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Smotherly Love: Grey Gardens: The Musical at Bay Street

August 14, 2015

Grey Gardens: The Musical was made for a run at Sag Harbor’s Bay Street Theater, just a few miles from the original East Hampton real estate that inspired the Maysles’ Brothers classic documentary film.

Starring the two Edies Beale, inseparable mother and daughter, the nonfiction film spawned an HBO movie from the Broadway play, book by Doug Wright, music by Scott Frankel and lyrics by Michael Korie. The evolution from the facts of the mother-daughter symbiosis uncovered by David and Albert Maysles is a story with its own momentum.

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Stirring the Pot with Florence Fabricant:

August 10, 2015

Last week, at Guild Hall’s series, “Stirring the Pot,” featuring conversations with “culinary celebrities,” Geoffrey Zakarian was not expecting to talk politics. Florence Fabricant, New York Times food writer, author of several cookbooks including Park Avenue Pot Luck, a compilation of recipes from friends, and host of this entertaining series—next up Dr. Oz and Lisa Oz, and cronut creator Dominique Ansel— questioned Zakarian about his recent contretemps with Donald Trump. The chef was asked to open a restaurant at the historic Old Post Office Pavilion in Washington D.C., part of Trump’s luxury hotel, and as the story goes, he pulled out when Trump made his unfortunate remarks about Mexicans last month. Rather than talk about this news, Zakarian quipped, his reason to be here was Florence’s invitation to make him clam sauce for lunch.

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Authors Night 2015: Cooks, Cookbooks, and Others

August 9, 2015

High profile authors like Nelson DeMille, Dick Cavett and Dr. Ruth Westheimer had stacks of books to sell under the Authors Night tent. Not surprising, the longest line was for author Ed Burns, yes that Ed Burns. The cover of this week’s Hamptons Magazine, creator of a new television series, Public Morals, for TNT, and author of the memoir, Independent Ed: Inside a Career of Big Dreams, Little Movies, and the Twelve Best Days of my Life, the actor was prime for chats and selfies, and the crowd was having it all.

Then there were the books about the famous: David Browne’s So Many Roads: The Life and Times of The Grateful Dead, and Hope: Entertainer of the Century, Richard Zoglin’s biography of Bob Hope. As writers and their fans moved on to private dinners, Zoglin who would be a guest at Patti Kenner’s with Dr. Ruth told me he had fantasies of discussing Hope’s sex life with the famed pint-sized therapist. The piles of books dwindled.

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With Jason Segel at Lunch at the Lotos Club: Celebrating of The End of the Tour

August 6, 2015

By 1996, upon the publication of the gargantuan novel Infinite Jest, its author David Foster Wallace was the envy of writers. Touted in exalted ways, praised as brilliant, his work produced an “anxiety of influence” for the literary. The Rolling Stone reporter, novelist David Lipsky, asked editor-in-chief Jann Wenner to assign him to accompany Wallace who was then teaching in Bloomington, Illinois on the last leg of the writer’s book tour, to Minneapolis. In the convoluted way that life is so much more fascinating than fiction, that road trip is now the basis of a fiction feature, The End of the Tour, with a script by playwright Donald Margulies, who noted when he was offered the possibility of crafting this material for a stage play, that this really had a broader backdrop, the American heartland.

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Montauk Journal: Fishing Town in Flux

August 6, 2015

A place of transformation, where Memory Motel late night drinkers spill onto Montauk Highway, oblivious to traffic, and outsized master-of-the-universe houses have replaced beach shacks, Montauk has been much in the news. Yet, some new comers and longtime residents are unified by a vision of Montauk as Paradise:

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Hamptons Journal: Michael Shannon Stars in 99 Homes / Chess in the Schools

August 3, 2015

Last week, at a special screening at Guild Hall, Michael Shannon spoke about his work on 99 Homes, a feature directed by R amin Bahrani about the housing crash, specifically dramatizing the horror to families as their homes are reclaimed by those from whom they were offered home loans in the housing boom. Michael Shannon plays the heavy, his square jaw set as he gives fathers, like Dennis Nash, played by Andrew Garfield, a few minutes to gather wives, kids, belongings, and get out. The results are heart wrenching, with everything they own thrown out onto the street. If the families don’t have a place to go, they might end up in the lowdown motel where Nash, his son and mother (a fierce Laura Dern) end up. The drama plays like a taut thriller arousing your worst nightmares, as these events are based on the true plight of many Americans caught in the 2008 housing crash.

