First the announcement: the kids in School of Rock bringing down the house at the Winter Garden Theater are playing their own instruments. As this rousing show hews close to the 2003 Richard Linklater movie on which it is based, everyone knows the terrain. Rock is freedom, man, and the joy of School of Rock comes from some brilliant casting: Alex Brightman’s Dewey literally channels Jack Black, and those kids are a force unto themselves. A concert musical in the end, it breaks the Broadway form in introducing the band by actor name. By that time you are out of your seat thumping the beat.
recent posts
- 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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When the New York Film Critics Circle named Michael Keaton Best Actor, the game changed for Spotlight. The ensemble cast had been honored at the Gotham Awards the night before; up until that point critics and pundits found it difficult to discern a lead actor among the fine ones in this movie. But this win for Keaton makes sense on so many levels: He portrays the Spotlight bureau chief Walter “Robby” Robinson who, as a character grows and changes in the manner of a classic protagonist, allowing Keaton to be considered for the prize he did not receive for his lead turn in last year’s Birdman. The Best Supporting spot can go to Mark Ruffalo who plays Michael Rizendes, one of the key Spotlight reporters on the Boston Globe story about pervasive abuse of young people by Catholic priests. Bringing the film into sharper focus, Spotlight is about the media’s role in the cover-up. -
Harvey Weinstein threw a swell party for Helen Mirren this week at House of Elyx, a chic loft in the Meatpacking that Mickey Rourke used to own. Standing and greeting guests for two hours, Mirren chatted with admirers of her work in Woman in Gold, based on the true story of Maria Altmann, who with her lawyer E. Randol Schoenberg took on the Austrian government to regain Klimt’s famous painting, Nazi-held loot in the Holocaust. The drink of the night: a special cocktail with a gold leaf and Absolut Elyx served in old-fashioned champagne glasses. Mirren talks clothes: she wore a floral Dolce & Gabbana shape hugging sheath, the better to be seen, she said, among the sea of black that marks a New York social event. She talks human rights: reminding a clutch of fans of her speech at the Gotham Awards where she segued from marital sex to the plight of the poet Ashraf Fayadh in Saudi Arabia sentenced to death for his writing. “I was among people of influence,” she explained, and urged everyone to take action through PEN. -
That Spotlight won Best Feature at the Gotham Awards last night was not a surprise. These awards, usually celebrating the edgy in filmmaking, noted Carol and Tangerine and The Diary of a Teenage Girl, but the win for Spotlight, for many, is an indication of a sweep in the months ahead. Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer’s script won the Best Screenplay award. The Spotlight ensemble seemed poised for this recognition: everyone but Stanley Tucci was present for its Best Ensemble special Jury award: Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Liev Schreiber, John Slattery, Brian D’Arcy James, Billy Crudup, and Rachel McAdams posed for cameras, and shouted out to the newspaper men on whom many of their characters were based. -
If you are going to celebrate a movie following a group of guys who make a lot of money, The Four Seasons is a good place to be. So it seemed as director Adam McKay, his stars Brad Pitt and Ryan Gosling, Pitt’s Plan B producing partners DeDe Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner, and co-screenwriter with McKay Charles Randolph joined Malcom Gladwell for a panel discussing the making of the film The Big Short, based on the book by Michael Lewis. Steve Carell and Christian Bale, not present at the luncheon, square off the stellar cast. A great entertainment, fast paced like an action flick,The Big Short limns the economic collapse of 2008 through the machinations of four men. -
On screen Bill Pullman is that guy, rarely first choice for the girl, but you spend a lot of watching wondering exactly why not: see Sleepless in Seattle, or While You Were Sleeping; he comes late, back from the war, in the movie A League of their Own, and Geena Davis leaves baseball for his shy winsome character. Perfect for the romantic comedy genre, Bill Pullman was also a brilliant fit for David Lynch in his Lost Highway, an observation made by Greil Marcus in his The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice, in which he could trace the American landscape across Bill Pullman’s face: “I always saw something in his eyes,” Marcus quotes Lynch, and it’s that quality that makes him a tender American icon on film.
