Reviews Short Takes

MUSIC

The Next Incarnation

Call them the ever-shrinking group. In their earliest days the B-52S were a quintet riding the new-wave crest, but the death of guitarist Ricky Wilson and the recent resignation of vocalist Cindy Wilson have dwindled the group to a trio. Still, as their seventh album, Good Stuff, demonstrates, their talent has by no means diminished. What were once "rapid-fire three-way vocals," as singer Kate Pierson calls them, are now back-and-forth dialogues between Pierson and Fred Schneider. Familiar motifs abound: hot pants, UFOs and mother earth. The music on the album is just as colorful as its cover design, with lyrics full of sex and in-your-face politics. And, in true B-52s fashion, still as infectious, each tune inspiring a hip-shaking jig.

TELEVISION

League of His Own

Sparky Smith (Joe Mantegna) is a hotheaded baseball manager who loses his job with the Seattle Mariners and winds up coaching a squad of inept Russians. But THE COMRADES OF SUMMER is more than just a Slavic Bad News Bears. Shot in the former Soviet Union, the HBO film nicely mixes savvy baseball comedy with post-cold war satire: Sparky has to scrounge for equipment on the black market, holds practices in a cavernous warehouse and listens sadly to Voice of America broadcasts as his Mariners head for the World Series. (It's a fantasy.) Mantegna is delightfully dour, and the film knows its capabilities: it doesn't swing for the fences, but gets a lot of sharp singles.

THEATER

Rash Impulses

Without aiding Jesse Helms, might one advise performance artists that there are worthier topics than graphic details of sexual awakening? David Drake's THE NIGHT LARRY KRAMER KISSED ME comes from a radicalized gay who is too busy satirizing cruising in bars and gyms to define the thinking that shaped him. Josh Kornbluth's RED DIAPER BABY is less ably performed yet livelier because it recounts a more exotic upbringing -- as a son of doctrinaire U.S. communists. But Kornbluth barely hints at his own political evolution after an eye-opening trip to Russia, while devoting queasily explicit minutes to losing his virginity. Both off-Broadway shows squander serious opportunities in exchange for laughs or titillation.

CINEMA

Portrait of a Psycho in Blue

UNLAWFUL ENTRY is a movie just waiting to be denounced by some presidential candidate. It's not completely anticop, but a desperate pol could read it that way. Rogue Los Angeles bluecoat Pete Davis (Ray Liotta) has some very weird ideas about protecting and serving Michael and Karen Carr (Kurt Russell and Madeleine Stowe). He comes to investigate a burglary at their house and stays to hit on her and harass him, after Michael sees through his bulletproof vest of politesse to the psychopath beneath. Liotta's chilly boyishness is hypnotic. Jonathan Kaplan's film is a little distant and a lot manipulative, as it reminds some of us paranoiacs that you don't have to be Rodney King to get more police attention than you really want or need.

BOOKS

Just for Kicks

Stephen King returns from the crypt with GERALD'S GAME (Viking; $23.50) his 27th novel. The game begins on an average day in an airy summer house in Maine. Jessie Burlingame agrees to let her husband Gerald try a little bedtime bondage, but somewhere along the line he gets nasty -- and so does she, dispensing a vicious kick that leads to a fatal heart attack. Here lies Gerald, and so does Jessie, cuffed to the bedstead as a mad dog scratches at the door. Meanwhile, her mind and memory play hideous tricks, as the ghosts of her sexually abused childhood rise up to terrorize her. This is the old Helpless Woman in the Haunted House number, but refreshed by a combination King has rarely used before: subtle plotting and acute psychological insight.