The Advertisement is by Natalie Ginzburg, who I'm told is a German-born writer who lives in Italy and writes in Italian. It will be done in English, however, and somebody volunteered to review it, so it must have admirers. At the Loeb Ex, Thursday-Saturday, February 14-16, 7:30 p.m.

archy and mehitabel is a back-alley children's opera after don marquis's stories of a journalistic cockroach and an evil-minded cat. saturdays and sundays and next wednesday at 2:30, theater two, 196 broadway.

I've never heard William Walton's The Bear or Ralph Vaughn Williams's Riders to the Sea, but Walton and Vaughn Williams were both good composers of the 20th-century English pastoral school, I guess you could call it, and Chekhov and Synge aren't bad librettists. Associate Artists Opera, at the Boston Center for the Arts. Tonight and Saturday, February 16, 8 p.m. Some rush seats.

Classics from the Russian Ballet is, presumably, classics from the Russian ballet. But perhaps it is a film. At the Loeb, Thursday-Saturday, February 14-16, 5:30 and 9:30 p.m.

The Independent's theater critic sidled up to me at lunch the other day and told me to say that Neil Simon's The Prisoner of Second Avenue is a tepid comedy with a mediocre cast. It ran successfully in New York, of course, but then so did President Nixon. 7:30 at the Colonial Theater in Boston.

Swallowed, the mainstay of these listings for the last month or so, has been temporarily cancelled because of technical problems. A frog in its throat, maybe.