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ARTS:The Best %u2018Gong Show%u2019 in t own at Performing GarageBY TED HOFFMANThis enthusiastic review covers theatre, music, fashion, food, and fooling around, as is appropriate to the culture which informs %u201c Gong of Java: A Shadow Puppet Play With the Son of Lion Gamelan Orchestra,%u201d an entrancing entertainment gracing the Performing Garage for just one more short weekend.In its easy, open amiable Eastern way, %u201c Gong%u201d provides an American sense of the kind of environmental intermedia performance some communal-type theatres in the %u201960%u2019s tried to explore and enforce without achieving. The motivating spirit here is Barbara Benary, an American musiciancomposer-artist who is also professionally an ethnomusicologist. She simply lures an audience to loll through an evening experience of attending to good food, fascinating music, and a lively %u201cwayang kulit%u201d show.The space is spread with handsome batik pillows and cushions for reclining. Benary seems to conduct the five and seven tone %u201c Gong and metallophone%u201d ensemble of instruments authentically designed by Dennis Murphy and played by her students and colleagues from Livingston College. The pre-show dining number, %u201c Circular Thoughts,%u201d by Daniel Goode, shows what compelling use American composers can make of such instrumentation. The gamelan goes on with amusing traditional court music and singing during the %u201c wayang,%u201d which like much ethnic romance puppetry narrates and enacts an epic melodrama in a contemporary ambience of license, full of bawdry, ridiculous references, and flowing comic events. All of this permits audiences to drop out, socialize, refresh and drop in again.Visual artist James Walsh made and operated the puppets, two dimension rod-articulated silhouettes against a translucent screen, through Benary%u2019s script. The plot is appropriately jocular. A nudnick character, Bragodharma, sent to steal a gong, confuses it first with %u201c dong,%u201d and finally unlooses %u201c Kong,%u201d a captive creature from Hoboken who promptly vamooses to the hills with The Princess aralakshmi, which provokes her lover Prince back from studying photography in the States, to consult the Televishnu Swami. From there, anyone can project the mayhem.So in addition to touting glorious theatrical japery and musical verve, done without pretension, here%u2019s a fashion plug for Gordon Bishop International, which provided the batiks (and has showrooms at 1059 Third Avenue, a veritable museum of Javanese culture), plus recognition that at $3 a mixed plate, or $1 a serving for GadoGado salad, Nasi Kuning tumeric rice, and Rendang Sumatran beef, %u201cGong%u201d may also have the best buy show time dinner in town.GONG OF JAVA, A ShadowPoppet Play With The Son ofLion Gamelan Orchestra; produced by Boyd Compton. Thursday through Saturday, August24-26; Food and Music at 7;Performance at 8 pm. The Performing Garage, 33 Wooster.$4.00.966-3651.COWARD%u2019S ANGELS: Rita Litton (loft) and Jennifer Sternberg in Noel Coward%u2019s %u201c FallenAngels, directed by Trueman Kelley, currently playing at the SoHo Rep Theater, 19 MercerStreet. (Jerry Engeibach photo)Coward%u2019s F ro lic s o m e * Angels%u2019 Tie One OnBY CAROL IANNONESet in London in 1925, Noel Coward%u2019s %u201c Fallen Angels,%u201d now at Soho Rep, is a frisky frolic that mischievously inquires if men must %u201chave a monopoly on the wild oats.%u201d Jane and Julia, friends since girlhood (%u201ceight and nine, respectively%u201d ), have been married for five years to %u201caggressively English%u201d husbands, Willy and Fred. Romantic excitement has faded and, although the women love their spouses, they are not %u201c in love%u201d with them, a crucial difference.While the men are off for a%u2018Dog Soldiers%u2019 DampenedIn Unstopped RainBYL.J. DAVISAnybody who tries to tell you there are no rules in this game probably has motives of his own and bears watching. There are lots, and here follows a brief sampler of the ones either I am about to break or the work under discussion does.1. Book reviewers should think twice before reviewing a movie, especially if they have read the book.2. It is never a good idea to review the work of a friend,3. If a movie is based on a book, and the book had a neat title, and the movie people changed the neat title to a dumb one, watch out.4. Books into movies are seldom a very good idea anyway, unless the book is by James Warner Bellah and the movie stars Johft Wayne. Then it%u2019s okay.%u201c Who%u2019ll Stop the Rain%u201d is the dumb title given to the movie version of Robert Stone%u2019s book %u201c Dog Soldiers.