Rachel and Marion love Woody, Jeanne and Barry love to Scrabble, Jerry loves La Cage, and Conan loves Twitter

NO PEOPLE LIKE SHOW PEOPLE: Whatever he’s got, he’s still got it. Woody Allen is set to shoot another film in Paris this summer — mais oui, they love him in France — and

MCADAMS: To Paris with Woody

Rachel McAdams and Marion Cotillard have already signed on … flamboyant figure skater Johnny Weir, the Winter Olympics’ favourite bad boy, is now set to guest with Ice Theatre Of New York at the company’s 2010 Home Season stint April 29-May 1 at Chelsea Pier … John Tory, the new Chair of the TIFF Bell Lightbox campaign, is seeking $17.5 million in gifts needed to complete the TIFF Bell Lightbox between now and the opening of the building, which is still scheduled for this fall … Kelsey Grammer is back on Broadway, currently in previews at the Longacre Theatre for the Olivier Award-winning revival of La Cage Aux Folles that took London by storn. Composer Jerry Herman says this new version “is hysterical, touching, outrageous, ingenious — a revelation from curtain to curtain.” This we gotta see … Channing Tatum and Al Pacino are teaming up for a new screen drama, Son Of No One …  and Sebastian Stan, best known for his roles on Gossip Girl and Kings, has joined the cast of Captain America as leading man Chris Evan’s sidekick.

MARCUS TRIO: at Smiling Buddha tonight

SHARPS ‘N’ FLATS: Talk about a musical coup d’etat! Sting, Elton John, Lady Gaga and Dame Shirley Bassey will perform together at Carnegie Hall  at a Rainforest Fund benefit concert on May 13. The event will mark the 21st birthday of the charitable organization founded by Sting and Trudie Styler to help protect and preserve the world’s threatened rainforest areas and the pricey tickets includes a gala post-performance dinner at the Plaza … Jann Arden, Tom Cochrane and NHL legend Darryl Sittler are set to join Anne Murray at her 2010 Charity Golf Classic in support of Colon Cancer Canada on May 18 at Angus Glen Golf Club in Markham … at last! Hypnotic singer-songwriter Jane Ford has finally released a new album, All I’ve Needed Most, a five-song EP featuring “some great new tunes I know you’re going to love.” Count me in. Her new album is available on iTunes in the US and Canada. “And Europe. Everywhere actually!” … Justin Bieber pop-rocks tomorrow night on SNL … and professional crowd-pleasers The Marcus Trio return to one of their favourite haunts, The Smiling Buddha Bar on College Street, tonight at 10 pm.

O'BRIEN: networking

TWITTERBUG: Deposed late-night prince Conan O’Brien wasn’t a great believer in social networking until NBC bounced him off his Tonight Show throne. But after being hounded by both his friends and personal Followers (read, Employees) O’Brien finally saw the light. He now has close to a million followers on both Facebook and Twitter. Which is how, with a few well-placed wisecracks, he has managed to almost completely sell out his 30-city comedy tour which kicks off on Monday night. “Five days to the opening of my tour,” he tweeted yesterday. “I don’t want to over-hype this thing, but attendance will cure all known diseases.”  His first stop on his sweep of North American cities? Eugene, Oregon.

(Now that’s funny.)

BEKER: all-star Scrabble soiree

SCRABBLE RABBLE: Autograph collectors should have a field day Monday night at the 6th annual Scrabble® With The Stars soiree at the King Suites. Returning hosts Jeanne Beker and Barry Flatman will welcome so many marquee names that I can’t possible mention them all here. Suffice it to say that the glamourous role call includes Angela Asher, Jaymz Bee, Mark Breslin, Dave Broadfoot, Dinah Christie, Arlene Duncan, Jayne Eastwood, Lili Francks, Graham Greene, C. David Johnson, Deb McGrath, Sheila McCarthy, Colin Mochrie, Micki Moore, Eric Peterson, Leah Pinsent,  Avery Saltzman, Elizabeth Shepherd, Paul Soles, Amy Sky, Theresa Tova, Robin Ward, Sara Waxman and enduring entertainment icons Sharon, Lois & Bram, all in aid of the Performing Arts Lodge (PAL) of Toronto. Tickets include dinner, a game of Scrabble with a celebrity and a tax receipt, and as usual there’s only a handful of tickets left. So if you want to play, don’t delay — just click here!

And have a great weekend.

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Hannah goes to Krakow, Brigitte goes to Sarasota, Liz cheers for a Ghost Writer & Tina Fey is EVERYWHERE!

NO PEOPLE LIKE SHOW PEOPLE: Where is Tina Fey these days? Everywhere, promoting her new movie with Steve Carrell on every talk show on the dial, Yesterday it was

FEY & FRIEND: she's everywhere!

