Wednesday, November 15 ANDROCLES AND THE LION (NBC, 7:30-9 p.m.). Richard Rodgers puts to music George Bernard Shaw's tale of man and beast. Norman Wisdom plays Androcles, Geoffrey Holder the lion. And Caesar? Noel Coward, naturally.
THE KRAFT MUSIC HALL (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). Tony Randall stars as "Stagedoor Johnny" in a musical comedy set in the New York of the 1920s. Guest stars include Walter Winchell, Cab Calloway, Gilbert Becaucl, Nathaniel Frey, Michele Lee and Marilyn Maye.
ABC WEDNESDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC. 9-11 p.m.). Laurence Harvey, Diane Cilento and Hugh O'Brian in Dial "M" for Murder, a David Susskind TV version of the Broadway play that was transferred to the screen by Alfred Hitchcock in 1954.
Thursday, November 16 CAROL CHANNING AND 101 MEN (ABC, 9-10 p.m.). Carol has the boys in for the first of two specials. Among them: Walter Matthau. Eddy Arnold and the Air Force Academy Chorale.
Friday, November 17 TARZAN (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). The guests make this one interesting: Helen Hayes and her son, James MacArthur, as a domineering mother and her son who wants to be a jungle doctor.
AMERICAN PROFILE: THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Robert Gulp narrates a visit to the National Gallery, featuring an account of Resident Restorer Francis Sullivan's use of X rays to uncover hidden secrets in several masterpieces. One example: The Lady in Domino by Tiepolo. She holds a closed fan, but X rays show that the artist first painted the fan open and later closed it.
Saturday, November 18 N.C.A.A. FOOTBALL (ABC, 4:10 p.m. to conclusion). In the battle for the national championship (at least in the rating polls), U.S.C. meets U.C.L.A. at Los Angeles.
ABC SCOPE (ABC. 10-11 p.m.). The first of a two-parter, "People of War," focuses on the villagers in a much fought over hamlet in South Viet Nam. Repeat.
Sunday, November 19 ISSUES AND ANSWERS (ABC, 1:30-2 p.m.). Dr. Kenneth Galbraith is the guest.
AND DEBBIE MAKES SIX (ABC, 8-9 p.m.). Reynolds gets together with Bob Hope, Jim Nabors, Donald O'Connor, Bobby Darin and Frank Gorshin.
THE SMOTHERS BROTHERS COMEDY HOUR (CBS, 9-10 p.m.). Tonight's visitors include George Segal, Nancy Wilson and Paul Revere and the Raiders.
Tuesday, November 21 WORLD PREMIERE (NBC, 9-11 p.m.). Darren McGavin, Sean Garrison, Shirley Knight. Nancy Malone, Ossie Davis and Edmond O'Brien in The Outsider, a made-for-TV detective movie.
CBS NEWS SPECIAL (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). "Gauguin in Tahiti: The Search for Paradise." Sir Michael Redgrave is the voice of Gauguin in this special, which focuses on the years spent by the artist in the South Seas.
ONE-NIGHT STANDS (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). ABC News crews hopped on planes, buses and cars to record the stop-and-go lives of Bandleader Woody Herman, Singer Johnny Rivers and the Bartok-Hunt Circus.
NET PLAYHOUSE (Shown on Fridays). An Enemy of the People is Arthur Miller's adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's scathing indictment of a corrupt society. James Daly won an Emmy last year for his portrayal of the idealistic doctor. Repeat.
NET JOURNAL (Shown on Mondays). "LSD: Lettvin v. Leary." A pseudopsychedelic trip complete with whirling lights and a confrontation between Head Guru Timothy Leary and M.I.T. Physiology Professor Jerome Lettvin.
THEATER
On Broadway
MORE STATELY MANSIONS. Eugene O'Neill wanted the uncoordinated, lengthy manuscript of this play destroyed. Somehow a copy survived, and has been subjected to the surgery of Jose Quintero, who manages to make the great U.S. dramatist appear as inept as a summer-stock apprentice. As a husband, wife, and mother fencing for one another's love, Arthur Hill, Colleen Dewhurst and Ingrid Bergman all appear lost in a disenchanted forest.
THE LITTLE FOXES. An admirable Lincoln Center revival of Lillian Hellman's 1939 play demonstrates how securely bricks of character can be sealed together with the mortar of plot. Anne Bancroft, George C. Scott, Richard Dysart and Margaret Leighton are expertly guided by Director Mike Nichols through gilt-edged performances as members of a family afflicted with a vulpine itch for plunder in the turn-of-the-century South.
WHAT DID WE DO WRONG? A ponderous put-down of the contemporary foibles of young and old falls on its face as it peers into the generation gap. Devotees of Paul Ford may be amused by their idol in a hippie getup, but others will consider Wrong? more absurd than theater.
HENRY, SWEET HENRY lured theatergoers into picking up $400,000 worth of tickets in advance of its opening. These venture-capitalists have a dismal evening in store for them. The musical concerns itself with a pair of schoolgirls who spend off-hours spying on a concert-stage idol (Don Ameche). When he is not pounding the keyboard, he dallies with suburban and urban matrons. The music is tuneless, the lyrics witless, and the dances could pass for mass hopscotch.
ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD might be called Two Characters in Search of a Plot. British Playwright Tom Stoppard takes his protagonists from the wings of the Globe and sets them stage center to wonder, with coruscating wit and in spiritual desolation, who they are and what they are doing at Elsinore. Scintillating performances by Brian Murray and John Wood endow the evening with rousing theatricality.
