On Broadway

TELEVISION

Wednesday, March 3 1 ABC SCOPE (ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.).*"Thorn of Plenty," a report on the hard life of California's migrant farm workers and the crucial labor shortage faced by fruit and vegetable growers.

Friday, April 2

THE GREAT ADVENTURE (CBS, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). A Civil War drama about Union officers who plot to escape from Virginia's notorious Libby Prison, with Jack Warden and Fritz Weaver.

FDR (ABC, 9:30-10 p.m.). "Distant Thunder" documents Europe's deepening crisis in the '30s: Munich, the Nazi seizure of Czechoslovakia, Italy's march into Albania, and, finally, Hitler's invasion of Poland and the outbreak of World War II.

Saturday, April 3

ABC's WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). Highlights of the Sebring Grand Prix of Endurance from Florida and the Holmenkollen International Ski Jumping Championships from Oslo.

TOP CAT (NBC, 9-9:30 p.m.). A new animated cartoon series about a gregarious alley cat. Premiere.

SECRET AGENT (CBS, 9-10 p.m.). This new series is imported from England, where it is one of the top ten, stars Patrick McGoohan as a British special agent. Premiere.

Sunday, April 4

THE AMERICAN SPORTSMAN (ABC, 4-5 p.m.). Hunting elephants in Kenya, deep-sea fishing off Panama, salmon fishing in northern Quebec, with Actor-Sportsman Robert Stack and others.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.X "Man with a Violin: Isaac Stern."

WORLD WAR I (CBS, 6:30-7 p.m.). The Allies intervene in the Russian Revolution.

PROFILES IN COURAGE (NBC, 6:30-7:30 p.m.). President Grover Cleveland's opposition to benefits for Civil War veterans.

THE GENERAL (ABC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). An informal portrait of Douglas Mac-Arthur, narrated by Van Heflin.

THE SUNDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 9-11 p.m.). War Hunt, an offbeat film about valor and insanity in the Korean War, with Robert Redford and John Saxon.

Monday, April 5

THE 37TH ANNUAL ACADEMY AWARDS (ABC, 10 p.m. to conclusion). Rex Harrison? Julie Andrews? Anthony Quinn?

Tuesday, April 6

NBC WHITE PAPER: TERROR IN THE STREETS (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). A study of criminal violence in the U.S., with Chet Huntley.

THEATER

THE ODD COUPLE, by Neil Simon. Walter Matthau and Art Carney, two middle-aged newly de-weds, share living quarters and watch their friendship go on the rocks for precisely the same reasons that their marriages did. The play, on the other hand, is convulsively successful, thanks largely to deft construction by Playwright Simon (Barefoot in the Park) and daft direction by Mike Nichols.

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF strays a world away from Broadway to capture the happiness and the hurt, the folkish airs and graces of a small Jewish community in a Russian town in 1905. Zero Mostel, an intuitive and masterly recorder of the mind's merriment and the soul's grief, gives this musical an unfaltering heartbeat. A male wedding dance with empty wine bottles perched in men's hats is a tingling high spot.

THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT, in the persons of a bookstore clerk (Alan Alda) and a prostitute (Diana Sands), hoot and screech at each other until they discover that they have something uncommonly common in common.

TINY ALICE, the dark lady of Edward Albee's allegory, has baffled critic and playgoer alike; in the impeccable performances of a cast headed by Irene Worth and John Gielgud, pseudo-metaphysics take on theatrical vitality.

LUV. Murray Schisgal sees life as a sickness from which most people recover, and he amusingly deflates the gassy, self-pitying bosh that is talked about it. Alan Arkin, Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson ride this troika of hilarity.

Off Broadway

A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE. Arthur Miller has expanded his famed 1955 one-acter about a longshoreman's fatal and incestuous jealousy into a powerful drama that approximates, even though it falls short of, the catharsis of Greek tragedy.