Oprah, this morning it’s Regis & Kelly, and this weekend she’ll host Saturday Night Live with Canadian pop music phenom Justin Bieber as her musical guest … despite the rave reviews she won when her hypnotic Hugh Hefner documentary premiered at TIFF last September, Oscar-winning director Brigitte Berman returned to the edit suite in January and has emerged with an even sleeker version. Last month she screened it to sell-out crowds and positive press notices at the Miami International Film Festival and at the Museum Of Modern Art in Manhattan, the latter as part of the prestigious

BIEBER: set for SNL

MoMA Canadian Front organized by MoMA’s Larry Kardish and Telefilm Canada festival booster Brigitte Hubmann. “At the first screening in New York Tony Bennett, Dick Cavett, Geoffrey Holder, Dr. Ruth and Christie Hefner were in the audience,” reports Berman, “and the response could not have been more enthusiastic!” This month she’s off to introduce the film at the  Sarasota Film Festival, and next month she’ll fly to L.A. to join Hefner when UCLA hosts a special screening of the film in his honour at the Billy Wilder theatre … Amber Marshall invited her Heartland fans to help her find a new name for her foal, “the horse soon not to be known as Harry,” and has been swamped by thousands of suggestions. Now all she has to do us sort through them all and pick one! … international filmfest planner Hannah Fisher is packing her bags for Poland, where she’ll welcome Aussie director Jane Campion and Bollywood superstars Amitabh & Jaya Bachchan to Krakow and The Off

MARSHALL: she's not wild about 'Harry'

Plus Camera Film Festival of Independent Cinema … and New York gossip girl Liz Smith is not a fan of Roman Polanski. “Let let him submit to the law as he should have years ago,” says Liz flatly to her devoted wowOwow.com readers. But that doesn’t change her belief that Polanski is a great filmmaker. Ms. Smith is an unflagging champion of his new Pierce Brosnan-Ewan McGregor thriller The Ghost Writer, which she insists is only “a whisper away from being as great as Chinatown. It is a tension-filled, politically based noir with just enough twists to keep you slightly off-balance but never off-track. This one makes you think and demands all your attention. One deep dig

HAWCO as DOYLE: season finale tonight

into the popcorn and you’ll miss something.All the performances are superb – wonderful turns by Kim Cattrall and Tom Wilkinson – with an especially great hand to Olivia Williams. She is the prototypical noir female – in danger, dangerous, impossible to know. And better if you don’t!”

Okay, I’m sold!

The Ghost Writer is stiill on view at a neighbourhood theatre near you.

P.S. To REPUBLIC OF DOYLE fans: Don’t miss tonight’s first-season finale of the Allan Hawco hit series at 9 pm on CBC-TV. And don’t be surprised if you hear people talking about it tomorrow. My spies tell me it’s quite an eyeful!

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Cole Porter said it with music, but with all the attention he’s getting, is Justin Bieber ‘just one of those things”?

His new CD My World 2.0 debuted at the top of the Billboard 200 albums chart this week, making him the youngest male artist to hit #1 on Billboard since a 13-year-old Stevie Wonder in 1963.

To borrow a lyrical phrase from legendary songwriter Cole Porter, is Justin Bieber just ‘too hot not to cool down?’

The 16-year-old bubblegum popster from Stratford Ontario has been actively pursuing fame since he posted his homemade music videos on YouTube when he was 13.  As Internet success

BIEBER: YouTube baby

stories go, he’s no Susan Boyle – but he did attract the attention of, and subsequent offers of management from, both Usher and Justin Timberlake.  As you probably know (unless you’ve been in a convent,) he signed with Usher, who has become not only his mentor and shrewd in-house guru but has also appeared with him in music videos and on key TV talk shows (e,g., Ellen.) Usher, as if you didn’t know, is one smart, talented and uncommonly classy guy. Professionally, at least, young Justin is in very good company.

Bieber is the first artist to have seven songs from a debut album make it on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart and his new sizzling hot CD is his  first studio album. His first tour as a headliner, coming up this summer,includes gigs at the Air Canada center in Toronto on Aug. 21, the John Labatt Center

USHER: Atlanta mentor

in London, Ont. on Aug. 22, and Scotiabank Place in Kanata, Ont. on  Aug. 24. And as if those rooms aren’t large enough he’s already set to play Madison Square Garden on August 31.

His fans in Newfoundland will get to glimpse him even sooner. When CTV telecasts the 2010 Juno Awards from St. John’s on April 18, Bieber will share the spotlight with Billy Talent, Blue Rodeo, Classified, Drake, Great Lake Swimmer, Johnny Reid, K’Naan, Metric and another Madison Square Garden veteran, still new-ish old pro Michael Bublé.

