Because the 2010 exhibition of her work at MoMA was titled “The Artist is Present,” Marina Abramovic knew what to do. At a recent screening of a documentary based on this show appropriately at MoMA, she explained she could do nothing but be present, that is, occupy a chair facing a viewer for 12-hour sessions. Clad in a heavy gown, –one was red, another white, –the artist exuded a somber essence, not taking a break for a coffee or a pee. Viewers queued up for hours, camping outside of the museum, taking turns to sit there on a wooden armless chair opposite her, at times eliciting tears. Filmmakers recorded all this including a young devotee who removed her dress before sitting. Museum security whisked away the rule-breaking girl. The actor James Franco took a seat, and when he left, the next up asked, “Are you an actor? You have that actor thing.” That was perhaps the film’s most humorous moment.
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Everything in its time! The Tonys, the Oscars for Broadway theater, marks the end of an awards season as rigorous and varied as that for film, although one noteworthy difference is the absence of red carpet couture commentary; somebody should have been reporting on presenter Jessica Chastain’s glittery, lacy number. From the bleachers of my bedroom, she looked great as did Nina Arianda in strapless, Tony-winner for her performance in Venus in Fur, excitedly telling Christopher Plummer, “You were my first crush, sir.” -
When people say that at 74 a person is over the hill, Jane Fonda says she is looking at the next hill on the horizon. With an upcoming HBO series, her recent book Prime Time, several new movies including one in French and Bruce Beresford's Peace, Love, and Misunderstanding opening this week, the hill looks more like a lush peak in the Catskills. In fact, her character lives upstate. As Grace, a pot-dealing relic of the hippie era living in Woodstock, she has a few lessons for her daughter, Diana (Catherine Keener), an uptight lawyer whose marriage is breaking up, and her grandkids, Zoe (Elizabeth Olsen) and Jake (Nat Wolff). At breakfast at the Regency on Monday, over a plate of watermelon, the movie icon talked to a select group of women about hair, husbands, health, films, family, friendships—with co-star Keener joining in–and the future. -
“I just celebrated twenty years of my accident,” announced Auti Angel at a luncheon at Robert for the reality show Push Girls. Premiering on the Sundance Channel, the show features four feisty and beautiful wheel chair bound stars, three friends–Tiphany Adams and Angela Rockwood as well as Auti– who are car accident survivors, and Mia Schaikewitz, a champion swimmer who as a teen suffered a ruptured blood vessel in her spine, causing her paralysis. So, just what is making Auti, a dancer who cannot walk, so happy about a life change that many would consider tragic? -
I am pleased that the reports from Cannes about the On the Road, Walter Salles’ film are mainly favorable, although I have taken note that some say there is no inner world for the characters, that the film has no discernable plot, that it is overlong. I have been following this progress for at least a decade. When I interviewed Francis Ford Coppola in 2007 about his film, Youth Without Youth, I inquired as to its status; at that stage, several writers had attempted a screenplay including one by Russell Banks where he, Russell Banks, runs into Jack Kerouac in a bar in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and they spend a drunken week together. Francis looked me in the eye and asked, “Have you read the book? It is impossible to script.” There were titters at the table of critics who were aware that I am a noted Kerouac scholar. -
Of the brownstone at 7 Middagh Street, the basis of a new musical, February House at the Public Theater, the composer/ writer Paul Bowles used to say he did not want to live in a place with another composer. He was referring to Lincoln Kirstein. When he heard the rent would be cheap, he moved in. W.H.Auden managed the whole thing, he recalled, collecting money and making dinners. Then Bowles would stick up his nose in perfect Audenesque, and mimic the famed poet, “Tonight there will be a roast, two veg and a savory, and no discussion of religion or politics.” -
Jewish jokes are so plentiful online: who hasn’t been blessed with multiple emails forwarded from friends, or visited the Youtube videos of real-life old Jews telling jokes? Now a fast-paced revue at the Westside Theater—where the beloved Love, Loss, and What I Wore held sway for many seasons– is unexpectedly fresh. Yes, the familiar tropes: sex before marriage, after, business and money, death, mothers, and kvetching on every foible of life are revived in full force: Do you want a drink? Goes one. No, I don’t want to dull the pain. -
