Wildly wacky and whimsical, Sister Follies: Between Two Worlds, rests on a singular, spectacular conceit. For the centennial of the Abrons Arts Center, a gem of a theater on the Lower East Side, Basil Twist, winner of a recent MacArthur Prize, imagined the ghosts of the Lewisohn sisters, performers and patrons of the arts from 1915. As the curtain opens, the sisters fly, circling one another, bickering competitively as only sisters can do. Their images also are also projected onto the proscenium where they continue their sibling rivalry and narrate. Joey Arias and Julie Atlas Muz inhabit these roles on the ground, performing “Jephthah’s Daughter” and other avantgarde performances from that time. Jonothon Lyons, an actor with amazing pecs, and a cast of puppets, Basil Twist's métier, complete the sensational scene, an assemblage from the Bible.
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- 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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For his Café Carlyle debut performance, vocalist Kurt Elling celebrates Frank Sinatra’s centennial with “Elling Swings Sinatra.” Backed by a wonderful band, maybe the largest I’ve ever seen work this room, featuring Clark Sommers on bass, arranger John McLean on guitar, Jared Schonig on drums, Wayne Tucker on trumpet, Troy Roberts on tenor sax, and Gary Versace on piano, Elling swings his way through such familiar hits as “Come Fly with Me,” “In the Still of the Night,” and “Nice & Easy,” sprinkling the lyrics with scat, the songs with useful information. “Frank Sinatra is the #5 top selling jazz vocalist of all time,” he informs the attentive crowd, quipping, “Do you know how depressing that is for me?” He performs a dozen great songs, but avoids one: “Who else can sing “My Way” but Frank Sinatra? -
The most terrifying movie of the season does not involve aliens, ghouls, or men in hooded masks. It is the movie Room, from Emma Donoghue’s screenplay based on her best-selling novel, showing moments of tender love between a mother and young son in a small cell-like shed with only a skylight to the outside: the claustrophobia is contagious. Played to perfection by Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay, under Lenny Abrahamson’s excellent direction, the mother and son, form a bond essential to their survival. The acting is formidable, and will be noted during award season. Last weekend, Room won the Hamptons International Film Festival Audience Award for Narrative Feature. -
Arriving early to The Westside Theater’s opening night of Joe DiPietro’s Clever Little Lies, Ali Wentworth and Peggy Siegal posed in front of the play’s poster, mimicking the star Marlo Thomas poised with shhh finger over her mouth. This is a play with secrets, and Hoda Kotb was giggling nearby, but the big laughs for Clever Little Lies would come shortly. With all the seats filled, we could hear Tony Danza laughing loudest. -
The Maidstone in East Hampton was party central for the Hamptons International Film Festival, both scheduled and spontaneous. Caterer Janet O’Brien, supplying the Guild Hall green room with goodies of cheeses and figs, spoke about partying late into the night at the Maidstone, sipping the Bedell win“es. On Sunday morning, the dining room was locus of a HIFF institution: brunch celebratingThe Variety 10 to Watch,” a program for young actors, mentored by Emily Blunt, herself a “rising star” from a previous version of the same program. Now of course, Blunt has risen: (see The Devil Wears Prada, and the recent action thriller Sicario). Bel Powley (noted for The Diary of a Teenage Girl and her latest A Royal Night Out) and Christopher Abbott (HBO’s Girls and James White) are among this year’s most looked at actors. In previous years, Dane DeHaan, Alicia Vikander, and Adam Driver occupied that spot, and look how they turned out. -
Introducing his movie of music legend Miles Davis for the closing night of the New York Film Festival, Don Cheadle reminded everyone that Miles was inducted posthumously into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame –for his innovations in jazz. Eight years in the making and now slated for an April 2016 release, the movie shifts between two time frames, an early romantic period as Miles Davis (Cheadle), well-kempt, an already noted jazz trumpeter met dancer Frances Taylor (Emayatzy Corinealdi) who would become his first wife, and a later time, when a pushy Rolling Stone reporter (Ewan MacGregor), trying to get his story, ends up a sidekick to the jazzman in a fuzzy halo of hair, hunting down some stolen session tapes. -
When Patti Smith met Sam Shepard back in the day, she thought he was a drummer cowboy named Slim Shadow, until Jackie Curtis set her straight, “He’s the biggest playwright off-Broadway. He won five Obies!” Now his Fool for Love is on Broadway under Daniel Aukin’s expert direction at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, an MTC production from the highly charged Williamstown revival this past summer. A regular “Marlboro Man,” Eddie, in hat, boots, and swiveling hips signals the cowboy swagger. Sam Rockwell inhabits Eddie, wielding a rifle, a lariat, and tackling his lover May with balletic skill, until she knees his groin. With Nina Arianda in this role, May gives as good as she gets. For a tight 90 minutes, they go at each other in a spare, grim motel room in Nowheresville, the Mojave Desert’s edge. From Eddie’s first words: “I’m not leaving,” you are in the play’s intense grip, pondering: who are these people?
