Critics' Choice

THEATER

AIN'T MISBEHAVIN'. The joint is jumpin', again: the jubilant Fats Waller songbook that won three 1978 Tony awards returns to Broadway with the original staging and cast, including Nell Carter.

KING LEAR. Ontario's Stratford Festival shows why it is the biggest repertory theater company in North America in this splendid staging. William Hutt excels as the timeworn king.

FRANKENSTEIN -- PLAYING WITH FIRE. The doctor tracks his doomed creation to the North Pole in a visually arresting, high-tech version, told in flashback, at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.

MUSIC

KARLA BONOFF: NEW WORLD (Gold Castle). Ballads as personal and focused as the last pages of a diary. Bonoff makes music that is spacious of spirit but clearheaded about the byways of romance.

NIELSEN: SYMPHONY NO. 5; MASQUERADE (CBS). Somebody has to make a case for Carl Nielsen, and Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen certainly does, in both the strikingly original symphony and the dazzling excerpts from the opera.

JEAN SIBELIUS: VIOLIN CONCERTO, KARELIA SUITE; FINLANDIA (Finlandia). Miriam Fried gives a passionate performance of the dour Finn's splendid concerto.

CINEMA

TUCKER. Francis Ford Coppola fashions a grand entertainment from the heroic efforts of Preston Tucker to market his 1948 "car of tomorrow." Jeff Bridges and Martin Landau front a splendid cast.

MONKEY SHINES. Man meets capuchin monkey; monkey falls for man; monkey goes bananas. George A. Romero's deft thriller is the best ape movie since the 1933 King Kong.

BAMBI. This 1942 Disney fable has everything a child could fear or want: a forest fire, a mother's death, cute comedy and a deer heart to cherish. Bonus: Bambi's bunny pal Thumper makes Roger Rabbit look like a wimp.

TELEVISION

TANNER '88: THE REALITY CHECK (HBO, debuting Aug. 22, 10 p.m. EDT). Dukakis has won the nomination, but Tanner, TV's alternative candidate, is pondering a third-party run in the final cable installment of Robert Altman and Garry Trudeau's ingenious political satire.

DRESS GRAY (NBC, Aug. 21 and 22, 9 p.m. EDT). Gore Vidal's script brings intelligence and bite to a tale of shady doings at a military academy. One rerun worth saluting.

40TH ANNUAL PRIME-TIME EMMY AWARDS (Fox, Aug. 28, 8 p.m. EDT). L.A. Law leads in the nominations as the TV community gathers once again to recognize its best and listen to windy thank-yous.

BOOKS

MARKETS by Martin Mayer (Norton; $18.95). What you need to know about stocks, bonds, commodities and the ways professionals stack the deck, by a gilt-edged financial journalist.

THE LETTERS OF EDITH WHARTON (Scribner's; $29.95). The writer's marvelously acute and poignant love letters, penned during an ill-fated mid-life affair, offer a new look at the private pains of a publicly triumphant life.