On a 42nd Street block that used to house peep shows, The Duke Theater is a resonant location for a play called Cock. For this four-actor drama, The Duke is entirely reconfigured as an arena where onlookers are up close and personal as if watching a cockfight, taking bets. Four characters spar. You could say, they vie for John’s male member. The sexual politics of Mike Bartlett’s play could be one linear reading: John (Cory Michael Smith) is living with M (Jason Butler Harner) and has sex with W (Amanda Quaid), finding he likes it. This comes as a surprise as he has had so little experience with women. Then, the quandary: each works to lure him from the other, to win and control John. M’s father, F (Cotter Smith) is brought in, rounding out the square. John, as much an Everyman as his name suggests, has to sort out who he is. -
The U2 frontman joined the festivities somewhere in the middle of the Jazz Foundation of America’s annual benefit singing “Angel in Harlem,” assuredly an anthem to the Apollo theater. In rock style, the orchestra audience rushed the stage, Iphones snapping. Bono was simply one of many headliners in “A Great Night in Harlem,” orchestrated by SNL’s Hal Willner. Quincy Jones presented the Dr. Billy Taylor Humanitarian Award to Montreux Jazz Festival’s esteemed Claude Nobs. Macy Gray, Dr. John, Randy Weston, Paquito D’Rivera, David Johansen, the Treme Brass Band, the Kansas City Band with reference to Robert Altman’s great 1996 film, and Essie Mae Brooks, John Dee Holeman, Sweet Georgia Brown, George Wein took the legendary stage. Darrel Hammond and Triumph the Insult Dog lent some comic relief as did the Sopranos veterans Vince Curatola and John Ventimiglia. Wendy Oxenhorn wailed on her harmonica. Macy Gray’s “At Last” was assuredly meant to remember the great Etta James, but no one could have anticipated that music would lose yet another yesterday, Donna Summer, for whom there was a moment of silence.Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura
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The new movie Hysteria answers an age old question, what do women want most? Based on a historic moment in the 1880’s when a particular contraption for the alleviation of women’s non specific ailments (unhappiness, indigestion, the desire for equality, the right to vote, freedom) was invented, this romantic comedy features an early feminist Charlotte Dalrymple (Maggie Gyllenhaal), her conventional sister Emily (Felicity Jones), their provincial father (Jonathan Pryce), and a young progressive doctor Mortimer Granville played by Hugh Dancy with an easy touch. In the employ of Dr. Dalrymple, he learns to apply just the right manual pressure to give suffering women “paroxysms,” never to be confused with sexual pleasure. With the help of a nutty inventor (Rupert Everett), an electronic device was made available for home use. Despite the eh, explosive nature of this subject, this delightful movie is titillating, yet chaste. -
Introducing Hillary Clinton to 2300 women –and a sprinkling of men– gathered in a ballroom at the Marriot Marquis for breakfast celebrating the New York Women’s Foundation’s 25th year this morning, Abigail Disney recounted where this filmmaker and activist was in her own life at each stage of Clinton’s political career from First Lady to Secretary of State, defying the perceived wisdom that little would come of her. What was so divisive about all the common sense she was making –how dare she have plans for health care, Disney asked. Do you know what history does to women? You know the fabulous bookcase you see at IKEA. You know how when you buy it, you pick it up in a flat box. History casts women in two dimensions. For her, Clinton was a woman who would take no prisoners, unless of course they were political prisoners on her plane, she quipped referring to recent events and Clinton’s trip to China. The Secretary of State gamely took the stage and in the combination of making larger points about women helping women effect change and the intimate personal stories of struggle that marked the speeches, Clinton talked about the lessons learned from her mother who died last November.
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The Costume Institute’s new exhibition is a happy collision of fashion titans. Decades apart, Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada are joined in a conceit devised by Met curators, Andrew Bolton and Harold Koda: a filmed dialogue, directed by Baz Luhrman, inspired by Louis Malle’s two-hander, Dinner With Andre–only this is two women talking, both Italian and interested in clothes. Hence “Impossible Conversations:” Judy Davis is cast as Schiaparelli and Prada is, well, her self. Their discourse is projected, heard over the mannequins sporting their shoes, dresses, ensembles, and hats. Provocative pairings make for exhibition as theater. -
Of the atrocities of the Nazi period in Europe, the theft of art may be the least of the horrors, but as the new documentary Portrait of Wally shows, the provenance of art can be infinitely fascinating. “Who owns art?” you might say is the center of the debate concerning art stolen from Jews. But as my mother, an Auschwitz survivor used to say, there is a right and a wrong. Directed by Andrew Shea, this provocative film tells the gripping tale of an Egon Schiele painting, seized from a Vienna art collector’s home, and the drama of restitution. A world premiere screening at the Tribeca Film Festival seemed particularly apt, as part of this painting’s story took place in New York.
