Running up to the Tony Awards, Cyndi Lauper was busy with events celebrating the CD release of the Kinky Boots original cast recording, and a tour that would start the day after the Tony’s. On Wednesday evening, just after a photo shoot for Vogue, Lauper signed her caricature at Sardi’s. It was hard to say what she, in a short black dress that showed deep cleavage, and flame tufted hair, thought of the drawing that made her look more blond and eh, wholesome. If Lauper wins a Tony for her music and lyrics—as well she should– she will be the first woman to do so solo (not teamed up with a male partner).
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- 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 his time, the late ‘80’s, Morton Downy, Jr. was the hottest voice on television, loud and abrasive. For nearly two years, he brow beat and brawled his way to top ratings, ultimately alienating top tier guests, until his talk show devolved into something of a circus act, showcasing strippers and carnies, a precursor to Jerry Springer, and the in your face television of today. At the Paley Center on Wednesday night, television and media personalities: Donny Deutsch, Rosanna Scotto, Dick Cavett, Joe Conason, Dan Abrams, Peggy Siegal and others gathered for a screening of documentary Evocateur: Morton Downey Jr. As much as everyone knew about this chain smoking loud mouth, the documentary still held many surprises, including his anxiety of influence over his famous dad. -
Courtney P. Vance couldn’t get over it. He was presenting a Theatre World Award to Tom Hanks, not only a two-time Oscar winner and beloved star of many movies, making an award-worthy debut on Broadway in Lucky Guy. Every night, he said, West 44 Street looks like Mardi Gras; people from other shows wanting to catch a glimpse of this star. The annual award, now in its 69th year, is meant for first timers on Broadway, or a very special standout performance, and Hanks graciously accepted, emphasizing that he is a “lucky guy,” speaking the late Nora Ephron’s words 8 times a week. She came to New York knowing she wanted to write for newspapers, but what she really wanted was to write for theater. This award is second best to her being here, he said, his voice cracking.
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For those of us who remember the thrilling violence enacted by James Chance & the Contortions, the muted manifestations of “punk” at the Metropolitan Museum are outrage mediated, excitement without menace, and a study of how revolution passes into history. The crafted looks of Vivienne Westwood, Helmut Lang, Dolce & Gabbana, and others, including Guido Palau’s bubbled fur head pieces are amusing, and unlike Costume Institute events of the past, such as the exceptional 2011 Alexander McQueen show, where art transcended function, these are not looks I recognize from that era. Maybe that’s the point: a head trip, the Met “Punk” show offers many fascinations beyond the displayed facsimile of CBGB’s latrine, but punk vibe isn’t one of them.
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Our environment is as much on the minds of those who remember the pioneering efforts of Lady Bird Johnson in making the natural resources of America a priority during her tenure as First Lady, as the young filmmakers—Brit Marling and director Zal Batmanglu — who created the thriller The East, which opened in theaters this week. At the annual National Audubon Society Women in Conservation luncheon on Wednesday, Johnson’s efforts were celebrated at The Plaza Hotel, with awards created by Tiffany’s, and a fine meal worthy of the occasion: beet Nicoise salad, hand made pappardelle with wild mushroom ragout, and Meyer lemon meringue torte, vegetarian, to reduce the carbon and methane emissions released into the environment by high volume meat consumption. While far from the dumpster foraging featured in the movie, the menu underscored the philosophy of the Rachel Carson Awards, to protect all forms of life on Earth. -
Rama Burshtein’s glimpse into Tel Aviv’s Hasidic community, Fill the Void is a stunning film taking the viewer into the marriage practices of a hermetic society, offering an intimate, if fictional view, of how matches are made. Ultimately a love story, Fill the Void is most surprising in revealing unexpected emotional connection and subdued passion in places where love is most often a last consideration. Shira (Hadas Yaron), an 18 year old woman drinks tea with suitors at dates arranged by matchmaker; they interview one another as to how they want to live their lives; suddenly after a family tragedy Shira has to consider marrying Yochay (Yiftach Klein) her older sister’s husband, twice her age.
