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about: Regina Weinreich

  • Sting and Trudie in Love: Twin Spirits at Lincoln Center

    Sting The true love story of music legends Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck is the stuff of 19th century sturm und drang: forbidden love, lofty language, melancholy, and early death. Portraying this passionate couple on Wednesday evening, Sting in waistcoat, with his wife, actor, producer, political activist, Trudie Styler, begowned in a splendid black Roland Mouret strapless swept across the stage at the Allen Room of Jazz at Lincoln Center. Silhouetted against the expansive darkening sky over Central Park, the players looked iconic, the night magic, for an awestruck packed house.

    The Culture Project in association with Music Unites hosted this special production of Twin Spirits, in celebration of Robert Schumann's 200th birthday. Narrated by David Strathairn, the program featured violinist Joshua Bell, pianists Jeremy Denk and Natasha Paremski, cellist Nina Kotova. Nathan Gunn and Camille Zamora portrayed Robert and Clara in song. In a collaboration that dates back to 2005, director John Caird crafted this “poetic meditation” on passionate love, combining Robert and Clara's love letters, their marriage diary, with compositions mostly from Robert Schumann with additional music from Chopin and Mozart.

    After the stunning performance, Mayor Bloomberg addressed the audience, including “Precious” Oscar winning scriptwriter Geoffrey Fletcher, actors Joel Grey and Richard Kind, Denise Rich, among many others. The mayor had one complaint, that he had not been offered the role of Robert Schumann. After all, he said, being a dashing young leading man, “that's what I do.” He went on to thank Sting and the Police for their hefty $million donation to the city for the planting of trees. Proceeds from “Twin Spirits” would go to music education. 

    Trudie Styler said her understanding of Clara came from seeing this talented woman as a heroic figure: after all, through the tragic circumstance of Robert's demise, she supported their 8 children. She also kept the delicate loving advances of Brahms at bay. Sting quipped that this expert ensemble had met that afternoon-except Trudie, he laughed. “I've known her longer.”

  • Andy Warhol’s Last Decade at the Brooklyn Museum and Remembered at the New York Public Library: Please Sign My Banana

    AndyWarho Andy Warhol more than exceeded his famous dictum about fame. Now an excellent exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum focuses on his last decade, meaning, work of this art-world genius in late mid-career. The bewigged Warhol predicted he would not survive the hospital when he went in for a routine operation, and he was right. By a fluke, (neglect, or malpractice) he died in 1987 at age 58. As you make it through the 5th floor galleries past “Last Supper,” a 10 x 32 foot canvas with renderings of Leonardo's masterpiece and motorcycles suggesting religious-cum-erotic themes, or “The Origins of Cotton,” one of several collaborations with Clemente and Basquiat, you are reminded of his versatility beyond the much lauded Pop period, dazzled by the sheer brilliance of his vision. At the time, he seemed the enemy of abstract expressionism, and in his last decade, a practitioner of it, in his way.

    The exhibition catalogue features a fine essay by the show's organizer, Joseph D. Ketner, explaining how peeing on a canvas treated with metallic paint turned into a method of abstraction utilized in the series “Oxidation Painting.” A wise inclusion is Julian Schnabel's 1989 take on the Shadow paintings so monumentally displayed at Dia: Beacon with only a few on display in Brooklyn: “These paintings hover as the shadow of life's edge. . . . whereas the subject of many of Andy's paintings is a record of events in life, these are a record of the act of painting.” Also included in the catalogue, in an essay by Bruno Bischofberger, “Collaborations: Reflections on My Experiences with Basquiat, Clemente, and Warhol,” is a Basquiat portrait of Andy Warhol as a banana, brown spots included.

    On Wednesday night a few who knew him gathered at the New York Public Library for a panel moderated by Factory historian Steven Watson: John Wilcock, Gerard Malanga, Taylor Mead, Gretchen Berg, and surprise guest Bibbe Hansen. Joseph “Little Joey” Freeman spoke up from the audience. The occasion was the re-publication of The Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol by John Wilcock. Known for the documentary, Guest of Cindy Sherman, the editor of the reissue, Christopher Trela said he was inspired to publish it after picking up an original copy of this interview collection with photos by Shunk-Kender. The book's title comes from Paul Morrissey, and becomes a sly comment on its contents: interviews with Factory regulars and other Warhol associates: Charles Henri Ford, Naomi Levine, Marisol, Henry Geldzahler, Sam Green, Ultra Violet, Lou Reed and Nico, among them, by Village Voice founding editor and Interview Magazine founding co-publisher John Wilcock. 

    Much was said of Warhol as a catalyst for the art in others, his intense work ethic, but no one knew for sure what Warhol was like in bed. The sexiest image: Warhol in come stained jockeys greeting Little Joey, asking, does he need anything when he showed up at his townhouse. In true Warhol spirit, Trela created a marketing device offering a banana shaped bookmark to lure book buyers who would also have the panel members sign. When the books sold out, fans queued up, uttering the line of the night: “Please sign my banana.”

  • Nice Girls Don’t Stay for Breakfast: Robert Mitchum and Great Directors

    RobertMitchum Homage to great cinema was a theme at two events at the Museum of Modern Arts this week. On Monday, in an evening hosted by the Hamptons International Film Festival, photographer Bruce Weber showcased excerpts from “Nice Girls Don’t Stay for Breakfast,” his documentary-in-progress about Robert Mitchum. Through Weber’s lens, the Hollywood tough guy of Westerns and noirs, the creep in the
    original Cape Fear with deep cleft chin and eyes at half mast emerges as a shy, modest, non-celebrity jamming sweetly off-key with Dr. John, Marianne Faithfull, and Richie Lee Jones.

    A Q&A with Alec Baldwin following the screening showed yet another side of Baldwin who should have his own late night Letterman style talk show. Trading anecdotes, Baldwin spoke about Weber’s provocative work in Calvin Klein ads, photographing hunky models bulging in jockeys, recounting how Marcy Klein, in an intimate moment would see her father’s name on her date’s underwear.

