On Broadway

TELEVISION

Wednesday, December 14 CHRYSLER PRESENTS A BOB HOPE COMEDY SPECIAL (NBC, 9-10 p.m.).* Visiting Acapulco during Mexico's film festival, Bob runs into a star shower that includes Michael Caine, Cantinflas, Dolores Del Rio, Glenn Ford, Gina Lollobrigida, Lynn Redgrave, James Mason and Rita Tushingham. ABC STAGE 67 (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). Arthur Kennedy narrates "The Brave Rifles," a documentary celebrating the 22nd anniversary of World War II's harrowing Battle of the Bulge.

Friday, December 16

THAILAND: THE NEW FRONT (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). The first of a three-part news special on "The Battle for Asia." Ted Yates is the narrator for this look at Communist expansion and U.S. determination to halt it in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia and Viet Nam.

Saturday, December 17 MR. MAGOO'S CHRISTMAS CAROL (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Scrooge by the nearsighted Magoo in a comic animation of the Dickens classic.

CHRISTMAS WITH LORNE GREENE (NBC, 8:30-9 p.m.). Lome Greene finds a bonanza of Christmas spirit with the help of a 60-voice UNICEF choir.

Sunday, December 18

TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN (CBS, 10-10:30 a.m.). Folk music and contemporary poetry are used to interpret the meaning of Christmas. Chad Mitchell and Judy Collins sing; Ossie Davis is narrator.

BELL TELEPHONE HOUR (NBC, 6:30-7:30 p.m.). Focusing on the traditional, Florence Henderson hosts "Christmas Through the Ages" with Soprano Mary Costa, Baritone Sherrill Milnes and musical comedy stars Anita Gillette and Bruce Yarnell.

HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS (CBS, 7-7:30 p.m.). Boris Karloff does the talking in an animated special based on Dr. Seuss's fable of the wicked Grinch atop Mount Crumpit and his attempt to keep Christmas from coming to the Whos living below in the village of Whoville.

Monday, December 19 DREAM GIRL OF '67 (ABC, 2:30-2:55 p.m.). The premiere of a daily beauty contest featuring four pretties and a panel of bachelor celebrities as judges.

JACK AND THE BEANSTALK (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). A musical adaptation of Jack's climb produced by the Prince Street Players, a New York City repertory company.

Tuesday, December 20 CBS REPORTS: HARVEST OF MERCY (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). Charles Kuralt and Winston Burdett report on this year's famine in India and the massive rescue effort, headed by the U.S., that has saved an estimated 70 million Indians from starvation.

In coming weeks, check your educational TV stations for times of:

N.E.T. PLAYHOUSE (shown on Fridays). Ofoeti. A modern folk tale about a boy who confuses fantasy and reality when he searches for a troll, that mythological creature who often lives under bridges -he finds him too, and his name is Ofoeti. Under the direction of the American Conservatory Theatre's William Francisco.

N.E.T. JOURNAL (shown on Mondays). "A Second Chance" describes the helping hand extended to youngsters at the Job Corps' center in New Bedford, Mass., focusing on a 17-year-old Puerto Rican high school dropout from New York City and the Job Corps' effect on his life.

THEATER

WALKING HAPPY is an amiable amble through a Dickensian landscape breezily propelled by moving sets, spirited choreography, and a beguiling zephyr named Norman Wisdom who, as a "my fair laddie," is lifted out of the lower classes by his shoestrings.

RIGHT YOU ARE. Luigi Pirandello is the philosopher king of 20th century playwrights, an existentialist before Sartre and Camus, an absurdist before Beckett and lonesco. Though written in 1918, this intellectual whodunit has scarcely a grey line in its script, and the APA troupe has faithfully obeyed the playwright's commandment: "To convert the intellect into passion."

THE SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL. The APA company rubs too much 20th century balm and too little 18th century acid into the pores of this high-styled Sheridan comedy. But it does have one incomparable delight: Rosemary Harris as Lady Teazle, the country kitten who comes to London town, takes the burr out of her purr and meows down the city minxes.

CABARET. Onto the sleazy canvas of a 1930 Berlin nightspot, the Kit Kat Klub, this musical squeezes the borrowed pigments of bloatedly satiric George Grosz cartoons, Brecht-Weillschmerz, and the black-gartered cinemantics of the Dietrich of The Blue Angel. A whale of a production but a minnow of a show.

THE ROSE TATTOO is a sensuously direct drama of a Sicilian widow in Louisiana with an obsessive attachment to an urn containing her husband's ashes. Maureen Stapleton once again plays Tennessee Williams' high-strung heroine.

THE KILLING OF SISTER GEORGE. The idol of soap-opera devotees works up a lather when she discovers that she is being written out of radio existence. So far, so standard, but there's a twist to this one as Beryl Reid plays a lesbian with the manners of a bulldozer and a pickax wit.

Off Broadway

AMERICA HURRAH offers three of Jean-Claude van Itallie's kaleidoscopic views of the changing and coalescing patterns of life in the U.S. A well-directed cast performs with striking precision.

EH? is both the question and the answer in British Playwright Henry Livings' parable of an upsidedown, inside-out non-hero of a boiler-room custodian in search of hallucinogenic mushroom caps. Eh?

RECORDS

Choral & Song

HANDEL THE MESSIAH (3 LPs). Handel himself scored several versions of his oratorio, and they bear scant resemblance to the later interpretations inflated by choruses of thousands. Today's revived interest in baroque music has resulted in two new albums that aim at authenticity, each using a chorus of 40 or fewer and an orchestra of similar size. The soloists in both albums strive -with mixed success -to ornament their melodies in 18th century style. Robert Shaw (RCA Victor), conducting his own chorale and orchestra, shows how dramatic the scaled-down work can be; his version, with its furiously paced hallelujahs, is hard-hitting theater. The second new recording, by the London Symphony Orchestra and Choir conducted by Colin Davis (Philips), manages to scale the same emotional heights, but with less apparent effort. Moreover, Davis has a superior soprano in Heather Harper, whose floating arias alone are worth the price of the records.

