Critics' Voices: Nov. 27, 1989

THEATER

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE. Dustin Hoffman plays Shylock, warts and all, in a shimmering Broadway production transferred intact from a sold-out London run. A tough ticket worth every penny and every minute of the wait.

CLOSER THAN EVER. This musical sampler from lyricist Richard Maltby Jr. and composer David Shire is an off-Broadway charmer deftly performed. Special joys: character songs that actors Brent Barrett and Sally Mayes render as richly nuanced as one-act plays.

MYSTERY OF THE ROSE BOUQUET. Jane Alexander and Anne Bancroft play a nurse and a patient in a taut psychological study by Manuel Puig, author of The Kiss of the Spider Woman, at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.

RADIO CITY MUSIC HALL CHRISTMAS SPECTACULAR. Like its Rockefeller Center neighbors -- a towering fir tree and a glistening ice rink that displays the endlessly watchable gyrations of amateur skaters -- this New York City bring- the-family pageant is one of the grandest holiday traditions in the U.S. Satisfyingly the same from year to year, yet spruced up just enough, the fast- moving script mingles Charles Dickens, Santa Claus and Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker with carols and hymns. The climactic Nativity scene features camels, donkeys and other live animals. This year's production serves up dazzling special effects and opulent costumes, as well as the show-stopping, high-kicking Rockettes. If at times the narration suggests the entire world is Christian, or should be, the overwhelming message is joy and goodwill.

MUSIC

LINDA RONSTADT: CRY LIKE A RAINSTORM, HOWL LIKE THE WIND (Elektra/Asylum). Ronstadt takes lessons learned from her three successful albums of pop standards and puts them to work on the kind of material she did so well in the '70s: confessional ballads and songs of love gone amiss. The cathedral- filling orchestral arrangements threaten the fragile structure of some songs, but Ronstadt's singing (superbly accompanied on four tracks by New Orleans soulster Aaron Neville) keeps everything on course.

ART

THE NEW VISION: PHOTOGRAPHY BETWEEN THE WORLD WARS, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. This smartly conceived show, which introduces the Metropolitan's new Ford Motor Company Collection of 20th century photographs, highlights the camera's courtship of pure form. Through Dec. 31.

THE INTIMATE WORLD OF ALEXANDER CALDER, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York City. A delightful demonstration that for family and friends the sculptor could make practically anything out of anything. Through March 11.

MOVIES

VALMONT. Maybe it's time to call it a day for film remakes of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos' novel of sexual gamesmanship among 18th century French aristocrats. Director Milos Forman and screenwriter Jean- Claude Carriere have not so much adapted this deliciously nasty tale as they have embalmed it.

IMMEDIATE FAMILY. Glenn Close and James Woods desperately want a child; Mary Stuart Masterson is about to have one. Director Jonathan Kaplan's comedy-drama finds sympathetic laughter in everyone's burdens and opportunities. The tears come later.

BOOKS