TELEVISION

Wednesday, April 28 "MY NAME IS BARBRA" (CBS, 9-10 p.m.)* The first of Streisand's long-awaited specials -- and as close to compulsory viewing as TV showbiz ever gets. Highlights include a madly chic fashion number in deserted Bergdorf Goodman, introduced by Fanny Brice's old song Second-Hand Rose. For those who lamented its exclusion from Funny Girl, Barbra belts out My Man. The show has everything --namely, Barbra Streisand.

ABC SCOPE (ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.). "Wall Street: Instant Money," a report on stock-exchange specialists.

Thursday, April 29 THE WORLD'S FAIR ENTERTAINMENT SPECTACULAR (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). A celebration of the reopening of the fair, with Gordon and Sheila MacRae co-hosting.

Friday, April 30 RAWHIDE (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Every now and then the most serious actress wants to play cowgirl. Thus: Julie Harris, guest-starring in "The Calf Woman."

BOB HOPE PRESENTS THE CHRYSLER THEATER (NBC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). George C. Scott plays a World War II sub captain in a dilemmatic moment: Japanese ships are cross-haired in his periscope as the atom bomb is dropped on Hiroshima. To fire torpedoes, or not to fire?

Saturday, May 1 ABC'S WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). The 13th annual $75,000 golf Tournament of Champions from Las Vegas (final rounds on Sunday).

THE KENTUCKY DERBY (CBS, 5-6 p.m.).

From Churchill Downs, preceded by high lights of earlier races this year.

Sunday, May 2 EARLY BIRD SATELLITE BROADCAST (ABC, CBS, NBC, 1-2 p.m.). A three-network pool presentation of the first transatlantic television exchanges via Comsat Corp.'s new private-enterprise satellite, orbiting synchronously with the earth 22,242 miles above the South Atlantic.

L.B.J. REPORT NO. 2 (NBC, 5-5:30 p.m.).

More about the Administration's problems and progress to date.

PROFILES IN COURAGE (NBC, 6:30-7:30 p.m.). George Mason, the Virginia dele gate to the 1787 Philadelphia convention who refused to endorse the Constitution because it failed to include a bill of rights.

Monday, May 3 If all goes well, NBC will bounce Today (7-9 a.m.) off the Comsat satellite; CBS plans a news special on Viet Nam (1-2 p.m.) featuring a transatlantic discussion between Dean Rusk, Barry Goldwater, former Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home and British Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart; ABC is scheduling a women's news show from London (2-3 p.m.). All three plan to incorporate Com sat into news broadcasts (6-7 p.m.).

MELINA MERCOURI'S GREECE (ABC, 9-10 p.m.). Including a wedding on Crete, the Acropolis, Athens, the Parthenon, Delphi, and the old Byzantine community of Mistras, with music by Manos Hadjidakis and singing by Miss Mercouri. Color.

Tuesday, May 4

THE SCIENCE OF SPYING (NBC. 10-11 p.m.). A documentary special to fill all the U.N.C.L.E. and Bond fans in on the realities of espionage, including an interview with former CIA Chief Allen Dulles.

THEATER

On Broadway

THE ODD COUPLE consists of two de-wived males who share an apartment. This latest entry by Author Neil Simon and Director Mike Nichols is an astutely characterized study of marriages that are made in hell. Actors Art Carney and Walter Matthau manage to make incompatibility hilarious.

LUV. Here Nichols is concerned with a weird trio. Anne Jackson, Eli Wallach and Alan Arkin are creatures of the absurd, weeping cocktail tears of self-pity while the audience has all the laughs.

THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT. This couple isn't so odd, but funny all the same as a light-minded prostitute (Diana Sands) manages a stuffed shirt (Alan Alda).

TINY ALICE. Edward Albee may be the only person who is still worried about who or what Alice is. John Gielgud and Irene Worth may not know, but they provide an exciting evening of theater.

Off Broadway

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ENTIRE WORLD AS SEEN THROUGH THE EYES OF COLE PORTER REVISITED simmers with campy humor, and the bewitchers who stir the broth include a loony (Elmarie Wendel), a lovely (Carmen Alvarez), and a larky clown (Kaye Ballard). The little-known Porter songs are basted in wit.

JUDITH is more sensualist than saint in Jean Giraudoux's version of the apocryphal tale of the beautiful Jewess who saved Israel by killing an Assyrian general. Rosemary Harris' Judith suggests all the contradictions and fascination of the minx who became a myth.

A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE has all the compassion and sensitivity to Everyman's feeling of the best of early Arthur Miller. The tragedy brought by a Brooklyn longshoreman to himself and his family is movingly depicted by a fine cast.

RECORDS

Children's Favorites

Any parent who doesn't live in a cork-lined room has probably heard Mary Poppins (Buena Vista) by now, and probably feels that Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Disneyland), Alice in Wonderland (Disneyland) and Peter and the Wolf (Columbia) are members of the family.

More items old and new on the children's hit parade:

CINDERELLA (Disneyland) is in many ways the classic fable of how a star is born--hard work, neglect, catching the eye of the prince, and after that, top billing, with all the glass slippers a girl could want. There are lovely ballads, notably A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes.

A CHILD'S INTRODUCTION TO READING, WRITING AND ARITHMETIC (Golden) bounces through the three Rs with catchy tem pos, infectious lyrics, and clever character profiles. The number zero, for example, is a rather dispirited down and outer: "Dear little zero/Queer little zero/ He's nearly fat as he's tall." Nobody's hero, apparently, but once the other numbers discover the multiple advantages of standing next to zero, he becomes an incredibly popular and happy little cipher.