    The big question of the night, how did Weber get such candid footage from interview phobic Mitchum who eluded the invitations of Barbara Walters, Dick Cavett, and Larry King. Weber, in signature head scarf, is disarming and sly, telling how he sent beautiful women with gifts to Mitchum’s door.

    Great Directors On Tuesday, Paladin president Mark Urman emphasized the importance of premiering another documentary, Great Directors, at MoMA, one of the first institutions to recognize film as art as well as industry. Director Angela Ismailos wanted to talk to legendary directors to discover what makes them great. The result is an engaging moveable feast with Bernardo Bertolucci, Agnes Varda, David Lynch, Stephen Frears, Ken Loach, Liliana Cavani, Todd Haynes, John Sayles, Catherine Breillat, Richard Linklater interwoven with evocative clips from such classics as The Night Porter, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, ThenConformist, The Gleaners, Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive, to name just a few. Admittedly this is a subjective list inviting the film lover to make up one’s own– and more, to revisit these beloved gems.

    MoMA was packed with directors Bob Balaban, Oren Moverman, Mira Nair, Daryl Wein, documentarians Barbara Kopple, Ellen Kuras, actors Oliver Platt, Susan Sarandon, Marisa Berenson, Ben Shenkman, Stella Schnabel, performers Laurie Anderson, Moby, and artists Chuck Close, David Salle who stayed on for dinner in the museum’s lobby and sculpture garden. The image of Marlon Brando reaching for the butter in Last Tango in Paris lingered.

  • Tilda Swinton Gets a Haircut: I Am Love

    Tilda Introducing her new movie, I am Love, to an audience of fashion and food people last February, Tilda Swinton in a razored asymmetrical blond hair do-we are used to seeing a redhead-said she would be on hand to help if we got impossibly hungry which is what happened with audiences at film festivals in Toronto and Sundance after seeing this stylish movie shot in Italy. She plays Emma Recchi, a wife and mother in a Milan mansion, an emotional ice palace. But soon we are seduced in nature, hidden caves and water racing over rocks, with glimpses of her naked-and having sex with her younger lover Antonio, a cook, who in one elegantly shot scene shears off the baggage of her neatly coiffed look. Forget food! Bring on Italian men. No wonder a critic called this film “a guilty pleasure.” 

    Awakening hungers of all sorts, I am Love premiered last Wednesday with an after party at Barbounia Restaurant hosted by Acqua di Parma and Tuttobello. Another audience of fashion and food people including Cynthia Rowley, Drew Nieporent, filmmakers Jim Jarmusch and Sara Driver, actors Martha Plimpton and Amy Landecker joined director Luca Guadagnino, composer John Adams, and cast members: Tilda Swinton, Marisa Berenson, Pippo Delbono for a lavish Italian buffet. 

    Director Luca Guadagnino explained his commitment to food in an interview in February:

    I wanted to be a chef. I chose film. Food can be a great dialogue between people. Food can nurture and also give a great cultural experience. New tastes and textures can change you. Antonio transforms Emma. He takes the integrity of the ingredients and turns it into a work of art. As a director I am like an orchestra conductor, a chef, I meld elements to make an image and sound, influenced by art and life.

    Italian, raised in Ethiopia by his Algerian mother, Guadagnino has a keen sense of otherness, a profound intellectual subtext to this movie, that explains his characterizations, filmic conception, and casting.

    We are all others, and scared of “othermess.” I shot a portrait of Tilda and she talked about love, the otherness of love. I wanted to make this into a narrative and started to think about a woman in a big house. 

    Having built the family, I wanted to link to cinema of the past-like Antonioni. One day Tilda called me from Paris. She had been to Christian Dior haute couture, and stopped to see Marisa Berenson. Oh, I am a huge fan. We agreed she would be a perfect Rori. Marisa is the niece of Ilsa Schiapparelli. Bernard Berenson, great historian of the arts. She speaks Italian, English, and French. 

    And then I met this amazing, stunning woman, and had to say, we would like to offer you the role of Tilda's mother-in-law, a mother–and grandmother! We did wigs and makeup to age her. I love the way she is in the movie. 

    Yes, but Rori is an older woman who remains in this house, the same house that Emma must escape. This woman, Emma, is liberated but must lose her son, an unthinkable tragedy for a mother? Emotionally, the circumstance is unbearable-and operatic. Was that an aesthetic choice?

    I believe in Freud. Emma loses her son because of the incapacity of the son to confront the reality of the mother's otherness. He doesn't understand that mother is not an empty box that you fill with the concept of motherhood. She has needs, sex, a body, and an emotional deep psychological life that goes beyond the role she has to play. As Freud would say, what happens to him is not an accident. He couldn't face the reality of his mother. Women are objects of the patriarchal system: Asexualization of women on the one hand and desexualization of women. She wants neither. She is a person, a female person. She has to face a devastating loss that will stay forever within her self and never be healed. To live within the confines of the house would be a contradiction. This character and choices she made force her to leave the house forever and to be private and intimate with the loss, but not conflicted with the love she feels for the other man. 

    Now, months later, Luca introduces me to Tilda, and yes, her hair is different, shorter and still blond. Aware that famously she is in an “open marriage,” often traveling with a younger artist, I would meet her the next day for an interview. Laughing, she says she has only 3 answers: yes, no, and all the time.

    How much of Emma's spirit matches your own? 

    The sense of being quiet in situations where other people are not quiet, the habit of relying on inner life when other people are babbling. I have never found myself in any of her circumstances. For the record, I have never in my life rolled around in a garden with an Italian man. 

    Emma goes from being extremely well put together, to wearing a zip up track suit and rushing out the door. 

    Her changed looks are emblematic of her freedom. My friends think Emma starts off as a caked doll but as the story progresses she gets cleaner and freer. It is about being a regular human being. If I have been in films at all it is to be regular, to have a normal human face. And I like flexibility; idea of transformation is so practical. Every time a woman puts on lipstick to go to dinner with her husband she calls on her ability to transform. Cinema is a window of transformation.

