TELEVISION
Wednesday, May 21
WEDNESDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 8:30-11:05 p.m.). Deborah Kerr, as Governess Anna Leonowens, squares off against Yul Brynner in his Oscar-winning performance as Siam's petulant but engaging monarch in Rodgers and Hammerstein's The King and 7(1956).
JACK BENNY'S BIRTHDAY SPECIAL (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Ann-Margret pops out of the cake while Lucille Ball, Lawrence Welk, Dan Blocker, Dennis Day and Jerry Lewis clown around to make Jack forget he's -- you guessed it -- 39. Repeat.
Thursday, May 22
NET PLAYHOUSE (NET, 8-9:30 p.m.). "Let Me Hear You Whisper" might seem a vari ation on the old frog-and-princess tale: it's the story of a scrubwoman (Ruth White) who strikes up a friendship with a porpoise, played by a life-size puppet and Puppeteer Bil Baird's voice.
Saturday, May 24 MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL GAME OF THE WEEK (NBC, 4 p.m. to conclusion). St. Louis Cardinals v. Los Angeles Dodgers, at Los Angeles.
WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). World light-heavyweight champion ship, with Bob Foster v. Andy Kendall, live from Springfield, Mass.
CHARLIE BROWN AND CHARLES SCHULZ (CBS, 8:30-9 p.m.). Co-Stars Schulz and Brown, live and in animation, with friends and admirers Astronaut Walter Schirra, the Royal Guardsmen (singing excerpts from Snoopy and the Red Baron), Vince Guaraldi (playing his composition Linus and Lucy) and Rod McKuen (growling out his theme music from a forthcoming Charlie Brown feature movie).
MISS U.S.A. BEAUTY PAGEANT (CBS, 10-11:30 p.m.). One of the nonevents television does so well, this 18th annual competition comes from the Miami Beach Auditorium. June Lockhart is hostess; Bob Barker emcees.
Sunday, May 25
WHITSUNDAY SPECIAL (CBS, 10-11 a.m.). Highlights of Duke Ellington's Sacred Con cert, featuring the timeless Ellington, his orchestra, four vocalists and three choirs. Repeat.
GUIDELINE (NBC, 1:30-2 p.m.). Hatred and tension between black and white and ways to dispel such troubles are the subjects under discussion on "Race and the Church: A Priest and a Nun."
A.A.U. CHAMPIONSHIP TRACK AND FIELD MEET (CBS, 3-4 p.m.). California relays from Modesto, Calif.
THE NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC YOUNG PEOPLE'S CONCERTS WITH LEONARD BERNSTEIN (CBS, 4:30-5:30 p.m.). Bernstein is billing Hector Berlioz's still fascinating Symphonic Fantastique as "the first psychedelic symphony in history."
CHILDREN'S THEATER (NBC, 6:30-7:30 p.m.). Sixty-three young dancers from the Children's Ballet Theater in a new version of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, choreographed by Christine Neubert. The original score is by Robert Maxwell; Geraldine Page narrates.
Monday, May 26
HIGHLIGHTS OF RINGLING BROS. AND BARNUM & BAILEY CIRCUS (NBC, 8-9 p.m.). Top acts, hosted by Arthur Godfrey with his good old horse Goldie. Circus stars include Animal Trainer Gunther Gebel-Wil-liams, the Four Brizios Clown Act, Rogana, the Queen of Balance, the Mickey Antalek Chimps and the Lindstroms, high-wire unicyclists.
THE DICK CAVETT SHOW (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). A new prime-time talk and variety series that will broadcast on Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Truman Capote, Liza Minelli, James Coburn and Candice Bergen will drop by to help Dick with the premiere.
Tuesday, May 27
NET FESTIVAL (NET, 9-10 p.m.). Barry Morse, who co-starred in The Fugitive, plays scenes made famous by great actors (David Garrick and Henry Irving, to name two) across three centuries. Repeat.
TUESDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11 p.m.). The now-classic Beatles frolic through their now-classic first film, A Hard Day's Night (1964).
CBS NEWS HOUR: GENERATIONS APART (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). The barriers between generations, as seen by students, S. I. Hayakawa, Margaret Mead, Herbert Marcuse, Sidney Hook and Dr. Benjamin Spock. Part 2 of a series, this segment is called "A Profile of Dissent."
THEATER
On Broadway
HAMLET. Some actors merely occupy the stage, but Nicol Williamson rules it. 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. It is a Hamlet of spleen and sorrow, of fire and ice, of bantering sensuality, withering sarcasm and soaring intelligence. Williamson cuts through the music of the Shakespearean line to the marrow of its meaning. He spares no contempt for the perfidious king who killed his father, but he saves his rage for the unfeeling gods who, in all true tragedy, make and mangle human destiny. Williamson is, in all, a great, doomed, spine-shivering Hamlet, and anyone who fails to see him 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. One need pay no heed to the fact that it won a Tony award, but some playgoers apparently still do.
PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM. Woody Allen stars in his own play about a young man who is rejected by girls even in his fantasies. Though the play does not properly progress along with the evening, Allen's nimble jokes and kooky angle of vision are amusement enough.
FORTY CARATS, with Julie Harris as a middle-aged divorcee wooed and won by a lad barely half her age, while her daughter succumbs to a man of 45, enters a plausible plea for a single standard of judgment on age disparity in marriage.
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 imagines himself elected Pope.
Off Broadway
NO PLACE TO BE SOMEBODY is a black panther of a play, stalking the off-Broadway stage as if it were an urban jungle, snarling and clawing with uninhibited fury at the contemporary fabric of black-white and black-black relationships. If the characters of Playwright Charles Gordone are not quite solidly realized, their sentiments most emphatically are. Gordone is too honest an author to lie about a bright brotherly tomorrow just over the horizon, but in thunder and in laughter he tells the racial truth of today.
THE MISER. Robert Symonds gives his best performance yet with the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater as the mock hero of Moliere's comedy. Skittering about like a bespectacled magpie, his Harpagon is a sprite of the cashbox, a stringy-haired witch of usury. To see him is a pleasure. To see him undone is a delight.
ADAPTATION--NEXT. Two one-acters, both directed with a crisp and zany comic flair by Elaine May. Miss May's own play, Adaptation, is the game of life staged like a TV contest. Terrence Mc-Nally's Next features James Coco in a splendid performance as an overage potential draftee.
TO BE YOUNG, GIFTED AND BLACK. An able interracial cast in a tribute to the late playwright Lorraine Hansberry presents readings from her works--journals, letters and snippets of plays.
DAMES AT SEA, with a talented cast of only six, is a delightful spoof of the movie musicals of the 1930s, with all their intricate dance routines and big, glittering production numbers.
CINEMA
WINNING. Paul Newman portrays a racing driver competing for his honor and the heart of Joanne Woodward in a noisy, disjointed film, in which separate scenes mesh as badly as stripped gears.
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 Francois Truffaut catches the glow of its director's warm humor and characteristically gentle insights into the benign folly and innocence of adolescence.
THE NIGHT OF THE FOLLOWING DAY. Masquerading as a routine kidnaping melodrama, this is actually an artful thriller directed and co-authored by Hubert Cornfield. Marlon Brando gives his best performance in almost a decade.
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, while Ring tells the story of a London accountant who adopts an otter.
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 sometimes lurches out of control, Richard Benjamin and stunning Newcomer Ali MacGraw save the show with finely shaded performances.
THE FIXER. Bernard Malamud's novel is the source for this resonant essay on individual courage and political morality. The actors--notably Alan Bates, Dirk Bogarde and Ian Holm--all seem perfect for their roles, and John Frankenheimer's direction is impeccable.
SALESMAN. The Maysles Brothers, with camera and sound equipment in hand, spent six weeks tracking a group of New England Bible salesmen on their weary rounds. The result is a searing, melancholy and not wholly unsympathetic portrait of what the Maysles call "one part of the American dream."
RED BEARD is an Oriental Pilgrim's Progress in which Japan's Akira Kurosawa explores the psychology of an ambitious young doctor so deftly that one man's frailties and strengths add up to a picture of humanity itself.
BOOKS BOOKS Best Reading
THE LONDON NOVELS OF COLIN MaclNNES (CITY OF SPADES, ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS, MR. LOVE AND JUSTICE). Icy observations and poetic perceptions of the back alleys and subcultures in that pungent city on the Thames.
PICTURES OF FIDELMAN, by Bernard Malamud. Yet another schlemiel--saint in fiction--but this one is canonized by Malamud's compassionate talent.
THE GUNFIGHTER, by Joseph G. Rosa. A balanced, wide-screen view of the often unbalanced men who infested the Wild West.
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 suburbia, Cheever stages the struggle of two men--one mild and monogamous, the other tormented and libertine--over the fate of a boy.
SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Through flashbacks to the catastrophic Allied 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.
THE MILITARY PHILOSOPHERS, by Anthony Powell. The ninth volume in his serial novel, A Dance to the Music of Time, expertly convoys Powell's innumerable characters through the 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, ir reverent young poets knocked about above the tree line and put time on ice.
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.
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 (3)
4. The Salzburg Connection, Maclnnes (7)
5. The Vines of Yarrabee, Eden (9)
6. Ada, Nabokov
7. Airport, Hailey (6)
8. Sunday the Rabbi Stayed Home, Kemelman (8)
9. The Love Machine, Susann
10. Except for Me and Thee, West (4)
NONFICTION
1. Ernest Hemingway, Baker (1)
2. The 900 Days, Salisbury (2)
3. Jennie, Martin (3)
4. The Peter Principle, Peter and Hull (5)
5. Miss Craig's 21-Day Shape-Up Program for Men and Women, Craig (6)
6. The Money Game, 'Adam Smith' (4)
7. The Trouble with Lawyers, Bloom (7)
8. The Age of Discontinuity, Drucker
9. The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson, Goldman (8)
10. Instant Replay, Kramer (10)
-All times E.D.T.
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