Paltrow debut gets mixed reviews

London Oscar-winning actress Gwyneth Paltrow won praise Thursday for her first West End stage performance in the London production of “Proof,” David Auburn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play.

The 29-year-old actress “brings a hauntingly lost, 25-going-on-14 quality to the role,” wrote Paul Taylor of The Independent, who didn’t like the play.

“Though Paltrow makes an arresting impression,” he wrote, “the play patronizes the audience by running a mile from any real discussion of the eponymous discovery. … Less than the sum of its derivative parts, it is Broadway’s mistaken idea of a truly penetrating play.”

The Daily Mail’s Michael Coveney, however, called “Proof” a “riveting play about maths and madness in sandals, windcheaters and dungarees.”

Newmans put on own ‘Our Town’

Westport, Conn. Paul Newman is returning to the stage for the first time in 35 years.

The Oscar winner will star in “Our Town” next month at the Westport Country Playhouse, which is near his home.

The movie star and Westport resident was not the first choice for the lead role of stage manager in the Thornton Wilder play.

Joanne Woodward the theater’s artistic director and Newman’s wife said she didn’t think of her husband for the lead when she chose the play to open the theater’s 72nd season.

“It wouldn’t have dawned on me to ask him!” Woodward said Wednesday.

Seinfeld star takes teaching gig

Los Angeles Former “Seinfeld” co-star Jason Alexander has agreed to teach acting courses at the University of Southern California this fall.

The actor, best known as shallow George Costanza on the popular NBC sitcom, will conduct seminars in acting, scene study and musical theater, the university said this week.

Alexander, 42, joins the school as the inaugural George Burns Distinguished Visiting Professor in Performance, established through a $1 million gift from the estate of the late entertainer.

Boss opts of political career

Trenton, N.J. Bruce Springsteen, 52, decided he wasn’t born to run for political office after all.

Doug Friedline, a consultant who helped professional wrestler Jesse Ventura win the Minnesota governor’s race in 1998, had hoped to recruit Springsteen to run as an independent in November’s U.S. Senate race. The Boss would have faced off against incumbent Sen. Robert Torricelli, a Democrat, and whichever Republican emerges from the June 4 primary.

A spokeswoman for the singer said that he had no desire to seek office.