Barbra Streisand, presenting the 42nd Chaplin Award to Robert Redford, her co-star in The Way We Were, recounted a story about a fan screaming “Hello, Gorgeous.” She thought it was for her, for Funny Girl. But no, the “gorgeous” was for Robert Redford. Indeed, there was no elephant-in-the-room in the spacious Alice Tully Hall: every woman presenting from Jane Fonda to Elisabeth Moss spoke about Redford’s good looks. But clearly, he is much more than eye candy.
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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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In this comedy about a wedding, It Shoulda Been You, the “you” is a young man, the former boyfriend of the bride-to-be, played with gusto by Josh Grisetti in his Broadway debut at the Brooks Atkinson Theater. His Marty Kaufman is Jewish, so of course he’s perfect for the bride, who has instead chosen a goy (David Burtka) who insists upon learning Yiddish. I’ve had a crush on Josh Grisetti ever since I died laughing watching him in Enter Laughing at Sag Harbor’s Bay Street Theater a few seasons ago. The show went on to a run Off Broadway. Now Grisetti gets to display the full force of his talents in a show of eminent performers including Tyne Daly as mother of the bride, and Harriet Harris as mother of the groom, who go head to head, curlered to coiffed. Directed by David Hyde Pierce, this farce including the genre’s traditional slamming doors, is a shtick fest with a twist. -
The musical based on that Russian classic Doctor Zhivago inevitably evokes comparisons with the Omar Shariff-Julie Christie, David Lean 1965 movie, from Boris Pasternak’s 1957 novel. A Broadway show with name recognition, Doctor Zhivago has played in Australia and South Korea—in Korean—and was much loved. Given its politics, that’s a coup. Les Miserables Russian style, under Des McAnuff’s direction, Doctor Zhivago has The Broadway Theater exploding with war, unexpected petards from the rafters, casting the stage in smoke and fire, and jarring the audience with attention commanding noise. By contrast, Lucy Simon’s score with lyrics by Michael Korie and Amy Powers features memorable songs: “Now” and “Love Finds You” are standouts. -
La Grenouille experienced a British invasion yesterday for a lunch celebrating the film Far From the Madding Crowd, based on Thomas Hardy’s beloved 19th century novel. Carey Mulligan, currently starring in Skylight on Broadway, plays Bathsheba Everdene, a strong-willed and occasionally wrong-headed heroine, a pre-feminist, you could call her. Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts portrays Gabriel Oak, the pre-feminist hunk who protects her. He is loyal, kind, brave, talented, hard-working, and dreamy. When I asked Schoenaerts, memorable for his performance opposite Marion Cotillard in Rust and Bone what he thought of this character, he enthused, “I can learn from him. I want to BE him.” -
As film festivals go, Sarasota Film Festival is hard to beat, for films, parties, and people. In addition to the awards listed below, Jane Seymour spoke about her career in film with Regina Weinreich, representing her latest, Bereave, directed by Evangelos and George Giovanis. Rachel Weisz, spoke with David Edelstein about her work producing Radiator, directed by Tom Browne, and Blythe Danner, star of the festival’s closing night film, I’ll See You in My Dreams, directed by Brett Haley, received the festival’s Impact Award at a ceremony at the Sarasota Opera House. Blythe Danner noted that this festival screened over 100 films by women. Then guests moved onto the stage for Sarasota Film Festival President Mark Famiglio’s closing night dinner, where, in an informal tribute, legendary documentarian Albert Maysles was remembered. -
At heart, Finding Neverland, now charming audiences at the Lunt-Fontaine Theater on Broadway, is about the creation of theater: this is the backstory to J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Following closely enough to the Johnny Depp starred movie, the Broadway musical begins with J.M. Barrie’s colossal writing block when the playwright (Matthew Morrison) is past deadline with theater impresario Charles Frohman (Kelsey Grammer). Among the many joys in this musical is seeing the backstage shenanigans of actors who, quite frankly, need the work Barrie fails to deliver. Where can the writer find inspiration? A man who won’t grow up, he finds it in the park with the Llewelyn Davies boys including Peter (Aidan Gemme for the opening) and their lovely if ailing mother (Laura Michelle Kelly). -
As An American in Paris opens at the Palace Theater, a Nazi flag seemingly draped over an entire city, drops down and floats away. The city is Paris, its narrow streets dour until we get to a café, where an American soldier, Jerry (Robert Fairchild) meets an American composer, Adam (Brandon Uranowitz), and a Frenchman, Henri (Max von Essen) who wants to sing cabaret. As color and light envelop the city, all three fall in love with the same girl, Lise (Leanne Cope), a shop girl who aspires to dance. If you know the 1951 movie on which it is based, this story provides the perfect premise for a traditional Broadway musical. This new incarnation features George Gershwin’s classic score, well known, (“I Got Rhythm,” “S Wonderful”) and lesser known songs (“I’ll Build a Stairway to Heaven” and “Fidgety Feet”), Craig Lucas’ book, Bob Crowley’s costumes and set, and the prodigious talents of Christopher Wheeldon, ballet choreographer extraordinaire working the Broadway musical genre for the first time, as choreographer and director. Given this mix of gifted artists, this production promised to be wonderful, a Tony contender, a huge hit—and indeed it is. -
