From People News:
Madonna has announced that she is to make her West End stage debut playing an art dealer in a comedy called Up for Grabs, which will open on 23 May at the Wyndham's Theatre.
The play, a satire on the art world, was written by one of Australia's leading playwrights, David Williamson, and broke box office records when it opened in Sydney last year.
It is about an art dealer and the way she attempts to manipulate her friends when a highly covetable painting comes on the market. The subject is close to Madonna's heart – she is known to be a keen collector of modern art.
The play will have a cast of seven and is to be directed by Laurence Boswell, who also directed Ben Elton's Popcorn. Madonna last trod the boards in 1988, when she appeared in David Mamet's Speed the Plow on broadway.
According to her publicist, Madonna is looking for a fresh challenge but is keen to stay in London. She and her husband Guy Ritchie have a young son, Rocco, and have spent most of the past six months in Malta, filming Ritchie's latest film project called Love, Sex, Drugs and Money.

Tickets are available online for UK and International customers at Ticketmaster.

The March 2002 issue of Q Magazine has article entitled The 10 Tours That Changed Music.
Madonna's Blond Ambition Tour is included under the bylines Madonna Has Sex On Stage and Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret.
The article by Lucy O'brien goes on to descibe how with the Blond Ambition tour Madonna raised the ante for live pop performance - and became the world's best-known naked female body.
To see the photographs which appear in the article, go to the gallery.

To see more about Q Magazine go to www.q4music.com

LittleStar - The Madonna Site has managed to obtain some photographs from inside the Mario Testino Portrait exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London.
This is so that everyone who cannot attend the exhibition can see how the photographs of Madonna are laid out (and how large they are).

Click here to see more pictures and a floorplan.

LittleStar now has 35 brand new avatars from Truth or Dare - In Bed with Madonna.

You'll find the Truth or Dare Avatars here.

This week Madonna has been staying at her home in New York.
While she was staying in New York Madonna and Guy Oseary attended the Michelle branch (another Maverick Artist) concert at the Irving Plaza.

Photograph from John at Madonnarama.

The stylist for the Pop Magazine shoot has spoken about working with Madonna.

From the Evening Standard:
Katie Grand, the 30-year-old stylist and editor of Pop magazine - the biannual fashion fanzine - had serious reservations about styling the Madonna shoot. Although the material girl perfectly embodies the Icon theme of Pop's latest issue, Grand had had a bad experience before working with two other well-known female singers. 'My most miserable moments were styling All Saints," she says. "They were so rude and horrible they put me off music people completely.
I expected Madonna to be difficult. You know, huge entourage, a lot of attitude and very demanding. In fact, I was dreading the shoot for weeks ahead. I'd been a fan for 17 years and couldn't bear discovering that she couldn't live up to what I wanted her to be. On the morning of the shoot, if I could have got somebody else to do it, I would have.'
As it was, Madonna surprised her. She arrived on time - even though the singer later jokingly described the studio location as 'some shit-hole that took forever to get to'. She brought only one assistant. She was amenable to all suggestions made by Grand and the photographers Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott. But she took an active role in decision-making.
'She was professional and very conscious of her image. She wanted the pictures to be cool, strong and hip and she knew when the photographers had caught her. She would just say, 'OK, we've got that one', and then move on. It was very familiar and relaxed and we worked together for seven hours. It was a great experience and, at the end of the day, we all walked away feeling happy,' says Grand, who says the two are now friends.
One of her close friends is Stella McCartney. And it was with her that Grand decided to produce the Icon edition of Pop, focusing on Stella's personal icons such as Charlotte Rampling, Sam Taylor Wood, Chrissie Hynde - and, inevitably, Madonna who, with pictures like these, looks set to hold onto her iconic image for some time.

The Andreas Gursky photograph which was unveiled at the Pompidou Centre in Paris last week has finally been published in the press.

The photograph was in the UK newspaper The Independent on Sunday.

LittleStar - The Madonna Site has managed to get hold of a copy of Pop magazine before the official publishing date.
The photographs are included as part of an interview with Stella McCartney about her icons.
Here is the text that appears beside Madonna's photographs:

Mother, Artist, Rebel, Friend, Survivor, Sex Goddess....Icon
MRS RITCHIE
Occupation: Whatever
Location: Some shithole that took forever to get to
Who's your icon?: What's an icon?
What are you wearing?: Some rope

     

A brand new photograph of Madonna will feature on the cover of Pop Magazine.

This advert was published in The Face magazine (March 2002 issue). Pop magazine is on sale in the UK on 18 February.

The photographers for this shoot were Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, and was shot in Highgate Studios early in January.

In the National Enquirer (19 February 2002 issue), the usually scathing Mr Blackwell actually approved of something Madonna wore.

The outfit in question was the one she wore to watch the Versace Fashion show in Paris on 19 January 2002.

Here's what he had to say:
Madonna doesn't exactly look Like a Virgin, but her snow-white filigree sweater is pure perfection and it softens her funky wide-leg pants.

From heat magazine:
Madonna's childhood toys and paintings were snapped up in just 12 minutes at a recent American auction.
A bright red toy truck that the singer used to play with as a toddler, Madonna's own drawing of her Dad and Stepmother and a portrait of the Material Girl by a family friend were all sold in the auction in Ohio.
Madonna's childhood belongings were sold along with the house that was her home from the age of 12 until she went off to the University of Michigan.
The toys were sold in order to lure Madonna fans into bidding for the property which eventually sold for $1331,000.

From heat magazine:
Uh-oh. It looks as though Madge and Dido have both been shopping at Versace.
We'd put it down to coincidence if it wasn't for the fact that we've noticed a few other similarities between them recently.
Both are known by their first names only, Dido's hairdresser seems to have taken some inspiration from Her Madgesty's cut and Dido has recently developed a keen interest in public jogging.
What next? Dido donning a conical bra?

The National Portrait Gallery in London has produced a book to coincide with the Mario Testino exhibition.

Mario Testino gives this introduction to the section of the book devoted to Madonna:

In 1995 Gianni Versace asked Madonna to appear in a series of portraits wearing his winter couture collection. Madonna was the first major star to specify Testino as her photographer of choice and this was to be the first set of his fashion photographs to cross the frontier into portraiture of an established icon.
Known as an artist who constantly re-invents herself the Madonna commission proved to be a new kind of challenge. 'I could not just walk in and tell her what I wanted to do. She had always controlled her own image. But I thought that if she had asked for me she wanted my way of seeing her. This gave me the confidence to convince her that she should appear very naturally. I had got to the point in my work where I could only really like a photograph of someone if I could feel that the image had an intense reality; that you actually sense the real life of the person.
The first time I met Madonna I was struck by how beautiful she was in herself, not relying on the theatricality of her stage persona. It has been the longest collaboration that I have had with an artist of her standing. I was told that it would change my life to photograph Madonna. I did not realise to what extent'.
Versace headlined the pictures. Versace presents Madonna by Testino. Until that point Testino's work had only been recognised within the fashion world. The Madonna pictures changed that overnight.

All the photographs featured in the book can be seen in the Gallery.