Here is a musical on Broadway with a philosophy a girl can love: Kinky Boots starts with a rousing tribute “The Most Beautiful Thing,” to shoes. On a pedestal sit a pair of red patent leather pumps to die for. Fetish, to be sure—“Sex is in the Heel”, Kinky Boots, at the Al Hirschfeld Theater, is comprised of music by rocker Cyndi Lauper with book by Harvey Fierstein based on a charming and memorable British film of the same title, Kinky Boots is also a feel good extravaganza of leggy drag queens and divas including two major talents, Stark Sands and Billy Porter, who as Charlie Price and be-sequined performer Lola, dare to ask the quintessential Fierstein question: what is a man? (This may not be simply a matter of footwear.)
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- 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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Heads roll, as do other body parts. Literally. In “Killer Kids of the Taliban,” little boys tell you that the imam assured them, the bomb strapped to their bodies explodes outward, murdering everyone in its path but not them. And in case you were wondering which border is the world’s most dangerous (Pakistan-India) or how to make a gun out of scrap metal, Vice on HBO is the show for you. Showrunners, Shane Smith and Ryan Duffy, the most affable hosts you will see on a news program, started posting their videos of trips to challenged areas on YouTube, and now HBO has picked them up big time. Committed to exposing the most absurd, mind-bending stories on the rapidly morphing human condition, the show, airing on Friday, is executive produced by Smith, Eddy Moretti and Bill Maher, with Fareed Zakaria as consulting producer. Curious and fun,Ryan Duffy, a riot of tattoos, rides in a car with arguably the world’s most endangered species, a man running for election in the Philippines. Don’t worry, says the targeted would-be official, the car is bullet proof. Duffy’s deadpan is worth watching all on its own. -
Tom Hanks sporting ‘80’s-ish facial hair was explaining the difference between his naturally grown mustache and that of the character he portrays in his Broadway debut Lucky Guy, the play by the late Nora Ephron based on the life of Mike McAlary. His went out in tough bristles, Hanks gesticulated madly bringing his hands under his nose where a tight, well clipped fringe sat by contrast. A gaggle of interviewers laughed.
The mood at the Broadhurst Theater and at Gotham Hall for Lucky Guy’s opening night on Monday was bittersweet exuberance: with the tearful final moment of the play, when Hanks, as McAlary after a near death accident and sick with the cancer that killed him, delivers a weighty speech and a portrait of Nora Ephron hangs over the stage. Hanks was not the only one crying.
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It was like travelling to the moon, to an alien place, said Barbara Walters about her trip to China with the president during the Nixon administration. If he were here right now, he was so awkward, he wanted so much to be liked, he would tell a dirty joke. Speaking from the stage at the Walter Reade Theater after a screening of Our Nixon, the documentary by Penny Lane and Brian Frye on closing night of the New Directors/ New Films series, she went on about that historic China trip: “Everyone was wearing Mao outfits. You could not tell the men from the woman. I was there to buy gifts for Henry Kissinger’s girlfriends,” she quipped. That was Tricky Dick with Plastic Pat, who finally came into her own as an interesting First Lady, only for Nixon to resign. “We forget how good he was on foreign policy. He deserves to have a better reputation than he has.” -
Shoulder to shoulder like Homeric heroes, Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper descended the long stairs at the Landmark Theater on Thursday night, joining Eva Mendes, Ray Liotta, Dane DeHaan and others of the cast and crew onstage for the premiere of Derek Cianfrance’s new movie, The Place Beyond the Pines. The two actors, perhaps the best of their generation, deliver deft performances as their fictive lives twine, one a carny, the other a cop, in this triptych about fathers and sons on the American landscape, making this the most thrilling two and a half hours of storytelling in the cinemas right now. -
On the eve of this year’s New Directors / New Films Festival, a collaboration between The Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, the Titus I theater was abuzz with downtown indie elite: Sofia Coppola, Alex Karpovsky, Elizabeth Olsen, John Cameron Mitchell, Mark Birbiglia, Julia Garner, and photographer Bob Gruen. Gimme the Loot, Adam Leon’s film about two graffiti artists attempting to raise money by any means for the ultimate NYC art project, had its premiere. Featured in the 2012 ND/NF, Gimme the Loot was introduced with the kind of praise reserved for films by Almodovar, whose name was invoked in the introduction, films that will be discussed forever for moving the medium forward. In this film’s case, the language is fresh, that is, bold, bawdy, and brimming with life. The scammers, actors Tashiana Washington and Ty Hickson, and a rich girl played by Zoe Lescaze remain memorable. -