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Marlon Brando Speaks for Himself: Listen to Me Marlon Premieres

July 30, 2015

The visually sumptuous documentary, Listen to Me Marlon, made a big impression at this year’s New Direction/ New Films Festival. Especially noted was director Stevan Riley’s achievement in making a biopic about a great subject, Marlon Brando, who, despite having died in 2004, nevertheless comes fully alive in his own voice. Eschewing most documentary apparatus, talking heads, for example, Listen to Me Marlon is crafted from 300 hours of Brando’s audio tapes, some marked “self hypnosis.” The critics so far have been in thrall. Now about to open in New York, the film’s style was debated at this week’s premiere at the Tribeca Grand Hotel.

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Garden as Art at Guild Hall-Grounds as Wild Kingdom at Watermill Center

July 27, 2015

“We don’t do rows,” exclaimed Dr. Alexandra Munroe, curator of Asian Art at the Guggenheim, during a preview of the upcoming Guild Hall Garden as Art tour. The Munroe/ Rosenkranz site features nine garden “rooms.” Your eye may focus on the expansive croquet or tennis courts, but guiding visitors past a basket of today’s crop, Dr. Munroe waxed passionate about artichokes from the vegetable garden, ready to steam and savor.

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Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation Premieres in the Hamptons

July 25, 2015

Introducing the latest in the franchise, Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, to an East Hampton audience that included Rudy Guiliani, Lorne Michaels, Matt Lauer, Gayle King, Dan Abrams, Christie Brinkley, Alec Baldwin, who plays it straight as CIA boss Alan Hunley, quipped about how it works to be in a big budget Hollywood movie: they need you to turn your head a different way, and fly you back to London to reshoot. He went six times—and to Casablanca too, said Hilaria Baldwin at the after party at The Blue Parrot.

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Hamptons Journal: Osteria Salina, LongHouse Reserve, Wordtheater at Guild Hall

July 20, 2015

Even before we got to the Osteria Salina on route 27 in Wainscot, the reincarnation of the Italian restaurant from School Street in Bridgehampton, the word was owners Tim and Cinzia Gaglia (she is also chef) put in a barroom baby grand for Billy Joel, just in case he popped by for some pasta, as The Piano Man was wont to do. The rumor was firmly denied by Tim with a laugh, before he launched into a tale about the foibles of having music in restaurants. And by the way, he concluded, Billy Joel did drop by last Monday, and he performed. Alan Alda, dining in the porch room overlooking the pond, made his way to where Joel was playing his signature tunes to greet him, reported Tim.

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Woody Allen’s Irrational Man: Fantasies of the Perfect Murder

July 17, 2015

Woody Allen revealed, at a pre premiere press panel for his new movie, Irrational Man, that he has fantasies of strategizing the perfect murder – in art, of course, as in Dreiser’s An American Tragedy or Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, epic novels or Macbeth and Hitchcock: “I love to see it. It’s fun to make it. Murder is the stuff of drama.”

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Amy Schumer Triumphs in Trainwreck

July 15, 2015

“This is the best night of my life,” Amy Schumer addressed the exuberant crowd at Alice Tully Hall on Tuesday for the world premiere of her romantic comedy, Trainwreck. Director Judd Apatow stood nearby feeding the comedienne lines, reminding her to thank Universal and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, hosts of the spectacular launch, including the lavish after party at the refurbished Tavern on the Green. Apatow had introduced Bill Hader, the movie’s nerdy heartthrob. That’s not an oxymoron. Hader did his best to project his goofy appeal onstage, but wow, he’s that sensitive, relatable man of your dreams with the wacky, raunchy Amy in this fresh and true take on love from Amy Schumer’s script based on her personal story. The hundreds gathered for this stellar event whooped with joy.

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Ian McKellan in Mr. Holmes: How British is It?

July 14, 2015

Introducing his new movie, Mr. Holmes, at MoMa in which he plays Sherlock Holmes as you have never seen him, Ian McKellan called this the “quintessential” British story, as told by Americans: Jeffrey Hatcher’s screenplay from Mitch Cullin’s A Slight Trick of the Mind, and directed by Bill Condon. “The British never had a chance.” Fortunately, Americans are just as intrigued by Sherlock Holmes! With Laura Linney, deglamorized to play a frumpy housekeeper Mrs. Munro, and Hiroyuki Sanada as a revenge-bound son, the movie is as British as a crumpet. The fine ensemble swirling around McKellan’s killer performance as the aging Mr. Holmes, now in retirement in the country, is first rate. And in that spirit, the movie’s Monday premiere took advantage of Broadway’s dark night, with theater actors out for drinks and ravioli at Southgate in celebration.

