Daily News from New York, New York • 198

CNTERTAINMENT Table Settings' a stage feast to enjoy By DOUGLAS WATT TABLES SETTINGS. Play bv James Laplne. With Frances Chaney. Mark Blum, Brent Spiner, Eric Gurry, Marta Kober, thru Weatherhead, Carolyn Hurlburt. Staved by the author.

Setting by Heidi Landesman. Costumes by Bob Woiewodsfci. Lighting by Beverly Emmons. At Playwrights Horizons Theater. author's smart direction, and he has a fine cast to work with, its members sometimes addressing the audience directly.

Frances Chaney is all the fussy Jewish stage mothers rolled into one. and Mark Blum is a very quick-witted nogoodnik, indeed, as the younger son. Brent Spiner as the spindly, disengaged lawyer, Chris Weatherhead as his chic wife, and Carolyn Hurlburt as the latter's sister are all dandy. But a special word for the children, for Eric Gurry's smartass Grandson and Marta Kober's anxious Granddaughter on the edge of puberty, especially when she tips over it and, all dressed up for her first party date, clomps off unsteadily on her first high heels, an old device cleverly reworked here. Heidi Landesman's box-like setting, with its converging blue walls revealing innumerable doors and cabinet panels at unexpected places, has been admirably designed for the play's fleet purposes, and both Bob Wojewodski's costumes and Beverly Emmons' lighting are of immeasurable help.

"Tables Settings" is an original, swift-paced and unfailingly likable comedy. "Tables Settings," last night 's comedy at Playwrights Horizons, is an entertaining 90- minutes. James Lapine's off the-wall family portrait plays like a series of loosely-strung-together animated cartoons, each episode announced by an orotund Voice Over, Paul Sparer's. The characters are two-dimensional stereotypes, but the thingr they say and do are bright, funny and sometimes oddly revealing. The writing is unsentimental but not unkind, and the sharpness of the dialogue and situations is enhanced by the light, unpretentious air maintained throughout.

All the action takes place around a dining table, mostly at home but occasionally in restaurants. And the home most frequently visited is that of the matriarch, a Jewish mother nostalgic about Minsk and the solidarity of the family unit there as opposed to the unmanageable group she must contend with here. Why, exhort them as she may, they wont even stuff themselves properly at table. Her older son is a conservatively-drssed lawyer in his 30's who smokes too much, drinks too many double martinis and. reading or preopccupied with other matters, pays scant attention to his shiksa wife and their two bratty, precocious children, a nine-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl.

The lawyer's untidy and unemployed younger brother is cheerfully into pot, cocaine and other escape routes. The wife's madly rational-sounding sister, a divorcee who takes up with the younger brother, is, to the amazement TODAY Chris Weatherhead, left, Marta Kober and Eric Gurry In "Table Settings" New York Philharmonic. All-Elgar. Avery Fisher Hall, 7:30 p.m. Chamber Music Society.

Beethoven, Barber. Weber, Schubert. Alice Tully Hall, 7:30 p.m. Metropolitan Opera. "Lohengrin." Metropolitan Opera House, 7:30 p.m.

Pearl Bailey. Pop songs. Radio City Music Hall, 8 p.m. Phlladephia Orchestra. Beethoven.

Schubert. Carnegie Hall, 8 p.m. concealment beneath the table, a place he, too, used to hide as a kid. When the mother, after asking her younger son why he doesn't get a job, says, "Why did you go to college?" he replies, "To avoid being asked questions like this after high school." Divided by dimouts, the scenes pass smoothly one into the other under the of the rest, engaged in the business of mental rehabilitation. The author's smiling tolerance for their disorderly behavior arouses friendly feelings in us.

When the lawyer, who has by now given up smoke and drink for jogging, tries to revive the early ardor of their marriage by acting out the tiger to his wife, he is unaware of his son's Music Hall gets a lift Vincent RiehlOaily News Parties like this recent affair for a TV spectacular brought out guests like Cynthia Harris, left. Colleen Dewhurst and Edward Fox and helped line Music Hall coffers By ERNEST LEOGRANDE Good news is where you find it these days so the report that Radio City Music Hall is thriving sounds like a triumphant trumpet blast. "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," the stage production that was expanded from the Walt Disney movie, has returned and will run through March 9. The Easter show, "The Spring Holiday Spectacular," incorporating the "Glory of--Easter" pageant and the Vienna Boys Choir, begins March 14. "The Rockettes Spectacular," a show featuring the famous dancing line, begins May 2.

"Manhattan Showboat," which Radio City Music Hall refers to as its "summer spectacular" will run from June 6 through Sept. 14. Other shows still to be announced are being considered for the fall after which "The Magnificent Christmas Spectacular" will be back with us beginning Thanksgiving. "We're very optimistic that Radio City Music Hall Productions will prove to be a viable operation in 1980," spokeswoman Patricia Robert said. "No, we haven't begun to show a profit yet, but each show has been a success.

The first year of an operation is bound to be non-profitable. You expect that. Our restoration cost and the cost of the Christmas show are being amortized over a five-year period." As further evidence of health, she said the company has been leasing its own warehouse in Weehawken, N.J., since last October, a setup for building not only its own stage sets but also sets for other companies. There is a catering kitchen and staff to take care of private rentals of the theater for parties, such dinner-dance last Thursday by Mobil Corp. to this, to provide an auxiliary source of income to take the brunt off the box office as the only support for the theater." Tickets for the Christmas show are on sale now, Robert said.

No, it's not that time of year again already, just her way of emphasizing Radio City Music Hall's firm future. promote a TV show it is sponsoring, "Edward Mrs. Simpson." "At Christmastime, on a Saturday," Robert said, "we did a buffet luncheon for IBM for several hundred people in our lower lounge and we did it all between shows. We employ 600 people because the basis of the foundation of the production company was to do things like 3 PI z. 70 Sign language play Two performances of Yves Jamiaque's new comedy "Monsieur Amilcar" will be staged with sign language for the deaf on Jan.

31 and Feb. 8 at 8 p.m. at the Chelsea Theater Center. A special block of seats close to two interpreters have been reserved for each performance. For more information, the deaf may call (212) 254-6800 a number that employs the VOICETTY telephone service.

The sign-language stagings were arranged with the cooperation of the New York Interpreters for the Deaf. Scheduling of regular signed performances is part of a program at the Chelsea to give the handicapped easier access to its productions. A aancer of the Seven Principles Ballet Ensemble, which will give two performances at the Theater of the Open Eye Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m..