On Broadway

YOU KNOW I CAN'T HEAR YOU WHEN THE WATER'S RUNNING. Four consistently droll, frequently hilarious, and occasionally touching playlets by Robert Anderson, who plays his variations on a theme of sex--as an element of shock in art, a waning force in middle age, a matter of concern to parents, a misty memory of the aged.

THE HOMECOMING. Awarded the Tony as the season's best play, Harold Pinter's drama melds the mystique of the surreal with relentless honesty in the examination of interpersonal relationships. Flawlessly performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company, it forcefully binds the audience in a puzzled spell while catching it up in heated controversy.

BLACK COMEDY is a slam-bang comedy--literally. The humor of Peter Shaffer's one-acter springs more from body English than feats of wit. It is based on a single conceit --agile actors in a blaze of lights behave and misbehave, bump and reel, as if in total darkness.

THE APA REPERTORY COMPANY. The mix in the company's current dramatic bag is set in the English drawing room and the Norwegian household; it is also culled from the Russian epic and the American farce. Rosemary Harris leads the highly competent group in School for Scandal, The Wild Duck, War and Peace and You Can't Take It With You.

CABARET, winner of eight Tony Awards, including one for Best Musical, is all binding and no book. The ambiance of the musical, set in the decadent Berlin of the 1930s, is as sinuous and sexy as original sin, but the show's plot line and score are all predictability and convention.

Off Broadway

HAMP. A sweet but Simple Simon gives in to panic at the front during World War I and is punished by a military machine that cannot afford to temper steeliness with compassion. Robert Salvio gives a most sympathetic interpretation of Private Hamp as he faces court-martial.

AMERICA HURRAH, by Jean-Claude van Itallie, erupts on the theatrical landscape, pouring a lava of satire, comment and invective on some questionable aspects of modern life. Three playlets, Interview, TV and Motel, are inventively directed by Jacques Levy and Joseph Chaikin and interpreted by a flawless cast.

EH?, by Henry Livings, is about Valentine Brose. He lives in a boiler room. He is a nit. His wife lives in there too. She is a nut. He is funny. She is funny. So is the play.

RECORDS

Jazz

ANDREW HILL, COMPULSION (Blue Note). Haitian-born Pianist Hill is magnificently obsessed with the complex rhythms and bold colors of African music. Aided by Nedi Quamar's African thumb piano (a handmade wooden box holding long metal prongs that are plucked), Renaud Simmons' conga and Joe Chamber's drums, he conjures up a thundering, lashing storm with sweeps across the keyboard --and then lets it fade into the silver pinging of random raindrops. Freddie Hubbard's trumpet has a cry for every change of mood.

BILL EVANS, A SIMPLE MATTER OF CONVICTION (Verve). It's always refreshing to listen to a fellow who believes that songs--not sounds--are the basis of all music. Pianist Evans takes such familiar standards as Stella by Starlight and My Melancholy Baby, and by graceful, deft accenting, restores their sharp and spice-fresh lilt. One of his best is a spirited flirtation with Star Eyes, in which he woos the melody in the key of C before taking it off to dance in E-flat. Part of the zestfulness of the album is due to Drummer Shelly Manne and Bassist Eddie Gomez, who at 21 already has the world on his strings.

ORNETTE COLEMAN, THE EMPTY FOXHOLE (Blue Note). Any recent Ornette set is a many-faceted multi-instrumented emotional assault on the senses. Out of his alto comes resentful sadness in the title tune; from his violin wails an out-of-key nightmare symphony in Sound Gravitation; his trumpet drives an impatient bleating note down Freeway Express. In Zig Zag he plays his alto cool. But coolest of all is his precocious drummer. Would you believe Ornette Denardo Coleman, age ten?

MILES DAVIS, MILES SMILES (Columbia). Miles the man is seldom seen to smile, but his music is another thing. Something very like joy breathes through the far-out trumpet track of Orbits and his modal romp through Dolores. A quiet delight ripples out chorus by chorus from the ballad Circle, deftly paced by Pianist Herbie Hancock, while Tenorman Wayne Shorter spirals moodily around the core of Miles's lyric. Throughout the six original Miles tunes, Drummer Tony Williams expertly helps build the mood and Bassist Ron Carter has a sure feel for the note that under lines the swirl of chords.

DUKE PEARSON, SWEET HONEY BEE (Blue Note). For those who like their listening smooth, clean, and swinging in the mainstream, Composer-Pianist Pearson offers a well-wrought melody in impeccable taste. Sweet Honey Bee is breezy, while After the Rain is a cloudy, contemplative tune. With the felicitous exception of the freewheeling Sudel, Pearson's usually ebullient sidemen, James Spaulding on alto and flute, Joe Henderson on tenor and Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, tailor their considerable talents to his tight weave.

CHARLES LLOYD, FOREST FLOWER (Atlantic). Aptly titled is Forest Flower, for the music pushes up softly and lyrically at first, then blossoms in a crescendo of effects as Lloyd's tenor sax bobs and bends. In full petal, Flower fragments into dazzling, disturbing psychedelic sounds, only slowly to resolve back into gentle normality. An inventive percussive sound is created by Pianist Keith Jarrett, who holds down the piano strings of the notes he is playing with one hand while striking the keys with the other.

MIKE WOFFORD, STRAWBERRY WINE (Epic). A first record in which Pianist Wofford ranges from traditional bop phrasing to more modern--or at least farther out--voicings. Whether in his meditative, impressionistic probings on Moment, his frolicsome display of technique on Steeplechase, or his Bill Evans-like rendering of I Know Your Heart, Wofford is well worth meeting.