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Elizabeth Swados’ One Shade of Gray: My Depression (The Up and Down and Up of It) on HBO

July 13, 2015

Even though this is a serious matter, Elizabeth Swados makes you feel the levity of depression. And more, you can handle it. In one scene in the animated HBO documentary, My Depression (The Up and Down and Up of It) based upon her 2005 book, you visit a supermarket stocked with “Fresh Doubt,” “Malaise,” and “Always Rotten.” If you have ever had the dark cloud she describes hovering, you will surely recognize your personal binge. But that’s exactly what this talented theater writer and her artistic partners —David Wachtenheim and Robert Marianetti— had in mind. Aside from medication, talk therapy, and all the remedies needed to fight depression, Swados wants you to know, in the most charming, entertaining way, you are not alone.

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Alec Baldwin Shows Up for Summerdocs: William F. Buckley vs. Gore Vidal on Television in Best of Enemies

July 12, 2015

The first of three documentaries in the Hamptons International Film Festival’s Summerdocs series hosted by Alec Baldwin, Best of Enemies was sure to be a hit with the East Hampton crowd. Featuring a historic event of verbal jousting between two well matched public intellectuals, men who could turn a phrase, the conservative William F. Buckley and the leftist Gore Vidal, author of the controversial gender-bending Myra Breckinridge, the movie is perfection for an audience that remembers the media spectacle. That Buckley and Vidal were enemies aided the cause: to boost ratings for ABC, in 1968, when the network was third, or last in the age’s few channel options. In the view of Best of Enemies and its creators, Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon, this televised sparring changed television forever. Ratings for ABC skyrocketed.

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Billy Collins to read at Guild Hall: A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the Dentist

July 10, 2015

When I heard that Billy Collins would give a reading at Guild Hall, I wanted to talk to the U. S. Poet Laureate (2001-2003). I caught up with him in transit.

I hope I’m not interrupting anything.

I am on the way to the dentist, so figure I have just a few minutes. I just spent two weeks in Italy at a writers retreat, Civitella in Ombria in a 15^th century castle, so now I have to catch up with things like the dentist. I recommend going to a writers retreat: It is a unique sensation to wake up in the morning and have nothing to do, so I opted to write and came up with a dozen new poems.

Will you read them at Guild Hall on July 12?

I always read new poems [at my readings].

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“Hey Monkee Man:” Micky Dolenz at 54 Below

July 9, 2015

Micky Dolenz sprinkles so many stories through his superb show at 54 Below, you are repeatedly astounded at the decades of history that go with the popular soundtrack of Carole King and Jerry Goffen tunes as well as mint Monkees he performs. That is, if you are of a certain age. And even if you aren’t—there was a teen seated front row center among those adorned with silver manes and fedoras last Tuesday —there are always television reruns of The Monkees for reference. But Dolenz’s career also featured Broadway (Aida), just down the block from 54 Below. At 70, he has the chops to do it all.

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Arthamptons Lifetime Achievement Award: Ruth Appelhof at the Maidstone

July 3, 2015

Just prior to the Arthamptons opening, I met with Ruth Appelhof, Executive Director of Guild Hall, who will receive the Arthamptons Lifetime Achievement Award on July 5. Over eggs Benedict at the Maidstone in East Hampton, we talked about her background in the arts, accomplishments at Guild Hall over her 16-year tenure, how things get done in the premiere arts institution out east, celebrities, and her interest in women artists.

Over the years, since you took the reins at Guild Hall, you have created a state of the art theater, exhibition space, and educational program. How do you explain your leadership strategy?

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Of Good Stock: Come and Smell the Bacon

July 2, 2015

Melissa Ross’ new play, Of Good Stock, a Manhattan Theater Club production, directed by Lynne Meadow, belongs to the genre of literature that illuminates family misery as unique, and universal. Three sisters, the Stocktons, daughters of a famous novelist, who has had at least one book that changed readers’ lives, converge on a Cape Cod beach house where all three summered growing up. Literary legacy aside, the dead father’s philandering had an impact on his girls. The eldest and most grounded, Jess (Jennifer Mudge), now lives in the cedar shingled house with her husband, Fred (Kelly AuCoin), a food writer; Jess wants to celebrate her birthday with family.

