TELEVISION

Wednesday, February 28

PRESENT LAUGHTER (ABC, 9-11 p.m.).* Noel Coward's 1946 Broadway hit comedy adapted for TV, with Peter O'Toole and Honor Blackman.

Thursday, February 29

CAROL CHANNING AND 101 MEN (ABC, 9-10 p.m.). Broadway's Dolly has the answer to a maiden's prayer on leap-year day. Her collection includes: Eddy Arnold, Walter Matthau, George Burns, the Association and the U.S. Air Force Academy Cadet Chorale.

Friday, March 1

THE SOVIETS IN SPACE (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). A first--and impressive--look at the Soviet space program. Highlights of this joint Soviet-NBC effort include a look at the Baikonur Cosmodrome (the Soviet Cape Kennedy), shots of Yuri Gagarin's first manned space flight, and a visit to Star Village, where the cosmonauts live.

Saturday, March 2

ABC'S WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). The World Figure-Skating Championships, from Geneva, and the World Snowmobile Championship, from Eagle River, Wis.

Sunday, March 3

ISSUES AND ANSWERS (ABC, 1:30-2 p.m.). Illinois Governor Otto Kerner and N.A.A.C.P. Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins discuss the report made by the President's Commission on Civil Disorders.

NBC EXPERIMENT IN TELEVISION (NBC, 3-4 p.m.). "Passport to Prague," a bilingual (English-Czech) love story filmed on location in Prague.

THE CBS CHILDREN'S FILM FESTIVAL (CBS, 4-5 p.m.). "Flash, the Sheep Dog" is the story of a boy and his dog roaming the hills of Scotland.

THE 215T CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). "Jonas Salk," a look at what the good doctor has been doing since he developed polio vaccine in 1955.

MUTUAL OF OMAHA'S WILD KINGDOM (NBC, 7-7:30 p.m.). A cougar and her three cubs migrate from high in the Rocky Mountains to a lower valley where they will spend the winter.

A HATFUL OF RAIN (ABC, 9-11 p.m.). Sandy Dennis, Peter Falk, Michael Parks and Herschel Bernardi star in the TV version of Michael Gazzo's Broadway play about a drug addict's attempts to kick the habit.

Monday, March 4

THIS MORNING (ABC, 10:30 a.m. to noon). Dick Cavett hosts a new topical-talk and variety show. Premiere.

Tuesday, March 5

DEAR MR. GABLE (NBC, 8-9 p.m.). Burgess Meredith narrates a chronicle of the life of Clark Gable, comparing the real man with the reel man.

TUESDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11 p.m.). Shadow Over Elveron, specially made for TV, is a drama of small-town corruption and its devastating effect on the lives of the town's inhabitants. With James Franciscus, Shirley Knight, Leslie Nielsen and Don Ameche.

S. HUROK PRESENTS (CBS, 9:30-11 p.m.). Pianist Artur Rubinstein playing Beethoven, Violinist David Oistrakh performing Bach, and the Bolshoi Ballet in an excerpt from Giselle.

THEATER

On Broadway

PLAZA SUITE proves once again that Neil Simon is a master mirthologist, as in two of three one-act plays he adroitly sketches a satire and broadly paints a farce. In the first play, Visitor from Mamaroneck, he achieves a new tone of rue as he depicts the poignant confrontation between a much-married duo. The professionalism of Director Mike Nichols and Actors George C. Scott and Maureen Stapleton matches that of the playwright.

THE PRICE finds Arthur Miller sermonizing again on his favorite texts of guilt, responsibility, and the way a man's identity is forged or warped by society's image of what he is or should be. The play is a museum piece out of the '30s, which Miller has never intellectually left, but the performances of Pat Hingle and Arthur Kennedy as sibling rivals blow away some of the dust.

JOE EGG. In moments of pain, a man may laugh, and in a desperate situation, he may take refuge from his grief in humor. In British Playwright Peter Nichol's comedy, Albert Finney and Zena Walker bounce from sadness to clowning and back again as the parents of a child described as a "wegetable."

PANTAGLEIZE. History is a farce, Michel de Ghelderode tells us in his play about how one sunny day a man looking for his destiny and a revolution looking for a leader collide and, due to circumstances beyond their comprehension or control, destroy each other.

ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD. To Shakespeare, Hamlet's university friends were nothing but functionaries, but to Tom Stoppard, they are pawns in a weighted chess match--for which they cannot even decipher the rules. Brian Murray, John Wood and Paul Hecht provide spirited, sophisticated acting.

Off Broadway

YOUR OWN THING takes the plot of Twelfth Night, shakes it up, spins it around until it spills out as a rock musical, put over with pizazz by an energetic and ingratiating young cast.

RECORDS

Opera

BELLINI: BEATRICE Dl TENDA (London; 3 LPs). Though Vincenzo Bellini's heroes and heroines usually deceive, accuse, torture and betray each other, they are always asked to sing like angels. As a result, many critics consider Bellini's operas featherweight musicianship, whose scores constantly belie his texts. Not so, for his bel canto idiom, which relies on "extended melodies" and tremendous vocal agility, can be far more meaningful and moving than the harshest forms of modern expressionism. Few singers in history have had the talent and temperament to bring out the best in Bellini's music. Among the few is Joan Sutherland, and in this album she portrays a typical Bellinian heroine who goes to her execution singing forgiveness of her treacherous husband. The supporting cast is quite adequate, and Sutherland's husband, Richard Bonynge, conducts the London Symphony with rare expertise.

