Television, Theater, Cinema, Books, Fiction, Nonfiction: Feb. 7, 1969

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HEART ATTACK (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). This ABC News Special on the nation's heart-attack victims explores their relationships with doctors, adjustments with their families and the road to recovery.

Tuesday, February 11 N.Y.P.D. (ABC, 9:30-10 p.m.). James Earl Jones guests in "Candy Man," Part 1, as the director of a narcotics-rehabilitation center in a residential neighborhood that becomes aroused when the patients are suspected of a series of robberies.

THEATER

On Broadway

CELEBRATION, by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, the co-creators of The Fantasticks, is a charmer for sophisticates who have never quite forsaken the magic realm of childhood. Potemkin, a master of ceremonies winningly played by Keith Charles, presides over a land of enchantment peopled by a handsome blond Orphan, a crestfallen Angel, a bored and impotent Mr. Rich and a group of Revelers. With a straight melodic line and the unpretentiously apt lyrics of the songs, the play is one of those good things that come in small packages.

COCK-A-DOODLE DANDY is a Sean O'Casey play that, with its zany unconcern with sequiturs, probabilities or dramatic ps and qs, has rarely been staged during the 20 years since it was written. The players of the APA Repertory Company make this blast at what O'Casey felt was wrong with Ireland into a rollicking, rumbustious piece of theater.

HADRIAN VII is a dramatization of Frederick William Rolfe's novel, Hadrian the Seventh. Playwright Peter Luke makes Rolfe the hero of his own story; he is an eccentric misfit who, after being rejected twice for the priesthood, develops the fantasy that he becomes Pope. In a stunning performance that is a paradigm of the elegant best in English acting style, Alec McCowen manages to evoke for Rolfe a sense of pity and affection.

PROMISES, PROMISES is a slick, amiable and derivative musical based on the film The Apartment. Jerry Orbach is splendid as the tall, gangling antihero, but the rhythms of Burt Bacharach's score sound rather like sporadic rifle fire.

JIMMY SHINE. Playwright Murray Schisgal has created a totally transparent character; to see him once is to know him totally. What makes Jimmy more winning than his fate is Dustin Hoffman's bravura performance as the luckless adventurer.

FORTY CARATS is precisely the sort of show that people always say they want to see in order to forget the trials and tribulations of the day. The comedy stars Julie Harris as a half-smitten, half-reluctant lady, ardently wooed by Marco St. John, a lad almost half her age.

Off Broadway

TANGO, by Polish playwright Slawomir Mrozek, has David Margulies as a young man eager to exercise the sacred right of youth to rebel; but he finds that his totally permissive home life leaves him nothing to rebel against. Despite stilted direction and a somewhat awkward translation, the play is one of those rare and engrossing dramas that pay an evening-long courtesy call on the playgoer's mind.

LITTLE MURDERS is a revival of Cartoonist Jules Feiffer's first full-length play. Though it still seems a series of animated cartoons spliced together, Director Alan Arkin gives it a breath-catchingly funny air, a surrealistic style and an incredibly fast pace.