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Short Cuts
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Disney Charlize

Actress Charlize Theron is headed for Disney world with the romantic comedy Sweet Home Alabama for the Walt Disney Co. She’s also going to star in Woody Allen’s upcoming project for DreamWorks, which starts shooting this October. Theron revisited her modeling past in Allen’s 1998 film, Celebrity, appearing as a bewitching supermodel who mesmerises Allen’s alter ego Kenneth Branagh. Doing Alabama for Disney is another rematch for Theron, after her role supporting the big ape in Disney’s Mighty Joe Young. Alabama, which does not yet have a director, is slated to start shooting in spring. It’s the story of a young, white trash woman from Alabama who abandons her husband and runs away to the Big Apple. There, she reinvents herself as a New York socialite. She’s forced to confront her past when her Park Avenue boyfriend pops the question and she must choose between the two men in her life. Though this sounds very much like Breakfast at Tiffanys, Hollywood Reporter says that Alabama is an original story that was sold to Disney about two years ago as a pitch.

Ghostly Specie

Remember that man-eating woman in Species? She’s back and this time in a macho-macho sci-fi film. Natasha Henstridge, will be starring as in the John Carpenter-directed The Ghost of Mars, replacing an injured Courtney Love as a tough leader of a search team that comes upon a planet inhabited by ghosts. Henstridge had been set to play the title character in The Judith Exner Story, a Showtime TV movie about the woman who long maintained she’d had an affair with John F. Kennedy. Then, Henstridge got the offer from Carpenter to join a cast that includes Ice Cube and Jason Statham, and Sony worked out an arrangement so that Henstridge could be in the sci-fi picture, which began shooting this week. That’s not all. The Species star recently completed Second Skin, co-starring Angus MacFadyen. Other recent projects include Kevin of the North, with Skeet Ulrich and Leslie Nielsen and Bounce, with Ben Affleck and Gwyneth Paltrow.

SHAKESPEARE'S BACK

If Shakespeare has always fascinated you, this is your dream come true. Now, you can join in with the most famous players. The accent is on audience participation at the Shakespeare Exhibition, which is rapidly becoming one of London’s most popular tourist attractions. It is staged inside the thatch-roofed Globe theater, an exquisite copy of the playhouse where the Bard’s plays were first performed 400 years ago. Globe spokeswoman Sonia Noy said, ‘‘People say it is like coming home. The whole idea is to make Shakespeare accessible.’’ The message from the Globe is: Shakespeare can be fun. That is certainly the case on the stage where artistic director Mark Rylance has consistently caught the headlines. Last year he dressed up as a woman to play Cleopatra and this year Vanessa Redgrave has redressed the balance by playing Prospero, the Duke of Milan, in The Tempest. Elizabethan special effects are brought to life on touch screens: See how Ariel flew. Check out what Shakespeare used for onstage blood and how Macbeth’s thunder was created. You can even try your hand at editing Hamlet and print the results on a computer.

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