On Broadway: Feb. 25, 1966

TELEVISION

Wednesday, February 23

CINDERELLA (CBS, 7:30-9 p.m.).* Broadway tunesmiths who try to write original musical comedies for TV almost always fail, and Rodgers and Hammerstein were no exception, although this repeat should have a certain charm for the kids.

MICHELANGELO: THE LAST GIANT (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). Part 2, the artist’s life and work from the time he completed the Sistine Chapel in 1541 to his death in 1564. Jose Ferrer narrates, with Peter Ustinov as the voice of Michelangelo.

Saturday, February 26

ABC’S WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). Three seasonal championship contests: Winter National Drag Racing, National Outdoor Speed Skating and North American Tobogganing.

Sunday, February 27

DIRECTIONS ’66 (ABC, 1-1:30 p.m.). Kurd Hatfield in a biography of Trappist Monk and Author Thomas Merton.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). Walter Cronkite expounds the genius of Heart Surgeon Michael DeBakey.

THE BELL TELEPHONE HOUR (NBC, 6:30-7:30 p.m.). A program featuring the lyrics of Alan Jay (My Fair Lady) Lerner, with Singers Florence Henderson, Barbara Harris and Stanley (“Get me to the church on time . . .”) Holloway.

WALT DISNEY’S WONDERFUL WORLD OF COLOR (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Part 1 of “Ballerina,” a Disneyized drama about a girl who wants to dance, filmed in Denmark with the Royal Danish Ballet.

PERRY MASON (CBS, 9-10 p.m.). “The Case of the Twice-Told Twist” in which Mason gets involved with a gang of teenage Los Angeles car strippers who take their orders from a latter-day Fagin. In color for the first time after nine years of black and white.

Monday, February 28

HOLLYWOOD TALENT SCOUTS (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). Audrey Meadows, Robert Horton and Jan Murray tap some talent, most notably Sherri Spillane, wife of Mickey, who tries some singing. You, the jury.

TESTING: HOW QUICK IS YOUR EYE? (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). A chance to compare powers of observation with airline pilots, Marine Corps squad leaders, artists, scientists and taxi drivers.

Tuesday, March 1

TOWN MEETING OF THE WORLD (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). The Early Bird satellite relays a transatlantic discussion about nuclear controls between Senator Robert Kennedy in the U.S., French General Pierre Gallois in Paris, German Politician Franz Josef Strauss in Munich, and British Diplomat Lord Chalfont in Geneva.

THEATER

SWEET CHARITY is spectacular Gwen Verdon, who proves that she is still the dancer assoluta of the U.S. musical stage. Bob Fosse’s choreography is fresh, kinetic and witty, but the book, written by Neil Simon, is consistently stale, as if he had heard rather than written the gags.

INADMISSIBLE EVIDENCE is John Osborne’s Inferno, the journey of an “irredeemably mediocre” middle-aged soul through a modern hell. This anti-hero lashes out at his fate with visceral scorn and waspish humor. Nicol Williamson makes him a good sight larger than most heroes.

THE PERSECUTION AND ASSASSINATION OF MARAT AS PERFORMED BY THE INMATES OF THE ASYLUM OF CHARENTON UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE blends Brecht with the Theater of Cruelty, mixing in philosophy, revolution and insanity. A skin-tingling assault on the senses.

CACTUS FLOWER. This French transplant, nurtured by Director Abe Burrows, thrives on Gallic sex humor and farcical romance. Lauren Bacall as a spinster turned siren is as stingingly funny as she is decorative.

YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU. To be and let be is the code of a slightly nutty Manhattan family. Mama writes because a typewriter was delivered by mistake; Papa makes firecrackers in the basement. The APA revival of this 1936 George Kaufman-Moss Hart comedy envelops the humor in nostalgia.

Off Broadway

THE MAD SHOW. With only a passing nod to Mad magazine, this revue satirizes TV kiddie shows, soap-flake operas, sportscasters, recording stars. It has more jaw than teeth, but the show is amusing, thanks to a cast of remarkable impersonators.

HOGAN’S GOAT. Ethnic memory is tapped as William Alfred evokes Irish character, customs and political clout in Brooklyn at the turn of the century. Beneath the blarney and blather lies the turbulent story of the making and unmaking of an American politician.

THE WHITE DEVIL. A revival in modern dress recaptures all the gory gothic elements of John Webster’s 17th century melodrama of destruction wrought by ambition, greed, murder and revenge.

RECORDS

Orchestral

MAHLER: SYMPHONY NO. 10 (2 LPs; Columbia). Gustav Mahler died in 1911 after orchestrating about half of his last symphony. Several Mahlerites have fleshed out the last movements, including British Composer Deryck Cooke (TIME, Nov. 26), whose inspired and faithful version was used for this first recording. The anxieties of Mahler’s last summer, including illness and a marital crisis, along with the marginal notes on his manuscript (“Oh God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”), suggest that the music is programmatic in the most personal way. It is a melody-drenched, emotional and yet finally serene farewell to life, love and lyre. Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra give the work a smooth and haunting performance.

TCHAIKOVSKY: SYMPHONY NO. 4 (Columbia). From the first brassy challenge to fate to the booming triumph of the finale, Eugene Ormandy sweeps grandly through the Fourth Symphony, pulling from the Philadelphia Orchestra its famed bold and burnished sound. Nor does he slight the plaintive moments, or the whimsical. Ormandy has already made topnotch recordings of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth and Sixth, and the three performances are now available as a package.

