If you’ve attended any of the packed previews of The Last Ship at the Neil Simon Theater, you may have noticed its originator and composer Sting lurking about. At your surprise to see him, he exclaims, “It’s my baby!” Indeed, this musical, with book by John Logan and Brian Yorkey, under Joe Mantello’s direction and with choreography by Steven Hoggett, is an absolute must-see about a young man who leaves home and family to travel the world, only to return after fifteen years to a place altered by modernity, what the British metaphysical poets called mutability. This change is most dramatically felt by a community losing its traditions of shipbuilding, and the work that sustained them literally and spiritually for generations.
recent posts
- Lorne Premieres at Lincoln Center: Glimpsing Lorne Michaels Backstage at Saturday Night Live
- Alden Ehrenreich and Patrick Ball: The Men in Becky Shaw on Broadway
- Audra McDonald and “Original Nepo Baby” Gwyneth Paltrow: Honorees at the NYWFT Muse Awards 23 March 2026
- Zach Bryan Buys the On the Road Scroll/ Happy Birthday, Jack Kerouac!
- William S. Burroughs/ Nova ’78 at MoMA/ Remembering James Grauerholz
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The sights and sounds of old New York are just a few of the marvels of the musical On the Town, newly revived at the Lyric Theater. If you see a subway sign marked IRT, you know you are in the right place. Three sailors on an overnight pass get to see the sights, “from Yonkers on down to the bay, in just one day.” Naturally, and so the guidebook says, the Museum of Natural History is a must, and everywhere there are girls, girls, girls in this ribald and rollicking classic with Leonard Bernstein’s music and book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, based on the idea by Jerome Robbins. Director John Rando, with Joshua Bergasse’s choreography and James Moore’s music direction, has subtly reworked the original to great effect. -
Stephen Hawking, ALS and all, is such a “character,” he’s perfect as the charismatic center of a movie. That’s partly because of his brilliance in physics and cosmology, partly because his bold yet childlike persona, and partly because of the woman who kept his brain alive, his wife Jane. A new movie based on her account of their courtship, marriage, and ultimate friendship, The Theory of Everything, stars Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones as this exceptional couple. Last week at lunch at the Lotos Club, in a Q&A led by the charming Stephen Daldry, the stars and screenwriter Anthony McCarten discussed their movie relationship in what many are calling performances that top the lists for this year’s acting awards; the film should be nominated for Best Picture. -
Famed and multi-awarded neurologist Dr. Allan Ropper, author of the definitive textbook on clinical neurology, with the help of Brian David Burrell, has turned his prodigious medical knowledge to us, the people, with an entertaining and eminently readable book, Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole. Demystifying the art and practice of healing neurological disorders, he turns a keen eye on his patients, interviewing them and recounting stories straight from the hospital front. As the doctor told me in a recent interview, almost all of the many anecdotes contained in the book are taken from his owned taped interviews, and are 70% verbatim.
