This time of year, Jane Fonda is usually at the Cannes Film Festival, but this year she is working back home. After a screening of the first two episodes of the second season of Netflix’ Grace and Frankie, part of a new Tribeca Talks series at the SVA Theater for the Tribeca Film Festival, the iconic stars Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin took the stage for a panel moderated by Gayle King. Chatting, bickering, japing, with one another, the stars fielded questions on aging, women in the industry, careers, and lovers. “This is how it is on the set,” they assured a packed audience. In the fall, Fonda was nominated for a Golden Globe for her role as an aging actress in Youth. She said, she’s just happy to be working. With Grace and Frankie now filming their third season, she and Tomlin will be working for a long time.
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Last week at the Pierre, the Fountain House annual symposium and luncheon focused on the topic of “Suicide: Looking for Answers” with a panel of experts in this field. A special humanitarian award was presented to HBO’s Sheila Nevins, introduced by Rosie O’Donnell.Dr. Maria Oquendo opened the symposium with the grim news that suicide has increased for girls aged 10-14, and for women aged 45-64. Professor Thomas Joiner who had lost his father to suicide spoke of three feelings often shared by those contemplating taking their lives: they often feel fearsome, burdensome, and lonely. Most emotional was Kevin Hines, a young man who survived after throwing himself off the Golden Gate Bridge. Rescued by the coast guard after a woman in a car called, and then immediately operated upon for his broken back, Hines is now an inspirational speaker on suicide, traveling all over the world with a message for those who see a loved one on the brink: “Have a meal together.”
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Women don’t have it so good in Tennessee Williams’ plays, and Orpheus Descending is one of his darkest. In the production at St. John’s Lutheran Church in the village, you can see why this one, with its histrionic speeches and soap opera story, is rarely produced. Which is why this production, low budget and noble, is its own kind of miracle, set where Christ and the apostles in stained glass can look on in sympathy and dismay. In Lady Torrance (Irene Glezos), Williams created a formidable heroine who is running the store, while her elderly husband (the legendary film star Keir Dullea) languishes sick. In comes a stranger (Todd d’Amour), a young man in a snakeskin jacket, who needs a job. Can you see where this is going? -
It was a big night for Megan Hilty on Tuesday, not only the opening of her two-week engagement at the Café Carlyle, but she’d garnered a Tony nomination that morning for her comedic bombshell turn in the revival of Noises Off! “And I wasn’t even singing,” she exuded, her blond curls taken back into a chignon. Shining bright in a black, curve hugging, lace and sequined gown, she’s shed the sass for class for this show, a tribute to Rosemary Clooney. -
Irritating and irascible, the subject of the documentary short, Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah, the French intellectual writer and filmmaker, Claude Lanzmann, could be charming, and cunning as he got his desired interviews. His epic-length Shoah (1985) went farthest to document the Holocaust, the most cataclysmic and defining event of the twentieth century, even as some deny it ever happened. In Spectres of the Shoah, to air on HBO on May 2, Adam Benzine, interviews the interviewer at age 90; the result is essential viewing for understanding Shoah’s remarkable backstory. -
As leading man to the pounding disco drama, American Psycho at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, Benjamin Walker is all abs and six pack. Sinfully envious, his Patrick Bateman embodies the ethos of the bygone late century: what he cannot have, he seeks to destroy. His body, and apartment’s walls are often red splattered as if this musical were a circle from Dante’s hell. Credit Es Devlin’s sets. You may question the premise of this show, a British import based upon Mary Harran’s 2000 film of the controversial 1991 book by Bret Easton Ellis, so misunderstood its original publisher cancelled: can you really make a musical about a serial killer? You might say, that misunderstanding can go for Bateman himself, as he compares business cards with friends and foes, diddles both fiancée and girl on the side, and generally acts out in axe wielding mayhem. Fortunately the projectile blood lands on a scrim; nothing living was hurt in the making. And if you can keep the numbing thump as satire, you may just find yourself having a good time. -
For some, even the talk of math inspires a mind freeze. The actor Dev Patel who plays a real life math genius from Madras claimed to be one of those last night at the premiere of his new movie, The Man Who Knew Infinity. As Srinivasa Ramanujan, his emphasis was the relationship, not the one with the lovely Devika Bhise who plays his wife Janaki, also attending the special night at Elyx House, but with G. H. Hardy, a perfect and prim Jeremy Irons in the role. Amazed by his facility with figures, Hardy invited Ramanujan to Cambridge, England where he faced racism, cold, and culture shock, and still managed to move mathematics forward much the way Sir Isaac Newton advanced the laws of physics, finding a formula for partitions that others thought was impossible. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society.
