The Orlando Sentinel from Orlando, Florida • Page 45

The Orlando Sentinel Stations aim to soothe the working crowd Radio Waves, E-2 SATURDAY, March 28, 1992 What's on TODAY'S BEST BETS IN ENTERTAINMENT 'PRELUDE' CODA rSftb i it I St 0 00000 2 wV i- v5 grz "JS vc4; mLmMd" TOM BURTONSENTINEL Ted Mansfield (left), Leesa Halstead and R. Wesley Kaye appear in 'Prelude to a ROBERTO GONZALEZSENTINEL Jeffrey Lyons has his makeup fixed during production of 'Hollywood's Golden First Media's debut in national syndication. Production team aims high After a strange old man appears at their wedding reception and kisses the bride, everything changes for Peter and Rita, the protagonists of Prelude to a Kiss, which ends its run at Theatre Downtown, 2113 N. Orange Orlando, after tonight's 8 o'clock performance. David Lee's production glosses over some of the threats implied by Craig Lucas' script, but it is rich with stunning moments and polished performances.

Tickets, $7 and $10, may be reserved by calling (407) 841-0083. 1 I POPS DOES PARIS The Florida Symphony Orchestra makes its annual outdoor appearance tonight at 8 at The Springs, on State Road 434 in South Seminole County. Michael Krajewski will lead the orchestra in a program called "Springtime in Paris," with such music as La Marseillaise and Gershwin's American in Paris. Tickets, available from the FSO at (407) 894-2011 and all Ticketmaster outlets, are $18 in advance, $20 at the gate, which opens at 5 p.m. GRAND 'GRAND HOTEL' Based on the 1929 novel by Vicki Baum, Grand Hotel, the Tommy Tune-directed touring musical now at Carr ated and produced by the 2-year-old production company.

(The show will air at 5 p.m. Sunday on WKCF-Chan-nel 18.) It is far from being the last. In early May, at Universal Studios Florida, First Media will tape nine one-hour episodes of Karaoke Showcase," a syndicated summer series that capitalizes on the nightclub craze imported from Japan. If the series wins -with viewers (it airs locaUy on WOFL-Channel 35), its distributor, Genesis Entertainment, will market it as a regular series next year. These shows represent a sweet victory for Len DePanicis, executive producer and vice president of program development for First Media.

DePanicis, 40, came to Channel 6 almost eight years ago to begin building a production team that could produce television shows for national consumption. A New York City native, DePanicis approaches his projects with the energy of a speeding subway train. A graduate of the University of Miami, DePanicis' return to Florida was a Please see STUDIO, E-3 A TV production company based at WCPX breaks into the national market with 'Hollywood's Golden By Catherine Hinman OF THE SENTINEL STAFF It is 11 on an early March morning in Orlando, and Jeffrey Lyons of PBS' Sneak Previews is soon to trade his New York tweeds for a black tux and go before the cameras as host of a nationally syndicated Academy Awards television special. He is not at Universal Studios Florida. He is not at Disney-MGM Studios.

He is, rather, in the studios of WCPX-Channel 6, where the production company First Media Entertainment is producing Lyons' one-hour Oscar preview show, Hollywood's Golden Night. The urbane, bespectacled film crit- rim Len DePanicis heads First Media Entertainment at WCPX. ic has done many movie specials, but Holiyioood's Golden Night will be a unique challenge. "This one is the one I'm hosting by myself," he says. "And I'm really excited about it." Lyons' television solo is even more a cause for celebration at First Media Entertainment, a division of WCPX's owner, First Media Corp.

Hollywood's Golden Night is the first nationally syndicated show to be cre Performing Arts Centre, 401 W. Livingston Orlando, compresses into just two magical hours all the hopes and dreams of the inhabitants of the grandest of grand hotels in pre-war Berlin. Tickets to the play, at 2 and 8 p.m. today and Sunday, are $23.50 to $38 at the Orlando Re- Arte Phillips and Victoria gan in 'Grand Election-year politics is grist for comedy mill i i i By Jody Leader Arena box office and at Ticketmaster outlets. LOS ANGELES DAILY NEWS iNDIA'S MUSICAL MASTERS World music fans can see three prominent figures in North Indian classical music at the Beacham Theatre, 46 N.

Orange Orlando, at 7:30 tonight. Tabla player Ustad Alia Rakha was sitarist Ravi Shankar's accompanist in the '60s and '70s; his son, Tabla player Zakir Hussain, joined guitarist John McLaughlin in the band Shakti and has collaborated with Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart for years. Ustad Sultan Khan is a master of the sarangi, a bowed string instrument. Tickets are $17 and $25. University of Maryland who, for the past 25 years, has been observing popular culture and the American political process.

