`JEKYLL & HYDE' SEASON LOOMS IN PERFORMING ARTS.

Is Frank Wildhorn building a monster - a monster career, that is? Could be. The unabashedly pop-oriented composer has three Broadway hits to his credit, and while a few New York critics have tried to bury him, audiences adore Wildhorn's lively, accessible scores. This season, Los Angeles will host a Wildhorn double-header, beginning, fittingly enough, with ``Jekyll & Hyde.'' This latest version of the horror classic about the ultimate split personality, plays Tuesday-Sept. 19 at the Pantages Theatre, while Wildhorn's other pop-romantic epic, ``The Scarlet Pimpernel'' will have its L.A. debut this spring at the Ahmanson Theatre.

Following in the steps of his ``Frasier'' colleague Kelsey Grammer, David Hyde Pierce, who paid his theater dues for years before reaping TV payola, will tread the boards in ``The Boys From Syracuse,'' the latest in the Reprise! series of staged concert musicals. The Rodgers and Hart spin on Shakespeare's ``The Comedy of Errors'' plays Sept. 22-Oct. 3 at UCLA's Freud Playhouse.

The Russian-speaking world's greatest playwright teams with one of the English-speaking world's greatest directors when Michael Langham helms the Geffen Playhouse production of Anton Chekhov's ``Uncle Vanya,'' Oct. 8-31. In a career stretching more than half a century, the venerable Brit has engineered some of the best classic theater seen anywhere from Broadway to London to Canada's Stratford Festival.

Looking for the new face of the American musical? Then gas up the car and head south to the Laguna Playhouse, which is hosting the California premiere of ``Violet,'' winner of the New York Drama Critics Award for Best Musical of 1997. Adapted from Doris Betts' story about a young woman on a cross-country pilgrimage, the show features a terrific mix-and-match score of bluegrass, gospel and jazz by Jeanine Tesori (``The First Picture Show''). It's playing Sept. 16-Oct. 10.

Or if an Orange County road trip seems too far, take an odyssey to the furthest-flung corners of human consciousness without ever leaving L.A. ``Space,'' written and directed by stage innovator Tina Landau (``Floyd Collins''), zooms into the Mark Taper Forum for its West Coast premiere Oct. 7. Originally performed at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre, ``Space'' uses the story of a neuro-psychiatrist treating patients claiming to be alien abductees as a launch pad into cosmic queries about Life, the Universe and Everything. Sounds heavy, but Landau's lively choreography should keep ``Space'' from falling down a black hole.

From black holes to white whales is an imaginative leap best left to inquiring minds like that of Herman Melville, author of ``Moby Dick.'' Unless, of course, you're high-tech shaman Laurie Anderson, who'll put her own computerized spin on Melville's classic sea yarn with ``Song and Stories From Moby Dick,'' Oct. 20-23 at UCLA's Royce Hall. Suggested marketing pitch: ``You'll laugh! You'll cry! You'll blubber!''

Rooms with a view

Just don't call her Mrs. Jackson Pollock. In her own right, Lee Krasner (1908-1984) was a major 20th-century painter and a prominent member of the New York art vanguard. A major retrospective, opening Oct. 10 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, examines the work of this important proto-feminist artist, from her geometric abstractions of the late 1930s through the major collages of the early 1960s and magisterial late works such as the ``Eleven Ways to See'' series of the late 1970s.

LACMA's fall blockbuster should be as explosive as the cranky Italian mountain that engendered it. ``Pompeii: Life in a Roman Town'' (opening Oct. 17) is drawn from the regional museums of the area around ancient Pompeii, Mount Vesuvius and Naples. Among the show's more than 390 objects are finely wrought wall frescoes from private villas, along with delicate blown glass, bronze instruments and vessels.