Truman Capote’s glory days as a celebrated writer were revisited at the opening of Richard Greenberg’s, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, on Wednesday night at the Cort Theater, and a black & white ball—eh bash at the Edison Ballroom. The play starts with a narrator called Fred reminiscing about a New York brownstone where he once lived, and a particularly spectacular neighbor, Holly Golightly with whom he partied and took baths. The tall and lanky, handsome “Fred” (Cory Michael Smith) may be the epitome of everything that the “bulldog” Capote was not, but the self-invented Holly (Emilia Clarke), one of his greatest creations, hews close to the author’s bone. -
As the manager of a girl band looking, Dave Lovelace (Chris O’Dowd) teaches the four Aboriginal singers the distinction between country western and soul music: both are about loss, but in country western, they just resign themselves to it and whine. In soul, they yearn to get back what they had. In 1968 Australia, this useful information helps to catalyze these young women; they switch to soul, come of age, break some ethnic barriers, leaving behind family, including a child for opportunities in Viet Nam singing for American troops. That child, Tony Briggs, wrote a stage play based on the adventures of his brave mom and her pals, and now a movie—in fact, the feel good movie of the year– The Sapphires has dazzled audiences, making its rounds through various festivals including last year’s Cannes. -
Whenever I am blue, I can snap out of it conjuring Sigourney Weaver’s image as Snow White. That was the take away when I saw Christopher Durang’s Chekhovian mash up, Masha, Sonia, Vanya and Spike at Lincoln Center in December. Now the enterprise has moved to Broadway, its Sturm und Drang at a Bucks County country house on a pond successfully transported to The Golden Theater. Act I is a sendup of Chekhovian tropes with prescient views on real estate and familiar philosophical exclamations like “I’m in mourning for my life!” In Durang’s whimsical mix master, as directed by Nicholas Martin, the tragic—and neurotic– circumstance of everyday life turns to high hilarity.
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If you want to get attention at a swank party at The Four Seasons, do not walk the carpet behind Katie Holmes. In a dark lacy shirtwaist, the star had the photographers snapping steady and at least one observer noted, she could play another Kate—Middleton in a biopic about the British royal couple. Yes, The Observer fete had everything, including a British contingent: author Amanda Foreman served on the 2012 judging panel for the esteemed literary award, Man Booker Prize for Fiction, with Dan Stevens. Yes, Dan Stevens, or Matthew Crawley to you, offed in a car crash at the end of Season Three, leaving viewers beyond anxious about the future of Downton Abbey. It took three beats to register exactly who he was, standing there, handsomely familiar, blond hair darkened and spiky for a new movie, A Walk Among Tombstones, he is shooting with co-star Liam Neeson. But what was Dan Stevens doing HERE? Turns out he is not just another pretty face but commands the online quarterly, The Junket, and writes a column for the Daily Telegraph, having read English literature at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Did he really, really want to leave Downton Abbey, this reporter asked gamely. Yes, but not that way.
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The summer of 1969, with Stonewall in June and Woodstock in August, represents a shift in the American ethos. These events meet in a new play Hit the Wall at the Barrow Street Theater. Woodstock may evoke the peace and love generation, and to a lesser degree, the look and sound is represented in Hit the Wall by a trio of musicians, a girl guitarist in headband and slovenly dress with her bra showing in the back recalls that bygone era. Hey, at least she wears one! But Stonewall is another thing unto itself: a routine raid on a gay bar in Greenwich Village, a stone’s throw from this theater, turns into a full scale riot, inaugurating change that still resonates. Hit the Wall is a reminder of early violence, a turning point. Today, same sex couples still arouse volatile passions for some. -
The documentary Girl Rising—the title evokes uprising– mixes urgency with great storytelling appeal. The latest moment of the feminist revolution is not about debating issues of women’s equality in the workplace. It is about changing the world one girl at a time through education.Coming just after the recent PBS series, MAKERS, a history of the recent phase of the Women’s Movement in America in all its diversity, Girl Rising asks the question, how do we nurture girls to become “makers” of their own destiny? Taking its agenda global, Girl Rising addresses the dire subjects of girls’ vulnerability –to poverty, human trafficking, bonding which is a form of slavery, child marriage, and assassination for the simple desire to go to school.
