A match made in...somewhere (Getty Images)

Monday evening, Woody Allen announced the cast of his yet-to-be-titled film, set in San Francisco and New York. (This is different from his upcoming summer feature with Jesse Eisenberg, To Rome With Love, which is set in Rome.)

The cast is...eclectic, to say the least. To say the most would be calling it the work of either an insane genius or just a regular insane person. Let's take a look, shall we?

Woody Allen announced today the cast of his latest untitled film. Starring, in alphabetical order, are Alec Baldwin, Cate Blanchett, Louis C.K., Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Dice Clay, Michael Emerson, Sally Hawkins and Peter Sarsgaard. Co-stars include Max Casella and Alden Ehrenreich. It is a Gravier Productions film produced by Allen’s long time producers, Letty Aronson and Stephen Tenenbaum.

The new film will be shot in New York and San Francisco this summer. This marks Allen’s second time directing in San Francisco -- his directorial debut, 1969’s TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN, was also set there.

Of course, everyone is flipping biscuit's over the casting of Andrew Dice Clay, most recently seen playing himself on Entourage, though a close second is Louis C.K. (Though we could absolutely see the FX star as a blue-collar Woody surrogate in the feature.) But the other members of the cast are just as strange: Cate Blanchett and Alex Baldwin are the biggest names on the roster, but we just can't imagine those two with any type of neurotic sexual chemistry.

Then there's Michael Emerson, better known as the villainous Ben Linus from Lost, who absolutely should be in everything, ever. But maybe not a Woody Allen movie? Unless Andrew Dice Clay will be playing a Smoke Monster going through a mid-life sexual crisis, only to be aided by the help of his best friend, a grown-up Vincent Delpino.

Add Peter Skarsgard, and you have a farrago of stoic, emotionally-repressed character actors...and Andrew Dice Clay. Based on the casting, we're going to assume that Mr. Allen's next feature will be a tense melodrama, in the vein of Matchpoint or the one with Ewan McGregor that no one saw.

Last night, at what is widely hyped as the best night in New York fashion, the attendees of the annual gala benefit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute did not disappoint. Patterns, we saw a few: a lot of black, a lot of neon, a lot of feathers, and a lot of sheer. And Beyonce's dress? We still don't know what to think. See our picks for best and most bewildering are in this slideshow, and read our rundown from the red carpet here.

Fashion Week fixtures gathered in the space, jaws slackened as they watched the massive projections. Each screen showed a video installastion by  Solve Sundsbo, showing two models, one female, one male, with continuously changing body parts. To a haunting electronica sound track (if it wasn't the same hypnotic hymn played in the Standard Hotel's storied elevator, it was hardly distinguishable), well-toned legs morphed into writhing snakes, chests became blooming flowers and close-up ready faces were transformed into raven's heads, always assuming a vaguely anthropomorphic shape. It was a trippy fashion fantasy, supposedly inspired by "the changing idea of beauty." Ironically, both models at the center of the tableaux were conspicuously classic beauties.

Cate Blanchett, Martha Stewart, Olivia Palermo, Tory Burch, Anna Dello Russo, Coco Rocha, Yigal Azrouel, Lara Stone and  Shalom Harlow absorbed the hypnagogic installation whilst imbibing champagne, wine and vodka. There was no food, only a few trays of Maison du Chocolat truffles making the rounds in honor of St. Valentine's day.

After a flute (or tw0) we decided to broach a contentious subject with our fashionable comrades. Karl Lagerfeld recently called Adele "too fat," (a comment which he later retracted, but let's not get bogged in details, shall we?). We wanted to know what people thought about the fashion guru's comments. With whom would they side, Uncle Karl, patron saint of Couture, or Grammy sensation Adele?

"Um, I think she is a fantastic singer. I never, like, think about the body. I mean its like the beautiful voice, it's a beautiful face, it’s a beautiful woman," host Stefano Tonchi said. "I find any of these things kind of stupid," he said, finally.

We asked Diane von Furstenberg (who was staring, transfixed at the screens)  if she thought the idea of beauty was really changing in fashion. "Is it?" she asked whimsically, apparently still under the film's spell. Of Adele, she angrily brushed aside any naysayers, snapping back to reality. "I think that she’s hot, I see her picture, she looks great. Listen, beautify is what beauty does. John Keats said it before me." While we're not sure if that's a direct quote, we appreciated Ms. von Furstenberg's sentiment.