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Truth, a riveting movie about the famous scandal at CBS 60 Minutes that cost Dan Rather his nightly news anchorship, is based on Mary Mapes’ account. A sassy, hard working producer, Mapes was fired in this incident calling into question George W. Bush’s military record. Rather and Mapes knew they were reporting a true story, but many thought it was a take down of the president just as he was seeking re-election. Rather is played with gravitas by Robert Redford, but Mapes– with Cate Blanchett in the role– takes center stage. Not only is this a must see movie for her stellar performance, but it is a reminder of a time when real investigating was the goal for television—and print—news. Mistakes were made and heads did roll, but not without some loss of journalistic ideals. -
The famously reclusive and curmudgeonly photographer/filmmaker Robert Frank smiles throughout the documentary Robert Frank Don’t Blink, as if he’s having a good time with Laura Israel, a longtime assistant who deigned to make a film about him. When she asked, the Swiss-born artist did not say no.In distinct stages marked by evocative music (Velvet Underground, Rolling Stones, subjects of his 1972 Cocksucker Blues, and more), the film moves through his making of The Americans, the iconic photo-book of the 1950’s, its poetic, sainted “road” essence affirmed in Jack Kerouac’s introduction, the filming of Pull My Daisy, featuring Kerouac’s narration and starring Larry Rivers, David Amram, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, Delphine Seyrig, Alice Neel, Milo O’Shea, and his son Pablo, the little boy.
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Jan Donovan Amorosi had just seen Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies at a special screening the night before its New York Film Festival premiere at Alice Tully Hall on Sunday night. “We had no idea what our father had gone through when we were growing up in Brooklyn,” she said, now preparing for a second viewing. “We wondered why no one did anything with his unusual story for forty years, after he died. We now know what he went through, that he was a hero.” Her father, Jim Donovan, an insurance attorney, comes to save two Americans—U-2 pilot Gary Powers and graduate student Frederic Powers— held in East Berlin in 1962, by ingeniously engineering a trade for a Soviet spy, Rudolf Abel. Donovan is played by the immensely appealing Tom Hanks in one of his best performances, and Abel is played by one of the most brilliant theater actors, Mark Rylance. -
In case you were wondering about his rocker roots, David Johansen can be seen in a photograph flashing amidst many images in the documentary Robert Frank—Don’t Blink. In fact, he was a star in Frank’s 1988 Candy Mountain back in the New York Dolls days, along with Tom Waits, Leon Redbone, Dr. John, Joe Strummer, and Kazuko. Today performing at the Café Carlyle, in a pencil thin ‘stache worthy of John Waters and his signature pompadour, as Buster Poindexter, he’s no less of a star. In fact, he’s transitioned effortlessly onto the intimate uptown cabaret stage with a witty, smart show, sprinkling song with jokes, backed by a first rate band: Brian Koonin on guitar, Richard Hammond on upright bass, Ray Grappone on drums, and Brian Mitchell on piano and accordion. Poindexter adds to his own raspy voice with a cool harmonica. -
Labyrinth of Lies, a new Holocaust themed movie, the German entry for the Foreign Language Film Oscar, takes place in the era after World War II, when 22 “ordinary” German men who committed anti-human crimes at Auschwitz were brought to justice in Frankfurt. Filmmaker Giulio Ricciarelli, a Milan born German from Munich is proud to say that Germany is the only country to have sought legal action for the murder of Jews, as the citizens of his country increasingly became aware of what went on under the Nazi regime. Over cappuccinos at the Regency Hotel in mid-September, we talked about his film, based upon the true history of these trials.