HENZE: DER JUNGE LORD (Deutsche-Grammophon; 3 LPs). While most aficionados consider Violetta, or Sigmund, or even the sadistic Turandot a familiar acquaintance, or even a friend, few can cozy up to Hans Werner Henze's heroes and heroines. In The Young Lord, the hero turns out to be an extremely well-trained monkey, and the moral of the tale seems to be that the modern world is so fad-conscious that people will imitate practically anyone with a social passport, even if he is an ape in disguise. It might sound like comedy, but the work is filled with bitter misery. Henze has said: "This music fashions, out of itself, its own new dwellings from which it will emerge and explain itself only for those who can show it a suitable visiting card." Those with the right visiting cards will be gratified by the excellent cast from Deutschen Oper Berlin, plus a libretto with color photos of Gustav Rudolf Sellner's lavish original sets and costumes, including the young lord's remarkable monkey suit.

PONCHIELLI: LA GIOCONDA (London; 3 LPs). German tradition holds that opera is not worth listening to unless conductor, orchestra, text, music and singers all work together to produce one whole art. Italians, on the other hand, are partial to individualistic vocalism that is sensually beautiful as well as expressive. This record leans toward the Italian style. Renata Tebaldi, Robert Merrill, Marilyn Home and Carlo Bergonzi are all equipped with voluptuous voices singing this perennial "singers' opera," complete with massive arias and roof-hitting dramatics. Tebaldi, the star of them all, has compensated for the loss of the famous velvet in her voice by inserting pulsating hysteria. Sometimes the effect works, sometimes not. Conductor Lamberto Gardelli makes a valiant effort to keep everybody's bombastics under control.

VERDI: ATDA (Angel; 3 LPs). Who can be nostalgic for the Golden Age while singers like Franco Corelli and Birgit Nilsson are around? Both are near legends--though they are still in their prime. Both have very big voices. And both sing as if they were competing for top billing--which of course they are. Whether Verdi envisaged his heroic opera the way Nilsson and Corelli do it is another question. In any case, the rest of the cast is well-nigh unnoticeable behind all that star sound, and Zubin Mehta's conducting is efficient but not especially revealing.

CINEMA

CHARLIE BUBBLES. Albert Finney proves that he can direct as well as act, but leaves some question as to whether he ought to, in this stupefyingly familiar film about a writer who has descended into a hell of modern materialism.

POOR COW. Actress Carol White is totally convincing as a woman who can find a bit of fun and some fatuous hope in the flat she shares with a thief.

THE PRODUCERS. Zero Mostel as a Broadway producer caricatures Merrick not as David but as Goliath in this often disjointed and inconsistent yet frequently uproariously funny film directed by Mel Brooks.

THE GRADUATE. Director Mike Nichols doesn't quite pull a Babbitt out of the hat in this sophomoronic film about the disillusioning encounters suffered by an idealist college grad (Dustin Hoffman) when he returns home to Los Angeles.

BOOKS

Best Reading

VANITY OF DULUOZ, by Jack Kerouac. The beat hero of the 1950s shows himself to be the prodigal returned in this autobiographical novel of a man who regains his innocence.

CONTACT ON GORKY STREET, by Greville Wynne. Spying and its hazards are brought into chilling focus in this memoir of a British agent who was an important channel of information before his discovery by the Russians.

DEATH IN LIFE: SURVIVORS OF HIROSHIMA, by Robert Jay Lifton. An American psychiatrist discerns the effects of large-scale disasters on behavior as he sifts the recollections of 75 Japanese who lived through the first atomic bombing.

THE CODEBREAKERS, by David Kahn. More than 1,000 pages of cryptologic lore, including accounts of how ciphers changed the currents of history.

TO BROOKLYN WITH LOVE, by Gerald Green. The author of The Last Angry Man summons up the sights and sounds of the 1930s in this novel about a wild summer in the life of a 12-year-old boy.

THE NAKED APE, A ZOOLOGIST'S STUDY OF THE HUMAN ANIMAL, by Desmond Morris. A controversial romp through millions of years of man's evolution, concluding that man may be the sexiest but not the sanest primate.

MAKING IT, by Norman Podhoretz. The literary critic and editor of Commentary contends that the "dirty little secret" of the age is not sex but the lust for money, fame and power.

TOLSTOY, by Henri Troyat. Making masterly use of mountains of documents and diaries, the Russian-born biographer forges an unforgettable portrait of one of literature's greatest figures.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. Topaz, Uris (1 last week) 2. The Confessions of Nat Turner, Styron (2) 3. Vanished, Knebel (4) 4. Christy, Marshall (3) 5. The Exhibitionist, Sutton (7) 6. Where Eagles Dare, MacLean 7. The Instrument, O'Hara (6) 8. Myra Breckinridge, Vidal 9. The President's Plane Is Missing, Serling (9) 10. The Chosen, Potok (5)

NONFICTION

1. Nicholas and Alexandra, Massie (1) 2. Our Crowd, Birmingham (2) 3. The Naked Ape, Morris (5) 4. Tolstoy, Troyat (4) 5. Between Parent and Child, Ginott (3) 6. Rickenbacker, Rickenbacker (6) 7. The Way Things Work: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Technology 8. Thomas Wolfe, Turnbull 9. Memoirs: 1925-1950, Kennan (7) 10. The New Industrial State, Galbraith (8)

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