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• 'Into the WildÂ’ leads SAG nominations with 4 nods
  LOS ANGELES — The road-trip drama “Into the Wild” received a leading four Screen Actors Guild Awards nominations Thursday, including honors for lead actor Emile Hirsch and supporting players Hal Holbrook and Catherine Keener.Directed by Sean Penn, “Into the Wild” also was nominated for performance by its overall cast, along with the Western “3:10 to Yuma,” the crime sagas “American Gangster” and “No Country for Old Men,” and the musical “Hairspray.”Conspicuously absent from the guild field was the British romantic melodrama “Atonement,” which was shut out after leading the Golden Globe nominations a week earlier with seven nominations.Hirsch was nominated as best actor for his role as fierce idealist Christopher McCandless, a recent college graduate who abandoned a cozy life and took to the road for two years, coming to a tragic end in the Alaska wilderness in the 1990s.Other best-actor nominees were George Clooney as a conscience-stricken attorney in “Michael Clayton,” Daniel Day-Lewis as an oil baron in “There Will Be Blood,” Ryan Gosling as a social misfit with a life-size doll for a girlfriend in “Lars and the Real Girl” and Viggo Mortensen as a Russian mobster in “Eastern Promises.”
• REVIEW: Ingalls family, ChildrenÂ’s Theatre offer true Christmas cheer
  For a respite from the holiday sales and the yearly bombardment of television commercials with slogans like “Duh,” look no further than A Laura Ingalls Wilder Christmas at Lexington Children’s Theatre.A tender tale more tenderly rendered, LCT’s holiday offering is a warm, heartening celebration of the deep bonds of family that triumph in the face of material and psychological adversity.If you haven’t read The Little House on the Prairie series of children’s books, the Ingalls were a real family whose pioneer life was chronicled by second daughter Laura Ingalls Wilder. (Later, the books inspired the long-running TV show Little House on the Prairie.)Playwright Laurie Brooks stays true to the spirit of Wilder’s work, crafting a story that deftly weaves humor, sadness and the triumph of a family’s love in the face of chores, bullies, measles and even death.A pioneer family slowly forging its way west in 1876 Iowa, the Ingallses include Ma, Pa and their three daughters: Mary, Laura and Carrie.
• Kanye West, Amy Winehouse lead Grammy nominations
  LOS ANGELES — Whether he wins or loses on Grammy night, the chances of more Kanye West awards show drama were high after he received a leading eight nominations Thursday.The British singer Amy Winehouse received six nominations after months of personal problems that took the focus off her gritty, soulful music. Other top nominees included the Foo Fighters, Jay-Z, Rihanna, Paul McCartney, T-Pain and Timbaland.Central Kentuckians nominated for awards include Nicholasville resident J. D. Crowe and his band, the New South, for Lefty's Old Guitar, nominated for Best Bluegrass Album.Both West and Winehouse were nominated for album of the year for their CDs “Graduation” and “Back to Black,” respectively. Winehouse was also cited for best new artist, plus record and song of the year for the defiant hit “Rehab.”Other record of the year candidates included Beyonce’s “Irreplaceable,” the Foo Fighter’s “The Pretender,” Rihanna’s “Umbrella” and “What Goes Around Comes Around” by Justin Timberlake.
• Paducah man makes jump from YouTube to TV
  William Sledd, the Gap employee from Paducah known for his phenomenally popular Ask a Gay Man online fashion-advice series on YouTube and www.OutZoneTV.com, is taking his Internet celebrity to the small screen.The Bravo network has green-lighted a new reality series starring Sledd, the network announced this week. The title of the show will take its name from Sledd’s less-than-family-friendly signature greeting: Hey B----es! (Hint: It rhymes with witches.)According to Bravo, “The pilot will follow Sledd as he contemplates making the leap from his hometown of Paducah to the world of high fashion in New York. If you’ve ever watched one of William’s videos, you know that he can dish it out, but the question is, can he take it?”No date has been set for the show’s premiere.Sledd, 24, first garnered attention last year when one of his YouTube videos, called Ask a Gay Man: Denim Edition, got 2 million hits. Since then, he has attracted fans including Broadway star Christine Ebersole, who filmed an episode of Ask a Gay Man with Sledd in his Paducah bedroom, where most of his videos are set.
