Short Takes: Apr. 20, 1992

MUSIC

Thunder at the Top of the Charts

“DO YOU WANNA GET ROCKED?” shouts DEF LEPPARD on its new album, Adrenalize (Mercury). The answer, judging by the way the record has beaten Springsteen to the top spot on the pop charts, is a thunderous yes. The British band offers its trademark formula: a sonic avalanche of crunching power chords, rock-solid rhythms and surprisingly tuneful vocals. The lyrics remain gleefully sophomoric. On Make Love Like a Man, singer Joe Elliott pleads, “Don’t call me gigolo./ Don’t call me Casanova./ Just call me on the phone, and baby c’mon over.” The Leps may not change the world, but when it comes to crafting unabashed anthems to sex, girls and love, they are deffer than ever.

TELEVISION

Heart Tuggers

IN MOST RESPECTS, DATELINE NBC, THE network’s new prime-time magazine show, is typical of the booming genre. Two well-manicured hosts (Jane Pauley and Stone Phillips) introduce three stories a week, from investigative pieces to heart- tugging features. For shameless emotional manipulation, however, the show may set new standards. A report last week on a Pennsylvania company accused of selling machine tools to Iraq was loaded, irrelevantly, with grieving parents of dead U.S. soldiers. A story on forecasting failures at the National Weather Service tried to clinch its case by coaxing tears from a woman whose husband had been killed by a freak storm. Ratings so far are promising, alas.

CINEMA

Cheerful Shuffle

A MURDERED COURIER, HIS BODY DIScovered on the rim of a New Mexico canyon; an attache case stuffed with the usual large sum of money; any number of strange disappearances: WHITE SANDS bedazzles mainly by the speed and dexterity with which it shuffles and deals its assorted plot elements. Eventually, corrupt FBI men, a guy who claims to be CIA (Mickey Rourke in a role small enough so he doesn’t wear out his welcome), some crooked arms dealers and a sexy mystery woman (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) all cherchez le loot. Director Roger Donaldson puts a curiously cheerful spin on paranoia, and Willem Dafoe, as a deputy sheriff, provides a knowing parody of Charlton Heston doing jut-jawed heroics.

THEATER

Fine Players, Flawed Play

WHAT A DREAM CAST: ROGER REES IN HIS first New York theater role since he won the Tony for Nicholas Nickleby, as a British aristocrat turned Southern California hustler; TV stars Nancy Marchand of Lou Grant, double-cast as his London mother and his Los Angeles boss, and Jean Smart of Designing Women, as both of his abused wives. What a pity that promising playwright Jon Robin Baitz, 30, who in THE END OF THE DAY parallels Old World and New World corruption from charity medical wards to drug dealing to corporate raiding, can’t stitch together a coherent narrative. His common but fatal mistakes: portraying all capitalists as repugnantly the same without making any of them believable, and sniffishly equating evil with mere bad taste.

BOOKS

Parents at Bat

FOR NINE YEARS CBS COMMENTATOR BILL Geist has coached Little League baseball in Ridgewood, N.J. His rueful LITTLE LEAGUE CONFIDENTIAL (Macmillan; $17) does an expert job of creating humor out of the chaos of managing squads of unfocused kids, like the girl who hesitates to field wearing her press-on nails. But most of the laughs come from the author’s withering observations of parents and fellow coaches. They all suffer from Little League Syndrome, which causes “dyspepsia and distemper.” And very antisocial behavior. At one point a mother snarls: “I pity your children.” A coach whom Geist calls Dick Knavery plots to illegally garner top players. And Geist is hardly immune: in the big game he persuades Ms. Press-On Nails to go to the toilet so his star can bat. His team wins.