Flash-forward to the late 1970s, where we encounter Raymond Pettibon, the Southern California artist whose brother Gregory Ginn was lead guitarist of the punk band Black Flag. Pettibon's early drawings were distributed primarily through self-published photocopied books that he sold for a few bucks. Today, his work is widely admired among the contemporary art audience for its vivid, cartoon-inspired imagery with handwritten text, weirdly poetic fusions of pulp fiction and virtuoso technique and a sensibility somewhere between William Blake and Charles Manson. The Museum of Contemporary Art looks at Pettibon's unique oeuvre Sept. 26-Jan. 2. Warning: This show could blow the roof off.

- Reed Johnson

Carnations, anyone?

Wanted for immediate employment: 15,000 pink and white carnations. Must be willing to work long hours. Must look good under the stage lights at UCLA's Royce Hall. Duties involve being sniffed by ferocious-looking Alsatian dogs, and being carried to and fro by approximately 21 dancers and four stunt people, enacting passionate yet enigmatic rituals that apparently have something to do with artistic freedom and the absurd joys of human life. Interested? Then apply to Pina Bausch, the German-born avant-garde choreographer, who'll bring her Tanztheater Wuupertal to Royce Oct. 5 and 7-10 to perform ``Nelken (Carnations),'' a 1982 dance/theater work whose metaphorical richness has proven as durable as its pungent sensuality.

Primal storytelling power meets ferocious athleticism and mesmerizing musicianship whenever Guinea's Les Ballets Africains is around. The 48-year-old company investigates African ceremonial rites of passage in ``Evolution,'' which it will perform Oct. 2-4 at UCLA's Schoenberg Hall and Oct. 6 at the Probst Performing Arts Center in Thousand Oaks.

Bring in the acrobats

Send in the clowns? Not if you're Cirque du Soleil The arty French-Canadian circus troupe doesn't need any red-nosed guys named Bozo to pack the tent. With touring companies that span the globe, Cirque has become a high-concept show-biz juggernaut. Maybe that's why with its latest work, ``Dralion,'' Cirque is getting back to the basics of juggling, trapeze swinging, hoop diving and other feats of feet and hand, performed by a company of 54, including a house troupe of 35 Chinese acrobats. Cirque will be pitching its trademark blue-and-yellow Big Top on the beach near the Santa Monica Pier from Sept. 23-Nov. 21. Bring your own beach towel.

Millennial marches

Let the plebes lead la vida loca: You prefer to live la dolce vita. The last fall of the millennium is crowded with highbrow performances that promise to be something really special.

Welcome our soon-to-be artistic director of the L.A. Opera to town on Sept. 8, when the great Placido Domingo - who's also 33.3 percent of the Three Tenors - joins Denyce Graves in the Opera's production of Saint-Seans' ``Samson et Dalila.'' For those who are particularly deep of pocket, there's a star-studded benefit gala following.

On Oct. 2, the most recent winner of the prestigious Van Cliburn piano competition, Jon Nakamatsu, comes to Santa Barbara to play the venerable Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2. In celebration, the city closes the streets within a block of the concert hall to stage a music and food festival. Dollar drinks! Mime alert!

And if all this transcendent music doesn't put you close enough to the divine, try the ``Sacred Americas Concert'' on Oct. 10 at the Hollywood Bowl. The kickoff to a weeklong festival around L.A., the concert features the Los Angeles Philharmonic, a mass gospel choir led by First AME Church, Halau o Kekuhi performing traditional Hawaiian chants and Tibetan monks and nuns.

Make sure to drop the name of His Holiness the Dalai Lama with friends: as in, ``Well, His Holiness told me recently ...'' You don't have to tell people that the spiritual leader was addressing you and 17,000 other folks at the Hollywood Bowl, where he'll introduce the concert.

- Marla Matzer

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3 Photos

Photo: (1) ``Nelken'' (translated ``Carnations'') from avant-garde choreographer Pina Bausch comes to UCLA's Royce Hall in October.

(2) Cirque du Soleil performs a new acrobatic show, ``Dralion,'' under the big top at Santa Monica Pier, Sept. 23-Nov. 21.

(3) This wall frescoe and other remnants of the ancient city of Pompeii, destroyed by a volcanic eruption, go on display Oct. 17 at LACMA.