Category: Events

  • For his run at the Café Carlyle this week, John Pizzarelli focuses on one of his inspirations, Nat King Cole, who would be 99. On guitar and vocals, John fronts an outstanding band of jazz musicians: Mike Karn on bass, Konrad Paszkudski on piano and “the sheriff” Andy Watson on drums for standards including “Paper…

  • At the Metropolitan Museum this week it was easy to forget that Wes Anderson’s brilliant new movie, Isle of Dogs, is animated. Oracle, a pint-sized pug, announces snow is on the way, and she was right. New York was bracing for another blizzard, its fourth of the season. That’s a tall blond woman, you think…

  • Brrr! It’s been so cold in New York, the tropical island in the new musical, Escape to Margaritaville at the Marquis Theater, is a vision of welcoming palm trees asway in a warm breeze. Who wouldn’t want to veg in Paradise, drink in hand, with hunks all around? But early on in this entertaining show…

  • Back in the day, Rose Styron, the writer and wife of William Styron, recounted the story of an American delegation of authors visiting Rio, among them her friend the playwright Arthur Miller. Local headlines focused on Miller, the husband of Marilyn Monroe. In this rich documentary of her father, Rebecca Miller addresses the matter of…

  • Hollywood can learn a thing or two from the French, its film industry and joie de vivre. Mathieu Amalric, attending this year’s Rendez-vous with French Cinema, the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s annual popular series in collaboration with Unifrance, presented his film Barbara, homage to a chanteuse, not so famous anywhere but France. Best known…

  • Maybe all theater is behavioral study, characters in a petri dish. Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo is a pair of two-handers yoked together thematically with Peter (Robert Sean Leonard) a foil for two outsized personae; in the first, Homelife, his wife Ann (Katie Finneran) baits him in one way, and in the second,…

  • “Music, champagne, dancing—wonderful things that make you forget, until you find something to remember,” Ute Lemper laughs dramatically perched on a barstool close to the Café Carlyle’s grand piano, skin showing through her skirt’s slit. She chides the audience, “Stop looking at my legs. They are not that good. I just know what to do…

  • Feminists come in all shapes and sizes. JC Lee’s Relevance, an MCC production at the Lucille Lortel Theater, presents a clash between a seasoned author and old school academic, Theresa (the formidable Jayne Houdyshell), and a freshly minted writer Mesmaji (Pascale Armand), given to texts, tweets, and social media. Age and looks aside, these two…

  • Dedicated to celebrating courageous and audacious women leaders, the Athena Film Festival captures the Zeitgeist. Under the auspices of Barnard College, Athena honored J. J. Abrams, presenting him an Athena Leading Man award, among its stellar women in film honorees this year, Amma Asante, Athena Breakthrough awardee Bridget Everett, and Barbara Kopple its Laura Ziskin…

  • Now that’s a Broadway musical! One breathtaking moment in Hello, Dolly is Dolly, professional meddler, glamorous in red descending the stairs. As in the grand tradition of Dolly Levi before her, Bernadette Peters takes her turn in the superb revival of Hello, Dolly at the Schubert Theater, replacing the much-adored Bette Midler. At a recent…

  • In honor of Yoko Ono’s birthday this weekend, Laurie Anderson led guests at Guild Hall in a face-reddening scream. The occasion was a talk between Anderson, who now looks remarkably like Christopher Walken with spiky hair and otherworldly pallor, and curator Christina Strassfield, who is putting together a show of Anderson’s work at Guild Hall…

  • A Valentine’s Day tradition at the Cafe Carlyle, John Lloyd Young’s dreamy tenor conjures romance better than a box of chocolates. Some men just don’t get old: Dark glasses cannot hide John Lloyd Young’s dimple-chinned prom date good looks, but then again, his music does not age either. As he says about “Sherry” from Bob Crewe…