• Studio players''Cuckoo': fresh, edgy, nuanced
  Opening nights are always special, but the opening night of Studio Players’ One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was particularly special, namely because two of its author’s friends and contemporaries, Ed McClanahan and Gurney Norman, were sitting in the audience. After the show, the pair swapped insights and anecdotes about their pal, Ken Kesey, whose seminal novel forms the basis for Dale Wasserman’s stage adaptation.McClanahan shared the fact that Kesey had actually seen two productions of the play — one by a group of high school students in Sacramento, Calif., and a later one starring Gary Sinise on Broadway. Backstage after the Broadway performance, Kesey told Sinise that the Broadway production was OK, but the high school production was better. This goes to show that star power, venue and funding do not guarantee a show’s superior merit.If Kesey (who died in 2001) had been sitting with his old writing buddies in the opening night audience, I can’t help but think he would’ve been equally impressed by another small production in a small theater far from the bright lights of New York City.
• THEATER REVIEW: LCTÂ’s mountain ghost story ‘FryeÂ’ is delight
  Most good ghosts stories inspire a kind of gleeful fear. Stories from beyond the grave can give us a thrilling chill of excitement, like teetering on the edge of a steep roller-coaster hill.Lexington Children’s Theatre’s latest production, Old Dry Frye, is an Appalachian ghost story of the opposite variety. All of its fun lies in its non-scariness — the blatant, absurd and unlikely hilarity of a dead preacher who loves fried chicken so much it nearly kills him.Actually, it does kill him. But being dead doesn’t stop him from haunting the folks of Troublesome Creek who fail to set an extra place for him at the Sunday table, even after his passing. A fried-chicken connoisseur otherwise known as Preacher Man, Old Dry Frye (James Hamblin) loves nothing more than good home cooking. He spends most of his non-ghostly life haunting the local dinner tables, where he strikes not the fear of God into his flock but the fear of his insatiable appetite. Set in Eastern Kentucky, the play relies on the interconnectedness of wildly colorful characters and events to trace Old Dry Frye’s path from a real-life Preacher Man to a ghost with an appetite that the afterlife cannot satisfy on its own.
• ‘HamletÂ’ is technical tour de force for AGL
  More than two decades after its inception in a restaurant basement, Actors Guild of Lexington has brought one of the most famous plays of all time to the Downtown Arts Center.Since revising its mission statement to include all genres of plays, not just contemporary works, AGL is putting a firmly contemporary stamp on Shakespeare’s classic Hamlet by partnering with Cyburbia Productions, a multimedia performance studio based in Fairfax, Va., that specializes in creating a synthesis of cinema, theater and music. The effect of this marriage is not only a stimulating, more engaging theater-going experience, it is just plain cool. Sometimes it feels like you are personally inside a living movie — one that is dark without being Goth, modern but not dated, sprawling in theme and technical wizardry yet intimate in delivery. A politically provocative thriller, this production of Hamlet centers on one man’s disturbing descent into what could be rampant paranoia, or more disturbing still, a revelation of truths so chilling none but him will face their implications.As a prince of Denmark mourning the death of his father, the king, and his mother’s swift marriage to his uncle (the dead king’s brother), Hamlet is already in a deep “distemper” before the arrival of his father’s ghost. Eerily appearing on a series of surveillance video screens, Hamlet’s father’s distorted image and haunted, raspy voice reveal that his death was no accident, but a murderous plot by his usurping brother (and current king) Claudius. If Hamlet needs a reason to come unhinged, here it is. And thus the play unfolds.Director Richard St. Peter’s gutsy move to set this classical play “anytime, anywhere” pays off, largely due to the cohesion of a keenly devised vision and its refreshingly innovative, well-executed presentation. Woe to the viewers of a classical play that has been recklessly “updated” with imaginative but irrelevant twists. Most thankfully, this is not the case with this production.
• THEATER REVIEW: ChildrenÂ’s Theatr