Stratford gets Sean, Montreux gets a Weather forecast, PBS gets Ethan’s Time Machine and a Legend gets an Ella

NO BIZ LIKE SHOW BIZ: Visiting New Yorker Jake Ehrenreich winds down his love affair with Toronto this week as A Jew Grows In Brooklyn closes Sunday night at the

DAY: Legend

Panasonic … honorary co-chairs Elton John and Quincy Jones will present Natalie Cole with the 19th Ella award on June 1 at the Beverly Hilton. But I’ll bet Elton, Quincy and Natalie are all secretly dying to meet the normally reclusive songbird who’s taking home this year’s Legend award: The one and only Doris Day… Vibes legend Peter Appleyard will bring his magic to Campbellford, ON this summer with an Aug. 1 Westben concert at The Barn … showbiz wunderkind Ted Dykstra directs the Soulpepper revival of David French‘s backstage comedy Jitters, opening June 24 … Sean Cullen returns to Stratford this summer in King Of Thieves, esteemed playwright

CULLEN: thieving

George F. Walker’s take on The Beggar’s Opera … and ya gotta love the title of west coast artist Ron Terada‘s new show, opening this weekend at the Banff Centre. He calls it Who I Think I Am.

GLOBAL SWARMING: The oh-so-lively Dead Weather, the alternative-riffs band formed by Jack White (The White Stripes, The Raconteurs) and Alison Mosshart (The Kills) are now set to rock the Miles Davis Hall on July 3 at the 44th annual Montreux Jazz Festival. The band’s new album, Sea of Cowards, dropped earlier this month … can’t help wondering if any of those comely 20-somethings cheering Harry Connick Jr.’s version of And I Love Her on American Idol last week knew he was singing a Beatles song? … and speaking of The Beatles, their stereo boxed set, released last September, has been certified Diamond in Canada by the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA).

BERMAN: at UCLA this week

The boxed set is the first CD release since October 2007 to be certified Diamond in Canada, which means The Beatles now have more certified Diamond albums in Canada than any other group or non-Canadian artist.

NO PEOPLE LIKE SHOW PEOPLE: Oscar-winning filmmaker Brigitte Berman is set to premiere her doc on Hugh Hefner, with Hef in attendance, in Hollywood this Thursday at the Billy Wilder Theatre at UCLA … Kylie Minogue’s new single All The Lovers will be released at the end of June, one week before her new studio album Aphrodite drops a week later on July 6 … 10-year-old piano virtuoso and showman Ethan Bortnick is set to razzle-dazzle ’em at the PBS National Convention in Austin, Texas next week, all to promote his sizzling upcoming Musical Time Machine special with Gloria Gaynor, Arturo Sandoval and the Canadian Tenors … and Dynamic Double Exposure duo Bob Robertson & Linda Cullen have launched a naughty new website which features, among other things, a somewhat flatulent beaver. To check out the latest 2X shenanigans, just click here.

TOMORROW:

Get out your calendars!

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Lena’s rage, Sofia’s roses, and Maria’s mission

STORMY WEATHER: Advance word on Lena Horne’s autobiography, A Rage To Live, is decidedly steamy. Apparently her memoirs, at better

LENA: all the rage

bookstores everywhere next month, are more than aptly titled, as Lena’s life has been full of rage. Younger readers are astonished to learn some of the hard facts of her so-called lush life, such as MGM’s policy of staging all her big musical numbers as stand-alone sequences, so that she could be cut out of screenings in the U.S. south without interfering with the movie’s story line. And one of Lena’s older fans reports that she read the singer’s riveting 500-page highly-personal confessions in one hypnotic sitting.

Can’t wait.

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SOFIA: Swiss miss

EVERYTHING’S COMING UP ROSES: Head-turning beauty Sofia Milos is back in her home country this week. The Zurich-born star of CBC-TV’s hit drama The Border is in Lucerne tonight to hand out some hardware at the 49th annual Rose d’Or television festival … Camilla Scott, who still commands a stage the moment she sets foot on it, is currently rocking Toronto audiences nightly in, you guessed it, We Will Rock You … and yes, it’s official — dynamic Double Exposure duo Bob Robertson and Linda Cullen are back, bringing you their irreverent brand of political satire and humour every Saturday in a brand new podcast produced for the internet. For more info, click here.

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AWAY FROM HERE: California’s first lady Maria Shriver is a champion of Alzheimer’s research for all the right reasons – and the hard ones, too. Her father, Peace Corps founder Sargent Shriver, has Alzheimer’s. “This was someone with a sharp, beautiful, in-tune mind,’ Maria told New York Times Q&A queen Deborah Solomon. “Now he doesn’t know my name, but I always introduce myself to him, and he flashes a smile.”

MARIA: on a mission

Shriver is the co-producer of the current four-part HBO series, The Alzheimer’s Project. Has she seen Julie Christie’s Oscar-calibre performance as an Alzheimer’s patient in Sarah Polley’s brilliant film Away From Her?

“I watched half of it. I sobbed, and then I turned it off. I couldn’t handle it.” In that case, asks Solomon, why should anyone watch The Alzheimer’s Project? “This is not going to make you laugh. But it will move you. When this is over, you can always go out and rent Wedding Crashers.”

To see more of Solomon’s excellent Q&A with Shriver, click here.

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MAIDEN FLIGHT: The award winning film Iron Maiden: Flight 666 returns tonight for one night only. The doc is a revealing portrait of one of the world’s most successful rock bands on tour from Mumbai to Sydney, Tokyo to L.A., Mexico City to Costa Rica, Bogota to Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires and Santiago to New York and Toronto and places in-between. For screening times and locations click here