On Broadway

TELEVISION

Wednesday, March 26 ADVENTURES AT THE JADE SEA (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.)* William Holden narrates as an expedition of fellow conservationists and photographers visit the shores of Lake Rudolf in Kenya "to witness a way of life earmarked for extinction as the inev itable outcome of conflict between civ ilized and primitive man."

MARCUS WELBY, M.D. (ABC, 9-11 p.m.).

A special preview of next season's series featuring Robert Young as a dedicated family physician. James Brolin plays the doctor's young assistant; Anne Baxter, Susan Strasberg and Lew Ayres are guests.

KRAFT MUSIC HALL (NBC, 9-10 p.m.).

Joel Grey, Jerry Orbach and Jane Mor gan are a few of the stars from hit shows on "Broadway's Best . . . 1969" with Host David Merrick.

YOUR DOLLAR'S WORTH (NET, 9-10 p.m.).

Three tax experts explain "How To Save on Your Income Tax" legally, painlessly and by April 15.

Thursday, March 27 THURSDAY NIGHT MOVIES (CBS. 9-11:10 p.m.). A seedy ex-priest turned tourist guide (Richard Burton) suffers Deborah Kerr, Ava Gardner and Sue Lyon in Tennessee Williams' The Night of the Iguana (1964).

Saturday, March 29 CBS GOLF CLASSIC (CBS, 4-5 p.m.). Al Geiberger and Dave Stockton v. Art Wall and Charles Coody in first-round match.

THE NATIONAL AIRLINES OPEN GOLF TOUR NAMENT (NBC, 5-6 p.m.). Third round of a new $200,000 contest from the Country Club of Miami; final round Sunday 4-5:30 p.m.

WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). Two events from Florida, the Florida Derby at Gulfstream Park and the Sebring 12 Hours of Endurance for sports cars at Sebring, plus the N.C.A.A. Indoor Swimming and Diving Championships at the University of Indiana.

Sunday, March 30 DIRECTIONS (ABC, 1-2 p.m.). "The Final Ingredient," an opera by David Amram (libretto by Arnold Weinstein) celebrates a Passover Seder in a Nazi concentration camp. Repeat.

THE SOUTHERN BAPTIST HOUR (NBC, 2-2:30 p.m.). A look at religious themes in great art masterpieces on "Art and the Bible" with Aline Saarinen from Washington's National Gallery.

THE NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC YOUNG PEOPLE'S CONCERTS WITH LEONARD BERNSTEIN (CBS, 4-5 p.m.). "Bach Transmogrified" means Bach updated for orchestra, electronic synthesizer and the New York Rock and Roll Ensemble. Bernstein says the program has "switched on, turned on, rocked, rolled, shaken and baked" Bach.

SUNDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 9-11:15 p.m.). Alan Ladd, Jean Arthur. Brandon deWilde, Van Heflin and Jack Palance are gunfighters and homesteaders in the classic Shane (1953).

PRUDENTIAL'S ON STAGE (NBC. 10-11 p.m.). Problems of heart transplants are dramatized in "The Choice," an original play with Melvyn Douglas, George Grizzard, Celia Johnson and Frank Langella.

Tuesday, April 1

NET FESTIVAL (NET, 9-10 p.m.). Andre Watts prepares and performs Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 24, assisted by Conductor Zubin Mehta and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

THEATER

HAMLET. Everything about this production of the APA Repertory Company is peculiarly wrong. The costumes are a strange mixture of period and modern; the sense and tempo of the play have been mangled both by Director Ellis Rabb's cuts and his use of the corrupt First Quarto; and Hamlet, played by Mr. Rabb with monotony and weariness, seems in desperate need of geriatric drugs.

IN THE MATTER OF J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER, by Heinar Kipphardt, offers audiences the chance to weep over the renowned physicist who. in 1954, was deprived of his security clearance. Dissertation, however, is not drama; the play is as inert as a stone, and Joseph Wiseman as Oppenheimer is mannered and brittle.

PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM. Woody Allen has written, and stars in this story of a neurotic young man whose wife has just left him. The play does not progress along with the evening, but it is amusement enough to have Allen's kooky angle of vision and nimble jokes.

CELEBRATION features Potemkin, a master of ceremonies and revelers, presiding over a world peopled by an Orphan, an Angel and an evil Mr. Rich. Simplicity and clarity are the order of the evening, and that alone makes the show a treat by contrast to most other Broadway musicals.

HADRIAN VII. Playwright Peter Luke makes Frederick William Rolfe, one of the most freakishly talented eccentrics of English letters, the hero of Rolfe's own novel of wish-fulfillment, Hadrian the Seventh. Alec McCowen gives a polished performance as Rolfe, a rejected candidate for priesthood who is elected Pope.

FORTY CARATS is a frothy farce from Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Gredy, the team that wrote Cactus Flower. With Julie Harris as a middle-aged divorcee wooed by a lad of 22, the play enters a plea for a single standard of judgment on age disparity in marriage.

Off Broadway

SPITTING IMAGE. Some plays sound distinctly unappetizing in conception but prove surprisingly palatable in realization. For anyone who can abide the idea, this work about two homosexuals who have a baby provides a consistently amusing evening, nursing its basic joke with taste and felicity. Sam Waterston and Walter McGinn turn in accomplished performances as Daddy One and Daddy Two in what is probably the first homosexual play with a happy ending.

ADAPTATION--NEXT is an evening of two humorous one-acters directed by Satirist Elaine May with a crisp and zany comic flair. Miss May's own play, Adaptation, is the game of life staged like a TV contest. Next, by Terrence McNally, features an enormously resourceful performance by

James Coco as an overaged potential draftee called before a female sergeant for a humiliating physical and psychological examination.

