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A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM. Since Plautus originally wrote it, this musical is more than 2,000 years old, but the situations are still funny, the houris are delectable, and Zero Mostel is a pluperfect master of the comic revels.
HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING will probably run as long as its title. Going into its third year, it is still sharp, sassy and socko.
Best of off-Broadway holdovers:
THE DUMBWAITER and THE COLLECTION, by Harold Pinter. Britain's most stimulating young playwright likes to write comedies of terror, and no one writes them better.
THE BOYS FROM SYRACUSE. Plautus does it again, this time with the added tinkering of Shakespeare, George Abbott, and Rodgers and Hart. Apart from being a tuneful comic delight, the show contains an adorable and gifted cutie named Julienne Marie.
THE BLACKS, by Jean Genet, just past the 1,000-performance mark, may just possibly be the finest work of art ever produced on the color question.
SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR, by Luigi Pirandello, offers a model revival of a modern classic.
CINEMA
THE V.l.P.s. Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Louis Jourdan, Orson Welles, Rod Taylor and Margaret Rutherford spend the night in an airport, and believe it or not, they seem to enjoy the experience. So do the customers.
THE CONJUGAL BED. There's no fool like an old fool, and it's sometimes painfully funny to see one learn just how foolish he is in this Italian comedy about a middle-aged man (Ugo Tognazzi) who marries a young girl (Marina Vlady).
THE MUSIC ROOM. India's Satyajit Ray tells a poignant and profoundly Asiatic tale about a man who ruined his life to save his face.
THE SUITOR. This slap-happy story about a young man in a hurry to get married is a magnificent catalogue of sight gags, all of them written, directed and personally interpreted by a young French funnyman named Pierre Etaix.
WIVES AND LOVERS. A jack (Van Johnson) and two queens (Janet Leigh, Martha Hyer) make a full house in this amusing game of stud devised by Scriptwriter Edward Anhalt and Director John Rich, who for the most part play their cards very well indeed.
THE LEOPARD. Burt Lancaster gives the finest performance of his career in one of the year's finest films: Luchino Visconti's noble, ironic and richly mournful lament for the death of feudalism in Sicily.
LORD OF THE FLIES. With scarcely a nod to Novelist William Golding's chilling allegory of the essential evil in man's nature, the producers end up with little more than a scary adventure story about a band of castaway boys on a desert island.
BOOKS
Best Reading
THE FAIR SISTER, by William Goyen. A white Texan peers behind the facades of the store-front cathedrals in the Negro ghettos of great East Coast cities and finds a world of religion, chicanery and entertainment that only Negroes know from the inside. The novel's heroine, part prophetess, part charlatan, is all woman.
THE AGE OF LOUIS XIV, by Will and Ariel Durant. In the eighth volume of their massive study of Western civilization, the Durants describe with wit and a wealth of anecdote an age preoccupied by the confrontation between rationalism and faith.