THE ROOM and A SLIGHT ACHE. Harold Pinter can be relied on to produce unnerving, dramatic and provocative comedies of terror, and he does it again in these two engrossing one-acters.

RECORDS

Folk & Gospel

THE MITCHELL TRIO: TYPICAL AMERICAN BOYS (Mercury). They look typical enough--conventional haircuts, clean shirts--but when it comes to singing, Chad Mitchell and friends pride themselves on being latter-day Weavers, a combo with a conscience. They specialize in satirical numbers such as Which Hat Shall I Wear (a giddy social type talking to her Negro cleaning woman) and Yowzah ("Shonuf, Yassuh Boss!"), an acid comment on the Uncle Tom refrain. They have three of the smoothest voices in folkdom, and their racial protests, though skimpy in content, are strictly nonviolent to the ear.

TRINI LOPEZ: THE FOLK ALBUM (Reprise). On the theory that a song can hit twice if it can hit once, Trini's first all-folk album consists mostly of other people's winners, such as Puff (the Magic Dragon), Crooked Little Man and We'll Sing in the Sunshine. He does not always listen to the words--Blowin' in the Wind sounds as exuberant as if those are greenbacks blowin', but why not? Trini has become accustomed to their flutter ever since he jammed the jukeboxes with If I had a Hammer two years ago.

ODETTA SINGS DYLAN (RCA Victor). In the space of a year or two, Bob Dylan, the prolific minnesinger from Minnesota, has refurbished the repertory of nearly every folk singer on record. Now Odetta lends her deep, dramatic voice to ten of his songs. She is as authoritative as the Delphic oracle in The Times They Are A-Changin', brave and bluesy in Walkin' Down the Line; but she melts the fierceness of Masters of War into a mere lament.

JOHN JACOB NILES: FOLK BALLADEER (RCA Victor). Niles started learning the folk music of his native Kentucky as a boy, collected more than 1,000 songs by the time of his extensive concert tours in the '30s and '40s, when these ballads (including Mary Hamilton, The Ballad of Barberry Ellen) were recorded. Niles weaves a strange, anachronistic spell as he sings them in a high, sweet voice, strumming a homemade dulcimer.

PETE SEEGER: I CAN SEE A NEW DAY (Columbia). Everyone seems to take his new songs to Pete. Fred Hellerman, for example, handed him his new, gospel-like prayer for Mississippi (Healing River) just before Seeger flew down there last summer. Pete also sings some traditional ballads (Follow the Drinkin' Gourd) and his own haunting Bells of Rliymney.

THE STAPLE SINGERS: AMEN! (Epic). The Staple family--Roebuck, his son Purvis, Daughters Mavis and Cleotha--is one of the liveliest gospel groups around, and they raise the roof with More Than a Hammer and a Nail and He's Got the Whole World in His Hands. But they are entertainers too (their title song, Amen, comes from the movie Lilies of the Field), and they incidentally demonstrate the strong kinship of gospel to rock 'n' roll.

CINEMA

THE OVERCOAT. In this virtually flawless Russian film based on Gogol's classic story, Roland Bykov is superb as the nondescript clerk for whom a new overcoat becomes a matter of life and death.

A BOY TEN FEET TALL. An orphaned British lad (Fergus McClelland) wandering alone through Africa falls in with a grizzled old diamond poacher (Edward G. Robinson) in a crackling adventure story with the charm of Huck Finn and the ruggedness of a Hemingway safari.

THE TRAIN. Boxcars full of French art are the rolling stock of Director John Frankenheimer's muscular World War II drama about a Nazi colonel (Paul Scofield) and a Resistance leader (Burt Lancaster), playing tug-of-war with trains.

DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID. Director Luis Bunuel (Viridiana) mitigates the imperfections of his corrosive satire with some artistry--and with Jeanne Moreau, who is cast as the Parisian servant girl in a rural landscape teeming with sadism, fetishism, frigidity, rape and murder.

