Emily Mann’s Gloria: A Life, a theatrical event about journalist, feminist, activist Gloria Steinem is not so much a drama, but an exposition of the history of this wave of feminism, the feminist discourse of our time. As the titular Christine Lahti, sporting Gloria’s signature black bell bottom jeans and native American inspired belt with just a change of vest to jacket to bunny ears, wants women to speak their truth and consider the power in numbers. Yes to pussy hats!
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When New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham would train his camera on you—whether at a posh opening or on the street—it made your day. Anna Wintour –Cunningham photographed the Vogue editor since she was a teen—famously used to say, “One dresses for Bill.” His discerning eye assessed celebrities and civilians alike, snapping those with elan, style, joie de vivre. His attention would say, You had “IT.” This beloved New York icon, who died in 2016 at age 88, is revived in a new documentary, The Times of Bill Cunningham, Mark Bozek’s loving tribute. Featuring an interview with Cunningham at its center, this entertaining documentary premiered at Alice Tully Hall this week, one of several stellar non-fiction selections at this year’s New York Film Festival. -
If any one can make the perilous professional sport of rock climbing sexy and glamorous, Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi can. In Free Solo, their latest documentary (the couple made the extraordinary Meru), they turn their lens on renowned climber Alex Honnold, as he fulfills a dream, to climb El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. Of course he had done this before, utilizing all the tools of his trade including ropes, but now he wants to go it without. Needless to say, many have died attempting to climb without this support. To add to the drama, Alex is also in a relationship with Sanni. The charm of Free Solo is that the film goes into Alex’s personal, eccentricities, living in a van, eating with a spatula as his utensil of choice. He’s quite the barbarian, softened by a lovely blond who teaches him to say, I love you. -
Despite a long and distinguished career making film portraits as creator of PBS’ American Masters series, Susan Lacy will not just do anyone. She proclaimed at a Q&A with Alec Baldwin at a Hamptons International Film Festival pre-screening of her HBO documentary, Jane Fonda in Five Acts, she would not make a film about someone she does not like, “like someone who I want to get out of the White House.” “I really understand,” replied Baldwin, scrunching up into his best Trump face. “I really, really do.”Reflecting on her PBS time, recounting the genesis of American Masters, Lacy spoke about her certainty that stories on culture-shifting figures such as James Baldwin, Joni Mitchell, Judy Garland, and her favorite, Leonard Bernstein, were inherently dramatic, often geniuses fighting against cultural mores, or their own demons. That was a difficult sell, but she prevailed. Now making films for HBO, like last year’s superb Spielberg, she does not have to raise the money. HBO just asks, what’s your budget?
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Peace in the Middle East feels like a mirage, a glimmering haze on a distant desert horizon. But in 1992, key figures from Israel and the PLO came together in a neutral place in Norway armed only with hope to frame a peace agreement on the fragile and beleaguered strip of land that is called Israel. Last year a hit play at Lincoln Center dramatized their dialogue of peace. And now, timed with the September 13 anniversary of the Oslo Accords, and the Jewish New Year, a new documentary, The Oslo Diaries, airs on HBO. For filmmakers Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan, residents of Tel Aviv, in historic Rabin Square, with their two children, the story of the Oslo Accords is personal. They add to the existing record with diaries and fresh interviews with the men from Israel, Jewish and Palestinian leaders, who met for 1,000 days, recognizing one another’s right to exist, forging strong bonds, waging the terms of peace, and watching them turn to dust. Last week I had the opportunity to speak to the filmmakers: is the hope of peace kaput forever? -
Now in our second year of a presidency that continues to depress the spirits of most Americans, Michael Moore returns to the scene with Fahrenheit 11/9, which had a stellar New York premiere this week at Alice Tully Hall. A human barometer of what’s going on in the heartland, Moore continues his filmic outrage at our government, entwining narratives of racism, Russians, guns, greed, and craven leadership in his coverage of the lead-infused water in Flint, Michigan, with the passion of Parkland students, going places obscured in the average daily news cycle. Often operatic, Moore’s tragicomedy intensifies as Pagliacci overtakes the soundtrack. An equal opportunity blamer, he is tough on Trump and does not spare Democrats who did not do enough, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, in his outcry: Take Action! -
Photo: David AndrakoWarming up with “When You’re Smiling,” the charismatic, jazzy backup band for Jane Lynch and Kate Flannery cued the Café Carlyle audience: we were set for a night of music and laughs. The “Two Lost Souls” came onstage, like a pair of Chaplinesque hobos, foils of one another, and funny. Reaching up, Jane Lynch, the more “Sapphic” of the duo could hit the ceiling. And crouching down, Kate Flannery, “by way of Jameson,” had a low center of gravity. Between the two, such songs as “One Note Samba,” “Bei Mir Bist Du Shon,” and “Good King Wenceslas,” rose to lively, harmonious levels. Kate’s “Shy,” belted out, was hilariously unconvincing. And Jane did a great “Mambo Italiano.” And on they went till the near finale, Jule Styne’s “The Party’s Over,” followed by Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus.”
