TELEVISION
Wednesday, October 23
SUMMER OLYMPICS (ABC, 1-2 p.m., 7-7:30 p.m., 10-11 p.m.).* Continuation of ABC's 44-hour telecast of the 1968 Summer Olympic games live from Mexico City. Ends Sunday.
AMERICAN WONDERLANDS&151;THE NATIONAL PARKS (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). A National Geographic Society special on the beauty of the U.S. parks system.
GIRL FRIENDS AND NABORS (CBS, 8-9 p.m.). Jim Nabors hosts Debbie Reynolds, Vikki Carr, Carol Burnett and Metropolitan Opera Soprano Mary Costa in a variety of tunes ranging from Row, Row, Row Your Boat to the waltz from Gounod's Romeo et Juliette.
SOPHIA (ABC, 9-10 p.m.). Italian Film Star Sophia Loren narrates the rags-to-riches life story of Sophia Loren.
KRAFT MUSIC HALL (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). A Friars Club Roast. This year, the organization of showfolks skewers Johnny Carson. Alan King is roastmaster with Ed Sullivan, Steve Allen, Ed McMahon, Don Rickles, Groucho Marx, Flip Wilson and New York Mayor John Lindsay.
THE BING CROSBY SPECIAL (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Bing's helpers: Bob Hope, Diana Ross and The Supremes, Jose Feliciana and Stella Stevens.
Thursday, October 24
IT'S THE GREAT PUMPKIN, CHARLIE BROWN (CBS, 7:30-8 p.m.). Animated Peanuts.
Sunday, October 27
AFL FOOTBALL (NBC, 4 p.m. to conclusion). San Diego Chargers v. Kansas City Chiefs, at Kansas City.
Monday, October 28
MONDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11:30 p.m.). Exodus (1960). Part one of Otto Preminger's version of Leon Uris' novel about the Israeli war for independence. Stars are Paul Newman, Eva Marie Saint, Ralph Richardson, Lee J. Cobb and Peter Lawford. Part two: Tuesday, 9-10:55 p.m.
NFL FOOTBALL (CBS, 9:30 to conclusion). Green Bay Packers v. Dallas Cowboys, live from Cotton Bowl, Dallas.
Check local listings for dates and times of these NET specials:
NET FESTIVAL. Dylan Thomas: The World I Breathe. Award-winning portrait of the Welsh poet. Program includes recordings of his own readings, as well as interviews with his close friends Novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson and Painter Mervyn Levy. Repeat.
NET PLAYHOUSE. The Soldier's Talc. Stravinsky's ballet, starring Robert Helpmann and Svetlana Beriosova.
THEATER
THE APA REPERTORY COMPANY offers two drawing-room comedies in verse. Moliere's The Misanthrope is as deliciously vicious a lampoon of the manners and meanness of Louis XIV's court as it was 300 years ago, and it is performed with panache. But T. S. Eliot's 1950 spiritual parable, The Cocktail Party, seems stilted and stale in a limp production.
THE GREAT WHITE HOPE, a sprawling semidocumentary, by Howard Sackler traces the career of the first Negro heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson. The play is a drama of contrition spiked by the adrenaline of newspaper headlines, but James Earl Jones, as the brooding boxer, commands the stage like an avenging giant.
THE DEATH OF BESSIE SMITH and THE AMERICAN DREAM, by Edward Albee, are caustic comic strips of the American scene. In Theater 1969's deft revivals, Rosemary Murphy is chilling as the coldly hysterical nurse of Bessie Smith, while Sudie Bond is endearingly shrill as the Grandma of Dream.
THE MAN IN THE GLASS BOOTH. Actor-Author Robert Shaw introduces some precarious psychologizing and implausible "what-if" elements to an Eichmann-like situation in a rerun of the victimization of the Jews and Nazi guilt. Donald Pleasence enlivens an otherwise turgid evening with a memorable performance.
LOVERS AND OTHER STRANGERS spins through four different steps in the mating dance. The first three playlets are gently amusing, and the fourth, enhanced by Richard Castellano as a man whose marriage is a desperate grind, foams with compassionate laughter.
ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD. Tom Stoppard's reincarnations of Shakespeare's bit players are part Beckett, part Charlie Brown. In the title roles, Brian Murray and John Wood prove themselves linguistic acrobats.
Off Broadway
THE BOYS IN THE BAND gather to play at a homosexual birthday party, and the melody, while at times merry, is mostly minor key. Mart Crowley's characters parry wittily and wound easily.
A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN. Salome Jens, W. B. Brydon and Mitchell Ryan play shadowy Eugene O'Neill figures whose dreams never see the light of day.
RECORDINGS
Piano Concertos
For the most part, today's composers ignore the concerto. Some believe that it is an anachronism, a throwback to the 19th century, when the individual performer counted most. Others say that it is too expensive to rehearse 100 or so musicians and hire a top-name soloist to perform a new concerto. Both arguments have some justification. Still, audiences love the familiar old concertos as much as ever. And so do pianists, as these releases make clear:
ALEXIS WEISSENBERG: RACHMANINOFF PI ANO CONCERTO NO. 3 IN D MINOR (RCA Victor); CHOPIN PIANO CONCERTO NO. 1 IN E MINOR, PIANO CONCERTO NO. 2 IN F MINOR, and SMALLER WORKS FOR PIANO AND ORCHESTRA (Angel, 3 LPs). After returning to the U.S. last year from a decade-long self-imposed exile, Weissenberg, now 39, changed his first name from Sigi to Alexis. He obviously had some new musical ideas on his mind too. In the Rachmaninoff, the Bulgarian-born pianist displays a Horowitz-like technique, a poet's heart and vast reserves of power; he throws up wave upon wave of volume without ever losing the shimmering roundness of his tone. In the Chopin, he adheres to the composer's theory that the melodic line should bend gracefully but never at the cost of a steady rhythmic pulse. Weissenberg's long sabbatical has transformed him into a superb Romantic stylist.
