TELEVISION

TELEVISION Wednesday, February 21 KRAFT MUSIC HALL (NBC, 9-10 p.m.).-.ohn Davidson, Tom Jones, Buffy Sainte-Vlarie and the Fifth Dimension make music "The Class of '68" likes to hear.

Thursday, February 22 CINDERELLA (CBS, 7:30-9 p.m.). Rodgers and Hammerstein's only original TV musical with Lesley Ann Warren as Cinderella, and Ginger Rogers, Walter Pidgeon, "Celeste Holm and Jo Van Fleet. Repeat.

CBS THURSDAY NIGHT MOVIE (CBS, 9-11 p.m.). Part 1 of The Great Escape (1963), starring Steve McQueen, James Garner, fames Coburn and Richard Attenborough. Part 2 Friday night, same time. Repeat.

Friday, February 23

TOMORROW'S WORLD: FEEDING THE BILLIONS (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). A land-clearing project in the Amazon jungles, an Idaho fish farm, and large-scale production of protein-rich algae in California are some of the experiments under way to expand the world's food supply.

Saturday, February 24

ABC'S WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). Winternational Drag Racing championships from Pomona, Calif., and the International Surfing championships from Makaha Beach, Hawaii.

PURSUIT OF EXCELLENCE: THE VIENNA CHOIR BOYS (ABC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Alfred Drake narrates this look at the life and training of the young Austrian choristers.

Sunday, February 25

DISCOVERY '68 (ABC, 11:30 a.m. to noon). "The Ghosts of the Old West" walk again when Discovery visits Tombstone, Ariz., and reminisces about Bat Masterson, Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp.

ISSUES AND ANSWERS (ABC, 1:30-2 p.m.). Senator William Fulbright is the guest.

FRONTIERS OF FAITH (NBC, 1:30-2 p.m.). In the last of four sessions on the question "Is Peace Possible?" NBC Correspondent Pauline Frederick discusses the social and political aspects of order, disorder and violence with Dr. Arthur Was-kow of Washington, D.C.'s Institute for Policy Studies.

NBC EXPERIMENT IN TELEVISION (NBC, 3-4 p.m.). The Hamster of Happiness, starring Mildred Dunnock, presents a new actress (Susan Tyrrell) and a new playwright (Charles Eastman) with a story about a cantankerous woman and her frightened daughter-in-law.

NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE (CBS, 2-4:30 p.m.). Toronto Maple Leafs v. the New York Rangers at New York.

THE CBS CHILDREN'S FILM FESTIVAL (CBS, 4:30-5:30 p.m.). Skinny and Fatty is the story of a poor, skinny kid who helps his fat, rich chum learn the ropes in and out of school. Repeat.

THE 21st CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). "From Cradle to Classroom," Part 2, examines two projects that work intensively with economically and culturally deprived children almost from birth until they enter school: Syracuse University's day-care center for babies of working mothers, and the University of Illinois' nursery school, where there is a teacher for every five children.

Tuesday, February 27 THE RED SKELTON HOUR (CBS, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). As a sequel to his 1960 award-winning performance, Red presents another hour of pantomime, "Laughter--the Universal Language," before an audience of U.N. diplomats from 46 countries.

REPORT FROM VIET NAM BY WALTER CRONKITE (CBS, 10-10:30 p.m.). In order to shed light on the tangle of recent events in Viet Nam and the direction the war is taking, this special analyzes recent Viet Cong offensives and includes interviews with South Vietnamese and American diplomats and politicians.

NET JOURNAL (shown on Mondays). "Farewell Arabia" tells of an Arabian sheikdom, Abu Dhabi, which became an air-conditioned boom town when oil was discovered.

NET PLAYHOUSE (shown on Fridays). "The 39th Witness" is a fictionalized account of the killing of Kitty Genovese in New York City, who was stabbed to death within sight and hearing of 39 unmoved and unmoving neighbors.

THEATER

On Broadway

THE PRICE finds Arthur Miller sermonizing again on his favorite texts of guilt, responsibility, and the way a man's identity is forged or warped by society's image of what he is or should be. The play is a museum piece out of the '30s, which Miller has never intellectually left, but the performances of Pat Hingle and Arthur Kennedy as sibling rivals blow away a little of the dust.

JOE EGG. The juxtaposition of the horrifying and the hilarious forms part of the common round of existence--and of this startling play. British Writer Peter Nichols constructs a comedy of anguish, extracting laughter from the uncomic plight and blistering pain of two parents (Albert Finney and Zena Walker) whose ten-year-old daughter is a spastic.

DARLING OF THE DAY is another of this season's dead-as-the-dodo musicals. Weary of adulation, a famous painter assumes his deceased valet's identity and achieves happiness with a pneumatic widow. As the painter, Vincent Price acts like a berserk semaphore and sings in a mauve whisper. As the widow, Patricia Routledge performs with a joyous professional authority lacking in the score and the show.

PANTAGLEIZE is Michel de Ghelderode's inventive celebration of the individual "unfit for anything except love, friendship and ardor," and a condemnation of our "autodisintegrated age." The APA production projects much of the excitement and magic typical of the Belgian playwright.

THE SHOWOFF. An unwelcome son-in-law crashes like a wayward meteor into the mundane sphere of the earthy Fisher household and sets it ablaze with his inflammatory manner. George Kelly's 43-year-old comedy is revived by the APA.

ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD. To Shakespeare, Hamlet's university friends were nothing but functionaries, but to British Playwright Tom Stoppard, they are pawns in a weighted chess match --for which they cannot even decipher the rules. Brian Murray, John Wood and Paul Hecht provide spirited, sophisticated acting.