    And yet in our world, it seems, everyone wants to look the same-young.

    I was brought up entirely in love with my 97 year old grandmother-it never occurred to me that life would not keep on getting better. The idea of being in resistance to age is such a waste. 

    Fashion is so much a part of the film, used to decode everyday life, identity. The corporate men wear Fendi, and you Jil Sander. 

    Raf Simons designs for Jil Sander. He understands perfectly the classical references and yet is a modernist, playful and expressive in color. Emma is very interior. I remember saying to Luca years ago, I want this film portrait to show you more about this woman in the way she wraps a ribbon from an unwrapped present around her hair than any long speech about what she does and does not feel. When she's falling in love, she wears scarlet. When she goes to San Remo to embark on this sun filled love, she wears tangerine orange.

    What do you imagine happens to Emma after she leaves?

    Maybe she just evaporates, disappears. It is a fairy story. Her husband says she doesn't exist. How does she go on breathing after what happens at the pool? When terrifying things happen to people, they say this is not happening to me. Imagining it is real; trying to grasp that something is real, is close to performance.

    On first viewing, I thought she would return to Antonio.

    We don't know. We make the suggestion that they are in the cave together.

    You mean like Tristan and Isolde?

    That could have been our soundtrack if John Adams had not offered his music. 

    You have two films releasing this summer, this one and Sally Potter's Orlando, based on Virginia Woolf. Is that a coincidence?

    It is amazing that two very precious films that I developed alongside the filmmakers for years, family projects, films made with paper and string-will come out this summer.

    Tell me about the fragrance you are launching this afternoon at Bendel's.

    A great perfume house on rue des Archives in Paris said, we want you to develop a perfume. I was challenged with what I could put in a bottle that would make me feel at home: ginger, vetiver, and the smell of my grandfather's greenhouse.

  • Stonewall Uprising at Film Forum

    Stonewall While we grapple with such problems as whether or not the recently out but obviously gay Sean Hayes is believable as a heterosexual in love with Kristen Chenowith in the delightful Broadway revival of Promises Promises, it is good to remember this privileged debate is hard won. Going back to a time when same sex coupling was a crime, marriage unthinkable, a new documentary, Stonewall Uprising, directed by Kate Davis and David Heilbroner, closely following David Carter's book, Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution, has now opened at Film Forum and tells the amazing story of this evolution in human rights. 

    Tracing the untoward history of gay liberation in America, from what it was like in the 'sixties, a fairly recent past, when homosexuality was demonized, and thought to be a disease that might be cured with electric shock reconditioning, through a pivotal event on June 28, 1969, when police attempted to shut down the Stonewall Inn, an important gay watering hole on Christopher Street, near The Village Voice. 

    This would have been business as usual as gays were perceived as limp-wrist sissies, except for the ensuing eruption of solidarity-the enough is enough moment-when gay men and women came together-and resisted in days of riots and a newly formed consciousness. This film limns this stage in American democracy, featuring poignant archival footage and speakers many of whom are brought to tears as they remember–and are also surprisingly funny.

    Those who took part and talked to the filmmakers are all grayed now, recounting a time when they were in their twenties, or younger. Yvonne Ritter, for example, turned 18 that night and recalled the special dress she wore, taken from his mother. Many of the participants were on hand on Wednesday for the opening night, including Jerry Hoose, celebrating his birthday at the premiere of the film. The biggest laugh: The rule for arresting a cross-dresser was you had to be wearing 3 gender appropriate items, socks excluded: after underwear, the next piece of clothing was going to ruin the outfit. 

    Seymour Pine, the police officer in charge of the raid sums it up: They were breaking the law, but what kind of law was that?

  • Betty White: Hot in Cleveland, Anywhere

    Betty White The last surviving “Golden Girl,” –now that Rue McClanahan died last week,– Betty White is also the IT girl, hot on the football field, on Twitter, as Saturday Night Live host, and on a new television show. At a special screening of Hot in Cleveland, TV Land's first original sitcom, to air on Wednesday night, White, ladylike and elegant in black sequins, was irrepressible, her timing impeccable, shouting out: How do you like it so far?, just as the Crosby Hotel screening room went dark. Eighty-nine must surely be the new 50!

    The show features a fabulous four, a winning Golden Girls formula that worked as well for Sex & the City. The conceit: 3 best friends (Valerie Bertinelli, Jane Leeves, and Wendie Malick) flying to Paris from home in Los Angeles, are grounded in Cleveland and find themselves hot in the heartland. Why go back to the place where they'd have to be pulled to perfection when they are perfect here? In due course, they find a Victorian house with its own pot-smoking, track-suit clad caretaker, played by Betty White. 

    Fresh from hosting the Tony Awards, the show's executive producer Sean Hayes introduced the program to a crowd that included Kristen Chenowith, Mo Rocca, Christian Siriano, Hoda Kotb, and, OMG, Raquel Welch. Funny woman Sandra Bernhard said she has an engagement coming up in July at the City Winery, and Mad Men's Bryan Batt has a new book out, "She Ain't Heavy, She's My Mother" (Random House). Regarding his role as Salvatore Romano on the popular show's new season. he said, "All I can confirm is my character's not dead."

    Fraser veteran Jane Leeves said working on the TV Land sitcom gave her a taste for Cleveland. Er, where was it shot? In LA.

  • Equus in East Hampton

    Alec Baldwin What happened in that proverbial stable? That is the mystery at the heart of Equus, a 1973 drama by Peter Schaffer now revived to stunning effect at Guild Hall in East Hampton. Memorable for the previous 2008 revival on Broadway starring Daniel Radcliffe, the bespectacled Harry Potter of film, this time the “known” actor is Alec Baldwin as the shrink with an interest in the classics, who envies a small town boy's passion. The John Drew Theater stage is at once a stable, a psychiatric hospital, Greek temple, auguring something primitive, carnal, and spiritual. Based upon a kernel of a true story, Equus is embellished psychologically, eroticized. This is a brave play that can feel dated, but the Guild Hall production gets it right.