MOZART: OVERTURES (Angel). Besides six overtures, including The Marriage of Figaro and Cosl Fan Tutte, Otto Klemperer plays the gently brooding Masonic Funeral Music and the rich and somber Adagio and Fugue in C Minor, which Mozart arranged for string orchestra from a two-piano fugue. With London’s Philharmonia Orchestra, which was reorganized and renamed the New Philharmonic Orchestra during the course of these performances.

RESPIGHI: ROMAN FESTIVALS (RCA Victor). Zubin Mehta, who prides himself on being a showman as well as a fine musician, sets off multicolored fireworks in his first recording as conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic (and the first from the Pavilion of Los Angeles’ new Music Center).

CARL RUGGLES: SUN TREADER (Columbia). Ruggles spent six years on his symphony, which had its premiere in Paris in 1932 and in the U.S. only last month. Like his more prolific friend and fellow Yankee, the late Charles Ives, Ruggles writes dissonant but cogent and original music. Sun Treader is a sober, seamless, one-movement tribute to a tragic hero, for thus Browning addressed Shelley eleven years after he was drowned (“Sun-treader, life and light be thine forever!”). Performed by the Columbia Symphony Orchestra, Zoltan Rozsnyai conducting.

CINEMA

THE SHOP ON MAIN STREET. Set in Nazi-controlled Slovakia in 1942, this perfectly played Czech masterpiece reduces an awesome tragedy to human size. Its seriocomic hero is a well-meaning Aryan nonentity (Josef Kroner) who seizes the button shop owned by a feeble, trusting old Jewess (Ida Kaminska) and finds himself a partner in her fate.

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW. An Italian Communist, Director Pier Paolo Pasolini, vividly re-creates the world and work of Christ with a cast of non-professional actors, a script taken line for line from Scripture, and a blessed absence of the usual conventions.

KING AND COUNTRY. The trial and execution of a pathetic World War I deserter (Tom Courtenay) mean agony for the officer (Dirk Bogarde) assigned to defend him in this rigorous British drama by Joseph Losey (The Servant).

THE FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX. While the wreckage of a twin-engined transport sizzles in mid-Sahara, Director Robert Aldrich coolly studies a crew of survivors headed by James Stewart in their attempt to escape on a wing and a prayer.

OTHELLO. Playing the Moor of Venice in black face, Laurence Olivier often strikes verbal fire from the kindling poetry of Shakespeare’s tragedy, but fails to ignite the smouldering passion of the inner man.

DOCTOR ZHIVAGO. Omar Sharif and Julie Christie head an exceptional cast in Director David Lean’s literate, thoroughly romantic evocation of life and love in Russia a half-century ago.

REPULSION. Terror shrouds a London flat in this classic chiller about a demure blonde murderess (Catherine Deneuve) and her eager suitors.

THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD. This strong, stark adaptation of John le Carre’s novel has Richard Burton giving his best screen performance as a burnt-out British agent sent to set a diabolical trap for a tireless foe (Oskar Werner) in East Germany.

DARLING. Low jinks in the jet set, with Julie Christie bouncing from pillow to post.

JULIET OF THE SPIRITS. Director Federico Fellini (8½) looks into the mind of a troubled matron, played by Giulietta Masina, and finds a kaleidoscope of fantasy.

BOOKS

Best Reading

A CHOICE OF WEAPONS, by Gordon Parks. The well-known Negro photographer recounts without a trace of self-pity his struggle to find a better weapon than hatred to use against the injustices he encountered in a white man’s society.

IN COLD BLOOD, by Truman Capote. The darkest side of murder—in this case the killing of a farm family in Kansas—is illuminated with a fidelity that makes the act as real as it was meaningless.

A VISION OF BATTLEMENTS, by Anthony Burgess. This wry account of a hapless young Briton’s jousts with the military bullies and oafs stationed on Gibraltar during and after World War II shines like a Faberge bauble when compared with the usual assortment of wartime fictional reminiscences.

BERNARD SHAW: COLLECTED LETTERS (1874-1897), edited by Dan H. Laurence. Shaw wrote as compulsively as he talked, and the 691 letters in this volume form a fascinating biography from the age of 17, when he was a Dublin real estate agent’s clerk, to the age of 41, when he was on the eve of his first big success, Candida.

ALLENBY OF ARABIA, by Brian Gardner. Lawrence of Arabia is more famous today, but Allenby of Arabia was a much greater soldier, or so Historian Gardner says, and he demonstrates the proposition with eloquence and scholarship in a biography of Sir Edmund Allenby that includes a superb description of his military masterpiece: the Palestine campaign that knocked Turkey out of World War I.

THE PROUD TOWER, by Barbara Tuchman. The author skillfully reconstructs the edifice of Europe—comfortable, complacent, seemingly secure—that was to topple forever before the guns of August 1914.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. The Source, Michener (1 last week)

2. Those Who Love, Stone (2)

3. The Double Image, Maclnnes (4)

4. The Lockwood Concern, O’Hara (3)

5. The Comedians, Greene (6)

6. Up the Down Staircase, Kaufman (5)

7. The Embezzler, Auchincloss (9)

8. Thomas, Mydans

9. The Billion Dollar Brain, Deighton (7)

10. Hotel, Hailey (8)

NONFICTION

1. In Cold Blood, Capote (1)

2. A Thousand Days, Schlesinger (2)

3. The Proud Tower, Tuchman (3)

4. Games People Play, Berne (4)

5. Kennedy, Sorensen (5)

6. A Gift of Prophecy, Montgomery (6)

7. The Penkovskiy Papers, Penkovskiy (7)

8. Yes I Can, Davis and Boyar (8)

9. A Gift of Joy, Hayes (9)

10. Is Paris Burning? Collins and Lapierre (10)