Desperate to ask Daphne Guinness the same question, we hovered around the heiress while she chatted with a friend. "Ms. Guinness," we began, only to have a "Please Desist!"  hand thrust in our face by her personal body guard who was, it turns out, a better hoverer than our self.

We approached the bar for a re-fill, only to find that we had stepped in somebody's overturned Bloody Mary. We looked up at the bar, and our neurons began to fire:  Aside from splashes of tonic, champagne, wine and vodka were the only drinks being served meaning..... "Is that...blood?!" we asked an onlooking girl who had not cared to warn us of the bodily fluids.

"Um, yes. Someone, like, fell on their champagne glass," she said.

Indeed the remnants of the ill-fated flute could be seen, shattered and bloody, in the hemoglobules. Feeling slightly faint, we walked away from the scene, tracking a trail of vital fluid with our (rather nice) boots. Between the film, the blood, the cavernous space and the giraffe-like models, the scene could not possibly have been more surreal. An attendant soon appeared with a bottle of Perrier to clean the mess, but not before we had time too Google clinics in the area where we might get tested for blood-borne infections.

Bergdorf Goodman's Linda Fargo, in frothy Vera Wang, lamented having to miss the two shows for the event. "I feel terribly guilty because I'm missing two shows tonight; Tahari and Proenza Schouler. I sent them all apologies ahead of time, and I tried to schedule getting into the showroom to make up for it." Ms. Fargo explained that she felt she deserved a break after a Fashion Week that averaged 12 destinations a day. Also, "they're our neighbors. Van Cleef is almost a part of Bergdorfs! And we don't get to treat our senses to this kind of thing very often. I know I will be very spoiled by this."

Wearing very sparkly diamond earrings, Piper Perabo looked much more like an Upper East Side socialite than the Coyote Ugly bartendress that made her famous. Currently shooting the sci-fi thriller, Looper, with Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ms. Perabo told The Observer she was excited for her scenes with Mr. Willis, which begin shooting next week.

Richard Meier coyly deferred answering whether he liked Frank Gehry's new residential tower in the Financial District, smiling shrewdly, "I haven't seen it." He also told The Observer that he designed a very architectural, gold necklace for his daughter for her recent nuptials.

Flashbulbs erupted and guests murmured in awe as Cate Blanchett ascended the steps of the former Carnegie Mansion in a jet-black taffeta Balenciaga column. Asked if she had chosen a dress for the next week's Academy Awards, where she will be a presenter, Ms. Blanchett said, "No, I haven't!" A glimmer in her eye. "I literally just flew in from Sydney."

Arriving at the event without a coat, Chelsea Clinton must have inured herself to the cold while visiting ski bum hubby Marc Mezvinsky in Jackson Hole. The couple continued to battle rumors that Mr. Mezvinsky's flight to Jackson Hole spelled the seven-month itch for the young couple, who posed arm in arm.

Former supermodel Carolyn Murphy arrived on the arm of designer du jour Jason Wu. The model, who recently relocated to New York City, told The Observer, "I'm working on a book for parents about bibliotherapy--storytelling."

Ms. Murphy assured The Observer that her 10-year-old is not allowed to have a cell phone and instead borrows her nanny's phone for texting.

Mr. Wu told The Observer he felt underdressed for the event. "I feel like I should be wearing some jewels!" Asked which jewel exhibited he would steal if given the chance, Mr. Wu beamed without skipping a beat, "I have the prettiest one," slipping his arm around Ms. Murphy's waist (which was about shoulder height for the diminutive designer).

Fiery fashionista Julie Macklowe lamented the 9 a.m. Yigal Azrouel show that morning. "Ugh, I was at the Buck Cherry last night, and then I had Yigal at the crack of dawn, and my kid, of course, standing on my bed at like 5 a.m.!"

Downtown jewelry designing darling Waris Ahluwalia also felt underdressed for the event, whose dress code designated "black tie and bejeweled."

"I didn't come bejeweled. I wore black tie, but no jewels. I thought about wearing some of my new pieces," said Mr. Ahluwalia, who had his debut Fashion Week presentation at the Museum of Art and Design the day before. "But I don't really wear my own jewelry."

When asked which piece from the exhibit she would swipe, society stalwart Muffie Potter Aston, didn't hesitate: "Marlene Dietrich's bracelet," lingering on the words like a heroine addict chasing a fix. "A big cuff from the '40s that's done as only those big '40s bracelets were done, with the big diamonds on top and the rubies--spectacular!" She also confided that she has thought about launching her own jewelry line now that her daughters had been accepted into kindergarten at Spence and assured The Observer, "I have been approached."