  • The McKittrick Hotel is well known for unusual theatrical events—cue the long-running immersive Sleep No More. Now fresh from Edinburgh’s International Arts Festival comes Flight, a much-awarded incomparable narrative art installation. Plucked from the headlines of refugees fleeing war, Flight tells the story of two brothers on a journey escaping Afghanistan, adapted by playwright Oliver…

  • AAt the Majestic Theater last week, Renee Zellweger called her Blondie and Tommy Tune sang “The Way You Look Tonight” with pictures of him dancing the “East Texas Push” with her, but that was not the showstopper at Liz Smith’s memorial: The distinction went to a video of Liz crooning “I’m an Old Cowhand, from the…

  • At an opening at the Morgan Library & Museum celebrating exhibitions of Peter Hujar’s photographs and Tennessee Williams’ memorabilia, a gentleman in a maroon jacket marveled that the Morgan, known for collections of old master drawings and manuscripts would now show photography, especially of the type created by Hujar. While Williams’ scripts and Playbills form…

  • When the category of Best Picture swells to nine, you can be sure that your favorites will be covered. Throughout “the season,” prognosticators haggled –with one another and themselves– over the supremacy of The Shape of Water over Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, Lady Bird over Get Out, Dunkirk over The Darkest Hour. An excellent…

  • Amidst the racks of multi-colored Missonis on Saks 4th floor, Shiva Rose led a meditation, a prelude to a panel featuring Naomi Watts, cover girl on the winter issue of Purist, the wellness themed brainchild of Cristina Cuomo. Just sitting with eyes closed, to a guided breathing contrasted with the commerce, bright lights and bustle of the store. And…

  • Okay, Michael Moore is not Jewish, but he’s a menschy guy who cannot abide injustice. Co-hosting—with Fran Leibowitz— a post-screening party for Netflix’s documentary, One of Us, this week at the Waverly Inn, the Oscar winning documentarian and recent Broadway star could not restrain his indignation at the plight of Etty, an Orthodox Jewish woman…

  • Whenever I see Lee and Bob Woodruff, I know the event is going to be serious, and I’m going to laugh. At Variety’s inaugural Salute to Service luncheon this week at Cipriani on Broadway, the brainchild of Gerry Byrne, vice chair of Penske Media and a Vietnam War veteran, Bob Woodruff got up to introduce…

  • Weighing in at a cool four hours, Amir Bar-Lev’s epic documentary Long Strange Trip records the artistic journey of an American band over decades of cultural change, but it also illuminates the personality of a kind of American hero only America could produce. The band itself, The Grateful Dead, were sloppy and spontaneous, or blissful…

  • The evening was not unusual. Just a screening of a documentary, Icarus, for a roomful of leading documentarians: Academy Award winning ones like Alex Gibney and Barbara Kopple among many others, for purposes of Oscar nominations. The unusual part was having Lance Armstrong participate in the post-screening panel at 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge. The movie,…

  • No one had to complain about anyone’s misconduct, not sexual anyway, at last night’s New York Film Critics Circle Awards dinner at Tao in the meatpacking. Every honoree, including the great Molly Haskell who picked up the group’s Special Career Achievement Award for her lifetime of serious reviewing, actresses Saoirse Ronan and Tiffany Haddish, and…

  • Do you believe in magic? The first thing magicienne Belinda Sinclair tells you at her Hell’s Kitchen salon where she conjures, misdirects, fans cards and sets fires in her highly entertaining magic show, is that she cheats. Believe her. Even as your eyeballs are a few feet away, she’s able to find your card in…

  • A dressmaker’s model can be erotic, or comic. Just look at the women who wear the extravagant frocks designed by Reynolds Woodcock as played to austere perfection by Daniel Day-Lewis in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Phantom Thread. You have Barbara Rose, a wealthy rotund patron with the great Harriet Harris in the role, and you…

  • The Lucille Lortel Theater has been sold out for weeks, ever since the MCC production of School Girls; or, The African Mean Girls Play arrived with its stellar cast of young women. Set in 1986 Ghana, Jocelyn Bioh’s play can be seen as an African variation of Tina Fey’s Mean Girls, with the action unfolding…