    When asked about the decision to stage this play director Tony Walton said, Alec said he always wanted to play this doctor, the shrink in Equus, but to do it right you needed the boy. “Harry Potter” had recently done it on Broadway, said Walton. And then, Tony said, I found him. He had just cast this actor in Candida for the Irish Rep co starring with Melissa Errico: Sam Underwood.

    At issue in the 2008 production was Daniel Radcliffe's image: could audiences appreciate the actor's wizardry and his coming of age, in this case by doing something creepy, hidden-to horses?
    Sam Underwood carries no such baggage. With Baldwin as the heavy weight with a British accent, the two actors must balance each other out-and they do. In truth, Baldwin is ubiquitous in the Hamptons, loveably so, as he lends his name and talent to many arts projects. But his acting is generous too. His roles in 30 Rock and opposite Meryl Streep in “It's Complicated” are notable for his pitch perfect comic timing. In the Nancy Meyers romantic comedy, who can forget his naked leap on the bed, visible on Skype? For the Equus boy to weigh in equally is no small feat. He must be vulnerable and naked before the scene in which he actually takes off his clothes.

    The horses are believably portrayed by six well-hung men in chestnut body suits, horse-shaped masks, and hoofs of woven wire. See it for the suspense, the masterful unraveling of a crime, but more, for the emotional pitch, the pandemonium of steeds gone wild. When theater as spectacle is done this well, it is simply thrilling.

  • Roman Polanski’s Stew

    Change of Plans
    At the center of Daniele Thompson's delightful comedy of manners, Change of Plans, a hit at the 2009 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, to open theatrically later this summer, is a dinner attended annually on June 21, on World Music Day, by the same –more or less– collection of characters. On Tuesday, after IFC's special screening, Thompson's longtime friend Diane von Furstenberg and husband Barry Diller hosted a dinner at DVF's studio in the Meatpacking district. “I am so happy she offered. Diane makes these wonderful dinners,” said Thompson interviewed earlier that day. Fortunately, the menu did not include the “bigos,” of the film, an old time Polish recipe credited to Roman Polanski.
         
    “Every people has this kind of stew,” said Thompson. “The kind of dish where you throw everything in: leftovers, meat, cabbage, and so on. Roman Polanski, who is a friend, made it for me.” In Change of Plans, the husband who is Polish, busily prepares this signature dish.  Thompson's son Christopher who acts in this ensemble piece and also co-wrote the script with his mother said that Polanski's wife, the actress Emmanuelle Seigner who plays Sarah, kept complaining on the set: “Roman's tastes so much better.”
         
    And how is he doing? People think it is so easy to be confined in a Swiss ski house, but really, he cannot go out to have a cup of coffee. He is suffering, said Christopher. In the meantime, in New York, Stephen Sondheim, Fran Lebowitz, Zoe Lister-Jones and Daryl Wein, Ann Dexter-Jones, Frederic Tuten, and many others supped on two kinds of pasta, two kinds of salad, and desserts by the sublime Sant Ambroeus.

  • American Theater Wing Spring Gala at Cipriani 42nd Street

    Frank-Leoser Tony nominees Linda Lavin, Chad Kimball, Montego Glover, Valeria Harper, Jan Maxwell, Stephen Kunkel, Stephen McKinley Henderson, and Katie Finneran were among those walking the red carpet at Cipriani 42nd Street Monday night along with others of the theater community: Harry Connick, Jr., Tommy Tune, Liz Smith, Phyllis Newman, Pia Lindstrom, Jimmy Nederlander. The occasion: the annual American Theater Wing gala, celebrating the work of composer Frank Loesser, a prelude to the big Tony night coming up this Sunday.

    Here is a glimpse of this tribute, a big night on its own: Memphis's Montego Glover said no to canapés, slight in a yellow gown, while her co-star Chad Kimball spoke laughingly of the wear and tear on his body in the demanding role as the young white D.J. who falls in love with the Memphis sound, and the black girl who performs the music like no other. Stephen McKinley Henderson, quietly forceful as Denzel Washington's best friend in Fences. Jan Maxwell, hilarious in the bedroom farce Lend Me a Tenor complained of being asked the same questions by reporters. Or rather, had the same answers for reporters?  Looped may have closed, but Valerie Harper is conveniently in town filming a movie, and Linda Lavin, lovely in an off the shoulder purple gown was pleased when I said I took her side in the play Collected Stories. “You're a writer, aren't you?” she said, knowing that her role as the older novelist whose life story is taken as material by her young assistant, resonates.

    Praising Katie Finneran for her killer performance in Promises, Promises, I confessed I fell out of my chair. I love that, she said, I love the unpredictable ugly laugh. Glancing at her watch, “this real pro” disappeared before dinner because they had a performance making up for missing on Tony night. It was only 7:30, and Finneran was not to appear until the second act, leaving the rest of us to ponder, what does she do during Act I, while waiting to go on? Cornering the very tall Tommy Tune, I asked what his favorites were. “Next Fall for Best Original Play,” he said, “because it made me think long after leaving the theater. And American Idiot for Best Musical, but those of us over 40 may need ear plugs.”

  • Howl Has New York Premiere at NewFest/ In Memorium Peter Orlovsky

    Howl The actor James Franco channels poet Allen Ginsberg in Howl, the part animation, part courtroom drama, part period piece about the creation of the iconic beat poem and the censorship trial for obscenity that followed its 1956 City Lights publication. Having filled the prestigious slot of opening night film at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Howl was featured this week at NewFest, premiering in New York at the 22 year old lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender film festival–appropriately so, as every kind of sex is openly rejoiced in this iconic poem, written at a dire time comedian Richard Pryor dubbed “the great pussy drought.” 

    Howl, unusual for a film, delves deeply into the poem's language evoking taboo images of a subterranean realm of sex, drugs and jazz, and effectively conveys the arguments critics had to make in defense of the poem's redeeming human values, and America's first amendment rights at large. The actual trial transcripts supply the dialogue, comic in today's world. 

