A “live documentary” by the filmmaking team Sam Green and Joe Bini, A Thousand Thoughts is a true celebration of collaboration in media ("live documentary") and joyful art-making. At Guild Hall this week, in a production with the Hamptons International Film Festival, Sam Green narrated the Kronos Quartet history in a film, in the presence of the string quartet, performing on violins, viola, cello, and for one selection, water-filled glassware. That’s the live part. The players, David Harrington, John Sherba, Hank Dutt, and Sunny Yang, accompany themselves and the many artists who have worked with them, including Allen Ginsberg, Philip Glass, and Laurie Anderson, present on this dynamic night.
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- Marisa Tomei and Matthew Broderick at Guild Hall: The Plight of an Upper West Side Arts Space Gives A-List Actors The Big Chill
- Raul Esparza and Lily Rabe in The Winter’s Tale: Wet in Central Park
- Authors Night in East Hampton: If it’s Not One Thing It’s Your Mother
- Documentaries: Jocelyn Wildenstein The Lion Queen/ Tovah: How Jewish is It?
- Hamptons Journal: John Waters at Guild Hall: “Gay is not Enough” / “Cagney” at Bay Street/ “Signs” at the Bridgehampton Museum Tractor Barn
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Just before his death in 1997, Allen Ginsberg wrote to President Bill Clinton advising him that just in case he was going to name an American poet laureate, this would be a good time to honor him. As we know, that never happened. But look around: Allen, over 20 years after his death, is everywhere. In Martin Scorsese’s documentary of Bob Dylan’s tour, Rolling Thunder Revue on Netflix, the poet is named “The Oracle at Delphi,” giving him some classic, other-worldly stature. Seated Buddha-style he lends a religious benediction to a rock and roll tour that features Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith, Sam Shepard, Anne Waldman, Ronnie Blakely, and others. Dylan’s great music is of course the star, but Allen exercises his chops. A highlight of the tour that starts in 1975 is a visit to fellow poet Jack Kerouac’s grave, near his birth home in Lowell, Massachusetts. Only recently dead since 1969, Kerouac may have enjoyed Ginsberg and Dylan cavorting and reciting from “Mexico City Blues” and otherwise paying homage to the dead beat. -
Sylvia Miles passed away today at 94. She always said she would not leave this earth without her academy award but sad, to report, that she did. A two-time nominee for just minutes of screen time in Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Farewell My Lovely (1975), Sylvia was a New York actress who would not relocate to Hollywood for greater fame and fortune, or better roles. Just last month MoMA featured the work of Abel Ferrara: in his Go Go Tales (2007), Sylvia Miles wears a Chanelesque jacket, as she performed opposite Burt Young, landlords to a downtown dance club run by Willem Dafoe. The movie ends with her sweet rendition of “Bed, Bath, and Beyond,” because the big store was going to replace the edgy pole dancing venue. Ah, gentrification. Sylvia made much of that jacket and the way it defined her character. I am so happy that she urged me to the screening, so I could see her in action from a bygone time, even if only in a movie. She wanted me to report any press to her, in the event that attention was paid. -
Designing Women in its 20th Year: The Look of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Game of Thrones, 60 Minutes
Photo: Regina WeinreichThe makeup, hair people and costumers behind the scenes rarely get their due attention, but for 20 years, New York Women in Film and Television, has been celebrating them. While women are under represented in media, and often paid less than men doing the same jobs, makeup artists, hair stylists, and costume designers enjoy a distinct parity, even if they are not as publicly visible. As comedian Zainab Johnson, host of last evening’s star-studded event at the Directors Guild Theater pointed out, “Women can do anything.” Everyone in this room could laugh at how banal that sounded.
