Masterpiece

With its flower-power aura and hippie-esque cast, the 1971 musical, "Godspell," might seem retro, but director/choreographer Todd Pearthree imbues it with new life at Towson University's Maryland Arts Festival.A retelling of the Gospel according to St. Matthew, with a book by John-Michael Tebelak and score by Stephen Schwartz, the show originally sported a clown/flower-child motif and a Jesus decked out in a Superman shirt.Pearthree does away with that, inserting his own updated references, which, together with the exuberance of the youthful performers, cast a fun-filled spell on "Godspell."

The Shakespearean masterpiece "King Lear" opens the season at Washington's Shakespeare Theatre on Tuesday. Company member Ted van Griethuysen stars as the tragic monarch, under Michael Kahn's direction.Portraying Lear's daughters, Regan and Goneril, are Jennifer Harmon and Baltimorean Tana Hicken. Monique Holt plays Cordelia, the youngest daughter. Holt, who is hearing-impaired, is signing her lines, which are spoken by Floyd King, the actor playing Lear's Fool."King Lear" is currently in previews.

WASHINGTON -- Back in the early '70s, director Lewis Milestone was talking with a fan about his masterpiece, the classic anti-war film "All Quiet on the Western Front."Nearly five decades had passed since that seminal film dominated the Academy Awards, saved Universal Studios from bankruptcy and began earning its reputation as one of the greatest movies of all time. Prints of "All Quiet" were suffering from nearly a half-century of accumulated cuts and scratches, of censors' attacks and ill-considered edits, of cheaply made copies and midnight showings on TV stations that really didn't care what it looked like.

Jose Donoso, 72, a leading figure in Latin American literature whose novels often were marked by obsessive fantasy, died Saturday of cancer in Santiago, Chile, his family reported.An internationally renowned novelist and short-story writer, he was working on soap opera scripts for Televisa, the giant Mexican television network, when he died. He also was writing a novel.His first great success -- and for many, his masterpiece -- was his 1978 novel, "The Obscene Bird of Night," a complex, nightmarish account of a failed writer.

small group of people at the Walters Art Gallery have embarked on a long and cautious journey. They are painstakingly making their way across the cracked and dulled surfaces of "King Jugurtha Brought Before Sulla," the magnificent historical painting by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo that hung over the gallery's marble staircase for years.Last week, art conservator Catherine Rogers inched her way up a ridge of buckled paint that formed a piece of sky and succeeded in smoothing the heavens. Next week she will "mend" the cloak and upper body of a Roman soldier with the help of a new technique that allows brittle, 18th-century paint to relax onto the canvas without cracking.

All right, Terrence Stamp, you're one of the most handsome men ever born, you've had a distinguished career on stage and screen, you've been seen in the company of some of the world's most beautiful women, and there you are, standing on a bar in the rude and bumptious land of Outback Australia in six-inch heels, pantyhose, a ton of makeup and a wig that cascades to your shoulders. Your lipstick is perfect but your bra strap is really cutting.What are you thinking?"Well," says Terrence Stamp, still handsome at 56, "at that moment, I was thinking, 'What am I doing here?

My alarm went off at 4 a.m. and I dragged myself, bleary-eyed and fuzzy-brained, out of my warm bed and into the chilly darkness of pre-dawn Maine. Armed with a thermos of steaming coffee, my trusty camera and a ton of photographic equipment, I sped down coastal Route 1 in search of a masterpiece -- my masterpiece.I was midway through my weeklong travel photography class at the Maine Photographic Workshops, and this was the morning my instructor, Bob Krist, had chosen for our lighthouse-at-sunrise shoot.

Uck. Urp. Gack. Blech.As a celebration of naughty impulses, you can't do much better than this collection of nastiness that's a refreshing anecdote from all those sugary, arty, refined animation collections making the rounds.This one, which plays at the Charles this weekend and next, is about as refined as a toilet seat. It assembles 20 of the most grotesque examples of animation ever done for a 90-minute gagfest. If you don't like nasty, I'd advise steering well clear.Some are old favorites and some are just old but not favorite.

Violist Kim Kashkashian performs at PeabodyViolist Kim Kashkashian is one of the most passionate musicians and one of the few people who has ever been able to give her neglected instrument star status. The Peabody Conservatory alumna will perform Tuesday at 8:15 p.m. in Friedberg Hall with another Peabody alumnus, the talented pianist Charles Abramovic. Their beautiful program will include Brahms' Sonata in E-flat, Britten's "Lachrymae," Falla's "Suite Populaire" and Penderecki's "Cadenza for Solo Viola."

THE SHARK-INFESTEDCUSTARD: A NOVEL OF CRIME,VICE AND SEX.Charles Willeford.Underwood-Miller.` 272 pages. $20.95.This posthumous work by the superb crime novelist Charles Willeford answers with its title one riddle (which is the book's epigraph: "What is very sweet, bright yellow, and extremely dangerous?") and poses a couple of others with its publishing history.Part I, the first of four separate but linked point-of-view stories, was privately published, in an edition of 400 copies, as "Strange" in the collection "Everybody's Metamorphosis" in 1988 -- the year the author died at age 69. Part II was also privately published the year before.

