NEW YORK (AP) — A musical celebrating Ray Charles is headed for Broadway this fall. “Unchain My Heart” will open Nov. 7 with preview performances beginning Oct. 8. Producer Stuart Benjamin said Thursday the show would feature a book by Suzan-Lori Parks and direction by Sheldon Epps. Casting will be announced. Benjamin worked with the late singer for 15 years and produced “Ray,” the hit movie about his life starring Jamie Foxx. Parks won a Pulitzer Prize for her play “Topdog/Underdog.” An earlier version of the musical called “Ray Charles Live” was produced at California’s Pasadena Playhouse in 2007.
March 12, 2010 | Posted in
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NEW YORK (AP) — A musical celebrating Ray Charles is headed for Broadway this fall. “Unchain My Heart” will open Nov. 7 with preview performances beginning Oct. 8. Producer Stuart Benjamin said Thursday the show would feature a book by Suzan-Lori Parks and direction by Sheldon Epps. Casting will be announced. Benjamin worked with the late singer for 15 years and produced “Ray,” the hit movie about his life starring Jamie Foxx. Parks won a Pulitzer Prize for her play “Topdog/Underdog.” An earlier version of the musical called “Ray Charles Live” was produced at California’s Pasadena Playhouse in 2007.
March 12, 2010 | Posted in
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CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is grateful that actor Sean Penn has defended him against his critics within the U.S. media. In an appearance on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” last week, Penn slammed Chavez critics who refer to the socialist leader as a dictator. The Oscar-winning celebrity noted that Chavez has won repeated elections and suggested that media critics who call him a dictator should be jailed. He says that “there should be a bar for which one goes to prison for these kinds of biases.” Penn has visited Chavez several times and frequently defends the president’s leftist political policies. Chavez welcomed Penn’s comments Wednesday and thanked the actor for standing up to his detractors.
March 12, 2010 | Posted in
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WASHINGTON (AP) — A spark that helped ignite Elvis Presley’s fame more than 50 years ago was lit by the newspaper editors and critics who hated him. They detested his voice and thought his moves were unfit for family publications, all while teenagers went wild. It’s that shocking style and clash with the media that also will make Elvis the subject of a new exhibition at the Newseum, a history museum that celebrates the First Amendment in Washington. “Newspapers in the mid-’50s viewed themselves as arbiters of social values, and they felt they should be among the ones to speak most loudly when they saw someone threatening America’s mores,” said Ken Paulson, the Newseum’s president and former editor of USA Today. “What’s interesting is that fiercely negative coverage drove Elvis’ fame. … After the national news coverage kicked in, he was the king of rock ‘n’ roll.” Elvis’ two years of service in the U.S. Army, though, was a turning point. Parents couldn’t hate him anymore, and the news media eventually came along, too. The exhibit opening March 19 traces Elvis’ rise in the 1950s – in part a study in image management by his longtime manager, Col. Tom Parker – to his meeting with President Richard Nixon at the White House in 1970. It will include rare objects from Presley’s life, some never before displayed outside of Graceland and others never before publicly displayed anywhere. Objects in the collection include Elvis’ 1957 Harley-Davidson motorcycle that was key to his rebel image, his first Grammy Award for “How Great Thou Art” in 1968, the overcoat and gold belt Elvis wore to meet Nixon at the White House, and the Bureau of Narcotics badge the president gave Presley. He had requested to be made a “federal agent-at-large” to help fight drug use. Many documents will be displayed for the first time, including the 1955 exclusive management contract Elvis and his parents signed, giving Parker 25 percent of his income. (Later, in the 1970s, Parker’s stake rose to an unprecedented 50 percent.) “If you’re a die-hard Elvis fan, you either love Colonel or you hate