What do Madonna, Barbra Streisand, Celine Dion all have in common? They are part of an elite group of women who made this year's Forbes.com top 20 list of "Cash Queens of Music."

According to the report, The Material Girl stands alone in the top spot. Madonna pulled in $72 million between June 2006 and June 2007 and then earned an additional $260 million for her Confessions world tour.

The number two spot went to Streisand who grossed $60 million. Celine Dion came in third with $45 million.

Here's the list:
1. Madonna, $72 million
2. Barbra Streisand, $60 million
3. Celine Dion, $45 million
4. Shakira, $38 million
5. Beyonce, $27 million
6. Gwen Stefani, $26 million
7. Christina Aguilera, $20 million
8. Faith Hill, $19 million
9. The Dixie Chicks, $18 million
10. Mariah Carey, $13 million
11-13 Hilary Duff, Avril Lavigne and Martina McBride, $12 million each
14. Britney Spears, $8 million
15-16. Carrie Underwood and Nelly Furtado, $7 million each
17-19. Fergie, Jennifer Lopez and Sheryl Crow, $6 million each
20. Norah Jones, $5.5 million
[source]

This spring, Jessica Alba will give birth to her first child with fiancé and movie producer Cash Warren. But on a recent evening, the 26-year-old star was anticipating another due date: the release of "The Eye," a remake of the Pang brothers' 2002 Hong Kong thriller. Alba stars in the film as a blind musician who, after receiving a dead woman's eyes in a double corneal transplant, is haunted by hellish visions.

"I want people to talk to the screen and be like, 'It's behind you!' 'Get out of there!' " says Alba, giggling gleefully. "I think that's fun."

Alba is actually a bit of a closet horror fan. As a kid, she used to hide behind her parents' couch to sneak peeks of scary movies such as "Hellraiser" and "Friday the 13th," as well as Hitchcock classics. And she once took a date to see "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" to ensure maximum cuddle time. "When you're just starting to get used to the opposite sex, it's a great icebreaker," she says, her voice cracking ever so slightly.
[source]

Jessica Alba At The Late Show David Letterman

IT won't be easy resurrecting a hopelessly old-fashioned musical that was left for dead seven years ago at the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut.

But if any team can do it, it's probably Harry Connick Jr. and his favorite director, Kathleen Marshall.

Ever since their pleasant revival of "The Pajama Game" won a surprise Tony Award in 2006 - beating out the great "Sweeney Todd" - the two close friends have been looking for their next show.

And it will be . . . "They All Laughed."

Never heard of it?

Who has?

It's some strange hybrid of the 1926 George and Ira Gershwin musical "Oh Kay!" run through the typewriter of Joe DiPietro, whose "I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change" has been running off-Broadway for

so long that detractors call it

"I Love You, You're Perfect,

Now Close - PLEASE!"

"They All Laughed" opened at Goodspeed on Aug. 11, 2001. The critics gave it polite enough reviews, but there was plenty of backstage trouble - the director pulled out one week before opening night - and the show quickly became just another poster in Goodspeed's foyer.

The convoluted plot involves Prohibition, a Temperance Society, bootlegging, speakeasies, a playboy, an heiress and some lovable gangsters.

But it was the songs, pulled from the golden Gershwin trunk and inserted into the story line, that carried the evening: "I've Got a Crush on You," "He Loves and She Loves," "Blah Blah Blah," "Do Do Do" and "S'Wonderful," among them.

As dopey as the plot of "They All Laughed" might be, I suspect that plenty of theatergoers will line up to hear Connick sing those songs.

In "The Pajama Game," he brought down the house with "Hey, There," "There Once Was a Man" and, accompanying himself on the piano, "Hernando's Hideaway."
[source]

The very public problems of US pop singer Britney Spears are rarely out of the headlines, but now her troubles are being put on the stage by one of Britain's leading modern dance companies.

The Rambert Dance Company have set the 26-year-old's battles to music and dance in an interpretation called "Meltdown" that takes in her hounding by paparazzi photographers and when she shaved off her hair in a tattoo parlour.

Early Thursday, Spears was taken to hospital by ambulance in Los Angeles for the second time this month, according to the celebrity gossip website TMZ.com, due to fears over her own safety and that of others.

Choreographer Hubert Essakow said that like many people, he became interested with the singer's problems about a year ago and thought it would provide good material for a show.

"I thought this was a really modern day tragedy, this reversal of fortune. I saw somebody who had such great hope and was adored by millions of people then goes down the wrong route," he told BBC television Thursday.

"I thought it would make an interesting story and try to translate this into dance."

In an extract of the show in the broadcaster's report, Britney is seen dancing in a pink crop top, black PVC hotpants and a pink stetson and harassed by photographers in menacing black costumes.

She is eventually carried off by dancers dressed as doctors in white coats.

Music for the piece is by Richard Thomas, who worked on "Jerry Springer -- The Opera", a musical based on the US television show host.

