Short Takes

TELEVISION

Not Long for This World

SITCOMS CAN SOMETIMES BE THE SADdest places on TV. Whenever you see a new one with a star who rarely does television, there's usually a tale about dried-up movie roles or a career on the downswing. The latest actress to come crawling back is Shelley Long, who left Cheers six years ago for a movie career that has gone nowhere. In GOOD ADVICE (CBS, debuting April 2), she plays a marriage counselor whose sunny outlook is dashed when she discovers that her husband has been cheating on her. In the usual sitcom way, her real family is at the office, where she shares quarters, oddly, with a bald-headed chiropractor and an aggressive divorce lawyer (Treat Williams -- boy, this is sad). Long still has her bristly charm, but the vehicle has little.

THEATER

Rage Uncorked

IT'S DIFFICULT TO call agitprop against South Africa hard-hitting; how many pro-apartheid plays get mounted in the U.S.? But THE SONG OF JACOB ZULU, which Chicago's Steppenwolf troupe brought to Broadway last week, redeems its overlong preachments with Eric Simonson's deft direction and K. Todd Freeman's luminous acting of the title role, especially a final monologue in which he unsentimentally uncorks the rage that drove a minister's son to terrorism. What makes the show unique is the unearthly beauty of a capella songs by Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the group highlighted on Paul Simon's Graceland album. The nine singers become a sort of Greek chorus and attain the dimensions of classical tragedy.

THEATER

Triangular Love

MOST OF GEORGE BERNARD SHAW'S SOcial comment is pretty stingless these days, but there's still spark in the love triangle in CANDIDA, where the title character chooses the "weaker" of two men -- not the lonely boy inured to pain but the proud public man, used to cosseting. Candida's fail-safe feminist speech enlivens the otherwise kittenish and cloying Broadway debut of Mary Steenburgen, an Oscar winner for Melvin and Howard. But the real joy is watching fellow film star Robert Sean Leonard (Dead Poets Society, Swing Kids) as her coltish adolescent admirer. He brings quiet reality to the most extravagant talk and gawkily comic gestures and makes one think the play should be called, after him, Marchbanks.

MUSIC

Resurrecting the Golden Age

EARL WILD TOURED WITH, AND THEN REcorded, three synoptic all-Liszt programs, called "The Poet," "The Transcriber," "The Virtuoso" -- three apt descriptions for Wild himself. He's a throwback to the Golden Age pianists, exulting in the sensuality of Romanticism and the vertiginous, almost orchestral possibilities of the piano. Two CDs demonstrate his superb musicianship and rare virtuosity: Chopin: 4 Ballades -- 4 Scherzi and Earl Wild Plays His Transcriptions of Gershwin (Chesky Records). Chopin's works vary widely in mood and tempo, yet Wild sustains the long singing lines that provide their pulse and shape. That singing -- with wit, warmth and Lisztian heroics -- defines Wild's Gershwin, especially his extended Fantasy on Porgy and Bess.

BOOKS

Real Man's Mush

HOT TIP FOR MALE NOVELISTS WITH A YEN to be Danielle Steel: a motorcycle will haul almost any load of sentimental mush. Robert Olmstead knows this. In his novel AMERICA BY LAND (Random House; $20), Ray Redfield, 23 and drifting, heads out on his Harley to visit his cousin Juliet in New Mexico. He doesn't know she has just sold her newborn daughter to a pair of yuppies. She doesn't know he is bleeding internally from an industrial accident. On the big bike, wounded together, they blast through Colorado and Nevada at 80 m.p.h., charming waitresses and sassing state cops, bumming joints from road people who have read too much Jack Kerouac. Some of this is fun, but adult readers will yell, "Get a job!"