Critics' Choice

MUSIC

SAM KINISON: HAVE YOU SEEN ME LATELY? (Warner Bros.). Abusive, scurrilous and hilarious: post-punk comedy meets primal-scream therapy. Offensive? You betcha. But there are wonderful bits about sexism and heartbreak, as well as the best riffs on organized religion since Lenny Bruce.

ROSANNE CASH: HITS 1979-1989 (Columbia). She's got a half-past-4-in-the- morning voice and a knowing way with a song that can make any listener wish the night would go on forever.

ANTONIN DVORAK: AMERICAN SUITE, SYMPHONY NO. 9 (Virgin Classics). Libor Pesek conducts the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra in exuberant renditions of these powerful works, whose brooding, Slavic soul belies their New World theme.

ART

THOMAS HART BENTON: AN AMERICAN ORIGINAL, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Mo. He said he wished his work could be exhibited in saloons, but the colorful, cantankerous Benton (1889-1975) is being honored in his centennial year not only with a biography and a PBS special but also with this full-dress retrospective in his native state. Featured: the stylized murals of American history and daily life for which he was best known. Through June 18.

WHISTLER AND HIS CIRCLE, Minnesota Museum of Art, St. Paul. Etchings, lithographs and paintings representing Whistler's high achievements in those media as well as his influence on other late-19th century artists, chiefly such Americans as Joseph Pennell, Charles Keene and John Marin. Through June 25.

NELL BLAINE: RECENT OILS AND WORKS ON PAPER, Fischbach Gallery, New York City. Forty-eight works by a premier U.S. artist whose spontaneous brushstrokes and brilliant colors enrobe nature in a tender intimacy. Through April 26.

TELEVISON

THE FORGOTTEN (USA, April 26, 9 p.m.). Six Viet Nam POWs, released 17 years after the war's end, discover that sinister Government forces were behind their capture. Steve Railsback, Stacy Keach and Keith Carradine co-star in this thriller, the USA cable network's first venture into made-for-TV moviedom.

THE KOPPEL REPORT: D.C. -- DIVIDED CITY (ABC, April 27, 10 p.m. EDT). The much-publicized plague of drug-related violence in the nation's capital is examined by Ted Koppel, first in a prime-time special, then in a live discussion that will take over the Nightline time period.

GUTS AND GLORY: THE RISE AND FALL OF OLIVER NORTH (CBS, April 30, May 2, 9 p.m. EDT). Following his real-life trial, the embattled lieutenant colonel (David Keith) gets his day in TV court, courtesy of a two-part docudrama.

MOVIES

HEATHERS. There's a disturbing mortality rate among Westerburg High's snooty elite. A rash of suicides? Or is someone killing the prom queens of Ohio? Daniel Waters' witty script touches two stark teen issues: the need to be accepted and the urge to end it all.

84 CHARLIE MOPIC. In the jungles of Viet Nam, a lost patrol finds enemies on both sides of combat. But the main character of Patrick Duncan's war movie is a documentary-film camera. Through its unblinking eye, a familiar horror story gains raw immediacy.

BOOKS

CITIZENS: A CHRONICLE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION by Simon Schama (Knopf; $29.95). Exactly 200 years after the bloody facts, a Harvard historian offers a fascinating, often surprising account of what went right -- and wrong -- during one of the world's most celebrated social convulsions.

A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY by John Irving (Morrow; $19.95). In this inventive, indignant novel, a boisterous cast and a spirited story line propel a sawed- off Christly caricature through two decades of U.S. foreign-policy debacles.

THEATER

AMULETS AGAINST THE DRAGON FORCES. Paul Zindel's off-Broadway play about a self-destructive alcoholic and a neurotic but winsome adolescent is superbly acted, and its melodramatic excess sings like pure truth.

THE MEMBER OF THE WEDDING. Esther Rolle (Good Times) and Amelia Campbell glow as nanny and budding adolescent in this moving off-Broadway revival of Carson McCullers' coming-of-age story of the pre-civil rights South.

PEER GYNT. Hartford Stage Company captures both the epic sweep and the proto- Freudian core of Ibsen's poem of self-discovery in a sequential pair of full-length productions.

GHETTO. Joshua Sobol's Nazi-era tragicomedy, seen across the U.S. in an Israeli production, makes its English-language debut on Broadway with the same vibrant staging.