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Broadway luminaries attended the American Theater Wing gala on Monday night at the Plaza Hotel to honor James Earl Jones: Angela Lansbury, Tony Bennett, and Cecily Tyson, who is starring with Jones in The Gin Game. The annual event always features performances in the Plaza’s Grand Ballroom: among other performers, Norm Lewis blew everyone away with a medley from Les Miserables. American Theater Wing chair William Ivey Long took the stage to introduce the award presenters George Lucas and Samuel L. Jackson. “No,” said Long, “I never costumed James Earl Jones.” Jackson paid tribute saying he tried out for Ragtime because Jones, an actor of color, was out there. He didn’t get the job. George Lucas—Jones was the voice of Darth Vader, the unforgettable villain of Star Wars– proclaimed, “If you want to make a strong movie, you have to make a strong theater.” -
Defying categorization, Roger Waters The Wall premiered this week, not just a rock concert filmed, although it is that; even more, in a classic Oedipal journey, Roger Waters seeks his paternity, the father and grandfather he did not know. The casualties of the two world wars, these men become the objects of a quest in a 1961 Bentley Waters bought specifically for this odyssey. The elongated vehicle snakes comically on winding cliff-side roads as he travels from France to Italy, to the battlefield at Anzio where his father fell. Driving, he waxes philosophic with his passenger Willa Rawlinson, who proclaims in poetic heaviness, the two wars erased any memory of fathers, and, the smell of one’s grandson and the blessing of Zeus, the king of gods, are one and the same thing. -
When James Marsh’s Oscar winning documentary Man on Wire premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2008, it seemed like a miracle, not only Philippe Petit’s stunning walk across wire 110 stories in the air, but the image of the World Trade Towers from August 7, 1974, as their destruction was fresh in everyone's mind. Now recreated in a fiction film, The Walk, in Real3D, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the role of Petit, the story goes from historic to mythic, with a huge WOW factor: the magic of Robert Zemeckis’ technical expertise puts viewers are up there with him. You know how this mad caper is going to end, and yet The Walk is the thriller of the season.
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You have to love Nancy Meyers for her happy endings, and her optimism about women’s lives. In her latest film confection, The Intern, a laugh-out-loud, melt-in-your-mouth bonbon, the adorable Anne Hathaway plays Jules Ostin, a workaholic founder of a successful women’s wear Internet business housed in a chic downtown loft. Launching a senior intern program for retirees, her company gets Robert DeNiro as Ben Whitaker to play her right hand man. He’s good: patient, kind, understanding, confident, mature, requiring little maintenance except for a foot massage. He solves all her troubles both in and out of work. She learns, in the ultimate women’s fantasy of our time, how to have it all. -
Rifle wielding right-to-lifers hell bent on violence. Sounds like an oxymoron. But as illustrated in a powerful new documentary, The Armor of Light, a directorial debut for Abigail Disney, guns and God can make strange bedfellows. This week at a luncheon at 21, the movie’s key figures, an Evangelical reverend and anti-abortion activist Rob Schenck, and a remarkable grieving mother turned anti-gun activist Lucy McBath, spoke on a panel, raising the film’s issue: can you be both pro-gun and pro-life?
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A consummate showman, the Broadway star, Brian Stokes Mitchell took the stage at Café Carlyle this week as if he were born to perform at the iconic supper club. His debut show there, “Plays With Music,” might be a pun on plays, as in dramas (think Man of La Mancha), or plays as in how he accompanies himself on instruments from simple pipes to one that has piano keys called the melodica. Accomplished as he his on these, his instrument, his voice, is perfection itself. Backed by a first rate band, Mark McClean on drums, Gary Haase on bass, and Tedd Firth’s piano, he began his set with “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” and made this Irving Berlin standard sound like you’ve never heard it before. -
By the time I got home from the Sicario premiere at MoMA this week, the film’s star Emily Blunt was trading puke takes with Stephen Colbert on his Late Night Show. The vomiting is not as random as you’d think: the new movie directed by Denis Villeneuve has such grim imagery, the characters, FBI agents raiding a house in the Arizona desert double over in wet heaves in the dry courtyard. That’s just the beginning; when we first see Emily Blunt’s Kate, she’s almost too pretty and too vulnerable to do this job. “This took off layers of skin,” Blunt said at The Modern after party, in her poised British. -
