TELEVISION
TELEVISION
Wednesday, November 13
A SENSE OF WONDER (ABC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.)-- Helen Hayes narrates a documentary based on the works of the late Rachel Carson (The Sea Around Us, Silent Spring). Miss Hayes also reads excerpts from The Sense of Wonder and Edge of the Sea as cameras range from the rocky coast of Maine to California's Big Sur.
KRAFT MUSIC HALL (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). "Comedy 2001--Give or Take a Couple of Weeks." Julie Harris, Bill Dana, Shelley Berman and Lynn Kellogg join Host Steve Allen in a series of skittery sketches about the lighter side of life in the 21st century.
Friday, November 15
THE UNDERSEA WORLD OF JACQUES COUSTEAU (ABC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). "Whales." The world-famed French oceanographer explores the depths off the coast of Madagascar in search of finback, sperm and killer whales.
Saturday, November 16
N.C.A.A. FOOTBALL (ABC, 8:30-11:30 p.m.). Alabama v. Miami at Miami in the Orange Bowl.
TENNESSEE ERNIE FORD SPECIAL (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). Guests: Lucille Ball, Andy Griffith, Wayne Newton and the Golddiggers.
JACK BENNY'S BAG (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Musical variety special, with Eddie Fisher, Phyllis Diller, Lou Rawls and Eddie (Rochester) Anderson.
Sunday, November 17
A.F.L. DOUBLEHEADER (NBC, 1:30 p.m. to conclusion). San Diego Chargers v. Buffalo Bills at War Memorial Stadium, Buffalo. Second game: New York Jets v. Oakland Raiders at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum.
N.F.L. FOOTBALL (CBS, 4 p.m. to conclusion). Minnesota Vikings v. Detroit Lions at Detroit.
HEIDI (NBC, 7-9 p.m.). A TV adaptation of Johanna Spyri's classic children's story, filmed in the Swiss Alps and Germany, starring Maximilian Schell, Jean Simmons, Sir Michael Redgrave, Walter Slezak, and Jennifer Edwards as Heidi. Oscar Winner (Marly) Delbert Mann directs.
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). An army commander (Theodore Bikel) plots to overthrow his country by imprisoning an influential cardinal. The Impossible Missions Force takes it from there.
Monday, November 18 THE CAROL BURNETT SHOW (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). Guests: Songstress Ella Fitzgerald and Comedian Sid Caesar.
THEATER
On Broadway
THE APA REPERTORY COMPANY whizzes through Moliere's The Misanthrope with a light touch and airy style but gets bogged down by the heavily symbolic, psychological poetry of T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party.
THE GREAT WHITE HOPE, by Howard Sackler, attempts to re-create the fight world that existed in the 1900s, using the dramaturgy of the 1930s and drawing dubious parallels with events of the 1960s. James Earl Jones exudes vitality and ego energy as the first Negro heavyweight champion.
THE MAN IN THE GLASS BOOTH. Donald Pleasence displays furious intensity in his attack on the role of a Jewish tycoon who masquerades as a Nazi SS officer. But Robert Shaw's insights about victim and victimizer are transparent; his drama toys with the terrible reality of Hitler's final solution instead of illuminating it.
LOVERS AND OTHER STRANGERS possesses grains of truth beneath some predictable chaff. The evening's four tales of men and women prove again that while there may sometimes be poetry and rhyme in love and marriage, there is rarely reason.
Off Broadway
TEA PARTY and THE BASEMENT are a pair of Pinter puzzlers that amuse as well as bemuse. The first playlet deals with a successful businessman whose system short-circuits when all the forces in his life--secretary, wife, children, parents--come together at an office gathering. In the second, two men and a girl try to conquer one another and their living space.
HOW TO STEAL AN ELECTION is a free-wheeling revue, brashly taking to task all the U.S. Presidents from Washington to Lyndon Johnson. D. R. Allen's portrayal of Calvin Coolidge is a particular delight.
RECORDINGS
Soviet Sounds
RIMSKI-KORSAKOV: SCHEHERAZADE (and excerpts from TSAR SALTAN) (RCA Victor); RIMSKI-KORSAKOV: "ANTAR" SYMPHONY and MIASKOVSKY: SYMPHONY NO. 21 (RCA Victor). These days it is considered chic to denigrate Nikolai Rimski-Korsakov for his love of Oriental fantasy and Slavic legend. Yet there never was anyone who could match the great orchestrator's gift for handling sound--a churning sea in Scheherazade, say, or the attack of a monster bird in "Antar." In Scheherazade, Conductor Andre Previn produces the best effort yet in his current series of recordings with the London Symphony Orchestra: a slow, controlled interpretation that succeeds in understatement where others fail with bluster. In "Antar," drawn from the same rich compositional vein of color and rhythmic excitement, Conductor Morton Gould and the Chicago Symphony are every bit as impressive in the first stereo recording of the score. The Miaskovsky, a compact, one-movement work, is one of the best ever composed by this 20th century conservative; he has written 27 symphonies, but is not as well known outside his homeland as he should be.
SHOSTAKOVICH: SYMPHONY NO. 2 ("TO OCTOBER") and SYMPHONY NO. 3 ("MAY DAY") (RCA Victor). The first recordings of two early symphonies by the current dean of Russian symphonists, performed expertly by Morton Gould and the Royal Philharmonic. Both end with patriotic chorales dedicated to the cause of the October Revolution. Though the text for each is proletarian, the style of the music is advanced, experimental and complex. Symphony No. 2, dating from 1927, is the bolder, more original of the pair--an-titonal, wildly scurrying, almost Ivesian in passages. The more conservative No. 3, written in 1929, is full of false starts and is less well-organized. While neither is a masterpiece, each supplies a missing and necessary chapter in an important career and shows how the young Shostakovich experimented with the advanced musical ideas of his time.
