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Aretha Franklin at the Tribeca Film Festival Opening Night: Celebrating Clive Davis

April 20, 2017

Music mogul Clive Davis is so beloved, one of his premiere stars Aretha Franklin, complaining of upper respiratory problems, came out in full vocal force to celebrate him at Radio City Music Hall for the opening of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. What a night! First the screening of the documentary, Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of our Lives, a glorious film directed by Chris Perkel tracing Clive’s genius career, first seeing Janis Joplin at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, and signing her up at CBS, which prior to that auspicious recognition of rock and roll as art, was dominated by the sing along sound of Mitch Miller.

Through success and scandal, Brooklyn-born Clive Davis comes off as modest, even humble, his passion for music an unpredictable gift. After he was unfairly ousted from CBS, and disbarred, in the midst of a new business rise, he studied for the bar exam, and passed. It was that important to him to bring the karma around. The death of Whitney Houston was as devastating for him as his loss of parents when he was in college, he said, but he soldiered on, as she would have wanted, with his legendary pre-Grammy party.

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Paula Vogel’s Indecent on Broadway: Is It Good For the Jews

April 19, 2017

Indecent dramatizes the epic journey of the Jews in Europe and America in the early part of the 20^th century. Staged with utter brilliance through the story of the staging of a single play, Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance, here is an event at the Cort Theater that brings that controversial 1907 work back to Broadway.

Opening with the actors, suitcases in hand on a bare black space, this 100 minute fast-paced tour from Berlin to Constantinople, to New York and back to Lodz and the great beyond, had the star-packed opening night audience –including Joel Grey, Molly Ringwald, Julie Taymor, Tovah Feldshuh, Arianna Huffington,
Mercedes Rueh l, and many more—revealing where their ancestors were from, how they came to America, where they were during the McCarthy period. No small task, however small the venue, Indecent was a breathtaking sweep for the audience, the cast and crew, and the creators, Paula Vogel and director Rebecca Taichman. More than one said, “This is for my grandmother.”

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Richard Gere in Norman: It’s all about the accessories

April 18, 2017

Upon meeting Israeli actor Lior Ashkenazi at the premiere of Norman, Joseph Cedar’s smart new movie starring Richard Gere in the title role, I first looked at his feet. His shoes, elegant leather lace ups, looked remarkably like the ones he, as Micha Eshel, accepts from Norman, before he becomes Prime Minister of Israel in the film, when he is a low level government official and Norman, a self-styled entrepreneur and businessman, is courting him in a Lanvin boutique. The shoes are a benign if expensive gift, a way for Norman to get his foot in, so to speak, believing that the connection to Eshel will pay off. An important person must wear important shoes.

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Dynamic Screenwriter Initiative at the Sarasota Film Festival

April 16, 2017

On the Sarasota Opera House stage last week, where Sarasota Film Festival President Mark Famiglio’s annual swank dinner was well under way, John Henry Summerour entertained a diverse group of writers and actors with a hilarious performance, his lanky limbs moving in every direction at once. Who knew he had this in him? That afternoon I had the opportunity to meet this award winning filmmaker and Saschka Unseld, a pioneer in virtual reality filmmaking, alumni of the prestigious Nantucket Screenwriters Colony, to talk about their residency at the Hermitage Artists Retreat in Manasota Key, Florida, in a newly formed partnership with the Sarasota Screenwriting Colony for developing film projects and virtual reality storytelling.

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Frida Kahlo in Andrea Dantas’ One-Woman Show at BAM

April 15, 2017

Perhaps Frida Kahlo, a singular artist, could only be portrayed in a one-woman show. Voices of her parents, Diego Rivera, Nelson Rockefeller, Georgia O’Keeffe, and others supply the illusion of an outside world. Playing with her dolls and stuffed monkey, or her paints, Brazilian actress and Flamenco dancer Andrea Dantas, who also wrote Fragmented Frida, inhabits this legendary figure at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Fisher Hall under the fine direction of Christine Renee Miller; the outside world, outside the clay house in Coyoacan, Mexico with its vivid red bougainvillea comes alive through the chatter of fascinating art world and political characters, Kia Rogers’ superb lighting, Justin West’s projections of New York City, and evocative Mexican music: “Llorona” fills the room.