    Thus focused, Howl avoids the biography of the poet. And so spends little screen time on Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg's life partner who died this week of lung cancer, and who was buried on June 3, Allen Ginsberg's birthday. Peter Orlovsky penned the poetry volume, Clean Asshole Poems and Smiling Vegetable Songs, encouraged by Ginsberg to write.

    This sad synergy augurs the end of an era: with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Diane DiPrima, and Gary Snyder the remaining elders of the beat movement. Fortunately the literature holds up with new publications forcing a re-evaluation of this literary circle that used to be best known for scandal. Look for the just released, The Typewriter is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation by Bill Morgan (Free Press), and especially the upcoming Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters (Viking). The correspondence reveals the sweet and sometimes belligerent Orlovsky on every page-Jack calls him Petey– in his role as muse and significant other.

  • Neil LaBute Unplugged

    LaBute
    A 20 year old Neil LaBute! play, Filthy Talk for Troubled Times was revived in a staged reading to benefit MCC Theater at the Lucille Lortel Theater on Thursday night. You know you are in this playwright's libidinous world when the word penis is used in the first few lines.–and by Julia Stiles no less, as a waitress, one of two. The other is Alice Eve. They serve two tables of two men: Craig Bierko, Johnny Galecki, Josh Hamilton, and Justin Long. The unnamed men and women do not actually talk to one another as they mouth fantasies and fondle verbal genitalia. Language is what they dish up-in indiscrete riffs: you learn the versatility of “cunt,” the phallic nature of urban architecture,  the pleasures and pain of a man sandwich, the damage done to a boy coming in on his father whose member is inserted in the woman next door, the resilience and fragility of twisted balls, of egos of each gender. Frank Sinatra's “I've Got You Under My Skin” is more than background sound.

    This play was written before LaBute added narrative to his repertoire: Fat Pig and last season's reasons to be pretty, both MCC productions, attracted such fine actors as Jeremy Piven, Keri Russell, Andrew McCarthy, Marin Ireland, Thomas Sadowski, to name a few. As Bernard Telsey, MCC artistic and casting director, said at the after party at Ramscale, actors are always drawn to the edgy, sexy characters in Neil LaBute plays. And this ensemble got their filthy talk down in 48 hours!

  • Ron Galella in Focus: Smash his Camera, A Love Story

    Ron Giella The word paparazzi always had a tinge of menace–camera toting maggots a-prey on celebrities–and got a worse name after the throng chasing Princess Diana through a Paris tunnel caused her death.  But the Ur-paparazzo, a lone figure lurking behind Central Park foliage, disguised in funny wigs and hats, was Ron Galella. Famously sued by Jackie Kennedy, his jaw broken by Marlon Brando, he is the subject of a new documentary, called "Smash His Camera" expertly directed by Leon Gast, to air on HBO on June 7. 

    A career defining encounter with the obsession of his life provides the title, not his gorgeous wife Betty, to whom he proposed within two minutes of their meeting and whisked off to bed “to seal the deal,” but Jackie, by this time, O, commanding her secret service detail, “Smash his camera.”

    Jackie It's easy to be competent in photography, says Chuck Close eloquently in this biopic, hardest to be distinguished because of all the arts photography lacks the human hand, begging the question, is self-proclaimed superstar Galella, artist or stalker? This topic was much debated at a premiere screening at MoMA on Tuesday. Dick Cavett, Floyd Abrams and son Dan, Bob Balaban, Marie Brenner, David Margolick among photographers Harry Benson, Sonia Moskowitz, Neil Leifer, watched as Galella on film presented his extensive, historic archive, millions of photos of Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Robert Redford, and more, neatly stored in his Montville New Jersey mansion, and explained his guerilla tactics, how he got his “Mona Lisa” shot, “Windblown Jackie,” the former first lady in jeans and t-shirt walking, her tight torso half turned toward his camera, her hair strewn across the iconic semi smile. 

    Gossip doyenne Liz Smith, splendid in yellow silk, suggested in her Q&A that Jackie, despite taking him to court, loved his attention too, and Betty, shouting out from the audience reminded everyone that he was Andy Warhol's favorite for recording the famous in the unexpected act of being who they really are, that Roger Ebert called him a “national treasure.” Is he still an idealist, asked Smith. Oh yes, it all paid off, said the unrepentant Galella. “I want to thank Jackie for suing me,” he went on. “She made me famous.”

    While the famous supped on sea bass at the Monkey Bar afterparty, Galella snapped away soon joined by celebrity photographer Patrick McMullan. At his table sat newly discovered relations, Ottavio Galella and family from Montreal, responsible for a show of his work in the small town in Italy of his ancestry. Ottavio's wife Marisa nailed it, he may have started as a stalker but he became an artist, which may just show a change in the times, as Galella laments a loss of fun, “there are few to photograph now. The new girls, Lindsay Lohan, are bombarded, they expect it and they love it.”

  • A Career in Mid-Life: Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work

    Joan Rivers Puh-leeze! Comedy icon Joan Rivers may be best known for dishing on the red carpet, or hawking her wares on QVC, her porcelain face, pressed to perfection, stretched over cheekbones, eyes frozen catlike, but from the first frame of this fine documentary by Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern, showing glaring close-ups of makeup applied to yes, porous lips, this film is the real deal, a chemical peel, if you will, to a survivor story. 

    For those of us of a certain age who grew up with Rivers, watching her brash and blue performances interwoven with footage from Johnny Carson, with whom she had a famous falling out, and key moments from a television career that goes back to the medium's beginnings, her story inspires. 

    One theme is loss, of her husband Edgar who committed suicide as her career flagged. “He abandoned us,” says Rivers ruefully, exhibiting classic anger at his abrupt demise. Her agent Billy Sammeth, too, seems to have disappeared. Her take, the loss of someone with whom she could share references; now there's no one to say, do you remember the time when . . . ?

    Another theme is parenting. Daughter Melissa weighs in, showing surprising insight into her illustrious and difficult mom. And then there's the New York apartment décor: Marie Antoinette, if she had money, Rivers quips, and you see a whole lot of stuffed brocade.

