Some men just don’t get old: Dark glasses do not hide John Lloyd Young’s prom date good looks. He may be hiding from his girly fans’ swoons, but on the night we attended his Café Carlyle run, the audience was passionate about another side of this Jersey Boys’ career, his efforts to lobby for arts education. So when this dimple chinned crooner who hearkens back to your coming of age tells you he has serenaded Karen Pence, Lynne Cheney, Michelle Obama and Jill Biden,his bipartisan activism has meaning, as he launches into “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You.”
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Some men just don’t get old: Dark glasses do not hide John Lloyd Young’s prom date good looks. He may be hiding from his girly fans’ swoons, but on the night we attended his Café Carlyle run, the audience was passionate about another side of this Jersey Boys’ career, his efforts to lobby for arts education. So when this dimple chinned crooner who hearkens back to your coming of age tells you he has serenaded Karen Pence, Lynne Cheney, Michelle Obama and Jill Biden,his bipartisan activism has meaning, as he launches into “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You.”
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The wild party at the Imperial Theater known as Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 is not your usual samovar affair. This entertainment, referencing 70 pages of Tolstoy’s masterpiece War & Peace, has its own backstory: two downtown versions had the performers mingling among the guests, diners at a banquet. While that novelty is not repeated on Broadway, the audience is privy to the gesture. The Imperial Theater is converted to a kind of supper club, music at center, with tables all the way to the stage, although the staging is not distinctly separated from the theater’s ample front area. Ramps just about everywhere allow the company to enter and exit, and dance, offering—throwing– boxed knishes to those strategically seated. Small bars serve vodka at intermission. A coffee table sized book describes the journey of this new musical to Broadway. -
Sting and J. Ralph composed the song, “The Empty Chair” for the documentary Jim: The James Foley Story. As you see the clip of Sting performing that song at Bataclan, the historic Paris theater, for its opening one year after ISIS terrorists gunned down 89 people there, you cannot help but register that in “The Empty Chair—Live from the Bataclan,” his empathy is so overwhelming, Sting puts himself in the place of the man who was so brutally murdered by ISIS terrorists in 2014, singing, “Keep my place in the empty chair/ Somehow I’ll be There”/ “Vive la Bataclan!”James Foley, was a photojournalist committed to bringing news from war zones. He was taken captive as he was documenting civilian casualties of war, specifically the Syrian refugees. You may remember him best from a widely seen photo of Jim kneeling beside “Jihadi John,” the man who would behead him. The film was made by his childhood friend, Brian Oakes, and features Foley’s family, friends, fellow journalists in the field, and fellow captives, speaking about the life, integrity of this man, and his final days.
Just before the Grammy’s, I had a chance to speak to Sting, on tour with his new album, 57th and 9th, and J. Ralph about their work on “The Empty Chair,” now nominated for a Best Original Song Oscar.
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A musical of outsized passions as only Andrew Lloyd Webber could compose, Sunset Boulevard trades in hyperbole. “The greatest star of all,” in the words of Max, her homme d’affaires, Norma Desmond is camp drama queen extraordinaire. With Glenn Close in the role, reprising her Tony-winning performance of 22 years ago at the Palace Theater, Norma is petit as she is large. Need dominates her manipulations so acutely, only the powerhouse chops of the actress who put the word fatal in Fatal Attraction could pull off this tour de force of fragility and grand delusion. -
David Oyelowo, so brilliant in a recent theater production of Othello, playing the king against Daniel Craig’s Iago, is now a king again in Amma Asante’s A United Kingdom. Groomed to take the throne of Botswana, Seretse Khama is studying in London where he meets an office girl, Ruth Williams (the lovely, angelic Rosamund Pike). They fall in love. Let us just say, in this period drama based on a true story, the racism works both ways; and the colonialism is in-your-face exploitative. Some lines in this movie had the audience cheering: one wag, predicting the white woman would not last as the king’s wife in dusty Africa opines, “Wait till she finds out, there’s no Buckingham Palace in Botswana.” And when Ruth Williams is picked out of the typing pool, she asserts, “I’m no office girl.” Every time a British official condescends to the king, he offers a sherry, a double dig as in Botswana the blacks are not allowed to drink. -