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Director Regis Roinsard was particularly excited when his film, Populaire, opened the annual Rendez-vous with French Cinema at the Paris Theater. He exulted introducing his stars Romain Duris and Deborah Francois. Evoking Doris Day and Audrey Hepburn movies, Populaire follows this festival’s first night traditions as a frothy comedy with old-fashioned sexist overtones, charming as only the French can make them! Populaire turns out to be a pink typewriter Francois’s character uses to win a ‘50’s era typing competition and land the man of her dreams played with fetching allure by Duris. What surprises, as Roinsard explained at the French Cultural Services afterparty, is that this was a first feature, based on a historic typing competition. Influenced by American movies, he wanted to make it into a love story. Of course, at the end, as the tap tap tap accelerates, the industrial types imagine the word machine’s future: the ball, with all the letters of the alphabet contained in a golfball-sized metal sphere, rotating as it makes its marks. -
If “This Guy’s in Love with You” means anything, Herb Alpert and Lani Hall’s show at the Café Carlyle offers, in Alpert’s words, “music that is very déjà-vu.” Performing several decades worth of their hits and American songbook classics like “Close to You,” “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” “Let’s Face the Music and Dance,” this couple of 39 years, go through their signature repertoire sprinkled with anecdotes and backstory, backed by a first-rate band: Bill Cantos on piano, Hussain Jiffry on bass, and Michael Shapiro on drums. And because the Carlyle is such an intimate room –(I enjoyed seeing it on this week’s episode of Girls)–Alpert likes to kibitz with the audience, asking for questions—this is the ultimate in interactive, with one caveat, no requests. But that didn’t stop first-nighters, including Regis and Joy Philbin and producer Tommy LiPuma and a fan all the way from Korea among them, from shouting out favorites anyway. “Rise,” yelled one enthusiast, and they did. -
The award season is all about superlatives and thank you speeches but for East Hampton’s Guild Hall Lifetime Achievement Awards it is about community and family. Marshall Brickman, Master of Ceremonies at a most packed ballroom at the Plaza for the annual Lifetime Achievement Awards on Monday night, paid homage to Peter Stone who held this honor for years. Of course, in theater Brickman is known for Jersey Boys and The Addams Family, and so, when he introduced Nathan Lane, winner for Performing Arts, he knew from what he spoke as Lane had originated the role of Gomez Addams: for rehearsal, he was off book, that is, knew his lines by heart, and knew everybody else’s lines too. Director Jack O’Brien screamed a cathartic scream realizing that their new play, The Nance, starring Lane, was only three weeks away from opening. That work, which he will direct from a script by Douglas Carter Beane, should be wonderful, if his work on the new book of Cinderella, which opened on Sunday night at the Broadway Theater is any indication, but more on that later. Ever charming, ever quipping, Nathan Lane took the stage retooling the award season bromide: “I didn’t prepare a speech. I didn’t think I would win.” -
“This is a competition disguised as a film festival,” said First Time Film Festival co-founder Johanna Bennett, before introducing a panel featuring Harry Belafonte on Saturday morning at The Players Club. Twelve first films are screening and a winner will get distribution. Just when you thought the world had enough film festivals! But in addition to discovering new talent, the festival celebrates the old in a unique way. Successful filmmakers love their first films, and so, as a unique feature of this festival, Darren Aronofsky, Barbara Kopple, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Nancy Savoca, Hal Hartley, Christine Vachon, Melvin van Peeples, and Todd Solonz will show their debut work. On Friday night, Sofia Coppola screened The Virgin Suicides, with a Q&A that lasted twice the allotted time, illustrating that passion, First Fest co-founder Mandy Ward pointed out, surprised at how well this venture is going—after only one day. (The festival ends with an awards ceremony on Monday night at the Players Club, with Johanna Bennett’s father Tony, Ellen Burstyn, Martin Scorsese, and others.)
