FALL PREVIEW : The Calendar Critics’ Best Bets for the Rest of ’90 : Stage

How can you tell fall has arrived in eternally sunny Southern California? Well, one way is by the start of the autumn arts and entertainment season. This special fall preview section provides listings of events from today through the end of the year and our critics’ picks for the best bets in film, pop music, jazz, stage, music and dance and the visual arts. (Some box-office telephone numbers may not be in operation yet.) The Mark Taper Forum is the theater most likely to give us our inaugural shot of adrenaline in a fall season otherwise heavily punctuated by the tried (mostly in New York) and true.

The Taper season opens Thursday with “Hope of the Heart,” Adrian Hall’s staging of Robert Penn Warren works (see story, Page 6) ; followed Nov. 29 by the Manhattan Theatre Club production of Terrence McNally’s “The Lisbon Traviata,” a swirling tale of gay marital break-up set against a frantic backdrop of opera lovers addicted to Maria Callas. Richard Thomas will headline.

If one were to pick the potentially biggest hitter this fall season, however, it would have to be “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway.” This Tony Award-winning Robbins sampler will rekindle the lights Oct. 10 of the Century City Shubert (dark since “Les Miserables” skipped town).

In Costa Mesa, South Coast Repertory will present David Hare’s “The Secret Rapture,” a social comedy that made news when New York Times critic Frank Rich, who had lavished praise on the show in London, panned it in Gotham and Hare challenged him to a duel of words. Rich declined, and so did the production, but you may want to see what the hoopla was about starting Oct. 26.

Wendy Wasserstein could do worse than have Amy Irving light up the Doolittle stage in her Pulitzer- and Tony-winning “The Heidi Chronicles” beginning Oct. 14. And for the devotees of the space-age circus, Le Cirque du Soleil’s “Nouvelle Experience” will set up its nouvelle tent--and show--on Santa Monica Pier starting Oct. 11.

Finally, two unseasonal items for December: Watch for “M Butterfly,” David Henry Hwang’s stylish spin-off on Puccini’s opera and the ultimate true tale of cross-dressing, to arrive at the Wilshire Theatre on Dec. 5--and for Reza Abdoh’s “Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice” to replace this theater wiz kid’s previously announced “Bogeyman” Dec. 13 at the Los Angeles Theatre Center.