Critics' Voices

By TIME''s Reviewers. Compiled by Linda Williams

MOVIES

THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS. Bumbling burglars, wiseacre kids, nasty adults, guilty secrets: this spook sonata sounds like a forced merger of Home Alone and Arsenic and Old Lace. The movie is all setup and little payoff, but writer-director Wes Craven (the first Nightmare on Elm Street) and a good cast make it fun. Sometimes the best part of a horror movie is waiting to be scared.

FRANKIE & JOHNNY. Now that Garry Marshall's comedy about displaced lovers in New York City has proved to be a fall flop, we like it a little more. See it (in an uncrowded theater) for Michelle Pfeiffer's sad beauty, Al Pacino's drooling-puppy ardor, Nathan Lane's good-natured bitchiness.

TELEVISION

CLASSIC WEEKEND II (CBS, Nov. 23-25). CBS has found gold in its rerun vaults. Following last season's high-rated tributes to All in the Family and Mary Tyler Moore, the network has put together clipfests of M*A*S*H, The Bob Newhart Show and (for a second time) The Ed Sullivan Show.

HOT COUNTRY NIGHTS (NBC, debuting Nov. 24, 8 p.m. EST). Dolly Parton failed a few seasons back, but this music series will try again to cash in on the nation's love of country.

LAND OF THE EAGLE (PBS, Nov. 24-27, 8 p.m. on most stations). "For the Cherokee, autumn is a time of great renewal . . ." If you can survive George Page's droning narration, you'll better appreciate the lush photography in this eight-hour survey of the natural history of North America.

MUSIC

JOHNNY ADAMS SINGS DOC POMUS: THE REAL ME (Rounder). Superb R. and B., recorded in New Orleans this past spring shortly before the death of the songwriter it does so proud. Doc Pomus, who wrote his fair share of classics (Save the Last Dance for Me, This Magic Moment), had a lyric finesse that could not only match but also bring out the best in his collaborators. Prominent among them was the estimable Dr. John, who co-wrote seven of these 11 cuts, all sung by Adams with a soul of fire.

ABBEY LINCOLN: YOU GOTTA PAY THE BAND (Verve). Abbey Lincoln has done it all -- supper-club singing, song writing, movie acting (The Girl Can't Help It, For Love of Ivy). Now on the comeback trail as a jazz diva, she combines the emotions of Billie Holiday with a personal delivery rooted in her own poetic lyrics. Never has her talent been better displayed than on these 10 songs, five of them from her own pen, featuring outstanding backup work by the late tenor-sax great Stan Getz.

DVORAK, SYMPHONY NO. 6; JANACEK, TARAS BULBA (London). Though Dvorak composed at least four great symphonies in which Czech-flavored melodies flow with Schubertian ease and Brahmsian grandeur, he is known mostly for his ninth, the "New World." Christoph von Dohnanyi leads his Cleveland Orchestra here in a fine performance of the sixth and a deftly dramatic reading of Leos Janacek's programmatic rhapsody Taras Bulba.

THEATER

THE HOMECOMING. A quarter-century's passage and a second-rate Broadway revival reveal that what seemed scary, mysterious and darkly funny in Harold Pinter's signature work was mostly just implausible. The one strong performance, by Roy Dotrice as a chortling gutter patriarch, lacks the ferocity of Paul Rogers in the original.

DISTANT FIRES. Race is the issue in a union job contest that embodies many of the conflicts of blue-collar life. Kevin Heelan's pungent and poetic language gets a fluid off-Broadway staging by Clark Gregg.

ELMER GANTRY. A robust satiric novel, then a romantic movie, now Sinclair Lewis' tale of a ne'er-do-well turned preacher is a brooding stage musical at California's La Jolla Playhouse.

ART

THEATER IN REVOLUTION: RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE STAGE DESIGN 1913-1935, the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco. To many, the birth of Soviet Russia was a heady time that promised freedom from bourgeois artistic shackles. On display are 250 works of art including costume and set designs and posters by such artists as Malevich, Rodchenko and Lissitzky. Through Feb. 16.

WISDOM AND COMPASSION: THE SACRED ART OF TIBET, IBM Gallery of Science and Art, New York City. A show of 150 scroll paintings and sculptures from the occupied homeland of the Dalai Lama. Through Dec. 28.

ETCETERA

NEW YORK CITY BALLET. The winter season opens with a preview of a new work by ballet master in chief Peter Martins, whose splendid Sleeping Beauty was last spring's headliner. Set to Bach's A Musical Offering, it will feature eight of the company's glittering principals. Nov. 19 to Feb. 23.

SALZBURG MARIONETTE THEATER. A strange but mesmerizing take on Mozart's operas is offered by the 78-year-old troupe of master puppeteers whose exquisite dolls take the stage to the accompaniment of first-class recordings. In the repertory are Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro and The Magic Flute. Nov. 19 to Dec. 8 in Toronto, New York City and the Los Angeles area.

ON TRACK

The night before his Pulitzer Prize winner, The Piano Lesson, started rehearsals at the Yale Repertory Theater in 1987, August Wilson began drafting the next installment of his 10-play cycle about American black life. That work, Two Trains Running, at Washington's Kennedy Center through Dec. 7, is following its predecessors Fences, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and Joe Turner's Come and Gone on a meticulous route of regional development toward Broadway. Wilson loves blues music, and his plays all have a bluesy structure of alternating humor and lament, rhythm and ritual punctuated by violent outburst. Outwardly a slice of late-1960s life in a Pittsburgh luncheonette where no one speaks of the turbulent public events of the day, Two Trains subtly embodies the entire black political dialectic from that time to this -- isolation vs. assimilation, hostility toward vs. cooperation with whites, clinging to bitter memory vs. moving on into a better world. The ending is pure serendipity, street crime transmuted into poetry.