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Diane Lane in Paris Can Wait: Closing Night of the Sarasota Film Festival

April 10, 2017

Wearing a red cocktail dress, her hair in elegant chignon, Diane Lane accepted the Sarasota Film Festival’s Award for Excellence in Cinema on Saturday night, introduced by Rosanna Arquette. A screening of her new movie, Eleanor Coppola’s Paris Can Wait, followed, and a few minutes in, Lane as Anne was dressed for dinner in a romantic inn, wearing the same dress and coif, a sly nod, perhaps, to the movie’s realism. Based on Coppola’s true road trip with a business associate of her husband through the gastronomic riches of France, Lane as Coppola’s stand-in portrays the film’s central character, proper but beguiled by a Frenchman who pays more attention to her than does her work-obsessed husband. Alec Baldwin performs that role, almost a reprise of his Hal in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine. In the post-screening Q&A, Lane called Baldwin a “hero,” rescuing the production after another actor pulled out. What could be bad? Three days on location in the south of France, a wet dream for any foodie.

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Rosanna Arquette in Born Guilty at the Sarasota Film Festival: If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother

April 8, 2017

The actress and filmmaker Rosanna Arquette was filling a shopping cart at Whole Foods in Sarasota, Florida. Having just arrived to support her latest film, Born Guilty, written and directed by Max Heller at this year’s Sarasota Film Festival, she realized she had forgotten, well, everything, toothbrush, hairbrush, and other necessities. Cart piled high, she said she had not yet seen the film. Was it okay, she asked, and I was struck by how much this comic market scene could have played in the landmark 1985 Desperately Seeking Susan in which Arquette starred with Madonna. In fact, the next day at Sarasota’s Ritz Carlton, at an interview with Arquette, Heller and executive producer Bill Mahoney, Heller reminded his star that she prepared for the role of Judith, a New York Jewish mom based on his own, imagining herself in “Susan” 20 years later, divorced with a grown son living in LA, on whom she depends for every whim and crisis.

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Kevin Kline in Present Laughter: “ I Am Always Acting”

April 7, 2017

Kevin Kline descends a staircase, not nude, but hung over, his leg making a fancy ballet over the bannister. As the suave, debonair stage actor in his twilight, Garry Essendine, in Noel Coward’s Present Laughter in a charming production at the St. James Theater, he doesn’t remember the cute fan Daphne (Tedra Millan, truly adorable in her Broadway debut), now ensconced in the study behind a closed door, but for his staff, used to taking care of these nights, it’s nuisance as usual. His ménage includes his secretary Monica (the hilarious Kristine Nielsen), his ex-wife Liz (the formidable Kate Burton), two pals/ business associates Henry Lyppiatt (a prim Peter Francis James) and Morris Dixon (a hysterical Reg Rogers). Under Moritz von Stuelpnagel’s expert direction, characters come and go in comic rhythm. When a visiting—read crashing–would be playwright, Roland Maule (Bhavesh Patel) arrives, doors slam vigorously in the manner of a Feydeau farce. Enter Henry’s wife Joanna (Cobie Smulders) in a seductive, slinky gown, a “predator” and Garry’s equal in witty banter, looking for her latest conquest.

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Amelie: Cornering Cute on Broadway

April 4, 2017

Based on the 2001 hit movie from France, Amelie, brings original music and distinctive whimsy to the Walter Kerr Theater. (“Hoping to see you/ In Macchu Picchu” is one tickling lyric. What’s not to love?) Characters may don fish heads and in one incredibly silly bit, an Elton John sequined suit, but it’s all to Amelie’s happy theme: love conquers even acute cases of fear of closeness to others. And if this musical’s Paris looks familiar, look to the bridge, reminiscent of the children’s classic, “Linnea in Monet’s Garden” for inspiration. Best of all, Amelie is played by Phillipa Soo, Hamilton’s original Eliza; for the 100 minute, no intermission duration of this show, you are in great company.

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Going in Style: Sir Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, and Alan Arkin as Gentlemen Robin Hoods

April 1, 2017

Zach Braff’s comedy, Going in Style, from Theodore Melfi’s script, epitomizes the genre of geezer heist. Starring a trio of venerable superstars of a certain age, Sir Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, and Alan Arkin, the movie’s chase takes place in a shuttle bus rather than a speeding car; everything goes at the pace of a walker, except for the comic timing. A bank is successfully robbed. Matt Dillon investigates, and John Ortiz aids and abets the crime. A forgetful Christopher Lloyd provides contrast to the dynamic three. The laughs keep coming. With Ann-Margret as a hot chick on the make for Alan Arkin, there’s sex too!

