Category: people

Illinois’ disgraced and indicted former governor, Rod Blagojevich, isn’t exactly a stay-at-home kind of guy. This weekend, for example, he’ll attend a performance of the Second City spoof, “Rod Blagojevich Superstar,” where he “has been contracted to show up” to announce its extension and to participate in the post-show improv. The revue’s producer “wouldn’t discuss on the record what financial deal had been made with Blagojevich.”

“The first family has spoken frequently of championing the arts, and so far, it appears that it is leading by example. Fresh off a Parisian tour de culture, the Obamas jumped the English Channel and made a visit today to London’s West End theater district, where first lady Michelle and daughters Sasha and Malia attended a performance of Disney’s ‘The Lion King’ at the Lyceum Theatre.”

“[A] theatre executive who played a role in establishing Hamilton Place in Hamilton, Ont., and Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto, … MacPherson had a long and varied career in the theatre, including managing artists such as Harry Belafonte and Victor Borge. But he is most noted for his role in transforming the Broadway touring industry to create the current system of first-class touring shows.”

“Born in Raipur, Tanvir is considered a pioneer for bringing Indian folk theatre – its stories, music, the Chhattisgarhi dialect and even untrained performers hailing from villages – to the contemporary stage.”

“After bestselling biographies of Mary Queen of Scots and Marie Antoinette, Antonia Frasier is now turning her professional attentions to her own life, and her marriage to the Nobel prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter, who died on Christmas Eve 2008. Fraser will draw both from her memories and the diaries which she started to keep in October 1968 to write Must You Go? which will be published next January.”

“All these years later, Frances Kroll Ring can still see it, the afternoon she filled out an application at Rusty’s Employment Agency on Hollywood Boulevard and drove to Encino to meet a writer who was looking for a secretary.” The writer was F. Scott Fitzgerald, and he needed her help in the last 20 months of his life as he worked on his Hollywood epic, “The Love of the Last Tycoon.”

“The three great Salinger mysteries: 1) Has he been writing? 2) What will become of what he’s written after his death? (He doesn’t seem inclined to publish anything before then.) And, finally: 3) If it exists, how good is it?”

“Britain has sort of forgotten about Paul Potts. It was only two years ago that the former mobile phone salesman moved thousands of viewers… to tears during his first audition when he shuffled on stage wearing a £35 suit from Tesco and blasted out a spine-tingling version of Nessun Dorma.” But in Germany he’s a big star…

“Rather than showing her vote phone number finishing with the digits 08, the clips showed either 07 or 09. Diversity, the winning dance group, was eventually given the number 07 while third-placed saxophonist Julian Smith had the number 09.”

“As an actor, and possibly as a human being, David Carradine was a walking yin-yang symbol, a bundle of opposites tightly stitched together.”