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

TELEVISION

Lotsa Talking Going On: Comedian Keenen Ivory Wayans is throwing his hat into what could become history’s most crowded field of African American late-night talk-show hosts. Wayans, who rose to fame in Fox’s “In Living Color” before moving on to movies, including “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka” and “A Low Down Dirty Shame,” will produce and star in a five-day-a-week syndicated late-night series for Disney’s Buena Vista Television, planned to premiere in August. Wayans said his show will be “talk-variety with an attitude” and will offer “something different and irreverent every night.” Although Wayans’ target audience has been largely disenfranchised in late night since Arsenio Hall’s show ended in 1994, Wayans is one of four black men planning to take on the genre. The highest profile contenders are Earvin “Magic” Johnson, who has agreed to host and executive produce a syndicated late-night series that would premiere some time in 1998, and “Vibe,” a Quincy Jones-produced show hosted by comic Chris Spencer that’s set to begin airing this summer on KCOP-TV Channel 13. Also previously announced was “The John Salley Show,” starring the NBA alumnus, which was to have premiered in June as a weekly late-night entry on Fox-owned stations before being bumped up to weeknights. But Mort Marcus, president of Buena Vista Television, which was also to have distributed the Salley show, said Tuesday that the Wayans deal “puts a fork in the road” for Salley’s project, and “whether or not he goes on the air . . . we just don’t know yet.”

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Faith in a Box: Religion coverage continues to rise in prime-time television, according to a study commissioned by the Parents Television Council. However, the group, an adjunct of the conservative Media Research Center,, still decried a shortage in depictions of faith while asserting that about one in five portrayals of religion last year was negative. Depictions of religion have increased four-fold since the study was first conducted four years ago, thanks largely to the addition of prime-time shows like “Touched by an Angel” and “Promised Land” on CBS (which the group dubbed the most “faith-friendly network”) as well as the WB network’s “7th Heaven.” Still, the total number of “portrayals of faith” amounted to about one every four hours, the group said.

POP/ROCK

Jackson’s Princely PR: Prince Michael Junior. That’s the name given by the “King of Pop” to his infant son. “My grandfather and great-grandfather were both named Prince,” Michael Jackson told the European magazine OK!, “so we have carried on the tradition and now we have a third Prince in the family.” OK! is said to have paid $4 million for the Jackson interview and photo exclusive of the light-skinned baby, which came out Monday. “I’m in bliss 24 hours a day,” Jackson told the magazine. “There were shouts of joy when the baby was born. I couldn’t believe the miracle I had just witnessed. It was unbelievable.” Jackson added: “I have lived in a fish bowl all my life, and I want my son to live a normal life.” Jackson’s wife, Debbie Rowe, told the magazine that Jackson is a model father who changes diapers, feeds his 5-week-old son and sings to him. “I have married and had a baby with the man I will always love, and I am on top of the world,” she said.

MOVIES

Black Showcase: Works by African American filmmakers and actors will get a showcase in Mexico this summer. The first annual Acapulco Black Film Festival, co-sponsored by the Acapulco Tourism Board in an effort to attract African American visitors to the resort town, takes place June 24 to 29. Warrington Hudlin, president of the U.S.-based Black Filmmaker Foundation, which is organizing the event, said the festival will “recognize and enjoy some of the works that have been traditionally overlooked by mainstream festivals and award ceremonies.”

CLASSICAL MUSIC

Pressure’s On: They’re under pressure to be perfect every time, and they have to work most nights and weekends. But what causes the most stress for classical musicians? In a word: conductors. In a poll of 1,639 members of 56 orchestras in Europe, Asia, North America and Australia, a whopping 73% said they have suffered stress because of a conductor who sapped their confidence, and 61% also cited incompetent conductors as major stress culprits. “Our questionnaire gives musicians a voice to air problems that they dare not speak about,” said Ian James, founder of the British Performing Arts Medicine Trust, which conducted the study. But David Sternbach, chairman of the American Federation of Musicians’ health care task force, said the true number of musicians hampered by conductors was probably higher: “I think [some conductors] are so violent they drive people out,” he said. “[Those surveyed] are the tough remainder who survive.”

QUICK TAKES

So what was the meaning of the blue ribbon worn by best screenplay winner Billy Bob Thornton on Oscar night? The Red Cross said Tuesday that they supplied Thornton and others with the ribbons to express support for victims of the Southeast tornadoes and Ohio River flood. . . . Fox has renewed “Millennium” for a second season, despite lackluster ratings. The show, from “The X-Files” creator Chris Carter, ranks 80th in rating out of 118 major network shows, drawing an average of 10.7 million viewers a week.