    Funny ladies Sarah Silverman, Rachel Dratch, actors Bob Balaban, Cady Huffman, Michael Stuhlbarg, theater stars Cheyenne Jackson, Tommy Tune, documentarians Barbara Kopple and Robert Richter, and many others sat rapt at Wednesday night's premiere at the Angelika, hosted by Elie and Rory Tahari, and enjoyed the gorgeous city views from their Soho penthouse. Peggy Siegal put her state-of-the-art polish on this party, with Rivers a woman akin to her own heart; Siegal once posted all her doctors' addresses to share the fyi on plastic surgery with friends. 

    At 76, Joan Rivers is looking toward a new television show co-starring her grandson Cooper, she said at her premiere, zippy, ageless, and resplendent in brass sequins, and wouldn't it be great to make a shidagh for Cooper with Miley Cyrus. 

    Maybe her life would be seen as tragic, if she weren't so funny: laughs are her prescription for longevity, although she deadpanned (pun intended), she might help the filmmakers more if she dies, you know, the last year of Joan Rivers. For a serious movie, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (to open June 11) offers laughs and more; hanging out with Joan is so entertaining.

  • Sex and the City II: The Morocco Connection

    Sex-andthecity
    The Carrie & Co. actors of Sex and the City may have enjoyed a premiere party in Moroccan style splendor at Lincoln Center's Damroch Park, a tagine in the tent theme based on the romance of desert dunes so comically played out in their new movie, the sequel to their 2008 hit and the HBO series on which this franchise was based, but I was in the real Morocco, in Tangier. 

    Known in the West for the mid 20th century presence of expatriate writers Paul and Jane Bowles, as well as William Burroughs, and a collaboration that resulted in the production of the notorious Naked Lunch, a reconfiguration of Tangier as Interzone, this port city would be unrecognizable to these literary types today, with new housing developments lining the path from the airport to the medina. But I am happy to report Tangier retains its allure without the Burroughsian menace.

    In 1983 when I first arrived, I occupied a room next to the famous one Matisse used as a studio in the Hotel Villa de France, now in the midst of years of reconstruction. Getting redone too is Il Muneria, down by the port, its grunge newly painted. The garden's palm has died leaving a high frondless stump as a monument. The owner's son says he greets visitors daily ushering them into this beat shrine. The rooms where Burroughs wrote and Kerouac famously typed go for about $25/night.

    Literary Tangier lingers with the presence of Mohammed Mrabet whose orally told stories Paul Bowles translated and had published by the British Peter Owen. Seated on traditional floor cushions, the author of The Lemon and Love with a Few Hairs went into a trance like state and recited a story about how he was birthed by a tree and somersaulted into the sea, sucking milk from a giant fish. He has returned to painting, and during the time of my visit, an intricate black & white work grew to mural size.

    The purpose of my trip was the annual Performing Tangier conference now completing its 6th year. Under the auteur-ship of Professor Khalid Amine of the University of Tetuan, the event brings together scholars from all over. Topics may be related to avant-garde theater, but attendees' aesthetic concerns were debated in the scenic, historic Kasbah Museum hosted by the conservator, Abdelaziz Elidrissi. The conference offers a rare glimpse for us Westerners into the concerns, intellectual, political, and spiritual of the Arab world. 

    Wanting to experience Tangier from the Kasbah vantage point, I stayed at la Tangerina, a riad style bed and breakfast just next door. Charming, a reconstruction faithful to its original, the house features rooms and suites set off a central courtyard. Breakfast, a feast of Moroccan pancakes, breads, local jams and fruit, is served rooftop with a view to the sea and port. Priced for tourists, this is still a good value, as is a guest house in the Marchand, Bayt Jasmin, offering a room with its own garden, and the soothing sound of the ocean just a block away.

    For sand dunes, you have got to go much farther south, which is where the Abu Dhabi footage would have been shot with the help of Morocco's thriving movie industry. Busy promoting the new movie, on Tuesday at Macy's, at the annual New York Women in Film and Television Designing Women event, Cynthia Nixon presented the Variety Ensemble Award to the hair, costume, and makeup team for Sex & City II.

  • Tony Nominations: Reflections on Collected Stories, Promises, Promises, and the New Demise of Enron

    Tonyaward Bespectacled Donald Marguiles looks like a writer out of central casting. And as a playwright, he is indeed pleased. When you write for theater, he said the morning after the Tony Award nominations were announced, as opposed to film or television, where the hope is the writer will recede into the woodwork, everyone works to portray your vision. His play Time Stands Still garnered important Tony nominations for the fine Laura Linney and the play itself. Of course it is bewildering what gets picked, what doesn't. Brian D'Arcy James, for example, said the playwright, is Broadway's Best Kept Secret.

    A revival of his Collected Stories has Linda Lavin a contender with Linney for the Best Actress in a Play award. The two-woman drama about a prominent writer and her student begins with the younger woman's sycophantic attentions to the older one set in her Greenwich Village apartment. By the end of Act I, they are locked in an embrace and I wondered, where's the drama? Where's the conflict? But by the end, the interplay of younger and older gives way to a subtle, edgy, competitive discomfort; the drama becomes a devastating meditation on the predatory nature of artists. Where does one's material come from? And quite amazingly, by the end, you are taking sides. For me, Linda Lavin's character, Ruth Steiner, is most vulnerable. This seasoned actress gives a nuanced performance: a gesture of the hand, raised brow conveys the complex range of her feelings as she has her life story ripped off. Don't be surprised however if you side with the younger, Lisa Morrison (Sarah Paulson): Isn't this what you taught me? she asks innocently. She didn't fool me one bit.

