Critics' Voices

MUSIC

HECTOR BERLIOZ: SYMPHONIE FANTASTIQUE (Angel/EMI). Lean, brisk and idiomatic: Roger Norrington leads the London Classical Players in Berlioz's virtuoso ear grabber.

CLINT BLACK: KILLIN' TIME (RCA). Real nice, unassuming, go-to-meeting country music by a new Nashville hotshot. Black sounds like Randy Travis with a few more years of book learning and a cozy way with a melody.

BOB DYLAN: OH MERCY (Columbia). He started the decade with a great album (1981's Shot of Love), and closes it with another. The record is structured like an intimate revival meeting between Dylan and listener: there are messages of devotion and political sermons; parables of the spirit and love songs; and, in Shooting Star, a luminous benediction. Dylan continues to make heavy demands -- these ten songs are the most intensely introspective work anyone has done in rock this year -- but asks only what he brings from himself: some reckless imagination, a sense of playful mystery and a full measure of passion.

BOOKS

JERUSALEM: CITY OF MIRRORS by Amos Elon (Little, Brown; $19.95). "Where there is so much destructive memory, a little forgetfulness may be in order," concludes one of Israel's best-known writers in this anecdotal history chronicling 4,000 years of trouble in his hometown.

AMONG SCHOOLCHILDREN by Tracy Kidder (Houghton Mifflin; $19.95). In this close-up view of a typical fifth-grade class, the Pulitzer-prizewinning author portrays living, breathing children, often overwhelmed by homegrown problems, and an outstanding teacher who scores an A for dedication.

LORD BYRON'S DOCTOR by Paul West (Doubleday; $19.95). A tour de force about the cruelty of genius, starring Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, his wife Mary (author of Frankenstein) and the narrator, an indiscreet physician.

TELEVISION

SATURDAY NIGHT WITH CONNIE CHUNG (CBS, Sept. 23, 10 p.m. EDT). CBS's long- struggling magazine show, West 57th, has re-emerged with a new name and a new star as host and chief correspondent. One added element certain to cause a stir: dramatized re-creations of news events.

THE PREPPIE MURDER (ABC, Sept. 24, 9 p.m. EDT). The tabloid shows had a field day with it. Now the case of Jennifer Levin -- the New York City teenager killed during a session of "rough sex" in Central Park -- is rehashed as a TV movie.

SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE: 15TH ANNIVERSARY (NBC, Sept. 24, 9 p.m. EDT). Still crazy -- or at least trying to be -- after all these years, the once groundbreaking comedy show waxes nostalgic in a prime-time special.

ART

PICASSO AND BRAQUE: PIONEERING CUBISM, Museum of Modern Art, New York City. The title tells all: two giants, and the origins of a style that shook -- and shaped -- the rest of the century. Through Jan. 16.

CROSSROADS OF CONTINENTS: CULTURES OF SIBERIA AND ALASKA, Seattle Center Pavilion. Art and artifacts by native peoples on both sides of the Bering ! Strait, assembled jointly by the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Through Oct. 15.

MOVIES

A DRY WHITE SEASON. A white liberal turns radical after confronting the brutality of South African racism. Hard-edged drama that couples the pulse of popular fiction with the jolt of moral outrage.

THE ADVENTURES OF MILO AND OTIS. Milo is a barnyard kitten and Otis his dogged friend in this live-action children's film narrated by Dudley Moore. If cute were still a word of approval, Masanori Hata's charming parable would earn it.

WIRED. The saddest thing about John Belushi's death might be this grotesque requiem.

THEATER

THE COCKTAIL HOUR. Nancy Marchand's sozzled, sardonic portrayal of a grande dame enriches A.R. Gurney's Wasp family tale at Washington's Kennedy Center.

SWEENEY TODD. Stephen Sondheim's unlikeliest musical, a sympathetic look at a murderous barber and the woman who recycles his victims as meat pies, returns to Broadway in a shrewdly staged chamber version.

THE LADY IN QUESTION. Just what is the pleasure of a drag show? If the leading "lady" is unconvincing, it's gross. If he's too convincing, there's no coy guessing game. And if he's just campy enough, the joke is over in five minutes. Alas, this off-Broadway farce lasts two hours.

THE GEOGRAPHY OF LUCK. The drifters and hustlers in Marlane Meyer's desert panorama mingle the doomed banality of Sam Shepard characters with the quixotic blessings of William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life. At the Los Angeles Theater Center.