Category: Events

  • Michele Lee, of ‘80’s era soap opera Knots Landing fame, will perform Cy Coleman tunes in a tribute celebrating the composer’s birthday at 54 Below for three nights, June 11-13. A great and giving storyteller, Lee’s engagement should be a music fest, yes, but also anecdote-laden treat, with some tasty Broadway legend tidbits. The multi-talented…

  • Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, the famed memoir of the author’s time as a nurse during World War I, is now a major motion picture perfectly poised for summer. Leave it to David Heyman, the producer of the Harry Potter films, to put this book on screen. Heyman seems to specialize in coming of age…

  • You know the old joke: how do you get to Carnegie Hall? For jazz giant Nina Simone, it took more than practice. A classical piano prodigy, Simone, nee Eunice Waymon, was denied entrance to the Curtis Institute of Music, and could not be booked in clubs even after she showed she had the chops: she…

  • Even though she loves awards, Meryl Streep did not show up to introduce Ann Roth at last night’s New York Women in Film & Television’s Designing Women evening, where the legendary costume designer was being honored for lifetime achievement. At a Roth tribute at the Hamptons Film Festival in 2013, the actress who had been…

  • You can tell the play Nice Girl at the Labyrinth Theater is set in the ‘80’s because when a woman in a housedress enters the living room and flicks on the set, the television has Jane Pauley on the Today Show. Her daughter, Jo, follows, to make breakfast for her mother before going off to…

  • Whatever special kinks spice up your sex life, the particular coupling of spanking and faith in Robert Askins’ play, Permission, will having you laughing, and googling Christian Domestic Discipline (CDD) at intermission. Who knew this was a real life church sanctioned practice? In its world premiere at the Lucille Lortel Theater, under the direction of Alex…

  • This week’s opening of the American Ballet Theater’s Othello at the Metropolitan Opera House, a spectacular version of Shakespeare’s tragedy about the warrior king who succumbs to the manipulations of an ensign, and murders the love of his life, marks ABT’s commitment to newer works. As part of its 75th anniversary ABT had been showing…

  • On night two of her two-week not to be missed run, the Café Carlyle was packed with fans for Megan Hilty. Surveying the scene, Hilty spotted a girl front and center, and asked her what her favorite Broadway show was, hoping she would say Wicked. A debut for Hilty back in the day when she…

  • Now that Mad Men has reached its endpoint, with critics dissecting its meaning and import, not to mention its influence and destiny during awards season, it is time to further point out its antecedents in literature. In a penultimate episode, the viewer could contemplate Don Draper’s demise by dropping from the windows of McCann-Erickson, as…

  • Melissa Rivers was a perfect fit as honored guest at the annual Mamarazzi luncheon, hosted by The MOMS, Denise Albert and Melissa Musen Gerstein’s mother advocacy lifestyle brand. Not only one of the most famous of daughters, a mom herself, Melissa Rivers has a book out, The Book of Joan: Tales of Mirth, Mischief, and…

  • As Claire Zachanassian, the richest woman in the world Chita Rivera makes an outrageous demand in Friedrich Durrenmatt’s 1956 “The Visit.” Now a show at the Lyceum Theater, with Terrence McNally’s book, John Kander and Fred Ebb’s music, and choreography by Graciela Daniele, whether or not The Visit wins its Best Musical Tony, the show…

  • Blythe Danner is a sublime and funny actress, as we’ve seen in the Meet the Focker comedies, and decades of movies and stage plays. In I’ll See You in my Dreams, she’s the femme fatale of the geriatric set, sure to make you rethink 70. Vibrant, with it, her character Carol sings karaoke, plays golf,…

  • Playwright Mike Poulton spoke to a British contingent at the Morgan Library last week about adapting Hilary Mantel’s Man Booker prize-winning novel, Wolf Hall, for the stage. Tony-nominated Wolf Hall, parts I and II, about Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII, his wives and politics, is now wowing audiences at the Winter Garden Theater. Poulton said he…