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Wednesday evening at the Metropolitan Museum was meant to be a correspondence, an exploration of words and music featuring the Kronos Quartet and the writers Rula Jebreal, Marjane Satrapi, and Tony Kushner, but to most ears there was a friendly cacophony. Salman Rushdie, president of PEN introduced the much anticipated event noting that the World Voices Festival began in the midst of President Bush’s second administration when the dialogue between this country and others was breaking down. As the world has changed, a new U.S. president seemed to brighten attitudes toward America from all over the world. Still repression prevails: Satrapi’s film which had been shown on Tunisian television is now banned, the station’s head on trial for programming it. Echoing Kushner’s epic Angels in America, so prescient of current events, a Mormon presidential candidate’s gay aide is fired. -
If you are going to chat with New York based artist Audrey Flack, she might ask you about the color of your lipstick, particularly if it is a shade of classic red as worn by iconic women, say Marilyn Monroe. In her early photorealist phase, this very girly prop shows up in likely and unlikely places, atop a dresser, near a mirror, revealing something of an obsession with the ill-fated movie star; but in the 1978 oil, “World War II (Vanitas),“ going up at auction at Christie’s next week, that very red is the color of a candle as well as a rose. Speaking about this work and its impending resale over lunch at the midtown restaurant Rare, Flack said, because of its historic reference, the painting is a work for a museum. Indeed, with its Holocaust reference, Flack juxtaposes a bright cherry on a petit four on an ornate silver dish, lustrous pearls, a butterfly, a teacup, a sumptuous gathering of life affirming objects with the grays and blacks of a row of Buchenwald inmates from a photograph by Margaret Bourke-White taken upon the concentration camp’s liberation. At an art history class at Baruch College that morning, Flack told students, back in the day, she was criticized for this odd, possibly insensitive assembling of images. But to her surprise, Holocaust survivors got it, asking her, how did you know the dream of pastries kept us alive during those dire times when all we ate were crumbs. -
Greeted by a standing ovation, Wayne Shorter and the band he’s been playing with since 2000 took the stage on Friday night for the first of two sold out concerts at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center: Brian Blade on drums, John Patitucci on bass, Danilo Perez on piano, with Shorter on tenor and soprano saxophone. For the next hour and forty minutes the quartet performed a set evocative of familiar material from this legendary composer, some phrases from Footprints, but not quite. Accumulated and contextualized by what went before, the music was intellectually rigorous. At first the listener had to grasp the abstraction of the composition, how an element of surprise is found in this structure. I actually had the feeling that the music had no center, just fanciful engaging riffs. As John Patitucci performed, draped over his bass, he became the center, and so on. Then Blade on his snare and Perez on piano would pick up a thread. Not until an encore when the group played a variation of Joy Ryder, did each instrument talk tightly to the next. -
Rumor has it, Tennessee Williams used to sit in the back of the theater for performances of his Streetcar Named Desire, and laugh hysterically when in the end, Blanche would be escorted out on the arm of a doctor en route to the insane asylum. Following his lead, two Tennessee Williams plays in town, the revival of Streetcar at the Broadhurst on Broadway, and the world premiere of his last experimental work, In Masks Outrageous and Austere at Culture Project, may cause a laugh riot. -
Now on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theater after a stunning debut two years ago, Bruce Norris biting Pulitzer Prize winning drama Clybourne Park begins in 1959 with a couple leaving their Chicago home after many years. Under Pam MacKinnon’s expert direction, Russ (Frank Wood) sits in a lounger eating Neapolitan; his wife Bev (Christina Kirk) debates the geographic origin of this ice cream’s name, an agreeable three-tier assemblage of vanilla, chocolate and strawberry. The colors, while distinct white, brown, and pink, work well together. This savvy play, about race and our unease with the matter, suggests we might do the same, live side by side, and illustrates how we don’t, neither in the midcentury nor today. -
Well, The Daily Show funnyman John Oliver did not exactly recommend stealing the six rather heavy looking, grand crystal chandeliers at the St. Regis Hotel, but he did refer to them a few times, as emblematic of the posh surroundings at the same time that he advised the gown and tuxedo clad crowd to follow the British’s lead when it comes to stocking their museums. “Steal as much as you can. It works for us,” he joked. “Then you won’t have to have a benefit dinner.” Honoring Philippe Dauman, Chief Executive Officer of Viacom, Randy Falco, President and Chief Executive Officer of Univision Communications, and George Kaufman, Chairman of Kaufman Astoria Studios, Mayor Michael Bloomberg included this Museum of the Moving Image event in his rounds, pointing out that the city had 50 ½ million tourists last year: “We are the media capital of the world.” Perhaps keyed to the Queens-based museum’s recent exhibition of Jim Henson’s legacy, he said: I took Kermit to a Yankee game and offered to buy him popcorn. He’s a cheap date. The frog said, I’ll just go out in the field and catch some flies. -