RUDOLF SERKIN: BRAHMS PIANO CONCERTO NO. 1 IN D MINOR (Columbia). Obviously Serkin likes this noble battle plan for piano and orchestra. Previously, he recorded it with Fritz Reiner, George Szell, and with Eugene Ormandy. Now he's back again with Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra. Few other scores so perfectly show off Serkin's heroic style, his armor-plated technique, and his by now infallible sense of just when to charge Brahms' craggy, imperial peaks.
WALTER GIESEKING: BEETHOVEN PIANO CONCERTO NO. 5 IN E FLAT (Seraphim). This is the second low-priced issue of a Gieseking Emperor; the first (on Odyssey) is older and not as up-to-date in sound. For a seasoned campaigner, the late German pianist could be surprisingly youthful when he turned to Beethoven. Here he treats the Emperor more like a prince-in-waiting than an absolute monarch; he never stoops to imperious rhetoric, his tone is lithe and silvery, and he moves with quickness and grace. It is not the only way to treat the music, but in its own manner, it is definitely royal.
EMIL GILELS: BEETHOVEN'S FIVE PIANO CONCERTOS (Angel, 5 LPs). Recorded last April in Cleveland with Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra, this set often finds the Soviet pianist more in a mood to polish his tone than to push Beethoven's cause. The concertos are all neatly and expertly done, but they rarely express the excitement, abandon and sheer joy of the music. Gilels does better in the three sets of solo variations that constitute the sidefillers; the 32 Variations in C Minor is especially notable for its logic and rhythmic verve. But as a whole, this ambitious undertaking does not live up to the talent or reputation of either participant.
CINEMA
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Using all the technical resources of the medium, Director Stanley Kubrick has produced a space-age parable of man's place in the cosmos that stands as one of the most stunning visual adventures in film history.
THE BOFORS GUN. Actors David Warner and Nicol Williamson make this static film about life in the postwar British army into a realistic antimilitary document.
ROMEO AND JULIET. Franco Zeffirelli breathes new life into one of Shakespeare's most familiar plays. The violence is so visceral and the youthful lovers are so passionate that the story assumes a startling immediacy.
THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER. Alan Arkin's magnificent performance as the mute in this Hollywood adaptation of Carson McCullers' novel is the only real glimmer of poetry in an otherwise determinedly prosaic film.
WARRENDALE. A magnificent Canadian documentary by Allan King that movingly depicts the troubled lives of a small group of emotionally disturbed children.
THE SUBJECT WAS ROSES. In this adaptation of Frank D. Gilroy's Pulitzer prize-winning play, Patricia Neal, Jack Albertson and Martin Sheen bring poignant substance to the bleak story of an Irish family in The Bronx struggling to understand their relationship to one another.
VOYAGE OF SILENCE. A deceptively simple story of a young Portuguese carpenter emigrating to Paris is given uncommon strength and stature by the compassionate observation of Director Christian de Chalonge.
FUNNY GIRL. Barbra Streisand becomes a movie star in this musical biography of Fanny Brice, whose brassy personality fits the leading lady like a feather boa.
BOOKS
Best Reading
STEPS, by Jerzy Kosinski. In his second novel, the author of The Painted Bird coolly describes a series of acts of voyeurism, cruelty and revenge that combine to form a shocking picture of a pathological mind.
THE FIRST CIRCLE, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Using a model prison as an allegory for Soviet society, Russia's greatest living novelist constructs an endless labyrinth of despair.
GEORGE ELIOT, by Gordon Haight. This fond, scholarly biography finally does justice to a Victorian lady novelist whose life and works both deserve it.
MAKING GOOD AGAIN, by Lionel Davidson. A suspense novel explores the tangled lives and moral problems involved in the payment of reparations to families persecuted by the Nazis.
THE THIRD BANK OF THE RIVER AND OTHER STORIES, by Joao Guimaraes Rosa. Though rooted in the specifics of Brazil's wild interior, this collection of stories by the late author of The Devil to Pay in the Backlands bears an abundant crop of universal values.
TIME OUT, by David Ely. Weird stories for this secular age, among them a pirate cruise for tired businessmen and a desperate church organist's life-or-death struggle with a musical computer.
LOST IN THE FUNHOUSE, by John Barth. When read straight through, these 14 experimental pieces of fiction by the author of Giles Goat-Boy interact to produce a series of enticing illusions.
Best Sellers
FICTION
1. Preserve and Protect, Drury (2 last week)
2. Airport, Hailey (1)
3. The Salzburg Connection, Maclnnes (5)
4. The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn (9)
5. Couples, Updike (4)
6. True Grit, Portis (6)
7. The Senator, Pearson (3)
8. Testimony of Two Men, Caldwell (7)
9. The Hurricane Years, Hawley (8)
10. The Queen's Confession, Holt
NONFICTION
1. The Money Game, 'Adam Smith' (1)
2. The Rich and the Super-Rich, Lundberg (2)
3. The Beatles, Davies
4. Between Parent and Child, Ginott (5)
5. The American Challenge, Servan-Schreiber (4)
6. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Wolfe (3)
7. Iberia, Michener (6)
8. The Right People, Birmingham (8)
9. Black Rage, Grier and Cobbs (10)
10. Soul on Ice, Cleaver
* All times E.D.T. through Oct. 26. E.S.T. from then on.
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