On Broadway
TELEVISION
Wednesday, December 23
SCOPE (ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.).* "This Way to Santa," a documentary on a Santa Claus who spends most of the year lonely and drifting but gets into his red suit each Christmas for the children.
Thursday, December 24
CHRISTMAS EVE SERVICES (ABC, 11:15 p.m.-midnight). Episcopal services from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan; (NBC, midnight-l:45 a.m.), Mass from St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan; (CBS, midnight1 a.m.), from St. Luke's Lutheran Church in Manhattan; (ABC, midnight1 a.m.), Mass from the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C.
Friday, December 25
TODAY SHOW (NBC, 7-9 a.m.). Burr Tillstrom and Kukla, Fran and Ollie in a special Christmas Day program.
THE ENTERTAINERS (CBS, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). Carol Burnett, Caterina Valente, Art Buchwald and Bob Newhart star in a special Christmas show.
Saturday, December 26
AMERICAN FOOTBALL LEAGUE CHAMPIONSHIP GAME (ABC, 2 p.m. to conclusion). The final contest for the 1964 A.F.L. crown.
Sunday, December 27
NOYE'S FLUDDE (CBS, 10-11 a.m.). A 13th century miracle play, originally performed in the English cathedral city of Chester, reinterpreted by Benjamin Britten.
YEAR END REVIEW (NBC, 4-5 p.m.). An NBC News special reviewing the events of 1964.
YEAR IN-YEAR OUT (ABC, 10:15-11 p.m.). An ABC News special on the events of 1964.
Monday, December 28
CAROL FOR ANOTHER CHRISTMAS (ABC, 9:30-11 p.m.). The first of a series of specials on the U.N., this dramatic show is based loosely on Dickens' Christmas Carol, has a script by Rod Serling, a musical score by Henry Mancini, and is directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz.
Tuesday, December 29
THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. (NBC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). Madlyn Rhue guest-stars as a lorn lovely who asks Agent Napoleon Solo for help.
PROJECTION '65 (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). NBC News's annual forecast of world events.
THEATER
On Broadway
POOR RICHARD. Jean Kerr is still wearing the life-of-the-party grin from Mary, Mary, but behind the witticisms something sobering denies that life is that kind of party at all. With Alan Bates playing a lyric poet turned wench charmer and lush, the comedy is less funny than Mary, Mary but more probingly perceptive.
THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT. Bill Manhoff fills every round with comic impact in this verbal slugfest, pitting a fiery, sexy shrew, Diana Sands, against a self-righteous bookstore clerk, Alan Alda.
LUV refuses to keep a straight face before some of the pious obsessions of the contemporary world and stage. Eli Wallach, Alan Arkin and Anne Jackson do honor to Murray Schisgal's comedy and Mike Nichols' direction as they rant and romp on a bridge.
OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR. Every living wordmonger of sacred theatrical cliches would swear that no one could make musical entertainment out of the spilled blood, blind gallantry, and stupefying idiocy of World War I. Joan Littlewood and her amazingly adroit London Theater Workshop company have done it. The result is hilarious, ironic, heart-warming and heartbreaking.
Off Broadway
MAN AND SUPERMAN. Performed with deceptive ease, superb acting finesse, and unfaltering intelligence, this APA-at-the-Phoenix revival of one of Shaw's masterworks is the sort of tribute that only finely polished talent can pay to acknowledged genius.
THE ROOM and A SLIGHT ACHE inject Harold Pinter's special menace-and-dread serum directly into a playgoer's veins.
THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY. Juicy characters never conceived by James Thurber have entered Mitty's fantasy world in this breezy and entertaining musical farce.
CAMBRIDGE CIRCUS. The free-flowing antics of a troupe of clever Cantabrigians demonstrate that successful humor need not be sick or bitter, just terribly funny.
RECORDS
Best Listening: 1964
OPERA: Baritones rarely get the girl, but this year they take the cake. Geraint Evans turns in one of opera's great characterizations as the lecherous old swindler in RCA Victor's Falstaff, amply supported by the other singers and by Conductor Georg Solti. In Rigoletto (Deutsche Grammophon), Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. best known for his sorrowful lieder. proves himself equally expressive as the tragic hunchback in a powerful performance led by Rafael Kubelik.
CHORAL: Carlo Mario Giulini masterfully melds the Philharmonia Orchestra, chorus and four soloists into an incandescent Verdi Requiem (Angel). Intricate but eloquent, the Symphony of Psalms is performed by the CBC Symphony and the Festival Singers of Toronto, spurred on by Igor Stravinsky (Columbia).
INSTRUMENTAL: Pieces often played by students reveal unsuspected subtleties as Glenn Gould makes eloquent the several voices in Bach's Two-and Three-Part Inventions (Columbia) and Artur Rubinstein turns Chopin's Waltzes into lilting, sparkling poems (RCA Victor). Sviatoslav Richter makes Schubert's "Wanderer" Fantasia sing (Angel), and John Browning premieres what may become one of tomorrow's classics, though not too different from yesterday's: Samuel Barber's 1962 Piano Concerto (Columbia).
ORCHESTRAL: A triumphant beginning to the Boston Symphony Prokofiev series is the big, wartime Fifth Symphony, conducted by Erich Leinsdorf. Leonard Bernstein fired up the New York Philharmonic for Liszt's Faust Symphony and cooled them down for a lapidary performance of Haydn's Symphonies 82 and 83 (Columbia). Haydn (in Symphonies 95 and 101) also got the benefit of Fritz Reiner's accumulated wisdom and inborn precision in his last recording, made two months before his death (RCA Victor).