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Don’t expect Die Hard Bruce Willis in his Broadway debut in Misery at the Broadhurst Theater. As best-selling author Paul Sheldon in the play based on a beloved if frightening film based on a beloved if frightening Stephen King book, Willis drops the tough guy pose, making most of his moves in a vertical position. That’s because he’s been in a terrible car crash, and fortunately saved from the wreck by his # One Fan, Annie Wilkes, as feisty and superb as the seasoned actor Laurie Metcalf gets. Annie has made up a lovely bedroom for him in her house, and she’s got plans, wielding both a mallet and a rifle as needed. A good case could be made for gun control, at least background checks for crazies. -
The Oscar buzz around Todd Haynes’ new movie Carol may focus on the two women Cate Blanchett’s Carol and Rooney Mara’s Therese, but Phyllis Nagy’s adapted screenplay, from Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Price of Salt, will surely garner an Oscar nod too. The story of two women, an upper class suburban housewife and mother, and a shopgirl cum photographer, and their love affair, subversive for the early 1950’s, is timely, with a screenplay that is intelligent, and avoids clichés and sentimentality. Carol is married to Harge (an excellent Kyle Chandler), handsome and moneyed, but the marriage is cold. Yes, there is sex, but not lurid. -
A master storyteller in the tradition of medieval balladeers, Sting recounted a childhood experience at a celebration this week of his The Last Ship from the River of the Northern City, a handcrafted boxed edition of his Last Ship lyrics with woodcuts by “luminist” painter Stephen Hannock, published by Two Ponds Press. Growing up in his Northern English city of Newcastle, near Scotland and water, Sting used to attend official ship christenings. Because dignitaries and royals would attend too, his mother would dress him in Sunday best, attire he hated. Once he saw the queen there, and in a moment fantasized that they had made eye contact, a personal connection. He saw the fancy automobile in which she arrived and imagined a different life from the one he was clearly destined for. And now of course he lives in Manhattan. He pointed to the spectacular panorama from the 44th floor of the Hearst Building, and, accompanying himself on guitar, sang: “Dead Man’s Boots,” “The Night the Pugilist Learned to Dance,” and “The Last Ship.” -
The stage at the Lyceum Theater for this exceptional theater event, the current revival of Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge looks like a set for a boxing match, with audience on three sides, not the more traditional sitting room of a Brooklyn apartment. Director Ivo van Hove’s vision goes for the iconic: a fight ring, a stand-in for a battle of emotion. Unlike a previous New York revival where an actual bridge looked to the joining of boroughs, in this production’s abstract conception, the bridge, a device for transitions may refer to coming to America, old school mores versus new, life and death. The bridge may be the play’s trans-Atlantic journey from London’s Young Vic production to these shores. Most powerfully, here invisible, the bridge is yours to imagine. -
In celebration of their new cookbook, Fig & Olive: The Cuisine of the French Riviera, Francine and Laurent Halasz, mother and her devoted son, greeted dinner guests with glasses of Veuve Clicquot and warmth at the Fig & Olive restaurant in the Meatpacking this week. Laurent especially emphasized the work of his mother in creating the special recipes contained in the book, an Assouline publication, and for their restaurants. With smiles to all, Francine, gorgeous in red, worked the room, not saying much as she does not speak English, but you could see that the room was packed with grateful diners, already high on champagne, and spirited by the chestnut and butternut squash soup with Grenache Syrah pairing. -
The sixth annual DOC NYC festival opened on Thursday with Miss Sharon Jones!, Barbara Kopple’s documentary about soul singer Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. Early on we see Sharon Jones getting her short braids shorn, an accommodation to her stage two pancreatic cancer as she was being treated with chemo. A pint-sized dynamo, Sharon Jones is a tough person to keep down. The film follows her care in Sharon Springs, New York with her friend Megan, a healer, who blends green smoothies to ensure Jones stays on a healthy diet. Her doctors are on board too, and her band mates who depend on the gigs. Brothers, they form a bond through their music and lives, escorting Jones to her doctors, as well as backing her onstage. They know that Sharon Jones is an indomitable force with raging talent, and they’ve held together for decades. For performances alone, this is a film to see. At Lugo where an after screening party was a celebration of this film and the week of documentaries to come, Barbara Kopple spoke about how Miss Sharon Jones! fits into her exceptional body of work: “It’s about family.” -
