Some very sad news: gifted Toronto stage and film actress Tracy Wright passed away Tuesday. A truly dynamic performer, she forged a lengthy career as one of Canada's most versatile, underrated character actors.

Bea Arthur passed away over the weekend at age 86, and I'm feeling totally bereft.

The phrase "old pro" is tossed around a lot in showbiz, but few performers are as deserving of the title as Liza Minnelli. The woman has earned her bona fides -- now 63, she's been in the business for a staggering six decades. And watching her performance (an adapted version of the Liza's at the Palace extravaganza that ran on Broadway in December and January) at Toronto's Roy Thomson Hall last night was witnessing an artist whose very DNA is programmed to come alive onstage.

Legendary actress Jane Fonda made a triumphant return to the stage recently, starring in the Beethoven-themed Broadway play 33 Variations. If you're a Fonda fan who's bummed about not being in NYC to catch the production, you'll be relieved to learn Hanoi Jane has been blogging and Twittering about her entire experience on the Great White Way.

In April, Star Wars: The Musical Journey, an over-the-top stage treatment of the film franchise, debuts in London. Fans of the 32-year-old franchise -- who seem to defy the adage that familiarity breeds contempt -- can watch a 90-minute montage of all six movies displayed on a 100-foot LED screen while a full orchestra performs a new arrangement of John Williams' classic score.

It’s no big secret that we here at Arts Online are huge fans of any project in which Neil Patrick Harris is asked to display his considerable musical theatre chops. So our discovery of Prop 8: The Musical! on the Funny or Die site was met with squeals of great delight.

Toilet humour has a great shelf life. The public appetite for scatological knee-slappers is so great that entire movies have been devoted to it. The latest unlikely participant in this brand of low-brow humour is Hugh Jackman, who told Playboy magazine he peed his pants onstage in a musical production of Beauty and the Beast. Granted, this was way back in 1995, but still.

This little gem is a little bit old, but it was sent to me by a very dear friend of mine last night, and it's so great that I'd be remiss if I failed to share it with Things That Go Pop! readers. In case you couldn't tell from his tour-de-force performance in Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog, Neil Patrick Harris (the former Doogie Howser and current How I Met Your Mother star) is a huge musical theatre geek.

If the High School Musical phenomenon and the continued success of populist song-and-dance shows like Mamma Mia are any indication, musical theatre can be a rather lucrative business these days. Cross-pollination between film and theatre, as in the Meryl Streep-starring adaptation of the aforementioned Abba-sical, or the Mobius-strip like movie-turned-musical-turned-movie Hairspray, is particularly au courant. And yet, we can't help but think that some projects are best left as pipe dreams.