On Broadway

TELEVISION

Wednesday, June 22

BOB HOPE PRESENTS THE CHRYSLER THE ATER (NBC, 9-10 p.m.)* "In Pursuit of Excellence," written and directed by John Cassavetes, concerns a college track star who decides to cheat on his finals.

THE JOHN GARY SHOW (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). The musical-variety summer re placement shows are still pouring out of the network woodwork. Filling in for Dan ny Kaye, this one features -- surprise --Danny as its first guest. Premiere.

Friday, June 24

WAYNE AND SHUSTER TAKE AN AFFECTIONATE LOOK AT JACK BENNY (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). Canada's top comics clip filmed and taped performances of U.S. comedy greats the way holders of gilt-edged securities clip coupons.

Saturday, June 25

ABC'S WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). The National A.A.U. Out door Track and Field Championships at Randall's Island, N.Y.; the Grand Prix of Belgium in Spa; the final hours of the Le Mans 24-hour Grand Prix of Endurance.

Sunday, June 26

CAPELLA PAOLINA (CBS, 10-11 a.m.). A special on two Michelangelo frescoes --The Conversion of St. Paul and The Cru cifixion of St. Peter -- in the Pauline Chap el of St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome.

CAMERA THREE (CBS, 11-11:30 a.m.). One of the earliest Negro activists was a slave named Sojourner Truth. She was born in 1797, and she went to court to test segregation, retrieve a child from slavery, sue a white man for slander. This program dramatizes her struggle.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). Moscow University and its 35,000 students. Repeat.

NBC NEWS ENCORE (NBC, 6:20-7:20 p.m.). David Brinkley is "Our Man on the Mississippi," taking a camera cruise from Lake Itasca, Minn., to Pilottown, La., and never the Twain shall meet. Repeat.

THE SUNDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 9-11:30 p.m.). Gordon MacRae and Shirley Jones in the film version of Rodgers & Hammerstein's Carousel.

Monday, June 27

DARK SHADOWS (ABC, 4-4:30 p.m.). A new daytime serial all about a young governess and a ten-year-old boy who live in a brooding, 19th century castle on a precipitous cliff above the raging sea on the rockbound coast of Maine. Premiere.

THE AVENGERS (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). One of the season's wittiest British imports now turns its satiric eye on Manchurian Can didate in "Room Without a View."

Tuesday, June 28

THE RED SKELTON HOUR (CBS, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). Tallulah Bankhead plays Madame Fragrant, "the world's greatest authority on exotic perfumes," to Skelton's man from the gas company looking for a leak. Repeat.

ESSAY ON HOTELS (CBS, 10-11 p.m.).

Harry Reasoner, whose Essay on Bridges and Essay on Doors were both delightful blends of fact and philosophic musing, now finds an inn thing to do--illustrated by film clips of hotels and motels in 50 cities with prices ranging from $500 to $1.10 a day.

THEATER

MAME is more lavish entertainment than outstanding musical, but it looks good and has the brash assurance typical of Broadway when it does something well because it is familiar. Angela Lansbury plays kooky Auntie with gusto.

PHILADELPHIA, HERE I COME! When a man leaves home and country, he buries part of himself, and he is not likely to stand beside that grave dry-eyed. Patrick Bedford and Donal Donnelly are excellent as the public and private selves of a young Irishman on the eve of departure for Philadelphia and the New World.

SWEET CHARITY. As a dance-hall dolly whose heart is leaden but whose feet are mercury, Gwen Verdon is effusive. The slickness of Bob Fosse's choreography is suffusive. What there is of Neil Simon's book is elusive.

CACTUS FLOWER. In a sex farce from France, a seasoned playboy dentist (Barry Nelson) loves nothing more than to cut the mustard. His plain nurse (Lauren Bacall) puts an end to all that with relish.

RECORDS

Piano

BACH: CONCERTO IN D MINOR; CHOPIN: CONCERTO NO. 2 IN F MINOR (London). Vladimir Ashkenazy's technical brilliance is enough by itself to rivet the listener's attention, but it is only one factor in a superb performance. He moves across the glittering surface of the Chopin like moonlight on a windswept lake, and gives the popular Bach concerto an almost hearty treatment that displays to perfection the gaiety in its baroque adornments.

BEETHOVEN: DIABELLI VARIATIONS (RCA Victor). Thirty-three variations on a waltz by the Austrian composer Anton Diabelli pose a formidable test for the virtuoso talents of 32-year-old John Browning. Much talked about but seldom performed, they strain the pianist's technical mastery and his emotional ambience. Browning, who is one of the best of the "percussive" school, passes the technical trials splendidly, but in the melancholy later variations, when he should be exploring Beethoven's darker nature, he appears to be marking time before the florid finale.

JOHN CAGE: VARIATIONS IV (Everest). Composer Cage arranges a curious counterpoint to the playing of David Tudor by splicing a variety of noises into the staccato piano theme: the sound of traffic on the street outside, a patrician English girl chattering nervously, a chanteuse, a coloratura, a boy soprano, Florence Foster Jenkins murdering high D at the end of the Queen of the Night's aria from The Magic Flute. Oddly but irresistibly, they add up to a cry from the heart.

MOZART: CONCERTOS 14, IN E FLAT MAJOR, AND 17, IN G MAJOR (Columbia). The elegant flowers of Mozart's genius are tended with loving care by Rudolf Serkin. He does particularly well at portraying the shifting moods of the G Major Concerto, which begins like one of the composer's opera overtures with a triumphant flood of sound, then grows increasingly introspective. Serkin's careful hands hold the balance, and the listener hears one of Mozart's most poignant statements.

