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

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

Staying Atop the Hill: Lauryn Hill’s “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” was the nation’s best-selling album for the third straight week, according to SoundScan figures. Hill sold almost 214,000 copies last week, easily outdistancing the 127,000 figure for rapper Canibus’ debut album, “Can-I-Bus.” The surprise was that the soundtrack sequel “Back to Titanic” actually sank a little, falling from No. 2 to No. 5 (107,000 copies sold). Courtney Love’s new album with the band Hole, “Celebrity Skin,” sold an encouraging 86,000 copies, ranking ninth.

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Even Bigger ‘Hair’: Thirty years after its premiere, the original creators of the rock musical “Hair” are launching a three-year, 27-city revival tour, beginning in San Francisco in the spring of 1999, with an eventual stop planned for Los Angeles. Original producer Michael Butler said Wednesday that this time, the show will be set within “Hair, the Festival”--a traveling performing arts village with entertainment activities and vendors attempting to recapture the hippie era, including re-creations of Haight-Ashbury and Greenwich Village, a multimedia retrospective narrated by Walter Cronkite, and reenactments of famous speeches by Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Timothy Leary and others.

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White House’s Jazz Night: Cable’s VH1 will show “Jazz: An Expression of Democracy,” a commercial-free program hosted by President and Mrs. Clinton, on Friday from 7:30-9 p.m. The program, celebrating a “truly American musical art form,” will be taped that night at the White House, and will feature Wynton Marsalis performing with an all-star jazz orchestra, plus a discussion on jazz’s impact on American culture.

QUICK TAKES

The Senate has turned down a proposal to stop providing money to the National Endowment for the Arts. The 76-22 Senate vote against the measure late Tuesday came two months after the House also endorsed NEA funding. The president has requested $136 million for the agency next year, up from the current $98 million. . . . A notebook with Paul McCartney’s handwritten lyrics to the Beatles’ hits “Hey Jude” and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” sold for about $168,000 at a Sotheby’s auction in London Tuesday. Meanwhile, a separate Sotheby’s sale Wednesday of former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell’s wardrobe from her Ginger Spice days raised nearly $250,000 for a British children’s cancer charity. . . . The Hollywood Bowl’s tribute to Warner Bros. film music--marking John Mauceri’s 150th appearance conducting the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra--will be on Friday. It is the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra’s final date of the season.