MCC’s production of Matthew Lopez’ The Legend of Georgia McBride at the Lucille Lortel in the village, like Kinky Boots on Broadway, features stunning high heeled footwear and over-the-top pastel wigs. Add to that padded rumps and sequined brassieres, sized triple D! Backstage at the Cleo bar in Florida’s Panhandle, a sweet-faced Elvis impersonator, Casey (David Thomas Brown) re-fashions his studded jumpsuit into a dress and under the tutelage of the divine Tracy Mills (Matt McGrath), transforms. Voila! Dull as “The King,” he’s a dynamite Queen in drag. A Star is Born! -
Out on Eastern Long Island, real food and real estate rule, somebody who knows recently told me. This wisdom was proven at a special dinner at the Pollock-Krasner House on the waterfront Springs site where the artist couple lived, and at Guild Hall’s annual Garden as Art tour featuring vegetable gardens at several spectacular estates. On a late August Thursday chef Michael Rozzi from East Hampton’s 1770 House, riffed on the recipes found in Robyn Lea’s Dinner with Jackson Pollock (Assouline).Taking the steps for the abstract expressionist’s clam pie, he put the filling in a clam shell, like a baked clam, and served it along with Pollock’s home baked white bread spread with salmon to a dozen guests seated around the table Lee Krasner acquired to host Jackson’s dealers and collectors, a paint splattered tablecloth protecting the oak. Arguably, wildly delicious borscht was the highlight of the menu. Helen Harrison, director for the house and study center, led a tour up the stairs to a room used by Krasner as a painting space for a decade, with its view to Accabonac Creek. As a survival tactic for her marriage, Lee, who could not cook, learned the recipes of Jackson’s mother, Stella Mae McClure Pollock, and entertained friends with him on that inspiring site. -
In the movie world you would not expect a smallish screening for a movie like Rock the Kasbah to have a night like this, but Bill Murray has great karma. Rock legends turned out in East Hampton Friday night: Sir Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Jon Bon Jovi, to start. Bill Murray plays a down on his luck music manager in Barry Levinson’s new movie, Rock the Kasbah. The premise is simple: he takes his “talent” (Zooey Deschanel) to tour in Kabul, Afghanistan. Arriving after a scary flight to the desolate site—the actual location in Morocco never looked so drab– he says, “Think Aspen in wartime.” Truth is, you take Bill Murray anywhere, and he’s funny as hell. The things he says in anyone else’s mouth might not crack you up as much. But take him to this dangerous desert, and you get comic genius. -
When Michele Lee did her show at 54 Below this past June, celebrating Cy Coleman just a stone’s throw from Broadway, she was secretly planning to return to star in Wicked as Madame Morrible—a schoolmistress cum sorcerer. As the character’s name suggests she’s marvelous as she is horrible. With a look that channels Effie Trinket from The Hunger Games, she could be at home at Harry Potter’s Hogwarts, but Madame Morrible has some wizardry all her own. I had an opportunity to chat with Michele Lee by phone after a recent performance of Wicked—stunned by her transformation, I just had to know how the former star of television’s Knots Landing manages to grace this show with a Broadway veteran’s poise, comic timing, a ton of makeup, and her own brand of “wicked.”
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Talk about extreme sports. The new documentary Meru will make you wonder why anyone would want to put themselves so far out of any human comfort zone. That doesn’t mean you won’t want to watch this daring film. Meru, in fact, plays like an action thriller, because the characters’ extreme drive is compelling as are the intense relationships of this group of climbers. As summits go, Meru in the Himalayas is the opposite of Mount Everest, the metaphor for gargantuan peak. But at Everest, you can get a Sherpa to carry your things up the mountain, pitch your tent, and make your food. Meru has a shark fin top, and a reputation: you cannot climb it. So for Jimmy Chin, Conrad Anker, and Renan Ozturk, Meru, is like Ahab’s Moby Dick, an unconquerable, irresistible force of nature. -
“This story wasn’t going away,” said David Simon explaining his persistence in making the six-part mini series, Show Me a Hero, he co wrote with William F. Zorzi based on Lisa Belkin’s 1999 book. The story in question is about chaos in Yonkers in the late ‘80’s, over desegregation in housing. Yes, the ‘80’s are already fodder for nostalgia–think shoulder pads, but the issue of race remains hot, the headlines continuing to scream injustice. In the Yonkers version of the story, a story of race in America reverberated in other David Simon projects for HBO like “The Wire” and “Treme,” a single character, Nick Wasicsko stands out. Elected mayor at age 28 on his platform against the affordable housing mandated to be built in middle class neighborhoods—read: whites forced to live with blacks—he changes heart.
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