Justin lives in Atlanta now – Usher’s home base – and is admittedly having the time of his

BUBLE: with Justin at Junos

life. He loves performing, he loves his fans, he loves making music.  It took Michael Bublé 10 years to get booked at Madison Square Garden, but 10 years from now he’ll still be playing the big rooms. Ten years from now Justin Bieber will be 26, his teen glory days far behind him. When full-bloom BieberMania ends – as it most certainly will — let’s hope Usher can help Bieber sidestep the showbiz traps and pitfalls that have crushed so many other meteoric shooting-star careers.

In the meantime, I won’t be one bit surprised if readership of this blog spikes today — not because I’m writing about Justin Bieber, but just because I mentioned his name.

Yes, folks, he really is that hot.

NEAL: New York honours (photo: David Shankbone)

TONY’S FIRST LADY: Do you know who won the very first Tony Award? Give up?  It was screen siren Patricia Neal for her performance as Regina Hubbard in Lillian Hellman‘s Another Part of the Forest in 1946.  Which is only one reason that the Peccadillo Theater Company will present An Evening with Patricia Neal at the Players Club in Manhattan on April 12. Neal, a director’s actor whose distinguished screen stints include The Fountainhead, A Face In The Crowd and Hud, will be presented with PTC’s Legends of the American Theater award, one more highlight in a long and illustrious career.

Happy long weekend. And remember, we all need to be in the light now and then. So don’t forget to soak up some sunshine!

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Majumder raises the roof, Atwood tells tales of Twitter, Alice fever sizzles & Rivers takes another bite of Reality

NO PEOPLE LIKE SHOW PEOPLE: Howcum funnyman Shaun Majumder keeps shining in dramas? First it was 24, then his recent stint on Republic Of Doyle, and now the ABC series 187 Detroit. (187 is police code for homicide.) Can Shaun do a spot-on impression

MAJUMDER: raising the roof

of series star Michael Imperioli (a.k.a. Christopher on The Sopranos)? Ask him yourself when he jets in from L.A. to headline his favourite comedy fund-raiser Raising the Roof, April 16 & 17 at The Rivoli … it’s not her fault, okay? Margaret Atwood sez her Twitter pals egged her on. Which is why she’s finally telling all – okay, almost all – about her adventures in TwitterLand in the New York Review of Books, right here …  …. Jake Doyle’s prodigal brother Christian returns to the Rock, much to his younger brother’s dismay, on Allan Hawco’s hit series Republic Of Doyle tonight at 9 pm on CBC-TV … and Joan Rivers and her producer daughter Melissa are reportedly set to do a new reality show about Joan moving in with Melissa, grandson Cooper and Melissa’s current squeeze Jason in L.A.. Says blogger Paula Froelich: “This will rock harder than Poison at Spring Break.” Froelich joined Rivers & Co. for their Passover seder at Melissa’s house in Pacific Palisades. To read her Daily Beast report, click here.

ALICE: Disney classic

BALLET HIGH: Highlight of the National Ballet’s summer season next year should be British Choreographer Christopher Wheeldon’s new full-length, two-act interpretation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a co-production between the National Ballet and The Royal Ballet (UK). with a commissioned score by British composer Joby Talbot. Neither Tim Burton nor Johnny Depp have anything to do with this one as far as we know — but isn’t it odd how Lewis Carroll’s peculiar heroine has returned to the collective consciousness? Now Disney, whose magicians created the original Un-Birthday song, is celebrating the Un-Anniversary of its 1951 animated classic by

KAIN: a once-and-future Alice

reissuing it on DVD before Burton’s wacky new 3-D Alice hits the stores.  The new ballet version, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, will debut first in London in February 2011 and then here in Toronto, June 4 – 12, 2011 …  meanwhile, NBOC chief Karen Kain sent the company’s notable outreach mini-show Dance About to Ontario’s Near North District School Board yesterday for two performances, at Maple Ridge Public School in Powassan and Sundridge Centennial Public School in Sundridge … and happy anniversary to the American Ballet Theatre, set to celebrate its 70th (!!) season May 17-July 10 at the Met. And speaking of Twitter, and aren’t we always, at both the ABT and the New Yotk City Ballet there are no policies on dancers’ increasing participation on Twitter. Says New York Times writer Gia Kourlas: “At the moment the relationship between tech-savvy dancers and company administrators seems to be akin to a child showing a parent how to use e-mail.”  To read her amusing account of young ballet stars who “now tweeter as well as flutter,” click here.

