Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake might take the stage together Thursday night (November 6) in Los Angeles, and the world owes it all to Madonna, reports E! Online.
"They are going to be onstage performing with Madonna," E! News' Ryan Seacrest said on KIIS-FM host BoyToy Jesse's Wednesday afternoon show. The Material Girl will be at Dodger Stadium for the latest stop on her Sticky & Sweet Tour, and if Seacrest has his facts right, Timberlake and Spears will be by her side.
"If Justin and Britney end up on that stage with her ... I don't know if I've ever seen anything quite like that before," he said. "Expect some real serious surprises." He added that he might have more details on Thursday before the anticipated collaboration would reportedly go down.
In related news, TMZ reports that on Wednesday afternoon, the roof of the stage where the trio will reportedly perform began to lean. Dodger Stadium sources told the Web site that the stage will be repaired for Thursday's show.
Spears, Timberlake and Madonna have all collaborated with one another, but never as a trio. Timberlake and Madonna have spent a lot of time together this year: Timberlake worked on a number of tracks for her Hard Candy album, made a special appearance at her "secret" NYC club show and introduced the legendary pop star when she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in March.
Madonna appeared on Spears' "Me Against the Music" in 2003, and famously kissed the younger singer (and Christina Aguilera) during a Video Music Awards performance that year.
And, of course, Timberlake and Spears dated each other in the late '90s, after meeting on "The New Mickey Mouse Club" as teenagers. He helped produce her track "What It's Like to Be Me" before the couple broke up in 2002. "I haven't spoken to her in years," he told Oprah Winfrey in 2007. "I mean, there's no ill will — I have nothing but love for her.
Madonna and filmmaker Guy Ritchie are to end their marriage after nearly eight years, British newspapers reported Wednesday.
Citing unnamed sources, The Sun and Daily Mail said the couple hoped to have a divorce finalized by Christmas. The Sun said that Madonna, 50, had wanted to wait until her latest world tour wraps up in Brazil in December before announcing the split.
The singer will perform concerts Wednesday and Thursday in Boston as her "Sticky and Sweet" tour continues.
Barbara Charone, Madonna's spokeswoman in London, declined comment on the reports. Ritchie's mother, Lady Amber Leighton, told reporters the family wouldn't be making any statement to the media.
This is the second time this year that the superstar couple's marriage has come under the media microscope. Over the summer, Madonna was linked — unfairly, she said — to the breakup of New York Yankee Alex Rodriguez and his ex-wife Cynthia.
In July, Madonna's U.S. publicist released a statement that said the singer and Ritchie had "no plans to divorce."
Madonna and Ritchie married in December 2000 at a Scottish castle. The couple have two children: Rocco, 8, and David Banda, 3, who was adopted from Malawi in 2006. Madonna also has a 12-year-old daughter, Lourdes, from her relationship with personal trainer Carlos Leon.
The couple are reportedly worth some $525 million, the bulk of that belonging to Madonna. Ritchie has an estimated $35 million fortune. They own homes in London, Los Angeles and New York, and a 1,200-acre retreat in Wiltshire, England.
Alan Kaufman, head of family law for London firm Finers Stephens Innocent, said he would be surprised if Madonna and Ritchie hadn't come to some arrangement before they were married.
Kaufman, who isn't involved in the case, also said he doesn't expect the case to end up in court because the couple would likely prefer to come to a private agreement both custodially and financially.
"They both had substantial assets and don't really need any money from each other," Kaufman said.
"This is not like the McCartney divorce," he said, referring to the acrimonious split between former Beatle Paul McCartney and Heather Mills earlier this year.
“Tick-tock, tick-tock,” sang Madonna’s backup singers as video screens and subwoofers blasted to life at the Izod Center. Time obsesses Madonna on her Sticky and Sweet Tour, which made its first American stop here on Saturday night.
Time means beat and rhythm, and it means the pop history encapsulated in the hits she has been making since 1982. It also means the aging that Madonna defies with workouts, image makeovers and what looks like plastic surgery. A 50-year-old working mother, Madonna can no longer be seen as a clubland ingenue, a Hollywood glamour queen, an iconoclast rejecting a Catholic upbringing or a kinky provocateuse, and she won’t be any kind of dowager yet. Time has brought out her core: careerist ambition and a combative tenacity.
Has there ever been a colder pop sex symbol? For all the invitations in her lyrics, Madonna has always projected more calculation and industriousness than affection. She works; her audience looks and pays, becoming another conquest.
“I can keep on going through the night,” she insisted in “Heartbeat” from her latest album, “Hard Candy” (Warner Brothers), which provided nearly half of the concert’s songs. That was the point: There she was, 50 be damned, spreading her legs, strutting, pushing her dancers around, even doing double-dutch jump rope steps without a tangle.
Madonna built her career on her assets — her ear for hooks and beats, her looks, a predictive fashion sense and an instinct for pushing cultural hot buttons — and the Sticky and Sweet show insists, even demands, that they still have their effect.
She pumps up the volume, piles on the beat and mixes the unstoppable and the baffling, the thrilling and the ridiculous. The set had four thematic sections: the present-day dance floor, the old school, the big wide world, and political and spiritual aspirations (via the dance floor). For thumping electro songs from “Hard Candy,” she had the album’s hip-hop guests — Kanye West, Pharrell Williams, Timbaland — performing on towering video screens, sharing the proudly mercantile sentiments of songs like “Candy Shop.”
