Russell gets Cannes, Leah gets yoga, Jeff gets on stage, Brenda gets new Shoes, and Rick gets Rideau Hall??

NO PEOPLE LIKE SHOW PEOPLE: First it was all those enthusiastic fans who launched that Rick Mercer For Prime Minister campaign. Recently it was Toronto Star sportswriter

ALLEN: next month in Niagara

Randy Starkman who proposed that, due to Mercer’s unflagging support of our amateur athletes, Canada should make him an honorary Olympian.  Last weekend legendary Montréal Gazette editorial cartoonist Aislin proposed yet another new role for Mercer, as our next Governor General. Where was Mercer when Aislin’s creative comment was published? Hiding out at one of 007’s favorite haunts in the Bahamas, enjoying some well-earned post-season R&R and trading sunburn remedies with fellow resort-dweller Paul McCartney.  Meanwhile, to see Aislin’s clever cartoon, just click here …. funnyman Tim Allen and SNL alumnus Joe Piscopo are both set for two-night stints at Fallsview Casino next month …  Al Pacino’s reportedly eyebrow-raising portrayal of Dr. Jack Kervorkian premieres this coming Saturday night on HBO Canada … crowd-pleaser Christian Potenza has just launched his own YouTube Channel … Brenda Hoffert’s new photography exhibit, Shoes, opens April 30 at Gallery 888 on Queen Street in Leslieville …

TRAVIS: looking for heroes

Thursday night headliners Ken Lindsay and Mark Cassius surprised fans at Fuzion last week by switching roles for The Nearness Of You. While ex-Nylon Cassius caressed the ivories (the ivories loved it,) piano man Lindsay delivered the vocal … terminally gorgeous screen siren Leah Pinsent has signed up for a double fitness marathon of yoga and high-energy Zumba Fitness sessions on April 25 at the 2nd annual Yoga in Motion at the Liberty Grand Entertainment Complex. The award-winning actress is fund-raising in support of breast cancer research at Mount Sinai Hospital. For more info, click here …Modern Family scene-stealer Ty Burrell is reportedly set to star opposite Jennifer Garner in her new romantic comedy Butter … and the biggest buzz-du-jour in TV circles is Debbie Travis’ new prime-time show – her first for CBC.

CROWE: heading for Cannes

Especially fascinating is her current search for local heroes. If you know someone you believe deserves to be recognized for his/her service to your community, don’t keep it a secret – just click here!

FLICKERS: Okay, don’t get me wrong, I realize that director Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe are one of filmdom’s most dynamic duos. First there was Gladiator, then A Good Year (hey, nobody’s perfect,) then American Gangster with Denzel Washington and then Body Of Lies withLeonardo DiCaprio.  All in all, pretty good stuff.  But did I expect their new collaboration, Robin Hood – yes, that Robin Hood – to be invited to open this year’s Cannes Film Festival? Nope. Which strongly suggests

EHRENREICH: Grow-ing concern

that this Robin Hood must really be something to see … and Toronto’s fast-approaching Hot Docs filmfest will celebrate springtime by presenting three special open-air screenings in its new Rooftop Docs series. The annual marathon of documentary films will take over the top tier of the Citipark Cumberland Garage in Yorkville on Thursday May 6, Friday May 7 and Saturday May 8, presenting film screenings and live music, with locally brew courtesy of Steamwhistle Breweries and free popcorn courtesy of Whole Foods Market. For more info, click here.

FOOTLIGHTS: First Ken Gass directs the much-anticipated return of George F. Walker’s hit comedy Featuring Loretta, opening May 1 at the Factory Theatre. Then the

SEYMOUR: on stage in June

theatre world gathers to celebrate Factory’s big birthday with a 40th Anniversary Gala on May 10. And yes, tickets are still available. For more info, click here … David Mirvish is set to premiere Jake Ehrenreich‘s now-fabled  stage production A Jew Grows In Brooklyn at the Panasonic Theatre on April 28  … after winning glowing reviews in L.A. for both his direction and his performance, Jeff Seymour is set to co-star with Len Lesser (a.k.a. Uncle Leo on Seinfeld) in Ronald Ribman’s Cold Storage, on stage for 10 performances only, June 1-11 at the George Ignatieff Theatre … how do you attract attention for a new play without a big ad/pub budget? Bobby Del Rio is garnering eyeballs with an intriguing movie-style trailer for his new theatrical venture, The Market, now set to open in T.O. next month. To sample his stage wares on video, click here .

And have a great week!

