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N.F.L. FOOTBALL (CBS, 9:30 p.m. to conclusion). The Los Angeles Rams start off their season against the St. Louis Cardinals at St. Louis.
Tuesday, September 17
JULIA (NBC, 8:30-9 p.m.). Diahann Carroll as Julia Baker, a lovely young Negro widow who is attempting to make a new life for herself and her six-year-old son, discovers that the boy is a matchmaker in "Mama's Man." Premiere.
TUESDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11 p.m.). Bob Hope stars as a widower with Dina Merrill as his own special diversion in "I'll Take Sweden," 1965.
THEATER
On Broadway
ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD. Tom Stoppard borrows the Mutt and Jeff of the Globe entourage, keeps them in the Shakespearean situation, but endows them with 20th century complexes and complaints. John Wood and Brian Murray revel in the sometimes melancholic, ofttimes witty dialogue.
PLAZA SUITE. The impersonality of a hotel room has been the setting for many a personal encounter. Neil Simon arrives with three short comedies, in which Maureen Stapleton and E. G. Marshall play three different couples whose experiences in a Fifth Avenue hostelry range from the wistfully amusing to the farcical.
Off Broadway
A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN is a play for those who are lost and lonely. W. B. Brydon, Salome Jens and Mitchell Ryan are a father, his daughter and her almost-lover who see their lives slip away in the course of one lunar arc. Ted Mann's direction transmits much of the tenderness and sadness of Eugene O'Neill's tribute to the isolated.
THE BOYS IN THE BAND plays all the variations on the theme of homosexuality. Mart Crowley's composition has grace notes of hilarity but ends in a coda of bitter recognitions. Director Robert Moore conducts a finely tuned cast with precision and sensitivity.
JACQUES BREL IS ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN PARIS while his bold songs are sung nightly in Manhattan. Furious at life yet madly in love with it, Brel challenges it with bold imagery, sighs over it in sad verse, embellishes it with melodic observations of sly humor.
YOUR OWN THING. Shakespeare again proves himself to be a most congenial co-author as Twelfth Night provides the plot and cast of characters for an inventive rock musical about confusion of the sexes.
SCUBA DUBA. Playwright Bruce Jay Friedman makes a mockery of his "hero," a youngish, aging American on a holocaust of a holiday. The question is who is more intolerant, the intolerable protagonist or the creator who cannot tolerate him? Scenes of loving satire relieve the strain of an evening of tense comedy.
RECORDS
Opera and Oratorio
ROSSINI: RARITIES (RCA Victor). Montserrat Caballé sings some of Rossini's lesser-known arias in the florid style of another Spanish diva, Isabella Colbrán, who was Rossini's first wife. Caballe's pianissimos are her forte, and her Willow Song from Otello is like an aching echo of sorrow. Also affecting is the love song Di tanti palpiti from Tancredi, which in its day was so popular that ushers in Venetian law courts were expressly forbidden to hum it during sessions. As in most such recorded assemblies of fancywork, the display is more evident than the drama. Nevertheless, this is bel canto at its bellissimo, and it ravishes the ear.