Divorced, beheaded, died. Divorced, beheaded, survived. School kids learn the fate of Henry VIII’s six wives in this chant. At the end of the daylong Wolf Hall Broadway premiere on Thursday, at the restaurants in Rockefeller Center where a lively celebration for the epic holding court at the Winter Garden Theater was underway, my hands were clasped in those of Nathaniel Parker, the actor who so winningly portrays Henry VIII in Wolf Hall, and we were singing it in unison. Wolf Hall, based upon historic fiction by Hilary Mantel, focuses on the period in his reign when the king, smitten with the sexy Anne Boleyn, concocts a strategy for ridding himself of his wife of 18 years, Catherine of Aragon, and then tiring of Anne in favor of Jane Seymour, finds Anne guilty of treason in the form of adultery. That costs the new queen her head. As to kings having their way, it doesn’t get juicier. -
As the vice president, Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) was just a heartbeat away from the presidency. Call it fate: the president has stepped down to care for his ailing wife, and Selina, whose bungling White House antics we’ve gleefully enjoyed on VEEP for three HBO seasons, now gets her shot at the most powerful post in the land. In her first episode as president, screened for the show’s premiere this week at the SVA Theater, Selina addresses Congress as her teleprompter goes blank mid-sentence. In the second, she unwittingly has a work of art painted by a Native American, a yellowish abstract called “Massacre,” removed from the oval office, causing a PR nightmare. Heads roll. Needless to say, she and her hilarious team– including aides, advisers, press secretary, strategist played by a great cast, Anna Chlumsky, Matt Walsh, Mike McClintock, Gary Cole, –surface intact, the great fun of observing this behind the scenes glimpse of government a la showrunner Armando Iannucci. -
You think a Tony-winning star would perform Broadway show tunes for her engagement at the Café Carlyle. Not Lena Hall, who told me at the “Kinky Boots” opening night back in 2013, that her true music metier was rock in the manner of Robert Plant and Janis Joplin. Of course she was a rocker in her awarded role as Yitzhak in “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” so when she was invited to sing at the Carlyle, she was not sure they even knew what she’d do: had they made some kind of mistake? And, would a loud sound work in an intimate room?
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A favorite at film festivals throughout the fall, the movie Time Out of Mind, stars one of the great cinematic heartthrobs, Richard Gere. “Lord have mercy,” exclaims one of the retirees in the recent Best Marigold Hotel sequel when Gere’s silver haired character enters the room. Of course we all fell in love with him in Garry Marshall’s Pretty Woman, Runaway Bride, and even when he was impossibly handsome eye candy in Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo. But here, in Oren Moverman’s film to open the Sarasota Film Festival, Gere plays against type, a homeless man living on the streets of New York City. Oren Moverman, recently interviewed, was surprised that Richard Gere brought him the project, and that Mark Famiglio invited him to Sarasota with this film: -
Hand to God, a delightfully subversive, dark comedy opened this week on Broadway at the Booth Theater after successful productions downtown by MCC Theater and Ensemble Studio Theater. Featuring a puppet provocateur called Tyrone, wreaking destruction and devilish mayhem on a church schoolroom set, the actor Steven Boyer as Jason whose task it is to give life to the gray wool mass swaddling his left hand reminded everyone at the after party at Urbo, “Hey it’s only a sock!” But to the rest of the cast, like Geneva Carr, excellent as Jason’s widowed libidinous mother, Tyrone is a being with whom to reckon. -
In an age when a coinage such as “frenemies” has meaning, the operative word in the title of a new documentary, Best of Enemies, is the word “best.” The film, about a particular historic event of verbal jousting, is between two very well matched public intellectuals, “best” practitioners of the English language of their time, the conservative William F. Buckley and the leftist Gore Vidal, author of the controversial Myra Breckinridge. That they 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. -
Bruce Springsteen’s voice sets the tone for Alex Gibney’s riveting documentary portrait of Frank Sinatra: All or Nothing at All. “The Boss” says, I first heard him when my mom and I used to hunt down my dad in New Jersey saloons. Hear that? His mother would say. That’s Frank Sinatra. Even Stevie van Zandt, who attended the premiere at the Time Warner Center this week, raised an eyebrow at Springsteen’s candor. “All or Nothing at All,” the title of one of his songs aptly defines his code; the film neatly weaves Sinatra’s line, a leitmotif, as he rises in artistry and fame, and personally in cycles of sad and sublime. With testimony from Frank’s family, “Italian” wife Nancy, son Frank, Jr., daughters Nancy and Tina, and stunning actress Ava Gardner (her words from a transcribed interview read by Gina Gershon) for whom he left Nancy, the documentary to air this weekend on HBO reveals filmmaker Alex Gibney’s gift for making films that feel like the subjects, even deceased ones, thrive in the next room, still singing and living their successes and troubles. -
“How’s my German?,” asked British actor Allan Corduner who plays Gustav Bloch-Bauer in the film Woman in Gold. He’s Maria Altmann’s father, in flashback to pre-war and Nazi occupied Vienna, when she was a young woman who managed to escape. Helen Mirren plays Maria’s older version, and they had only one scene together, when Maria, in a time close to the present, walks through the magnificent apartment she was forced to leave, seeing the ghosts of her murdered family in their glory. As stories evoking the terrible history of the Holocaust go, this one, based on true events, has a fairy tale happy ending, as Maria Altmann with her lawyer, E.Randol Schoenberg, grandson of the famed composer Arnold Schoenberg, take on the Austrian government to claim paintings by Gustav Klimt, stolen, like much property owned by Jews. -