THE BIRTHDAY PARTY is nine years old and Harold Pinter's first full-length play. On Broadway for the first time, it is as highly individualistic, if not as technically poised, as his later works. The playwright cuts through the conventions of accepted stage behavior and the rules of the well-made play to expose the cruel and the comic, the frighteningly familiar and the terrifyingly unknown in each man's existence.
AFTER THE RAIN is an eggshell of a play from an egghead playwright. John Bowen borrows and embalms theatrical modes and ideas from Bertolt Brecht, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and Peter Weiss and colors them in a fashionable shade of apocalypstick. As the tyrannical leader of a Noah-like band of survivors from the flood of 1969, Alec McCowen is convincingly diabolical as he plucks open the soul of a power maniac.
Off Broadway
SCUBA DUBA is in the tradition of the "new comedy" that draws its laughs not from funny-ha-ha but from funny-peculiar. Novelist Bruce Jay Friedman (Stern, A Mother's Kisses) puts one of his Mom-obsessed neurotics in a chateau on the Riviera during the night his wife is out cuckolding him with a Negro. Jerry Orbach is excruciatingly believable as a modern victim-persecutor, one minute hiding under the coats in the closet, the next brandishing a scythe at his enemy, the world at large.
CINEMA
THE COMEDIANS. Graham Greene's Haitian purgatory has an excellent cast (Richard Burton, Peter Ustinov, Alec Guinness, Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Ford) and enough transcendent drama to absolve it from its most glaring sin: at two hours and 40 minutes, it is too long.
WAIT UNTIL DARK. A blind woman (Audrey Hepburn) who has become the nearly helpless victim of a trio of terrorists led by Alan Arkin tries to equalize the situation by removing all the light bulbs in the house; but she forgets the one in the refrigerator--with chilling results.
FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD. Direc tor John Schlesinger and Screenwriter Frederic Raphael, who collaborated on Oscar-winning Darling, now team to bring Hardy's brooding novel to the screen, with solid performances by Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Peter Finch and Terence Stamp.
ELVIRA MADIGAN. A Swedish cavalry officer (Thommy Berggren) deserts his wife, children and career to spend a summer of delirious happiness with a tightrope walker (Pia Degermark) in this spare and remarkably sensitive film.
FINNEGANS WAKE. A surprising number of James Joyce's Eire-borne visions survive in the screenwriter's version of the screedwriter's novel, thanks to Director Mary Ellen Bute's audacious dream sequences and witty collages and montages.
COOL HAND LUKE. A cocky prisoner (Paul Newman) becomes a folk hero to his fellow inmates by repeatedly escaping and indomitably refusing to knuckle under to sadistic guards.
THE INCIDENT. The sight of 14 subway passengers paralyzed with fear as two punks (Tony Musante and Martin Sheen) pummel their way through the car makes shockingly clear the fact that the desiccating pressure of urban life could well be the real villain.
MORE THAN A MIRACLE. A beautiful peasant girl (Sophia Loren) brazenly steals a horse from the handsome prince (Omar Sharif), gets herself a job making omelets in the palace kitchen, beats out seven princesses after a dishwashing contest, finally catches the prince and lives happily ever after in this utterly mindless but totally delightful fairy tale.
BOOKS
Best Reading
THE YEAR 2000, by Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Wiener. Two practitioners of the art of futurism consider what the world may be like 33 years hence.
MEMOIRS: 1925-1950, by George F. Kennan. A close-up look at a crucial quarter-century of U.S. diplomacy by a man who was one of the first to see the cold war coming, and who was also one of the first to predict a thaw.
THE MASTER AND MARGARITA, by Mikhail Bulgakov. This subliminal Russian satire has survived 25 years of official suppression to reach the U.S. in two separate and unrelated editions.
THE MANOR, by Isaac Bashevis Singer. In this tragicomic account of the changes that rack a Victorian Polish-Jewish family, a popular Yiddish storyteller demonstrates that he has the credentials of a major novelist.
THE SLOW NATIVES, by Thea Astley. One of Australia's leading writers tells a prickly story of a Brisbane family of intellectual pioneers who undergo a painful adjustment to a philistine society.
THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER, by William Styron. The author's fourth novel, a powerful, timely and imaginative reconstruction of a Negro slave uprising in 1831, installs his name at the top level of contemporary writers.
THE PYRAMID, by William Golding. In a seemingly simple tale about a bright lad who sacrifices everything to escape his low origins, Author Golding explores his favorite theme, which holds that original sin is an anthropological fact.
ROUSSEAU AND REVOLUTION, by Will and Ariel Durant. This tenth and last volume of their 38-year labor, The Story of Civilization, is one more proof that the Durants are the most eminently readable historians around.
Best Sellers
FICTION
1. The Confessions of Nat Turner, Styron (1 last week)
2. The Gabriel Hounds, Stewart (3)
3. Topaz, Uris (2)
4. The Chosen, Potok (4)
5. The Arrangement, Kazan (8)
6. Rosemary's Baby, Levin (7)
7. Night Falls on the City, Gainham (5)
8. A Night of Watching, Arnold (6)
9. Christy, Marshall
10. The President's Plane Is Missing, Serling
NONFICTION
1. Our Crowd, Birmingham (1)
2. The New Industrial State, Galbraith (3)
3. Nicholas and Alexandra, Massie (2)
4. Twenty Letters to a Friend, Alliluyeva (5)
5. A Modern Priest Looks at His Outdated Church, Kavanaugh (4)
6. Anyone Can Make a Million, Shulman (7)
7. Incredible Victory, Lord (6)
8. The Beautiful People, Bender (9)
9. Too Strong for Fantasy, Davenport
10. At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends, Eisenhower (8)
* All times E.S.T.
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