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Cezanne et moi: Breakfast with Daniele Thompson and Guillaume Gallienne

April 1, 2017

Introducing her friend Daniele Thompson’s new film Cezanne et moi at a special screening at the Whitby Hotel last week, Diane von Furstenberg noted the painterly look, the sheer beauty of this movie. The audience of artists in all media could not have been more fitting: Marina Abramovic, Eric Fishl, Ahn Duong, Bennett Miller, Ellen Burstyn, Fran Leibowitz, Brigitte Lacombe, Art Spiegelman, among many others. Cezanne et moi, limns the intense and passionate friendship between two towering figures of world culture, painter Paul Cezanne and writer Emile Zola, imagining them as schoolmates, and rivals in art and love.

Just before the movie’s premiere, I had breakfast with Daniele Thompson, the esteemed director of Avenue Montaigne, co-writer of Cousin, Cousine, and the actor Guillaume Gallienne, who stars as Cezanne. Both Thompson and Gallienne identified with these artists’ struggles, while recognizing Cezanne as something of a mad genius. Thompson originally wanted Gallienne to play Zola. As it turned out, Guillaume Canet, the film’s Zola, and straight man in the bromance, could not make the celebration as his real-life partner Marion Cotillard was just giving birth to their child.

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John O’Hurley at the Café Carlyle: A Man With Standards

March 30, 2017

Best known as J. Peterman, Elaine’s boss on Seinfeld, John O’Hurley performs his show at the Café Carlyle as if he were that character projecting his outsized personality on an intimate stage. He’s cornered the market on “arrogance and pomposity,” he is quick to point out, as if those were a virtue, and then he launches into “Mr. Clown,” a song he uses to begin and end his hour and a half set. Waxing nostalgic, he reminisces about schooldays when his best friend told he had the worst voice, to later times when Frank Sinatra said he sounded good singing Sinatra: Joe Raposo’s “There Used to be a Ballpark,” the song that wooed Frank, works pretty well for the rest of us too.

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Five Came Back on Netflix: Hollywood and the Second World War

March 29, 2017

“We still have not come to grips with World War II,” asserted newsman Tom Brokaw, the author of several books on the subject. “It was the largest event in the history of mankind.” Moderator of a panel on Monday night following Netflix’s preview screening of its series, Five Came Back, at Alice Tully Hall, Brokaw shot questions to Guillermo Del Toro, Lawrence Kasdan, George Stevens, Jr., the series’ director Laurent Bouzereau, and the author Mark Harris on whose book the documentary is based. One would have to agree with Brokaw. The series shines a light on little known film work of five midcentury highly successful Hollywood directors: John Huston, John Ford, George Stevens, William Wyler, and Frank Capra. Each left lucrative careers to document what was going on in Europe during the war, with life changing results as Del Toro, Kashdan, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, and Paul Greengrass attest in this riveting documentary series.

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Jessica Chastain in The Zookeeper’s Wife: The Myth of the Good German

March 28, 2017

A genuine Holocaust era heroine, Antonina Zabinski could charm a tiger. Now her story is a major motion picture: The Zookeeper’s Wife, based on Diane Ackerman’s 2007 book on this historic figure has everything: animals in mortal danger, an excellent cast led by Jessica Chastain as Antonina, Daniel Bruhl as Lutz Heck, Der Fuhrer’s chief of zoos with a scientific agenda in sync with the Nazi desire for pure breeds, and an imperiled young boy, Antonina’s son Rys. Action packed, the story based on Antonina’s diary of that time, is a nail-biting account of the Warsaw occupation and the miraculous efforts of non-Jews, smuggling their friends out of the ghetto, risking their lives to help Jews survive.