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How cool is Buster Poindexter? The alter ego of David Johansen of New York Dolls fame, Poindexter is VERY cool. A seasoned lounge singer, he sports a pompadour, a wavecrest that may stand erect using a formula once shared by Bello the Clown: a mix of Rogaine and Viagra. A pencil thin mustache grazes his upper lip a la John Waters, but he makes it his own as he shimmies, sashays, and rhumbas his way around the Carlyle stage, his pelvis moving to Presley precision. His show—only five nights– is a tongue-in-cheek medley of genres: doowop, country, rock, his wit evident throughout, opening with “Viper” (“I had a dream about a reefer five feet long”), and “Bad Boy” (“I’ve taken the trouble to turn my night into day.”). After four songs, he predicted his own review: “Did you see Poindexter the other night?” “How was it?” “Good. But he was crazy.” -
Alex Gibney’s documentary, Mr. Dynamite, limns the extraordinary rise of James Brown’s career, and more: interviews with his sidemen give a history of rhythm and blues, and race. Mick Jagger talks about coming to the Apollo to see James Brown and trying to simulate, and surpass, the legendary performer’s signature moves. Jazz musicians Fred Wesley and Christian McBride reveal the many ways that Brown’s unique talent and professional ethics transformed the music, how the theatrics of putting on a cape near the end of the act—borrowing from the world of boxing– would lead to an encore, and how subbing for Little Richard on tour, styling himself with that makeup and adapting from his sound, led to Brown’s scream. Many who appear in the film were on hand for a premiere at the Time Warner Center on Monday night, including Mr. Wesley, Mr. McBride, Martha High who tells how James Brown changed her name, and the Reverend Al Sharpton. -
Every computer-age gadget is deployed to bad effect in Jason Reitman’s satiric new movie, Men, Women, and Children, and that’s the least of the targets of his scrutiny: how about sex, ambition, and most of all, power, particularly of the parental kind. Let me say, there was not one adult I could admire in this film. In that way, the movie is a fantasy of teen disaffection in perhaps the mode of J. D. Salinger. Forget social media, which as Reitman so aptly put it in the post-screening Q&A with a panel of psychologists and experts including Psychology Today editor-at-large Hara Estroff Marano, is mere “geography.” As in the case of all of Reitman’s movies, especially Juno, Thank You for Smoking, and Up in the Air, this movie is smart and edgy; its themes will generate much debate. -
Radiant in black taffeta on Guild Hall’s stage after the movie Still Alice screened, Julianne Moore said the way you play a woman with degenerating early Alzheimer’s is to reach for normality, for what she can remember. Even buffeted by family, a supportive Alec Baldwin, and daughters Kate Bosworth and Kristen Stewart, son Hunter Parrish, not to mention a house in the Hamptons, Dr. Alice Howland, a prominent professor of linguistics at Columbia, makes a wrenching journey toward not recognizing those closest to her. And she’s only 50. The movie struck a chord big time in the Hamptons community. -
As any Freudian will tell you, father and son relationships are mythically fraught. In Robert Downey, Jr.’s new movie, The Judge, he’s a killer New York lawyer with a small town judge father (Robert Duvall) to topple, but there’s a twist: he has to defend his father in a murder case. The courtroom tension rests in questions of justice, with a silver-maned and chilly Billy Bob Thornton as a determined prosecutor. At a luncheon at 21 last week, fathers and sons faced off in celebration of this excellent movie that also features a superb supporting cast: Vera Farmiga, Vincent D’Onofrio and Jeremy Strong. Not only were the stars present, but Downey’s renowned filmmaker father, Robert Downey, Sr., and Dan Abrams with his father, legendary First Amendment attorney, Floyd Abrams. -
Holding court after a sumptuous brunch honoring Hilary Swank for receiving Montblanc’s Creative Impact in Acting award and Variety’s “Class of 10 Actors to Watch” at the Maidstone in East Hampton, Swank, her dog Kai by her side, spoke about her role as Mary Bee Cuddy in The Homesman, Tommy Lee Jones’ movie set in “the territories.” You could say this is a dark “how the west was won” from a woman’s point of view, with strong Coen Brothers influence. Based on Glendon Swarthout’s novel, The Homesman has the mythic structure of Jones’ directorial debut, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, with a star-studded supporting cast including John Lithgow, James Spader, Hailee Steinfeld, Tim Blake Nelson, and Meryl Streep, his Hope Springs co-star, the familiar faces a cushion for the movie’s somber message. Hilary Swank said she took the role of a woman tasked with bringing three women gone mad back to their Iowa families from a Nebraska frontier, an arduous journey, because it was a feminist story.