The black-tied-and-bejeweled guests were slowly ushered into Bronson van Wyck's silk dinner tent for the Jean-Georges Vongrichten five-course dinner.

Ms. Blanchett, the clear guest of honor, was seated at the central table next to Van Cleef & Arpel's chief, Nicholas Bos, and flanked by Jason Wu on her left. At a neighboring table, Mr. Meier's dinner partner was Ms. Aston. The nearly 1,000 guests listened attentively, spooning their Meyer lemon gelée and caviar while Smithsonian director Wayne Klough thanked the audience for joining him at the opening of the Van Cleef & Arpels exhibit. Smirks passed like a contagious pathogen around the room as Mr. Klough pronounced the French house's name "Arples," like Ms. Marple. Half of the guests filtered out before the Sparkling Key Lime pie arrived, streaming past the hanging mobiles of dyed feather butterflies suspended from the tent ceiling.

He hasn't seen it yet, but he hears good things:

“From what I’ve heard, it’s fabulous, and I plan to reach out to Cate and her theater company to talk about bringing the show to a wider audience,” Mr. Byrd said. “I hope she will consider it. I’d love to be involved.”

Of course there's still Actor's Equity and pesky babies to contend with.

That possibility appears small. In an "active but brutal" season where celebrity appearances have proved key to success, the buzzy Blanchett Streetcar would seem like a strong prospect on Broadway--but! Obstacles. Like:

- Babies. A Broadway production requires a long run in order for producers to recoup their investment, and Blanchett has three little kids to consider.

- Unions. Would they keep the Sydney Theater Company Actors, or replace them with Equity members?

- Stephen C. Byrd. He has the rights to to an all-black production of Streetcar, and The Times reports that "several Broadway producers" believe he has dibs on any Broadway production of the play in the immediate future.

So, return to your business. You will probably not be seeing Blanchett DuBois on Broadway anytime soon, nor will you magically get BAM tickets this weekend.

There's only one problem with this carefully marketed plan: Race, Mr. Mamet's sure-to-be-great new play, isn't great at all. It's not even very good.

The curtain comes up at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, where Race opened Sunday night, on a stylized Santo Loquasto set of a looming book-filled law-firm library, plopped like a diorama—this is an educational lesson, after all—in the center of an otherwise bare all-black and starkly lit stage. Four actors—two middle-aged white men, one middle-aged black man and a younger black woman—are in that conference room, awkwardly already in mid-conversation. (Mr. Mamet directs his play, yielding pacing and placement often as stilted and abrupt as his famous dialogue.)

The well-known and powerful billionaire Charles Strickland (misplayed by Richard Thomas, who never seems either powerfully angry or powerfully dismissive) is in the lawyers' office, attempting to hire them. He has been accused of raping a young black woman in a hotel room, which he denies. Jack Lawson (an excellent James Spader, who it could be argued has been training his whole career for this role) is the cynical and brilliant litigator he wants to represent him, and Henry Brown (David Alan Grier) is Lawson's black law partner, which makes this firm a good choice for Strickland, considering the accusation. Susan (Kerry Washington) is a young black associate at the firm, the novice to whom Lawson can pontificate—and to whom Mr. Mamet can make his arguments. It is she who, as the wobbly third leg of the firm, will be the center of Mr. Mamet's usual swirl of possible treachery and double-crossing.

The first act has Lawson and Brown discussing whether they want to take Strickland's case, and, with Susan, whether they think he's innocent or guilty. (Don't lawyers specifically not do that?) This provides Mr. Mamet the opportunity to put in his characters' mouths—especially Lawson's—his theories about guilt and innocence, truth and perception, back and white. All black people hate all white people, all white people are guilty; everyone feels all sorts of guilt and shame, truth is flexible and a smart lawyer's skill is to manipulate all that.

It's all rendered with Mr. Mamet's expected verbal pyrotechnics, but the inherent pleasure of virtuosity aside, the fireworks fall flat. The play is reveling in its subversive political incorrectness, but political incorrectness hasn't seemed flamboyantly subversive at any point in this new century.

