The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 97

NDAR Cos Atujclce (Times Thursday, August 24, 1989 Part VI CADE BOB GRIESER Urn Angela Tlma Neptune Can Be as Close as Your TV By STEVE WEINSTEIN Pete Townshend, left, and Roger Daltrey, below, in San Diego reprise moves and sounds that made the Who great in the '60s and '70s. The group plays LA. tonight and Friday. KFAC Parcels Out Classical Library By CLAUDIA PUIG and TERRY McQUILKIN 5k C53 POP MUSIC REVIEW Who's Who? Meet the New Band, Not the Same Band By ROBERT HILBURN, Times Pap Music Critic Every once in a while, a clever screenwriter reminds us that when we peer up at some distant star or planet, we are actually looking into the past because the light thrown off by the celestial body takes so long to travel to us here on Earth. On public-television stations around the country tonight, would-be astronomers and insomniacs alike can spend the wee hours looking at close-up photographs of Neptune's recent past as Voyager 2 zips past the planet and its moons at 38,000 m.p.h., snapping pictures like a shutter-happy tourist.

Traveling at the speed of light, the signals that make up those photographs will take four hours and six minutes to traverse the 2.7 billion miles separating Neptune and Earth. And just as soon as the signals are received by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's deep space tracking antennas in California, Spain and Australia and then turned into photographs by scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, viewers will be able to see them on their television screens. The cosmic slide show begins at 11:30 p.m. on KCET Channel 28, at 11 p.m. on KVCR Channel 24 and at 12:25 a.m.

on KPBS Channel 15, and will continue until at least 4 a.m. Friday. Anyone willing to stay up will get the first look at these pictures from deep space just hours after the 1-ton Voyager spacecraft makes its closest pass over the clouds of Neptune, turns 45 degrees with the help of the planet's gravity and then flies past Neptune's quirky moon, Triton. Voyager is scheduled to buzz within 3,000 miles of Neptune's wispy cloud tops tonight at 9. Reports on Voyager's close encounter with Neptune, the pale-Please see NEPTUNE, Page 3 When KFAC-Los Angeles' first and only commercial classical radio station abandons its venerable format next month, its substantial collection of recordings will be parceled out to Stanford University, the Los Angeles Public Library, and to public radio station KUSC, station officials have disclosed.

The donation of the library serves as a virtual nail in the coffin for the classical station, assuring that KFAC (FM 92.3) will not remain classical as was promised when the station was bought by Evergreen Media Corp. in January for $55 million. After reports that he was trying to sell the library and call letters for $1 million, KFAC president and general manager Jim de Castro said Tuesday that in late September he plans to donate the record portion of the station's library estimated at 50,000 recordings to Stanford University and the station's collection of 5,000 compact discs to the Los Angeles Public Library. "We have come to terms and we're delighted with opportunity of donating our library as opposed to selling our library," De Castro said. "The reason we're donating it is so the Los Angeles public will have the opportunity to it out at the public library at no cost." Said City Librarian Wyman Jones of the donation: "We are very pleased to receive this remarkable gift.

It will be housed in our Central Library in downtown Los Angeles where it will be available for loan to the public." William Moran, honorary curator of Stanford University's Archive of Recorded Music, think it's absolutely tremendous." De Castro said he also plans to donate "some of the rarest and most unusual discs that they don't Please see KFAC, Page 4 1 mm j' be upstaged by some young rock 'n' roll hotshots, because there is no support act on the tour, which includes stops tonight at the Universal Amphitheatre and Saturday night at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. But the group's performances would invariably be weighed against the greatness of the band's shows back in its prime, when the Who was rivaled as a creative force in Britain only by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Could the Who now celebrating its 25th anniversary still stand tall against that memory? The outlook wasn't good at the start of the evening because of all the commercialism surrounding the show. First, huge banners advertising the tour-sponsoring beer covered the banks of speakers on both sides of the stage. Then, Please see THE WHO, Page 9 SAN DIEGO The scene before the Who stepped on stage Tuesday night at San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium looked grim for anyone who has ever cared about the legendary British rock group.

Many longtime Who fans, in fact, have been anxious since hearing the news that the three surviving members of the band-guitarist Pete Townshend, singer Roger Daltrey and bassist John Entwistle were going on the road again. This return seven years after a highly successful "farewell" tour conjured up visions of a veteran prizefighter who, driven by either ego or money, just can't call it quits. So he ends up stepping into the ring one time too many and gets humiliated by the lightning jabs of a younger and stronger opponent. In the Who's case, there was no chance these musicians, all in their mid-40s, would GARY FRIEDMAN Los Angeles Tunes ELLEN JASKOL Los Angeles Times STAGE WATCH DANCE REVIEW A 23-Year Equity Chief Confirms Retirement 'Corsaire': Triumph of Balletic Kitsch 7 later, after he became convinced that it was being abused. A modification of the Waiver, proposed by the union's Western Advisory Board and voted in by the Los Angeles membership, resulted last year in a lengthy and bitter dispute between Equity and local small theater operators (many of whom were also Equity members) who wanted the vote rescinded.

Allegations of improprieties, predictions of doom and gloom, and a lawsuit eventually resulted in a mutually acceptable modified plan. But Weston took a lot of personal abuse from unhappy Waiverites during the year-long struggle. He acknowledged Wednesday that the badgering had influenced a decision he had begun to make a year and a half ago. C. Fields said, 'It was a woman who drove me to drink and I never wrote to thank If the By SYLVIE DRAKE, Times Theater Writer Rumors had been going around for months, but Edward Weston, Western Regional director of Actors' Equity, has now officially confirmed that he will retire from his post at the actors' union on Sept.