STRAVINSKY'S THE RITE OF SPRING: YEVGENY SVETLANOV AND THE U.S.S.R. SYMPHONY (Melodiya/Angel); also by SEIJI OZAWA AND THE CHICAGO SYMPHONY (RCA Victor). The Melodiya/Angel disc contains the first recorded Rite to have come out of the Soviet Union. It has a raw power that gives an appropriate primitive quality to Stravinsky's pagan ballet classic. For sheer conducting and orchestral virtuosity, however, the better Rite is the version recorded in Chicago by the brilliant young Japanese-born Conductor Seiji Ozawa. Stravinsky himself now prefers to hear Rile as a concert piece; he would no doubt approve the supersymohonic sweep that Ozawa brings to the fiendishly difficult score.
SHCHEDRIN: THE CARMEN BALLET (Melo-diya/Angel). Rodion Shchedrin, 35, the current Establishment favorite of Russia's younger generation of composers, wrote this ballet for his beautiful wife Maya Plisetskaya, the Bolshoi Ballet's prima ballerina. Hearing the Toreador Song and the Changing of the Guard freely arranged for strings and 47 percussion instruments is pleasant for the first time, but no more. Shchedrin mistakes brashness for cleverness so often that familiarity with his work breeds boredom.
CINEMA
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Stanley Kubrick explores the history and future of man in a space-age epic that dazzles the eye with its overpowering technical effects.
BULLITT. A violent journey into the criminal underworld, where the crook is a savage and the cop a man alone. Steve McQueen, as a San Francisco police lieutenant, provides a supercool performance that is his best to date.
FUNNY GIRL. Barbra Streisand comes on strong--maybe too strong--in a musical biography of Fanny Brice. It will appeal mainly to those who feel that the leading lady can do no wrong.
THE SUBJECT WAS ROSES. The woes of a middle-class Irish family in The Bronx may be an unlikely subject for drama, but the performances of Patricia Neal, Jack Albertson and Martin Sheen kindle the spark of real life in material that often seems like lace-curtain O'Neill.
ROMEO AND JULIET. Director Franco Zeffirelli brings a poignant immediacy to one of Shakespeare's most familiar plays. As the star-crossed lovers, Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting perform with a passion to match their young years.
WARRENDALE. The melancholy, sometimes desperate lives of a group of mentally disturbed children are portrayed in this magnificent Canadian documentary by Allan King.
BOOKS
Best Reading
MOSBY'S MEMOIRS AND OTHER STORIES, by Saul Bellow. Six stories, balancing satire and compassion, are a reminder that Bellow is at the very forefront of American writing today.
THE CANCER WARD, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Soviet author uses a cancer ward as a metaphor for Russian society; the doomed patients reveal jagged, damning insights into the everyday enormities of life under Stalin. Not quite so successful a book as The First Circle, it is still a relentless narrative and a powerful, often poetic novel.
LYRICAL AND CRITICAL ESSAYS, by Albert Camus. Camus was a sensualist and humanist who found inspiration on the sun-soaked shores of his native Algeria. His great poetic perception flavors this new collection of early essays, which are surprisingly mystical and serene.
THE BOGEY MAN, by George Plimpton. What happened to George as a bogus touring golf pro should not happen to a golf ball, but while absorbing his routine athletic humiliations, he manages again to write knowingly and entertainingly from inside a major sport.
THE PUBLIC IMAGE, by Muriel Spark. The author is out to tease, tantalize and teach, and she succeeds in doing all three in this story of a movie star who must decide between private truth and public life.
EVA TROUT, by Elizabeth Bowen. This is a rare commodity on today's fiction market: a novel of sensibility. The story is about a wandering, capricious heiress who leaves many lives bobbing helplessly in her wake.
A SMALL TOWN IN GERMANY, by John le Carre. A missing embassy official, stolen secret files and the illusion-fed machinations of the diplomatic life in Bonn are all part of the puzzle in this novel of suspense and political intrigue.
A FAN'S NOTES, by Frederick Exley. A young man, unable to participate in the American myth, uses pro-football heroes to act out his own ineluctable dreams.
STEPS, by Jerzy Kosinski. Acts of cruelty and voyeurism unfold in a series of episodes that are bound together by the author's private vision of inhumanity.
GEORGE ELIOT, by Gordon Haight. An admirable biography of a writer whose life was as rich in Victorian drama and morality as any of her novels.
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. Best Sellers
FICTION
1. Preserve and Protect, Drury (2 last week)
2. The Salzburg Connection, Maclnnes (1)
3. Airport, Hailey (3)
4. The Hurricane Years, Hawley (5)
5. The Senator, Pearson (4)
6. A Small Town in Germany, Le Carre
7. Couples, Updike (7)
8. Testimony of Two Men, Caldwell (6)
9. The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn (8) 10. Red Sky at Morning, Bradford
NONFICTION
1. Sixty Years on the Firing Line, Krock (5)
2. The Money Game, 'Adam Smith' (1)
3. The Rich and the Super-Rich, Lundberg (4)
4. The Beatles, Davies (3)
5. Soul on Ice, Cleaver (7)
6. Iberia, Michener (9)
7. Between Parent and Child, Ginott (8)
8. The Case Against Congress, Pearson and Anderson (6)
9. The Doctor's Quick Weight Loss Diet, Stillman and Baker
10. The American Challenge, Servan-Schreiber (2)
*All times E.S.T.
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