Short Takes

VIDEO

Celebrity Breakdown

IN THE LAST YEARS OF HIS LIFE (HE DIED of cancer in 1984), comedian Andy Kaufman developed an inexplicable obsession with professional wrestling. First he satirized the macho sport by wrestling women, crowning himself the Intergender Champion. Then he launched a feud with Memphis, Tennessee, wrestler Jerry Lawler, and things began to get out of hand. He was seriously injured more than once, goaded the "hick" Memphis fans with increasing venom and began to worry even his closest friends. ANDY KAUFMAN: I'M FROM HOLLYWOOD (Shanachie Home Video), an extraordinary account of Kaufman's ring exploits, chronicles what was either the shrewdest put-on in comedy history or a brilliant performer's mental breakdown. Your call.

MUSIC

Bow vs. Baton

WHERE DID MSTISLAV ROSTROPOVICH GO wrong? The retiring music director of Washington's National Symphony was one of America's cold war trophies, but his baton work has only rarely matched his peerless way with the cello. Consider a new Italian-issued CD (Intaglio) with Gennady Rozhdestvensky and the London ! Symphony, recorded in Carnegie Hall in 1967. Rostropovich sails through Tchaikovsky's Pezzo Capriccioso and digs into Prokofiev's Concertino, written for the cellist and completed by him after Prokofiev's death in 1953. But the glory of the recording is a magisterial reading of Elgar's Cello Concerto; Rostropovich's probing musical mind goes to the heart of this sorrowful masterpiece and brings balm to its unquiet soul.

MUSIC

Backwoods Beau

HE HAS THE SORT OF VOICE YOU MIGHT hear wafting pure and plaintive from the holding tank in a county jail. With the face of an orphaned angel, STACY DEAN CAMPBELL offers no fuss, no frills, just righteous white-boy blues ("Would you run away from me/ If I came crawlin' back to you"). His debut album, Lonesome Wins Again, is 10 sticks of slow-fused Nashville dynamite from his own pen and those of top country songsmiths Don Schlitz and Jamie O'Hara. The best tunes, including Baby Don't You Know and I Won't, take you two-stepping back to 1957 -- rockabilly prime time -- when Marty Robbins, the Everly Brothers and Don Gibson were teaching city kids how country sounds: like a murmur from the echo chamber of a broken heart.

BOOKS

Defense Slash, Shabby Secrets

THE GENERAL'S DAUGHTER, BY NELSON DeMille (Warner Books; $21.95), a gaudy, cinematic thriller, is two or three levels better than routine, partly because the author's sentences march well. That never hurts. The setting is a dormant military base in Georgia just after the Gulf War. Officers worried about their careers are trying to look busy. Paul Brenner, a criminal investigator for the Army, is there to sort out the bizarre sex murder of Captain Ann Campbell, daughter of the base's commanding general and, not coincidentally, lover of virtually every man on the general's staff. Brenner, digging out secrets that are brutal, sexist and shabby, carries out his duties with a "bleep you, sir" style that onetime soldiers will cherish.

THEATER

Dream Mythology

NOTHING MAKES AN OPERA MORE CLASsical than a mythological subject, and nothing makes it more modern than psychology. Playwright Craig Lucas (Prelude to a Kiss) and composer Gerald Busby fuse the two in ORPHEUS IN LOVE, an off- Broadway retelling of the Orpheus legend -- mingling hints of Oedipus -- in which the characters are music teachers or pupils and hell is interwoven with high school. The sound, too, (by a string quartet, piano and two bassoons) - hovers between melodic-traditional and staccato-modern. Kirsten Sanderson's witty staging deftly evokes dreams -- their fleeting lyricism, transposed logic, sexual ambiguity and poignant blend of chagrin and nostalgia.