Wednesday, May 14

SPECTRUM (NET, 8-8:30 p.m.).* "The Trembling Earth" reports on new methods being used by seismologists to study earthquakes. Repeat.

KRAFT MUSIC HALL (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). Tony Sandler, Ralph Young and Judy Carne start their twelve weeks of summer hosting with Guest Star Lena Horne.

Thursday, May 15

NET PLAYHOUSE (NET, 8-10 p.m.). Orson Bean and Dustin Hoffman in The Star Wagon, a comedy-fantasy by Maxwell Anderson. The wagon is actually a time machine that gives people a chance to see whether their lives would be different if they could relive them. Repeat.

Friday, May 16

COMRADE SOLDIER (ABC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.) takes a trip behind the Iron Curtain to examine the life and training of a Soviet army recruit and finds some amazing differences between today's G.I. Joe and his Russian counterpart.

Saturday, May 17

THE PREAKNESS (CBS, 5-6 p.m.). The 94th running of the Preakness, which is the second leg of the Triple Crown, from Maryland's Pimlico race track.

HOLLYWOOD PALACE (ABC, 9:30-10:30 p.m.). Dan Rowan and Dick Martin slip over to ABC for "a comedy concert."

Sunday, May 18

APOLLO 10 (Noon). All three networks will cover the launching of the Apollo 10 spacecraft and will present special reports during its eight-day flight.

A.A.U. TRACK-AND-FIELD MEETS (CBS, 4:30-5:30 p.m.). The premiere of a series of 18 championship track-and-field meets held in the U.S. and Europe will present live coverage of the Martin Luther King International Freedom Games at Villanova University in Villanova, Pa.

THE POGO SPECIAL BIRTHDAY SPECIAL (NBC, 8:30-9 p.m.). Pogo and his pals from the Okefenokee Swamp decide that every day should be a holiday and start things off by throwing a surprise birthday party for Porky Pine.

Monday, May 19

ALAN AND HIS BUDDY (NBC, 8-9 p.m.). A two-man show, specializing in satire, where the Alan is King and his Buddy is Hackett.

Tuesday, May 20

CBS NEWS HOUR (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). "A Question of Values," the first of a three-part series called "Generations Apart," will look into the attitudes on both sides of the generation gap.

THEATER

On Broadway

HAMLET. Some actors merely occupy space; Nicol Williamson rules the stage. His nasal voice has the sting of an adder; his furrowed brow is a topography of inconsolable anguish. His Hamlet is a seismogram of a soul in shock. Here is a Hamlet of spleen and sorrow, of fire and ice, of bantering sensuality, withering sarcasm and soaring intelligence. He cuts through the music of the Shakespearean line to the marrow of its meaning. He spares the perfidious king who killed his father no contempt, but he saves his rage for the unfeeling gods who, in all true tragedy, make and mangle human destiny. Take him, all in all, for a great, mad, doomed, spine-shivering Hamlet, and anyone who fails to see Williamson during this limited engagement will not look upon his like again.

1776 presents a stereotypical version of the key signers of the Declaration of Independence, together with the sometimes abrasive, sometimes soporific deliberations of the Second Continental Congress. With a practically nonexistent musical score, the show brings the heroic, tempestuous birth of a nation down to a feeble vaudevillian jape.

FORTY CARATS, with Julie Harris as a middle-aged divorcee wooed and won by a lad nearly half her age, enters a sane and plausible plea for a single standard of judgment on age disparity in marriage.

PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM is Woody Allen's play in which he also stars as a young man with so many hang-ups that he makes his audience feel positively healthy.

HADRIAN VII. Alec McCowen gives a masterly performance in Peter Luke's play as the English eccentric, Frederick William Rolfe, a rejected candidate for the priesthood who eventually imagines himself elected Pope.

Off Broadway

THE MAN WITH THE FLOWER IN HIS MOUTH. An evening of three one-acters by Italian Playwright Luigi Pirandello. The title play deals with death, The License with the evil eye, and The Jar with innate human idiocy. The actor who animates each is Jay Novello, a wily performer with a tasty slice of prosciutto in him.