  • MoMA’s Titus I theater looked like a gathering for New York filmmakers and artists on Monday night: Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach, Greta Gerwig, Jim Jarmusch, Laurie Anderson, Hal Willner, Gay Talese, and others, many of whom had already seen the Apu Trilogy as Satyajit Ray’s masterwork is called. They were there to see part 1, PATHER…

  • Film festivals flourish in beautiful places. The Montclair Film Festival in Montclair, New Jersey, now at its midpoint, adds to that rule, expanding to ten days, and inaugurating awards for filmmaking in memory of two Montclair residents who died this year: New York Times media writer David Carr, and documentary filmmaker Bruce Sinofsky.

  • Beginning with her first song, “Open the Door,” Judy Collins had her audience at the Café Carlyle on the opening night of her 2-week run in thrall. A performer for 56 years, her crystalline sound, whether she’s accompanying herself on acoustic guitar or at piano, rang clear. Not a glass clanked, nor dish rattled. And…

  • In Something Rotten!, as in the famed line from Hamlet, “there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark,” two Bottom brothers, one a talented poet named Nigel (John Cariani) and the other Nick (Brian d’Arcy James), compete with Shakespeare (Christian Borle), the rock star of the Renaissance. You can tell by his codpiece, he’s got…

  • Orange would not be the new black for Iris Apfel, who wore that color in fur for the movie premiere of Iris last week at the Paris Theater: the brighter the better, it was practically neon, and contrasted with saucer-sized turquoise beads. The outfit would be unusual for anyone, let alone the 93 year old…

  • Barbra Streisand, presenting the 42nd Chaplin Award to Robert Redford, her co-star in The Way We Were, recounted a story about a fan screaming “Hello, Gorgeous.” She thought it was for her, for Funny Girl. But no, the “gorgeous” was for Robert Redford. Indeed, there was no elephant-in-the-room in the spacious Alice Tully Hall: every…

  • In this comedy about a wedding, It Shoulda Been You, the “you” is a young man, the former boyfriend of the bride-to-be, played with gusto by Josh Grisetti in his Broadway debut at the Brooks Atkinson Theater. His Marty Kaufman is Jewish, so of course he’s perfect for the bride, who has instead chosen a…

  • The musical based on that Russian classic Doctor Zhivago inevitably evokes comparisons with the Omar Shariff-Julie Christie, David Lean 1965 movie, from Boris Pasternak’s 1957 novel. A Broadway show with name recognition, Doctor Zhivago has played in Australia and South Korea—in Korean—and was much loved. Given its politics, that’s a coup. Les Miserables Russian style,…

  • La Grenouille experienced a British invasion yesterday for a lunch celebrating the film Far From the Madding Crowd, based on Thomas Hardy’s beloved 19th century novel. Carey Mulligan, currently starring in Skylight on Broadway, plays Bathsheba Everdene, a strong-willed and occasionally wrong-headed heroine, a pre-feminist, you could call her. Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts portrays Gabriel…

  • As film festivals go, Sarasota Film Festival is hard to beat, for films, parties, and people. In addition to the awards listed below, Jane Seymour spoke about her career in film with Regina Weinreich, representing her latest, Bereave, directed by Evangelos and George Giovanis. Rachel Weisz, spoke with David Edelstein about her work producing Radiator,…

  • At heart, Finding Neverland, now charming audiences at the Lunt-Fontaine Theater on Broadway, is about the creation of theater: this is the backstory to J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Following closely enough to the Johnny Depp starred movie, the Broadway musical begins with J.M. Barrie’s colossal writing block when the playwright (Matthew Morrison) is past…

  • As An American in Paris opens at the Palace Theater, a Nazi flag seemingly draped over an entire city, drops down and floats away. The city is Paris, its narrow streets dour until we get to a café, where an American soldier, Jerry (Robert Fairchild) meets an American composer, Adam (Brandon Uranowitz), and a Frenchman,…