Perhaps the most recognizable poster created by Paul Rand is the one he made for IBM, with its clean iconic triad, the eye, the bee, with the alphabet letter M, striped to match the body of the bee, to complete the rhebus. The graphic designer Paul Rand (1914-1996) is acknowledged as the artist who lifted graphic design to a new level of Art. Known not only for his corporate work, identity programs, packaging design, brochures, Paul Rand, born Peretz Rosenbaum in Brooklyn, was a teacher, in the lecture halls at Yale, and as a writer of numerous volumes including Thoughts on Design and Design, Form, and Chaos. Writing constantly, he wrote not only to educate, but to clarify his thoughts and assertions. At the Museum of the City of New York, the breadth and scope of his career is in full display. A bit too crowded to give each work its full measure of weight, the exhibition, ads hung chockablock on the walls and laid out in vitrines in a first floor gallery, is a testament to his legacy. -
Remember the old feminist adage: A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle. It is in that antique spirit that The Heidi Chronicles in a new production at the Music Box Theater follows art historian Heidi Holland (a pitch perfect Elisabeth Moss) through decades of social and political change with the men and women most prominent in her life. She met Peter (Bryce Pinkham just off his Tony winning performance in A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder) at a high school dance, and Scoop (Jason Biggs) at a McCarthy fundraiser; those historic markers anchor Wendy Wasserstein’s smart, quip-heavy drama, further informed by the soft rhetoric of consciousness raising, through the strident ‘70’s into feminism’s late ‘80’s moment, when Heidi, still unwed learns how to deal with her aloneness, as did this significant playwright in her real life before her early death. -
Seymour Bernstein at 88 is such a loveable man, and so talented an interpreter of classical music, it is easy to fall in love with him. But that’s not why Ethan Hawke was so inspired at meeting him at a dinner party, so much that he knew he wanted to spend more time with Seymour documenting him. Hawke’s movie Seymour: An Introduction captures Seymour's wisdom and generosity. It should be mandatory viewing for anyone in the arts, in fact, everyone alive. Seymour’s gift as a teacher of piano is to supply ample instruction, carrying over into life itself, advocating integration and balance. He believes, “Whatever talent you have is the essence of who you are.” Hawke’s goal was to show young people, how a passion for an art form can inform the art form and life; in this anti-Whiplash, Seymour helps Hawke with his stage fright, ironic because after stellar reviews on the concert circuit himself, as a young man, he gave up performing because the pre-performance anxiety was unmanageable. So it was a special treat when he sat at the piano performing for invited dinner guests at last fall’s New York Film Festival. -
If Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, Alex Gibney’s new documentary only illuminated the outsized personality of L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of the Church of Scientology, it would be a fascinating study of one of the most compelling figures of the mid-twentieth century. But this film, based on Lawrence Wright’s book of the same title, is so much more, exposing the secretive society within our society Hubbard founded. Given to bizarre behavior, tantrums, and self-aggrandizement, Hubbard wrote the best-selling Dianetics, and with that invented an ideology. Hubbard found a way to avoid taxes by naming this phenomenon a church; and, he understood the one thing Americans truly worshiped was celebrity: John Travolta and Tom Cruise were cultivated to lure a populace to its ranks. When LRH died of a stroke in 1986, his reign fell to David Miscavige who expanded the empire; his speeches to the fold—footage shown through fair use– are done on a spotlit stage with Nazi-esque imagery crossed with Who Wants to be a Millionaire extravaganza. -
What makes French films, eh, French? The facile answer: a focus on love: married, obsessive, at first sight. In its 20th season the popular Rendez Vous at Lincoln Center, shows a penchant for action adventure—and, serial killers. What happened to the frothy comedies and romantic musicals of the past?Benoit Jacquot’s 3 Hearts opened the festival. Known for making each movie a love letter to women, Jacquot’s films were celebrated at the French Institute Alliance Francaise with a retrospective. 3 Hearts features three of France’s best imports: Catherine Deneuve, Chiara Mastroianni, and Charlotte Gainsbourg, in an odd triangle. Deneuve is the family matriarch. Her daughter, Charlotte’s Sylvie, meets Marc (Benoit Poelvoorde). In a coup de foudre, she’s set to leave her life behind to be with him. Fate intercedes. They lose each other, but her sister, Chiara’s Sophie, strangely meets him and falls in love. The problem is Marc, a loser from the beginning, not at all sexy, and exhibits, let’s say, issues of character and ethical behavior. Is this casting the director’s calculation, to play his movie for comedy? Otherwise, this taut drama has you in its grip with intense, intriguing car scenes. 3 Hearts features strong sister ties between Sylvie and Sophie. Irony is: the actress Charlotte Gainsbourg’s real life sister died just after the filming. Gainsbourg now lives in New York with her husband filmmaker Yvan Attal. At the opening night party, Nathalie Baye laughingly complained, she’s the only French actress never to have been cast in a Benoit Jacquot film.
