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Wisdom (NBC, 5-5:30 p.m.). A conversation with Bertrand Russell. Repeat.
THEATER
On Broadway Gideon, by Paddy Chayefsky. A lustrous morality play about the simple farmer chosen by the Lord to lead the Israelites to victory over the Midianites. Fredric March as the Lord and Douglas Campbell as Gideon are, to put it mildly, magnificent. Chayefsky's vocabulary spirals off into rhetoric and his reasoning is sometimes flawed, but his theme is enduring—man's relationship to God.
The Complaisant Lover, by Graham Greene. A frothily amusing triangle play about a dentist, his wife, and the other man she picks to balance her emotional diet. An ingratiating cast headed by Michael Redgrave skates elegantly over patches of thin ice in the writing.
An Evening with Yves Montand flows as naturally and attractively through the singer's Paris as the Seine. Montand has a bedroom voice, but he can also mimic, clown, and act with a barometric sensitivity of mood.
Write Me a Murder, by Frederick Knott (Dial "M" for Murder), marks the Broadway spot where a superior mystery thriller may be found.
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying is put together as precisely as a fine watch by the jeweler of U.S. musicomedy jokesmiths, Abe Burrows. As the up-from-window-washer hero, Robert Morse is the funniest ployboy in the history of officemanship.
A Shot in the Dark, adapted by Harry Kurnitz from Marcel Achard's Paris hit, L'Idiote, is a sex-cum-murder comedy. Stars Julie Harris and Walter Matthau keep the winy wit at a steady bed-and-courtroom temperature and pour it to a farce connoisseur's taste.
From the Second City is a mirthful revue in which eight saucy Chicagoans mime flicker-lit parodies of silent films, sass headline heroes, and enact an all-too-human comedy about a horn-rimmed girl doing the Talkathon Twist with a beatnik boy.
The Caretaker, by Harold Pinter. One of Britain's most gifted young playwrights plants two brothers and an aging tramp in a junk-cluttered room, where they become entwined in an ambiguous relationship of spite, pride, dependence and rejection that richly epitomizes the wayward condition of man.
Off Broadway
Misalliance, by George Bernard Shaw. A jam session of ideas recorded by that master improviser, G.B.S., back in 1910. With a knowledgeable band of actors handling the lines, the bounce is still there.
BOOKS
Best Reading The Complete Ronald Firbank. The collected fiction, all clockwork nightingales and silver cobwebs, of an ineffable British fantast whose stories have delighted a small set of admirers for some 40 years.
The Great Forgery, by Edith Simon. The hero of this ironical novel, a scruffy old painter who forges a Holbein to show the art experts up as Philistines, is a fine, randy character who bears a strong resemblance to Joyce Gary's Gulley Jimson.
The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., by Sir John Hawkins, Knt. No biography could replace Boswell's, but this one, written four years before Bozzy's and then chased out of print by literary feudists, is well worth the time of Johnson fans.