Act Ii

Stockholm, Sweden - If it's true, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, that there are no second acts in American lives, then that undoubtedly goes double for the careers of American rock stars. It isn't just that these musicians have a hard time coming up with a credible second chorus once their original ideas have played out; making things worse is the fact that American rock fans seem by and large unwilling to accept change as the necessary price for artistic growth.Bruce Springsteen hopes to change all that.

Tom Griffin's "The Boys Next Door," currently in production at the Colonial Players of Annapolis, is a rare breed: an unabashedly didactic work that manages to make its point deftly and humorously without wailing, teeth-gnashing, or the plucking of society's guilt strings.The subject is mental retardation and illness, and the play revolves around an extraordinary quartet of mainstreamed men who live in a group apartment under the watchful eye of their well-intentioned, long-suffering social worker.

This is the Year of Mozart, the 200th anniversary of his death. More by accident, it's also the year of "The Masked Ball," Verdi's aria-packed opera staged by about every company in sight, including the Met and the Baltimore Opera.Tonight at 8 p.m. on MPT's channels 22 and 67, the Met's 2 1/2 -hour version taped Jan. 26 brings a solid performance of the 1859 opera romanticizing events leading to the assassination of the popular Swedish King Gustav III at a 1792 court ball.James Levine conducts and F. Murray Abraham is the host.

Bulgarians are finally shaking off rule by Communists. Last spring, after 45 years of communism, they did not realize they could. But the resignation of Prime Minister Andrei Lukanov in favor of a national coalition caretaker regime guarantees it. The people freely voted-in the Communists, renamed as Socialists, in June. But they voted anti-Communist with their feet in the general strike that has brought down the regime. A new election next spring is promised.What just happened was a relatively benign revolution.

GIOACCHINO ROSSINI'S "Semiramide" has such florid and complicated singing the Metropolitan Opera Company hasn't produced it since 1894 and then with the famed Nellie Melba in one of the four key roles. In the intervening century, Rosa Ponselle and Ezio Pinza were once considered, but another vital singer asn't found so the project was scrapped.Friday night the Met in New York found all three plus more and produced a smash four-hour hit before a sold-out house. Leading the way as she's led the recent revival of Rossini was a terrific Marilyn Horne, in the male role composed for a deep contralto, the army commander Arsace in Mesopotamia (nowadays Iraq)