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Not so long ago, having dinner with a friend at Café Un Deux Trois, a stone’s throw from the Belasco Theater where Network was doing brisk business, I could see the actor Tony Goldwyn on the street walking pensively. We waved and he waved back. Having not yet seen the show, I did not know that in a minute he would be in a fierce embrace with co-star Tatiana Maslany and that the audience for Network was watching too, thanks to some inventive camera work. The show’s star Bryan Cranston was already dubbed this year’s Best Actor in a Drama, word of mouth, and I was determined to see Network before its closing. Suddenly it was the last week of the show and somehow I snagged the very last ticket for the last week’s Wednesday matinee. -
Open Roads, an annual festival of new Italian cinema, kicked off this week at Film at Lincoln Center with a screening of Piranhas, directed by Claudio Giovannesi. Introducing his film, Giovannesi recalled having begun the script two years ago in New York, when he met with the novelist Roberto Saviano, the famed author of Gomorrah, about Neapolitan mobsters; their script for Piranhas won the Silver Bear in Berlin. -
A bed sits center stage at the Broadhurst Theater, in a Hell’s Kitchen apartment from the 1980’s. As Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune opens, Michael Shannon as Johnny and Audra McDonald, Frankie, make passionate love. From the grunts and groans, it’s pretty good sex we are witnessing, and when Johnny turns over, applause breaks out at the sight of his bare rump. Bodies are not all that’s naked in this intimate two-hander: as these co-workers in a diner have this night together, they talk and peel back histories of hurt. -
As the Tony Awards draw near, it is worth noting, at Bay Street Theater, in one very funny scene of a new play, The Prompter, an actress makes her Best Actress acceptance speech without thanking the very person most responsible for her award, her prompter. In her return to theater after a 20 year hiatus, Irene Young (the marvelous Tovah Feldshuh) simply cannot remember her lines and requires the services of Wade Wade Dooley, co-star and writer) to whisper through an ear piece the entirety of the work she is performing down to her stage movements. As narrated by the charming and talented Wade, Irene’s thank-yous are the source of angst. He knows how crucial he is to her performance, and by gosh, he deserves it. Besides, his mother is watching. -
Photo: David AndrakoMost women are loath to tell their age. Not Mary Wilson, the former Supreme now holding court at the Café Carlyle. When you see her, as you absolutely must, you will understand why 75 is a point of pride. Sassy and smart, sublime and simply gorgeous, she commands the stage, singing songs you know. When she forgets the lyrics to the 1966 hit, “My World is Empty Without You,” she’ll tell you, I was too busy doing my “oohs, ahs, and baby babies” behind Diana Ross (also 75, by the way) to actually say those words. And the audience, eating it up, helps her out, even as she segues into “Fever.” We are all backups for the night.
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Fashion designer Halston was a presence in Montauk in the heady 1970’s, renting from Andy Warhol on an oceanfront property east of town. One of the joys of Frederic Tcheng’s documentary Halston, produced by Roland Ballester, is seeing Halston at leisure with family seaside. Like Warhol’s estate, co-owned by filmmaker Paul Morrissey, Halston eventually went corporate, taking his Bergdorf Goodman pedigree to the masses in an ill-advised deal with J.C. Penney. For Halson’s A-list career, this was the beginning of a down journey. Yes, all of that is explained in the film, in the cocaine fueled, wild parties seen in archival footage. Using interviews with Pat Cleveland and Joel Schumacher, Halston’s unique moment in fashion is illuminated. His models, known as the Halstonettes, worshipped him. Looking movie star elegant, hair slicked back, impeccably groomed, he was in his heart, a Midwesterner, and wished most of all to re-establish his American roots. -
Advice for graduating seniors is de rigueur at commencement. Rocker/ poet/ memoirist Patti Smith had much to advise the School of Visual Arts graduating class last week, having composed her speech the day before in a dentist’s chair. Resist the temptation toward materialism, was one thought, as were words from William S. Burroughs: Keep your name clean, when she asked the Naked Lunch author for his wisdom. Mainly she said, follow your vision without compromise. -
Selma director Ava DuVernay’s epic mini-series, When They See Us, to stream on Netflix, about a sensational case of racism and ill-justice reaching back to the late 1980’s, premiered at the Apollo Theater this week. Remember “wilding,” and five black teenagers convicted of a brutal rape of a jogger in Central Park, and their later exoneration? This is that story. Back in the day, the focus was on the hideous violence of the crime, and the young white woman, the victim, left to die. The media went berserk over “wilding,” teens looking to rob and beat innocent people, just for fun. Behind all of this was a seriously beaten woman who became a cause celebre, and some police officials trying to make their name. Today, in the #metoo era, and a time when a glaring light shines on the plight of blacks murdered by authorities, the case plays very differently. And that could be reason enough to tune in to this four-part series, but that’s not all. Especially when you know where it’s going, When They See Us is riveting, a must-see event. -
