TV/RADIOKinnear Will Replace Costas: Greg Kinnear, the...

TV/RADIO

Kinnear Will Replace Costas: Greg Kinnear, the friendly host of “Talk Soup” on the E! cable channel, signed a five-year contract Wednesday to replace “Later” host Bob Costas on NBC’s late-late-night interview show, NBC has confirmed. Sources say “Later With Greg Kinnear” will premiere in January and air Monday through Thursday at 1:35 a.m. Kinnear will executive produce and write the half-hour show, which will tape at NBC in Burbank so Kinnear can continue doing “Talk Soup” on E!. Costas, whose NBC contract ends in January, taped “Later” in New York. He is now reportedly talking with NBC about future plans, which will probably include sports. Kinnear had been rumored as one of the top candidates to take over Chevy Chase’s failed late-night talk show on Fox.

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King Tapped for Scopus Award: Radio/television talk show host Larry King will receive the 1994 Scopus Award from the American Friends of Hebrew University, an award originally scheduled to go to beleaguered pop star Michael Jackson. The singer reportedly asked that his name be taken out of consideration when he began treatment in London for an addiction to prescription painkillers. King will receive the award, which commemorates his humanitarian work and use of the communications media to help clarify complex issues, on Jan. 29 at the Beverly Hilton. Past recipients include Elizabeth Taylor, former President Gerald R. Ford, Barbra Streisand, Steven Spielberg, Johnny Carson and Frank Sinatra.

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Hopkins Plotting ‘Silence’ Sequel: Anthony Hopkins creates a fanciful plot line for a “Silence of the Lambs, Part Two” in a two-part television interview with Charlie Rose on Rose’s PBS talk show tonight and Friday. “If I were writing the script, I think he would make a deal with Clarisse: ‘You’ve got to kill me, but I’m going to set a game for you and you have to destroy me,’ ” Hopkins said, imagining that his character, Hannibal Lechter, is speaking to Jodie Foster in a sequel. There is no such script yet, Hopkins said, although there have been discussions about a sequel to the movie.

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Stern Raises Bobbitt Funds: “Shock jock” Howard Stern racked up at least $25,000 for John Bobbitt, the man whose wife cut off his penis for what she claimed was retaliation for a sexual assault, during a radiothon Tuesday on the nationally syndicated “The Howard Stern Show,” heard locally on KLSX-FM (97.1). In addition to raising funds for Bobbitt’s legal and medical bills, Stern solicited a date with Bobbitt from Susan Olsen, who played Cindy Brady on TV’s “The Brady Bunch.” Most of the thousands who called in pledged $25 in exchange for a T-shirt that has Bobbitt’s name on the front and “Love Hurts” on the back.

THE ARTS

Donetsk Ballet Won’t do ‘Nutcracker’: The Pasadena Civic Auditorium has canceled its Dec. 8-12 performances of the Donetsk Ballet’s “Nutcracker” because of poor ticket sales. Richard Barr, the Civic auditorium manager, said only 1,800 of 21,000 available seats had been sold. “It’s bad news for the theater,” Barr said. “Unfortunately, there are just too many ‘Nutcrackers’ out there.” It was to have been the West Coast debut for the Donetsk Ballet, a Ukrainian company that has toured the eastern United States since 1990. Ticket refunds are available at the point of purchase. . . . Citing financial problems, the San Francisco-based Philharmonic Baroque Orchestra has canceled its Jan. 12 and Feb. 23 concerts at the L.A. County Museum of Art Bing Theater. The group says it will, however, play its scheduled concerts at the museum in October 1994 and February 1995.

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Latin American Auction Results Mixed: Christie’s sold $6.9-million worth of Latin American art Tuesday in a surprisingly successful New York sale that included $1.2 million for 15 paintings and drawings by Chilean expatriate Claudio Bravo from a collection assembled by the late Malcolm Forbes. The highest bid of the night was for “Frutas,” a still-life by Columbian artist Fernando Botero, which sold for $552,500. Botero was one of the night’s stars, with four of his paintings being among the 10 garnering the highest bids. A similar sale the night before at rival auction house Sotheby’s was less successful, however. That sale brought in only $4.2 million, well short of the pre-sale low estimate of $6.5 million. And a third of the 74 works offered--including a number of works by Botero--failed to sell.

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‘Perestroika’ Reviews: The Broadway opening of “Perestroika,” part two of Tony Kushner’s epic “Angels in America,” got a rave from departing New York Times critic Frank Rich: “a true millennial work of art, uplifting, hugely comic and pantheistically religious in a very American style.” But not all the critics were that impressed. “Marvelous attributes notwithstanding, a sense of disappointment--perhaps unreasonably--hung in the air,” wrote Clive Barnes of the New York Post. Kushner “is never able to make his perceptions coalesce,” offered Howard Kissel of the Daily News. David Patrick Stearns of USA Today found “Perestroika” “more bizarre, visionary, poetic and profound” than its prequel, “Millennium Approaches,” and Michael Kuchwara of Associated Press wrote that “Perestroika” is “a wondrous display of strong, often vivid writing, memorable characters and a warmer, more effective production” than “Millennium.”