Perhaps the most inventively preposterous play ever to hit Broadway is the prequel to the Peter Pan story, Peter and the Starcatcher, at the Brooks Atkinson Theater. Opening on the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, this fanciful lark features two ships at sea, two trunks, one filled with sand, the other, eh, you must believe, stardust. Animated by pirates, lost boys, sea captains, a mermaid chorus, a nanny, and a girl, the play adopts clever uses for kitchen gadgets: you will see your veggie steamer in a new light, not to mention your hand juicer. That is if you have a hand, which as you may recall is a problem for a certain pirate. Here, an accident becomes an opportunity for a gag. Says the pirate to Pan, “You have singlehandedly singlehanded me,” and so on for groan-and-guffaw-worthy one-liners. -
Grounded in a current day realism about sex, friendship, and work for recent college grads, HBO’s much touted series Girls, airs this weekend. To focus on one aspect of its satire, in Girls, sex is free and freely given, an unsatisfying service by the girls, done with bewildered cads, happy to get what they can. Is this hooking up the logical extension of what Erica Jong extolled in her landmark 1973 novel Fear of Flying: “the zipless fuck?” Freed, women should pull down their pants at whim the way men do, right? For women who grew up with these “joys of sex,” watching Hannah (Lena Dunham of Tiny Furniture fame who also writes and directs) and her twenty-something pals is an untoward vision of what many suspected back in the day, that liberation did not necessarily bring enlightenment. Viewers can watch Hannah’s guy (Adam Driver) enter her from behind, with not much going on for her. -
While Republicans evaluate the electability of Mitt Romney vs. Rick Santorum, the revival of Gore Vidal’s witty 1960 play, The Best Man, comes to Broadway. At the Gerald Shoenfeld Theatre, dressed up as convention headquarters, this Cold War era take on how Americans nominate our presidential candidates, the man in gray, a mere shape behind a scrim gets the prize, but he does not necessarily win. Observers of the political discourse will be amused, and reminded that the platitudes, empty promises, manufactured scandals, and colorful personalities even in dismaying blandness have been with us for a long time. Only now, media has brought them to us faster. -
Do not miss Tracie Bennett as Judy Garland. The petite frame, boyish chestnut do, twitchy gesture, agile thrashing, lusty bravado, pouting tantrums, and powerhouse voice, Tracie Bennett has the “Over the Rainbow” girl down.End of the Rainbow, coming to Broadway’s Belasco Theater upon the heels of Whitney Houston’s sad demise, illustrates with great verve and great music: the untoward journey of the famous can be glamorous and grim. Focused on Judy Garland’s last comeback in 1968, Peter Quilter’s play under Terry Johnson’s expert direction, features the star in a triangle with her fifth husband, a much younger Mickey Deans (Tom Pelphrey), and her adoring piano accompanist, Anthony (Michael Cumpsty), in many ways a stand-in for her legions of gay worshippers. This cast—with Jay Russell in a variety of roles– is exceptional, as are the band and William Dudey’s sets, a suite at the London Ritz, and the Talk of the Town nightclub where at times Ritalin, liquor-feuled performances hit notes high and low. You would not be unhappy just listening to Bennett’s Garland on the American songbook: “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” “Just in Time,” “Smile,” “For Me and My Gal,” “The Man That Got Away.” She brings the house down with a heartbreaking “Come Rain or Come Shine,” and that’s aside from the Harold Arlen/ Yip Harburg classic by which all remember her most.
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“I’m the only presenter who slept with Catherine Deneuve,” said Susan Sarandon in a tribute speech at Alice Tully Hall on Monday night when the French actress was honored with the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s 2012 Chaplin Award. The ensuing clip from The Hunger (1983) shows the iconic Deneuve kissing her co-star’s hardened nipples. That was one of the movies I had to be a certain age to see, said Chiara Mastroianni about her feted mom; in a moment of public sharing, she begged The Umbrellas of Cherbourg star never to sing; when Chiara was little, her mother’s importance grew when she saw her in a photo with Miss Piggy. The picture now hangs in Deneuve’s bathroom. -
Introducing a private screening of his new movie, We Have a Pope, this week, director Nanni Moretti stopped mid-sentence and walked up the aisle to kiss kiss his pal John Turturro. Of course he was speaking in Italian and the gesture seemed so European, the audience including Tony LoBianco, Gay Talese, John Ventimiglia, Michael Musto, and a few non-Italians, Paul Schrader, Tovah Feldshuh, Alex Gibney, Lois Smith, Josh Mostel, Terry George, and Neil Simon, seemed to take the friendly gesture as a matter of course. Through his translator, Moretti, who is now celebrated at the IFC Center with a retrospective of his work, went on to tell a story about the making of this film about the inner doubts of a newly elected pope starring Michel Piccoli.
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