Critics' Voices

By TIME''S REVIEWERS/Compiled by Andrea Sachs

ART

ART OF THE YIXING POTTER, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis. More than 100 16th through 20th century ceramic tea containers from the Yixing region of China are on display, many decorated with plant and animal designs and engraved poetry. Through June 30.

ETERNAL METAPHORS: NEW ART FROM ITALY, the High Museum at Georgia-Pacific Center, Atlanta. Paintings, sculptures and drawings with Mediterranean overtones by nine contemporary Italian artists. Through May 31.

MUSIC

THE BEST OF JULUKA (Rhythm Safari). An object lesson in the benefits of / culture shock. Johnny Clegg, a white South African obsessed with Zulu culture, and Sipho Mchunu, a black man infatuated with the rhythm of rock, made seven raving, ravishing Juluka albums between 1979 and 1985. This selection of highlights from that time still has mule-kick energy, a proud social conscience and a sound that's fresher than the day after tomorrow.

FRANK MORGAN: A LOVESOME THING (Antilles). Ex-jailbird Morgan continues his comeback -- and feeds his legend -- with another dazzling performance on the alto sax. Up-and-coming trumpet phenomenon Roy Hargrove, 21, makes an impressive guest appearance.

SING A TO Z (A&M) The toe-tapping, finger-snapping alphabet soup on this album, served up by the Canadian children's trio Sharon, Lois & Bram, gets the two-year-olds and thirty-somethings in the house wriggling. When did frog sounds, xylophones, yodeling and zithers ever sound this good?

TELEVISION

DINOSAURS (ABC, debuting April 26, 8:30 p.m. EDT). Meet the Sinclairs, a blue- collar suburban family with a difference: they're domesticated dinosaurs. From an idea by the late Jim Henson, this live-action sitcom is set in the year 60,000,003 B.C. Any resemblance to our own society is purely intentional.

SWITCHED AT BIRTH (NBC, April 28-29, 9 p.m. EDT). Based on the true story of two infant girls accidentally exchanged in a Florida hospital and raised for a decade by the wrong parents, this four-hour mini-series stars Brian Kerwin, Ed Asner and the underappreciated Bonnie Bedelia.

MOVIES

OSCAR. Sylvester Stallone, in his first intentional comedy since Rhinestone, shows a light step as a recovering gangster in John Landis' Prohibition-era farce. Doors slam, satchels are snatched, offspring spring up, puns run amuck. It's all inexcusable -- and irresistible.

CROSS MY HEART. A 12-year-old's mother has died, and his schoolmates conspire to keep the tragedy a secret. In this comic essay on the desperate ingenuity of youth, director Jacques Fansten nicely reworks a long-held credo of French filmmakers: that childhood is both charmed and cursed.

SUPERSTAR. Andy Warhol's nonlife and odd times get a spiffy collage treatment from documentarist Chuck Workman. News and film clips mix with reminiscences from Andy's cheerfully perplexed family back in Pittsburgh. A few Warhol Factory workers show up, wry and rueful, eager to prove they survived it all.

BOOKS

PRESIDENT REAGAN: THE ROLE OF A LIFETIME by Lou Cannon (Simon & Schuster; $24.95). This is not the Reagan book that everyone is talking about -- though, oddly enough, from the same publisher -- but it is essential reading, compiled by a veteran journalist and Ronnie watcher, for anyone interested in the star politics of the 1980s.

DARK STAR by Alan Furst (Houghton Mifflin; $22.95). Plot is less important in this impressive spy novel than description, the re-creation of the nightmarish tensions that erupted during the 1930s between Soviet NKVD agents and Stalin's Georgian thugs.

THEATER

I HATE HAMLET. Nicol Williamson may really be John Barrymore's ghost -- he looks, sounds and swashbuckles like him as the bravura otherworldly mentor to a young TV star turned tragedian in this slight but fetching Broadway comedy.

ONLY THE TRUTH IS FUNNY. Jack Rollins and Charlie Joffe manage Woody Allen and David Letterman. Their new client, the first in more than a decade, is Rick Reynolds, whose lacerating autobiographical stand-up gets both laughs and tears off-Broadway.

ANOTHER TIME. Albert Finney on Broadway would be event enough, but in Chicago? At the Steppenwolf troupe's new home, he repeats his London triumph in this play by Ronald Harwood (The Dresser) about a South African piano prodigy battling his heritage.

ETCETERA

RINGLING BROS. AND BARNUM & BAILEY CIRCUS. "The Greatest Show on Earth" lives up to its own grandiose billing in its 121st year. From the Crescendo of Cats to the fingernail-biting Globe of Death, a motorcycle thriller, this all- American tradition is sure to delight. In New York City through April 28, then on to Providence, New Haven and Hartford.

CAUGHT IN THE ACT

There's a special flavor to music heard live in clubs: more relaxed than on records -- often fiercer too, with inhibiting mikes out of the performers' way. The first releases from Night Records, a new Virgin Records label specializing in live performances, catch four jazz stylists (Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Les McCann, Eddie Harris and Cannonball Adderley) in moods that seldom found their way onto more formal recordings. Kirk, best known for his atonal virtuosity in blowing three saxes at once, plays clarinet with a traditional New Orleans band in a sly, down-home version of The Black and Crazy Blues. And McCann, who prided himself on being as much an entertainer as a pianist, gabs, croons and narrates an off-the-wall encounter with Charlie Parker. Producer Joel Dorn has so far accumulated more than 200,000 hours of ad-lib material, including doo-wop, early rock and classics as well as jazz. The tapes were made mostly by amateurs; the sound, to judge by Night's initial CDs, is crisp and professional.