Rosanne Cash, The List (Manhattan). Everybody loves this CD, as well they should, so I’ll just add my two cents’ worth: Johnny Cash’s daughter, who has long been one of the best country-pop singer-songwriters around, blasts the bull’s-eye out of the target with this collection of twelve songs chosen from a list of “essential country songs” that was drawn up by her famous father many years ago. The singing is poignant, the band immaculate. No matter what your favorite kind of music may happen be, The List belongs in your CD player (TT).

Stephen Calt, Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Dictionary (University of Illinos Press, $26.95). An amazingly thorough, dryly witty glossary of the argot used by blues singers who recorded between 1923 and 1949. If you ever scratched your head over the meaning of such phrases as “alley baby” or “monkey woman,” scratch no more–the answers are here (TT).

The Starry Messenger (Acorn, 410 W. 42, closes Dec. 19). After an eight-year absence from the New York stage, Kenneth Lonergan has made a decisive return to form with his new play about a middle-aged teacher of astronomy (Matthew Broderick) whose life has gone sour. That Lonergan should have taken that most hackneyed of subjects, the midlife crisis, and turned it into a play of breathtaking subtlety and honesty is a not-so-minor miracle. The New Group’s production is beyond praise (TT).

Il Trittico (Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, performances on Dec. 9 and 12). Patricia Racette, who starred in The Letter, is now playing all three of the soprano leads in Puccini’s triptych of one-act operas. I’m prejudiced, needless to say, so instead of singing her praises, I’ll merely report that the audience burst into very loud shouts of approval after her aria in “Suor Angelica” when I saw the production last week. Jack O’Brien’s staging is decidedly Broadwayish, with megabuck sets to match. Great, great fun (TT).

Biography (Theatre 3 at the Mint, 311 W. 43rd St., closes Dec. 19). S.N. Behrman’s sparkling 1932 boulevard comedy about an impecunious portrait painter with a past who decides to write a tell-all memoir has been revived to brilliant effect off Broadway, with Tracy Shayne giving a bewitching performance in the starring role. The theater is tiny, the set small, the staging impeccable, the cast right on the money. You won’t see a funnier show this season (TT).

Les Ballets Trockadero, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 (Harmonia Mundi). Even if you don’t go in for drag acts, it’s hard to resist the fabulously ingenious dance comedy of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, an all-male troupe that performs classical ballet–complete with tutus. The smartest works in their repertory are Peter Anastos’ “Yes, Virginia, Another Piano Ballet” and “Go for Barocco,” in which the quirks and foibles of Jerome Robbins and George Balanchine are satirized with ruthlessly knowing precision. Both dances are available on a pair of newly reissued DVDs that also contain an assortment of “straight” classical works danced with paralyzingly funny near-sincerity. “Yes, Virginia” is on the first disc, “Go for Barocco” on the second (TT).

Nellie McKay, Normal as Blueberry Pie: A Tribute to Doris Day (Verve). Nellie McKay, of all people, has recorded an album of pop standards–and it’s a beaut. Her delicate alto-flute voice and tiptoe enunciation turn out to be ideally suited to the repertoire of Doris Day, who was a popular big-band singer before she moved to Hollywood and became a perky icon of Eisenhower-era American innocence. The fare ranges from light-footed swingers like “Dig It” to lyrical cameos like “I Remember You,” and the instrumental arrangements, most of them by McKay herself, are engagingly quirky. Glints of irony twinkle here and there, but there’s nothing sour or backhanded about Normal as Blueberry Pie (TT).

Jane Wilson: Horizons (Merrell, $60). The first full-length study of Wilson’s life and work, Horizons contains a penetrating biographical essay by Elizabeth Sussman, a wide-ranging interview by Justin Spring, and handsome reproductions of some ninety-odd paintings and works on paper. In recent years Wilson has specialized in all-but-abstract skyscapes whose canvas-filling bands of color and looming storm clouds are precisely poised between loose representation and abstract expressionism. Horizons puts these later paintings in perspective, illustrating the debt that Wilson owes not only to Mark Rothko but to Fairfield Porter. A long-overdue tribute to a superior artist greatly deserving of wider recognition (TT).