Off Broadway

YOUR OWN THING. Writer-Director Donald Driver mixes media and blends bits of the Bard with shreds of Hollywood folklore, shakes them up with high jinks and low camp, and comes out with an ingratiating rock musical version of Twelfth Night.

THE INDIAN WANTS THE BRONX. A new and gifted playwright, Israel Horovitz, has taken the tiger of violence that prowls the New York streets. and released it on the stage with terrifying veracity as two young punks savage an East Indian.

RECORDS

Orchestral

MAHLER: THE NINE SYMPHONIES (Columbia; 15 LPs). Even at a price of $100 for the handsomely leather-bound set, this blockbuster has for weeks been listed as one of Billboard's bestselling classical albums. As the apotheosis of romanticism, Gustav Mahler is very much in vogue, and the most flamboyant of his latter-day champions is Leonard Bernstein, who has been building up this treasury of recordings with the New York Philharmonic for seven years. No one can argue with the power and variety of Bernstein's interpretations, but his gifts are most appropriate to the later symphonies, from the Fifth on, with their careening metaphysics, thorny textures and dramatic contradictions. Bernstein explains that Mahler is "roughhewn and epicene, subtle and blatant, refined, raw, objective, maudlin, brash, shy, grandiose, self-annihilating, confident, insecure." Each symphony is also being released separately, and the Eighth, in particular, is not to be missed, as Bernstein masses his musical forces, in this case, the London Symphony Orchestra, for an impassioned yes to the whole cosmos.

BEETHOVEN: THE NINE SYMPHONIES (RCA Victrola; 8 LPs). Another big package, but at the bargain price of $20. Not everyone agrees with Arturo Toscanini's distinctly brisk, no-nonsense approach to Beethoven. About the heroic first movement of the Third Symphony, the maestro once dryly commented: "Some say this is Napoleon, some Hitler, some Mussolini. For me it is simply allegro con brio." Still, Toscanini's brio was like no one else's, and the NBC Symphony strikes sparks as it builds to one peak of excitement after another, and then softly and precisely casts long incandescent arcs of melody. The recordings date mostly from the early '50s, and are mono only.

CINEMA

POOR COW. TV Director Kenneth Loach's first film tells the story of a scruffy London slum dweller (Carol White) with humanity that is never sentimental and humor that never hurts.

THE JUNGLE BOOK. Walt Disney's animated version of the Kipling children's classic is thoroughly delightful and clearly aimed at the below-twelve market.

THE PRODUCERS. Zero Mostel as a Broad way producer caricatures Merrick not as David but Goliath in this often disjointed and inconsistent yet frequently uproariously funny film directed by Mel Brooks. THE GRADUATE. Director Mike Nichols doesn't quite pull a Babbitt out of the hat in this sophomoronic film about the disillusioning encounters suffered by an idealist college grad (Dustin Hoffman) when he returns home to Los Angeles.

BOOKS

Best Reading

DEATH IN LIFE: SURVIVORS OF HIROSHIMA, by Robert Jay Lifton. As he sifts the recollections of 75 persons who lived through the first atomic bombing, an American psychiatrist discerns the effects of large-scale disasters on behavior.

THE CODEBREAKERS, by David Kahn. More than 1,000 pages of cryptologic lore, including accounts of how ciphers changed the currents of history.

THE NEW AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH, by Louis Keren. The Washington correspondent of the London Times casts a sympathetic eye on the U.S. political system. TO BROOKLYN WITH LOVE, by Gerald Green. The excitement of Brownsville during the Depression is evoked in this memoir disguised as a novel by the author of The Last Angry Man.

THE NAKED APE, A ZOOLOGIST'S STUDY OF THE HUMAN ANIMAL, by Desmond Morris. A witty mixture of established anthropological theory and wild speculation on the evolution of Homo sapiens.

MAKING IT, by Norman Podhoretz. The literary critic and editor of Commentary tells of his lust for money, power and fame in this account of his career.

THE BLAST OF WAR 1939-1945, by Harold Macmillan. The second volume of the former British Prime Minister's memoirs focuses clearly on England's wartime government and Macmillan's role in it.

TOLSTOY, by Henri Troyat. Making masterly use of mountains of documents and diaries, the Russian-born biographer forges an unforgettable portrait of one of literature's greatest figures.

THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER, by William Styron. A shattering fictionalization of the futile 1831 Negro slave revolt in Virginia, based on the confession of the man who led it.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. Topaz, Uris (2 last week)

2. The Confessions of Nat Turner, Styron (1)

3. Christy, Marshall (3)

4. Vanished, Knebel (6)

5. The Chosen, Potok (9)

6. The Instrument, O'Hara (4)

7. The Exhibitionist, Sutton (5)

8. The Gabriel Hounds, Stewart (7)

9. The President's Plane Is Missing, Serling (8)

10. Rosemary's Baby, Levin

NONFICTION 1. Nicholas and Alexandra, Massie (1)

2. Our Crowd, Birmingham (2)

3. Between Parent and Child, Ginott (4)

4. Tolstoy, Troyat (3)

5. The Naked Ape, Morris

6. Rickenbacker, Rickenbacker (5)

7. Memoirs: 1925-1950, Kennan (6)

8. The New Industrial State, Galbraith (7)

9 Anyone Can Make a Million, Shulman

10. The Blast of War 1939-1945, Macmillan (8)

* All times E.S.T.

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