Broadway

It's virtually impossible to watch Smash star Katharine McPhee on screen and not be smitten. The American Idol alumna has a way to go before she masters the intricacies of acting, but it was thrilling to see her sing and dance - and above all be sweet, heartbroken, and sweetly heartbroken - on the first season of NBC's disarming, surprisingly enjoyable, if sometimes mediocre, musical drama, which returns for its sophomore year Tuesday night...

LOS ANGELES - Gore Vidal, 86, the iconoclastic author, savvy analyst, and glorious gadfly, died Tuesday at his home in the Hollywood Hills from complications of pneumonia, his nephew Burr Steers said. Impossible to categorize, Mr. Vidal was a literary juggernaut who wrote 25 novels and volumes of essays that critics consider among the most elegant in the English language. He wrote Broadway hits, Hollywood screenplays, television dramas, and a trio of mysteries still in print after 50 years.

It was a Ford Econoline Van, the flat-front version. Alki Steriopoulos was 20, driving that van. Full tank, empty head. That empty head cobwebbed with fatigue, because it was New Year's Day and he'd been up all night playing piano in a band, then partying with a girl he'd met that night, then scrambling into that van to drive from Pittsburgh to Indianapolis and another gig. Came within inches of driving that van into the back end of a gasoline tanker...

THEATER 'Horse' gallops into Philly "War Horse," one of the most honored dramas in recent Broadway history and a hit film last year, debuts locally Tuesday at the Academy of Music. The multiple Tony-winning show tells the story of how a young boy's horse wound up in combat during World War I, and the boy's journey to the front to save his beloved companion. Puppets - which won their own Tony - play the horses. Academy of Music, Broad and Locust streets, 8 p.m. Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sunday, 7:30 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday, Saturday, $100-$20, 215-893-1999, kimmelcenter.org/broadway.

A sure sign it's finally spring? Those very pink-hued, (sometimes sickly) sweet musical ads for the Gap starring American darling Sarah Jessica Parker and her rendition of the Broadway tune "I Enjoy Being a Girl. " But the British press is reporting that S.J.P., who's done three Gap campaigns so far, will do no more. It appears that Gap's face and voice are to be replaced by English teen sensation Joss Stone, who's currently in negotiations with the khaki-maker. According to London's Sunday Times, the Gap, which had previously used Madonna and Demi Moore, wants to capture the teen market by using the 17-year-old soul singer, who scored a hit last year with "Fell in Love with a Boy," a reworking of the White Stripes' "Fell in Love with a Girl.

The head of a violent, Bloods-affiliated street gang, who authorities say oversaw drug dealing in Camden from his Trenton State Prison cell, has pleaded guilty to leading a narcotics-trafficking network, the state Attorney General's Office said. Michael Anderson, 38, known as the "original, original gangster" or "godfather" of the Nine Trey Headbustas, faced Superior Court Judge Samuel D. Natal in Camden County on Friday. He became the last to plead among 15 gang members indicted by a state grand jury in July 2008 on charges including racketeering, drug dealing, and conspiracy to commit murder.

MUCH TO HER dismay, West Philly native Eve, is the star of the Internet's newest celebrity sex video. The 30-second clip, dated Nov. 20, 1999, shows a man using a sex toy on the naked Martin Luther King High graduate while he pleasures himself. The man has been identified by the New York Daily News as Bad Boy Entertainment producer Stevie J. A spokeswoman for Eve, formally Eve Jihan Jeffers, told the New York tab that the tape was made "years ago with her boyfriend of over two years.

Let this be a lesson. John and Kristen Zarroli of Southampton, Montgomery County, almost saw $200,000 turn into worthless pulp this summer. "I bought the ticket at the 7-Eleven in Maple Glen," John said. "There was a sign on the door saying a winning Powerball ticket bought there had not been claimed and it was going to expire July 25. I kept asking what idiot doesn't check their tickets, so when I told my wife about it, she decided to double-check our stack. Our deal is, I buy them and she checks them.

The blood is on their hands in Center City. And on their faces and in their hair. And splattering the walls, and pooling on the floors. Two professional companies are, by chance, presenting two of the bloodiest plays in modern theater - Luna Theater with Blasted and Theatre Exile with The Lieutenant of Inishmore . Their productions have created a hammy vampire's demand for realistic-looking gore: more than six gallons a night between the...

HAVE YOU heard? The other Jersey boys - the once "Young" and forever Rascals - are together again, reliving the blue-eyed-soul glory days of "Groovin'," "Good Lovin'," "I've Been Lonely Too Long" and "People Got to Be Free" with a sensory-bombarding, period-capturing show called "The Rascals - Once Upon a Dream. " Torn asunder by internal strife, it took decades of gentle goading and diplomacy by one of their biggest home-state fans - ace E Street Band guitarist, actor and now "Once Upon a Dream" scripter/producer Steve Van Zandt - to get the group back together.