Colonel,” said Angie Marchese, Graceland’s director of archives who helped develop the exhibit. “It’s like everything that Colonel did for Elvis in the 50s, would Elvis have been as big of a pop culture phenomenon without Colonel? Probably not. “But every relationship like that draws scrutiny.” The Newseum show on view through February 2011 is among a series of exhibits this year marking what would have been Elvis’ 75th birthday. In January, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery opened an exhibit of Elvis artwork. In Los Angeles, the Grammy Museum has a Smithsonian traveling exhibit of Elvis photographs by Alfred Wertheimer. Paulson, who said he has been an Elvis fan since he was a young boy, said a partnership with Graceland was a natural fit for a look at entertainment history through the eyes of the media. “There were many people who were more than willing to censor him or limit his expression,” he said. “So Elvis truly is a symbol of freedom in America for all the right reasons.” Marchese said the images and objects give people a chance to reflect on what Elvis might be doing if he were alive. “You’d want to think he would still be involved in music somehow, not necessarily going to Vegas and performing in jumpsuits like he was in the ’70s … his career probably would have progressed from that,” she said. “I’m thinking he probably would have had a career rebirth in Hollywood as well.” — On the Net: Newseum: http://www.newseum.org/
March 11, 2010 | Posted in
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NEW YORK (AP) — A 12-hour adaptation of a Dostoyevsky novel will be among the highlights of Lincoln Center Festival 2010, running for 45 performances this summer. Festival director Nigel Redden said Wednesday the arts celebration, which runs from July 7 to July 25, will take place at Lincoln Center and at various other locations around New York. The festival includes two events on Governors Island, located off lower Manhattan. The Governors Island productions will include Peter Stein’s 12-hour version of Dostoyevsky’s “The Demons,” performed July 10 and July 11 in Italian with English subtitles. The novel, also known as “The Possessed,” concerns a group of young revolutionaries. Among the other groups scheduled to take part in the festival are the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company (July 15-17) and Toneelgroep Amsterdam, which will present an adaptation by Ivo van Hove of “Teorema,” Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film and novel of middle-class disintegration. It runs July 15-19. The festival will open with the American premiere of Hisashi Inoue’s Noh-inspired play “Musashi” (July 7-10). It will also include “A Disappearing Number,” created by Complicite, the British theater company under the direction of Simon McBurney. “Number” (July 15-18) examines the friendship between two famous mathematicians, G.H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan, in the early years of the 20th century, juxtaposed with a contemporary love story. The New York Philharmonic will be featured in the festival, too, helping to perform the complete works of innovative composer Edgard Varese (July 19-20). And dance also will be represented by Thailand’s Pichet Klunchun Dance Company (July 24-25).
March 10, 2010 | Posted in
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LOS ANGELES (AP) — Long-ago lapped by Facebook in popularity and with fast-growing Twitter on its tail, social networking site MySpace is planning a series of updates over the next months that will link its users’ posts to those sites more easily and carve out its niche as an entertainment hub more clearly. Those changes, among others, were unveiled by co-presidents Jason Hirschhorn, 38, and Mike Jones, 34, this week following the abrupt departure of CEO Owen Van Natta in February after just 10 months on the job. The two remaining executives, who once shared a single office with Van Natta and now remain in it together, declined to comment much on Van Natta’s departure, other than to say his decision to leave was between him and parent News Corp.’s chief digital officer Jonathan Miller. They also shed no new light on the ongoing ad-sharing deal with Google Inc., which forms the backbone of MySpace’s revenue but expires in August. “Owen’s decision and Jon’s decision were their own. Jon came to us and said, `Would you like to be co-presidents?’ We said, `Hell yeah.’ We didn’t have to move our desks,” Hirschhorn said in an interview at the Beverly Hills headquarters. “We were very much operating the company from a day-to-day basis and believed in the strategy that we laid out with Owen, frankly.” Attempts to reach Van Natta were unsuccessful. The executives acknowledged that change has been slow coming to the site, and critics have often cited its clunkiness compared to Facebook. MySpace’s monthly visitors declined 7 percent in January from a year ago to 120 million worldwide, compared to Facebook’s 471 million visitors, a 100 percent increase, according to Internet tracker comScore Inc. Twitter grew 1,100 percent to 74 million visitors over the same time. The goal of changes in the works now is about “making sure we return to the consumer zeitgeist,” Jones said, not about competing feature-for-feature with other social networks. Hirschhorn said that MySpace needs to be more uniquely focused on the 14 million musicians who put songs and videos on the site and how fans interact with them, and is giving more control to artists over their profiles, including with tracking tools. The site is also going open up its platform for games more widely, add a movie fan page, and reward users who act as evangelizers of content. “The experience that Mike and I and the teams aim to build is such that it’s a complement to your experience on Facebook,” he said. While Jones said the pair did not feel “specific pressure” from News Corp. to change how the site earns revenue, he described a time frame that was fairly short – through August and through the company’s fiscal year, which ends in June. “I think we have everything lined up strategically to where it needs to be,” Jones said. “It’s about us operationally executing on all of this, keeping pressure on the organization to get refocused on the committed strategy.” The two helped shut down some projects that spread resources too thinly and tread on needs well served by the likes of portal sites such as Yahoo or AOL. Such segments focused on cars, parenting, weather, horoscopes, classified ads and jobs. Now the site is refocusing its gaze on the core 13-34 age group that represents more than half of its visitors and 84 percent of all the time spent on the site. Some changes include a better, smarter “stream” that allows users to see more of what their friends are doing in a central location, resembling Facebook’s “News Feed” more closely. Previously, videos added by users would not appear on friend’s streams, for example. The site is also rolling out a “Super Post” update bar that allows users to post links, videos and updates to MySpace, Facebook and Twitter all at once. And in a change that symbolizes it is really putting its past behind it, MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson, a smiling guy looking back across his white T-shirt, recently stopped being every new user’s first friend. Since last month, he’s been replaced by the cleverly named profile, Today On MySpace (T.O.M.), which features new songs, movie clips and celebrity updates and starts feeding into the new users’ stream right away. That leaves new users with a better sense of what MySpace has to offer, rather than leaving them with one friend and clueless, Jones said. “We were just like, `We’re not going to tell you what to do here, we’re not going to guide you. You’re welcome to here, and go figure something out,’” Jones said. “Now we’re saying, `OK we’re going to give you some guidance.’”
March 10, 2010 | Posted in
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NEW YORK (AP) — Welcome the latest celebrity children’s author, Hilary Duff. Simon & Schuster Books for Young readers said Tuesday the actress-singer will work on a series of young adult novels that starts with “Elixir,” to be published in October. The first novel will feature the worldwide adventures of photojournalist Clea Raymond. Twenty-two-year-old Duff also plans a nonfiction book about children coping with divorce, scheduled for 2012. Duff has written about her own parents’ separation in the songs “Stranger” and “Gypsy Woman.”
