Lily Rabe

We've been hearing a lot about this young lady, Lily Rabe. We wrote about her in Kathleen Turner-directed play Crimes of the Heart and she stars in Emily Hubley's animation film The Toe Tactic. Now she has joined the cast of the Public Theater's production of Hamlet in Central Park this summer, according to Variety. Ms. Rabe plays Ophelia to Michael Stuhlbarg’s Dane and Andre Braugher will play the royal usurper Claudius. Hamlet runs May 27-June 29. Tickets go on sale March 30.

Before the lights went down at the premiere of her first full-length animation film The Toe Tactic at Austin’s South by Southwest Music Festival a couple of weeks ago, director Emily Hubley said to the audience: “Don’t worry if you don’t get it all, just feel it all.” But she didn’t expect such an emotional response from the first-time viewers. “I felt a little bad because people were so weepy,” Ms. Hubley told The Observer in a phone interview from her home in Maplewood, N.J. “The conversation [after the SXSW screening] was just all about the healing properties of art and making art. It really was a gift that it wasn’t just empty kudos, that it was really infused with people’s intense personal responses.”  read more »

“Meg just left one. Lenny never had one. Babe just shot one. The MaGrath sisters sure have a way with men!”

That was the marketing tag line for the 1986 movie version of Beth Hanley’s play Crimes of the Heart, starring Diane Keaton, Jessica Lange and Sissy Spacek as three grown sisters. Sarah Paulson, 33, first watched it when she was living in Brooklyn, deciding whether to take the plunge into an acting career. Ms. Paulson, best known for her Golden Globe-nominated role as Harriet Hayes, the Christian comedian on the now-cancelled Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, has been too scared to rent the flick again since she started playing Meg, the character formerly inhabited by Ms. Lange, in the Roundabout Theatre’s production of the play, directed by that formidable, husky-voiced neo-grande-dame Kathleen Turner.  read more »