(2 of 3)
Winston Churchill: The Valiant Years (ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.). "Alone No More": Russia is invaded, Pearl Harbor blitzed.
Mon., Feb. 13
Family Classics (CBS, 8-9 p.m.). The Heiress, a TV adaptation of the stage adaptation of Henry James's novel, Washington Square. With Julie Harris.
THEATER
On Broadway
Midseason on Broadway finds an unfavorable balance of dramatic trade, with the two most provocative original plays and the liveliest musical all imported. They are Rhinoceros, a farce-satire by perky Avant-Gardist Eugene lonesco; A Taste of Honey, a sort of earthy British lonely-hearts story; and the wonderfully pert French musical Irma La Douce. The domestic dramas include the tender, poetic family chronicle, All the Way Home; Advise and Consent, a tense political melodrama; and Tennessee Williams' Period of Adjustment, a lively but somehow disappointing comedy-lecture on marital success. Among the musicals: although it is currently fashionable to dismiss it, Camelot holds many treasures that make it worth seeing; Do Re Mi, a Runyonesque piece, is nearly salvaged by the antics of Phil Silvers and Nancy Walker. And two of the season's smallest-scale efforts are also its sprightliest—Carol Channing's satirical revue, Show Girl, and An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May.
Off Broadway
There are new signs of life now, but so far this season, things have been nearly as disappointing off Broadway as on. There is one impressive original work, Edward Albee's one-acter, The American Dream, a somber and surrealistic situation comedy deploring the loss of values in U.S. life. Albee is also represented in a downtown double bill of disenchantment that includes his The Zoo Story and Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape. Other holdovers: the Brecht-Weill-Blitzstein Threepenny Opera, heading toward its 2,300th performance; The Connection, a now-famed pad full of Method hipsters seeking to prove that the opiate of the people is heroin after all; and Little Mary Sunshine, a boffo operetta satirizing the Kerny, Frimlous past. Among worthy revivals, there is a superlative production of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler and a welcome reprise of Epitaph for George Dillon by John Osborne and Anthony Creighton.
BOOKS
Best Reading The Queen's Necklace, by Frances Mossiker. In a clever crosscutting of 18th century memoirs and trial briefs, most of them entertainingly libelous, the author tells about the famed and still-unsolved theft of Marie Antoinette's 2,800-carat necklace.
The Ice in the Bedroom, by P. G. Wodehouse. Yet another out-of-plumb castle in the air, designed by the old master, this one inhabited by a tiddly young aristoclot named Freddy Widgeon, and besieged by a villain named Oofy Prosser.
A Reader's Guide to Literary Terms, by Karl Beckson and Arthur Ganz. With scholarship and scholars' wit, the authors offer all one cares to know and possibly a bit more about Anacreontic, Transferred Epithets, Inscape, Parnassianism, Pastorals, Passion Plays or Pastiche.
Fate Is the Hunter, by Ernest K. Gann. A novelist (The High and the Mighty) and oldtime airline pilot, the author tells eloquently about the attrition of confidence, caused by too many close scrapes and too many dead comrades, that persuaded him to give up piloting.