    I loved Promises, Promises, and risk my critical detachment to express the delight this production delivers. The “modern” decor, the dancing, high kicking men in suits, women-secretaries with their round  Marilyn Monroe rumps-so 60's, with office politics revolving around the use of one worker's available apartment for extra marital shenanigans. But when Katie Finneran as Marge MacDougall, a floozy Sean Hayes as Chuck Baxter picks up in a bar enters in Act II, I nearly fell out of my seat laughing. Ensconced in owl, her pas de deux with Hayes is a hilarious take on a one-night stand. This time of course he gets to use his apartment for himself but finds it unexpectedly occupied. With the wise additions of some Burt Bacharach classics to the score, this show is stunning. And forget about that controversy about gay actors playing straight roles! What could be more chaste than Baxter and his paramour Fran Kubelik (Kristen Chenoweth) at the end playing board games in the apartment? Friendship wins.

    It always seems odd that plays can disappear after only a handful of performances and can still glean Tony nods. Case in point Enron, the British import that recently shut down, but not before Stephen Kunken who is excellent in the role of Andy Fastow, the music (Best Original Score), Lighting Design and Sound Design also received well deserved Tony recognition. But what about Norbert Leo Butz as Jeffrey Skilling, Gregory Itzin as Kenneth Lay, and the ensemble that also includes The Classical Theater of Harlem's Ty Jones who also give striking performances in this physically demanding show. Expertly conceived as it was, the play's mechanics-techno sound, sleek chrome look– gave me a chill, as did the subject it was based upon. It may be too soon to translate the American titan Enron's collapse to the American people, no matter how finely tuned the production.

  • Christian Boltanski’s No Man’s Land at the Armory

    BoltanskiNina1 Is that my pink frilly frock dangling above a mountain of tired clothes by the paw of a crane? Look at it drop to join the tons of garments below, not quite far enough away to avoid the next random fistful. Maybe that's not my old party dress, but it could be. I am drawn to its fate, anyway, to the fact that eventually it will be out of reach, buried by the next drop. Obsessed with questions of identity, memory, and loss, Christian Boltanski created this huge installation now displayed in the 55,000 square foot drill hall of the Park Avenue Armory, having originated at the Grand Palais in Paris, inspired by one of those contraptions in an amusement park, where you try your best to pick up a teddy bear with a metal arm. Of course you never can, said Boltanski playfully the other day, looking a lot like Hitchcock. But this exhibition is dead serious: coats and outer clothing are meticulously arranged on the ground, in sections, with disturbing harsh lights thrown on them like a police lineup, an interrogation of the inanimate. And the noise, heartbeats, throbbing, in cacophony. I say, when I see a mass of anything I think of Auschwitz, of human hair, shoes, suitcases, and the iconic pile of bones.

    BoltoskiRegina4 He replies, “All my art is after the Holocaust. Yes it is about that and much more.” A woman offers, she sees the detritus after a plane crash. Walking around the space, you are pulled into history's large questions about man's place, the human condition, the value of life, and the power of pondering all that. But the making of art is far more practical. The tons of clothes were acquired from a place in New Jersey, solving a problem closer to what to do with the enormous excess of clothing now that it can all be purchased so cheaply.

  • The Passion of Sarah: Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play

    Pasion
    The passion of Christ as played out in iconography and theater since the beginnings of Christendom is terrifying, controlling, inflammatory, think of the dreary, racist 2004 Mel Gibson movie, but in Sarah Ruhl's poetic and sly vision, the Passion is also hilarious. It's still the story of Christ, for God's sake, nailed to the cross, the principles still include shady Romans in robes and Jews in tallises, but the difference is, this play asks key questions. And it also entertains.

    Developed over years from a two-act version to the current Epic Theater Ensemble production in Brooklyn–at the Irondale Center, within the deconstructed walls of a former Sunday school, part of a Presbyterian church–this daunting epic-length play of three and half hours flies by, thanks to the superb ensemble including Dominic Fumusa, fine in a variety of roles including a Vietnam vet and Polly Noonan, witty as the village idiot, under the direction of Mark Wing-Davey.

    Three sets of amateur actors perform a passion play: Act I opens in a village in Northern England in 1575, under Queen Elizabeth's rule, Act II jumps to 1934 Bavaria during Hitler's regime, and then Act III, to Spearfish, South Dakota, 1969, and Reagan era 1984; Ruhl's Passion is layered, asking, what does it mean to play these iconic figures? The virgin, the martyr, Pontius Pilate, how do these roles impress themselves upon the actors who repeat their performances year after year, imprinting their psyches as matters of religion interweave with the inner world of imagination, and the outer of politics.

    Sight gags, flying saints, translucent fish, snakes, all manner of theatrical amusement is deployed within the gym-like space, the cross's formidable “INRI” on one side and a menacing Nazi banner on the other. One of the funniest scenes takes place in the Garden of Eden with actors, attired as naked, attaching fig leafs to wooly genital hair. And the women, the two Marys, (Kate Turnbull and Nicole Wiesner) go gaga over Hale Appleman's “J,” hot in his slipping loincloth, as he gets nailed, again. T. Ryder Smith as powdered and pearled Queen Elizabeth, mustachioed Hitler, and apple-cheeked Reagan provides the necessary imperious airs.

    At the play's opening on Wednesday where actors  Philip Seymour Hoffman and Daphne Rubin-Vega partied with playwrights Tracy Letts and Winter Miller, producers exulted at the coup. Now that Sarah Ruhl is, well, Sarah Ruhl-her current play, In the Next Room or the vibrator play, nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play, Lincoln Center and Manhattan Theater Club wanted to debut Passion Play. But Ruhl made clear that she wanted a building that was not a theater per se, but a historically relevant structure, and she wanted everyone to be able to attend. To that end, some tickets can be purchased for $5.

  • Alex Gibney: Casino Jack and the United States of Money: An Interview

    Alex Gribney The more Jane Rosenthal quipped, they had renamed the Tribeca Film Festival for the Oscar winning documentarian Alex Gibney, the less her words felt like a joke. The prolific Gibney made My Trip to Al Qaeda, the untitled Eliot Spitzer, and a segment of the closing night Freakonomics, all huge hits at Tribeca. As if these historic, epic scaled entertainments weren't enough, he just released another signature documentary probe, Casino Jack: The United States of Money, about scandalous lobbyist Jack Abramoff. After seeing Fiddler on the Roof as a boy, Abramoff became a religious Jew, had a fling with filmmaking, and is currently and famously in jail. As with all of Gibney's work from Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room to his work in progress about Eliot Spitzer, his films entertain by examining and provoking our sense of discomfort with the Zeitgeist. Thinking of him as the historian of our time, I sat down with Alex Gibney in the offices of Magnolia Pictures on April 20.