1, 1990 one week after his 65th birthday. "It would be foolish to deny it," said Weston, who played a controversial and contradictory role in what became known last year as the "Equity Waiver Wars." Weston, who was the chief designer of the 1972 Equity Waiver Plan (whereby the union waived certain rules, though not its jurisdiction, in theaters of fewer than 100 seats, thus freeing actors to perform and to produce themselves in small venues) became one of the plan's chief opponents 16 years 'If the Waiver people did hasten my decision, I'd like to thank them Edward Weston, Actors' Equity Western Regional director Waiver people did hasten my decision," Weston said, "I'd like to thank them now. "We had predicted there would Please see STAGE WATCH, Page 8 By MARTIN BERNHEIMER, Times MusicDance Critic There are two great, rival ballet companies in the Soviet Union, and they are very different. Everybody knows that. The mighty Bolshoi of Moscow exults in flashy bravura, in high-class athletic indulgences, in generously gilded razzle and vulgar pyrotechnical dazzle.

The mighty Kirov of Leningrad, on the other hand, is a historic bastion of taste and refinement, a proud stronghold of academic purity, a vaunted sanctuary of muted classicism. Forget it You have to forget it when the Kirov puts on "Le Corsaire." The visiting Soviets did just that Tuesday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, and the result was a jolting revelation. This "Corsaire," the first full-length approximation of Marius Petipa's elusive romantic milestone to be seen in the United States, is, if nothing else, a bona-fide kitsch spectacular. It out-Bolshois the Bolshoi, and does so with irresistible cheer and infectious conviction. See the fragile ship tossed by ferocious waves, the picturesque passengers clinging to the boards for dear life.

Pity their fate as the ill-fated vessel crashes upon a nasty rock. Listen to the thunder. Watch the lightning. You ain't seen miff in yet. Ogle the pretty harem inmates in their spangled bras and bare midriffs, all dancing daintily and quaintly on their tippy-toes.

Observe the sophisticated hootchy-kootch maneuvers. Laugh at the lecherous pasha, sneer at the greedy merchant, check out those riotous pirates. Wait There's more. Sigh for the lovely, lovesick heroine who just happened to bring a spotless white tutu with her to the deserted island. Giggle at her adorably pert counterpart Sigh, again, for a matched pair of heroes one a swashbuckling charmer, the other a noble savage.

That's just the beginning, folks. Watch the assembled crew fly and soar, and duel and spin and kiss and wiggle through multilayered, hopeless convolutions of intrigue, mystery and adventure. Enjoy the colorful diversions, share the excitement of the uplifting derring-do. All this just for the price of one admission. While you're at it savor the lavish, faintly stylized, quasi-Technicolored scenery.

Admire the hysterical rainbow costumes. Gasp as you witness a veritable orgy of ever-moving scrims and veils and plumes and tassels and laser lights and genuine water fountains and drifting clouds and dancing flowers and countless CRITIC AT LARGE Suppression Can Be a Dirty Word, Too Farukh Ruzimatov as AH in the Kirov Ballets production 0 "Le Corsaire" in Costa Mesa. other manifestations of postcard exotica. Ah. The Kirov "Corsaire" is thoroughly, unabashedly, whole-heartedly, shamelessly, passionately, unre-pentantly tawdry.

And it is wonderful. It is easy to love. All one has to do is refuse to take it seriously. The dancers have to take it seriously, of course. That is the secret of their success.

We don't The production dates back, after a fashion, to 1856. Over the years, however, many hands have had their way with both the choreography and the score. What Oleg Vinogradov, current guardian of Kirov virtue, assembled in 1986 for this version is a sprawling pastiche a.k.a. mishmash or hodgepodge or jigsaw puzzle or free-for-all or patchwork. It acknowledges the confused contributions of four librettists (not including Lord Byron, who wrote the poem that inspired the subsequent variations) and six count Please see' Page 7 Matthiessen's brilliant, tragically foreshortened career, that books, the theater, films, radio and television all now have a freedom of expression beyond his fondest hopes.

Hardly a book above the level of "The Little Engine That Could" does not employ once-bannable language, yet no commonwealths have collapsed. Yet that old urge to cleanse us and protect us by censorship and suppression is abroad in the land now as always. What never seems to stay evident for long is that there is a difference between what may be clearly and presently dangerous to the society and what is merely distasteful or unpopular. And also now as always, the cures seem far more dangerous Please see SUPPRESSION, Page 6 Lillian Smith's novel "Strange Fruit" The book, serious and eloquent and concerned with racial relations in the South, contained one four-letter word which, it was thought, would bring the Commonwealth of Massachusetts or at least the City of Boston down in ruins. It was banned.

My memory is that the test case led to the acquitting of the book on obscenity charges, although it is true that my memory tends toward optimism. But Matthiessen, concerned with what he saw as the steady darkening of the world and the suppression of personal freedom, killed himself a half-dozen years later at 48, in the Cold War year of 1950. It is ironic, in the light of Prof. By CHARLES CHAMPLIN, Times Arts Editor One penalty for having lurched past 30 (or maybe it's 12), is that you begin to detect cycles and patterns in the world around you. Nothing so basic and natural as the relentless passage of the seasons.

I mean the battles you had thought were won, but weren't, the self-evident truths that don't stay evident for everybody, the divisive arguments that recur like athlete's foot or heat rash. It seems like only yesterday that a Boston bookseller and a writer named Bernard DeVoto and one of my professors, F.O. Matthiessen, were allowing themselves to be arrested for selling and buying TELEVISION MUSIC JAZZ Inside Calendar MORNING REPORT Bryant Gumbel is trying on a Andrew Litton and Peter Donohoe attheBowl. pg A pianist converses with his peers onBravo. page2 Saxophonist Frank Morgan says he's homeatlastpage jq MORNING REPORT OPENINGS RADIO: AM7FM highlights.

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