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Lynn Nottage’s Sweat: A Backstory for our Trump Troubles

March 28, 2017

For those still pondering how we got to Trump in the White House, “Sweat,” Lynn Nottage’s play just opened at Studio 54 for this Pulitzer Prize winner’s Broadway debut, and a prescient view of our collective political plight. “Sweat” gives poignant voice to a disenfranchised microcosm of the American heartland, as if Michael Moore’s Flint, Michigan had taken center stage, featuring a fine ensemble under Kate Whoriskey’s expert direction. Kudos to John Lee Beatty’s set design, for a bar in inviting reds, a mecca where birthdays are celebrated and the closing steel mill mourned. It’s “Cheers” with less cheer, with characters of limited career options and a variety of ethnicities when in 2000, the doors of opportunity slam shut.

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Suzanne Vega at the Café Carlyle: Lover, Beloved

March 22, 2017

The inspiration for Suzanne Vega’s show at the Café Carlyle is decidedly literary, the Southern writer Carson McCullers, author of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and Ballad of the Sad Cafe. Vega, a consummate songstress known for her signature songs, “Luka” and “Tom’s Diner,” crosstown and far from the Carlyle on 112th Street and Broadway, claims she’s lived in all the New York neighborhoods except the really nice ones. At the Carlyle, she has arrived. Most important, she finds the uplift in Carson McCullers, singing about her rivals in “Harper Lee,” with snarky snipes at Virginia Woolf, Katherine Anne Porter, Truman Capote, and Lee, the author of only one book. “I’d like to kill more than that mockingbird,” she quips in Carson’s voice. No matter the jealousy at the heart of the writerly persona, in “Lover, Beloved” and “Carson’s Last Supper,” songs she wrote with Duncan Sheik, Vega asserts her muse’s theory of transcendent love: “the love of my life is humanity.”

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Laura Osnes and Tony Yazbeck in Surprise Performance at the Guild Hall Gala

March 14, 2017

If you are going to honor Susan Stroman for her achievement in performing arts, as Guild Hall did this week at their annual gala at the Rainbow Room, you may expect, aside from the usual clip reel, some real live Broadway stars. Laura Osnes, a sublime Cinderella, now preparing for the opening of Bandstand, sang the Gershwin classic “But Not For Me.” And Tony Yazbeck, dazzling in On the Town, to star in Stroman’s next musical, Prince on Broadway, sang Gershwin's “They Can’t Take That Away From Me.” Among many highlights on this special night, was Tanya Gabrielian’s rendition of Chopin's Nocturne in C-sharp Minor, Op. Posth. on piano, and poetry from Alice Quinn, Executive Director of the Poetry Society and Philip Schultz, another of this year’s honorees. “Poetry asks us to celebrate our differences,” said the Pulitzer Prize winning poet, and he read a new poem about a same-sex couple called “The Kiss.”

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Cries from Syria on HBO: Assad’s War Against his Country’s Children

March 13, 2017

Cries from Syria, a documentary on HBO, tells such a horrific story, unfortunately the one you know if you’ve been paying attention to Syria, its government’s military efforts against protestors, use of chemical weapons on its citizens, and general violation of human rights. The regime claims it is protecting the country from terrorists. Most often the victims are children, and it is through their voices director Evgeny Afineevsky tells this untoward recent history bringing viewers up to date with Syrians relocating to European countries where they are shunned, and children wishing to return home. Introducing the film at a special screening last week at the Council on Foreign Relations, Sheila Nevins appealed to the audience: “Please, let’s change this.”

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Marcelo Mastroianni’s Presence at Rendez-Vous With French Cinema

March 12, 2017

A photo exhibit at the Film Society of Lincoln Center features color stills from the set of Fellini’s 8 1/2, the maestro’s last film in black & white. Photographer Paul Ronald shot them as an aside while he was shooting black & white production stills, and of course, as these things go, the cache was lost—and now found. Glorious Anouk Aimee, and Marcelo Mastroianni seated in profile, waiting, perhaps for his next scene. Curated by Sam Stourdze, the show will stay up till summer, as the Film Society is now planning to screen a Mastroianni retrospective. Back in the day, Mastroianni came to Lincoln Center for the New York Film Festival. Following a press screening, reporters and critics surrounded him, begging for autographs. “But you are the press,” he said gesticulating wildly, reminding the crowd of its place. Icon that he was, he would not tolerate this breach of decorum.

