Broadway Friday

- The fourth annual ABC Daytime Salutes Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS benefit will take place Sunday, March 2nd at Town Hall. All My Children star and Dancing With The Stars contestant Cameron Mathison will host. A large cast of soap stars will participate with special appearances by Barbara Walters, Whoopi Goldberg and Elisabeth Hasselbeck. Get tickets here.

- The cast recording of the Tony-winning musical Jersey Boys has been certified gold.

- 60's comedy classic Boeing, Boeing will open on Broadway this spring at the Longacre Theatre. The cast includes Christine Baranski, Mark Rylance and Bradley Whitford. Previews begin April 19th. Matthew Warchus will direct.

- Tony winner Sutton Foster will star as Fiona in the Broadway version of Shrek, set to open December 14th. Foster currently stars as Inga in Young Frankenstein. Christopher Sieber, a member of the original cast of Monty Python's Spamalot, will play the evil Lord Farquaad and Kecia Lewis-Evans will play the Dragon. Casting for Shrek and Donkey has not been announced. An out-of-town tryout of Shrek begins in Seattle in August.

- An Off-Broadway take on the City Center's Encore! series will begin next fall in the East Village and will be staged in a no-set, concert style. The first two Off-Broadway shows to be covered will be Promenade and Iphigenia in Concert.

- Saying "We don't laugh at sad people," the director of Spamalot has changed a line of the Diva's Lament number that poked fun at Britney Spears. The new target: Posh Spice. The request for the change came from director Mike Nichols. The line has now been changed in the Broadway and road productions of the show.

- David Groh, who gained fame as Joe on the sitcom Rhoda and later appeared on Broadway in Neil Simon's Chapter Two and in Twilight of the Golds, died of kidney cancer on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 68. As I recall, every time David Groh was in the scene your humble narrator became quite tingley.