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The normally reticent Robert DeNiro could not repress himself at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall for the annual Chaplin Award Gala last night. Presenting clips of Morgan Freeman’s greatist hits, and there are lots of them, DeNiro groused, “Morgan gets to play Nelson Mandela and God. In the past year I played an intern, and Bernie f—ing Madoff.” That was the biggest laugh of the tribute, not counting the various attempts to brag about sex with Helen Mirren, as Morgan did in Red, a high point no doubt of any actor’s career. -
Even when you know where The Meddler is going, Susan Sarandon is so likable as Marnie, a mom from Brooklyn with a thick accent and a big heart, you root for her and yet understand why her daughter Lori wants to keep her at bay. It’s not every mother who would corner your ex, and ask him to go back with you. Rose Byrne plays Marnie’s daughter who is not always appreciative of mom’s special gifts, including her meddling, or as I’d call it, her pathological intrusiveness. She needs to get a life, and she does. From director Lorene Scafaria’s screenplay, and based on her experiences, The Meddler is funny, wise, easily the most crowd-pleasing film opening this week. -
Everybody Knows . . . Elizabeth Murray premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival’s closing weekend. Even as the artist Elizabeth Murray was making news, installing the major retrospective of her extraordinary sculptural paintings at MoMA in 2005, one of 4 women so respectfully displayed, room after room on MoMA’s 6th floor galleries, she was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. Film production designer Kristi Zea was already making a documentary about her and her prolific career. Unlike writer Nora Ephron, say, who made the decision to keep her illness under wraps, Murray was open about the disease that she would fight valiantly working at her studio. And now Zea had a theme for her documentary: “The tone of the movie changed. Suddenly we had a story we did not know we had. What I found out,” said Kristi Zea just before the film’s premiere screening at the Whitney Museum, part of the Tribeca Film Festival, “was how much people loved her. She was ambitious, didn’t take no for an answer. ‘Everybody knows’ was the name of her last painting. That has so many connotations: everybody knows that I am sick, everybody knows me but they don’t.” -
Nobody moves like Chita Rivera. With all due respect to Catherine Zeta-Jones who earned an Oscar for her film role as Velma in Chicago, with one quick pelvic thrust in director Rob Marshall’s direction for Rivera’s opening night at the Carlyle, Chita Rivera blows away all competition. Of course she originated the role of Velma in 1975, only one of her iconic Broadway performances in a career that includes Bye Bye Birdie, The Rink, Kiss of the Spider Woman, and West Side Story. Her set at the Carlyle, “An Evening of My Favorite Songs,” features ample samples from her shows accompanied by an expert band, with music director Michael Croiter on guitar, Michael Patrick Walker, associate music director on piano, Jim Donica’s bass and Dan Willis reeds. And, there are stories galore from this Broadway legend, who starts her set with “I Won’t Dance,” and says, “I have trouble standing still.” From her, that’s a promise.
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The essential ingredients in John Carney’s films: music and heart—see Once (2007) and Begin Again (2013)— bubble up in ample supply in his new one, Sing Street. The movie had its premiere Tuesday night at Metrograph, a new old space on Ludlow and Canal, just around the corner from necktie designer Alexander Olch’s chic boutique on Orchard. Metrograph is Olch’s place too: he’s combining his love of movies with his awesome garment-making skills. There, Courtney Love, Rudy Guiliani, Terry George, Paul Haggis, and many others picked up their popcorn and pop and planted themselves in the plush chairs for the screening. The seating seems kind of free form, yet perfect for viewing Sing Street, a coming of age tale sure to be a hit, with the most appealing and talented characters this side of Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! -
At Café Carlyle this week, Katherine Jenkins’ magnificent voice fills the intimate room with Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” even before she gets to the stage, a wonder in a strapless magnetic blue ball gown. Billed as a Welsh superstar, a title you would never dispute, she sings opera, folk songs, and show tunes, and tells tales of the Carlyle’s special resonance for her, having lunch with the Queen, touring with Andrea Bocelli, and being summoned by Andrew Lloyd Webber, to sample some “Phantom of the Opera” compositions. At times, you think the glasses on your table will shatter, but Katherine Jenkins is in total control for her set, “Viva la Diva.” -
Arthur Miller was well served on Broadway this season with revivals of A View from the Bridge and The Crucible, both brilliantly directed by Ivo van Hove. At the Walter Kerr Theater, the spirits in The Crucible come alive, and for a moment the girls possessed by demons and led by Saoirse Ronan’s Abigail look like they escaped from Mathilda, wreaking noisy havoc in unison, their inner demons like locusts in formation, moving to Philip Glass’ original and eerily percussive music. As Act II opens, this choreographed chaos is a thrilling sight, and terrifying too. Coming at a time in life when sexuality awakens, these girls in knee socks and short skirts express no less than the confusing physicality of early womanhood. Abigail especially has transgressed with John Proctor in the person of Ben Whishaw who was in fact the spirit Ariel in Julie Taymor’s The Tempest, and the creepy serial killer protagonist of Perfume. As Proctor, Whishaw wishes he’s had nothing to do with the nanny, Abigail, but now risen up in fury, she’s bent on revenge.Of course, written in 1953, the irrational, manipulative, political Salem tribunal led by Ciaran Hinds, possessed by a chilling perverse logic, reflects upon the McCarthy era and its “witch hunt” that ruined many a life particularly in the arts community. But the play would not have its allusive force if not for its very grounding in human frailty. If you see it in this framework, and with the superb performances of Sophie Okonedo as the good wife Elizabeth, and a fine supporting cast including Tina Benko, Tavi Gevinson, and Ashlei Sharpe Chestnut, as in A View from the Bridge, forbidden sex has reared its ugly head.
Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura
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Off the charts irrepressible, Jerry Lewis, a few days after his 90th birthday, took charge at his own Q&A at MoMA after a screening of his first movie in 18 years, Max Rose. From a script written by first time director Daniel Noah, who persisted through many rejections from those who think you cannot make money on a movie about old people, Max Rose finally got to Lewis who accepted the offer to star. And from the looks of their relationship onstage at MoMA, it was made in heaven. Not so for the moderator, critic David Kehr, who became the target of many Lewis jabs: “Are you going to hang around long?” Fortunately, Kehr had a sense of humor and a thick skin sitting through as Lewis interviewed himself. -
A political theme ran through this year’s Sarasota Film Festival extending to its yearly event Cinema Tropicale redubbed Cinema Politicale. At the huge bash at Michael’s on East, a near naked man wore stars and stripes body paint in red, white, and blue. Guests included Matthew Modine, represented at the festival with a screening of Full Metal Jacket, Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 war movie that registers anti-war. At a resonant panel, three shorts Modine conceived screened, all revealing his deeply felt philosophy. One was made after 9/11. He interviewed people in Washington Square Park to show what America looks like in all its diversity. He’s also a producer and narrator of the documentary The Brainwashing of my Dad. Director Jen Senko traces the transformation of America through talk radio and the advent of meanness through her father who was, in her youth, a devoted John F. Kennedy democrat. Noting his profound change, the documentary features Rush Limbaugh stoking fear and racism through calculated mistruths. The movie goes far to show how we got to where we are.
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Rumer Willis, eldest daughter of Demi Moore and Bruce Willis may have her own take on love. At 28, she’s a headliner at the famed Café Carlyle with a jazzy, pop show that looks at love from many angles. Covering Doris Day’s “Perhaps,” she imagines a new honesty in the cha-cha beat. For Buddy Johnson’s “Since I Fell for You,” she croons, and goes softer where Liza Minelli belts Kander & Ebb’s “Maybe This Time.” Bringing her life partner and music director Tye Blue to the stage—“We have a lot in common. We both like boys”—she sings “Class” from Chicago; this number made me wish I had seen her as Roxie last year. -
Depending on what era formed you, you can relate to a piece of Gloria Vanderbilt. If you are old enough, it’s the “Poor Little Rich Girl” headlines, or maybe it’s her dating Frank Sinatra, or the designer jeans with the swan logo. Women wore her name across their derrieres. She’s lived every era fully, and as her son Anderson Cooper maintains, she’s still looking for the next great love, just around the corner. Anything can happen, of course, but at 92 no one is taking chances: Mother and son have co-authored a book, The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son on Life, Love, and Loss. Vanderbilt will have a show of her art, paintings, drawings and dream boxes, and Cooper and Vanderbilt star in a documentary by Liz Garbus called Nothing Left Unsaid, which brings her complicated story line into a coherent narrative. To air this weekend on HBO, Nothing Left Unsaid is a portrait of an American original. Introducing at the Time Warner Center, HBO’s Sheila Nevins said, “It’s beautiful. And if I haven’t called all my films beautiful, it’s too bad. This one really is.” -
The woman to my left at the Paris Theater premiere of The Girlfriend Experience pulled a lipstick out of her Prada bag and applied the nude Bobbi Brown in one swift motion without a mirror. I do that with my way more risky Russian red MAC, I thought, feeling competitive, and contemplating the series sample I was about to see. Is close female scrutiny what “the girlfriend experience” is all about? Is it a series in spiritual kinship to Claudia Weill’s “Girlfriends” from 1978? Or maybe HBO’s “Girls”? Well no, in the two episodes screened, we saw a smart young law firm intern, played by Riley Keough, Elvis Presley’s granddaughter, turn predator at a bar, have random sex (as in Erica Jong’s famed “zipless fuck”), become a high-priced call girl, and couple with her woman friend. This sexy drama will play out on Starz starting on April 10, for old school viewing, and will also be available for binge watching. So this is what Steven Soderbergh has been doing since he renounced filmmaking! -