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Burroughs: The Movie opens with a clip from Saturday Night Live. The actress/ model Lauren Hutton introduces William S. Burroughs, proclaiming him the greatest living American writer, in her view. That last qualifier had to be included so that it would not look like a hoax, SNL’s music director Hal Willner told me last night at the stellar revival of the documentary at the New York Film Festival, 31 years after its premiere screening at this prestigious festival. Its subject, the iconic Burroughs, and director, Howard Brookner, a young filmmaker who died of AIDS in 1989 at age 35, are now long gone, but vivid in the memory of Jim Jarmusch and Tom DiCillo, despite the drugs they took in the making of the film. Speaking of Burroughs' subversive behavior, his antics with guns, everyone lauded the work of literary executor James Grauerholz in keeping Burroughs in line, even moving him to Lawrence, Kansas. -
“I’m an actress,” exclaims Molly Ringwald on opening night of her Café Carlyle cabaret act, as if we could forget. Playful, she suggested we forego formalities and all the clichés of lounge singers, and end her set of classics from the American songbook by pretending to walk offstage, to be followed by resounding claps and screams of “Encore.” As she feigned surprise at being coaxed back for another song, she proclaimed, “I’m so touched.” Thus flaunting cabaret tradition, Ringwald was a grown up version of the cheeky and vulnerable teens we remember and loved in John Hughes’ “The Breakfast Club,” “Pretty in Pink,” and “Sixteen Candles.” -
Bill Murray’s got some moves in St. Vincent, a big-hearted movie that had its New York premiere last night, a few days prior to opening the Hamptons International Film Festival this coming weekend. Murray’s shimmying in his seedy Sheepshead Bay kitchen, and singing to Dylan’s “Shelter from the Storm,” are some of the film’s many highlights, but he has nothing on Naomi Watts’ pole dancing with a baby bump. You have never seen Watts like this, a “lady of the night,” her Australian accent turned Russian. Harvey Weinstein called her to ask, do you want to do something different. This funny role of Daka, is, well, just that, revealing her chops as a genuine comedienne. But how could it be otherwise opposite Murray, Chris O’Dowd, and Melissa McCarthy, a dream ensemble sure to garner acting nominations in the coming season. They mixed it up with McCarthy in the straight role, playing the mother of Jaedan Lieberher, one of those wise-beyond-his-years kids, utterly polite considering the grownup shenanigans, and the movie’s real star. -
Film audiences may flock to The Good Lie, a compelling drama because Reese Witherspoon is one of the stars, but they will fall in love with Arnold Oceng, Ger Duany, rapper Emmanuel Jal, and Kuoth Wiel; the story, about the lost boys and girls of Sudan during the terrible reign of war lords, The Good Lie is about their experience. As children their characters had to flee their homeland, walking thousands of miles to the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya. The dangerous African terrain is gorgeously shot under Philippe Falardeau’s fine direction. After 13 years, the orphans come to the United States, among the last to make that journey before 9/11 closed down those doors and possibilities for emigration. Once here, the boys need to find jobs, and learn our ways one electric light switch at a time, and that’s where Reese Witherspoon comes in to help with the transition. The Good Lie, a seeming oxymoron, takes its title from a dilemma solved by Huck Finn in saving Jim in Mark Twain’s classic, as Mamere (Oceng) learns from a literature class to adapt to American culture. The Good Lie speaks to a brave, resonant heroic act that reveals his character’s essential decency. -
The buzz continues for the documentary Keep On Keepin’ On, even this early in awards season: this documentary may follow 20 Feet from Stardom to Oscars. The documentary’s catchy title, Keep On Keepin’ On, comes from the legendary trumpeter Clark Terry, now 94, a line he uses to inspire young musicians such as Justin Kauflin, a blind pianist composer he’s nurtured. Both star in the movie, along with Quincy Jones, who has taken Kauflin on tour and recorded an album with him this summer. What do they have in common? All can call the legendary Clark Terry their teacher. Add to the list, Alan Hicks, the Australian drummer and surfer who made this debut documentary, along with his “mate,” –that is, friend–Adam Hart. The film won the Hamptons International Film Festival’s Summerdocs audience award, and will be featured during the festival this October. -
A Neil LaBute play is a genre unto itself, as illustrated by his new one, The Money Shot, an MCC production now deploying expletives at the Lucille Lortel Theater. Needless to say, the title relates to the range and depth of a particular sexual act, as La Bute one ups the tradition forged by God of Carnage, Yasmina Reza’s play: a two-couples-in-a-sitting room template that also featured projectile vomit.In this case, the setting is a swank home nestled in the Hollywood Hills, and the couples, movie stars more into branding than art, compete for bragging rights. The hosts, Karen (Elizabeth Reaser) and Bev (Callie Thorne), an editor who also wrestles, vie with their guests, Steve (Fred Weller) and Missy (Gia Crovatin), his younger blond wife. In a movie they are scheduled to shoot, Karen and Steve are asked to have onscreen sex, and they want to ponder the options over dinner.
