TELEVISION

Thursday, April 7

HIGHLIGHTS OF THE 1966 RINGLING BROTHERS, BARNUM & BAILEY CIRCUS (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.).* Roy Rogers and Dale Evans are hosts for the 96th edition of the Greatest Show on Earth.

REVOLUTION OF THE THREE R'S (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). This special explores some of the innovations in school curriculum and teaching methods developed to correct the shortcomings of today's educational system.

Friday, April 8

COURT MARTIAL (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). Premiere. Joan Hackett guest-stars in the first episode of a series about two young lawyers assigned to the Judge Advocate General's office during World War II.

Saturday, April 9

MASTERS GOLF TOURNAMENT (CBS, 5-6 p.m.). The 30th annual tournament, with Jack Nicklaus defending his title against top U.S. and foreign professionals and amateurs.

GOLF WITH SAM SNEAD (NBC, 5:30-6 p.m.). Golf lesson for one and all.

Sunday, April 10

MUSIC OF THE RESURRECTION (NBC, 2-3 p.m.). An Easter special that will present music from the 5th century to the present, including works by Bach, Brahms, Poulenc and Tournemire.

CBS SPORTS SPECTACULAR (CBS, 2:30-4 p.m.). "The World Ski Flying Championships" from Planica, Yugoslavia, features ski jumping that is twice as high (over 400 feet) and twice as long as usual.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). "Jackpot in Libya" explores the ramifications of the oil strike in this desert country--2 1/2 times the size of Texas.

BELL TELEPHONE HOUR (NBC, 6:30-7:30 p.m.). John Forsythe hosts a musical salute to spring, Passover and Easter. Guests include Richard Tucker, Gabriella Tucci, Nancy Ames, the Serendipity Singers and the Sholom Secunda Chorale.

Tuesday, April 12

CBS REPORTS (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). "The Other War in Viet Nam" will focus on Binh Dinh province, detailing the scope of the joint U.S. and South Vietnamese rural construction and development activities currently under way in key areas of South Viet Nam.

THEATER

MARK TWAIN TONIGHT! Hal Holbrook takes more than three hours putting on his Mark Twain makeup, but he has spent 13 years getting into Mark Twain's psyche. The result is a one-man show that is wise, warming and witty.

WAIT A MINIM! Light of hand, light of heart and light of foot, this musical revue from South Africa is keenly aware of and distinctly amused by more magnetic centers of civilization.

PHILADELPHIA, HERE I COME! The immigrant is an archetypal role in American experience, and now from Dublin,

Playwright Brian Friel sends a reminder of the wrench at leaving the other side. As a double exposure of the young Irish hero, Donal Donnelly and Patrick Bedford do not miss a trick or a tear in the whole course of the show.

SWEET CHARITY. Gwen Verdon, danseuse distinguee of the U.S. musical stage, is fetchingly exuberant as a taxi dancer seeking a wagon for her unhitched star. Bob Fosse's choreography pumps vitality into Neil Simon's flabby book.

INADMISSIBLE EVIDENCE, by John Osborne, is one man's violent outburst at how he has marred his life and how life has mauled him. Poisoned arrows of wit and vituperation fill the air, and Nicol Williamson is an actor-archer with deadly aim.

THE PERSECUTION AND ASSASSINATION OF MARAT AS PERFORMED BY THE INMATES OF THE ASYLUM OF CHARENTON UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE. While the lines of Peter Weiss's philosophical argument of the social revolutionary v. the anarchic egoist are a trifle jaded, the theatricality of his drama, as performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company under the direction of Peter Brook, is totally jarring to the unsuspecting.

CACTUS FLOWER. France is fertile soil for sex farces, and Director Abe Burrows has deftly pruned this recent sprout to make it thrive in the Broadway landscape. Lauren Bacall and Barry Nelson reap a rich harvest of giggles and guffaws.

RECORDS

Jazz

ORNETTE COLEMAN'S At the Golden Circle, Stockholm, Vol. 1 (Blue Note) is his first recording in three years, and shows the happy effects of his welcome in Sweden as a cultural force--the Willem de Kooning of jazz. Coleman has been such a successful musical iconoclast that his music no longer sounds far "outside," although his alto sax still skips and dips in a blithe, wild way. Here, it occasionally turns into a little tune and then suddenly wrenches free again. His string bass player, David Izenzon, provides a wonderfully eerie foggy bottom in Dawn.

DENNY ZEITLIN is both a pianist and an M.D. in psychiatric training who likes to analyze his music ("I attempted to build layer upon layer of tension to generate an organic shape"). In Live at the Trident (Columbia), he plays standards and some pieces of his own in a wide variety of moods and forms. Although he pays allegiance to Ornette Coleman as the most significant jazzman of the decade, Zeitlin himself plays it much safer and at times seems to be simply entertaining at the cocktail hour.

LEE MORGAN, a junior Dizzy Gillespie, last year unexpectedly found his jazz LP, The Sidewinder, winding its way inexorably up the country's bestseller charts. Now along comes The Rumproller (Blue Note), which is overflowing with Morgan's fluent and expressive trumpeting and some good tenor-sax playing by Joe Henderson. The title piece is a bit ponderous, with more rump than roll, but Morgan's composition Eclipso is a humorous bit of hopscotch through calypsoland, and The Lady is a dreamlike, moving ballad for Billie Holiday.

HORACE SILVER has led a successful quintet for ten years now, featuring his own melodic but hard-driving piano and compositions both bright and Silvery blue. The title piece of his Cape Verdean Blues (Blue Note) is a spunky bit of funk with a samba beat. In Nutville, Bonita and Mo' Jo, Veteran Trombonist J. J. Johnson adds a third horn to the trumpet and sax of the mellow, swinging combo.