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As galas go, Guild Hall’s is one of the best, a chance for city and country to meet up over art, cocktails, and dinner. On Monday, Hamptonites left their snowy driveways behind, hopped on a jitney, greeted the Manhattan crowd at Sotheby’s, mingled over cocktails and viewed Guild Hall's recent acquisitions at the annual winter love fest. A large untitled canvas features a beach scene by the Academy of the Arts’ new president Eric Fishl. Celebrating his birthday too, the Sag Harbor resident said he’d rather be here on this special day than anywhere else, and then introduced Laurie Anderson, who is so talented “you want to kill her.” If you know her seemingly effortless performances, you what he means. She went on to present the first lifetime achievement award of the night, for visual art, to photographer Ralph Gibson. Noting that he also performed music with Lou Reed, she was most grateful for his laughter. -
If you have never been to Buckingham Palace, you can now have an intimate view in The Audience, starring Helen Mirren as the Queen, imported across the pond to Broadway’s Gerald Schoenfeld Theater. However much conjured in your imagination, the room in which Queen Elizabeth meets with her Prime Minister every Tuesday (with one exception) over 6 decades, the premise of this sharply conceived drama under Stephen Daldry’s superb direction, is described in vivid detail by an Equerry in full regalia. A dazzling chandelier hangs overhead, two chairs of precise lineage and upholstery reign over the otherwise bare stage, a triumph of understated opulence, in Bob Crowley’s masterful design. And the queen herself, the magnificent Helen Mirren who has honed this role wig to wig, dowdy dress to coronation jewels, nails imperious, witty, wise, sympathetic, and politically astute to a tee. -
This is a boom time for Albert Maysles: his iconic Grey Gardens (1975) in a restored print is screening at Film Forum, and available from Criterion. A new documentary, Iris, about style legend Iris Apfel, a hit at the 2014 New York Film Festival will be released in late April. But then again, in the years that I have known him, he was always working. With D.A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock, and his brother David, Maysles was a pioneer in “fly on the wall” or direct cinema. A lover of movies, it is hard to imagine not seeing him on the scene at the premieres of the latest, encouraging young filmmakers. As he said to me in a 1994 interview: “Making a film isn’t finding the answer to a question; it’s trying to capture life as it is.” -
Having seen a rehearsal for the Malpaso Dance Company on a recent trip to Havana, a highlight of our cultural tour, we were eager to see the New York Joyce Theater’s full production. Guest choreographer Trey McIntyre, from Idaho, was on hand, enthusing about working on “Under Fire” with this talented group founded in 2012 by Daile Carrazana, Fernando Saez, and dancer choreographer Osnel Delgado, whose work, “Despedida/ Farewell,” was in preparation for its world premiere. The company is one of a few in Cuba not supported by the government. The program at the Joyce, through this weekend, is a thrilling affirmation of flourishing independent arts in Cuba. -
“This is the best show in town tonight,” exclaimed David Letterman at the SeriousFun gala, the only thing he said that wasn’t a joke. Founded by Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, SeriousFun was established to ensure childhood fun at summer camp for children with special needs. With Paul Shaffer at piano, Letterman did his Top Ten, featuring songs for Newman’s movies: only Shaffer could set Towering Inferno to the tune of West Side Story’s “Maria,”or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to “Mack the Knife,” but you get the picture. A mix of Newman nostalgia, performances by many campers, and high profile celebrities like Clooney, Streep and Hanks, SeriousFun was the place to be.
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