TELEVISION

Wednesday, May 28

PRUDENTIAL'S ON STAGE (NBC, 9-10 p.m.).* Workers on the committee of an antipoverty project include a war hero (William Shatner) and a poor girl (Elizabeth Ashley) who fall in love while dealing with politics and urban responsibility. The play's title: "... The Skirts of Happy Chance . . ."

WEDNESDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, p.m.). Anne Bancroft, Peter Finch and James Mason in The Pumpkin Eater (1964), about a woman whose fourth marriage has reached a shattering crisis stage.

YOUR DOLLAR'S WORTH (NET, 9-10 p.m.). "What Price Paradise?" pits the package tour and its routine activities (a hula lesson and a luau in Hawaii) against the adventures (climbing Mauna Kea, cave exploring) of independent travel.

Thursday, May 29

ANIMAL WORLD (CBS, 7:30-8 p.m.). Host Bill Burrud discusses such threatened African species as the elephant, giraffe, cheetah, lion and leopard.

THE PRISONER (CBS, 8-9 p.m.). Those who missed the antics of imprisoned Hero Patrick McGoohan in the show last summer can catch the series this year.

Friday, May 30

THE JOHN DAVIDSON SHOW (ABC, 8-9 p.m.). New summer froth featuring French Pop Singer Mireille Mathieu, Comic Rich Little and Baritone Davidson's pleasant demeanor. Special guests are Mama Cass and Ruth Buzzi. Premiere.

Saturday, May 31

MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL GAME OF THE WEEK (NBC, 3 p.m. to conclusion). Detroit Tigers at Seattle Pilots.

WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). International Surfing championships from Makaha Beach, Hawaii, and the N.C.A.A. Wrestling championship from Provo, Utah.

Sunday, June 1 A.A.U. CHAMPIONSHIP TRACK AND FIELD (CBS, 3:30-4:30 p.m.). First annual Ken nedy Memorial games from the University of California at Berkeley.

D-DAY REVISITED (ABC, 8-9 p.m.).

Observing the 25th anniversary of the be ginning of the end of World War II in Europe, Narrator Darryl F. Zanuck shows footage from his 1962 film The Longest Day.

SOUNDS OF SUMMER (NET, 8-10 p.m.).

Steve Allen will host the series of summertime music festivals, with "Casals in Puerto Rico" coming first. Ninety-two-year-old Cellist Pablo Casals conducts Mozart's Symphony No. 38 in D Major ("The Prague") and Brahms' Concerto in A Minor for violin, cello and orchestra, with Yehudi Menuhin and Leslie Parvas.

Premiere.

Monday, June 2 SUMMER FOCUS (ABC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.).

"War in the Mideast?" explores the tan gle of problems there; Frank Reynolds narrates this premiere of an irregularly scheduled news series.

Tuesday, June 3

FIRST TUESDAY (NBC, 9-11 p.m.). Something for everyone on the monthly "magazine": airline stewardesses, antismoking programs, teen-agers and the occult, and population control through sterilization of males in India.

NET FESTIVAL (NET, 9-10 p.m.). The Stuttgart Opera Ballet and its director John Cranko are subjects of "Cranko's Castle," a documentary-performance featuring the company in his Opus I.

CBS REPORTS: GENERATIONS APART (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). "The Youth International" shows signs of the gap in England, Japan and Mexico.

THEATER

On Broadway

THE FRONT PAGE. Robert Ryan plays Walter Burns, the tough managing editor of the Chicago Examiner, and Bert Convy plays Hildy Johnson, his top reporter, in this revival of the Ben Hecht-Charles Mac-Arthur saga of newspapering in the 1920s. The play has a certain cornball period flavor, but that just adds relish to a high-spirited and persistently amusing evening.

HAMLET. Some actors merely occupy space; Nicol Williamson rules the stage. His nasal voice has the sting of an adder; his furrowed brow is a topography of inconsolable anguish. His Hamlet is a seismogram of a soul in shock. Here is a Hamlet of spleen and sorrow, of fire and ice, of bantering sensuality, withering sarcasm and soaring intelligence. He cuts through the music of the Shakespearean line to the marrow of its meaning. He spares the perfidious king who killed his father no contempt, but he saves his rage for the unfeeling gods who, in all true tragedy, make and mangle human destiny. Take him, all in all, for a great, mad, doomed, spine-shivering Hamlet, and anyone who fails to see Williamson during this limited engagement will not look upon his like again.

PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM is Woody Allen's comedy, in which he stars as a woefully unconfident young man coached in the art of winning women by his fantasy hero, Humphrey Bogart. Though the play sometimes resembles an extended nightclub routine, it proves an amusing evening.

FORTY CARATS. Julie Harris plays a middle-aged divorcee ardently wooed by a 22-year-old lad, while her teen-age daughter runs off with a wealthy widower of 45. Directed with crisp agility by Abe Burrows, the show is never less than civilized fun.

HADRIAN VII is a deft dramatization by Peter Luke of fact and fantasy in the life of Frederick William Rolfe, a rejected candidate for the priesthood who dreams of becoming Pope. Alec McCowen plays Rolfe with a masterly command of technique.

Off Broadway

NO PLACE TO BE SOMEBODY is a black panther of a play, stalking the off-Broadway stage as if it were in an urban jungle, snarling and clawing with uninhibited fury at the contemporary fabric of black-white and black-black relationships. If the characters of Playwright Charles Gordone are not quite solidly realized, their sentiments most emphatically are. Gordone is too honest an author to lie about a bright, brotherly tomorrow just over the horizon, but in thunder and in laughter he tells the racial truth of today.

