from the executive dining room (I was lost, actually) for not laughing at one of his jokes? Or the anonymous hate letter that could only have come from a disgruntled former extra? It is true that I am quoted as attacking only three of the recently identified 50 worst films of modern times. But it is also true that I'd seen only three of the 50. All but the really devout masochists among film reviewers can take suffering or leave it alone, and 4o not have to have had the experience to know that "Revenge of the Maggots" or "Flaming Thighs" is not their cup of hot salt water. Like cops busting a wagonful of winos, you can always run up your critical arrest record by flailing away at the defenseless, or by snarling that a dumb program picture that will be lucky to end its playing days in the salon of a listing cruise ship in the Dead Sea is actually a crime against civilization.

But it's essentially a sham, and dispiriting as well. The feeling that you are dribbling your life away in Please see A HOT SEA Page 7 I 0 0 0 CLX o'ooo i i TrrrmiwwiintTirrTrrmim Joe Goodman, a music store owner, sees the keyboard synthesizer KEN MJIIAS jm Angara Timon as an instrument of social change. i iffl Betsy Joslyn in the new Harold Prince musical, "A Doll's Life." and it's no wonder that all these people, as well as the cast, appear hopelessly adrift all the long evening." Clive Barnes, in the New York Post: "Harold Prince's 'A Doll's Life' is a fascinating concept" A concept gone fairly adrift, an idea gone askew, a heady inspiration vaporized, at times excitingly; in its own promises. The show itself lacks involvement. The book and lyrics miss the weight of Ibsen.

The music sounds written to order Except in its look and performance, the show itself never flies with the concept. And even the performances waver dangerously in some no-man's-land between the Broadway musical and the classic theater." Two of the most popular local TV Please see DOLL'S Page 4 jpw if W7 the latest in pianos, electric pianos, organs, and synthesizers from three dozen U.S. and foreign manufacturers. The keyboard companies will have in tow professional musicians, inventors, engineers and keyboard clinicians. Synthesizers, with their elaborate high-tech appearance, often alienate rather than attract the general public.

But Goodman, an affable and articulate man of 28, argues that the general perception of a modern piano player needing a graduate degree in electronic engineering is a false one. Goodman predicts that within the next few years, every self-respecting household will have a synthesizer. Says Goodman, "There was a feeling in the early 70s that the piano was "out and the guitar was in, and that guitars would be the household instruments. But that's not worked, because for the average person to play the guitar takes a certain amount of technique, and muscles and coordination just to make a note sound. Anybody can sit down at an easy-play keyboard, press one note and get music." Please see GOODMAN, Page 7 CABALLE IN RECITAL AT AMBASSADOR By ALBERT GOLDBERG It was far from the cheeriest of occasions for either Montserrat Caballe or her loyal followers who packed the house, the pit and the stage of Ambassador Auditorium Thursday night.

The main thing may have been that in spite of obvious discomfort from a reported virus, the lady did sing and very often much better than might have been expected. The night before she had had to stop early in a performance of the San Francisco Opera Wednesday in S.F.'s "Ballo," A A A By R.W.GREENE All the action in music stores in recent years centered in the guitar departments. Groups of people, mostly male, normally congregated there with the enthusiasm of kids at a candy counter. No doubt about it: The guitar had a certain mystique. But the scene this week in a large North Hollywood music store was typical oT a growing shift of emphasis.

The guitars stood abandoned. The hew fascination is keyboards. One young man was ripping through Emerson, Lake and Palmer licks with a studied nonchalance. Surrounded as he was by an array of blinking lights, switches, dials and digital readouts, he looked like Liberace playing the space shuttle. Mom and Dad may not be there shopping for an instrument for little Johnny to learn, but they may be in.

the near future if Joe Goodman has his way. Goodman is a musician turned music store owner who is responsible for this weekend's Professional Keyboard Products show at the Howard Johnson's Motel, 4222 Vineland Ave. in North Hollywood. The trade show, one of few open to the public, will feature hundreds of cided with Cook's last-minute substitution. The performance also featured a less -than -ideal collection of singers with one glowing exceptionin the other principal assignments, and a conductor, Kurt Herbert Adler, who seemed patently unable to recapture former Verdian glories.

