TELEVISION

Wednesday, May 15

CBS PLAYHOUSE (CBS, 9:30-11 p.m.).* Arthur Hill, Barbara Bel Geddes and Barry Nelson star in Secrets, Tad Mosel's original drama about an accountant who refuses to account to his family or friends for his increasingly odd behavior.

Thursday, May 16

MAN, BEAST & THE LAND (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). A study of life on the Seren-geti-Mara plains of East Africa, one of the greatest remaining game reserves, where more than 1,000,000 animals roam free. Two Smithsonian Institution ecologists, Dr. and Mrs. Lee Talbot, guide the cameras, which single out the bedraggled and ungainly looking wildebeest as the most important animal on the plains.

Friday, May 17

JUDD FOR THE DEFENSE (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). "Tempest in a Texas Town," voted last year's Best TV Mystery by the Mystery Writers of America. Repeat.

Saturday, May 18

THE PREAKNESS (CBS, 5-5:45 p.m.), with commentary straight from the horses' mounts, featuring Eddie Arcaro and Willie Shoemaker.

Sunday, May 19

COLONIAL NATIONAL INVITATIONAL GOLF TOURNAMENT (ABC, 4-6 p.m.). Final round of the $125,000 tournament at Fort Worth's Colonial Country Club.

THE 20TH ANNUAL TELEVISION ACADEMY AWARDS (NBC, 10-11:30 p.m.). Every dog has its day, and this is the industry's special night to howl. Frank Sinatra is M.C. in Hollywood, Dick Van Dyke in New York.

Tuesday, May 21

CBS REPORTS: HUNGER IN AMERICA (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). Correspondents David Culhane and Charles Kuralt conduct a study of the 10 million Americans who suffer from severe malnutrition, and of the successes and failures of Government programs to help them.

THEATER

On Broadway

HAIR. Now that the hippie notion is fading away, a slickly packaged version of hippiedom has swung onto Broadway. The songs rock, the expletives explode and the energetic cast exuberates--but so quickly does U.S. society shift that the play's topics for dissent are often worn and dated. Director Tom O'Horgan achieves startling production effects even though distraction is certainly no substitute for destination.

JOE EGG. Into his unlikely comedy Peter Nichols throws snatches of tap-dance routines, jazz and vaudeville turns that leaven the tale of a young British couple (Zena Walker and Donal Donnelly) who camouflage the fragility of their marriage by concentrating their attentions and emotions on their hopelessly spastic daughter.

ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD, winner of the Tony Award for Best Play, takes a chip off the old Bard to construct a neo-Elizabethan existentialist drama. Brian Murray and John Wood are extremely adept as Tom Stoppard's nether heroes of flashing wit but blinking comprehension.

Off Broadway

THE MEMORANDUM. Director Joseph Papp introduces Czech Playwright Vaclav Havel to the U.S. with this wacky and pointed satire on bureaucracy and its bombast. Robert Ronan is pluperfect as the prissy pedant of Ptydepe, an artificial office language in which "ah" becomes "zukybaj," "ouch" becomes "bykur," "oh" becomes "hayf dy doretob."

MUZEEKA has as its hero Jack Argue. He composes rapturous songs from the words on a penny and dreams of being an ancient Etruscan, but he spends his life as an employee of an ubiquitous piped-in music firm and dies in Viet Nam with a unit signed to fight before NBC cameras exclusively. John Guare debuts as a playwright possessing a store of rich imagery and imagination.

THE BOYS IN THE BAND. Mart Crowley's comedy makes no apologia for the homosexual society but uses it as a frame within which to hang the skeins of diverse lives, while unraveling some of the knots into which human beings tie themselves. Leonard Frey, Kenneth Nelson and Cliff Gorman lead an exemplary ensemble through assaults of humor and barrages of put-down gags.

JACQUES BREL IS ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN PARIS and--one hopes--writing more of the poetic and potent songs that are transmitted tenderly by a quartet of chanteurs.

RECORDS

Instrumental

THE NONESUCH GUIDE TO ELECTRONIC MUSIC (Nonesuch; 2 LPs). Because electronic music somehow manages to maintain its esoteric prestige and because "responsible critics often refer to the new taped sounds as 'drips, bird whistles, squiggles, burps, coughs and other sorts of effects,' " Composers Paul Beaver and Bernard L. Krause decided that an album of sample noises complete with an explanatory booklet was long overdue. In the hope of inspiring "a new vocabulary which would be helpful in understanding the medium more fully," they describe some of the sounds of Peace Three, for example, as a "third voice" that "proceeds upward in a series of intervallic relationships developing out of the filter-swept cluster in the fourth voice." For those who remain mystified by such efforts, it would probably have been just as informative to limit the report to the fact that all the drips, bird whistles, squiggles, burps, coughs and other sorts of effects were produced on the Moog Series III synthesizer enhanced by the Dolby A 301 noise-reduction system.

JOHN WILLIAMS: TWO GUITAR CONCERTOS (Columbia). Joaquin Rodrigo, a gifted Spanish composer, blind since the age of three, wrote Fantasia para un Gentilhombre in 1954 for Andres Segovia. The concerto's themes and harmonic textures are based upon compositions of a 17th century composer, Gaspar Sanz, and the composer's success can be measured by the music's almost ageless sound. John Willams (a Segovia protege) plays it as a lament steeped in nostalgia, and he is well supported by the English Chamber Orchestra.