The old-school section, with a backdrop of animated characters invented by the artist Keith Haring, riffled through original elements of hip-hop culture — break dancing, disc-jockey scratching, double-dutch and graffiti — along with (inexplicably) some pole dancing. Since punk and hip-hop were contemporaries, Madonna also picked up an electric guitar for a enthusiastic punk-pop version of “Borderline.” Her moves were aerobic, not erotic; in one song, other dancers spotted her as if they were personal trainers.
Then came a high-fashion, geographically scrambled international romp, as dancers did flamenco, tango, Indian and Middle Eastern moves. The Spanish-language “La Isla Bonita” moved to Eastern Europe as Madonna brought out a gypsy-style band, with fiddle and accordion. It accompanied her in the one song that exposed her voice: the ballad “You Must Love Me,” with woeful sustained notes.
Madonna turned to messages: a save-the-world video that torpedoed its good intentions with overkill, juxtaposing John McCain with Hitler and Barack Obama with Gandhi. Although her outfit and a mop-with-bangs wig made her look like a bad 1970s comic-book character, Madonna was close to inspirational in an electrocharged version of “Like a Prayer,” with golden-rule religious teachings projected overhead. She followed it awkwardly, with guitar-slinging rock versions of “Ray of Light” and, returning to earthly things, “Hung Up,” with a feedback finish. She wants punk’s old rebel credibility.
“No one is ever going to stop me,” Madonna proclaimed in her finale, “Give It 2 Me.” But as the show ended, the last glimpse of Madonna was a video close-up of her sweaty, unsmiling, exhausted face. She had worked hard, and showed it.
Madonna performs on Monday, Tuesday, Saturday and Sunday at Madison Square Garden.
Madonna's tumultuous relationship with the Catholic church took yet another strange turn this weekend, when she paid homage to the Pope before performing her hit "Like a Virgin."
"I dedicate this song to the Pope, because I'm a child of God," the performer, 50, told 60,000 fans who flocked to the Italian capital for the latest stop on her Sticky & Sweet world tour, Reuters reports. "All of you are also children of God."
In 2006, Vatican officials accused the singer of putting on one of the most blasphemous displays of all time when she staged a mock crucifixion during her performance at the city's Olympic Stadium.
Madonna, who comes from a devout Italian Catholic family, has often clashed with the church over her penchant for mixing religious and sexual imagery.
The Vatican also condemned her controversial 1989 video for the song "Like A Prayer," which featured burning crosses, statues crying blood and Madonna seducing a black Jesus.
If you own a pub, you might as well drink there. That is exactly what Guy Ritchie did to celebrate his 40th birthday Wednesday night.
Ritchie, part-owner of The Punchbowl, chose it as the venue for his low-key party – a far cry from the over-the-top bash he threw for his wife Madonna's 50th b-day last month.
Still, a scrum of at least 20 paparazzi greeted Madonna and her husband of seven years when they arrived together at the traditional pub in London's posh Mayfair district.
Film director Ritchie turned and gave a thumbs-up to the photographers as they entered.
Their daughter Lourdes, 11, and son Rocco, 8, also attended the party. Meanwhile, a nanny for son David carried the Malawi-born boy (who turns 3 later this month) into the venue. Sporting Ugg boots, he wore a tartan top and matching pom-pom hat, in honor of his father's Scottish heritage.
Madonna and children left well before Ritchie – and that was a good thing.
While most British pubs close between 11 p.m. and midnight, Ritchie's party raged on until the early morning. (To prevent a licensing law infraction, the bash continued on behind closed doors in what is commonly called a "lock-in.")
The birthday boy – who's rarely seen smiling in public – headed out at 4 a.m., jumping for joy and grinning broadly at the waiting photographers.
Madonna's A-list pals had fans playing "Who's That Girl?" as they slipped into her London show on Thursday night, not long before the lights began to dim.
The singer's gym-buddy (and fellow Anglophile) Gwyneth Paltrow was all smiles as she settled in to watch the Sticky and Sweet show next to fellow actress Kate Hudson. Also sitting nearby in London's massive Wembley Stadium: Fergie and Penelope Cruz.
In fact, Madonna, 50, had so many famous friends on hand, they filled not one, but two VIP areas.
Another all-star box included Nicole Kidman, who – like Cruz, Fergie and Hudson – is in London prepping for the upcoming movie-musical Nine. During the singer's athletic, 90-minute set, the Oscar-winner laughed and joked with a girlfriend – Naomi Campbell, and "I Kissed a Girl"'s Katy Perry also made the scene.
Madonna – who had spent the previous night partying for husband Guy Ritchie's birthday – showed no signs of fatigue as she aerobicized her way through super-charged renditions of "Vogue," "Into the Groove" and her newest hit, "Give It 2 Me."
And the open-air concert went off without a hitch, despite dire weather predictions in the notoriously soggy city. "I would like to thank God, all my friends," she said as the show wound down, "because it didn't f---ing rain!"
Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake might take the stage together Thursday night (November 6) in Los Angeles, and the world owes it all to Madonna, reports E! Online. 