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Ms Smith goes on a tear, Ms Bisset goes Italian, & Ragtime returns to Broadway — without Garth

NO PEOPLE LIKE SHOW PEOPLE: British-born screen siren Jacqueline Bisset, who mastered an American accent to become a Hollywood star,

BISSET: Italian accent

apparently employs a killer Italian accent to play an over-the-hill actress in director Linda Yellen’s reportedly wicked satire The Last Film Festival. The beauteous Ms Bisset plays one of a group of misbegotten, narcissistic actors attending a third-rate movie festival in middle America. Also along for the free booze and tacky gift bags: Dennis Hopper, JoBeth Williams, Chris Kattan and LeeLee Sobieski … and Chris Pine, so good as the young Captain Kirk in this year’s Star Trek prequel,

PINE: from Art to Jack?

will go from co-starring with Denzel Washington in Ridley Scott’s Unstoppable to playing notorious counterfeiter Art Williams in The Art of Making Money. And while he’s shooting that one, Paramount Pictures will be negotiating with him to follow in the footsteps of Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck and play CIA analyst Jack Ryan in a new series of thrillers based on Tom Clancy novels. Don’t know ‘bout you, but I’d say he’s definitely doing something right.

IF YOU CAN’T SAY SOMETHING NICE, SIT BY ME: My Manhattan hero, gossip girl Liz Smith, constantly rises to the defense of such loose cannons as Whitney Houston and Lindsay

LOHAN: parent trap?

Lohan in her on-line column at wowOwow.com. Given a chance, Liz will always take the high road; she’d far rather praise showbiz Caesars than bury them. But after the Jon & Kate Gosselin debacle escalated last week, she could no longer contain herself. “In the years that the show Jon & Kate Plus 8 has been inflicted on America,” she writes, “Kate has revealed herself as a steely-eyed control freak with high ambitions for a life outside of her home – she wants to be a star, a talk-show hostess. Jon, her hubby, is an overweight, dim, resentful sad sack with a spine of jelly. He’s the type who could turn any woman into a shrew. He has ambitions too. He wants to party with ladies who haven’t given birth to eight children and who don’t correct him every five minutes.” Who’s to blame? Liz lays some of that guilt on “the once-respectable Learning Channel (who) put these deadbeats on the air.”

SMITH: no deadbeats, please

Who’s worse? In Liz’s view, the Gosselins come a close second to Lindsay Lohan’s parents, Dina & Michael Lohan. “What a pair!” she sighs. “Daddy Michael was in trouble with the law for a long time – stock fraud, for which he was jailed four years, probation violation (more jail), violating a court order to stay away from his children (and still more jail time!). He is afflicted with terminal verbal diarrhea, and can’t-stay-away-from-the-camera-itis. Almost always he is talking about his famous daughter.” Lindsay’s mother Dina, she says, “is a ferociously taut, blonde Mama Rose, who saw a moneymaking ‘Gypsy’ in the talented Lindsay. She has lived and partied vicariously through – and sometimes

RAGTIME: back on Broadway

with – her daughter, existing in a heightened state of denial.” Says Liz: “How cruelly ironic that Lindsay came to fame in a movie titled The Parent Trap.” And then tops herself by adding what she calls a “Totally Predictable P.S.– Michael Lohan and Jon Gosselin are new best friends.”

BACK ON BROADWAY: It was one of the greatest opening nights of the ’90s — first in Toronto, and then in New York  Thirteen tumultuous years later, previews of the retooled revival of Ragtime, a new production that won cheers when it premiered at the Kennedy Centre in Washington, start tonight at the Neil Simon Theatre. The opulent period piece, set to open on Broadway Nov. 15, is already causing mucho buzz in the theatre district. For one thing, it’s been quite a while since recession-struck New Yorkers saw a dramatic musical with a cast of 40 backed by a 28-piece orchestra. For another, the man who started it all, Garth Drabinsky, the driving force behind its creation, won’t be there to herald its return. It was seven years ago yesterday when Drabinsky was arrested and charged with fraud, and the real-life drama in which he’s currently starring makes it impossible for him to go to New York without risking arrest and imprisonment. But the show must go on. And it will — without Garth.

MAPLE LEAF JOKES? WE’VE GOT A MILLION OF ‘EM!:

Q: What do you call 30 millionaires around a TV watching the Stanley Cup Playoffs?
A. The Toronto Maple Leafs.

Have a great weekend!

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Charlize gets Sam, Rivers gets roasted, Leo gets Brave, & TIFF film buffs get The Essential 100

NO PEOPLE LIKE SHOW PEOPLE: Okay, in the Golden Age of Hollywood they would have made him change his name. Zach Galifianakis, who has

STREEP: As new bestseller Julia Child

his pick of projects since his boffo boxoffice Hangover, is set to do a new comedy called Dinner With Schmucks (a title they also would have changed) … rising Aussie hearrthrob Sam Worthington has just signed on to co-star with Charlize Theron in a new thriller called The Tourist … Leonardo DiCapiro and director Ridley Scott are developing a new version of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World …  the Walter Cronkite memorial this morning at Avery Fisher Hall is the hottest ticket in New York, and once President Obama arrives, they’ll seal the doors. So latecomers will not be an issue … Vanity Fair literary lion Dominick Dunne will be memorialized tomorrow afternoon at St. Vincent Ferrer Church … and there’s no doubt about it, Meryl Streep and Amy Adams (a.k.a. Julie & Julia) have made Julia Child ‘hot’ again. Good news is, Ms. Child’s famed cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking has been reprinted and is #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. Bad news is, my spies tell me the publisher didn’t reprint enough copies and most of the new editions have already been, you should pardon the expression, gobbled up.

