PEARCE BUNTING, who played the bootlegger Bill McCoy in the hit HBO series "Boardwalk Empire," with Steve Buscemi, has returned to his hometown of Philadelphia to step into a new role.
Edward Albee's 1962 play "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" premieres Wednesday night at the Plays & Players Theatre (1714 Delancey Place), in Rittenhouse Square. Bunting portrays the passive-aggressive George, who gradually loses his patience with his taunting, drunk wife, Martha, after she brings home a younger, married couple who - over the course of several hours of drinking - become enmeshed in George and Martha's domestic disputes.
"I'm at this lucid point now where I'm diving deeper and deeper into the play," Bunting told me Tuesday after a tour of the century-old Plays & Players.
"I have these real strong memories from the early '60s - the old television set in my parents' bedroom - a simpler time when my parents' life revolved around the bar at our house. It was always cocktail hour and their friends came over and everybody smoked and things were not politically correct."
Bunting said he remembers that his grandfather used to act at the same Plays & Players venue in the 1920s. "It's a wild ride we take in this play," he tells me.
His majestic morning of music
In his sophomore year of college at Penn, Mayor Nutter turned heads (and tables) as a DJ at the now-defunct Club Impulse, in town. Today, he will announce something that his people are calling "historic," "revolutionary" and a "major musical milestone." The "spectacular sensory" event takes place at 10:30 a.m. at Frankford Avenue near Delaware in Fishtown. We're dying to hear what this all could mean, but could our own Mix Master Mike (Nutter) be spinning the wheels of steel again as part of the showing?
Additionally, the newly sleek and slimmed-down District Attorney Seth Williams donated $2,500 to the ALS Association Greater Philadelphia Chapter yesterday. Williams shed a whopping 55 pounds as part of a weight-loss challenge he embarked upon in September to help raise money to fight amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease.
Onetime White House hopeful likes Hebrew
Howard Dean, 2004 presidential wannabe, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee and ex-governor of Vermont, had dinner Monday night at Zahav (237 St. James Place), my restaurant spies tell me.
Dean downed Zahav's delicious Mesibah menu, which consists of hummus and wood-oven-fired pita bread, a variety of vegetable salatim (Turkish red-pepper salad) and pomegranate-braised lamb.
We're not sure just whom he dined with, but pretty sure he didn't cause a scene this time with his infamous "Dean Scream."
Out of sight, out of mind
"It's not the man I know," Keshia Knight Pulliam, a/k/a Rudy Huxtable from "The Cosby Show," told me this week when she uncomfortably answered a question about Bill Cosby and the sexual allegations more than 30 women have lodged against him.
"I wasn't there, so how can you expect me to have a judgment on a situation? I can't speak to that. That's not any interaction I've ever had with him," she told me.
Pulliam makes her Wizard World Comic Con debut next month.
On Twitter: @PhillyGossipDN
Online: ph.ly/DNGossip