Cleopatra

Cleopatra's Moon A Novel Vicky Alvear Shecter Arthur A. Levine Books: 368 pp., $18.99, ages 13 and up Eyes ringed with kohl, her lithe body draped in a tunic, Cleopatra VII has been memorialized ad nauseam in numerous art forms, from paintings and opera to film and a seemingly endless string of books. The reason is simple: The last queen of Egypt was an exotic blend of power and beauty whose brief life came to a tragic end when she committed suicide with the help of an asp. Now her only daughter, Cleopatra Selene, is getting the historical fiction treatment in a beautiful new novel for young adults, "Cleopatra's Moon.

"Cleopatra's Second Husband," an edgy, erotic film about two Los Angeles couples, will screen at 7 tonight at the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, Leonard H. Goldenson Theatre, 5220 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood, as part of KCET's cinema series. It replaces the previously announced "You Can Count on Me," which was listed in Sunday's Calendar. The cost of the eight-part series is $120, or $195 per couple. Information: (323) 953-5888.

When guests at the Savoy Hotel finish their morning tea and look through the leafy gardens to Victoria Embankment, they glimpse a startling sight. There in the soft, misty air of the river side one of the last colossal obelisks to leave Egypt stands silhouetted against the sky.

The time: 1942. As the cobblestones of Europe ring with the hideous gavotte of war, there is trouble in North Africa as well. Black-helmeted Fascists strut across the sand toward Alexandria, its only hope a gallant band of Tommies captained by . . . Antony and Cleopatra? Actually, the battle scenes are the best part of Tony Richardson's staging of "Antony and Cleopatra" for the Los Angeles Theatre Center.

Shown nationally in December, the new Lyric Opera of Chicago production of Samuel Barber's "Antony and Cleopatra" was broadcast belatedly in Orange County in January. Tonight, even more belatedly, it can be seen on KCET Channel 28--and heard on KUSC-FM (91.5)--at 9. Barber, dead these 11 years, suffered deeply, it has long been reported, from the failure of the original "Antony," produced lavishly by Franco Zeffirelli for the opening of the new Metropolitan Opera house in Lincoln Center in 1966.

Southern California is seeing a lot of "Antony and Cleopatra" this summer. Jack O'Brien's production has just opened at the Old Globe Theatre and Tony Richardson's staging opens at the Los Angeles Theatre Center July 3. "Antony" is also hot in London. Peter Hall's production--his swan song as artistic director of the National Theatre of Great Britain--has been called his finest Shakespeare since his "War of Roses" cycle with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1964.

Sybil Christopher, who died last week in New York at 83, was a noted theater producer and the founder of Arthur, a Manhattan hot spot that attracted a ritzy celebrity clientele during the 1960s. Even if she hadn't become famous as the first wife, and later, ex-wife, of actor Richard Burton, Christopher would still have occupied an important seat in New York high society and culture. "She was very hands on -- as hands on a mother as she was a producer. " said Kate Burton, her eldest daughter.

Alan Rickman is aroused from a heavy-lidded languor recognizable from so many of his performances when the talk turns to a longtime crush. No, it's not Rima Horton, the economist he's lived with in London for 34 years. Nor is it the stage, which he still finds terrifying. What really excites him — truly, madly, deeply — is the English language. "It's so rich and cruel and beautiful, like a fireworks display, and yet it can be so subtle and so crude," says the 65-year-old classical actor and director.

Archaeologists think they may be close to locating the graves of the doomed lovers Cleopatra and Mark Antony in a temple on the Mediterranean Sea just west of Alexandria, Egypt. For years, researchers have been seeking the graves of the famed pair, celebrated in plays and movies, but all the leads have proved fruitless.

An epic love story, like a good horror movie, relies more on possibility than actuality. Surprise and anticipation, of what is to come and what it might mean, are what draw viewers in, binding them in fetters of pleasure and pain. Subtlety and nuance create the space between word and glance, between shadow and revelation, where imagination digs in and magnificence blooms. None of which happens, in any way, shape or form, during Lifetime's television event "Liz & Dick," a wildly graceless biopic that careens through the decades-long relationship between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton with more petulance than passion, knocking down gin bottles and rumpling silk sheets for no better reason than that's what it says to do in the script.