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Sounds like a joke, but Hunger Games composer T Bone Burnett, took a break to record his own original music for the documentary, A Place at the Table, a film illuminating the problem of hunger in America. This subject is no joke. Directed by Lori Silverbush and Kristi Jacobson, this film follows a few emblematic young citizens, a Colorado fifth grader named Rosie, a Mississippi second grader with severe health problems named Tremonica, a Philadelphia mom named Barbie, determined, hard working good people, who happen to live outside the food eh, network. Food insecure, they don’t know where their next meal is coming from. Literally. Barbie has to travel by bus to find a market that sells fruits and vegetables. Local stores are stocked with processed items providing minimally nutritious calories for her children. And she is lucky she can feed them. Rosie in a ramshackle rural community in a gorgeous mountainous landscape, relies on donations. On a panel this week at The Crosby Hotel, spokesmen Jeff Bridges and the Silverbush’s husband Tom Colicchio, star of television’s “Top Chef” made a key point: here is one problem that is fixable. -
In a new play The Madrid, Edie Falco works with her Nurse Jackie producer, the playwright Liz Flahive. As Martha, Falco seems to be as self-medicated as she is in her Showtime role. The Madrid, a Manhattan Theater Club production at City Center Stage 1, opens in a classroom where Martha is animated and engaged, teaching her kindergarteners about family until one (Brooke Ashley Laine) asks, do you have children. Her eyes glaze as the scene changes. Under Leigh Silverman’s able direction, so does the play’s tone. Now a family is looking for Martha, or noticing she’s gone. Family members, neighbors (John Ellison Conley, Heidi Schreck, Christopher Evan Welch) react. Her husband wants to sell the furniture. Even her mother, a good Frances Sternhagen, gets into the action, but she doesn’t have much to do, except crash her car in the hope that Martha will return. -
You want to scream, “Check out your sense of entitlement,” at the characters in Paul Downs Colaizzo’s richly evocative debut play Really Really, an MCC production downtown at the Lucille Lortel Theater, directed by David Cromer. That line, so memorable from Lena Dunham’s film Tiny Furniture, may not go far enough to cover the dire consequences of actions taken by this college group, illustrating a “Generation Me” philosophy that hews terrifyingly close to a Darwinian survival of the fittest. This is the generation born after Roe v. Wade, the most wanted generation, Colaizzo explained at the opening last week, defined by extreme narcissism and outsized sense of entitlement. -
In New York on Oscar Sunday, the red carpet will be more than a runway for hopefuls in borrowed gowns and glitter. Chef Daniel Boulud will host a special dinner and viewing of the awards show for the east coast Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at his Restaurant Daniel. The signature drink, a moired pomegranate colored cocktail with an ice cube ball featuring a mini gold statue of that hunk of an award, is called Red Carpet: pear infused vodka, Saint Germain, an elderflower liqueur, topped with champagne.
With the ultimate in Gallic grace, Boulud explained his party raison d’etre: I envy Wolfgang in Los Angeles, so we are celebrating here in New York. He and the Daniel staff worked hard to create canapes that correspond with the films:
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At B. B. King’s on Sunday night, at the Writers Guild of America Award ceremony, amidst a lot of foul-mouthed laughs and sober minded speeches, writer/ director Nora Ephron was remembered. As a young novelist, Meg Wolitzer attested, she received a most important recognition when Nora Ephron called to say she wanted to adapt her book, This is Your Life (1988), for film. Ephron, who died last summer of cancer, was a champion of young talent. When Lena Dunham got up to receive her prize for new series, she too spoke about Ephron seeking her out. The Girls originator and star also told a story when at 15 her mom took her to Caroline’s Comedy Club to hear Lisa Lampanelli.
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You could say that the chemistry between Katie (Julianne Hough) and Alex (Josh Duhamel) is incendiary in the psychological thriller cum romance Safe Haven. This film by Lasse Hallstrom based upon a Nicholas Sparks novel may be on trend in some unforeseen ways. Without spoiling the inflammatory (pun intended) end for its assured volume of fans, no one you fall in love with dies. But there’s some serious damage to property. That detail may resonate for recent hurricane, tornado, and blizzard victims. -
From beginning to end, John Lloyd Young’s performance at the Café Carlyle was a love affair attuned to the Valentine’s Day of your youth. “You’re Just Too Good to be True,” the Tony winning original “Frankie Valli” from “Jersey Boys” crooned, to “How Can I Be Sure,” followed by an homage to the room itself. Richard Rodgers lived here, Elaine Stritch still lives here, now it’s “My Turn.” Noting too the canvas murals by costume designer Marcel Vertes who died in 1961, the dimple chinned Young seemed to be pinching himself that he would now be working in such a swell place. -
Back in the day, the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti was all the rage. Paperbacks of A Coney Island of the Mind (1958) could be seen stuffed in jean pockets on college campuses, on subways. Even mainstream readers who were not particularly into poetry loved the surreal imagery of this verse. A decade later, books by Allen Ginsberg were not as popular, and those of Jack Kerouac were mainly out of print. Present at the historic Six Gallery reading where Ginsberg’s reading of Howl galvanized a poetry movement, and Kerouac passed a bottle of tokay, Ferlinghetti took action suggesting he put Ginsberg’s beat epic into print. This was the official dawning of a particularly American avant-garde literary movement: especially as founder of City Lights Books, publishing house and iconic San Francisco store, Ferlinghetti was at the center of The Beat Generation. -
The Women’s Movement is not only about Gloria Steinem, she will readily tell you. First, as Rita Mae Brown exclaims in MAKERS, a documentary chronicling the most recent phase of the Women’s Movement, she’s drop dead gorgeous. Then again, she’s smart, talented, and even when the focus is on her, as when she walked the red carpet at the Makers’ premiere at Alice Tully Hall on Wednesday night, she really wants to home in on YOU, who you are, what you dream. This poise, an outward gaze, gives Steinem enormous power.
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