Luxury bags are thrown onto plush couches in Susan Gutfreund’s sitting room overlooking Central Park: mostly Chanels and a random Hermes. They reserve seats for the fashion show marking the annual “Collaborating for a Cure Ladies Lunch” to benefit the Samuel Waxman Cancer Research Foundation. This year designer Dennis Basso, who surely dressed many women in the room over the years with his sable coats, mink shrugs, and three quarter length ermine jackets, attended to oversee his models. On a cold May midday, a fur would have been nice, and unobjectionable in these environs, even if politically incorrect everywhere else. A ban on trading in fur may even be made law with heavy penalties. But that was not the point. The point is cancer, and it is still killing us. -
Tattoo sporting white supremacists make skin crawl, almost as much as the violence perpetrated in the name of hate. Expanded from an Academy Award winning short, Guy Nattiv’s Skin, a feature at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival, stars a scary Jamie Bell, in over his head with a homeland terrorist “family.” Dad is Bill Camp, mom Shareen, a woman so smooth as she recruits new warriors into their hate group, offering sandwiches and hugs to runaways, you can see why Bryon could be so gulled, until he meets a family offering the dream of a “normal” life. Still, with his facial tats, he could never pass. And besides, they’d never let him leave. -
Portraying his beloved Shakespeare at last, Kenneth Branagh, both director and star, imagines the bard’s life in his final years. “He was after all a man,” proclaimed Branagh, introducing his new film, All is True, to a Broadway elite at the SAG-AFTRA Foundation: The Robin Willians Center for an intimate premiere. The film’s idea: after the famous Globe theater burned down, Shakespeare returned to his birth home, Stratford-on-Avon, to his wife Anne Hathaway (Judi Dench), and children. There, he does what any man would do, damage control to redeem himself for his long absence, talk about his legacy with the Earl of Southampton (Ian McKellen), and garden. This is known: both his daughters were engaged in scandals, and his son died mysteriously. Women were unschooled, and any impropriety would lead to a witch-hunt. There is enough drama, and family dysfunction, in other words, to enliven the creative chops of screenwriter Ben Elton for this gorgeously made period piece! -
The sound of typewriter clicks permeates “Camp: Notes on Fashion” the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute’s extravaganza exhibition, relieved only by a recording of Judy Garland singing “Over the Rainbow,” from The Wizard of Oz. The MET gala, its yearly benefit this week, may only exist as a distraction from all that the “Camp” show shows, with un-wearable art on celebrities devised to do and outdo the “camp” theme, dressing up itself as camp. But the exhibition, taken from Susan Sontag, the twentieth century diva of cultural dialogues, is a cerebral tour de force. -
Photo: Regina WeinreichCelebrating a retrospective at MoMA, cult filmmaker Abel Ferrara showed his music chops. The museum lobby, its platform facing the garden became a stage for Ferrara’s long time friends and collaborators Paul Hipp and Joe Delia, and some surprise vocalists Willem Dafoe, Gretchen Mol among them. Mol’s duet with Ferrara on guitar for “Bebopalula” and “Walk on the Wild Side,” homage to the late great Lou Reed, sent chills through the downtown art crowd including Debbie Harry, Julian Schnabel and Louise Kugelberg, Marla Hanson; many have worked with Ferrara. This wild party, hosted by producers Annie and Ed Pressman, was most certainly a throwback to headier times.
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Purple over orange is always a good color choice, regal and elegant. The Film Society of Lincoln Center has had a makeover; Film at Lincoln Center reflects a shift in name and logo hue. Celebrating its 50th birthday this week, the yearly gala honored, not one career as in its traditional Chaplin Awards, but rather its decades long life; the former “society’ screened clips of its five decades as a premiere film venue. Feting the art of filmmaking, they introduced the work of such mega talents as Bunuel, Bertolucci, Truffaut, Varda, Denis, Kurasawa, among many other directors. Personal tributes from a film world elite including Tilda Swinton, Pedro Almodovar, Martin Scorsese, Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan, and many others who had shown work there, illustrated how Lincoln Center broke boundaries, crossing geography, gender, and generations. In a backhanded compliment, contrarian John Waters said, at Lincoln Center, if you don’t see the films they anoint into their canon, the films they want you to see, you will go to film Hell. With his signature smirk, he walked off the stage. Funny how breaking barriers can go mainstream. -
Wow! No Glenda Jackson for being Lear, nor Mockingbird for Best Play! What are they thinking? Frankly, the list is good and thoughtful, and pleasing for a critic who studies the scene, and wonders from some reviews, did they see the same play as I did?First, Annette Bening in All My Sons, brilliant! And the play, nominated for Best Revival, is explosive. What makes it so great is her characterization as a woman who willfully pretends a truth about the death of her son in war. Arthur Miller’s play questions the high-minded motives for putting young men and women in harm’s way when governments wage war. The truth: industrialists win. For her to acknowledge this reality splits her in two. And it takes an actress at the level of Bening to get both sides of that personality. As director Jack O’Brien said, “There was no word for bipolar in the 1950’s.” That said, Janet McTeer deserves her Tony nod too, Sarah Bernhardt playing Hamlet.