ADAPTATION-NEXT are two one-acters directed by Satirist Elaine May. Adaptation, Miss May's own play, is cleverly staged like a TV contest, with Gabriel Dell playing the adaptation game from birth to death. James Coco gives an enormously resourceful performance as a middle-aged man undergoing a humiliating induction examination in Terrence McNally's Next.

RECORDINGS

Rock

THE LIVE ADVENTURES OF MIKE BLOOMFIELD AND AL KOOPER (2 LPs; Columbia). Mike Bloomfield makes his singing debut with a couple of Ray Charles songs, among others, and shows a bit of Charles' lilting, hesitating sense of the blues. Bloomfield's forte is still his blues guitar playing, which is at its best on this looser, more spontaneous follow-up to his first performance with Kooper on the LP Super Session.

CREAM: GOODBYE (Atco). This British trio produced a distinctive, complex, closely woven blanket of sound. Actually, each member of the group--Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker--is a highly individualistic musician, and only the centrifugal force of their hard-driving performances kept them together for nearly three years. Just before disbanding, Cream said goodbye with this album. It is the cream of their crop.

BEE GEES: ODESSA (2 LPs; Atco). There is a nostalgic quality to these inventive, richly melodious ballads, which are sung earnestly, sometimes with a trifle too much vibrato. Sounding occasionally like a wholesome choir of Beatles, this Anglo-Australian quintet is sufficiently international to handle soft rock, country and Western, and songs that sound like folk even if they are not. But while this is their best album, the Bee Gees are sometimes swallowed alive by the lush harmonies of the singing strings in the background.

MOTHERS OF INVENTION: RUBEN & THE JETS (Verve). Ruben is a put-on and a takeoff. Founding fathers of rock dada, the Mothers have a picnic singing their own freshly minted Golden Oldies ("Jelly roll gum drop got my eyes on you," "I need it, I need it, 'cause it feels so fine"). The mock-sentimental collection is hilarious, at least for a while.

JEFFERSON AIRPLANE: BLESS ITS POINTED LITTLE HEAD (RCA). The Airplane may be coming down to earth. Recorded live for the first time, they change head music to body music as they repeat some old songs (Somebody to Lore, Plastic Fantastic Lover). Even so, acid rock is still the foundation of the Airplane, and the eleven-minute Bear Melt is a darkly mysterious throwback to their old surrealistic cerebrations.

THE FLYING BURRITO BROTHERS (A & M) are musical siblings of The Byrds, to which two of the founding Burritos (Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman) once belonged. Like The Byrds, the Brothers favor a nasal country style of folk-rock, with twanging, Nashville-style guitar picking and close-knit, churchy harmonies. They bounce along with sardonic glee in an ode to draft dodging called My Uncle, and commemorate the sorrows of unrequited love in a mock-dour lament, Juanita.

JOHNNY WINTER (Columbia). According to reports in the trade, Columbia has guaranteed $600,000 over the next five years to this unknown, cross-eyed, albino blues singer from East Texas. Judging by his first album for the company, it may have been a pretty good deal. Johnny's raspy. throaty, wailing voice is perfectly suited to traditional blues, while his lightning-fast finger work, on both electric and acoustic "bottleneck" guitar, can only be compared to the style of such legendary black musicians as Robert Johnson and T-Bone Walker.

CINEMA

THE LOVES OF ISADORA. The distributors of this biography of Dancer Isadora Duncan have severely truncated and distorted a complex and colorful life by cutting over half an hour out of the film. But not even wholesale butchery could diminish Vanessa Redgrave's magnificent performance in the title role.

STOLEN KISSES. This exhilarating film by Franc,ois Truffaut catches the glow of its director's warm humor and characteristically gentle insights into the benign folly and innocence of adolescence.

GOODBYE, COLUMBUS. Larry Peerce is a director with a lamentable sense of style and a laudable way with actors. Although his version of Philip Roth's 1959 novella of young love in suburbia is full of visual vulgarities, Richard Benjamin and stunning Newcomer Ali MacGraw save the show with their finely shaded performances.