The subtitle of the unflinching documentary, Robert Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, comes from Senator Jesse Helms, enemy of free expression, hallmark of our democracy. Bookending the movie about the photographer who came of age in the ‘60’s and died at age 42 of AIDS in 1989, the senator’s words are meant to denigrate the art of one of the era’s most gifted photographers, and to usher in a new era of conservative repression. In fact, if you look at the pictures as instructed—and they are amply provided in this rich film to air on April 4 on HBO, you will see classic harmonies of shapes, genitals posed as objects of design, pistils and lilies so idealized, flowers exude an austere eroticism. Original and emblematic of the bygone moment from which the demimonde portraits emerged, Mapplethorpe’s work is simply beautiful. -
The sweet twang of bluegrass is just the right sound for the sweet happy ending of “Bright Star,” a musical based on a newspaper item found by Edie Brickell describing a miracle. Working with Steve Martin, a not so wild and crazy guy in his current incarnation as Americana icon, the two have composed country songs for a band that plays from inside an A-frame house. Pushed along Broadway’s Cort Theater stage as scenes change, the house is home to a family near Asheville, North Carolina, when son Billy Cane (A. J. Shively)) comes back from the war, and wants to be a writer. This post-war moment flashes back twenty-three years, to a spirited girl named Alice Murphy, with a story to tell. -
Steven Page, a guy-next-door type who co-founded a Canadian pop band called the Barenaked Ladies, and left to pursue a solo career in 2009, performs at the Café Carlyle for two weeks. You won’t be singing along to his tunes of day-to-day male angst. That’s because his tunes are not familiar: he has composed all of his material with several collaborators including Craig Northey who joins him on electric guitar and vocals. Page moves between piano and acoustic guitar, and Kevin Fox plays the cello. The ensemble makes for an excellent accompaniment to songs about a songwriter who may or may not have gone dry: “No Song Left to Save Me,” he sings with heartfelt verve in this highly entertaining show. -
The patron saint of smart New York women, Nora Ephron is sorely missed. We have not seen her like since 2012 when she died at age 71 of pneumonia and leukemia. Not that you could refashion her particular savvy, audacity, and wit. Now her son Jacob Bernstein has made a film about her, Everything is Copy: Nora Ephron Scripted & Unscripted to air on March 21 on HBO, and it is so full of memorable interviews with her on Charlie Rose and Dick Cavett, you can feel her presence in our midst. -
Joan Osborne’s many fans expected her to sing her signature “One of Us” at the Café Carlyle this week, but instead she sang a specially designed show of Bob Dylan tunes, and had us all in a head bobbing sing-along. “Who knew the Carlyle could become a hootenanny,” she quipped after telling tales of performing at Delta 88 and Mondo Cane on Bleecker Street. Bringing her downtown bluesy flair uptown, from “Highway 61,” to “Tangled Up in Blue,” to “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” some songs well rehearsed and some just winging it, the evening was a rediscovery of familiar Dylan, re-mined for new riches. -
Forget Cats. So much has spun off T. S. Eliot’s poetry, the Wasteland and Four Quartets scribe would be especially laughing from the grave with Noah Haidle’s surreal play Smokefall, a MCC production at the Lucille Lortel Theater. If you pay attention to the Playbill’s author note where Haidle claims to be living in Detroit with his wife and their nine cats, you can guess what you are in for. Details matter. The colonel (Tom Bloom), one of play’s characters, has dementia and still manages to advise, never go to Detroit. Among the other odd characters residing in the family’s house in Grand Rapids, Michigan is his daughter Violet (Robin Tunney in her stage debut), pregnant with twin boys, and granddaughter Beauty (Taylor Richardson), silent for most of the play. She’s decided never to speak again after hearing her parents quarrel. Her diet consists of earth, tree bark and paint, particularly of a sea green hue. Picky, picky! Most formidable is Footnote (Zachary Quinto), a narrator of this family’s lore, a philosopher, who doubles as one of the twins about to be born. Yes, prepare for birth!
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