ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT REPORTS FROM THE TIMES, NEWS SERVICES AND THE NATION’S PRESS.

TELEVISION

Russian President Takes Kids’ TV Fare to Task

U.S. broadcasters aren’t the only ones who get chided by government officials for the quality of children’s television programming. Russian President Vladimir V. Putin sounded off on the state of affairs in his nation this week, urging media executives to step up production of cultural children’s shows.

According to TheMoscowTimes.com, televised fairy tales, popular during the Soviet era, have largely been replaced with children’s game shows and imported cartoons, including the widely criticized “Pokemon.” The three national channels often air violent crime shows during afternoon and evening hours.

“It is the task of creative intellectuals to create such cultural examples that would squeeze out morally and artistically deficient characters and plots,” Putin said at a meeting with officials and cultural figures in the Kremlin. “The majority of national channels violate the basic rules of children’s programming in connection with this.”

Licenses for TV channels in Russia put quotas on children’s programming but they are rarely met. Putin ordered the press ministry to monitor them more closely and to use the media to deal with problems such as child loneliness and neglect.

POP/ROCK

Controversy Follows Grammy Speech

On the Grammy Awards telecast last week, National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences President Michael Greene addressed the problem of unauthorized trading of songs on the Internet. To illustrate his point, he showed clips of people he said were three students whom the academy arranged to tape as they downloaded nearly 6,000 songs in two days.

Some industry insiders found it strange that he’d acknowledge, on national TV, that the academy had broken the Electronic Theft Act.

Now, the New York Times reports, one of the downloaders has stepped forward to say that Greene’s allegations aren’t true. Although his two colleagues were UCLA students, Numair Faraz said he left school to found a technology business. And most of the music wasn’t taken from publicly accessible file-exchange Web sites, he said, but from music sent to them by friends via AOL Instant Messenger.

Because the songs may have been taken from CDs that were purchased, there’s no guarantee anything illegal went on.

Barb Dehgan, a spokeswoman for the recording academy, said, “The kids were asked to download as many songs as possible off the World Wide Web, specifically publicly accessible Web sites.” She did not comment about the legality of the project.

MUSIC

Barenboim Peace Initiative Put on Hold

Yet more fallout from the Mideast conflict: Israeli pianist-conductor Daniel Barenboim had to cancel a Wednesday night concert in the West Bank city of Ramallah after authorities said they couldn’t guarantee his safety, BBC News reports. The event was intended to be a musical plea for a dialogue to end the bloodshed.

The Israeli army said it had banned all Israeli citizens from entering territory under sole Palestinian control--and Barenboim was no exception. The musician was to have performed the “Recital for Peace” in the city, where Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has been confined by Israeli forces since December.

Palestinian sponsors of the concert expressed the hope that it could be rescheduled.

THEATER

Gelbart’s Racy ‘Lysistrata’ Hits Snag

Writer Larry Gelbart (the film “Tootsie,” TV’s “MASH”) has encountered problems with his adaptation of “Lysistrata,” Aristotle’s play about sexual politics that was supposed to premiere in May at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass.

The project, subtitled “Sex and the City-State,” was to have been the valedictory production of artistic director Robert Brustein, who is retiring at the end of the season. But leading lady Cherry Jones and others involved in the production found it too racy, the New York Observer reports, and refused to participate.

Rather than being performed with songs by Alan Menken and David Zippel, as originally planned, it will now have a reading at the Manhattan Theater Club on Monday.

Gelbart said that the phrase “‘political correctness’ was never used, but I think if we dusted off the e-mail we might see those fingerprints.”

QUICK TAKES

Mike Myers has put his legal conflict with Universal/DreamWorks/Imagine Entertainment behind him and signed to star in the title role of “Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat,” an adaptation of the kids’ classic from those three companies.... Jon Robin Baitz and David Henry Hwang, among others, will help the Center Theatre Group celebrate its 35th anniversary by participating in a panel, “Golden State of Mind: Seven Playwrights Consider California,” at the Taper on April 15. The event is free but reservations are required.... The MTV original series “The Osbournes” scored big in its debut for the cable network, drawing more than 5 million viewers Tuesday night, the highest series debut in MTV’s history.... Orson Welles, who died in 1985, is being resurrected to star in a new London TV series, Variety reports. “Tales From the Black Museum” will be narrated by the Hollywood legend, whose voice will be taken from the 1952 BBC radio series of the same name, and will feature an actor playing Welles in silhouette.... The Los Angeles Chamber Group is presenting “Casting Pearls”--a premiere of David Woodard and Jack Kevorkian’s collaborative suite--as a memorial to slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl on Saturday at Birmingham High School in Van Nuys at 7:30 p.m.