It’s a given: boys left to their own devices can come to no good. In the fine MCC Theater production of YEN, a British import, at the Lucille Lortel Theater, the unformed men in question are brothers by the same mother, one static, almost comatose in front of a tv when we meet him, the younger bouncing off walls in paint peeling squalor. Then a wasted mess of a woman comes to visit, as an unseen character barks from a distance, disturbing, and a testament to the power of the drama we create in our imaginations—if we are trusted by good writing, as we are in Anna Jordan’s script. Praise to Lucas Hedges as the taciturn Hench in his theater debut just as he was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his work in Manchester By the Sea, and to his foil Bobbie (Justice Smith). And to the women in this story: Ari Graynor as Maggie, their neglectful mom, dead drunk on first appearance, and Stefania LaVie Owen as Jennifer, a neighboring girl from Wales whose nickname is the play’s title, and wistful hope, as a yen might suggest. -
After you have seen more of Lena Dunham’s body than that of any other serious actress, there’s always the question of how you will greet her in the flesh, clothed and social, as at the spectacular HBO party thrown for the dynamic Girls quartet at Cipriani 42nd Street this week. Guests had just come from Alice Tully Hall, from a preview of an opening double episode, and a second, the first featuring Dunham’s Hannah sunbathing her most private part in Montauk. That moment gave pause to a more demure Maggie Gyllenhaal who revealed that she shows skin in her new series, “The Deuce,” in which she plays a prostitute. “I come from an older generation of women,” said Gyllenhaal with regard to Dunham’s unashamed nakedness and frank display of sexuality. No matter, everyone applauds Dunham’s brilliance as a writer and actress: her brave approach to normalizing the female image in every perfect imperfection is simply groundbreaking. -
Calling his Cafe Carlyle show, “Does This Song Make Me Look Fat?” Isaac Mizrahi signals surreal leaps of fancy from music, to looks, to insecurities. Who could ask for more from an evening? Multitalented, the fashion designer/ entertainer croons cabaret standards backed by a great band, his act sprinkled with self-mocking quips recalling Joan Rivers at her most cheeky! Really, what’s not to love? -
Elie Wiesel wrote Night, you could say, for an evening such as Sunday night’s marathon reading of his Holocaust era memoir at the Museum of Jewish Heritage: To Remember. He knew that the history in concentration camps—Auschwitz was just one of many– was so bad, so bleak, so dark, so beyond belief, he had to try to make testimony for generations to come. Moreover, perhaps he knew there would always be those who, out of the racism and hate that spawned the Holocaust and the systematic and specific murder of the Jewish people in the first place, would want to deny such a thing actually happened. The Trump administration’s tepid acknowledgment of Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27 is a variation on this theme, never mentioning the targeting of Jews for mass annihilation. That controversy hung in the air, relieved only by poetry. -
Israeli filmmaker Tomer Heymann gesticulates wildly talking about Ohad Naharin, a much-awarded choreographer, the artistic director of the Tel Aviv based Batsheva Dance Company. In town in early January with his exceptional, evocative documentary, Mr. Gaga: A True Story of Love and Dance, a highlight of this year’s Jewish Film Festival, Heymann exudes, “Ohad is an amazing character, perfect for a movie. I met him 25 years ago when I was a waiter; here was a sexy man with a beautiful Japanese woman, his wife, dancer Mari Kajiwara, a very unusual couple. They gave me a big tip.”“I knew a “hora;” said the filmmaker who made Mr. Gaga with his producer and brother, Barak, “that’s what I knew of dance. When I was offered a free ticket to “Kyr,” a Batsheva Dance Company performance, it changed my life forever.” Eight years in the making, Mr. Gaga will premiere this week at Film Forum and the Elinor Bunin Monroe Film Center at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in tandem with Ohad Naharin’s Batsheva Dance Company’s premiere of “Last Work” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Just prior to these openings, I had a chance to speak to Ohad Naharin, indeed handsome, with a quick and ironic wit, about the film, the birth of Gaga, Natalie Portman, and the vagaries of politics and art.
