TELEVISION

Wednesday, April 22

OPENING NIGHT AT THE WORLD'S FAIR (NBC, 7:30-9 p.m.).* A grand tour of the New York World's Fair, with Host Henry Fonda and Special Guides Carol Channing, Fred MacMurray and Marian Anderson.

Friday, April 24

BOB HOPE PRESENTS THE CHRYSLER THEATER (NBC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). Mr. and Mrs. Groucho Marx star in a comedy written by Groucho and Norman Krasna.

Saturday, April 25

NBC SPORTS SPECIAL (NBC, 5:30-6 p.m.). The N.Y. Athletic Club international fencing tournament.

SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11 p.m.). Kay Kendall, in one of her most delightful performances, as stepmother to The Reluctant Debutante, with Rex Harrison and Sandra Dee.

Sunday, April 26

DISCOVERY (ABC, 1-1:30 p.m.). The Arizona Desert.

SHAKESPEARE: SOUL OF AN AGE (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). A repeat of the highly acclaimed 1962 special in which Ralph Richardson narrates the story of Shakespeare's life, illustrated by visits to Stratford-on-Avon and other pertinent sites, while Michael Redgrave and other leading British actors read from the plays.

Monday, April 27

MONDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 7:30-9:30 p.m.). Father of the Bride, with Spencer Tracy as the father and Elizabeth Taylor as the bride.

HOLLYWOOD AND THE STARS (NBC, 9:30-10 p.m.). A look at "The Great Directors."

Tuesday, April 28

BOXING'S LAST ROUND (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). David Brinkley ponders whether professional boxing should be outlawed.

THEATER

On Broadway

HAMLET is played by Richard Burton as Hamlet would have liked to have been--masterly, heroic, and never self-doubting. The tragedy is missing, but the production is lucid, fresh and vivid, and Burton makes the lines ring with present meaning rather than bygone eloquence.

HIGH SPIRITS. Such wildly improbable sprites as Bea Lillie and Tammy Grimes spook the musical version of Nooel Coward's Blithe Spirit into comic afterlife. Danny Daniels' dancers are wide-eyed and their steps nimbly inventive.

FUNNY GIRL. The many-splendored talents of Barbra Streisand not only recreate the saga of famed Comedienne Fanny Brice but mark the shining birth of the theater's new girl for all seasons.

ANY WEDNESDAY. Anyone would swear that Sandy Dennis was a child bride, except that in this blithehearted bedtime story she is the mistress of a busy tycoon.

DYLAN. With mirth, sorrow, and an occasional flourish of eloquence, this play chronicles the U.S. reading tours of Dylan Thomas as the poet dipsy-doodled away his life. In the title role, Alec Guinness is uncannily good.

HEtLO, DOLLY! is a twinkle-toed musical, thanks to Director-Choreographer Gower Champion's dancers and to a raffish, resourceful matchmaker, Carol Channing.

NOBODY LOVES AN ALBATROSS. As a knavish TV writer-producer--not without charm--Robert Preston uses the backfire from his faulty schemes to set bonfires under the next person he wants to roast.

BAREFOOT IN THE PARK. Barely married and blissful but bickering, Elizabeth Ashley and Robert Redford cope with each other and with some engagingly kooky visitors.

Off Broadway

THE LOWER DEPTHS. In a crawly setting peopled by human termites, the Association of Producing Artists players feelingly capture some of the dimensions of sin, despair, death, love and grace that Maxim Gorky wrote into his turn-of-the-century classic.

THE BLOOD KNOT chokes half the life but none of the laughter, tears or bitterness out of two South African half brothers--one black, one white.

AFTER THE FALL. Making his actors enter and exit like the vagrant thoughts of memory, Playwright Arthur Miller tangles them in the web of a man's hurt and guilt.

THE TROJAN WOMEN, by Euripides, is a revelation of the power, agony and passion that exist in a classic of the past when it is conceived in terms of the present and executed at a level approaching perfection.

RECORDS

Popular Singles

No sooner did one Beatle song top the hit charts than another knocked it down. I Want to Hold Your Hand sold nearly 4,000,000 copies in three months, Can't Buy Me Love shot to just short of a million its first day, while a dozen more (Do You Want to Know a Secret, Twist and Shout) darted up the charts and jammed the air waves in the most amazing avalanche in record history.

But to separate one Beatle outburst from another, disk jockeys played and kids bought other hit 45s as well. Most of them cause adults to flee precipitously at first twang, but a few have a pleasant lilt or catchy sound. A sampling across the board:

HELLO, DOLLY! (Kapp). A grown man singing in teenland is a rare bird indeed, but Louis Armstrong comes on strong in the hit musical's title song with a growling, swinging beat for all ages.

BITS AND PIECES (Epic). The Dave Clark Five, another British export, look like the Beatles and bested them on a chart or two back home. The Five boast the Lively Tottenham Sound: hard and Mersey-less, achieved with what seems to be an arrangement for air hammers.

DON'T LET THE RAIN COME DOWN (Philips). A song as refreshing as a summer shower sung calypso-style by a new folk group (two girls, seven men) known with some justice as the Serendipity Singers.

DEAD MAN'S CURVE (Jan and Dean; Liberty) features the screeching tires of a Sting Ray and an XKE Jag set to an insistent, harmonious dirge and improved by a moral. "I found out for myself that everyone was right," intones the surviving drag racer to his doctor when he regains consciousness.