Aaron Mark’s play, Empanada Loca, a dramatic monologue that zips by in 95 minutes, starts in the dark. A voice, a light, and then Dolores! As Dolores, Daphne Rubin-Vega, her cheeks hollow as a skeleton, framed by her hoodie, recounts her life story, how she came to live here in the lowest recesses of a subway tunnel. The fine staging is minimalist at the Labyrinth Theater, just lights in a black box with a massage table at center. Infinitely resourceful, a skill she picked up in prison, Dolores has wired the space for lighting, she says with pride, so a visitor can actually see her, and get used to the dark, as she did, although the food’s not great down here several levels down, and loneliness is an issue. -
At 21 Club this week, screenwriter/ director Oren Moverman spoke excitedly about his new vocation as activist. Co-writer of Love & Mercy, Moverman was largely responsible for crafting a script, not your standard issue biopic about Beach Boy Brian Wilson, but a complex view of this iconic musician at two distinct points of his life. Early on, Paul Dano plays Brian Wilson, and later John Cusack, when he is out of the public eye, and totally under the control of Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti) for his growing psychosis. In a real life love story, Melinda, a car salesperson with soul (a wonderful Elizabeth Banks) rescues him. -
Philippe Sands, an eminent London-based human rights lawyer, stands in a grassy field near Lvov, the Polish/Ukrainian home of his grandfather in the documentary, What our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy. By the end of the Holocaust, eighty members of his family had been murdered and disposed of in this place. He stands in this mass burial site with two men, each sons of high-ranking Nazis responsible for the murders in this area. Sands claims to want accountability: one of these sons, Niklas Frank, hated his father, and what he did. The other, Horst von Wachter, still cannot come to terms with his father’s direct command of these horrors. Now in his 70’s Horst laments the loss of his childhood from the time he was six, and little else. In the film, he is relieved, and pleased, when Ukrainians in nationalist Waffen SS uniforms congratulate Horst for his father’s wartime actions. Unsettling viewing, this provocative documentary is a picture of the complexities that still dominate the psyche of those related to the Holocaust. -
At lunch in the book-lined dining room of the Lotos Club this week, Saoirse Ronan joined director John Crowley and producer Finola Dwyer for a discussion of the film Brooklyn, based on Colm Toibin’s beloved novel. Ronan stars as Eilis Lacey, a young woman who comes to America from Ireland. Moderated by Doubt playwright John Patrick Shanley, the panel discussed the film’s themes while Shanley spiced the proceedings with groan-worthy quips about having had enough to drink—oh those Irish!—Ronan’s radiant Eilis is the performance to watch as awards near.
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Bespectacled and mustachioed Bryan Cranston as famed screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, submerged in the bath, his work, smokes and whiskey laid out on a tray bestride the tub is a hilarious image of a writer at work. In Jay Roach’s new movie Trumbo, his heyday in Hollywood, testimony before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee during the ‘50’s red scare, prison term, and post-prison career fronting scripts, play like a cartoon of a world gone mad. Surrounding him are a loving family, with wife Cleo (Diane Lane), daughter Niki (Elle Fanning), like-minded friends Edward G. Robinson (Michael Stuhlbarg), Arlen Hird (Louis C.K.), B-movie mogul Frank King (John Goodman) and enemies including gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (Helen Mirren) who considered him a traitor. But lest this entertainment seem frivolous, some real issues regarding democracy, freedom of speech, rise to the fore. -
New to Broadway at The Music Box, the Olivier Award winning King Charles III is simply the play to see this season. Conceived by playwright Mike Bartlett as a future history, the play’s conceit is what happens when the queen dies and Charles finally ascends to the throne. “My life has been a lingering for the throne,” Charles says, his language echoing Shakespeare, but what ensues is not quite a simple ascension. After all, these are modern times: Are the royals outdated? As in the best of the bard, King Charles III poses a question for all time: what makes for good leadership? And that crown: It’s much heavier than anyone thought. -
After Richard Holbrooke died on December 13, 2010, former president Bill Clinton remarked, why does he have to die? The world is falling apart, and “here’s a guy who can put things together.” That was a sentiment shared by many. Both Clintons knew Richard Holbrooke quite well, his son David did not know him so much. Watching HBO’s documentary, The Diplomat, offers a generous glimpse into Washington circles, and an important era in American history. -
