Critics' Choice

TELEVISION

CRISTABEL (PBS, debuting Feb. 19, 9 p.m. on most stations). Acclaimed TV dramatist Dennis Potter (The Singing Detective) shifts from fantasy to fact in this four-parter about an Englishwoman who spent World War II as a citizen of Nazi Germany.

GLORY! GLORY! (HBO, debuting Feb. 19 and 20, 9 p.m. EST). Jim and Tammy could raise the bucks at least. In this two-part movie, Richard Thomas plays the dullest evangelist on TV, who recruits a drugged-out rock singer to save his ministry.

WITHOUT BORDERS (TBS, Feb. 19, 10 p.m. EST). A documentary on five of the world's great rivers and the people fighting to save them, produced for environment-minded TV mogul Ted Turner.

BOOKS

, THE SATANIC VERSES by Salman Rushdie (Viking; $19.95). Charges of blasphemy against the Prophet Muhammad have put Rushdie's book into international headlines. But there is no harm, only relentless artistry, in this encyclopedic fiction about the explosive, often comic meetings of East and West.

CAT'S EYE by Margaret Atwood (Doubleday; $18.95). A middle-age painter returns to show her work in Toronto, where she grew up, and falls into a quirky, brilliant meditation on childhood as seen from the middle distance.

THIS BOY'S LIFE by Tobias Wolff (Atlantic Monthly Press; $18.95). A vivid memoir of a bizarre upbringing, dwelling not on hardships but on the promise of awakening every morning in a vast land where people are prepared to forget the past and believe anything.

THEATER

BLACK AND BLUE. Three great singers, two dozen top dancers, 28 bluesy numbers and a zillion sequins add up to Broadway's hot new musical revue.

THE TAFFETAS. Goofy and winsome and ever so tuneful, this off-Broadway spoof biography of a fictional '50s girl group is superbly arranged and sung.

ART

VICTOR PASMORE, the Phillips Collection, Washington. Honoring his 80th birthday, a recap of the influential British painter's journey through realms of naturalism and abstraction. Through April 2.

GOYA AND THE SPIRIT OF ENLIGHTENMENT, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. This excellent show rescues the Spanish master from the Romantic shadows of the Goyaesque and presents him as a man immersed in the liberal currents of his time. Through March 26.