KISSIN' COUSINS (RCA Victor). Elvis sports a catalogue of 79 records now, but still seems to mean what he sells. This one is about a distant cousin who actually wasn't as distant as her mother might have wished.

THE SHOOP SHOOP SONG (Vee-Jay). Not many girl pop singers make it, but Betty Everett has a strong and agile voice and is on her way. To find out whether a boy loves you, you should "Kiss him, and squeeze him tight," she shouts. "Shoop, shoop," mutters the chorus.

JAVA (RCA Victor). Look Ma, no words. A jaunty and indelible tune artlessly tossed off by the big, bearded trumpeter Al Hirt.

FUN, FUN, FUN (Capitol). The five Beach Boys rode out the surf-singing craze and made a happy landing as bards of the hot-rods. Here they twang and yodel in celebration of a fast-cruisin' girl who's going to have fun, fun, fun, even though her Daddy took her T-Bird away.

SUSPICION (Crusader). One of the few ballads heard above the din of rock 'n' roll, delivered by Newcomer Terry Stafford. His cheerful voice betrays the lyrics: the dark doubts he harbors about his love seem to make his day, and why not? They promise to make his fortune.

DAWN (Philips) introduces a new kind of lover-hero. After some rhythmic screeching and wailing, the Four Seasons implore little Dawn to go away: "Think what your family would say. Think what the future would be with a poor boy like me."

CINEMA

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE. Committing slight but sly infractions of the thriller formula, Director Terence Young (Doctor No) sends James Bond, alias 007, alias Actor Sean Connery, on a binge of shocks and yocks that is more flip, and more fun, than Ian Fleming's novel.

BECKET. Richard Burton as England's 12th century martyr opposes the King Henry II of Peter O'Toole in this superbly played, eye-and ear-filling film spectacle based on Jean Anouilh's pungent historical drama.

THE WORLD OF HENRY ORIENT casts Peter Sellers as a concert pianist enduring the adulation of two zany New York teenagers, Tippy Walker and Merrie Spaeth, whose tandem movie debut is a triumph of scene stealing.

THE SERVANT is Director Joseph Losey's slick, frequently spellbinding study of class distinction in Britain. Dirk Bogarde contributes a perfect blend of good manners and menace as the "gentleman's gentleman" who destroys his master.

YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW. In three bawdy-to-bitter tales directed by Vittorio De Sica, the game of love looks like an Italian invention, and Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni obviously know just how it goes.

THE SILENCE. A lesbian, a nymphomaniac and an innocent child dominate Ingmar Bergman's bold, brilliant but ambiguous drama in which God seems to have tuned out on the human race, and vice versa.

DR. STRANGELOVE, OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB.

Stanley Kubrick's doomsday comedy-of-terrors starring Sterling Hayden, George C. Scott and the ubiquitous Peter Sellers.

THE GUEST is a faithful film adaptation of Harold Pinter's The Caretaker, made memorable by Donald Pleasence, repeating his stage role as the vicious old vagrant who bites the hands that feed him.

BOOKS

Best Reading

FIVE PLAYS, by Federico Garcia Lorca. These dramas, less well-known than Lorca's tragedies, have the same soaring poetry, which makes them better to read than to act.

THE WAPSHOT SCANDAL, by John Cheever. A companion novel to The Wapshot Chronicle in which the family ghosts of the Wapshots' past prove more real than the sterile realities of today's computer communities and suburbia.

SELECTED POEMS, by John Crowe Ransom. Though most of these poems are not new, they deservedly won the National Book Award this year. Elegant, lyric, often elegiac, they form a most consistently excellent body of American poetry.

KEEPERS OF THE HOUSE, by Shirley Ann Grau. In its quiet, assured way, this is a novelist's triumph: a story of miscegenation in the South that could be sensational but is written with the calculated artlessness and ambivalence of Light in August.

JUBB, by Keith Waterhouse. Through the weird alchemy of talent and restraint, British Novelist Waterhouse (Billy Liar) turns the story of a lonely voyeur into a novel with both compassion and comedy.

ONE FAT ENGLISHMAN, by Kingsley Amis. This year's liveliest comic novel dissects the endless ploys of a rich and artful British self-seeker to discomfit the U.S. colonials and get the girl.

THE OLD MAN AND ME, by Elaine Dundy. A sequel in spirit to her bestselling novel, The Dud Avocado, this one is about the adventures of a gallant, galling young lady who tries, without manners or morals, to secure a place for herself in London's Mayfair society.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Le Carre (1 last week)

2. The Group, McCarthy (2)

3. Convention, Knebel and Bailey (8)

4. The Wapshot Scandal, Cheever (4)

5. The Deputy, Hochhuth

6. The Martyred, Kim (5)

7. The Venetian Affair, Maclnnes (3)

8. The Night in Lisbon, Remarque

9. Von Ryan's Express, Westheimer (6) 10. The Hat on the Bed, O'Hara (7)

NONFICTION

1. Four Days, U.P.I, and American Heritage (1)

2. A Day in the Life of President Kennedy, Bishop (2)

3. Diplomat Among Warriors, Murphy (3)

4. Profiles in Courage, Kennedy (4)

5. My Years with General Motors, Sloan (5)

6. The Naked Society, Packard (9)

7. The Green Felt Jungle, Reid and Demaris

8. When the Cheering Stopped, Smith

9. Confessions of an Advertising Man, Ogilvy

10. J.F.K.: The Man and the Myth, Lasky (8)

*All times E.S.T. through April 25. E.D.T. thereafter.

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