The show will be performed Friday as part of the Rambert's new season of choreography at London's Southbank Centre.
[source]

Oh hear America singing, citizens of New York, as you never have heard it before. Hearken to your everyday sisters and brothers — the lost, the lonely, the fetishists, the freaks — as their voices swell and meld into one common chord of longing: to be seen, to be heard, to be (oh yes) famous.

Will it turn out that the great American musical of the early 21st century is an opera born in Britain? A convincing case for the rights to that title was made by the celestial “Jerry Springer: The Opera,” the notorious show from London about the transcendent within tabloid television, when it opened Tuesday night in a gorgeously sung concert version at Carnegie Hall for a sinfully short run of two performances.

Now “celestial” might seem an ill-chosen adjective for a work devoted to the raw and nasty public doings of a throng of aspiring celebrities with dirty little secrets expressed in dirty little words. But this remarkable work — which features a spectacularly inventive score by Richard Thomas, with a book and lyrics by Mr. Thomas and Stewart Lee — uncovers something grand within the small, squalid lives it portrays.

Those who attended “Jerry Springer,” which stars an affectingly disaffected Harvey Keitel in the nonsinging title role, expecting to snigger and hoot were not disappointed. There’s a guaranteed off-the-charts camp quotient in a show that sets the televised confessions of pole-dancing housewives and men with diaper fixations to music that often leans more toward Bach than Broadway.

In terms of sheer audacity, “Jerry Springer” is a helluva lot funnier than, say, “Young Frankenstein.” This is, after all, a work that features numbers with mock-liturgical titles like “Jerry Eleison.” And though I’d love to say that the demonstrators who assembled outside the theater on Tuesday to protest a show that “blasphemes our Lord” would be disarmed if they ever got to see “Jerry Springer,” I can’t.

They would find all the ammunition they need to continue their vigil in the show’s otherworldly second act.

But from the moment the chorus files on, caroling in sweet harmony and sour language about the television host who fills their lives with wonder and excitement, you intuit that there’s much more than easy satire afoot. If there weren’t, the basic joke of combining sacred music and profane content would endure for only the length of a cabaret comedy sketch.

That “Jerry Springer,” directed here by Jason Moore, only occasionally loses traction during its two-and-a-half-hour length is because it hears genuine beauty in the hunger for glory of the attention-starved souls it portrays. If the real “Jerry Springer Show” turns its rowdy, angry guests into objects of sneering sport, “Jerry Springer: The Opera” sees them as figures of passion, whose impulses, however base, translate into song that reaches for the stars. Laugh, if you will, with smug urbane knowingness. But the soulfulness in the music — performed by a cast that mixes Broadway sheen with classical heft — rises again and again to rebuke you.

O.K., before I get too highfalutin, let’s address the outrage factor that sparked a firestorm of protests in London after the show was (unwisely) shown on BBC television three years ago. (Before that “Jerry Springer: The Opera” had enjoyed a relatively untroubled existence of critical esteem and commercial success at the National Theater before transferring to the West End.)

The first act, which depicts the taping of a fairly typical Jerry Springer episode (bisexual cheating fiancé, diaper fetishist, woman with strip-club dreams), surely has more obscenities per minute than any work that ever played Carnegie Hall. But it’s the second act, which takes Jerry straight to hell to arbitrate a debate between Jesus and the Devil, that has raised hackles high.

The show, which was originally conceived as only one act, isn’t as strong in the second act as the first. An air of glib, giggly impiety — of an adolescent urge to see just how much it can get away with — is more clearly evident here, as Jesus (Lawrence Clayton) and Satan (David Bedella) squabble like potty-mouthed siblings, and God (Luke Grooms) shows up to complain about how weary it is to be he (in an irresistible high-corn-pone aria).

But even this half is infused with what is truly shocking about “Jerry Springer: The Opera”: an all-embracing empathy that finds the sublime in the squalid and vice versa. Mr. Thomas’s score — which blends, among other elements, Baroque oratorio, Gershwin-esque gospel and Samuel Barber-esque arias — unfailingly lends grandeur to lives contemptuously dismissed as “trailer trash” by Jerry’s warm-up man (also Mr. Bedella, who created the part in London and wears it with radiant naturalness).

Backed by a small but sumptuous orchestra led by Stephen Oremus, both the chorus members (who function, among other things, as the Springer studio audience and a chorus line of tap-dancing Ku Klux Klansmen) and soloists fully meet the music’s demands, even more than the performers I saw in London several years ago.
[source]

Police say a 25-year-old man has been arrested at the Los Angeles home of Brad Pitt.

Officer Karen Smith says a housekeeper called police around noon Wednesday after she saw a silver car blocking the actor's driveway. She told officers the man, who described himself as a freelance reporter, got out of the car and asked "Which one is Brad Pitt's house?"

Smith says neither Pitt nor Angelina Jolie was home at the time.

The man, identified as Eric Ray Mitchell, was arrested for investigation of trespassing.

Smith says Mitchell was taken into custody on a "private person's arrest" and it will be up to the housekeeper to decide whether or not to press charges.
[source]