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Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s Pulitzer Prize winning play staged like a Feydeau farce! Doors slam on a boisterous set aclutter with tchotchkes and eccentrics as fireworks go off from the basement. Where there’s smoke, there’s . . . No, no, not revolutionary bombs! Scott Ellis’ revival of You Can’t Take It With You at the Longacre Theater sets the stage on fire! -
David Cronenberg turns horror to comedy in his latest feature Maps to the Stars, based on fiction by Bruce Wagner. Hollywood is known more for its superficiality than for depths of any kind, so exploring themes of damaged children, incest, and high narcissism set in L.A., you may come up with a movie as disturbing as Maps to the Stars. Unless you take it as comedy, which Cronenberg claims was his intention. His star Julianne Moore came away from Cannes with a best actress prize for her turn as Havana Segrand, a waning star beset by frightening visions of her mother (Sarah Gadon). She has a laughing fit discovering that the child of a rival actress has been killed, leaving a coveted role, in fact a remake of one in which her mother starred, to her. Mothers and daughters are toxic in this movie. Quipped Bruce Wagner at the NYFF’s Q&A, “I saw this as a tender coming of age story. And much like Boyhood, it took a long time to make.” -
On the last day of shooting Lily of the Feast, a feature set in 1970’s Williamsburg, Troy Garity, in a suit, sits on the edge of a bathtub, counting. The L.A. based actor, son of Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden plays Santo Bastucci, a young man with a gift for memorizing numbers, a handy skill, and members of the mob are making offers he can’t refuse. The bathroom is miniscule in the soundstage clutter of Windmill Studios in Brooklyn, a set specifically designed for the movie by its director, Federico Castelluccio. We know him as Carmella’s heartthrob in HBO’s The Sopranos, when things are not going so great between this suburban mob wife and husband Tony, but here for Lily of the Feast, director Castelluccio, a known fine artist, extends his art to the screen. As many have told me, in making the feature length version of this story from a short, his artistic vision informs every frame. The film also stars Paul Sorvino and David Proval and is a passion project for screenwriter/ producer Michael Ricigliano, Jr. who grew up in this neighborhood. -
Rita Wilson told a funny story about having worked with Bobby Short, resident star singer pianist at this special supper club back in the day. “It was a commercial,” she laughed and sang a few notes from the Charlie ad, and we never really met. That was my brush with greatness.” That statement seemed odd given that she’s married to Tom Hanks who had Barry Diller, David Geffen, and Mike Nichols at his table to hear her perform her songs on opening night. But in many ways the charm of Rita Wilson’s Café Carlyle act is to confess just how hard it was to get there, given she’s risk averse. When she asked how long it took the audience, one man said, two and a half hours. Well, it took me decades, countered this actress, movie producer, and accomplished songwriter, who had some formidable risks to overcome: her parents fled oppressive regimes in Greece and Bulgaria. “You want to talk about risks!” Raised in Los Angeles, Rita Wilson idolized the musicians, songwriters and singers from Laurel Canyon: Carole King, Linda Rondstat, James Taylor, and especially Joni Mitchell; their influence on her music is resonant: “Joni” is an homage. But her themes are evident in the original numbers, “What You See is What You Get” and “Grateful.” -
