Arts and entertainment reports from The Times, national and international news services and the nation’s press.

STAGE

‘Guitars’ a Winner: August Wilson’s “Seven Guitars,” a co-production of Los Angeles’ Center Theatre Group, was chosen Monday as the best play of the 1995-96 theater season by the New York Drama Critics’ Circle. “Molly Sweeney” by Brian Friel was named best foreign play. “Rent” was honored as best musical, easily winning on the first ballot. It took four ballots to declare “Seven Guitars,” Wilson’s drama about the murder of a blues guitarist in Pittsburgh in 1948, a winner. The play, which was mounted at the Ahmanson Theatre earlier this year, also has eight nominations for the June 2 Tony Awards--more than any other nonmusical. Other plays receiving best play votes in the first round of the New York critics’ balloting were “Molly Sweeney,” “Racing Demon,” “Master Class” “Old Wicked Songs,” “The Monogomist” and “June and Jean in Concert.”

TELEVISION

Shore Thing: Can’t get enough of Aaron Spelling’s world--”Beverly Hills, 90210,” “Melrose Place,” “Savannah”? NBC is tentatively scheduling a daily one-hour serial, “Sunset Beach,” on the network’s daytime lineup for early 1997. The show will center on residents of a fictional beachfront community, according to an NBC announcement made Monday in New York.

MOVIES

No Statue, but . . . : Los Angeles writer-director Gary Walkow beat out more than 350 other entrants to win the 1996 Taos Talking Picture Festival’s first Great Western Land Grant Award for Innovation. The prize, awarded for Walkow’s film “Notes From Underground,” based on the Dostoevsky novella, includes five acres of land on the scenic Taos mesa. The festival plans to award a land prize annually in an effort to create a New Mexico community of talented filmmakers.

DANCE

On Her Toes: Russian ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, who has long been acclaimed one of the greatest ballerinas of the century, danced in New York City for the first time in more than a decade this weekend, and Associated Press writer Mary Campbell called the City Center performance “wonderful” while New York Times reviewer Anna Kisselgoff admired the ballerina’s “profound depth of artistry.” Plisetskaya is 70. Also on the bill were dancers from the Kirov Ballet, Bolshoi Ballet, new Russian Imperial Ballet, Lithuanian Ballet, Hamburg Ballet, Ukranian Ballet and New York City Ballet. “Almost everybody else was terrible,” Campbell concluded.

ART

Lost & Found: A lost watercolor of a blue chrysanthemum by Dutch artist Piet Mondrian has been discovered in the painter’s birthplace in the town of Amersfoort, the Mondriaanhuis Museum there announced. Art historian Corrie van Adrichem said the delicately executed pastel, which varies greatly from the abstract blocks of primary colors for which Mondrian became famous, was one of several watercolors Mondrian painted in the mid-1920s and sold for about $30 each to cover his living expenses. The painting is now worth about $60,000, Van Adrichem said. The watercolor--which had been inherited by a local woman after the death of her sister, who had lived in the United States since 1964--will be on exhibit at the Mondriaanhuis in Amersfoort until the end of June.

QUICK TAKES

After a yearlong study, the Smithsonian Institution has decided admission fees at its facilities are not feasible and “would breach an institutional tradition.” The Washington complex, one of the nation’s few remaining free museums, has been searching for new revenue sources in the face of shrinking government funding for the arts. . . . Siberian violinist Vadim Repin has the measles so his role as soloist at the L.A. Philharmonic concerts this weekend will be taken by Martin Chalifour, the Philharmonic’s principal concertmaster. Chalifour will play the originally scheduled works, the two Rhapsodies by Bela Bartok and Ravel’s “Tzigane.” The program, conducted by Pierre Boulez, remains as planned. . . . Meanwhile, Philharmonic managing director Ernest Fleischmann last week accepted the 1996 Laurel Leaf Award of the American Composers Alliance at a ceremony at Lincoln Center in New York. The award honors the Philharmonic’s New Music Group and its Green Umbrella concert series, which frequently features American music. . . . In Syracuse, N.Y., “60 Minutes” correspondent Steve Kroft returned to his alma mater Sunday to tell 5,000 Syracuse University graduates that he never was the ideal student. “My parents and my former faculty members would be surprised that I’m standing here,” the 1967 graduate said. “While my name appeared on several lists in the dean’s office, none of them was the dean’s list that my parents wanted.”