Short Takes

> As the New York Times's chief theater critic for the past decade, Clive Barnes is the night mayor of Broadway, a lively, literate reviewer who can make or break a new show with a stroke of the pun. Barnes is also the paper's leading dance critic, and in a typical week the indefatigable aesthete shuttles from theater to theater covering both arts.

His Times editors finally decided that his schedule is too busy and two weeks ago stripped Barnes of his drama post, leaving him with the less prestigious chair of dance critic. The move surprised many at the Times, Barnes among them. "I would like to have been given the choice of which job to keep," he said, "but I'm perfectly stoical about it. Presidents last only eight years."

His superiors explain that it was easier to find a new theater critic (second-string Times film reviewer Richard Eder) than to replace Oxford-schooled Balletomane Barnes as dance expert, the job for which he was imported from London in 1965. There were other possible reasons: many in Manhattan's theater community resented Barnes' immense power, and some disliked his tendency to review plays as works of literature rather than live performances. Barnes, 49, has also starred in local gossip columns concerning some marital problems, and his bosses at the Times were thought to be not amused, a prudishness they deny. "The idea that we'd tell him how to conduct his personal life is impudent," bristles Executive Editor A.M. Rosenthal. Though Barnes has lost his Times drama hat, he will continue his weekday theater and dance spots for the paper's radio station. Says he: "I've been going to the theater for 40 years; one doesn't give up that sort of thing."

> Shortly after Carll Tucker, a book and theater critic for the Village Voice, turned 25, his father-in-law, Manhattan Radio Station Owner R. Peter Straus, took him to breakfast to discuss the young man's future employment prospects. Straus brought along Norman Cousins, editor of Saturday Review since he turned 25 in 1940. Cousins "liked the cut of his jib" and last week found something for young Tucker to do: buy and then edit Saturday Review. The price was from $3 million to $6.5 million, depending on various future expenses, and part of the money comes from the Straus and Tucker families. Cousins, 61, will stay on as editor for a couple of years as he trains Tucker to succeed him.

A 1973 Yale graduate who has written five unpublished novels, Tucker hopes to enliven the magazine's high-minded mix of essays, reviews and reportage to draw a younger audience. "It's a damn good magazine with a lot of interesting stuff," he says, "but it's always somebody's aunt who reads it. None of my contemporaries do. I only began reading it after that breakfast."

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