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At a wall-to-wall packed opening at the Grey Art Gallery, photographer/ filmmaker / musician John Cohen held court in front of a video installation of some vintage photographs he took at the heyday of artist owned galleries on 10th Street. Talk about a fascinating pocket of art history! “Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City 1952-1965” features paintings by Alex Katz, Jim Dine, Jane Wilson and other noted artists of the midcentury, Dan Flavin, George Segal, exhibited in the context of the galleries: Tanager, Hansa, Brata, Delancey Street Museum, to name a few. A John Cohen photograph graces the handsome exhibition catalogue’s cover: Red Grooms crossing Third Avenue, transporting artwork in what looks like a baby buggy to the Reuben Gallery in 1960. -
Now, a dozen years after his death, August Wilson is on a roll. Maybe the wide release of the movie of his stage play Fences will bring him a posthumous Oscar for Best Screenplay, but more, because Denzel Washington has vowed he would see all 10 plays of this bard of Pittsburgh’s Hill District produced. A new Manhattan Theater Club production of Jitney, a 1982 drama at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, a Broadway debut for this early play, is a must-see. -
On inauguration eve, a different man of wealth was feted at MoMA, at a special screening of Becoming Warren Buffett. HBO’s Richard Pepler described the film’s subject as a man of decency, integrity, and character. Directed by Peter Kundhardt, this riveting film illuminates the life and work of Buffett, born in the depression in Omaha, to become one of the richest men in the world. And yet, he seems the opposite of many men of means: humble, self-effacing, humanitarian, without any posturing or affect of wealth. In an initial sequence, we see him driving himself to work, stopping at McDonald’s, weighing in on his breakfast choices. Many viewers of this essential documentary will look for his wisdom on how to amass wealth and make profitable investments. While few have his genius, his tips are of value. But even more vital is the realization that the ability to live as he does is within everyone’s reach, rich or poor. -
Not sure whether or not Jill Kargman would riff on the Led Zepplin classic “Stairway to Heaven,” I had to admit, the comedienne, creator of Bravo’s Odd Mom Out, and author of Sprinkle Glitter on my Grave brought something different to the Café Carlyle. The set list, for example, featured only eight songs. Kargman is gifted at stand up, weaving songs and stories together into a funny, entertaining evening, spoken from the perspective of an East Side mom at odds with the prevailing ethos. Tales of a Southern nanny named Sue, a Bulgarian make up artist, and a trip to Disneyworld gave new meaning to Jon Bon Jovi/ Richie Sambora’s “Wanted Dead or Alive,” the Alice Cooper, Desmond Child, John McCurry hit “Poison,” and Nikki Sixx, Mick Mars, Tommy Lee’s “Girls, Girls, Girls.” -
At the much celebrated New York Theatre Workshop production of Othello, Andrew Lieberman’s austere set looks like the inside of a packing crate as the audience files in, taking seats on three sides; mattresses are strewn about the floor, as if we are inside a military barrack. Under the imaginative direction of Sam Gold, the play starts in the dark. This is Shakespeare’s play, after all, and the black fixes you immediately on the bard’s poetry. By the time lights go on, you are prepared to witness Iago’s (superb Daniel Craig) cunning, brutal betrayal of the naïve, besotted Othello (David Oyelowo, equally Craig’s match in excellence). Jane Cox’s lighting creates the intimacy of a bedroom for vigorous lovemaking, and an arena for fierce man-to-man combat. You are not likely to find theater this engaging, this terrific, this season. -
At the Cinema Eye Honors luncheon celebrating documentary films and the filmmakers who make them, Otto Bell exulted: his The Eagle Huntress had just received a BAFTA nod, and one from the Directors’ Guild of America, but more exciting to him was a tea last week at the Plaza Athenee where Robert Kennedy Jr. had a conversation with him about falconry, and brought his own eagle. Successful with this first-time feature, Bell makes commercials for CNN. Blown away, he asked, “Can you believe it: “Robert Kennedy, Jr.!” -
This is a sign of things to come in the next four years: Meryl Streep outspoken about the performance of the year, the one that stunned her, and it wasn’t even in a fiction film. It was a real life public figure—unnamed—who mocked a disabled reporter. “Disrespect incites disrespect.” We need the press to hold power to account and out every outrage. I am paraphrasing from Streep’s powerful message from the podium of the Golden Globes, as she received the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement . Streep singled out only one outrage among so many she could have chosen from this public figure, the one who will now become the leader of the free world. Feel The Big Chill. -
Sunny Pawar, in case you have not yet seen this movie, is “Lion”’s secret weapon. Pint-sized and precocious, Pawar, now eight, was six when he inhabited the role of Saroo as a young boy separated from his mother in a remote area of India. When he began his acting career starring in this movie, he did not know English, but this week at a special screening of the film and dinner at The Monkey Bar, he was happy to talk about “Lion,” how director Garth Davis cast him, selecting from 2000 boys, and his next movie, “Love, Sonia” co-starring Demi Moore. In short, and no pun intended, he’s a natural with a big career ahead of him. I can still hear his whiskey voice. -
Why is this night different from all other [awards] nights? New York Magazine film critic and emcee for this annual awards fete David Edelstein had some answers about honoring the storytelling but Mark Ruffalo, on hand to present the Best Screenplay award to Kenneth Lonergan for “Manchester By the Sea,” put it succinctly: the speeches are fresh. This being the beginning of the long slog to Oscars, everyone can let loose. And “Manchester”’s lead, Casey Affleck did, reading one-liners from negative reviews, especially from the night’s emcee. Edelstein, for his part, was ruffled and began to praise Affleck for just about everything, until that wore thin. But it was all in good fun. Had the awards been televised as the Globes and Oscars are, this would have been a different night indeed. -
The quiet charm of Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, his latest movie, about a poet evoking the time and place of predecessor wordsmiths William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg, impresses with vitality, a life force. So much, that two-time Academy Award nominee for Best Actress, Sylvia Miles, quipped, she paid her academy dues just to nominate this work for a Best Picture Oscar: “It’s the best film I’ve ever seen on a creative person.” In a season of noisier films, will academy voters notice this gentle work of art?Adam Driver stars. Paterson is ensconced in the workaday life of a bus driver in Paterson, picking up his vehicle at the depot, picking up passengers on his route. He enjoys a happy home life with Laura (Golshifteh Farahani obsessed with circles or maybe orbs, and his neighborhood bar where he ties up his dog outside and retreats for a nightly beer, his routines as regular as the movements of the planets. Even his most casual observations, visions realized onscreen in a clever scrawl, recast all in the language of the eternal.
