Daily News from New York, New York • 47

CI The Liberated Lana 'Via Galactica' Is Lost in Space By DOUGLAS WATT All through the fancy stage show called "Via Galactica," a musical about outer space skyway that opened last night at Broadway's eapaciou3 new Uris Theater, I kept hoping they'd get to the feature film. They never did, of course. they say about surface acting, "from the teeth." A word about the chandeliered, book-lined room's cusine ifs not. "night club food." The opening night menu featured capon with wild rice, or roast beef, both tender and tasty. but it would have been welcome.

TIA GALACTICA Musical with book by Christo-. pher Gore and Judith Ross, lyrics by Gore and music by Gait MacDermot, produced by George W. George and Barnard S. Straus, in association with Nat Shapiro, at th Uris Theater, Nov. 28, 1972.

THE PRINCIPALS The storyteller Irene Cars Gabriel Finn Raul Julia Hefs Damon Evans April Edloe By TOM MeMORROW The new Lana Cantrell, lively, liberated and unscxy, bounced into the St. Regis Maisonette Monday night- with a women's lib marching song on her Bps and gave her audience an hour of entertainment as vigorous as most things Australian. Actually the new Lana Is the old Lana, the tomboy from Sydney, wearing no makeup, dressed in a jumpsuit and with a hairdo that is Plain Jane plain. In her fight for feminism, she has for saken femininity. On your table, as she works.

is a card with a picture of a sultry, pouting beauty, looking at you oyer her shoulder as she embraces her nude bosom it was the mildly sensational cover illustration for a Lana Cantrell record album, and it is difficult to associate this marvelouslv bad lady with the athletic-looking girl scout leader on stage. The in-between, sex-object Lana made her appearance in 1969, but has been rejected for a return to the original well-scrubbed image. The audience welcomed her enthusiastically, and the marching song, which includes the lines, "I am wise; I am invincible! I am Woman!" was well-received. The ringing, pure tone of her big voice makes you wish that she would eliminate that heavy hoarseness from her little voice, the one with which she gives you 'If You Go Away." It appears, at least, to be an affectation. Vigorous as it was, her performance somehow lacked warmth, possibly from weariness, because she had closed the night before in Chicago, but most of her singing seemed to be, as lyrics by Chistopher Gore, who also collaborated with Judith Ross on the book, and music by Gait MacDermot, aren't of much help.

I felt especially sorry for poor Dr. Isaacs, who, annoyed at the slow headway being made by his wife and Gabriel, had to sing: "Why did you procrastinate? AH you had to do was mate and procreate." They're Lost in the Star In fact, "Via Galactica" is a grand mess and I felt rather sorry for Raul Julia, as Gabriel; for the attractive Virginia Vest-off, who seemed to have trouble projecting her voice at times; though not, unluckily, in- a four-letter word with which the lyricist had gratuitously supplied her; and for the boxed-in Keene Curtis. John Bury designed the futuristic scenery and costumes and Lloyd Burlingame attended to the lighting, which included a rather nice opening projection of a star-filled universe. Musical director Thomas Pierson must have had his hands full for the orchestra pit doesn't seem to provide for proper exits for the players, some of whom were placed in the wings and others of whom had to loiter outside before climbing to their places. With severe trimming and the ftockettes to liven things up, "Via Galactica" might have kept the audiences at Radio City Music Hall amused between shows.

But at least it may serve to smooth some of the wrinkles (there were som cantankerous speakers in the heavily miked house) out of our newest and largest playhouse. You may be interested to know that they play mostly country music on the none-too-imagin-atively named asteroid of Ithaca, where most of the action takes place 1,000 years from now. By that time, it seems, the people of earth are all blue-skinned, a neutral color they've somehow assumed, and new generations are spawned to test tubes, the inhabitants keeping all their emotions in check by means of special hats topped with spiral-ing' cones. If you're still with me, you must learn that three of the earth people a garbage man named Gabriel, who seemingly places his daily collections in orbit, and a young couple, the female member of which is happily but unconventionally pregnant take off for Ithaca on Gabriel's flying garbage truck. On Ithaca, where animals but not people are produced artificially, Gabriel falls for an attractive young married woman named Omaha.

