THE STAGE

Put Up Your Dukes and Mad About Mintz. The Edelin trial is over, but there seem to be more farces in town than ever. The choice between these two is clear tradeoff between immediate gratification and helping out a good cause. Put Up Your Dukes is excellent--clearly the best Pudding Show in the last three years and possibly longer. It's everything it should be, with a very funny script that dips from fairly sophisticated Intellectual humor to suggestive double entendre. Mad About Mintz is undergoing some cuts which should make its first act tighter, but what's chiefly interesting about it is that it isn't a formula show the way the Pudding is, and that it was put together by students on a low budget without the certainly of trips to Bermuda. If you want to do something for the aid of Harvard theater and undergraduate playwrights, Mad About Mintz is a good bet; as far as pure amoral fun goes, though, the palm goes to the Pudding.

The Alchemist. Samuel Taylor Coleridge said that the Alchemist was one of the three greatest plots in the all literature (Tom Jones and Oedipus Rex were the other two.) It's a well-made play, to be sure, but don't expect anything that great. The production is good, with no gimmicks or flourishes.