POP/ROCK - Sept. 24, 1993

Geffen Suit Stands: A Los Angeles Superior Court judge left a former Geffen Records promotions director’s sexual harassment lawsuit against the company intact Thursday, ruling that Christina Anthony had cause to pursue her claims that she was subjected to acts of “sexual terrorism” and that upper-echelon executives failed to stop the behavior. Anthony, who filed suit against the company and several top executives last November, alleges that a since-fired executive pursued her relentlessly on the job, starting with rude comments and progressing to physical acts and exposing himself. A judge dropped charges a few weeks ago against individual executives accused of permitting the harassment.

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Country’s Climbing: Country superstar Garth Brooks and the line-dancing craze have led country music to new heights, according to the new Country Music Assn. Index, which tracks the industry’s growth through record sales as well as revenue from concerts, cable TV, radio ads and magazine circulation. The index found a 76% growth in country music revenues from 1990 to 1992, including a leap in record sales from $6.6 million to $1.4 billion over the two years. In other findings, concert revenues doubled, from $64 million to $126 million.

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Yanni Goes Home: New Age performer Yanni returns to his native Greece for concerts at the historic Acropolis tonight through Sunday. The shows, which also feature the Royal London Philharmonic Orchestra, will be taped for a live album and home video. The concerts mark Yanni’s first return to Greece in two decades.

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Last Call: Popular torch singer Andrea Marcovicci will give Angelenos a taste of her upcoming Carnegie Hall concert in two weekends of appearances at the Gardenia Club in Los Angeles. The singer will offer an evening of Irving Berlin songs tonight and Saturday, and on Oct. 1 and 2, she will perform a program of “December songs” that will be part of her Nov. 24 Carnegie Hall appearance. She opens in Frank D. Gilroy’s “Any Given Day” with Sada Thompson at the Longacre in New York on Nov. 16.

THE ARTS

Turkey Reclaims Met Objects: After a six-year legal battle, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has agreed to return to the Turkish government more than 200 6th-Century BC gold, silver and glass objects that had been in the museum’s collection since the 1960s. The museum acquired most of the works as gifts from “established” New York art dealers, but in 1986 the Turkish government told the museum it believed the objects had been illegally excavated from Turkish burial mounds. Turkey filed suit in 1987 to reclaim the works, which were created during the reign of King Croesus of Lydia. The Metropolitan’s director, Philippe de Montebello, said that two factors encouraged the museum to settle the suit: The Turks proved that the objects were indeed “clandestinely” excavated, and the museum’s own records “suggested that some museum staff during the 1960s were likely aware, even as they acquired these objects, that their provenance was controversial.”

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Woodward/Newman Pledge Funds: Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman have pledged $20,000 to the Marietta, Ga., theater that lost funding after presenting Terrence McNally’s “Lips Together, Teeth Apart,” a play dealing with AIDS. The same play just closed at Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum on Sunday. Woodward, who lived in Marietta as a child, said she and her husband would donate the money if the Theater in the Square could raise another $20,000. The theater lost its annual $40,000 subsidy last month when the Cobb County Commission voted to drop all arts funding. Two weeks earlier, in a move prompted by complaints over the play, the commissioners had approved a resolution proclaiming that the gay lifestyle is incompatible with community values.

MOVIES

‘Oleanna’ on Screen?: Robert De Niro’s production company has optioned David Mamet’s hit Off Broadway play “Oleanna,” the show’s producer says. If all goes as planned, Mamet will write the screenplay based on the two-character play about sexual harassment, and De Niro will star, but the two entertainment giants will reportedly have to fight for the director’s chair.

QUICK TAKES

For Inquiring Minds That Want to Know--Lorena Bobbitt, the 24-year-old Virginia woman who made international headlines in June for allegedly cutting off her husband’s penis, gives her first TV interview about the incident tonight on ABC’s “20/20.” . . . Kushner-Locke subsidiary Acme Productions, responding publicly for the first time to a nearly two-week-old strike by crew members alleging unfair labor practices on the set of the new CBS series “Harts of the West,” says it has offered to submit the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees union’s bid to represent the crew to a secret ballot before the National Labor Relations Board, but that such offers have been refused. “Though the union would like to characterize (Kushner-Locke) as unfriendly to unions, the fact is that (the union has) . . . refused to go through the legal channels because they said it would take too long,” said a Kushner-Locke spokesman.