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Sidney Torres: In CNBC’s The Deed, Reality is Real

March 10, 2017

Starring a charismatic New Orleans based investment mogul, Sidney Torres’ new series on CNBC, The Deed, shows how to invest in real estate. In the second episode, a building contractor named Russell, the son of a real estate agent, wants Sidney to invest in his project, but does not want to follow his advice. Sidney really wants to mentor Russell, but Russell seems to have a mind of his own about how to invest in properties, and you see the young man chafing, his ego bruised, as Sidney proves him wrong, about details of paint, floors, and especially pricing. Just before the episode aired, I had a chance to talk to Sidney about his show. He called his time with Russell a failure, but it sure makes for good television.

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Sally Field Glows in Candlelight: The Glass Menagerie

March 10, 2017

In the stunning revival of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie at the Belasco Theater, Sally Field’s smothering St. Louis Depression era mom Amanda Wingfield, exudes the nervous energy of a woman in compulsive command. Her son Tom, Joe Mantello, our narrator, is the butt of verbal abuse. We can see why her husband left this family high and dry sometime before the events of this memory play, abandoning not only this mother and son, but a girl, Laura, crippled with a limp in Williams’ script, but here played by newcomer Madison Ferris, mostly in a wheelchair, and when not, moving about bravely on hands and knees. This choice of actress is a reason that this Glass Menagerie makes you rethink a play you thought you knew. Stretched to abstract extreme by director Sam Gold whose vision this production realizes, the play’s traditional sitting room is gone, replaced by a bare cavernous stage; the whole, including a visit by an affable gentleman caller, Jim O’Connor, a perfect Finn Whittrock, is left to the imagination.

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At Lunch with Michelle Dockery at the Lotos Club: The Sense of an Ending

March 9, 2017

The Sense of an Ending, a Man Booker prize winning novel by the British author Julian Barnes, has at center a protagonist, Tony Webster, an uninteresting man with a vastly interesting past. In Ritesh Batra's movie The Sense of an Ending, intertwining narratives of past and present meet at a point of mystery: a suicide haunts in the way all suicides leave ultimate questions with no possible answers. At lunch at the literary Lotos Club this week, just before the film’s release, Michelle Dockery, Jim Broadbent, Harriet Walter, joined director Ritesh Batra for a panel moderated by Amanda Foreman, to ponder this puzzling story; it’s the sense of an ending, right?

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Sweeney Todd: The Barber of Fleet Street’s Revenge Tragedy

March 3, 2017

It is a tribute to the brilliance of Stephen Sondheim’s art that two so different productions of his work are now staged in New York. Uptown on Broadway, Sunday in the Park with George illuminates the creative mind of Georges Seurat, and downtown on Barrow Street, at the Barrow Street Theater, The Tooting Art Club’s production of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street inspires terror. With the theater tricked out as a pie shop, the audience seated at long tables designed for pub dining, the actors maneuver in your face, no matter that the play is essentially about a serial killer, a decent man brought low by the vagaries of Dickensian fate, his sidekick a woman trading in meat pies and, eh, alternate truths.

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Angelica Page’s Anxiety of Influence: Turning Page

February 28, 2017

At the outset of her one-woman show, Turning Page, perfectly staged in the intimacy of Dixon Place on Chrystie Street, Angelica Page explains why her mother’s spirit keeps calling out to her. For one thing, Geraldine Page was an Academy Award winning actress who rose to fame in several Tennessee Williams’ plays, and despite the kind of accolades and honors that anyone at Sunday night’s Oscars would die for, no one has written her biography or truly told her story. Encouraged by a psychic, Angelica Page, Geraldine’s daughter with her third husband Rip Torn, does just that, and the play, Turning Page, as its title suggests, is a journey.

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Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford in Sunday in the Park with George

February 25, 2017

Art isn’t easy. So say the characters in Sunday in the Park with George, now in a stellar revival at the newly renovated Hudson Theater. Part heady yet playful art history, part love story, the imaginative creation of painter Georges Seurat and his muse Dot from Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, has as its central conceit the painting of his famed “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.” Directed by Sarna Lapine, with Jake Gyllenhaal as the paint-aholic, famous for pointillism, you wonder, how does a person apply color like that, his hands moving in a staccato to the music. Dot, his appropriately named mistress, sits patiently for him but also attempts to distract the artist with daily living. For one thing, she’s carrying his child. Annaleigh Ashford is charming, as she eye rolls, speaking with a slight nasality reminiscent of Judy Holliday. And can she sing!

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