PHILADELPHIA | Following stints as a sitcom star, talk show host and Broadway leading man, Tony Danza is going back to school — to teach. Pending approval by Philadelphia school officials, the actor known for his roles on “Taxi” and “Who’s the Boss?” will begin teaching at Northeast High School this fall for a reality TV show. The series, called “Teach,” is slated to air on the cable channel A&E. “I’m so scared. You have no idea,” Mr. Danza said in a phone interview Thursday. “I can tap-dance, but I don’t know if I can make kids learn yet.” Mr. …

Email

Summertime has been good to Keith Urban. Three years ago, the country superstar tied the knot with Nicole Kidman during a stylish June wedding. The following summer, he took part in the inaugural Live Earth broadcast, playing a blistering set of country songs to 19 million viewers in America alone. One year later, he and his wife welcomed the birth of their first child. Such good fortune helped inspire the warm, affable sounds of “Defying Gravity,” Mr. Urban’s fifth solo record. Propelled by the singer’s melodic savvy and surprising talent on lead guitar, the album topped the charts upon its …

Email

If “Twilight,” HBO’s “True Blood” and myriad other pop culture touchstones are any indication, vampires have never been more in vogue. But you haven’t seen a vampire until you’ve seen a Park Chan-wook bloodsucker. The director broke through with indie- and foreign-film fans in the first half of this decade with his vengeance trilogy: “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance,” “Oldboy” and “Lady Vengeance.” Despite negligible impact at the American box office, these pictures quickly became cult classics and did big business on DVD. Focus Features hopes that fan base — and vampires! — will turn Mr. Park’s latest film, “Thirst,” into …

Email

“The Time Traveler’s Wife” is an effective romance film for the ladies with a patina of science fiction credibility to woo their boyfriends into joining. Of course, that patina doesn’t stand much of a chance against the floodlights of “District 9,” also opening Friday, but this is still a hearty exercise in counterprogramming. Emphasis on the heart: This is a first-class tear-jerker, so make sure to bring a packet of Kleenex into the theater. The movie opens on young Henry DeTamble (Alex Farris at 6; Eric Bana for the rest of the film), who’s about to undergo a trauma that …

Email

Amid rumors of a split from her partner, comedienne and media personality Rosie O’Donnell was spotted in Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport yesterday with an unidentified woman in the US Airways terminal by Washington Times market developer Joe Deoudes. Miss O’Donnell, who just signed on to host her own show this fall on Sirius-XM Radio, wed Kelli Carpenter, a former Nickelodeon exec, in 2004 in San Francisco. They have four children and have been vocal proponents of adoption for other gay couples. Last week, press chatter about the two being on the outs emerged, prompting Miss O’Donnell’s rep to respond …

Email

A single newspaper headline summed up what many in the establishment felt about the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, then taking place on a dairy farm in upstate New York: “Hippies Mired in Sea of Mud” the New York Daily News gloated in large type on Aug. 17, 1969. Barnard Collier, then a New York Times reporter, recounts in “Woodstock: Now and Then” — a theatrical-quality, two-hour documentary premiering tonight at 9 on VH1 and VH1 Classic and rebroadcast Monday night at 8 on the History Channel — that he had to fight tooth and nail to stop his prejudiced …

Email

PARIS Tarzan is back! (Cue distinctive jungle yell.) This time, however, the vine-swinging hero is a topic of serious cultural and philosophical study at a Paris exhibition exploring his links with popular culture. The venue — the anthropological Quai Branly Museum — dictates the serious treatment of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ creation, who has been deconstructed in an effort to understand Western culture and how the West views the rest of the world. Curator Roger Boulay says the exhibit — titled, naturally enough, “Tarzan!” — which runs through Sept. 19, has “philosophical aims” but in an amusing way, “without pretension.” Visitors …

Email

Fox News Channel cut away from President Obama’s town-hall meeting on health care reform Tuesday as he faced a far more polite crowd than has attended meetings hosted by members of Congress recently. CNN and MSNBC carried the session in full. The loud public debates have been a tonic for cable news networks during normally quiet August. The audience for Fox’s Bill O’Reilly on Aug. 6 was a half-million more than on a typical evening this year, and he credited his network’s willingness to listen to health care reform opponents for helping bring in viewers. The cable networks all covered …

Email

Forty years ago this week, a rock festival at an upstate New York farm turned into one of the seminal events of the ’60s. Woodstock has since been celebrated in every corner of pop culture — music, movies, fashion and art, among them. Now comes a celebration of Woodstock as a news event. A small exhibit at the Newseum, “Woodstock at 40: The Rise of Music Journalism,” explores how the concert event was covered by the news as an organizational disaster, concentrating on mud, traffic jams, food shortages and crowd control. “Prior to Woodstock, there were few reporters in the …

Email

No Love Lost Look out, Bristol. Your former flame and baby daddy has a new lady friend. Levi Johnston, the onetime boyfriend of Sarah Palin’s daughter and father of Mrs. Palin’s grandchild, Tripp, continued his love affair with the media by showing up at the “Teen Choice Awards” with comedienne Kathy Griffin this past weekend. Miss Griffin, the flame-haired flamethrower who is filling in for Larry King this week while he is on vacation, invited Mr. Johnston to be a guest on “Larry King Live” Monday night, where the two reminisced about their date night. Mr. Johnston brought along a …

Email