THE SOUND OF MUSIC. Julie Andrews winningly upstages the Tyrolean Alps and surmounts heaps of sugary sentiment in this Richard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein operetta about the Trapp Family Singers who fled Nazi-dominated Austria in 1938.

HOW TO MURDER YOUR WIFE. Uxoricidal impulses, batted around with a slapstick by Jack Lemmon as a reluctant husband, Terry-Thomas as his woman-hating Man Friday, and Italy's Virna Lisi as the superfluous lady.

NOTHING BUT A MAN. With impressive insight and objectivity, this drama gets under the skin of a young Negro (Ivan Dixon) who tries to run away from his life, his wife (Abbey Lincoln) and his color.

MARRIAGE-ITALIAN STYLE. After 20 years of fun, a pastry merchant (Marcello Mastroianni) discovers that his home-loving harlot (Sophia Loren) has hoarded up enough wild oats for a wedding cake.

ZORBA THE GREEK. The heart and soul of Nikos Kazantzakis' novel are brought roaringly to life by Anthony Quinn, as the wicked old brute who teaches a timid essayist (Alan Bates) to put away his books and plunge into real trouble.

BOOKS

Best Reading

THE FAMILY MOSKAT, by Isaac Bashevis Singer. The story of a rich Warsaw family from pre-World War I days until 1939, told with richness and scope reminiscent of the great 19th century Russian novels. Singer, too often tagged as "the master of Yiddish prose," ranks among the best contemporary novelists in any language.

SOUL OF WOOD, by Jakov Lind. The author, whose Austrian Jewish parents were killed by the Nazis, picks relentlessly at the fabric of guilt and complicity that made all humanity an accessory to Germany's crimes. Lind has a mocking, graceful wit that is both casual and lethal.

LINCOLN'S SCAPEGOAT GENERAL, by Richard S. West Jr. "The Beast"--Benjamin Butler--was one of the Civil War's toughest Northern generals. He earned Southerners' undying hatred as the governor of occupied New Orleans, became a fervent champion of liberal causes during the Reconstruction. West succeeds admirably in separating an unusual man from the usually accepted image of the Beast.

THE GOLD OF THE RIVER SEA, by Charlton Ogburn. Author Ogburn (The Marauders fills a rousing novel with high adventure and lusty characters, but is himself possessed--and possesses readers--by the grandeur and savagery of the Amazon.

PRETTY TALES FOR TIRED PEOPLE, by Martha Gellhorn. In three long short stories set in the weary world of Continental society, people manipulate friends as well as cards to shake their boredom. In both games there is always a loser, but in worldly collapse each of Gellhorn's failures finds the clue to moral regeneration.

THE ORDWAYS, by William Humphrey. With rich, wry Southern recall, Novelist Humphrey (Home from the Hill) retraces a family's oddball odyssey from post-Civil War Tennessee to East Texas and down to the Mexican border, marking every mile with fond and funny bouquets.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. Herzog, Bellow (1 last week)

2. Funeral in Berlin, Deighton (2)

3. Up the Down Staircase, Kaufman (5)

4. The Man, Wallace (4)

5. Hurry Sundown, Gilden (3)

6. Hotel, Hailey (6)

7. The Ordways, Humphrey (10)

8. The Rector of Justin, Auchincloss (8)

9. The Legend of the Seventh Virgin, Holt (7)

10. A Covenant with Death, Becker

NONFICTION

1. Markings, Hammarskjold (1)

2. Queen Victoria, Longford (2)

3. The Italians, Barzini (3)

4. The Founding Father, Whalen (4)

5. My Shadow Ran Fast, Sands (6)

6. Reminiscences, MacArthur (5)

7. Life with Picasso, Gilot and Lake (9)

8. Sixpence in Her Shoe, McGinley (7)

9. Iwo Jima, Newcomb

10. Catherine the Great, Oldenbourg

-- All times E.S.T

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