March 9, 2010 | Posted in
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LOS ANGELES (AP) — There are many reasons why George Clooney is one of the most popular stars in Hollywood: the crinkles around his eyes when he smiles, his soothing voice and his deep brown eyes. But he’s also one of the most generous celebrities on the Oscars red carpet. He bounded across the red ropes Sunday to the bleachers with a pen in hand, ready to shake hands and sign autographs. The fans leaped out of their seats to get a glimpse of him, pressing toward the carpet that ran into the Kodak Theatre. After he signed a woman’s security badge, she held it up in the air triumphantly and fans cheered for her. “That was super-duper nice. That’s what they all should do,” said Pauline An, a stay-at-home mom from Golden, Colo. “I talked to Mary Hart, shook George Clooney’s hand and Jason Bateman waved to me. It’s a good night.” — LOS ANGELES (AP) – Now Ryan Seacrest knows: Meryl Streep is watching. After noting that Seacrest predicted Sandra Bullock would win the Oscar for best actress, Streep went nose-to-nose Sunday with the E! red carpet host. “I was watching you earlier,” Streep said with mock gravity on her way into the ceremony at the Kodak Theatre. The actress, who is nominated also for best actress for her performance in “Julia & Julie,” chastised Seacrest for “cheerleading a little,” but added: “That’s all right.” Seacrest, a little stricken, responded: “I knew you were going to come and you were going to crush me.” Then Streep, referring to Bullock, gave in: “I’m in love with her, as is everyone in America. I kind of have been pulling for all the young gals.” Streep’s nomination was her 16th. She won for “Kramer vs. Kramer” in 1980 and “Sophie’s Choice” in 1983. — LOS ANGELES (AP) – The Oscars were a little bit country this year. “Crazy Heart,” which stars Jeff Bridges as an aging country music star, was the most obvious presence on the red carpet at Sunday’s ceremony. Bridges was nominated for best actor, Maggie Gyllenhaal was nominated for best-supporting actress and the song “The Weary Kind” by Ryan Bingham and T-Bone Burnett was up for best song. But Tim McGraw, co-star of the best-picture nominee “The Blind Side” was also in attendance with his wife, Faith Hill. McGraw plays the husband of Sandra Bullock’s character in the film. Miley Cyrus was also at the Kodak Theatre to present an award. She came with her mother, Leticia Cyrus, but not her father, Billy Ray Cyrus. “Last time I was here, I was with my dad,” the young pop star told E!’s Ryan Seacrest. “He kept stepping on my dress, so I’m hoping that doesn’t happen again.” — LOS ANGELES (AP) – In a throwback to more competitive days, Academy Award presenters rehearsed the line “and the winner is …” instead of the blander “and the Oscar goes to …” for Sunday’s show. The last time the language was used officially was for the 60th Academy Awards in 1988, when “The Last Emperor” won for best picture. The following year, show producer Allan Carr changed the wording, although some presenters ignored the new guidelines. “His goal was to make it not seem as competitive,” said Lucia Schultz, the motion picture academy’s librarian. Other awards shows also followed suit. Although academy staff would not confirm the change before Sunday’s telecast, presenters have been using the phrasing all week. At rehearsals on Saturday, Tom Hanks noticed the change and said, “You’re breaking the mold here guys.” During his rehearsal, he joked around saying, “The Saturday Oscar goes to …,” and “the winner of the fake Oscar is. …” — AP Business Writer Ryan Nakashima, Entertainment Writer Sandy Cohen and Associated Press Writer Raquel Dillon in Los Angeles, and Entertainment Writer Jake Coyle in New York contributed to this report.
March 8, 2010 | Posted in
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NEW YORK (AP) — Web tracker ComScore says Yahoo took the gold in Olympics Web traffic, besting NBC’s site for the games. Yahoo’s Olympics-devoted site received 32 million unique visitors during the two-week event. NBC’s Olympics site drew 18.9 million unique visitors. Both sites had reason to celebrate. While Yahoo could trumpet its record traffic, NBCOlympics.com tripled the users of the 2006 Winter Games with 45.7 million total visits compared to 13.3 million in 2006. NBC, which owned exclusive broadcasting rights to the games, also drew 45 million video streams of its video offerings online. NBC says that likely helped the site keep visitors for an average of 13.3 minutes, the most among Olympics-devoted sites. — On the Net: http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics http://www.nbcolympics.com
March 5, 2010 | Posted in
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LOS ANGELES (AP) — Police say they have arrested a man suspected of stalking television and radio therapist Dr. Drew Pinsky and his family. Pasadena police say they arrested 33-year-old Charles Pearson on Wednesday after Pinsky notified them of threats received by him and his family. Jail records show Pearson is being held on $150,000 bail. Police say Pearson is suspected of posting threats online about Pinsky and showed up at a Los Angeles radio station recently. Pinsky is an addiction specialist who hosts the radio show “Loveline” on Los Angeles’ KROQ 106.7. He also hosts several VH1 reality shows, including “Celebrity Rehab.” Jail records do not indicate if Pearson has an attorney.
March 5, 2010 | Posted in
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