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The East, a thriller co-written by Brit Marling, who stars, and Zal Batmanglu, who directs, features a Svengali type character played to mesmerizing perfection by Alexander Skarsgard. At the film's New York premiere party at Hotel Chantelle’s Rooftop on Monday, the actor who has no doubt honed his skills at fixing you in his gaze in the HBO series True Blood, seemed far from the low key cool he exuded so well in the recent What Maisie Knew, and had more of his Disconnect intensity. As Benji, leader of an anarchist group called The East, determined to make corporations pay for the damage they do to the environment, and to anyone in their path to profits, Skarsgard knows how to charm. To get back at an oil company known to have polluted waters endangering and killing wildlife, the group that also includes Ellen Page as “Isabella Duncan,” pumps oil into its CEO’s country mansion, coating it with slime. An eye for an eye. You may have had these revenge fantasies yourself. -
For those of us of a certain age, Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella is a nostalgia trip. The memory of this musical, a television landmark in the ‘50’s lingers as a singular pleasure. My fear in bringing young people, Noah (8) and Hannah (6), to a recent matinee was my losing composure and singing loudly along to “Impossible,” “In My Own Little Corner,” “Do I Love You Because You’re Beautiful?” Another concern: would it be as good for them as it was for me? To date, critics and awarders seem in thrall. Even though this is a Broadway debut, the musical has 9 Tony nominations as well as nods for other major awards, as a musical revival. -
If this were Dutch Masters instead of American Masters, I’d have a box of cigars, gripes Mel Brooks about the enterprise of including a documentary about him in the prestigious PBS series. On Wednesday night, an audience at the 92 Street Y got a sneak preview of the show, Mel Brooks: Make a Noise, that will air Monday night. The evening also included a conversation with director Robert Trachtenberg, The View co-host and comedian Joy Behar, and director Susan Stroman. The image of Mel Brooks hovered above them, a huge presence on Skype, echoing a moment in the film when Gene Wilder is asked whether it registered as important when he met Mel Brooks: Does Moses think it’s important when God speaks to him? -
It’s always Howdy Doody time in music producer Hal Willner’s workspace at the Film Center building in Manhattan. Best known for producing music for Saturday Night Live, Willner shares his lair with many antique puppets, Jackie Gleason memorabilia including a Ralph Cramden bus driver’s suit, as well as DVD’s of Shoah and other Holocaust films. He jokes, “My work sounds like a Warner Brothers cartoon or the soundtrack to a movie about Dachau.” -
The sight of two men in giant clown shoes and oversized pants shuffling on a commuter platform lingers in the mind. From the Signature Theater’s production of Old Hats, winner of this year’s “Outstanding Alternative Theatrical Experience” Award at last week’s Lucille Lortel Awards, the skit, featuring Bill Irwin and David Shiner evokes Chaplin’s little tramp and a history of slapstick. Unlike the Tony Awards, which are presented interspersed with acts from Broadway shows too, the Lucille Lortel Awards, a night of honors and entertainment from over 100 plays off-Broadway, takes much of its fun from the fact that the show would not be televised. -
Noah Baumbach’s new film Frances Ha is cut from the same cloth as Lena Dunham’s Girls. Written with Greta Gerwig, who stars as Frances, shot in black and white, Frances Ha evokes Woody Allen’s Manhattan and Francois Truffaut’s Paris, key locations for the twenty-something Frances to live her dreams. A moveable feast of guys, apartments, and jobs, Frances Ha freshens up the old tropes: cell phones and the internet play comfortably with the actors’ slapstick physicality and sight gags, a throwback to, and nostalgia for early filmmaking. A dancer, Frances runs awkwardly on the street to find a cash machine, falling on her face. Frances Ha’s world is almost entirely populated by a humorous and poignant variation of Generation Me characters, including Frances’ best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner) and young men played by Adam Driver and Michael Zegen. -