BILL EVANS, who usually stresses simplicity, has surrounded himself with strings for some improvisations on Bach, Chopin, Scriabin and Granados (Bill Evans Trio with Symphony Orchestra; Verve). It is best, and easy, to forget that Bach had anything to do with the gentle, romantic schmalz called Valse, but this and the other adaptations are pleasant displays of Evans' skilled, introspective and sometimes sentimental piano playing.

WES MONTGOMERY keeps his guitar swinging (in Naptown Blues) and singing (in End of a Love Affair). He is backed by a highly charged battery of eight brasses and five woodwinds conducted by Arranger Oliver Nelson, who can be counted on for vigorous and arresting instrumental settings. The album: Goin' Out of My Head (Verve).

CINEMA

MORGAN! Two gifted young British actors, David Warner and Vanessa Redgrave, enliven a way-out comedy about an eccentric London painter who is destroyed by his love for his divorced wife, his mother, Karl Marx and King Kong.

HARPER. As a private eye on a kidnaping case, Paul Newman bites off a chunk of the grand old Bogart tradition and spits it out in slick '60s style. Lauren Bacall, Arthur Hill, and Julie Harris help to complicate the plot.

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW. The life of Christ in a fresh and fascinating film based wholly on Scripture and played like an act of faith by a non-professional cast under Director Pier Paolo Pasolini, an Italian Communist.

OTHELLO. Sir Laurence Olivier, in sometimes distracting blackface, plays Shakespeare's Moor as a one-man show.

DEAR JOHN. A sex-starved seagoing man (Jarl Kulle) spends a weekend with a waitress (Christina Schollin) whose attractions turn out to be more than sin-deep in Swedish Director Lars Magnus Lindgren's tender, funny and lusty study of a love match in the making.

LOVING COUPLES. Another Swedish showpiece, this one contrived by Film Star turned Director Mai Zetterling. Antimarriage, antisex, anti-men, Couples is a long lively closeup of three young women and the ne'er-do-wells they cannot say no to.

SHAKESPEARE WALLAH. The sunset of colonialism in India colors a wry, wistful and poetic comedy by U.S. Director James Ivory, who delicately explores a love triangle composed of a young man (Shashi Kapoor), a native film star (Madhur Jaffrey), and an ingenue (Felicity Kendal), who are touring the provinces with an English Shakespeare troupe.

THE GROUP. Under the expert tutelage of Director Sidney Lumet, eight captivating young actresses rediscover the Roosevelt era in an irresistible drama based on Mary McCarthy's bitchy, college-bred bestseller about what happened to Vassar's class of '33 after commencement day. Joan Hackett, Jessica Walter, Shirley Knight and Joanna Pettet are the most active alumnae.

THE LAST CHAPTER. Quietly narrated by Theodore Bikel, this collection of rare film clips avoids the chamber-of-horrors approach in recalling the almost unbearably poignant history of Poland's Jews.

THE SHOP ON MAIN STREET. This Czech drama hurls the question of universal guilt into a tranquil, Nazi-occupied Slovakian village in 1942. The case concerns a little Aryan nobody (Josef Kroner) who is put in charge of the business, and the fate, of a shiningly innocent old Jewish shopkeeper (Ida Kamiska).

BOOKS

Best Reading

THE LAST BATTLE, by Cornelius Ryan. With meticulous detail, Author Ryan (The Longest Day) paints an exciting, often terrifying account of the final death agonies of Berlin and Hitler's Third Reich during World War II.

A GENEROUS MAN, by Reynolds Price. The wild and wandering pursuit of an escaped python through a North Carolina pinewoods provides the epic setting for this perceptive, humorous novel of an adolescent boy's march into manhood.

TOO FAR TO WALK, by John Hersey. Though his fictional sense is slightly askew, Author Hersey's finely tuned reportorial ear is near perfect in this Faustian spoof about a morose sophomore who temporarily strikes a bargain with the Devil.

THE DOUBLE IMAGE, by Helen Maclnnes. Another well-mannered and innocent hero, another band of dastardly international spies, and--presto!--Master Spy-writer Maclnnes produces another of her literate and first-rate suspense tales.

GARIBALDI AND HIS ENEMIES, by Christopher Hibbert. Author Hibbert has drawn a clear and coherent portrait of the red-shirted romantic who led Italy from confusion to nationhood a century ago.

THE SADDEST SUMMER OF SAMUEL S, by J. P. Donleavy. A writer who can see the humor in human despair, Novelist Donleavy here disburses another handsome, lean portion of his inexhaustible wit, this time about a man who embarks on a successful search for hopelessness.

BRET HARTE, by Richard O'Connor. Historian O'Connor does well with figures who never quite hit it big, and Bret Harte never did: despite all he wrote, his literary crown rests on two stories and a bit of very bad verse.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. The Source, Michener (1 last week)

2. The Double Image, MacInnes (2)

3. Valley of the Dolls, Susann (3)

4. The Embezzler, Auchincloss (5)

5. Those Who Love, Stone (4)

6. The Billion Dollar Brain, Deighton (8)

7. Tell No Man, St. Johns (7)

8. The Comedians, Greene (6)

9. The Lockwood Concern, O'Hara (10)

10. The Adventurers, Robbins

NONFICTION

1. In Cold Blood, Capote (1)

2. The Last 100 Days, Toland (3)

3. The Proud Tower, Tuchman (4)

4. Games People Play, Berne (2)

5. The Last Battle, Ryan (5)

6. A Thousand Days, Schlesinger (6)

7. A Gift of Prophecy, Montgomery (7)

8. Kennedy, Sorensen (8)

9. The Penkovskiy Papers, Penkovskiy (9)

10. Yes I Can, Davis and Boyar (10)

*All times E.S.T.

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