The Pearl Theater’s revival of Uncle Vanya illustrates this fine company’s signature charm, and does one better, doing Anton Chekhov the good service of playing his tragicomedy for humor over gravitas. Christopher Durang’s Tony-winning Chekhov sendup, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, made it all laughs. At the Pearl, when the characters speak lines like “I’m so bored,” the line is more than a cute dig to anyone without the means to live in their upscale country home with servants. On opening night this week, Dominic Cuskern, who plays the revered, hypochondriac professor spoke about these “characters,” egotistical eccentrics, the housebound enslaved by their sense of duty, the lovelorn consumed by suppressed passions. They’re funny! -
Ethan Hawke made it to the Stone Rose Lounge for the premiere of Denzel Washington’s new movie The Equalizer. Co-host of the party, Hawke proclaimed that the big blast action movie was polar opposite to the documentary he made about Seymour Bernstein, a poetic composer/ pianist/ educator, one of many highlights of the New York Film Festival opening this week. Superficially, Hawke is right. Denzel Washington plays a classic epic-scale do-gooder, up against the Russian mob in The Equalizer. His formidable opponents sport ominous tattoos and hit the girls they’ve forced into prostitution. Denzel, as Robert, quietly shuffles through the movie making a lot of noise, reading books for pleasure, and mentoring the young. Tough, he can skewer a fat neck with a corkscrew. Blood obscures inked skin, as a late night Home Depot offers a playground of lethal weaponry. And yes, Pushkin, the main Moscow honcho fries in this sure to be blockbuster.
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Jeff Goldblum wears a pork pie hat and wide grin in his Café Carlyle debut, even when heckled by a man who wanted less talk and more music. But the performance, in which he acts as quiz show host, pianist and front man for the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, a grand name for a jazz ensemble, proceeds amiably with more shmooze than most events at the legendary Carlyle. At Tuesday’s opening, Goldblum recounted how Woody Allen, who plays at the Carlyle on Monday nights, suggested The Fly actor make this scene. He also stopped the music to shout out to Edward Norton who attended with his pal Fisher Stevens, and Al Roker, celebrating his wedding anniversary. -
Mosab Hassan Yousef fixes you with his intense, messianic gaze, hardly seeming to blink. The son of a Hamas founder, dubbed “the green prince,” he gave intelligence to the Israeli Shin Bet, went into exile, and wrote a book about his experience, Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue, and Unthinkable Choices. His Shin Bet handler Gonen Ben Yitzhak is softly intense, a grandson of Polish Holocaust survivors; he left the Shin Bet and stepped up to help Mosab, when he faced deportation from his new home in the United States. The relationship between Arabs forced into spying against their communities, and their Israeli handlers is a trope now familiar in the west from last year’s fiction films Bethlehem and Omar, with fatal results. The story of Mosab and Gonen, as recounted in the current documentary, The Green Prince, offers a contrast, and a paradigm for peace, even as the headlines look bleaker than ever. Eschewing notions of “occupation” and other rhetoric, these men spoke to me last week about the movies and the Middle East: -
Along with Glenn Close, Meryl Streep hosted a premiere screening this week of Israel Horovitz’ My Old Lady at MoMA. Her family in tow, husband Don Gummer and daughter Mamie, she was celebrating her pal Kevin Kline’s lead performance in this charming romance set in Paris, as well as Horovitz’ debut as filmmaker. At 75, Israel Horovitz, author of 70 stage plays, took this one, popularly performed all over the world in many languages, and adapted it for the screen. His daughter Rachael Horovitz produced. He got Kevin Kline, as he recounted introducing the evening: at last Kline gets the girl. Horovitz got Dame Maggie Smith to play the titular old lady because at least she doesn’t die.
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