KEYBOARD GIANTS OF THE PAST, VOLUME II (RCA Victor). Memories of an older and less self-conscious day, when a world-famous virtuoso could sit down and race through the Ride of the Valkyries and not hear teeth grinding in the audience. Olga Samaroff does it here, and Paderewski plays Senta's Spinning Song from The Flying Dutchman. The tone is unabashedly romantic, the style bravura, and the fact that the sound doesn't come thundering down several amplifiers but stays within human bounds only emphasizes the heroic proportions of these interpreters. Among them are Josef and Rosina Lhevinne playing Mozart, Alfred Cortot with Ravel and Ossip Gabrilowitsch playing his own work. The record's chief delight is an utterly ravishing performance by Rachmaninoff of Kreisler's sentimental ditty, Song Without Words.

LISZT: SONATA IN B MINOR; SCHUBERT: "WANDERER" FANTASY (RCA Victor). Artur Rubinstein lavishes what seems to be a lifetime's wisdom and dedication on these masterpieces of 19th century pianoforte. In the Liszt and in the opening of the Schubert he displays brilliant pyrotechnics; in the slow movement of the Wanderer, he spins out the quiet melody tenderly and serenely.

CINEMA

THE NAKED PREY. A desperate white hunter (Cornel Wilde) flees ten man-killing native hunters, giving fierce momentum to a classic African adventure drama that never stints on beauty, blood or savagery.

"THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING." As a Soviet sailor whose sub runs aground on an island off the New England coast, Broadway's Alan Arkin (Luv) makes light of cold war jitters in a rib-cracking feature-film debut.

AND NOW MIGUEL. Growing up on a sheep ranch in New Mexico proves eventful for the ten-year-old hero (Pat Cardi) of a sturdy adventure film by the makers of such children's classics as Misty and Island of the Blue Dolphins.

LE BONHEUR. A happy French philanderer tacks blissfully between his wife and mistress in Director Agnes Varda's exquisite essay on young love, spelled out with considerable cynicism and eye-filling art.

BORN FREE. Living among lions and looking as though they love it, Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers add zest to a dandy movie based on Joy Adamson's bestseller about her rambunctious house pet, Elsa.

MANDRAGOLA. A cool Renaissance beauty (Rosanna Schiaffino) defends her virtue to the next-to-last gasp but turns out to be a good loser in Italian Director Alberto Lattuada's lively version of Machiavelli's comedy.

MORGAN! Polished performances by Vanessa Redgrave and David Warner lend luster to an oddball comedy about an eccentric London painter who woos his ex--gorilla-style.

DEAR JOHN. Swedish Director Lars Magnus Lindgren studies the sexcapade of a lusty sailor (Jarl Kulle) and a winsome waitress (Christina Schollin) who discover that a weekend abed can lead to love.

THE SHOP ON MAIN STREET. Cast by the Nazis as persecutor of a helpless old Jewish shopkeeper (Ida Kaminska), a seriocomic Aryan nonentity (Josef Kroner) struggles against moral bankruptcy in a fine Czechoslovakian drama that reduces the march of history to events on a pathetically human scale.

BOOKS

Best Reading

ARIEL, by Sylvia Plath. Suicide ended the promising career of Poet Sylvia Plath in 1963. In these poems written during her last months, she dipped her pen in old wounds and secret bile and scribbled a volume of violent verse that constitutes a -major contribution to the poetry of abreaction.

THE LAST GENTLEMAN, by Walker Percy.

In this chaste and witty fable, Walker Percy surpasses his earlier achievement in The Moviegoer, and tells how a bright, likable young Southerner settles up with his idealism by settling down to ordinary life.

1066: THE STORY OF A YEAR, by Denis Butler. In the 900th anniversary year of the Norman invasion, Author Butler memorably measures the price of Hastings in terms of the man who died there (Harold of England) and the man who survived to wear the crown (William the Conqueror).

THE DOCTOR IS S'CK, by Anthony Burgess. As usual, Burgess' thoughts run deeper than his plot in this richly antic tale of a philologist who enters a hospital with a brain injury and discovers that it is a fun house mirroring unaccustomed images.

EARTHLY PARADISE, by Colette, edited by Robert Phelps. From random reminiscences that Colette published from time to time, Editor Phelps has skillfully constructed a sort of accidental biography that reveals her as the most extraordinary character in her oeuvre.

SELECTED POEMS, by Eugenio Montale. Poet Montale has been called "the Italian Eliot," and this first volume of his verse in translation to appear in the U.S. shows that readers have been missing a writer of importance, indisputably the most profound Italian poet of this century.

ON AGGRESSION, by Konrad Lorenz. In this fascinating natural history of violence, a celebrated Austrian naturalist traces the all-too-human passion of aggression to its roots in the lower phyla and finds there an inherent (and hopefully inherited) capacity to transform aggression into love.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. Valley of the Dolls, Susann (1) last week)

2. The Adventurers, Robbins (2)

3. The Source, Michener (4)

4. The Double Image, Maclnnes (3)

5. Tell No Man, St. Johns (5)

6. The Embezzler, Auchincloss (6)

7. Those Who Love, Stone (7)

8. Tai-Pan, Clavell

9. The Comedians, Greene (10)

10. Columbella, Whitney (9)

NONFICTION

1. The Last Battle, Ryan (1)

2. Papa Hemingway, Hotchner (2)

3. How To Avoid Probate, Dacey (6)

4. In Cold Blood, Capote (3)

5. Human Sexual Response, Masters and Johnson (4)

6. The Proud Tower, Tuchman (5)

7. Games People Play, Berne (8)

8. The Last 100 Days, Toland (7)

9. Unsafe at Any Speed, Nader (10)

10. Churchill, Moran

* All times E.D.T.

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