UNFORGETTABLE: Besides being brilliant filmmakers, what do Ingmar Bergman, Francis Ford Coppola, Federico Fellini, Victor Fleming,

SCORSESE: two for the show

Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, Fritz Lang, Jean Renoir, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Francois Truffaut and Wong Kar Wai have in common? Of 87, count ‘em, 87 international film directors, they’re the only ones who have more than one movie in The Essential 100, the TIFF film and gallery tribute of 100 films which will open Bell Lightbox next September.  The eye-popping four-month film tribute, which will run to the end of the year, is designed as a showcase for the most influential films of all time. Can’t wait.

ANN-MARGRET: honoured tonight

AGE-CANNOT-WITHER DEPT.: She conquered television, movies and Broadway, in that order, and has never stopped working. Am I the only one who can’t believe that Lily Tomlin just celebrated her 70th birthday? … also defying

all the Old standards: Enduring Hollywood icon Ann-Margret, here to be honoured by Best Buddies tonight at the Four Seasons … another ageless screen charmer, Linda Sorensen, is currently in Montreal shooting Barney’s Version … and indefatigable Joan Rivers, a sensational 76, is back in Vegas playing the showroom at the Venetian Hotel.

RIVERS: roasted this weekend

“It’s been nearly a decade since I played this town,” she reports, “and boy have a lot of things changed! When I used to perform in Vegas, all of the shows starred married couples. You had Steve & Eydie, Sonny & Cher and my favorites, Siegfried & Roy. One thing, though, has stayed the same—Vegas is the only place where you can see Cher, Bette Midler, Celine Dion and me, all in one night and all played by the same man.”

La Rivers, who is set to play Casino Rama later this month, gets roasted by host Kathy Griffin and a clutch of comedians including Brad Garrett, Carl Reiner and Gilbert Gottfried this weekend on The Comedy Network.

TOMORROW:

Charles Darwin on the Origins Of TIFF, new stage turns for Louise Pitre and Edie Falco, and a celluloid Tree that keeps on growing.

500 channels, and not a single show I want to see. (Yeah, yeah, we know, awreddy!!

Wishing you could get away from reruns? 

 

HEATON: sans Raymond

Lots of new shows are coming our way from our next-door neighbours. But hey — be careful what you wish for.

 Accidentally On Purpose is a new CBS sitcom in which Jenna Elfman (Dharma & Greg) plays a film critic who gets pregnant after having a one-night stand and decides to raise the baby as a single mother. (I know, I know – hilarious.) Brothers is a new Fox sitcom starring Michael Strahan as a retired NFL star who is reunited with his brother whose promising football career ended because of a car accident. (Hey, the laffs just keep coming!) Modern Family is a new ABC sitcom written

GRAMMER: new series

 and produced by Christopher Lloyd and Steve Levitan about three different families seen through the lens of a Dutch documentary filmmaker and his crew (think The Office with accents and Married With Children anti-hero Ed O’Neill,) Cougar Town, exec produced by Courtney Cox Arquette, casts Friends alumnus Courtney as a divorced 40-year-old woman with a 17-year-old son and a 26-year-old lover. (Yup — problems ensue.) Patricia Heaton’s new ABC sitcom, sans Raymond, is The Middle, Her character, a car dealer salesperson, “is middle class in the middle of the country and approaching middle age.” And Hank is a new ABC sitcom, exec produced by Kelsey Grammer, who plays a washed-up Wall Street executive who is forced to return to his hometown and reconnect with his old friends. (James Burrows directed the pilot that got the green light. This is a good thing.)

GROSS: devilish

New hour-long dramas set to go head-to-toe with Jay Leno’s new nightly gabfest include The Beautiful Life, exec-produced for CW by twitterbug Ashton Kutcher, about a group of young male and female would-be models in New York. with Elle Macpherson and Mischa Barton. The CBS drama Three Rivers with Julia Ormond tells the backstory of organ donors and their lucky (sometimes) recipients. NBC is in the medical mix too, with Trauma, about first responder paramedics. “When emergencies occur, the

MARGULIES: Good Wife

 trauma team from San Francisco General is first on the scene.” Jerry Bruckheimer’s new ABC drama The Forgotten spotlights a group of amateur sleuths who take on John/Jane Doe cases to identify the victims so that they can bring their killers to justice. And Joseph Fiennes gets madly mixed up with quantum physics in ABC’s FlashForward,

Classiest of all fhe new drama entries: The new Tony & Ridley Scott venture, The Good Wife, with Julianna Margulies, Chris Noth and Christine Baranski; Parenthood, a “contemporary re-imagining” of the hit Steve Martin film, exec produced by Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, with: Bonnie Bedelia, Peter Krause and Craig T. Nelson; and Eastwick, a shot at re-spinning the hit flick Witches Of Eastwick, with angelic leading man Paul Gross inheriting Jack Nicholson’s devilish role.

Now that should be something to see!

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