On Broadway

TELEVISION

Wednesday, June 17

SIKKIM AND ITS YANKEE QUEEN (NBC, 9-10 p.m.)* The former Hope Cooke (Sarah Lawrence, '63). now wife of Maharajah Palden Thondup Namgyal of Sikkim, the tiny Himalayan kingdom, will narrate this on-location documentary about her new country and her new life. Color.

Thursday, June 18

ELECTION YEAR IN AVERAGETOWN (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Salem. N.J., like it or not, has been chosen to play the title role in David Brinkley's report on smalltown political attitudes.

Saturday, June 20

ABC'S WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). Jockey Eddie Arcaro reports the Gold Cup Race at Ascot.

Sunday, June 21

DISCOVERY (ABC. 1-1:30 p.m.). "The Good Old Days--Part 1." a visit to Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Mich., which has been restored to its 19th century state.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). "Ethiopia: The Lion and the Cross." part one of an award-winning two-part report. Repeat.

Monday. June 22

VACATION PLAYHOUSE (CBS, 8-8:30 p.m.). A summer replacement series made up of situation-comedy pilot programs never before seen on TV. except by reluctant sponsors. Match your wits with the experts: Which ones would have rated top Nielsens? This week: Herschel Bernardi in "Hurray for Hollywood."

HOLLYWOOD AND THE STARS (NBC, 9:30-10 p.m.). Perhaps the best of old film clips are slapstick silents. This sample, "The Funny Men, Part I," features Chaplin, Harold Lloyd. Buster Keaton, Ben Turpin and W. C." Fields. Repeat.

Tuesday. June 23

POLARIS SUBMARINE: JOURNAL OF AN UNDERSEA VOYAGE (NBC. 10-11 p.m.). The nuclear-powered sub George Washington on an actual operational mission. Repeat.

THEATER

THE SUBJECT WAS ROSES, but the theme is thorns in this perceptive new play by Frank D. Gilroy about the barbed blood letting that drains people who live within the closeness of the family without being close. The playwright could not have dreamed of a better cast than Irene Dailey, Jack Albertson and Martin Sheen.

HAMLET is played by Richard Burton as Hamlet wanted to be -- the self-assured ruler of his fortunes, and never the tormented prey of a tragic destiny. It is a portrayal alight with intelligence, but rarely aflame with feeling.

FUNNY GIRL, based on the life of Fanny Brice, is an entertaining excuse -- if any is needed -- to see an exciting new Broadway star who is far more than an entertainer, Barbra Streisand.

HIGH SPIRITS. Bea Lillie and Tammy Grimes are probably creatures of their own imaginations, since not even Author Noel Coward could quite conceive such zany stage sprites.

ANY WEDNESDAY. Sandy Dennis plays a kept doll with an unkempt sense of humor that leads to precious little love-making but does produce an unreasonable amount of fun-making.

DYLAN is another acting triumph for Alec Guinness, as he bodies forth the poetic fire, the playful wit, the alcoholic antics and the fierce urge to self-destruction that constituted the life and legend of Dylan Thomas.

BAREFOOT IN THE PARK turns a six-flight walkup into a cascade of laughs about young love in Manhattan.

Off Broadway

THE KNACK is a fantastically droll British bedroom farce played out in an all-but-bare room. If one can imagine three perplexed and, at times, almost pathetic Marx Brothers chasing a plump country girl, with the cry of "Rape!" punctuating the air like "Tallyho!", one gets a glimmer of Playwright Ann Jellicoe's comic instincts.

DUTCHMAN. A sex-teaser white girl lures and then tongue-lashes a sedate Negro in a subway car until he turns on her with a venomous tirade of racial hate. Playwright LeRoi Jones aims to terrify, and between stations he succeeds.

THE TROJAN WOMEN. This tragic masterpiece by Euripides is 2,400 years old. but in its current superb production, it is the most profoundly alive drama to be found in New York.

RECORDS

Pop IPs

The longest-lived popular recordings today are of Broadway musicals. My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music and Camelot have sold over a million copies each and are still buyers' favorites. Two original-cast albums of current shows may join these golden few. having displaced the Beatles this month as top sellers:

HELLO, DOLLY! (RCA Victor). Almost everyone who can carry a tune has recorded Jerry Herman's title song, but it sounds mellowest and best here where it came from. Eileen Brennan makes Ribbons Down My Back send shivers. However, it is the meddling matchmaker. Carol Channing. all brass and honey, who firmly takes over the proceedings when she announces, / Put My Hand In, and stays zanily in charge till she gurgles So Long, Dearie.

FUNNY GIRL (Capitol) is actually a fourth album triumph for Barbra Streisand. She sings nearly all the Jule Slyne-Bob Merrill songs, from the ragtime Cornet Man and up-tempo Don't Rain on My Parade to the ballads that are a fever chart of her love affair, from its first tender moments (People) to the dawn of doubt (Who Are You Now?). Danny Meehan is a lively musical addition as a vaudeville hoofer, but Sydney Chaplin sounds as if he needs to be wound up.

Other tops in the singing-pop field:

BEWITCHED (Kapp). There is no escaping Jack Jones these days on TV and bestselling record charts. Son of Musical Comedy Star Allan Jones, Jack is longer on looks than on personality, but his singing has a splash of Sinatra in it and an appeal to two generations, if not three. Here is something old, Dad's song, Rosalie, and something new, It Only Takes a Moment.