In the second act (the roughly 90-minute play includes what the Playbill notes is a 12-minute intermission), things make less sense. When it turns out Strickland's accuser is a prostitute, Lawson announces he won't reveal that fact to the jury. (Huh?) When it appears that associate Susan has sold out the defense's strategy to prosecutors, Lawson's partner, Brown, reminds us that he never liked her, pulling her college thesis from his desk drawer (conveniently handy!) and announcing its title, "Structural Survivals of Racism in Supposedly Bias-free Transactions" (conveniently suspicious!).

When word comes that the hotel maid has amended her testimony to police, undermining Lawson's planned defense, we're to understand that it's a false statement, proof that the prosecution is onto his strategy. But when word comes that the responding police officer has found a lost page of his report, also undermining the defense, this revelation is presented as an honestly lost-and-found document (confusing!).

Race is an intriguing play, and far better than Mr. Mamet's last Broadway effort, the mediocre sitcom November. (It's also much better than "Keep Your Pantheon," the main piece of The Two Unrelated Plays By David Mamet, which played at the Atlantic earlier this season.) Ultimately, this is not thought-provoking Mamet so much as a parody of it.

IN THE LAST CARGO CULT, MIKE DAISEY'S most recent monologue, which opened Monday night at the Public, Mr. Daisey talks about traveling to the small, primitive South Pacific island of Tanna to visit a culture almost entirely different from our own, one of communal living, with no private property and—more important—no money. He's going there to witness John Frum Day, an annual religious celebration of the island's John Frum's cargo cult, a religion based on Tanna's brief exposure to American servicemen during World War II. On John Frum Day, the people of Tanna celebrate by recounting U.S. history—or at least their version of it—in song, dance and theater.

Mr. Daisey is a funny, insightful, magnetic storyteller, and his travelogue—tales of flying to Tanna on a ramshackle plane, eating local delicacies, sleeping with a baby pig—are hilarious. They're also not really the point. Mr. Daisey is concerned with money, how Tanna survives without it and how much we rely on it. He's angry about the financial crisis; he's angry at the bankers who created it; and he's particularly angry to realize that the financial system has us all interconnected, that he can't revel in the bankers' misfortune because what's bad for them is bad for him, too.

He weaves several stories together—of the Tanna trip; of arriving at college and first being exposed to rich people; of all the "awesome stuff" in the world he wants and which require cash—to make us think about the role of money.

And you do think about it, for the time you're in the theater. Thinking about money is like thinking about air; you don't need to, because it's everywhere. More likely, what you will thinkk about Cargo Cult after you walk out of the theater is what a pleasure your last two hours have been.

TO SEE SO HELP ME GOD!, A LONG-LOST and very funny 1929 backstage comedy being presented by the Mint Theater Company at the Lucille Lortel, is to wonder why this one was forgotten while so many boring old backstage comedies—The Royal Family, currently at the Manhattan Theatre Club, for example—were remembered.

So Help Me God! is a witty and goofily screwball old-fashioned three-acter written by Maurine Dallas Watkins, who a few years earlier had written the play Chicago. (The Kander and Ebb musical arrived a half-century later.) It was set for an October 1929 opening, but the Great Depression interfered. This production, with a script adapted by Mint artistic director Jonathan Bank, who also directed, is essentially its premiere.

It's an All About Eve story, but one in which Eve is outflanked by Margo. Kristen Johnston is fantastic as Lily Darnley, the domineering diva, a 6-foot-tall force of nature in dramatic deco gowns (the costumes, I should disclose, are by my friend Clint Ramos) who casually molds people and situations and the plot of the play-within-a-play to fit her needs. My Girl star Anna Chlumsky is less strong in the Eve part, flat and insufficiently steely as she plots her rise. But the rest of the cast ably supports, especially Catherine Curtain as Belle, the blowsy broad in the company, and Jeremy Lawrence as the put-upon stage manager.

The characters are deadly serious in their backstage machinations, but, for us, it's a fun (if slight) night at the theater.

MELISSA JAMES GIBSON'S THIS, WHICH OPENED at Playwrights Horizons last week, is poorly named but impressively written, a smart, funny and affecting play about four old friends (and one sexy new addition to the group) who wrestle with changing lives as they grow up and, as people do, grow both together and apart.