Her husband, Dr. Isaacs, the planet's boss, encourages their liaison because he's had the bad luck to lose his heart, liver, pancreas and all organs other than his brain, so that his head protrudes from a box-like console. Alone at Last Gabriel and Omaha mate in a wagon, after which the quixotic Dr. Isaacs summons all his people into a space ark to take them, for reasons unclear to me, in search of a distant star. Apparently, they reach it, for many years later we observe what appear to be the offspring of Gabriel and Omaha descend- Franli Avalon Is No Turftey If anyone had told me, as much as two weeks Ego no, make that two days ago that I would enjoy watching and listening? to Frankie Avalon, I would have scoffed.

And I scoff pretty good. But everyone cats their words now and then, and here I am, eating away and enjoying: them as much as if they were the white meat of the turkey. Remember Frankie Avalon? Teenage idol of a few years back? He opened at the Copaea-bana Thursday and he was surprisingly good surprising me, anyhow. Frankie was the star a years back of such motion picture epics as "Beach Blanket Bingo," "How to Stuff a Wild Bikini," "Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine" and others, and how seriously can you take someone like that? Yet he turns out to be a pleasant, easy-going performer with a smooth voice and an engaging personality which comes across in a well-designed act.

He sings the songs identified with him during the late '50s, including "Venus," "Bobby Sox to Stockings" and others like that. Patricia O'Haira JJ- -Martin Gottfried, Women's Wear Daily -C4 CI C4 P5 TO i i I I Omaha Or. Iscs Prova Vesioff Keene Curtis Bill Starr ing good long ladder to embrace old earth once more. Besides the ark, which resembles a 19th century covered bridge, and the flying garbage truck (an ornate cherry-picker) labeled Helen of Troy, there is a contraption resembling one of those hopeless flying machines invented by amateur engineers early in the century. The latter spouts smoke, by the.

way, which caused a good deal of gasping and waving of programs in the front rows. Then, too, there is the curious fact that Ithaca's atmosphere is undependable, the people there given to bouncing into the air at times (on trampolines) and walking on firm ground at others. It is, needless to say, an ambitious production and Peter Hall has staged it, dances and all, as if he enjoyed all the gimmicks, especially the trampolines. But it is, at the same time, flat and humorless, and the songs, with stronsr Brechtian influence. It is powerfully played, ensemble style, by the large and polished company.

Ensemble acting, Greek drama and the Brecht style have a natural affinity for each other. The story is of an Athenian sick of an endless war (the Pelo-ponnesian War had dragged on 10 years when Aristophanes wrote the play in 421 B.C.) who flies up to the Greeks' Olympic heaven to plead for peace with the gods. MAT. TODAY AT 2 P.M. "SEXY AND FUNNY.

Present Aristophanes AlEIIAITJElEn SHO STOPPERS Martha Raye taps up a Bobby Van and Helen Gallagher high-step the dazzling 20's Benny Baker and Joy Hodges Charleston away to in German He finds that the gods are off on some kind of a marvelous party, leaving only Hermes behind, and that the goddess Peace has been imprisoned in a deep well by War. When he gets her out, with some connivance from Hermes, who is open to payoffs, he gets to take a stunning creature, Spring, home as a bride. Director Gunther Fleckenstein never lets the wordy comedy get talky, and the Eric Tass music and the dances are bright, again with the sardonic Brecht flavor. www www -i nn thrtl. $7.50, 6, 4 call si 2) rot location heas roul pjyjote ia naasan square uardea bestef 5QC per order tor handling Bv TOM MeMORROW The broad, biting and sometimes bawdy humor of Aristophanes can be enjoyed on a New York stage all this week if your German is faultless.

Die Brucke (The Bridge), a world-touring repertory company from Munich, is presenting the ancient Greek satirist's "Peace," (in German "Der at the Bar-bizon-Plaza Theater. "Der Frieden" will run through a Sunday matinee, and Georg Buechner's "Woyzeck" will take over the stage next Tuesday through the following Sunday. A synopsis of the plot appears in the program, but The Bridge makes no effort beyond that to bridge the language gap. Its goal is clearly to reach German expatriates around the world, which it has been doing with suceess since the mid-1960s. The plays are brought here by the Gert von Gontard Foundation of New York in association with the Goethe Institute of Munich, This version of the comedy was done by Peter Hacks, a leading adapter of dramatic classics from East Germany who shows a HURRY-BRING IHE DOS! NOW THRU JAN.

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