newsmakers

April 7, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

newsmakers

Domingo opens Manhattan restaurant

NEW YORK

Placido Domingo is back — ready to sing around the world. But first, on Monday, the star tenor opened his new Manhattan restaurant — four weeks after colon-cancer surgery.

“I was lucky to have the pain,” said the 69-year-old Spaniard, who was forced to interrupt a busy international schedule after a tour in Japan, where he experienced severe pain in the abdominal area.

Fortuitous symptoms spurred him to fly to New York, where his primary physician at Mount Sinai Medical Center, Dr. Valentin Fuster, delivered the diagnosis: a malignant polyp in the colon.

Houston postpones her European tour

NEW YORK

Illness has led to a brief postponement of Whitney Houston’s European tour.

The singer had been due to kick it off in Paris on Tuesday. But a statement released Monday by her representative says an upper respiratory infection is forcing Houston to bow out of that show on doctors’ orders.

California AG: Haim obtained pills illegally

LOS ANGELES

The California attorney general says Corey Haim obtained more than 550 prescription pills illegally in the three months before his death.

Jerry Brown says Haim obtained the meds, which included Valium and Soma, through seven doctors.

Brown says investigators have talked to the doctors and they appear to have been duped.

Haim died March 10 after collapsing in his mother’s apartment.

The star of 1980s films such as “The Lost Boys” and “License to Drive,” Haim struggled with drugs throughout his life.

Old Globe director dies

SAN DIEGO

Craig Noel, the founding director of the Old Globe theater in San Diego’s Balboa Park, died at his home of natural causes Saturday. He was 94. The Old Globe theater was built for an international exhibition in 1935. Noel helped the community troupe based at the temporary structure grow into an internationally known theater that staged Shakespeare plays and sent new dramatic work to Broadway.

Noel was named resident director in 1947 and made the Globe the first professional Actors’ Equity theater on the West Coast when the San Diego National Shakespeare Festival debuted in 1949.