THE MISER. Robert Symonds gives his best performance yet with the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater as the mock hero of Moliere's comedy. Skittering about like a bespectacled magpie, his Harpagon is a sprite of the cashbox, a stringy-haired witch of usury. To see him is a pleasure. To see him undone is a delight.

ADAPTATION-NEXT. Two one-acters, both directed with a crisp and zany comic flair by Elaine May. Miss May's own play, Adaptation, is the game of life staged like a TV contest. Terrence McNally's Next features James Coco in a splendid performance as an overage potential draftee.

DAMES AT SEA, with a talented cast of only six, is a delightful spoof of the movie musicals of the 1930s, with all their intricate dance routines and big, glittering production numbers.

CINEMA

PEOPLE MEET AND SWEET MUSIC FILLS THE HEART is an unlikely title for an even more unlikely film, a freewheeling satire on romantic melodramas and graphic sex movies. It comes as a pleasant relief in these Curious (Yellow) times.

THE ROUND UP and THE RED AND THE WHITE are handsomely pictorial films by Hungary's Miklos Jancso. Both films share a similar theme--the bitterness of war --and demonstrate savage irony and a loathing for war and its perpetrators.

WINNING. Paul Newman portrays a racing driver competing for his honor and the heart of Joanne Woodward in a noisy, disjointed film, in which separate scenes mesh as badly as stripped gears.

THE LOVES OF ISADORA is a biography of Dancer Isadora Duncan that has been severely truncated by the distributors. Still, as Isadora, Vanessa Redgrave conveys a radiant grace and joie that the rest of the cast sadly lack.

THE NIGHT OF THE FOLLOWING DAY. Masquerading as a routine kidnapping melodrama, this is actually an artful thriller directed and co-authored by Hubert Cornfield. Marlon Brando gives his best performance in nearly a decade.

MY SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN and RING OF BRIGHT WATER are two enlightening children's films that demonstrate an affection and care for their audience. Mountain is the story of a Canadian lad who runs off to the woods, and Ring is the real-life tale of a London accountant and his pet otter. Both are certain to charm children and gratify parents.

GOODBYE, COLUMBUS. Larry Peerce is a director with a lamentable sense of style and a laudable way with actors. Although his version of Philip Roth's 1959 novella of young love in suburbia sometimes lurches out of control, Richard Benjamin and stunning Newcomer Ali MacGraw save the show with finely shaded performances.

THE FIXER. Bernard Malamud's novel is the source for this resonant essay on individual courage and political morality. The actors--notably Alan Bates, Dirk Bogarde and Ian Holm--all seem perfect for their roles, and John Frankenheimer's direction is impeccable.

SALESMAN. The Maysles brothers, with camera and sound equipment in hand, spent six weeks tracking a group of New England Bible salesmen on their weary rounds. The result is a searing, melancholy and not wholly unsympathetic portrait of what the Maysles call "one part of the American dream."

STOLEN KISSES. Another chapter in the cinematic autobiography of Francois Truffaut, this perfect little film chronicles the adventures of the hero of The 400 Blows during the last months of his adolescence.

BOOKS

Best Reading THE LONDON NOVELS OF COLIN MaclNNES (CITY OF SPADES, ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS, MR. LOVE AND JUSTICE). Icy observations and poetic perceptions of the back alleys and subcultures in that pungent city on the Thames.

PICTURES OF FIDELMAN, by Bernard Malamud. Yet another schlemiel, but this one is canonized by Malamud's compassionate talent.

THE GUNFIGHTER, by Joseph G. Rosa. A balanced, wide-screen view of the often unbalanced men who infested the Wild West.

THE UNPERFECT SOCIETY, by Milovan Djilas. The author, who has spent years in Yugoslav prisons for deriding the regime, now argues that Communism is disintegrating there and elsewhere as a new class of specialists presses for a more flexible society.

BULLET PARK, by John Cheever. In his usual setting of uncomfortably comfortable suburbia, Cheever stages the struggle of two men--one mild and monogamous, the other tormented and libertine--over the fate of a boy.

SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Through flashbacks to the catastrophic Allied fire-bombing of Dresden in World War II, this agonizing, outrageous, funny and profoundly rueful fable tries to say something about human cruelty and self-protective indifference.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY: A LIFE STORY, by Carlos Baker. The long-awaited official biography offers the first cohesive account of a gifted, troubled, flamboyant figure who has too often been recollected in fragmentary and partisan memoirs.

THE MILITARY PHILOSOPHERS, by Anthony Powell. The ninth volume in his serial novel, A Dance to the Music of Time, expertly convoys Powell's innumerable characters through the futility, boredom and heroism of World War II.

Best Sellers

FICTION 1. Portnoy's Complaint, Roth (1 last week)

2. The Godfather, Puzo (2)

3. Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut (3)

4. Ada, Nabokov (6)

5. The Love Machine, Susann (9)

6. The Salzburg Connection, Maclnnes (4)

7. Sunday the Rabbi Stayed Home, Kemelman (8)

8. Except for Me and Thee, West (10)

9. Airport, Hailey (7)

10. The Vines of Yarrabee, Eden (5)

NONFICTION

1. Ernest Hemingway, Baker (1)

2. Jennie, Martin (3)

3. The 900 Days, Salisbury (2)

4. The Arms of Krupp, Manchester

5. Between Parent and Teenager, Ginott

6. The Peter Principle, Peter and Hull (4)

7. The Money Game, Adam Smith (6)

8. The Trouble with Lawyers, Bloom (7)

9. Miss Craig's 21-Day Shape-Up Program for Men and Women, Craig (5)

10. The Age of Discontinuity, Drucker (8)

* All times E.D.T.

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