FOLK MUSIC: Only two months old, the songs from Another Side of Bob Dylan (Columbia) are already being hummed and strummed, for no one in the folk world hits so many responsive chords.
JAZZ: Big Band and Quartet in Concert (Columbia) shows off nine virtuosos, playing Monk, with Monk, at Philharmonic Hall. Dizzy Gillespie and the Double Six of Paris (Philips) combine acrobatic trumpeting and exhilarating scat singing, while on the dreamier side, there's Getz/Gilberto (Verve), the record that introduced the girl from Impanema. Coltrane's Sound (Atlantic) sounds great.
MUSICALS: Barbra Streisand, Carol Channing and Zero Mostel are the winners from the Broadway precinct in their cast recordings of Funny Girl (Capitol), Hello, Dolly! and Fiddler on the Roof (both RCA Victor).
CINEMA
THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG. Every word of dialogue is sung in this sparkling French musical by Director Jacques Demy, who tells a rather foolish fable of young love with taste, spirit and style.
GOLDFINGER. Another slam-bang spoof of Ian Fleming's fiction has James Bond (Sean Connery) testing his mettle with a gilded nude, a shapely henchwoman named Pussy Galore, and a master criminal who plans to pry the gold out of Fort Knox.
THE PUMPKIN EATER. Three husbands, a swarm of progeny and a nervous collapse leave a well-kept wife with an unkempt psyche in this marriage-go-round.
SEND ME NO FLOWERS. Rock Hudson is an exurban hypochondriac who persuades himself that the hereafter is at hand, Doris Day is his widow-to-be, and Tony Randall is the sprightly crapehanger next door.
SEANCE ON A WET AFTERNOON. An unhappy medium (Kim Stanley) and her timorous spouse (Richard Attenborough) bumble through a kidnaping plot, and Director Bryan Forbes turns it into one of those throat-drying English thrillers in which every second seems split.
MY FAIR LADY. Bountiful as ever, the musical classic by Lerner and Loewe out of G. B. Shaw retains Professor Rex Harrison as the Edwardian phonetics expert who transforms Audrey Hepburn from a cockney flower peddler into a proper Lady.
WOMAN IN THE DUNES. Trapped in a hovel at the bottom of a sand pit, a man and woman find that their hellhole offers the only real freedom in this luminous, violent allegory by Japanese Director Hiroshi Teshigahara.
BOOKS
Best Reading
FRIEDA LAWRENCE: THE MEMOIRS AND CORRESPONDENCE, edited by E. W. Tedlock Jr. Essays, letters and fictionalized memories reveal that D. H. Lawrence's wife was herself a typical Lawrence heroine, and in being openly unfaithful to her husband, practiced in fact the sexual freedom that he earnestly preached in fiction--and priggishly deplored in reality.
CHALLENGE OF MODERNISATION, by I. R. Sinai. An Israeli scholar argues that democratic ideals and Western aid will be largely wasted on underdeveloped countries until ruthless, single-minded leaders overcome their nations' psychological inertia and modernize their social structure toward the future economic "takeoff" point when they can begin to make realistic use of the West's largesse and technology.
A TREASURY OF AMERICAN POLITICAL HUMOR, edited by Leonard C. Lewin. A happy sampling of parody, lampoon and satire that stretches in broad grins from Concord Bridge to the Kennedy Frontier and spares no political ideology, be it right, left or middle.
THE FOUNDING FATHER, by Richard Whalen. The facts of Joe Kennedy's career--the fortunes he made in oil and real estate and his swift conversion of money into power for himself and his sons--need no embellishment; his life is a blueprint for the wheeler-dealer and the kingmaker.
HENRY ADAMS: THE MAJOR PHASE, by Ernest Samuels. Covering the last 30 years of Adams' life, this final volume of Samuels' massive biography tells of the people and thinking that influenced the historian in the writing of his greatest books, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres and the classic Education of Henry Adams.
THE HORSE KNOWS THE WAY, by John O'Hara. More short stories by one of the alltime masters of the art. With this, his fourth collection in as many years, O'Hara is threatening to cut off the supply to concentrate on long fiction.
SELECTED LETTERS OF ROBERT FROST, edited by Lawrance Thompson. This collection shows the poet's wit, shrewdness, ego--and also the courage that saw him through an unrelenting succession of painful family tragedies.
LIFE WITH PICASSO, by Franc,oise Gilot. Picasso's penultimate mistress tells in bitterly frank detail of her nine turbulent years with the century's most extraordinary painter-genius and illumines, by her own very considerable artistic knowledge, his views on the art and artists around him.
Best Sellers
FICTION
1. Herzog, Bellow (1 last week)
2. The Rector of Justin, Auchincloss (2)
3. The Man, Wallace (3)
4. Candy, Southern and Hoffenberg (4)
5. Julian, Vidal (8)
6. You Only Live Twice, Fleming (7)
7. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, Le Carre (6)
8. This Rough Magic, Stewart (5)
9. Armageddon, Uris
10. The Brigadier and the Golf Widow, Cheever (9) .
NONFICTION
1. Markings, Hammarskjold (1)
2. Reminiscences, MacArthur (2)
3. The Kennedy Wit, Adler (5)
4. The Italians, Barzini (6)
5. The Kennedy Years, The New York Times and Viking Press (3)
6. My Autobiography, Chaplin (4)
7. Life with Picasso, Gilot (8)
8. The Words, Sartre (10)
9. Russia at War, Werth
10. The Warren Commission Report (7)
* All times E.S.T.
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