LADY IN THE DARK (RCA Victor). A reissue of Kurt Weill's songs from the classic musical psychodrama of 1941. The orchestral arrangements sound dated, and even in her prime (eleven years before her death) Gertrude Lawrence had the usual uncertain wobble in her voice, but her Saga of Jenny is nevertheless galvanic, and My Ship still haunting.

CATERINA VALENTE (London) sings one of the spate of new recordings glorifying the World's Fair City. Happen to Like New York. Caterina, who was born in Paris and can sing in eleven languages, has just the right cosmopolitan shimmer in her voice to make the compliment mean something, and she refreshes songs like Take the A" Train and Lullaby of Broadway.

ONCE AGAIN (RCA Victor). Ethel Ennis combines qualities found together less often than one would expect: natural musicality and an appealing voice. She seems to have narrow interests (Like Love, Wild Is Love, Love for Sale), but she has a way of setting a soft ballad floating for miles and then conducting a sultry, teasing tete-a-tete.

RITA PAVONE (RCA Victor). The U.S. wantonly sent rock 'n' roll rockin' round the globe, and now it's coming back from every quarter. Following the British contributions comes Italy's teen star, Rita Pavone. who looks like Jackie Coogan and who sings about various minor emotional mix-ups with a strong voice, weak English, and a peculiar Latin fury more suitable for political denunciations. She makes her opposite number in the U.S., 18-year-old Lesley Gore (Boys, Boys, Boys; Mercury) sound like a singing nun.

CINEMA

THAT MAN FROM RIO. Jean-Paul Belmondo ducks poisoned darts, outwits mad scientists, and narrowly escapes a Brazilian crocodile in Director Philippe de Broca's wonderfully wacky parody of all the adventure movies ever made.

YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW. Sophia Loren separates the men from the boys in three racy Italian fables directed with gusto by Vittorio De Sica. All three men are Marcello Mastroianni.

THE ORGANIZER. Marcello Mastroianni is superb as a scraggly 19th century revolutionary in this timeless, beautifully photographed, warmly human drama about workers who finally get up the nerve to strike against sweatshop living in a Turin textile mill.

THE NIGHT WATCH. Five prisoners trying to dig their way out of a cell unearth some bitter truths about the nature of freedom in this agonizing thriller from France.

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE. This dry spoof of Ian Fleming's fiction follows Secret Agent 007 (Sean Connery) to Istanbul, where wine, women and wrongs are swiftly and impeccably Bonded.

THE WORLD OF HENRY ORIENT. A pair of teen-age furies, Tippy Walker and Merrie Spaeth, pursue Pianist Peter Sellers around Manhattan with hilarious results.

THE SERVANT. Director Joseph Losey's smooth, spooky essay on class distinction in Britain casts Dirk Bogarde as the malicious valet who slyly cons his master out of his proper place.

NOTHING BUT THE BEST. In this cheeky, stylish, often mordantly funny variation on Room at the Top, an aristocratic wastrel (Denholm Elliott) teaches a lowly British clerk (Alan Bates) how to attain Establishment status.

THE SILENCE. Lightning bolts of Ingmar Bergman's genius illuminate a dark, chilling allegory in which two women and a child travel to a city abounding in lust, loneliness and death.

BOOKS

Best Reading

RAINER MARIA RILKE, THE YEARS IN SWITZERLAND, by J.R. von Salis. From an eventless life spent alone, Rilke drew lyric and contemplative poems that have made him a source of modern thought as well as modern poetry. Von Salis retraces what he can find of Rilke's life and describes the few people (all women) who influenced it.

JULIAN, by Gore Vidal. In A.D. 361, Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate took an 18-month back step to the Hellenic gods, using all his power to destroy Christianity. In this ingenious historical novel, Gore Vidal brings his wit and urbanity to his subject, and if he does not quite capture the spirit of this elegant hero, his novel is still entertaining and convincing.

NEW NEGRO POETS: U.S.A., edited by Langston Hughes. These 37 young Negro poets seem to have read their Wallace Stevens and Robert Lowell, along with everyone else. The result is highly personal verse, much of it good, more of it promising.

A MOVEABLE FEAST, by Ernest Hemingway. The Nobel-prizewinning author wrote this memoir of his lean years in the Paris of the '20s when he was in his 50s, rich, famous but passe. Feast reveals Hemingway's deadly, deadpan sense of humor, his lingering romanticism, but most of all the degree to which he fooled himself about the rich and glamorous, who, he thought, virtually kidnaped him into their world.

THE INCONGRUOUS SPY, by John Le Carre. Two earlier thrillers by the author of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold are reissued in one volume. The better one is also set in the Cold and has some of the same characters.

Best Sellers

FICTION 1. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, Le Carre (1 last week)

2. Convention, Knebel and Bailey (2)

3. The Spire, Golding (5)

4. The Night in Lisbon, Remarque (4)

5. The Group, McCarthy (3) 6. Candy, Southern and HofFenberg (7) 7. Von Ryan's Express, Westheimer (6)

8. The Wapshot Scandal, Cheever (8)

9. The Deputy, Hochhuth 10. The Martyred, Kim (9)

NONFICTION 1. A Moveable Feast, Hemingway (2)

2. Four Days, U.P.I, and American Heritage (1)

3. Diplomat Among Warriors, Murphy (3)

4. A Day in the Life of President Kennedy, Bishop (4)

5. The Naked Society, Packard (5)

6. The Green Felt Jungle, Reid and Demaris (6)

7. In His Own Write, Lennon (9)

8. Profiles in Courage, Kennedy (7)

9. When the Cheering Stopped, Smith (10) 10. My Years with General Motors,

Sloan (8)

*All times E.D.T.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.