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Oy! The Cossacks are coming! In the essential viewing Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish at Stage 42, as we know, the Jews in the fictional town of Anatekva are threatened by pogroms. Eventually the lives of Tevye and Golde, their five daughters, and all town-folk are disrupted; they are forced to take refuge elsewhere. Could the creators of this marvelous 1964 play, Joseph Stein’s book, Jerry Bock’s music, Sheldon Harnick’s lyrics, have realized the extraordinary resonance of this story? Director Joel Grey’s genius, rendering it in the dying language of Yiddish, — (even the actors don’t know it)– is to make audiences consider this a blueprint of exile: perhaps, a “heimish” combination of old world sound in sepia tones against a threatening, violent outside world, one’s own family history. And no matter where you were born, it is. -
Can you imagine a premise more ridiculous than a play featuring maids tidying up at a dump? Nathan Lane and Kristine Nielsen perform a comedic pas de deux, squeezing the gas out of dead Roman corpses in a giant heap in Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus at the Booth Theater. Cadavers require care: servicing them, Gary and Janice, (Lane and Nielsen) suck body fluid, and tend to erect penises, lucky to have jobs. What a dump!Echoing ancient politics: Gary proclaims, the mind has a lot to clean and organizes a coup, plotting to save the entire world and put an end to tragedy. Nielsen as Janice provides the appropriate skepticism, doing her signature grimaces and ambling among the bodies as choreographed by Bill Irwin and directed by George C. Wolfe. An optimist joins the couple: Carol (the adorable Julie White) in a lovely pink dress (Ann Roth’s costumes are superb), surely the color of high hopes as opposed to Gary and Janice’s hobo wear.
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At Playwright’s Horizons, Halley Feiffer, author and actor is making it with a serial adulterer, with Hamish Linklater in the role, in her comedy “The Pain of My Belligerence.” A master at creating young women who laugh at themselves, Feiffer explains in her program note, her plays skim the neurons of her life, and they are funny until they speak sad truths. In this case her character Cat falls for Guy, who seduces by taking nips at her exposed shoulder on their first date, and in classic wrong guy mode, makes promises that he will not keep. The narcissistic fatuous Guy is especially good at being this “monster” man. Director Trip Cullman keeps their love story zipping along. We, her audience, are privy to Guy’s double talk, of course; he’s seducing us too. (Caution: there’s partial nudity too, and the players are very attractive.) But Cat suffering undiagnosed Lyme’s Disease, reflects Feiffer’s obsession with illness as metaphor, to borrow from Susan Sontag. What can be more physical than the deterioration of one’s body? -
The carpet was orange at Cipriani Wall Street, for the annual Food Bank of New York’s Can Do Dinner this week. The Four Tops in white sequined jackets as well as Neil Patrick Harris and his partner David Burtka basked in its glow. One prize auctioned at the gala was a meal cooked by Cordon-Bleu trained chef, Burtka for your guests at your home. The couple would take over your kitchen, Harris acting as mixologist. With Christie’s Lydia Fenet keeping it fast and funny, that item went for a tidy $30,000 with the money going to help the hungry. Among the honorees, Jose Andres was feted for the great work he’s done this year, particularly in bringing food to Puerto Rico still recovering from two hurricanes two years ago, when the island suffered food and electricity shortages. You do remember a certain orange person tossing some Bounty to the hungry populace. -
The Jewish Museum opens a dynamic homage to Canadian poet/ songman/ novelist/ cultural icon Leonard Cohen this week, focused on his art, and work from others inspired by his life and oeuvre. Staring up at an image of myself reclined comfortably, I experienced his “Famous Blue Raincoat” with words projected on the walls as well as images inspired by the song. This was Ari Folman’s contribution, “Depression Chamber,” an installation, like a therapy session, that must be experienced one person at a time. I anticipate lines, even with a timed reservation. It is just one piece from artists such as Christophe Chassol and Tacita Dean occupying three floors of the museum. Taryn Simon’s “New York Times, Friday, November 11, 2016,” the newspaper displayed in plexiglass illustrates the timing of Cohen’s death just a few days before our current president’s election to office. There is some symbolism there, especially in the juxtaposition of Obama and Trump’s first meeting, and an advertisement for Bernie Sanders’ book, Our Revolution. -
Nothing says worker like hair tied up in Rosie the Riveter do-rag. The Classic Stage Company’s revival of Marc Blitzstein’s 1937 song cycle, Cradle Will Rock, hits a proletarian note. The talented ensemble, led by Tony Yazbeck as Larry Foreman, made up of steel workers, cops, newsmen, church officials, or factory owners, attempt or resist unionizing. Not your typical subject for a musical, this leftist cry was very much reflective of between the wars issues.The genre of “art song,” with composers Ned Rorem, Paul Bowles, Blitzstein, and others using song whimsically or politically, was quintessentially American. At CSC, with only a piano (played by four actors) accompanying, characters emerge, all in service to Mr. Mister (David Garrison). This way, a lot gets rationalized, thrashed out, manipulated into “fake news” in song.
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