A lot has happened since 2008 when a Sunday night premiere screening and dinner co-hosted by Gloria Steinem honored Leymah Gbowee, a charismatic social worker turned activist who, in the documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell, tells her compelling story about how women banded together to protest violence in Liberia, set their hideous dictator Charles Taylor on a journey of exile, to be put on trial for war crimes, and enabled a democratically elected woman to govern their country. Self-assured and instinctively political, Gbowee came off as a modern day Lysistrata, as in the ancient Greek satirist Aristophanes’ play, a character who organized women in a sex strike to protest the Peloponnesian War. Now a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Leymah Gbowee was honored on Thursday morning at the New York Women’s Foundation breakfast, along with Tina Brown, founder of Women of the World Foundation among her many media accomplishments, and Rachel Lloyd, founder of GEMS, Girls Educational & Mentoring Services, to help victims of domestic violence and human trafficking. -
A few years ago, the excesses of the new movie version of The Great Gatsby might have inspired cathartic revulsion. The scene outside Avery Fisher Hall for this week’s Gatsby premiere befit the mega wattage of the movie’s stars, particularly Leonardo DiCaprio as he made his way through a screaming crowd. Carey Mulligan, resplendent in red Lanvin, her blond hair swept up, walked the red carpet. In the grand chaos of this opening of a state-of-the-art Baz Luhrmann movie—think Moulin Rouge set in 3D fairy tale America—Baz Luhrmann failed to introduce his stars, but did manage to say in his introduction, as the story takes place in New York, there was no other place for its world premiere, even though this American epic will open the Festival de Cannes next week. -
The news that The Testament of Mary would close on Sunday hung in the air for Friday evening’s performance, more prominently than any of the play’s props, including a dead tree. At the prologue, the audience comes to the stage circling Mary as blessed icon, robed in blue. How she became that exalted figure is what this play’s about. To be sure, sharing the stage with a vulture may be genius, but not a good sign for a long life.
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The movie, The Iceman, is all the chillier because it is based on a true story. A hit man procedural directed by Ariel Vromen, the film opens with a close up of Michael Shannon as contract killer Richard Kuklinski looking haggard and hirsute, being asked if he has any regrets. Moving back in time to the ‘70’s, we see him tender, courting his would be wife, Deborah, and then we see his short fuse, in a back alley pool hall, when he feels dissed. Given its subject matter, a contract killer responsible for offing over 100 men, The Iceman shows remarkable restraint: you see some straight ahead violence, throats are deftly slit, but even more terrifying is the sight of doomed men pleading for their lives, or packed as human ice bricks. The ensemble work is first rate, with Ray Liotta as a mob boss and John Ventimiglia as his knife-happy underling. Chris Evans as Mr. Freezy is both butcher and soft ice cream salesman, with David Schwimmer, Robert Davi and James Franco, heartless losers in smaller roles. -
One of super agent Sue Mengers’ many rules for dealing with divas is never remind them of the beginning when you are walking them down the red carpet on the way to the Oscars. For example, do not say to Diana Ross, we are a far cry from when you were giving Berry Gordy blowjobs in the back seat of a limo. Taking that cue, it would be just wrong to remind the Divine Miss M of her work at the Continental Baths backed by the Harlettes before her Broadway revue, Clams on the Halfshell. Then again, she was so fabulous back in the day, and incarnating Sue Mengers, in I'll Eat You Last, a show that does not even touch her mega singing chops, she’s fabulous now. -
Gloria Steinem, often considered the face of feminism, attended a film by Saudi Arabian Haifaa al Mansour. Premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival this past weekend, Wadjda was celebrated at an afterparty at D.C. Moore Gallery in Chelsea. Amidst painted photographs by Duane Michals and paintings by Milton Avery, the filmmaker chatted with Queen Noor of Jordan and others, women decidedly international from the Middle East. Regal with her hair in a French twist, the queen wore a long skirt and jean jacket. Waiters passed hors d’oeuvres, including bite sized BLT’s, leading one to ponder, whose idea was it to serve bacon to Saudis?Haifaa al Mansour said it was not easy for a woman to make films in her country, but this film had government support. When asked what traditions she was following, she said, “There are no traditions.”
Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura
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On that cataclysmic day when Bernie Madoff was arrested, his loyal personal secretary Eleanor Squillari was convinced they had made a mistake. Life at the “lipstick building,” headquarters of the largest scale Ponzi scheme in financial history was wholesome and nurturing. They were family. But when she phoned Bernie to ask what gives, he was abrupt and perfunctory. And that’s when it hit her: this was for real. -
In North Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, two young men live in a rundown house, Phillip, an agile shut-in, and Treat, a menacing low level thief, in Lyle Kessler’s Orphans at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater. The play’s first time on Broadway, it will be interesting to see how the Tony Award committee will categorize this testosterone-ridden three-hander, as this fine production is sure to contend for top prizes. The third character, a Chicago businessman, Harold, enters the ménage: at first a willing caller wanting another drink, he becomes a kidnap victim when Treat smells the opportunity for quick cash. Soon a power shift: The rope bound Harold, with a nod to Houdini, frees himself and takes on a parental role. -
Thor Heyerdahl’s legendary journey from Peru to Polynesia on a raft was made famous in the Oscar winning documentary made in 1950, Kon-Tiki. In a new film of this voyage, Kon-Tiki, made with a fine cast of Norwegian actors, Thor Heyerdahl (Pal Sverre Hagen) enters The Explorers Club hoping to find support for this mad trip, and last week, in anticipation of the film’s opening and an exhibition of the raft, The Weinstein Company hosted a luncheon for a small group at The Explorers Club.After welcoming everyone, including Josh Bernstein, Richard Wiese, Lawrence O’Donnell, Chuck Scarborough, and Glenn Close, Harvey Weinstein recounted the importance of Kon-Tiki to him as an elementary schooler. As he exuded about the “show and tell” he did on the amazing story of this Pacific Ocean crossing, you could see the boy in the man.
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Even at 9 AM, you want a whiskey when you’re talking about Ken Loach’s new movie The Angels' Share, screenplay by Paul Laverty, especially as you want to brace yourself for the political and economic realities of this master storyteller’s work. Meeting Paul Laverty at the Nomad Hotel over a latte and chocolate croissant, I have to tell this lawyer turned writer in no uncertain terms that one of his collaborations with director Ken Loach, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, is on my list for best movie I wish never to see again. It was that powerful, that good, and that disturbing. And so I greeted the new film, about a young man from a difficult, violent background who attempts to rise above his circumstances when everyone around him is pulling him back down, with fear that Loach would do it to me again: that is, have me rooting for The Angels' Share’s protagonist, a young guy named Robbie (Paul Brannigan) who tries to make good and discovers he has a real nose for fine aged whiskey, only to disappoint me with an unremittingly sad end. I was not prepared to be so pleasantly surprised with The Angels' Share’s generous humanity. -
Fresh from D. C., from a concert at the White House, Sam Moore performed his “Hold On, I’m Coming,” “Something is Wrong with My Baby,” “Soul Man” revue at the We Are Family Foundation Benefit on Thursday night, a tribute to Sting and Trudie Styler for their humanitarian efforts. An impassioned Slater Jewell-Kemker (20) and an equally impressive young man Ndaba Mandela, yes, Nelson’s grandson, spoke about the rock couple’s work as founders of their Rainforest Foundation, as did Caryl M. Stern, President and CEO of U. S. Fund for Unicef. Then Sting and Trudie accepted their award, with Trudie doing all of the talking, explaining how, on a trip to Brazil, they learned that the logging industry was stripping indigenous peoples of their home, burning down the rainforest. They set up their foundation to help save the land from private, commercial interests and are now operating in 23 countries. Trudie Styler affirmed their mission, “Compassion for one another makes us special. Our destiny on this planet is a common destiny.” -
This entertaining show may be billed as a jazz quartet, but as aficionados know, John Pizzarelli has a secret weapon: his dad. As he tells you, Bucky Pizzarelli, now 87 and seated beside him, has a long and distinguished career on guitar performing with Vaughn Monroe and other big bands of that era, but with his son John—and another son, Martin on bass—(that must be the family rebellion), the show at the Carlyle that started this week is comprised of smooth standards sprinkled with patter, as if son John, front man on guitar who also sings, needs to tell Bucky just where to come in. -
For Holocaust remembrance 2013, what do we remember? As my mother, a survivor of the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz, and liberated from Stutthof used to teach us, life is a gift. And it really does matter, how you survive.Stories of survival can read like fairy tales, best case scenarios fueled by heroism, ingenuity, and luck. In the documentary No Place on Earth, guided by a strong-minded matriarch, Esther Stermer, who insisted that rather than follow their town in Ukraine to the ghettos and camps, the younger men should find hiding places. The family hid in caves, large enough in places, and also sufficiently sinewy and muddy to elude anyone trying to look for them.
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