On the third floor of the townhouse that is “21,” Tom Brokaw interviewed Jimmy Chin and Chai Vasarhelyi, the star and filmmakers of the documentary Meru at a special lunch celebrating the film’s success. (Meru is the Number 2 non-fiction film at the box office, behind Amy.) Featuring climbers on the dangerous Shark’s Fin of Meru, a mountain in the Himalayas more treacherous than Everest, Meru depicts a breathtaking journey to the top, focusing on the friendship among the climbers. Brokaw joked, for him, the hike up the three flights to the nautical-themed wood-lined dining space is an astonishing achievement. -
The travel posters adorning the intimate tent, the signature locale of the Big Apple Circus at Lincoln Center, promise trips to Marseille, Lille, Paris, London, and the Orient. Evoking the Roaring ‘20’s, and the modern voyage from the dawn of airplane travel to such conveyances as train and camel, “The Grand Tour” featuring aerialists, acrobats, animals, jugglers, a ringmaster with a booming voice, and two very silly clowns as conductors, this circus is a trip. -
Michael Moore’s latest satiric film, Where to Invade Next, travels to Finland and Tunisia among other places with a central conceit: countries most Americans wouldn’t imagine to be so advanced are doing some things better than we are, so why not learn from them, and get our s—t together. In a time of presidential hopefuls, many spouting promises they can barely articulate, Michael Moore has a clear plan for correcting many of our ills, like not encumbering our young people with crippling debt as they graduate from college. Like feeding our children in elementary school with lunch plans that teach the etiquette of sitting at the dinner table, as well as what foods are truly healthy. Other countries practice these programs as a matter of course, and maybe we did too, before our highest ideals got hijacked. Case in point, people of my generation got an education for free. Remember those days? It is easy to ponder penciling Michael Moore in for president, but he wouldn’t want the job. He’s having too much fun making movies that make people laugh. -
Bradley Cooper has been prepping for the role of Adam Jones in the film Burnt from the time he shucked oysters in a New Jersey restaurant back in the day. A kitchen view of the fine food industry, Burnt was demanding of all its actors—Sienna Miller, Daniel Bruhl, Omar Sy, Sam Keeley—they all had to work the kitchen, intoning “Yes Chef” in obedience to the master, and learning the arts of fileting, braising, broiling, and plating to perfection. At a breakfast panel last week at the London Hotel moderated by one of the film’s producers, Mario Batali, the actors talked about finessing these roles, and keeping their weight down in the process, especially Bradley Cooper who was preparing for his Tony-nominated performance in the play The Elephant Man where he went bare chested and gaunt. -
This is a big week for celebrating “difference.” Sesame Street introduces a new character named Julia. She has autism, and it will be interesting to see how she interacts with Cookie Monster, Elmo, and the rest of the colorful crowd. On HBO, the documentary How to Dance in Ohio, directed by Alexandra Shiva, features a no less colorful group of young teens from Columbus with autism, in the care of clinical psychologist Dr. Emilio Amigo. The three in the forefront, Marideth, Caroline, and Jessica have few filters. They wonder, as perhaps we all do however well we mask our social discomfort: if you want to say hello to a boy, how do you do that? The answer is not so mysterious: you say hello. And by the end of the documentary, which features a dance and a contest for king and queen, you cheer for the winners, and for the simple triumphs of being fully alive. -
Exploding buildings and passions define the fight for women’s right to vote in Britain in the early 20th century. The new movie Suffragette tells that story in a thrilling, action-packed all women production, starring Carey Mulligan as Maude Watts, a laundry worker, mother and wife. Radicalized by the rhetoric of activists including pharmacist Edith Ellyn (Helena Bonham Carter), fellow worker Violet Miller (Anne-Marie Duff), under the leadership of Emmeline Pankhurst (Meryl Streep), Maude Watts is compelled to violence in the streets, yes, but just watch her up close wielding a hot iron. While none of the actors showed up for a grand lunch at Locanda Verde in the movie’s honor, the director Sarah Gavron, producer Alison Owen, scriptwriter Abi Morgan, and Pankhurst’s great granddaughter Helen Pankhurst spoke on a panel moderated by Marie Brenner, about the filmmaking and why this film is relevant now.
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