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As a filmmaker, Ethan Hawke is something of a wildchild, fresh, irreverent, unexpected and totally loveable. His new movie, Blaze, about a little known country western singer/guitarist Blaze Foley is a marvel to watch, because everyone involved seems to be having so much fun immortalizing a man, a wildchild, who lived life in a no holds barred way, following his passions and foibles without restraint. Looking and acting the quintessential flower child, Blaze Foley could take no sound advice about his abundant talent as a musician and songwriter, nor about his life, blessed with true love, hokey as that sounds. Sybil Rosen, a Jewish girl with kinky hair joined him for a romp for a time, until the real world made their Edenic world unlivable. Blaze died tragically in 1989 at age 39, trying to help a friend, and Sybil wrote a book about him, Living in the Woods in a Tree: Remembering Blaze Foley, the backbone of this thrilling movie. -
“I am suffering!” That’s not a whine you hear often in East Hampton, but at Guild Hall, the plaint is cause for a visit to an emotional calibration center.When Guild Hall decided to commission new theatrical work from young artists, the move seemed radical. Over the summer season, the state of the art East Hampton arts institution had staged readings of traditional work by Eugene Pack and Harold Pinter utilizing the talents of seasoned and local performers such as John Magaro, Tim Ransom, Harris Yulin and Mercedes Ruehl, with Matthew Broderick to join in for a Q&A. But this week, The Summit, a collaborative multi-media work from directors Christian Scheider, Tucker Marder, and a master puppeteer, Isla Hansen, transformed the jewel box of a theater into a laboratory, for a tragicomedy, and for experimental theater.
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Under a makeshift tent, a staging spot for plating his culinary creations at the Brock residence in East Hampton, Flynn McGarry, a phenomenon as a young chef with his own Lower East Side restaurant, Gem, and a new documentary about him, Chef Flynn, shook hands, his fingers coated in egg yolk. “That’s how you want your chef,” smiled Flynn, at the party celebrating him, the movie about him, and the Hamptons International Film Festival’s Summerdocs 10th Anniversary: “Enjoy my food, and my life,” he told the crowd. He is 19. His Beef Tartare on a grilled lettuce cup, beautifully situated on trays, was a delight to look at, fleurettes with a sprinkle of sesame seed, and even better to eat. -
Patricia Clarkson is getting used to playing villains. If you’ve been watching Sharp Objects, the HBO thriller in 8-parts that will have its final episode this coming Sunday, you’ve seen this actress from New Orleans at her sinister best, a matriarch called Adora who is anything but adorable; her name alone exudes irony. Clarkson wears her bad side with high hauteur, an elegance and beauty that goes icy as human emotions draw near: it is impossible to turn away from her. In a new movie, The Bookshop, a lovely take by Isabel Coixet on Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel, starring Emily Mortimer, Clarkson continues in craven glamor. Bill Nighy’s character calls her behavior regarding the takeover of a bookstore repulsive. Clarkson says her acting strategy for playing hideous is to channel Glinda, the Good Witch.