THE SWORD IN THE STONE (Disneyland) is as bright as Excalibur. It is the ageless legend of the exploit by which young Arthur, the humble knight's equerry, became King of England. Arthur is simple of soul and fairly regal in silence, but Merlin is a beguilingly garrulous, absent-minded wizard.

THE CHIPMUNKS SING THE BEATLES' HITS (Liberty), insofar as the Chipmunks may be said to sing. The record pulses with twisting beat, and the lines and titles have the cloudless innocence characteristic of the Beatles: "I want to hold your hand," "Money can't buy me love," "Remember I'll always be true," "While I'm away I'll write home every day."

HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN (Decca). If children ever have the vote, they will elect Danny Kaye President. He is a child's ideal entertainer, with his scat doubletalk, his brook-bubbling laughter, his gentleness of manner, and the wonder in his voice. Here, in some of his familiar favorites, he tells and sings of Thumbelina, and the King's New Clothes and the "table rare who said 'How I'd love a chair.' "

SLEEPING BEAUTY (Disneyland). The intriguing thing about fairy stories is that they are not really fairy stories, but camouflaged parables about people and the good and evil that they do. Mary Martin tells and sings this one.

CINEMA

THE PAWNBROKER. Rod Steiger gives a virtuoso performance as an embittered old Jew whose memories of concentration-camp horror counterpoint the bleak daily grind of his pawnshop in Spanish Harlem.

IN HARM'S WAY. Pearl Harbor under attack sets the pace for Director Otto Preminger's slick, exciting melodrama of World War II, heroically fought by John Wayne, Patricia Neal and a seaworthy supporting cast.

THE OVERCOAT. In Gogol's classic tale, translated exquisitely to film, a clerical nonentity (Roland Bykov) loses his life discovering that clothes make the man.

A BOY TEN FEET TALL. Handsomely photographed, this African odyssey tells of a runaway British boy (Fergus McClelland) who joins forces with a diamond thief (Edward G. Robinson) and stumbles into lots of crisp, adventurous fun.

THE TRAIN. Prior to the Allied liberation of Paris, athletic Burt Lancaster pursues boxcars full of French art masterpieces toward the German border while Director John Frankenheimer wreaks havoc on the rails.

THE SOUND OF MUSIC. The Tyrolean Alps get an eye-and earful of Julie Andrews, who adds spice to the sugary Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein.

DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID. In the French countryside, Director Luis Bunuel (Viridiarui) mounts a study of sadism, fetishism, frigidity, rape and murder as seen through the eyes of a worldly-wise Parisian maid (Jeanne Moreau).

RED DESERT. The bleak beauty of industrial Ravenna fills Director Michelangelo Antonioni's (L'Avventura) first color film--a provocative, painterly essay on alienation in a young wife (Monica Vitti).

ZORBA THE GREEK. Nikos Kazantzakis' novel becomes a roaring hymn to life, as sung by a wild old goat (Anthony Quinn) and his world-weary playmate (Oscar Winner Lila Kedrova).

BOOKS

THE ERA OF RECONSTRUCTION, by Kenneth M. Stampp. Historian Stampp argues that the actions of the North during the Reconstruction, far from being reprisals against the South, were aimed at giving the Negro his full civil rights.

BACK TO CHINA, by Leslie Fiedler. A successful satire on the Saul Bellow school of fiction that overglorifies man as his brother's keeper. Fiedler's hero greedily absorbs the blame for distant misfortunes, while making life painful for those closely involved with him.

THE NINE-TIGER MAN, by Lesley Blanch.

A nimble spoof of Eastern and Western concepts of femininity. The novel's two heroines both fall in love with a masterful Indian prince--one sacredly, the other profanely.

CASTLE KEEP, by William Eastlake. A company of miserable soldiers is desperately trying to sit out the Battle of the Bulge in an isolated castle. The Germans locate them, and the action begins.

ROBERT BRUCE, by G.W.S. Barrow.

This biography of Scotland's greatest hero tells the rousing, gory story of his struggle against England. Careful justice is done to recent research showing that, contrary to previously accepted historical view, Bruce fought for Scotland's glory rather than for the enlargement of his own fief.

MAX, by David Cecil. The story of Max Beerbohm's sunny, uneventful life makes relaxing reading for a more frantic age.

THE GOLD OF THE RIVER SEA, by Charlton Ogburn. This gloriously old-fashioned tale of a young man's conquest of the Amazon and his own restless nature is a welcome return to romantic adventure as a novelistic form.

ATATURK, by Lord Kinross. An acute and gripping biography of the mercurial autocrat who, singlehanded, transformed Turkey from a decadent relic of medieval Byzantium into a modern state.

Best Sellers FICTION

1. Herzog, Bellow (1 last week) 2. Up the Down Staircase, Kaufman (2) 3. Hotel, Hailey (4) 4. Hurry Sundown, Gilden (3) 5. Don't Stop the Carnival, Wouk (7) 6. Funeral in Berlin, Deighton (5) 7. The Man, Wallace (6) 8. The Ambassador, West (8) 9. An American Dream, Mailer (9) 10. The Ordways, Humphrey (10)

NONFICTION

1. Markings, Hammarskjold (1)

2. Journal of a Soul, Pope John XXIII (6) 3. The Founding Father, Whalen(3)

4. Queen Victoria, Longford (2)

5. My Shadow Ran Fast, Sands (5)

6. The Italians, Barzini (4)

7. How to Be a Jewish Mother, Greenburg (8)

8. Catherine the Great, Oldenbourg (9) 9. Aly, Slater 10. Sixpence in Her Shoe, McGinley (10)

* All times E.D.T.

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