BEETHOVEN: MISSA SOLEMNIS (2 LPs; Angel). Otto Klemperer conducts the New Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus in a surging declaration of faith that should sweep away all earlier versions of the work, including his own. A second new recording, by Herbert von Karajan (on Deutsche Grammophon), approaches the music more humanly and pleadingly -and the effect is surprisingly persuasive. His orchestra is the Berlin Philharmonic and two soloists are especially fine: Gundula Janowitz and Christa Ludwig. For majesty, take Klemperer; for beauty, Von Karajan.

VAUGHAN WILLIAMS: HODIE (Angel). This first recording of Williams' cantata has some exuberant, even jazzy moments, but the general mood is sweetly hushed and hymnlike -a reverent setting for various poetic passages about Christmas, such as Thomas Hardy's Oxen and Milton's Hymn on the Morning of Christ's Nativity. David Willcocks turns in his usual impeccable performance as director of the several choruses and the London Symphony Orchestra.

NOEL (Vanguard). Mostly traditional Christmas carols sung by the silvery knife-thin voice of Joan Baez to the accompaniment of recorders, viols and the like. Not her best but still appealing and direct.

ClNEMA

TEXAS ACROSS THE RIVER. Cliches fly like arrows in this rambunctious spoof of that hallowed tradition, the Hollywood western. Barely defending Texas against the Comanches are Dean Martin as a bunkhouse bum, Rosemary Forsyth as pioneer womanhood, and Joey Bishop as a faithful Indian scout.

FAHRENHEIT 451. Ray Bradbury's somber tale of a futuristic society where reading is forbidden has been refurbished by France's Francois Truffaut (Jules and Jim) into a strangely humorous, coolly competent little film that stars Oskar Werner as a book-burning fireman and Julie Christie as both of the women in his life.

CULDESAC. A strong contender for the most bizarre movie of 1966, this jittery comedy of terrors describes in bloody detail what happens when a mobster-on-the-lam (Lionel Stander) becomes the uninvited house guest of a flabby old fool (Donald Pleasence) and his swinging young wife (Francoise Dorleac).

THE FORTUNE COOKIE. Director Billy Wilder's latest slap at American mores involves a money-grubbing angler (Walter Matthau) who uses his brother-in-law (Jack Lemmon) as bait to hook a large insurance company and cheat it out of a tax-free $250,000.

THE PROFESSIONALS. The liveliest western whoop-up since Shane stars Burt Lancaster,

Lee Marvin, Woody Strode and Robert Ryan as four nail-hard professional gunmen hired at $10,000 apiece to find an errant wife (Claudia Cardinale) and return her to her husband.

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM. Director Richard Lester's screen version of the Broadway hit is fussy and frenetic, but Comedian Zero Mostel saves the play as Pseudolus, a conniving, overstuffed Roman slave who would sell his own soul to buy his freedom.

BOOKS

Best Reading

LA VIDA, by Oscar Lewis. A pitiless exposure of poverty among Puerto Rican Americans, whose life stories are told largely by the subjects themselves into Anthropologist Lewis' tape recorder.

WINSTON S. CHURCHILL, by Randolph S. Churchill. Volume I of a five-volume biography of the most dazzling public man of modern times, written by his only son.

THE BEST TIMES, by John Dos Passes. An informal memoir, which also manages to be a typically understated and modest autobiography by a novelist who is not so much a historian as a journalist.

A HOUSE IN ORDER, by Nigel Dennis. A savagely witty parable posing as a novel, about a quiet man who prefers to be a prisoner in a glass house rather than throw stones in an unpleasant world.

THE HEIRS OF CAIN, by Abraham Rothberg. The history of the Diaspora in this century brilliantly retold through the agony of an Israeli assassin, who is a kind of Jewish Everyman.

VESSEL OF WRATH, by Robert Lewis Taylor. Although assorted biographers of Carry Nation have tried before to do justice to the lady with the hatchet, Taylor is the first to succeed -with a book that is as irreverent as it is readable.

LA CHAMADE, by Francoise Sagan. Another of the author's interlocking triangles -two young lovers and two older lovers at hopelessly crossed purposes. A brief novel, elegantly told.

TREMOR OF INTENT, by Anthony Burgess. This tale of espionage is only trompe 1'oeil; behind it flows the broad seriocomic vein that is the source of all of Burgess' wit.

Best Sellers

FICTION 1. The Secret of Santa Vittoria, Crichton (1 last week)

2. Valley of the Dolls, Susann (2)

3. Capable of Honor, Drury (3)

4. The Mask of Apollo, Renault (8)

5. The Birds Fall Down, West (4)

6. Tai-Pan, Clavell (6)

7. All in the Family, O'Connor (9)

8. The Fixer, Malamud (5)

9. The Adventurers, Robbins (7) 10. A Dream of Kings, Petrakis (10)

NONFICTION 1. Rush to Judgment, Lane (1)

2. The Boston Strangler, Frank (3)

3. Everything But Money, Levenson (2)

4. With Kennedy, Salinger (6)

5. How to Avoid Probate, Dacey (7)

6. Games People Play, Berne (4)

7. Random House Dictionary of the English Language

8. The Jury Returns, Nizer (5)

9. Human Sexual Response, Masters and Johnson (10)

10. The Search For Amelia Earhart, Goerner (8)

* All times E.S.T.

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