Matt Dillon, Joe Pantaoliano, Lois Smith, Meryl Streep, and Lili Taylor will be among the stars who will perform at Soho Rep’s Spring Gala, to be held at 7pm on Monday, May 14 at 101 Riverviews. The gala will be hosted by Tim Blake Nelson. The actors will perform excerpts from new plays by Will Eno, Nick Flynn, Jenny Schwartz, and Mac Wellman. The evening will also feature the announcement of the first Soho Rep Dorothy Strelsin Playwriting Fellowships. Among the evening’s attendees will be Edward Albee, Olympia Dukakis, Eileen Fulton, and Buck Henry. The gala includes a pre-performance cocktail reception and a post-performance party.

Meryl has received a nomination for the MTV Movie Award as Best Villain for “The Devil Wears Prada”, sharing her category with Bill Nighy (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest), Jack Nicholson (The Departed), Rodrigo Santoro (300) and Tobin Bell (Saw III). “Prada”‘s Emily Blunt has also received two nominations as Best Comedic Performance and Best Breakthrough Role. The winners will be voted by the fans, so you can visit their website here to have your vote casted. The MTV Movie Awards will be handed out on June 03, 2007.

Yet another stage award nomination for Meryl’s performance in “Mother Courage”. This time she has received as Outstanding Actress in a Play Nomination for the Drama Desk Award. A list with all nominees can be found at their official website. Thanks to Frank for the heads-up.

Meryl Streep’s performance in “Mother Courage” has earned her a nomination for the Drama League’s Performance Award. The award will be handed out on May 11, 2007. A list with all nominees can be found here.

Article courtesy The Times Online: Two Hollywood productions face being shelved indefinitely because their stories so grimly echo last week’s massacre on a university campus. Distributors are refusing to touch the films Dark Matter, starring Meryl Streep, which is about an alienated Asian student who shoots fellow students and professors, or The Killer Within, about an American student who goes on a similar rampage. They are wary of taking on films which bear striking parallels to the case of Cho Seung Hui, the Asian student who this month killed 32 students and professors at the Virginia Tech campus before turning his gun on himself in the worst single gun massacre in modern American history. One British distributor, who declined to be named, said: “These films are too close to the knuckle.” Dark Matter, in which Streep plays a university patron who tries to befriend the troubled student, took its inspiration from a 1991 tragedy in which a Chinese physics student opened fire in two buildings on the University of Iowa campus. He killed 6 people including a student and professors. Read the full article here.

According to Variety, Oscar-winners Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman will star in “Doubt,” the screen adaptation of the John Patrick Shanley play for Miramax Films that begins production in New York on Dec. 1. Shanley wrote the script and will direct. Scott Rudin is producing. Deals are being negotiated with both thesps. “Doubt” takes place in a Bronx Catholic School in 1964, where the principal (Streep), a nun who’s a strict disciplinarian, makes pedophile accusations against a popular priest (Hoffman). Still to be cast is a young nun caught between them. “Doubt” won both the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award, and is on tour.

According to Variety, Meryl Streep and her new sidekick, Christine Baranski, are in London to pre-record their musical numbers for the coming movie of “Mamma Mia!” They’ll be singing along with Britain’s Julie Walters, Colin Firth and Pierce Brosnan. Streep and Baranski will then come back to the U.S. for a month off. “Actually,” Christine says, “I’ll be killing myself with dance classes.” Then back to London for 10 weeks of filming and on to another five weeks on some exotic Greek island.

According to this interview with Anthony Hopkins, promoting his latest feature “Fracture”, the announced Tolstoy biopic “The Last Station” with him and Meryl Streep in the leads, has lost its stars.

Q: Are you going to play Tolstoy?
A: No, that all fell through. I don’t know what happened to that. They postponed and it was going and then I said, “Look, I’ve got to get on with my life.” I think Meryl Streep was going to do it and I think she pulled out of it basically because it was on and then it was off.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Pierce Brosnan is in final negotiations to join Meryl Streep in the movie version of the popular ABBA musical “Mamma Mia!” The story revolves around a bride-to-be (Amanda Seyfried) and her formerly rebellious mom (Streep) who raised her on a Greek island and never disclosed the identity of her father. The bride locates three men who might be her father and invites them to her wedding. Brosnan will play the main father figure. Phyllida Lloyd is directing the Universal project; ABBA members and songwriters Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus will serve as executive producers, as will Tom Hanks.

Lots of film news these days. Although Meryl’s appearance as Tolstoy’s wife in “The Last Station” is not officially confirmed yet, Variety has reported on February 8 that “The Last Station” has completed its financing with a $1 million award this week from German funding org FFA. The pic is now set to shoot in Germany sometime this year, pending confirmation of dates by Hopkins and Streep. The pic is based on Jay Parini’s book about the aging Tolstoy’s dilemma whether to bequeath his wealth to his beloved family, or to donate it to projects for the public good. The full article can be read here.