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Carla Hall is all about cooking with love. Sharing her food notes and anecdotes with Florence Fabricant at Guild Hall’s popular series, “Stirring the Pot,” the two foodies could not agree more about the limiting nature of food trends. For example, who says that beets must always be served with goat cheese? Duh. Well someone decades ago made that combo a standard and now diners expect that. Cooking with love is way more intuitive about what can go with what, and what is fresh and available. -
As the tributes to Aretha Franklin’s extraordinary career and legacy attest to the number of people she touched, and her incredible song list awakens our memories of decades of indelible music, it is good to remember her as a natural woman. Not only because she sang the song Carole King and Gerry Goffin wrote for her, but because she was a stealth warrior as a feminist, whether or not she cared about that term. Old school, no nonsense. No #MeToo for her, and you know she had stories. -
This Authors Night featured its signature mix of celebrity and well established authors, such as Jules Feiffer, Geraldo Rivera, Robert Caro, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Patricia Bosworth, A. M. Holmes, Lee Child, with first time authors such as Elizabeth Flock who researched five marriages in Mumbai for her novel, The Heart is a Shifting Sea. Hilaria Baldwin sat beside her husband with her book, The Living Clearly Method, claiming it had already made the popular benefit last year, but Alec Baldwin insisted. Of course you could not get near their table. His new book provocatively titled, You Can’t Spell America Without Me, with a photograph of him as Donald Trump gracing the cover, was selling like proverbial hotcakes, huge piles set before him dwindling down rapidly. He gamely brought Michael Lally this year, and had him sit cattycorner to them, at every chance hawking the poet’s book, Another Way to Play: Poems 1960-2017.
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Stealth operations are hardly associated with Guild Hall, the premiere arts institution of East Hampton, but as artistic director Andrea Grover announced at the summer gala this week, on a horse farm in Amagansett, more and more, Guild Hall is commissioning the work of emerging artists, “a quiet revolution,” as it were.Established artists are not overlooked, of course. The evening was a celebration of a new exhibition of Ellsworth Kelly’s art and the political career of Judith Hope Twomey. Alec Baldwin introduced Twomey noting that much is said about the lack of women in politics, and that is true, but “I wish there were more like her.” Twomey spoke about first coming to East Hampton from Arkansas, and notables such as Chuck Close and Saul Steinberg assisting with her campaign. When Baldwin offered to help, he went to speak in towns in upstate NY and the women turned out in droves to hear him. “They are still talking about it,” said Twomey amusing the crowd. Politically speaking, let’s hope for a bigger revolution.
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“I think it’s a masterpiece,” exulted Will Pomerantz after a performance of Evita at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor. True, he is the director of this lively production with its mainly Latino cast, and he should have bragging rights for his fine work, but he was thinking larger on opening weekend. This very special production made many rethink the well-worn Andrew Lloyd Webber/ Tim Rice musical most associated with songs so familiar you can sing along, Patti LuPone as Evita (or Madonna in the movie), maybe Ricky Martin as Che, stars who made it famous in its Broadway debut and revivals. Bay Street’s production refocuses its epic, historic, sweeping themes: celebrity, revolution, romance and love, and makes them intimate. -
When best-selling author Meg Wolitzer wrote her novel, The Wife (2003), she could not have imagined its current feminist resonance, nor the movie of the book, The Wife, soon to be released starring Glenn Close. The wife of a celebrated novelist as he is awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, Close's Joan Castleman is demure, even restrained as she seethes with resentment at her husband's narcissism. Some men, it seems, believe their lies–mostly, the ones about themselves and their own powers. And Close as the wife, takes it, her affect perfect explosion-under-composure, like her Norma Desmond, until the façade cracks, unlike Desmond's deluded Sunset Boulevard soul. Ever the wife, she reels it back. -
Mission Impossible: Fallout was #1 at the box office this week –no surprise to me. Of all the movie mega franchises, I love Mission Impossible the best. Lalo Schifrin’s score is an aphrodisiac to me. And the rest may have something to do with the hero Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt, a man of super capabilities who gets the job done. Whatever crazies animate him, he is willing and able to rescue a detonator from the edge of a rock cliff, hang from helicopters, and mess with equally crazy women. The blond “widow” in this one makes Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa the picture of propriety, even when she, leather clad, races around Paris on a motorcycle in hot pursuit of Cruise and his posse, Ving Rhames’ Luther and Simon Pegg’s Benji and the nut job of a villain/ social anarchist (Sean Harris) that must lead them to the prize, three globelike balls of Plutonium. We are saving the world here from crazies who believe, the more suffering, the greater the peace. Now I totally understand why chemical warfare on civilians is so necessary! -
Comedian/ actor Robin Williams was so beloved, his suicide four years ago at age 63 came as a shock to almost all who knew him. In a new HBO documentary, Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind, close friend, Billy Crystal recounts the last time he saw Williams he was in tears, and when Crystal asked why, is everything all right, Williams just said it was because he loved him so much; Crystal did not know this was a poignant moment close to the end. Marina Zenovich’s film, which had a special screening this week at SAG-AFTRA Foundation Robin Williams Center, weighs in on the side of a Parkinson’s disease diagnosis as the cause. Still, she makes good points for other contributing factors as she limns the changing times and his alienation. Much as you wish you could, you do not, in the end of this entertaining and insightful film, come inside his mind. -
Riveting and poised as she recounts the most horrendous story, Carey Mulligan is the one-woman center of Dennis Kelly’s Girls & Boys at the Minetta Lane Theater, a superb Audible production and Royal Court Theater transplant. Minetta Lane must be ground zero for one-actor tours de force. Witness Billy Crudup’s brilliant turn as Harry Clarke. Dimpled Mulligan in maroon trousers and burnt sienna shirt, against a bare stage, or ghostly living space that colors up as needed, for an hour and three quarters: you can’t take your eyes off her, as she asserts herself shifting from leg to leg under Lyndsey Turner’s fine direction. You hear only about the sensational tales of domestic violence, she says preparing you, as she, dry eyed and wise comes to the play’s climax. You already know it, and it’s shocking nonetheless, the play’s final sentence, a chilling line that could work broadly in our #MeToo moment, roughly: civilization was created to stop men.
