Critics' Choice

MUSIC

PHOEBE SNOW: SOMETHING REAL (Elektra). Real is right: ten raw and lyrical bits of musical autobiography from one of the '70s' best singer-songwriters. On the evidence, she should be flourishing in the '90s too.

SIMPLE MINDS: STREET FIGHTING YEARS (A&M). Superb rock with a big thematic reach and the rhythm to boost its high ambitions. Belfast Child, a heart-torn vision of the Irish troubles, is more evocative, and more devastating, than a hundred editorials or a thousand speeches.

MADONNA: LIKE A PRAYER (Sire). The title track is creating all the fuss, but this is a fine pop album, with a couple of the best tracks ('Til Death Do Us Part and Promise to Try) sounding as intimate as a confessional. Memorable from start to finish, and danceable throughout.

TELEVISON

THE MEETING (PBS, May 3, 9 p.m. on most stations). Two pathbreaking black leaders from the '60s, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, have a fictional encounter in Jeff Stetson's 1987 play, which he has adapted for American Playhouse.

WAR AND REMEMBRANCE (ABC, May 7-10, 14). Yep, there's more. Last November's installment of Herman Wouk's World War II mega-saga was a ratings disappointment. But it left enough dangling threads for twelve more hours and five nights.

THE U.S. AND THE PHILIPPINES: IN OUR IMAGE (PBS, debuting May 8, 9 p.m. on most stations). A three-week series on the countries' century-long relationship, written by Stanley Karnow (Vietnam: A Television History).

THEATER

IMPERIAL BELLS OF CHINA. The clang and whir of hypnotic musical instruments, the swish of dancers' 6-ft. sleeves and the rainbow splendor of ceremonial robes are explained by Gregory Peck's recorded narration in this imported spectacle now touring the U.S.

MINAMATA. The premonitory 1948 pollution tragedy in a Japanese fishing village inspired the images in this harrowing multimedia alarm at the Los Angeles Theater Center.

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

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.

MOVIES

SCANDAL. It's all here: the loveless romances of Christine Keeler with a Soviet spy, a Jamaican drug dealer and John Profumo, Secretary of War in Harold Macmillan's Cabinet. This express tour through Swinging London plays like News of the World headlines set to early '60s rock 'n' roll.

MISS FIRECRACKER. Holly Hunter reprises her stage role as a lovelorn orphan determined to win a beauty contest. Mary Steenburgen and Alfre Woodard also shine in Beth Henley's comedy about the danger of holding on to youthful dreams and the liberating effect of letting them go.

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.

CITIZEN WELLES by Frank Brady (Scribner's; $24.95). Anecdote and scholarship are nicely balanced in this biography of the late Orson Welles, whose roller- coaster career in stage, screen and radio covered the spectrum from classics to commercials.

ART

THOMAS HART BENTON: AN AMERICAN ORIGINAL, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City. 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.

MASTERWORKS OF MING AND QING PAINTING FROM THE FORBIDDEN CITY, Cleveland Museum of Art. Lent by the Palace Museum in Beijing, this show offers 76 treasures, mostly painted scrolls, from China's last two imperial dynasties (1368-1644 and 1644-1911). Through May 21.