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Five Presidents at Bay Street Theater

June 29, 2015

The fun of watching the new play, Five Presidents in its east coast premiere at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, is knowing the history moving forward from the momentous day, April 27, 1994 when the most exclusive club in the world, consisting of living presidents, comes together in a suite preparing for the funeral of one of their own, Richard Nixon. Under Mark Clements’ fine direction, first Gerald Ford (John Bolger) who is on the wagon but circles the bar like a vulture, then Jimmy Carter (Martin L’Herault) who gets a tall pour of scotch from his predecessor, then a slicked wigged Ronald Reagan (Steve Sheridan), George Herbert Walker Bush (Mark Jacoby) and “the new guy,” Bill Clinton (Brit Whittle), arrive one by one swapping stories about women they have nailed, the conflicts of going to war and sending young men and women to die, the economy, a rehash of everything you know about their presidencies meshed with their individual personalities and leavened by liquor. As these were the years before the name Monica Lewinsky entered the public consciousness, the name Gennifer Flowers is a reminder of that president’s pre-election dalliance. A Reagan verging on his famed senescence speaks inappropriately of a particular intimate act with Marilyn Monroe.

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Requiem for the Dead: American Spring 2014 on HBO, and Now

June 21, 2015

When HBO had a launch for the new documentary, Requiem for the Dead: American Spring 2014 last Monday, a gunman had not yet joined the prayer group at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina, ending in the shooting deaths of nine parishioners including Pastor Clementa Pinckney, not only a spiritual leader, but a prominent African American political presence. A who’s who of non-fiction filmmakers including D. A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus, and Nancy Buirski, marveled at the film’s ingenuity: the documentary, the brainchild of HBO’s Sheila Nevins, and directed by Nick Doob and Shari Cookson, providing a numbing account of the number of gun-related deaths in just one American season, is created of text messages, recordings of emergency calls to 911, news footage, home photos of a selection of such random deaths that all go back to the one common denominator: the availability of guns. By Wednesday, when the horrible killing in Charleston occurred, no more examples were needed to make the point. And yet, as many mourn, with memorial services now underway and the 21 year old gunman in custody, community leaders are saying this is the “never again” moment, the call for restrictions on guns.

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Kate Winslet in A Little Chaos

June 20, 2015

Kate Winslet in a smart ponytail and slinky black skimmer posed for selfies with fans as I approached MoMA this week for the New York premiere screening of her new film, A Little Chaos, directed by Alan Rickman. Finally prying herself loose from the crowd she joined the audience for this period piece in which she portrays Sabine De Barra, a self-possessed woman with a career as a landscape designer—from—most improbably—the 17^th century, the time of Louis XIV (Rickman is both imperious and human in this role as king). A Little Chaos describes her mode of design which impresses Andre de Notre (Matthias Schoenaerts) to hire her for the work at Versailles, and from there, the rest is history, as they say, or more to this film, historical fiction. There is much to say about Ellen Kuras’ stunning cinematography. The film was shot in the castles near London, exteriors in gardens, and interiors in bedrooms where the emerging love affair is swoon-worthy.

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Sam Waterston: A Temperate Prospero in The Tempest in the Park

June 19, 2015

A storm threatened. Not the one that opens Shakespeare’s late life play, The Tempest. On the evening I ventured into Central Park, to the Delacorte Theater for the always delightful experience of seeing Shakespeare under the night sky, rain was in the forecast. It would have been appropriate: not a downpour which would have cancelled the performance, but a melding of real nature with the teeming waters of the Public Theater’s ocean backdrop (Riccardo Hernandez’ design) for this season’s The Tempest, directed by Michael Greif, with Sam Waterston as Prospero.

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A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Julie Taymor’s Splendid Shakespearean Romp in Film

June 18, 2015

Julie Taymor’s latest triumph is the movie version of the play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, she debuted in 2013 at the Theater for a New Audience in Brooklyn. Her film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is a mesmerizing and indeed, dream vision composed of the Shakespeare’s scenes and characters, made into a surreal at times, slapstick at times, genuinely delightful version of this, one of the bard’s most popular comedies. Composer Elliot Goldenthal’s whimsical music enhances the dreaminess and shenanigans of the carnival of lovers, spirits, royals and workmen in this gorgeous confection.

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A Fashion Elite Turns Out for The True Cost, A Documentary About What We Wear

June 17, 2015

If the title of the compelling documentary, The True Cost, directed by Andrew Morgan, sounds a little mercantile, it is. Dealing with the dreadful reality behind “fast fashion,” the greed behind low cost clothes, the exploitation of a work force in underdeveloped countries, and the marketing of unnecessary, non-biodegradable, expendable tee-shirts and other splurge purchases to a population that does not need them, the documentary makes you want to avoid H&M, Forever 21, and Zara. (This last, in particular is in a much-publicized suit regarding racism and anti-Semitism, but I digress.) The film makes it hard to rationalize patronizing these retailers, knowing that the low prices passed along to consumers are the result of dire costs in human lives.

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