Jane (Julianne Nicholson), Marrell (Eisa Davis) and Alan (Glenn Fitzgerald) were classmates at an unnamed but elite school; they've remained tight for 15 years. Tom (Darren Pettie) was a staffer at the college; he's married to Marrell and together they have a newborn son who won't sleep for more than 15 minutes at a time. Jane has a daughter, too, and a husband who died a year earlier; Alan is gay and single and wittily self-lacerating. Finally, there's a Jean-Pierre (Louis Cancelmi), a handsome French doctor-without-borders ("I always think that makes it sound like he has a messy personal life," Alan snarks), who becomes enmeshed with the group as Marrell tries to fix him up with Jane.

Marrell and Tom are drifting apart, their distance exacerbated by the stress of young parenthood. Jane is exhausted by the world's sympathy and pity, and by the idea she had an ideal marriage until her husband got sick. Alan is lonely and bored and desperate to do something useful in the world. Jane and Tom fall into a brief affair. Tom doesn't want Marrell to know because he can't deal with the repercussions; Jane doesn't want Marrell to know because she can't stand to hurt her. There are kinds of unhappiness, Marrell tells Jane at one point, "personal, marital, professional, existential or interdisciplinary." Her own, she continues, is interdisciplinary. All of their unhappiness is interdisciplinary.

The unhappiness is also honest, and real, recognizable to us all if not in specifics then at least in spirit, intelligently rendered in sharp and wise dialogue. Together with another Playwrights production, Circle Mirror Transformation—which after being twice extended in the fall returns to Playwrights' upstairs space, the Peter Jay Sharp Theater, next week—it's one of the best new dramas of the season.

THE NEW A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, which opened at the BAM Harvey Theater last week, is every bit as good as you've heard. What more is there to say? It's the classic and powerful Tennessee Williams play; Cate Blanchett gives a mesmerizing performance as the delusional faded Southern belle Blanche DuBois, and Joel Edgerton is hunky and duly animal (if, sometimes, a bit too Brando-sounding) as Stanley. The Liv Ullman-directed production, originally staged at the Sydney Theatre Company, is only here through Dec. If you can still find a ticket, go.

editorial@observer.com

They saved the best for last. Sure, the end of 2008 produced its share of animated kid stuff. Daniel Craig overcame his James Bond label long enough to prove he can still act, in Defiance (this time as a homeless Jew gamely fighting back in the German forest during World War II). They refused to show Tom Cruise as a Nazi in Valkyrie to the critics (always a bad sign). Clint Eastwood’s return to acting as a bigoted old Korean war vet who finds his heart through the Vietnamese family next door was the only memorable element in the otherwise shmaltzy, sentimental and highly preposterous Gran Torino. And the bloated, overproduced and incomprehensible remake of the sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still turned out to be a sorry mistake. But when the news is good, it’s simply great. In a year notable mostly for its profligate tossing-around of overrated bores like Happy-Go-Lucky and pretentious, open-sewer trash like Synecdoche, New York, it comes as an act of real holiday season benevolence to bestow upon us, in rapid succession, The Reader, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Revolutionary Road. Here are three sensational movies that revive my faith in America’s greatest art form.

Brad Pitt is so pretty that a lot of people forget what an accomplished actor he is. In The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, even his most ardent fans will be unprepared for the physical and emotional power of his range and versatility in the title role of this wrenching, demanding and captivating film experience. Reunited with the gifted David Fincher, who directed him in one of his best films, the dark and creepy noir thriller Se7en, Mr. Pitt tackles an F. Scott Fitzgerald story as fresh and original as it is riveting. An ancient crone on her hospital death bed (another astonishing performance by Cate Blanchett) draws her last breaths sifting through her memories while her daughter (Julia Ormond) reads from the diaries of an old boyfriend named Benjamin Button, who narrates the events of his life like a work of literature. The contents pour out of the pages in a tableau of breathless cinematic adventures, as the story unfolds of a remarkable man who beat the odds against time and biology. Benjamin was born prematurely old in postwar 1918 New Orleans—a deformed freak in an inexplicable shift of time running backwards. Swaddled in a dirty baby blanket, he had the body of an ancient troll—arthritic, nearly blind with cataracts, wrinkled like yeast dough drying out on a cutting board. His mother died in childbirth, and when his grieving father, a buttons manufacturer, took one look at what he had sired, he plucked Benjamin from his cradle and abandoned him on the steps of a senior retirement home with $18 attached to his diapers. Oddly enough, among the elderly residents of the facility, the baby seemed right at home. By the age of 7, he was an old gnarled man in a wheelchair, befriended only by a black servant who acted like a surrogate mother, and a girl named Daisy, the granddaughter of one of the patients. As Daisy grows up, Benjamin gets younger, until they are the same age. She turns into Cate Blanchett; he turns from a withered little Truman Capote clone into the dashing countenance of Brad Pitt. At 17, he goes to sea and sees the world, his skin clears, his wrinkles iron smooth, and in an icy Russian winter in a boarding house for sailors, he experiences an introduction to sexual education in the bed of the lonely wife of a British trade merchant (Tilda Swinton), who changes his life. As one of the survivors of a violently depicted submarine attack, he returns to New Orleans from World War II in 1945 a hero, but Daisy has moved to New York to pursue a career as a dancer and ends up in the dream ballet in Carousel. By the time he gets to Broadway to see her, he’s turned into an Esquire cover of blond, camera-ready, clean-cut, all-American beauty, like a crew captain on the Dartmouth rowing team. “Look at you—you’re perfect!” she cries, and you can’t resist a laugh. I mean, he sure is. He’s Brad Pitt!