The result was, to say the least, a shaky night at the opera-. The most perplexing aspect of the performance involved Adler. In 1977 he led a "Ballo" notable for exceptionally supple tempos, for soaring lyricism and tastefully muted passion. On this nervous occasion, he enforced rigid, usually sluggish tempos, all too muted lyricism, and hardly any passion at all. Something clearly was wrong.

Please see VERDTS, Page 7 RON SCHERL Flu plagued Montserrat Caballe Yv 'DOLL'S LIFE' IN THE N.Y. DOGHOUSE By CLARKE TAYLOR NEW YORK "A Doll's Life," Harold Prince's new musical that failed to find favor in its Los Angeles tryout, opened on Broadway Thursday night and was roundly panned. It will close after Sunday's matinee, according to a spokesman for Prince. Wrote Frank Rich in the New York Times: iThe season is still young, but it's not likely to produce a more perplexing curiosity than 'A Doll's the dour musical that opened at the Mark Hellinger last night. On this occasion, three legendary Broadway hands Harold Prince, Betty Comden and Adolph Green have inflated a spectacularly unpromising premise with loads of money, good intentions and hard work, only to end up with a show that collapses in its prologue and then skids into a toboggan slide from which there is no return.

Call 'A Doll's Life' a casual blunder, which, like Topsy, just grew and grew and grew." Douglas Watt in the Daily News: "Nothing is right about this show: Not the capriciously unwinding Betty Comden-Adolph Green book, not the Larry Grossman score, not even Harold Prince's staging, which seems obtrusiVeand heavy-handed. Of course, the whole thing was viously a lost cause to begin with. (See Martin Bcrnhcimcr's adjoining review). For courage and for disregard of personal comfort the Spanish diva rates a triple A. The show must go on and her extraordinarily disciplined vocal cords enabled her to sustain the tradition.

But of course a price had to be paid and adjustments made. The original program of Handel, Schubert, Debussy and Granados had to be shifted to a larger portion of Handel, arias from "Adriana "Mefistofele," and miscellaneous Spanish songs. Offhand, the replacements seemed to be more demanding than the excised material, but Caballe had her own reasons. Several times she Please see CABALLE, Page 7 Thursday in Ambassador recital. CABALLE CANCELS HARD-LUCK 'BALLO' AT S.F.

OPERA By MARTIN BERNHEIMER, Times Music Critic SAN FRANCISCO Every season seems to have its hard-luck opera. This fall it is Verdi's "Un Ballo in Maschera." The troubles began long -before opening night an opening, incidentally, that marked Terence McEwen's first regular outing as general director of the San Francisco company. Luciano Pavarotti, the supertenor in Excelsis, was available only for the gala inaugural benefit Sept.10. His role would have to be assumed thereafter by a mere mortal, Vasile Moldoveanu. Then came baritone trouble.

Ingvar Wixell, who was to have sung Renato and who is a notorious, habitual canceler, withdrew from the cast close to the eleventh hour. Silvano Carroli flew in to replace him for the first four performances, and Pablo Elvira was to replace the replacement for the final rounds. Then there was the matter of Montserrat Caballe, another celebrated no-shoW specialist. The diva did indeed appear in the first performances, though she was reportedly not at her best and on-stage apologies were extended on her behalf. Her apparent indisposition lingered Wednesday night and, although a pale and tentative Caballe made it through Act I which requires the soprano to sing only one trio, in which she floated some exquisite pin-point pianissimos she did not make it through the opera.

Her place was taken for the bulk of the evening a big bulk by Rebecca Cook, 29, a' local soprano who had sung Micaela in "Carmen" last year and who. true to McEwen's new understudy policy, had been standing by as Caballe's "cover." Wednesday, Elvira's debut coin INSIDE CALENDAR BRIDGE: Page 4. FILM: "The Witness" by Kevin Thomas. Page 3. "Yes, Giorgio" by Kevin Thomas.

Page 7. MUSIC: Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra by John Menken. Page 5. TELEV ISION: Today's programming. Page 9.

Viewing Sports by Paul Uennigcr. Page. 9..