THE NIGHT OF THE FOLLOWING DAY might have been just another kidnapping movie, but Director Hubert Cornfield has a sure and shrewd eye that transforms an ordinary story into a surreal seminar in the poetics of psychological terror. The small cast is uniformly excellent, and Marlon Brando does his best work in years as a slangy hipster-criminal.

MY SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN and RING OF BRIGHT WATER are two children's films that do not talk down to their audience. Mountain is about a Canadian lad who runs away from home to live in the wilderness, Ring about a London accountant who adopts an otter. Both films are slight, sincere and very pleasant.

THE FIXER. An adaptation of Bernard Malamud's Pulitzer prizewinning novel that is faithful to the original in its impassioned portrait of the dignity of individual man. John Frankenheimer directs with taste, and the actors--notably Alan Bates, Dirk Bogarde and Ian Holm--are transcendent in their roles.

SWEET CHARITY is a multimillion-dollar musical that huffs and puffs its frenetic way to a maudlin conclusion. Shirley MacLaine as a pixilated dancehall hostess is good enough, but all of Director-Choreographer Bob Fosse's strenuous cinematic trickery does little to establish a single, compelling style.

BOOKS

Best Reading

PICTURES OF FIDELMAN by Bernard Malamud. Yet another schlemiel-saint in fiction -- but this one is canonized by Malamud's compassionate talent.

THE UNPERFECT SOCIETY, by Milovan Djilas. The author, who has spent years in Yugoslav prisons for deriding the regime, now argues that Communism is disintegrating there and elsewhere as a new class of specialists--technicians, managers, teachers, artists--presses for a more flexible society.

BULLET PARK, by John Cheever. In his usual setting of uncomfortably comfortable suburbs, Cheever stages the struggle of two men--one mild and monogamous, the other rootless and haunted--over the fate of a boy.

SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Through flashbacks to the fire-bombing of Dresden in World War II, this agonizing, outrageous, funny and profoundly rueful fable tries to say something about human cruelty and self-protective indifference.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY: A LIFE STORY, by Carlos Baker. The long-awaited official biography offers the first complete and cohesive account of a gifted, troubled, flamboyant figure who has too often been recollected in fragmentary and partisan memoirs.

URGENT COPY, by Anthony Burgess. In a collection of brilliant short pieces about a long list of literary figures (from Dickens to Dylan Thomas), the author brings many a critical chicken home to roost.

EDWARD LEAR, THE LIFE OF A WANDERER, by Vivien Noakes. In this excellent biography, the Victorian painter, poet, fantasist and author of A Book of Nonsense is seen as a kindly, gifted man who courageously tried to stay cheerful despite an astonishing array of diseases.

THE MILITARY PHILOSOPHERS, by Anthony Powell. The ninth volume in his serial novel, A Dance to the Music oj Time, expertly convoys Powell's innumerable characters through the intrigue, futility, boredom and heroism of World War II.

LETTERS FROM ICELAND, by W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice. A minor masterpiece, written in 1936 when two talented, irreverent young poets knocked about above the tree line and put time on ice.

TORREGRECA, by Ann Cornelisen. Full of an orphan's love for her adopted town, the author has turned a documentary of human adversity in southern Italy into the autobiography of a divided heart.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. Portnoy's Complaint, Roth (1 last week)

2. The Godfather, Puzo (2)

3. Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut (4)

4. Except for Me and Thee, West (9)

5. A Small Town in Germany, le Carre (7)

6. Airport, Hailey (6)

7. The Salzburg Connection, Maclnnes (3)

8. Sunday the Rabbi Stayed Home, Kemelman (5)

9. The Vines of Yarrabee, Eden (8)

10. The Lost Queen, Lofts (10)

NONFICTION

1. Ernest Hemingway, Baker (5)

2. The 900 Days, Salisbury (1)

3. Jennie, Martin (2)

4. The Money Game, 'Adam Smith' (3)

5. The Peter Principle, Peter and Hull (9)

6. Miss Craig's 21-Day Shape-Up Program for Men and Women, Craig (4)

7. The Trouble with Lawyers, Bloom (6)

8. The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson, Goldman (7)

9. Inland Island, Johnson

10. Instant Replay, Kramer (10)

* All times E.D.T.

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