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Imagine longing for Richard Nixon. Anything that smacks of “presidential” sparks pangs of pity for us in our current regime. As portrayed by Harris Yulin, with dignity and a yen for Italian style, in the Frost/Nixon revival at Bay Street Theater, Nixon seems human: he even detests golf. When he says he betrayed the American people, you also believe him, that he was doing what he thought best, even while breaking the law. For him it was clearly complicated. David Frost (Daniel Gerroll), as the play reveals, put everything on the line to get good television out of a four-part interview with the former president, the only one to ever resign rather than face the indignities of impeachment, and what that would mean to the office of president: “Resignation is a noble act! America first!” Nixon was held accountable. And, he could think and speak in complete paragraphs! Oh for the simplicity of the bygone era! -
Photo: Showbiz411Topical and terrific, Sandra Bernhard brought her no-holds- barred mouth to Guild Hall this week for a one-night only tour de force performance. Reaching out to Melania in the wings, “You are in a safe space here,” she consoled her. And, “Ooh, I like your jacket.” Calling out to a college student in the front row, she was both confrontational about her choice to quit Sarah Lawrence and go out west to study fashion, and supportive, sort of. “I could have talked to Marc Jacob for you.” She gave with one hand and took back with the other. And it was funny as hell. As she told me in a phone chat earlier this year: “I do not disappoint.” And she didn’t, giving one of the most spontaneous performances yet.
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The Paley Center was chockablock with long lost friends and family, a hug fest rejoicing a new must-see documentary, Three Identical Strangers, that starts in the celebratory mood of a miracle: triplets, separated at birth, and their happenstance reconnection as teens. As Tim Wardle’s smart film traces the path of these brothers, through home movies, footage of their appearances on Phil Donahue and all the talk shows, and interviews with the people who knew them best, a mystery unfolds, and the mood darkens until the charismatic New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright shifts the conversation to the science, asking, what is most significant in determining who we are, nature or nurture? -
In his memoir, Without Stopping, the American writer and composer Paul Bowles describes a party held on the beach in North Africa’s Caves of Hercules, with one grotto that had been decorated by Cecil Beaton. Truman Capote, fearful of scorpions, had to be carried down the face of the cliff by a group of Moroccans. Guests lay in the moonlight among cushions in the sand sipping champagne and smoking hashish, serenaded by an Andaluz orchestra. If Lisa Immordino Vreeland’s documentary, Love, Cecil, about the life and times of Beaton, a singular British photographer and illustrator for Vogue and Tony and Academy Award winning scenic and costume designer—for the films Gigi and My Fair Lady– omits mention of this gathering, she must be forgiven, because the detail she does provide—especially of Beaton’s art– is truly illuminating. As she said in a recent phone chat, “Making the film was a pleasure to me.” -
When Laurie Anderson talks about carrying no baggage in her new book, All the Things I Lost in the Flood, a tome literally about loss, of precious objects and dross, of anything that weighs you down, take her seriously. At her current one-woman exhibition at Guild Hall, comprised of large scale paintings of her dog Lolabelle, now deceased, in the Bardo, and films, including “Heart of a Dog,” an Academy Award nominated documentary, plus two extraordinary works of Virtual Reality, let’s just say, she gives the label multimedia new meaning. While all of this work is impressive, the two trips through Anderson’s virtual “looking glass” completely knocked me out.
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