ANDRE WATTS: BRAHMS'S CONCERTO NO. 2 (Columbia). Pianist Andre Watts was only 16 when Leonard Bernstein gave him a chance to play Liszt's First Concerto with the New York Philharmonic. Watts performed with such fervor and finesse that he became a celebrity overnight. Now, at 21, the shy Negro prodigy returns with his patron in a replay of that first triumph. Watts's burning romanticism remains undiminished. When he first played this most demanding concerto, he said that "I worked the piece to death, because my knees were clattering. I kept thinking that it was 50 minutes long, and I began to get the feeling, 'Boy, if I come out of this, I'll be such a hero.' " He did, and he is.

PHILIPPE ENTREMONT: STRAVINSKY PIANO CONCERTOS (Columbia). Stravinsky's music is more widely respected than beloved; his clean and vigorous sound prods the intellect rather than the emotions. Still it is a pleasure to hear these two intricately constructed concertos--one with orchestra, the other with wind instruments. Pianist Entremont's performance manifests his precise understanding of how they were meant to sound.

ITZHAK PERLMAN: TCHAIKOVSKY CONCERTO IN D AND DVORAK ROMANCE IN F (RCA Victor). Although he and Stravinsky were practically contemporaries, Tchaikovsky worked at the other end of the musical spectrum. His melodies and orchestration are positively voluptuous. And Violinist Perlman knows how to make the most of his emotional appeal. The Dvorak concerto on the rest of the record is a reliable staple of most record libraries.

CINEMA

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Director Stanley Kubrick sets out to define man's past and describe his future in a film that is at once a dazzling visual experience and a demanding philosophical exercise.

THE RED MANTLE. This Danish-Swedish film is a beautiful, occasionally bloody saga of the conflict of love and honor in medieval Iceland.

THE FIFTH HORSEMAN IS FEAR. A brutal tale of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia is raised by Writer-Director Zbynek Brynych's stark symbolism to a high level of creative cinema.

THE ODD COUPLE. Neil Simon's Broadway comedy of an alimony-poor sportswriter (Walter Matthau) and his fussy, divorce-bound buddy (Jack Lemmon) is transformed to the screen virtually unchanged. Actor Matthau more than makes up for the static mise en scene with his comic genius.

BELLE DE JOUR. Ranging easily from anticlerical broadsides to highly polished pornography, this bizarre tale of the sexual fantasies of a beautiful young wife (Catherine Deneuve) makes a fitting capstone to the 40-year career of Spanish Director Luis Bufiuel.

HOUR OF THE WOLF. Sweden's Ingmar Bergman returns to his favorite themes of spiritual crisis and psychological trauma in a dark parable of the deepening madness of a reclusive artist.

I EVEN MET HAPPY GYPSIES. The anachronistic life styles of the Indians of Europe --the gypsies--are portrayed in this melancholy and sometimes violent Yugoslav film.

NO WAY TO TREAT A LADY. A callow New York City cop (George Segal) dogs the elusive tracks of a killer (Rod Steiger) with a closetful of disguises.

BOOKS

Best Reading

THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT, by Norman Mailer. The author's "egoism of curious disproportions" casts him as the logorrheic mock hero of last fall's peace march on the Pentagon, resulting in a literary tour de force that owes less to journalism than it does to the novelist's gift for relevant distortion.

LYTTON STRACHEY, by Michael Holroyd. The author of Eminent Victorians was undoubtedly the oddest duck on the Bloomsbury pond, a fact amply documented on nearly every one of the 1,229 fascinating pages of this two-volume biography.

COUPLES, by John Updike. Wife swapping is the game, described in living off-color, but soul saving is the real stake in this rich and subtly rewarding novel by the crown prince of American letters.

T. H. WHITE, by Sylvia Townsend Warner. A biography of the tormented English author who re-created the legend of King Arthur in a new form--part magic and farce, part fairy tale and epic.

THE DISNEY VERSION, by Richard Schickel. Within a carefully prepared social, cultural and artistic context, Cinema Critic Schickel sees the late creator of Mickey Mouse and Disneyland as embodying the best and worst traits of the hard-charging entrepreneur.

IN THE HEART OF THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY, by William Gass. The author of Omensetter's Luck focuses with precision on the physical image of the Midwest.

THE LITTLE DISTURBANCES OF MAN, by Grace Paley. In this reissue of a 1959 collection of stories, ordinary lives become extraordinary when recounted in the author's supple, salty syntax.

TUNC, by Lawrence Durrell. Lush Mediterranean settings, evocative nature writing and ribald wit are the underpinnings of this exuberant novel about an omniscient computer and its inventor's struggles for freedom.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. Airport, Hailey (1 last week)

2. Couples, Updike (2)

3. Myra Breckinridge, Vidal (3)

4. The Tower of Babel, West (4)

5. Vanished, Knebel (6)

6. Topaz, Uris (5)

7. Christy, Marshall (10)

8. The Confessions of Nat Turner, Styron (9)

9. The Exhibitionist, Sutton

10. Testimony of Two Men, Caldwell

NONFICTION

1. The Naked Ape, Morris (2)

2. Between Parent and Child, Ginott (1)

3. The Double Helix, Watson (6)

4. Our Crowd, Birmingham (3)

5. Nicholas and Alexandra, Massie (4)

6. Gipsy Moth Circles the World, Chichester (5)

7. Kennedy and Johnson, Lincoln (7)

8. The Way Things Work: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Technology (8)

9. The English, Frost and Jay (9)

10. Rickenbacker, Rickenbacker (10)

*All times E.D.T.

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