%u201d The book was therefore not written by James Warner Bellah, but the movie stars Nick Nolte, a close second to John Wayne when John Wayne was John Wayne. I am a book reviewer and I read the book. The movie is written by my dearest friend. Okay, here we go.The first third of the movie doesn%u2019t make any sens. The last two-thirds of it are a corking good adventure flicker. The first fbird doesn%u2019t make any sensebecause the war correspondent (played by Michapl Moriarity) apparently decides to smuggle two keys of heroin home to Blighty because he%u2019s upset because the U.S. Army is shooting Vietnamese elephants.Karel Reisz, the director struggles manfully to make it into something more than that, what with a highly metaphorical establishing shot of the horrors of combat, but the scene%u2014with its mud and its flying bodies and the strange ballet of the men and the bursting shells%u2014is simply too beautiful; Reisz uses color in a way few directors have ever mastered. Which is too bad because, as I said, it doesn%u2019t work, and the fat is not pulled out of the fire in a subsequent scene where the correspondent persuades his old Marine buddy, Nolte, to take the stuff home in his stash. The conversation is so sophmoric and overplayed that the viewer is left wondering whose fault it is, not w hat%u2019s happening.Actually, that%u2019s only about a fourth of the film, but so far the coast critic is justified who said that the movie consists of unpleasant people doing unpleasant things in an unclear way. But help is at hand.It arrives in the form of Anthony Zerbe and two sidekicks, men who give villainy a bad name, and from then on its just one damn thingafter another as they chase Nolte and Tuesday Weld all over creation while giving Moriarity a very hard time with a hotplate. All the fumbling at the beginning wasn%u2019t necessary, after all (and will probably give a good many people who ought to know a good deal better the wrong idea about the film%u2019s connection with Vietnam); the very pointlessness of the chase, the deadly anarchy of the mother night into which they have all descended, becomes itself the point of the participants%u2019 existence.It is all for nothing, but a nothing given a value by the honor of Nolte, the perfect soldier cheated out of his profession, and the murderous determination of > his alter-ego, Richard Masur; this is an odd place to find your classic Shakespearean rectangle, but here it is. If the %u201c Marathon Man,%u201d say, leaned on that old favorite, Nazism, as a cheap excuse for its ingenious sadism, %u201c Who%u2019ll Stop the Rain%u201d leans into a vacuum where the horror is all the greater, because there is no excuse for anything but evil and valor, and the only measure of a man is himself.\opening August 25 at the Criterion, 1514 Broadway; 86th Street East, 210 East 86th Street; and Festival, 6 West 57th Street.couple of days of golf at Chichester, the women are thrown into a delicious frenzy by the anticipated visit of Maurice, a suave, handkissing Frenchman with whom both, yes both, had grandly passionate affairs in Italy two years before their marriages. Terrified of falling into violent love all over again, and utterly thrilled at the prospect, the two friends plan alternately to avoid and to meet him, to escape and to receive him. After a series of frustrations, resurgent jealousy, and too much champagne, they have a %u201cdreadful row,%u201d and part without having seen him at all.The husbands return early from their trip, also having had a %u201c row,%u201d and begin accumulating the %u201clurid%u201d details of their wives%u2019 premarital %u201c depravity.%u201d Making no particular claims for the purity of their own pasts, the men are nevertheless appalled at this %u201c unfaithfulness.%u201d Maurice finally appears and, seeing the trouble, suggests that the sordid story was all a pretense to make the husbands more attentive. Willy and Fred are thus allowed a restoration of faith, if a decidedly shaky one, in the unerring virtue of their wives.Director Trueman Kelley has captured the sense of high rampant silliness and the cast has locatedthe dry indignation and sustained self-importance necessary for upperclass nonsense. Maxine TaylorMorris is right as the worldly and resourceful maid, and Quinn Halford and Ken Hardeman are quite enjoyable as the stolid, sporty husbands, although Hardeman takes things a bit too seriously toward the end. Jennifer Sternberg and Rita Litton certainly bring a whirl of energy to their work and often hit just the right note of grandly suffering merriment, but sometimes overdo it, especially for such a small house. Good actresses both, they nevertheless work too hard in their dinner scene together; the director might here have encouraged a shade or two of relaxation and restraint, even for such a boisterous romp. Still, it is an evening of fun.The drawing room set by Nette Reynolds is beautiful, all pink and black damask, striped satin, and fringed lace. Danajean Cicerchi%u2019s costumes are richly detailed and gorgeous.FALLEN ANGELS, SohoRepertory, 19 Mercer St. [925-2588] Aug 26, 7:30;4:00; Sept. 1, 8:30;10:30; Sept. 9, 7:30;7:30. S3.50/TDF.Aug, 27,Sept. 2,Sept. 10,Beth Elohim To HostFilm SeriesCongregation Beth Elohim, located on Eighth Avenue and Garfield Place, is holding a Film Theatre this fall. Films will be shown Thursday nights at 8 p.m. beginning September 14 through December 21. Four categories will be featured: suspense/thrillers, comedy, Jewish themes and social drama. Admission for all films is a $2 donation at the door.The schedule is as follows: %u201c Day of the Jackal,%u201d September 14; %u201c The Big Sleep,%u201d September 21;%u201c Saboteur,%u201d September 28 %u201c Bringing Up Baby,%u201d October 19 %u201c Bom Yesterday,%u201d October 26 %u201cThe Producers,%u201d November 2 %u201c Lies My Father Told M e,%u2019 November 9; %u201cThe Fixer, %u2019 November 6; %u201c Shop on Main Street,%u201d November 30; %u201c King of Hearts,%u201d December 7; %u201c Shoot the Piano Player,%u201d December 14; and the classic American movie, %u201c Citizen Kane,%u201d December 21. For further information, call the Temple office at 768-3814. %u2022August 29,1978, THE PHOENIX, Page 13