RAVI SHANKAR IN NEW YORK (World Pacific). The master sitarist's latest rendition of the sound that has infiltrated jazz and indeed reOriented all Western popular music. Ever since the Beatles endorsed Shankars traditional Indian music last year, his ragas have become all the rage. From the long-necked, gourd-bellied sitar, Shankar strokes a whining, hypnotizing stream of spontaneous melodies within the framework of a predetermined pattern of notes. The Eastern "scales" he uses are now definitely required running by jazz musicians, especially bassists, whose solos frequently echo his soulful, inscrutable improvisations.

CINEMA

THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE. Julie Andrews, Mary Tyler Moore, Carol Channing and Bea Lillie flip through some oh-you-kidding dialogue and some ricky-ticky tunes in an otherwise lackluster musical set in the '20s.

LA VIE DE CHATEAU. French Screenwriter Jean-Paul Rappeneau (That Man From Rio) makes his directorial debut with a fresh and funny farce about the German Occupation and the French preoccupation --sex.

ULYSSES. Director Joseph Strick has fashioned if not the best, certainly not the worst possible film version of James Joyce's novel, helped by a fine cast of actors (particularly Milo O'Shea as Bloom) who ring as true as Irish shillings.

THE TAMING OF THE SHREW. Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor and Director Franco Zeffirelli have mounted the liveliest screen incarnation of Shakespeare since Olivier's Henry V.

PERSONA. A famous actress (Liv Ullman) and a nurse (Bibi Andersson) exchange personalities in this absorbing, if sometimes difficult, movie directed by Sweden's master film maker, Ingmar Bergman.

HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING. This movie version of the 1961 Broadway smash hit musical succeeds by sticking close to the original, but also disappoints a bit by not really trying for fresh cinematic values.

THE PERSECUTION AND ASSASSINATION OF JEAN-PAUL MARAT AS PERFORMED BY THE IN MATES OF THE ASYLUM OF CHARENTON UN DER THE DIRECTION OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE. An excellent film rendering of the Royal Shakespeare Company stage production of Peter Weiss's play, with laurels again to Director Peter Brook.

FALSTAFF. Actor Orson Welles has caught more of the dark than the light side of Shakespeare's pun-prone, fun-filled roisterer, and Director Welles's amalgam of five of the historical plays is often stonily dull, despite some sparks of genius.

LA GUERRE EST FINIE. A peek through the other end of the spyglass as French Director Alain Resnais examines the mind and mores of a Communist agitator left over from the Spanish Civil War but still traveling the dreadmill.

YOU'RE A BIG BOY NOW. Peter Kastner heads an impressive cast that includes Julie Harris, Elizabeth Hartman, Geraldine Page and Rip Torn in this daft if not always deft first effort by Director Francis Ford Coppola.

BOOKS

Best Reading

THE UNICORN GIRL, by Caroline Glyn The 19-year-old novelist, a great-granddaughter of English Novelist Elinor Glyn, takes the reader on a hilarious guided tour of a Girl Guide summer camp, where chaos reigns unrestrained and girlish tears flow often.

JOURNEY THROUGH A HAUNTED LAND, by Amos Elon. An Israeli journalist visits the scenes of genocide and writes a thoughtful study of postwar Germany.

DISRAELI, by Robert Blake. With loving care, the author constructs a fascinating mosaic of minutiae about one of the most brilliant and complex figures in British history, Victoria's favorite Victorian, Benjamin Disraeli.

FATHERS, by Herbert Gold. A basically sentimental celebration of fatherhood--Jewish fatherhood, in particular--that rises above itself because of the author's high craftsmanship, fine irony and strong sense of the absurd.

THE MURDERERS AMONG US: THE WIESENTHAL MEMOIRS, edited by Joseph Wechsberg. The incredible career of Nazi Hunter Simon Wiesenthal, who brought Adolf Eichmann and 800 other war criminals to final justice, is told in a spare, striking style reminiscent of Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op--now on international assignment.

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BERTRAND RUSSELL. This candid account of his early life and career by old (94) Mathematician-Philosopher Russell wittily explores and explains his preoccupation with the irrational and mystical quotient in human mathematics.

A SPORT AND A PASTIME, by James Salter. A highly promising new novelist tells in a new way that oldest of stories: boy meets girl. Cool, compelling and brilliantly written.

A SHORTER FINNEGANS WAKE, by James Joyce, edited by Anthony Burgess. Novelist Burgess (A Clockwork Orange) has pulled Joyce's astronomical Dublin masterpiece into the general reader's field of vision simply by cutting out two-thirds of it. There is still plenty of wit and wordplay left.

BLACK IS BEST, by Jack Olsen. The amusing, confusing life and times of Cassius Clay in a sharp-eyed biography that unerringly--and engagingly--separates fact from bigmouth blab.

THE FISH CAN SING, by Halldor Laxness. The foggy, fusty Iceland of a few generations ago, beautifully evoked by a Nobel prizewinner who loves best those fish in humankind who swim against the tide.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. The Arrangement, Kazan (1 last week)

2. The Secret of Santa Vittoria, Crichton (2)

3. Capable of Honor, Drury (3)

4. The Captain, De Hartog (5)

5. Valley of the Dolls, Susann (4)

6. The Eighth Day, Wilder

7. Tai-Pan, Clavell (7)

8. The Mask of Apollo, Renault (6)

9. Tales of Manhattan, Auchincloss

10. All in the Family, O'Connor (10)

NONFICTION

1. Madame Sarah, Skinner (1)

2. Edgar Cayce: The Sleeping Prophet, Stearn (2)

3. Everything But Money, Levenson (4)

4. Games People Play, Berne (7)

5. Paper Lion, Plimpton (5)

6. Inside South America, Gunther (3)

7. The Jury Returns, Nizer (6)

8. The Death of a President, Manchester

9. The Boston Strangler, Frank

10. A Search for the Truth, Montgomery

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