PETERSON: in memory

THE LEGACY LIVES ON: One aspiring musician entering a music program at York University this fall will be the lucky recipient of the first $40,000 Oscar Peterson scholarship, allowing them to pursue their dreams. The new Peterson program will also offer up to four $10,000 annual scholarships for current undergraduate music students. Meanwhile, Peterson acolytes Peter Herrndorf, Brian Robertson, Bob Rae, Bill Davis and Tommy Banks are among the boosters soliciting donations for a life-size bronze sculpture of the jazz great to sit outside the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. The statue of Peterson at a grand piano — created by Canadian sculptor Ruth Abernethy, the artist responsible for the stunning bronze of Glenn Gould outside the CBC Broadcast Centre in Toronto — will be unveiled on June 30 as part of Canada Day celebrations.

TOMORROW:

Is Justin Bieber just too hot?

And, celebrating ‘Tony’s’ first lady.

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Get ready for GLEE’s sophomore season, Justin in August, and a surprise from the fair maid Marion

THE POWER OF GLEE: First it conquered TV, then the music charts, and now it’s going legit — big time. Cast members from the hit FOX series Glee, led by Spring Awakening star

MICHELE: Glee girl

Lea Michele, have added yet another performance to their run at Radio City Music Hall, so they’ll now do five, count ’em, five shows in that 6,000-seat New York room on the weekend of May 28-30. In addition to Michele, who plays Rachel, the tour cast will include Cory Monteith (Finn), Amber Riley (Mercedes), Chris Colfer (Kurt), Kevin McHale (Artie), Jenna Ushkowitz (Tina), Mark Salling (Puck), Dianna Agron (Quinn), Naya Rivera (Santana), Heather Morris (Brittany), Harry Shum, Jr. (Mike), and Dijon Talton (Matt). And a third CD from the cast, this time featuring the music of Madonna, will be released on April 20, the same day the show’s Madonna-inspired episode is scheduled for telecast. And before you ask: The series’ second season starts Tuesday April 13 on Global.

NO BIZ LIKE SHOW BIZ: Prolific TV producer Laszlo Barna (The Bridge) tells Academy of Canadian Cinema breakfast club attendees what it takes to get a Canadian

BIEBER: T.O.-bound

production on a U.S. network this morning at the Academy’s T.O. office  …  teen sensation Justin Bieber is set to rock the ACC on Aug. 21. Will he arrive driving those new wheels Usher bought him for his birthday? … Broadway lion Victor Garber guests with Allan Hawco on Republic Of Doyle tonight on CBC …and ya gotta love music mogul David Geffen‘s off-the-cuff remarks when he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last week in New York. “I had no musical talent, but after working in the mailroom of the William Morris Agency I knew how to bullshit, and that’s how I got to handle Laura Nyro, Joni Mitchell, Cher and all the others.”  Whatta charmer!

A DRAGON IN THE DESERT: “I’m in a place some call the ‘Sandbox.’ It’s Dirty. Dusty. Dangerous. Bomb infested. My mission is to boost morale but I am the one who is walking away inspired. I won’t be able to think the same about my life ever again. This trip is having a profound effect on me.”

The speaker? Dragons’ Den diva Arlene Dickinson, tweeting from Afghanistan.

REYNOLDS: light touch

FLICKERS: Crowd-pleaser Paul Giamatti will co-star with Amy Ryan in Tom McCarthy’s Win-Win … Ryan Reynolds and Jason Bateman, both masters of the light touch, will co-star in Universal’s body-switching comedy The Change-Up … … John Malkovich will reportedly start shooting Transformers 3 with Frances McDormand (now that’s off-the-wall casting!) before winging to T.O. for his Luminato gig in June …the latest film by Donna & Daniel Zuckerbrot, My Nuclear Neighbour, is now a Yorkton filmfest nominee. Neighbour premiered last month on CBC’s The Nature of Things … and the April 10 premiere of Maria Del Mar’s new flick, A Touch Of Grey, at the 10^th annual ReelWorld filmfest is reportedly all sold out.

COTILLARD: closet comedienne?

SEE/HEAR: Young French import Marion Cotillard, seems to bring a special elegance to all her work, from her Oscar-winning turn as tortured chanteuse Edith Piaf to her portrait of Daniel Day Lewis’ betrayed wife in Nine. So what you are about to see is, I promise, a complete departure from the Marion we’ve seen on screen so far, but perhaps an indication of the secret Cotillard that lies within. It’s a fabulously funny send-up of so many commercials we’ve suffered through, and it comes, yet again, from Will Ferrell’s fertile Funny Or Die comedy site.  Click here, and enjoy!

TOMORROW:

Margaret Atwood, Shia Lebeouf, Jann Arden, Roger Ebert and more.