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“That’s our trouble,” said my friend Roger, “everything used to be something else.” I had just told him about meeting my brothers and their families for the third Chanukah candle, 13 relatives in all, at a glatt kosher restaurant called Taam Tov in the Diamond District, on the very site of the legendary Gotham Book Mart. On November 17, 1986, my book, Kerouac’s Spontaneous Poetics, one of the first full-scale studies on the iconic beat poet and novelist, was celebrated here. A sign, “Wise Men Fish Here,” marked the spot, a literary emporium on a bejeweled street. The James Joyce Society met here. Among many other book parties, a reissue of Junkie was feted here too, in 1977. Carl Solomon and Patti Smith attended, honoring William S. Burroughs’ work. Poet Allen Ginsberg, who had clerked here back in the day, snapped my picture. -
Pedro Almodovar loves women. His films feature memorable female roles: look at Kika, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Talk to Her, Volver, yet another great part for his protégé Penelope Cruz, and now Julieta, the titular protagonist penned for two fine Spanish actresses: Emma Suarez as the mature Julieta, and Adriana Ugarte, Julieta as a young woman. Based on short stories by Canadian author Alice Munro, Julieta further illustrates Almodovar’s literary bent—The Skin I Live In, for example was an adaptation of Thierry Jonquet’s revenge tale, Migale, but just right for his style, on the verge of melodrama. His women, in every case, are out there. Last fall, I had the opportunity to talk to his stars about working with this unique Spanish auteur, and how he prepared them for playing Julieta. -
How do you bring the brilliant, Pulitzer Prize winning Fences, to the screen? You stick close to August Wilson’s jazz poetry. This week Fences was celebrated with a screening at Lincoln Center’s jazz venue, Rose Hall. The movie’s director Denzel Washington led his killer hand-picked cast including Viola Davis, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Mykelti Williamson, Russell Hornsby—Denzel Washington wanted his actors to stand with him. -
Coney Island’s roller coaster known as The Cyclone was simultaneously alluring and terrifying. The Cyclone in Ride the Cyclone, a glorious MCC production at the Lucille Lortel Theater is no different with its premise of promising members of the Saint Cassian High School chamber choir wiped out on a single ride. Alluring, yes, terrifying, yes, but add teeming with life, despite the down cycle of death. A disembodied carny head in a box predicts the teens’ demise; the Amazing Karnac serves further to narrate their misfortune, and invite each to tell the story of a life interrupted. Brooke Maxwell and Jacob Richmond’s book focuses on these teens’ inner lives, revealing much to sing and dance about, and they do, especially as Karnac will restore one of them to the land of the living. As directed and choreographed by Rachel Rockwell, each one makes his or her case: attention must be paid. -
When I met with Gaston Pavlovich at the Ritz Carlton to talk about his work on Martin Scorsese’s Silence, the film’s producer expressed doubt: would movie goers come to this two hour plus film set in 17th century Japan about the persecution of Christians? I had just seen Silence the night before with an awe-struck audience; a panel followed, including producers Emma Koskoff and Irwin Winkler, and the Japanese actor Issey Ogata who plays The Inquisitor. From an opening procession in a shimmering mist, the film feels special. Scorsese told the rapt crowd, it was Ang Lee who suggested he shoot in Taiwan. Andrew Garfield was cast as Rodrigues because he read well for the part, but more, he wanted it so much. Scorsese wanted to film this book, Silence by Shusaku Endo, for 28 years. Many came away believing, as I did, that Silence was a game changer.
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