"Now we're back in the genial. The political humor hasn't been hard hitting. There hasn't been an intense negative use of humor since IPresident Ford. Vice President Dan Quayle got a little of it, but Bush has been almost impossible. They comedians do his voice, but they can't find a way to get a comedic handle on him.

"It remains to be seen if any of the Democrats will have a clear enough identity to be savagely ridiculed as others have been." Please see HUMOR, E-4 And Eddie Haskell (actor Ken Osmond) is running for president, stumping for a three-day workweek, real meat back in hot dogs and the return of the 25-cent stamp the two-bit He and "campaign manager" Michael Houbrick have released a rap single (with Osmond on vocals) "Are You Ready for Eddie?" During election years, politics is grist for the comedy mill, and this year is no exception, But the barbs are not as sharp, the cuts are not as deep. It's a kinder, gentler comedy. "During the Kennedy administration, we got very genial political humor. Then with Nixon and Johnson, there was a darkening and a deepening," said Larry Mintz, a professor of American studies at the LOS ANGELES While Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton is counting his delegates and former California Gov.

Jerry Brown is counting the pennies left in his campaign treasury, comedian first lady candidate Beth Lapides is organizing an inaugural first lady summer fashion show and rehearsing the First Lady Choir. Impersonator-improv actor John Simmons is graying his hair with correction fluid, donning pilot glasses and a golf cap and, in that distinctive George Bush twang, declaring "My health-care program consists of three words: 'Don't get 1 Hula-Hoops and marbles: Fun fads of bygone eras come full circle feg .1 m(St. Beijing has teen putting out a lot of hxp1a lately about Hula-Hoops. Three decades after the fad faded out in the United Suites, the rings of plastic tubing are suddenly the rage in China. Moreover, isn't it interesting that another old recreational item, marbles, hit our news pages at the same time? fiA first, the international news.

Hula-Hoops are being pushed by the Chinese government as physical fitness tools. Some zealots, unfortunately, obviously carried away by the party line, are throwing their sacroiliacs out of whack. Even so, the hoops are selling like rice cakes. And somebody's getting filthy rich all over again. I don't know about you, but in all my years it's never been my fate to cash in on a fad.

Once I thought I had it when desperation nearly drove me to going into business for myself. Technically speaking, you could say that at the time, 1949, 1 was already self-employed as a freelancer. Magazine articles and short stories, radio scripts and novels were my specialties. The only hitch, editors kept sending my products Ed Hayes in hundreds of smackers per week in no time at all. But in the end I did not take the plunge, thank gfxxlness.

I would have been stuck with a basement full of faddish devices as obsolete as running boards. So I kept investing in typewriter ribbons, paper and postage stamps, and took my chances on my own wit catching fire one day. Now as for the marbles, the news centers on the campaign to get warnings printed on new packages of the little glass balls, alerting parents that they can be fatal if kids use them orally. Very interesting. What ever became of common sense? But that's for others to argue.

The big revelation for me is that there's a market out there for marbles. While shooting marbles was more than a fad in my boyhoixi, I never knew one boy or girl who hmght any. Somehow it seemed we always had them. You won some, you lost some. One day I asked my dad where marbles came from.

He said the stork brought 'em. One thing about my dad, you never knew when he was kidding. OK, if warning labels are inevitable, let's add these words: "Harmful to the hearing and emotions under certain conditions!" Well, one night my parents were entertaining company in the living room. Directly overhead in the attic, my little brother and I stood on a Ix-d, and at a signal we turned over our boxes of marbles. They hit the wooden fl(Hr in a thunder and splatter.

Meanwhile in the kitchen, my older brother, the ring leader, threw a switch that pitched the house into darkness. When shouts and moans resounded from the living nxm, he turned the lights back on and scrambled upstairs to help us pick up the evident. In a minute or so our dad came and suxxi at the top of the enclosed staircase, and hxiked at the three innix-ents, down on all-fours. "What's going on up here?" he whispered after a moment's ominous silence. "Have you boys lost your marbles?" Retired Sentiwl staffer FA Hayvx, 67, is a freelance writer living in Orlando.

i i HEYDAYS back. So I explored the prospect of setting up my own business at home as an exclusive distributor of a newfangled kitchen gadget. It meant money up front, but company literature assured that once the gadget caught fire, I'd raking.