Category: Events

  • By 7:05 PM, just when a “Fountain of Color” explosion event was planned to surprise guests at the cocktail hour and art viewing at LongHouse Reserve’s gala on Saturday, organizers had to announce instead that because of extremely dry weather conditions, Cai Guo-Qaing’s artistic contribution would not occur. Of course the irony was not missed:…

  • Russell Simmons’ Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation Art for Life Benefit is always a great night, but this year’s benefit, “Midnight at the Oasis,” at Fairview Farms in Bridgehampton, was special thanks to a performance by Cynthia Erivo. Much beloved for her Tony awarded turn as Celie in last year’s revival of The Color Purple, Erivo…

  • Bring back the bustier! Fine lingerie takes center stage at Bay Street Theater where women (and a man) strip down to skivvies for the fine production of Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel. Kelly McCreary, from Season 10 of television’s “Grey’s Anatomy” stars as Esther Mills, and she is lovely, durable, and stoic, her character evoking a…

  • Director Brian Knappenberger brought his documentary, Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press to the Hamptons International Film Festival’s Summerdocs series this weekend at Guild Hall. A provocative look at the First Amendment and what its protections may or may not have wrought, the provocative movie in three acts, now on Netflix, opens with Hulk…

  • Errol Morris’ new film, The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography, is his most intimate yet. Usually working with out-sized personalities, McNamara to Rumsfeld, the murderous gasman of Zyklon B, to point at a few of his subjects, documentarian Errol Morris has the further distinction with his 1985 The Thin Blue Line, of having changed the…

  • Sophie B. Hawkins is the real deal: she composes her own songs and sings her heart out. At Café Carlyle, she channels Janis Joplin, whipping her mane around for a medley of “Ball & Chain /Piece of my Heart,” and goes nasal for Bob Dylan’s “I Want You.” Promising only one cover, she performs George…

  • Comedy is rich, relevant, and raunchy at the Nantucket Film Festival. It helps that Ben Stiller is on hand for hosting awards nights, and for the annual comedy roundtable. Never mind that, as Mike Birbiglia aptly pointed out, there is no round table. On Saturday night, the ‘Sconset Casino was the site for stand-up with…

  • Al Gore’s follow up to the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, brings climate change up to the present moment, or at least up to events before President Trump’s pull out of the Paris Accord. Under the fine filmmaking of a team, Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk, the documentary goes beyond…

  • Nick Broomfield will receive the Special Achievement in Documentary Filmmaking Award at this year’s Nantucket Film Festival. The festival will also honor Tom McCarthy with a Screenwriters Tribute Award and David Crane and Jeffrey Klarik for Impact in Television Writing. As a documentarian, Broomfield is known for putting himself in his films. While some of…

  • At a grand exhibition at Guild Hall of Taryn Simon’s photography, a man of color looks out from his seat at a bar. The site could be the iconic American working class watering hole in Lynn Nottage’s Sweat on Broadway, with Christmas lights dangling down. But it is the American Legion Post 310 in San…

  • Not since the late Joan Rivers have we had a comedienne so adept at putting herself down as Amy Schumer. Introducing her makeup artist, Kyra Panchenko, at the recent Designing Women Awards Ceremony held at NYU’s law library, the Trainwreck star was convinced she was not Panchenko’s first choice, given that she also made up…

  • Celebrating the 50-year anniversary of the Monterey Pop International Festival, D. A. Pennebaker’s newly restored film premiered on Wednesday at the IFC Center in New York, with further festivities to follow in Monterey this week. The film is now part of the prestigious Criterion Collection. According to the recent Clive Davis documentary, The Soundtrack of…

  • Based on a children’s book by Jules Feiffer, the musical “The Man in the Ceiling,” premiering at Bay Street Theater, celebrates creativity, and more specifically the art of cartooning. From the perspective of Jimmy, a kid whose father only wants him to play ball like the other kids, this is also a story about following…

  • That Bette Midler would not sing at the Tony Awards made news in the week running up to the Tony Awards. As disappointing as that announcement was, it did not stop the hope that she might change her plan—maybe, we hoped–once the huge crowd filing into Radio City Music Hall on Sunday night saw the…

  • Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke give stunning performances in the movie Maudie, a fictionalized account of the life of artist Maud Lewis. True eccentrics, Maud and Hawke’s Everett forge an unlikely coupling when he, the local fish peddler in Nova Scotia, advertises for a housekeeper and Maud, arthritic, limps over. She’s escaping her family: a rigid…

  • In an exceptional Broadway season, the anticipation for Sunday’s Tony Awards is palpable. This week, the Broadway League and American Theater Wing hosted a swank cocktail party at the Sofitel Hotel. So packed was a second floor banquet hall, waiters could not move their trays through the crush of Broadway elite: former Tony winners, current…

  • If Friends’ Chandler Bing had evolved into a martini guzzler he might resemble Jack, a character invented by Matthew Perry for his play The End of Longing, now in a snappy MCC production at the Lucille Lortel Theater directed by Lindsay Posner. From the start, at a L.A. restaurant where Jack tries to pick up…

  • Florine Stettheimer had a charmed life, to judge from the expansive, colorful, and grand exhibition at the Jewish Museum. An artist born to wealth, she painted her milieu: “Spring Sale at Bendel’s,” “Asbury Park South,” parades, parties, picnics, groups together enjoying life, and portraits like the one of Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Selavy, or her…

  • Few sights are as chilling as the ghost of Hamlet, Sr. in silhouette moving slowly through the arabesque in Waterwell’s excellent production of Hamlet at the Sheen Center for Thought & Culture. Wearing a tall hat befitting an Arab prince, this figure has presence and authority, a Hyperion among satyrs, to riff on his son’s…

  • Among the many joys of this year’s New York Public Library Spring Dinner held in the Celeste Bartos Auditorium of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, the spacious hall where Salman Rushdie, while still in hiding, gave a reading and talk, and where French intellectual Bernard Henri Levy beseeched some brave woman to have sex with…

  • Touring with her father Tony Bennett since she was a little girl, Antonia Bennett learned a thing or two about performing. For her impressive debut at the Café Carlyle, she sings classics from the American songbook backed by a first rate jazz band, with Spike Wilner on piano, especially good on a jazzy “Tea for…

  • As noted in the past: It is a truth widely held, that ladies who lunch are wont to shop. And so a fashion show to benefit the Samuel Waxman Cancer Research Foundation has become an annual luncheon event. The options for lavish spending were displayed at Andrea Stark’s penthouse apartment last Wednesday, featuring models wearing…

  • A young woman greeted me on the first day of class, looking at me hard to see if I could place her. Indeed, I had seen her before, in another class two years prior, as a young man. Not only do I remember you, but I remember your writing, I said, happy to have this…

  • Gypsy Rose Blanchard is now serving a ten-year sentence in prison for conspiring to kill her mother Dee Dee, knifed to death in June 2015 in Springfield, Mo. by Nicholas Godejohn, a boyfriend Gypsy met on the Internet. He will be tried this week, while Gypsy seems twice imprisoned. As Erin Lee Carr’s documentary, Mommy…

  • Honoring Robert De Niro at this year’s Chaplin Award Celebration at the Film Society of Lincoln Center on Monday, actor after actor acknowledged that he could do anything, referring to drama, comedy, and other film genres. Could Robert De Niro top an already amazing career? By Thursday, another brilliant performance premiered at MoMA: As Bernie…