Although their paths keep crossing, romance is on rewind. Guilt-ridden, the father who rejected him as an infant returns and leaves him a fortune, and Daisy’s dancing career is wrecked when her leg is crushed by a taxi in Paris. He thinks the time is finally right for unconditional love, but now she’s the one with the deformity who can only give half a loaf. By the time their lives at last conjoin in marriage in 1962, and she faces the truth behind the enigmatic puzzle of Benjamin Button, there are tears, and there is humor, too. “Will you still love me when I get old and my skin gets wrinkly?” she asks between bouts of passionate coitus. “Will you still love me when I get acne and start wetting the bed?” he counters. The notion of getting younger as the years go by may seem like a dream to most of us (the perfect antidote to Botox), but the problems are daunting. You outlive everyone you know. By the time you become a parent, you may have to share the nursery. How can you raise a child when it’s time to raise yourself? It would spoil things to reveal how the movie resolves this dilemma. When you first see him, he looks like a twice-baked Idaho potato. The last time you see Benjamin Button, he looks like the new Harry Potter.

The point in the F. Scott Fitzgerald story and the richly textured, meticulously redacted screenplay by Eric (Forrest Gump) Roth is that everything in life and death is predetermined, and even if you turn the clock backward, you might be able to reverse the order but you can’t change the outcome. Clearly, this is a movie that must be experienced, not explained. From Broadway to Russia, beginning in the Depression and ending when Hurricane Katrina sweeps through New Orleans’ Ninth Ward, this movie is so vast and covers so much ground that any feeble attempt to tell you what happens in it only weakens the impact. It is equally challenging to adequately convey the depth and range of Brad Pitt’s performance. I’ve liked his work since the first time I saw him, in that scene-stealing cameo in Thelma and Louise. Whether it’s great works like Babel or lousy mistakes like Troy and Interview With a Vampire, he always makes bold and adventurous choices, takes admirable risks and never fails to surprise. He’s a good collaborator for director David Fincher; Se7en was only a preview of what they both can do. Brilliantly directed and acted, sumptuously photographed and endlessly fascinating, Button runs nearly three hours, and I never glanced at my watch one time. Unlike the exhausting Australia, it’s an epic that sprawls but never meanders. Through the decades, it changes gears as fast as Brad Pitt changes his appearance, each period of time like a new chapter in a novel you never want to end. Trust me. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a monumental achievement—not only one of the best films of the year, but one of the greatest films ever made.

rreed@observer.com

Today in Sydney, Australia, actress Cate Blanchett looked as healthy as a horse, a very pregnant horse. “People often talk about pregnancy as if it’s an illness, don’t they, and the thing is I’m very fortunate to feel disgustingly well,” the 38-year-old actress told reporters on the red carpet at the city’s Theater Company, where an advance screening of her latest film, I’m Not There, was being shown. (The screening was reportedly arranged to benefit the theatrical organization, which wants to be able to sell 20 tickets for $20.)

“[My husband, director Andrew Upton] and I really want to find a way to make cheaper tickets available across all productions and we’ll be looking for a corporate partner to be able to do that in 2008,” Ms. Blanchett told The Sunday Telegraph. “I think a lot more people would go if they felt they could afford to go so we’re kicking off the initiative [with Blackbird] and hoping to extend the twenty-for-twenty idea further. I think generally theatre is very expensive for a lot of people [so hopefully this will] make it available to the wider community and invite new audiences in.” Blackbird is a play she is directing for the Sydney Theater Company; it explores childhood sexual abuse.