Sometimes you are in the mood to watch something intellectually engaging, such as the Masterpiece mystery series, "Inspector Lewis." You must pay attention when watching these British mysteries, because for the first half hour, you experience a 1.7-second delay between the British actors talking and your American ears understanding what in the devil they just said. This is because British people speak largely inside the face, whereas Americans project outward, flapping our lips expansively like sheets on a clothesline.

A masterpiece of avant-garde filmmaking becomes a masterpiece of restoration with Manhatta. Film historian Bruce Posner spent almost four years on this inspired salvage job, using some of the same cutting-edge digital tools developed to restore better-known pictures such as Kurosawa's Rashomon. The labor paid off: This print renews the sharp, gritty luminosity of the 1921 collaboration between photographer Paul Strand and painter Charles Sheeler. It plays Saturday at 3:30 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art, a perfect setting for a quintessential art film.

Tonight's Battlestar Galactica is an astoundingly moving full-circle finish to this four-season masterpiece - an epic/intimate odyssey of apocalypse survivors outracing extinction by seeking, yes, The Meaning of Life. Humans have gone on the run through space after seeing their civilizations nuked by a race of Cylon robots they created. But some Cylons have evolved into covert "skin jobs," who look and feel human and are unsure where their loyalties lie. Dueling toward the mythical planet of Earth, all have faced crises evoking every aspect of existence: love, politics, religion, class conflict, finite resources, resurrection, and especially their core values.

Brad Pitt runs Shakespeare's "seven ages of man" in reverse in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which ranks with the best films about youth (say, Hope and Glory) and mortality (say, The Dead). It starts in 1918, when Benjamin Button is born with an old face and dilapidated plumbing and wrinkled skin over an infant body, and ends in 2005, when his true love, Daisy (Cate Blanchett), completes the telling of his story. Every chapter in between brings with it a fresh air of discovery. And the movie's emotional completeness leaves you poised between sobbing and applauding - it comes from a full comprehension not just of one man's life, but of the intersection of many lives over the course of the 20th century.

LOS ANGELES - Skywalker's lightsaber going to the auction block Luke Skywalker's lightsaber from Star Wars, Indiana Jones' hat and whip from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Batman's cowl from Batman Begins are going on the auction block. The iconic movie items are for sale as part of Profiles in History's Hollywood auction, to be held Dec. 11 at the company's headquarters in Calabasas, Calif. The lightsaber is expected to sell for at least $150,000. Other items featured in the auction include C3PO's helmet, a complete set of Harry Potter books signed by J.K. Rowling, a three-volume collection of The Lord of the Rings signed by J.R.R.

The Kirov Opera took machine guns, knives, whips and even a chain saw to Verdi's comic masterpiece Falstaff this week. The result proved fascinating and sometimes funny, occasionally pretentious and even vulgar. Revisionism is so common now in opera that it can be almost a letdown to see a work presented in traditional, literal fashion. But there's still something unsettling about Producers Gone Wild (or Amok). Poor, decon- structed Falstaff never had a chance. If you go The Kirov Opera's Falstaff will be performed at 7:30 tonight at the Kennedy Center, Virginia and New Hampshire avenues Northwest, Washington.

There are an estimated 78.2 million baby boomers across the nation, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and they're starting to shove off across the River Styx for the great beyond. This is the generation that thought it could cheat death by eternally exercising, jogging, slathering themselves with anti-aging skin care products and sunscreen, while eating truckloads of arugula washed down with a latte from Starbucks. But alas, it's not to be, and as the poet observed so long ago: "Time and tide wait for no man."

The hero of Jean-Pierre Melville's masterpiece, Army of Shadows, Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura), establishes a Resistance cell in the grisly early days of Nazi-occupied France. Gerbier does more than "live in the moment." He knows that each moment in life includes and creates memories - and that memories can turn awful and tragic even if they're based on experiences that seem elating and inspiring. The rock-hard greatness of Army of Shadows goes beyond the tension of French rebels scrambling to preserve a remnant of civic virtue during the reign of the Vichy government.

Monet's foggy days in old London town The lowdown -- By the time Claude Monet arrived in London in 1899 to paint the ever-shifting appearance of the city's fog-shrouded river Thames, the pioneering French Impressionist had already created groundbreaking serial portraits of haystacks, the river Seine and the Gothic cathedral in Rouen. Now Monet's London images and those of his contemporaries are the subject of a spectacular exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art that brings together more than 100 paintings, prints and photographs inspired by the misty atmosphere and grand architecture of what was then the world's largest city.

The enthusiasm that follows for Pollyanna, tomorrow night's Masterpiece Theatre offering, may surprise you, because it surprised me. This tidy two-hour comedy-drama is a perfectly crafted little TV jewel, and the best depiction of an effusive young heroine since the original miniseries version of Anne of Green Gables. In Eleanor H. Porter's 1913 book, the bubbly Pollyanna is a whirlwind force of nature affecting the residents of a small New England town, who, in turn, rise to the challenge of cheering up Pollyanna when her own irrepressible optimism is challenged by personal tragedy.