LITTLE MURDERS. This revival of Cartoonist Jules Feiffer's play about a family living in a psychotic New York milieu of impending violence fares very well under the masterful hand of Director Alan Arkin.

TO BE YOUNG, GIFTED AND BLACK is a tribute to the late Lorraine Hansberry put together from her own writings. An able interracial cast presents sketches that thread an elegiac mood ranging through comedy, rage and introspection.

CINEMA

STOLEN KISSES. Francois Truffaut's new film is another chapter in his cinematic autobiography, a lovely souvenir of adolescence that focuses on the frantic romances and comic careers of an ebullient young man (Jean-Pierre Leaud).

THE NIGHT OF THE FOLLOWING DAY is one of the tensest, toughest thrillers anyone could ask for. But Director Hubert Cornfield is not content to stop there; he creates a surreal seminar in the poetics of violence. The small cast is uniformly good, and Marlon Brando is back in great form playing a hipster-hood.

SALESMAN. The Maysles Brothers spent six weeks filming a group of New England Bible salesmen at work to produce this arresting and occasionally appalling cinema verite record of one desperate part of American society.

3 IN THE ATTIC is a kind of bastard offspring of Alfie and The Graduate, a comedy with a cheap sort of charm about a campus ladykiller (Chris Jones) who gets his comeuppance from his steady girl (Yvette Mimieux).

THE STALKING MOON. Gregory Peck dashes around the hills of New Mexico pursuing and being pursued by a vengeful and ingenious Indian. Everything is terribly low-key and occasionally mannered, but there are some superb chills all the same.

SWEET CHARITY. A lot of energy obviously went into this adaptation of the hit Broadway musical, but the result is sadly lacking in vitality. Shirley MacLaine is fun to watch though, and a couple of the tunes are catchy.

RED BEARD is a prime example of why Japan's Akira Kurosawa is counted as one of the world's greatest film makers. He transforms a rather ordinary story about the spiritual growth of a young doctor into a vast, epical canvas executed with thematic brilliance and stylistic perfection.

THE SHAME. Ingmar Bergman lingers once again on the problems of an artist's moral responsibilities. This is his 29th film and one of his best, with resonant performances by Liv Ullman. Max von Sydow and Gunnar Bjoernstrand.

THE FIXER. John Frankenheimer has directed this adaptation of Bernard Malamud's novel with care and dedication. Alan Bates (as the accidental hero). Dirk Bogarde and Ian Holm all seem perfect in their difficult roles.

BOOKS

Best Reading

THE QUICK AND THE DEAD, by Thomas Wiseman. In this skilled, unsettling novel, a European half-Jew, haunted by decidedly unorthodox memories of a youthful acquaintance who turned Nazi, probes the past to learn why, even in death, this adversary-friend still dominates his life.

PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT, by Philip Roth, is a comic sex novel of the absurd, told in the form of a frenzied monologue by a 33-year-old Jewish bachelor on his psychiatrist's couch.

TORREGRECA, by Ann Cornelisen. A beautifully written documentary of human adversity in Southern Italy that deserves a place next to Oscar Lewis' The Children of Sanchez.

THE GODFATHER, by Mario Puzo, is a robust, crisply narrated novel about the Mafia with a clear-cut moral: the family that preys together stays together.

GRANT TAKES COMMAND, by Bruce Catton. In the final volume of a trilogy begun by the late historian Lloyd Lewis, Catton carries Grant's career to his day of final victory at Appomattox. The author's quiet lucidity and laconic humor are well suited to a portrayal of the elusive, taciturn little general.

JBS: THE LIFE AND WORK OF J.B.S. HALDANE, by Ronald W. Clark. One of the last great Victorian eccentrics, Haldane sought to embrace the "two cultures"--science and the humanities. Author Clark demonstrates, however, that he was vastly more successful in his scientific ventures than in his often wild misadventures in social causes.

THE TRAGEDY OF LYNDON JOHNSON, by Eric F. Goldman. Instant history, like instant coffee, can sometimes be remarkably palatable. At least it is in this memoir by a former White House aide who sees L.B.J. as "an extraordinarily gifted President who was the wrong man from the wrong place at the wrong time under the wrong circumstances."

PUSHKIN, by David Magarshack. In a solid, if sometimes pedestrian biography, the poet who was a founding father of Russian literature often seems more like a rakehell uncle.

AFTERWORDS: NOVELISTS ON THEIR NOVELS, edited by Thomas McCormack. The anxiety, excitement and loneliness of confronting blank sheets of paper, sharply recalled and brightly written by 14 novelists, including Norman Mailer, Truman Capote and Louis Auchincloss.

Best Sellers

FICTION 1. The Salzburg Connection, Maclnnes (2 last week) 2. Portnoy's Complaint, Roth (1) 3. Airport, Hailey (3) 4. A Small Town in Germany, le Carre (4) 5. Force 10 from Navarone, MacLean (5) 6. Preserve and Protect, Drury (7) 7. The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn (9) 8. A World of Profit, Auchincloss (8) 9. The Hurricane Years, Hawley 10. The Voyeur, Sutton (6)

NONFICTION 1. The 900 Days, Salisbury (1) 2. The Money Game,'Adam Smith'(2) 3. The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson, Goldman (4) 4. Thirteen Days, Kennedy (9) 5. Miss Craig's 21-Day Shape-Up Program for Men and Women, Craig (3) 6. The Arms of Krupp, Manchester (8) 7. Instant Replay, Kramer (5) 8. The Trouble with Lawyers, Bloom 9. The Day Kennedy Was Shot, Bishop (7) 10. The Intimate Enemy, Bach and Wyden'

*All times E.S.T.

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