    RW: When you made Taxi to the Dark Side, you were also editing your film about Hunter S. Thompson, finding comic relief in the iconic writer's story as compared with the grim tale of torture in Bahrain prison? Similarly, was there comic relief to balance Casino Jack?

    AG: The comic relief was in the film. The lifeguard-an American international global organization is actually run by a lifeguard, Dave Grosh, who is shucking oysters and a yoga instructor. Grosh said to me in an interview, 'I am not qualified to run a Baskin Robbins, much less an international operation.' Not to mention Jack's filmmaking career, or Tom Delay on Dancing With the Stars. That was the appeal of this film, that it was deadly serious and wildly funny.

    RW: Were there any interviews that were hard to get?

    AG: They were all hard to get. With every project I start out on, there's no footage. It's always a big slog to find the footage and we did–stuff that nobody has ever seen before. It's easy to get armchair analysts to talk, but to get people on the inside to talk is very, very hard. That's why the film took over 3 years to make. We had to put it aside while we waited for people to get out of prison, and decide whether or not to talk to us.

    RW: Who was hardest to get?

    AG: Bob Ney, Adam Kadim, and Sue Schmidt were reluctant to be interviewed right off the bat. Some of the folks in the Marianas. That was one of my most productive and riskiest trips. We were going a long way not knowing who would be willing to talk. And we got a few to talk that really made a difference. 

    RW: That sequence was hilarious.

    AG: And desperately sad at the same time: That guy who talks to Congressman Miller to ask if he would buy his kidney so he could go back to China. The hilarity of those trips: It's like Neverland: the snorkeling is great, the golf is great, the drinks are great. You can go see strip shows, hookers, and then you take a 15 minute tour of a sweat shop and report that everything is fine.

    RW: What were some of the surprises you found out about Jack Abramoff and his world?

    AG: We track his career as a young zealot, coming up as a young ideologue with Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist. One of the stunts they pulled was this right wing Woodstock in Angola, going over there with the contras. It was a known episode but nobody had any footage. We finally found a man in London who had been a cameraman for CBS at the time who had 20 hours. That makes for a fantastic sequence, both the immediacy of it and the absolute insanity of it. These guys joining hands and singing the equivalent of “Kumbayah.”

    RW: Given the difficulties, what drew you to this subject?

    The story is so wild, so outrageous, so much fun, so darkly analytical about a fundamental problem in American democracy; we are allowing congressmen and senators to be bought and sold like sneakers. And everyone will protest, 'no, this isn't so; there is no quid quo pro.' It is true. Even if on any particular bill someone votes against the contributor, at the end of the day the process is so dehumanizing, and it goes both ways. Corporations will say every week, 'we get shaken down by congressmen and lawmakers,' and now we are paying congressman and senators to raise money. The Jack Abramoff story shows us how bad that policy is, really not about the lobbyist. Jack Abramoff was a vehicle for something that was bigger than him and that was money. That is the conclusion that the movie reaches: Is he a bad apple or evidence of a rotten barrel? 

    RW: In Taxi to the Dark Side, you interview your father. Does this film reflect lessons he taught you?

    AG: My father passed on to me the idea of being relentlessly curious. When I interviewed him for Taxi, he was close to his death, but even then he was so attuned to what was going on around him, his sense of determined curiosity is what he passed on. In the Abramoff story I thought, you know, I don't really know enough about my own government, I am not sure that any of us knows how the government really works. We are all cynical about it, but we don't really know. It is like going into the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant and seeing how the sausage gets made.

    RW: What do you want people to get out of this film?

    AG: I want them to be entertained. But I want them to develop a righteous anger about how much money is perverting our democracy. If we don't get angry it is going to get worse. A lot of purse conscious Republicans should get angry about how money is thrown around in Washington. Congressmen and senators are being greased.

    RW: Are you indicting the Democrats? 

    AG: The Jack Abramoff scandal is a Republican scandal. Chuck Schumer, a dyed in the wool liberal, is an unbelievable shill, campaigning for things that are deeply undemocratic-i.e. the Hedge Fund loophole. Firemen and teachers pay a tax rate of 25% or 30 %. Hedge fund managers worth hundreds of millions of dollars pay 15%. Why? Chuck Schumer has become their protector and every time somebody takes that unfair loophole away, he kills it in the Senate because he and his pack are getting hundreds of millions of dollars. It's obscene. We didn't have time to get into Schumer in the film but there is a clue there that it is not just Republicans. I never met him. By all accounts he is a nice guy. That's another thing I learned from doing these films: everybody's nice. But that doesn't mean he hasn't done something deeply corrupt. Schumer will defend his decision, well I'm from NY and Wall St. is NY. So I would say, what about firemen and teachers, why should they pay double? It makes my blood boil.

    RW: You are showing an untitled Spitzer documentary. Is there a connection between questions raised about government, politics, and money in Jack's story with Eliot Spitzer?

    AG: The Spitzer story is more complicated. Unlike Casino Jack, there's no easy prescriptive answer to Eliot Spitzer, but I was interested in him as a character, in his rise and his fall. He is one of the few who understands the political economy, the wicked games that are played in the financial community, and he knew how to get tough. The SEC wasn't doing it. I admire him.

    After the scandal happened, everybody was talking about it; still is, because it cuts very deep. How do we choose our public officials? What do we need them for? What about relations between men and women? How do we parse that? Spitzer is not the only powerful man who was unfaithful to his wife, but it was a spectacular moment because the way he presented himself he was so unlikely a character a candidate for using prostitutes. He prosecuted people for having done the same.

    There's no doubt that his enemies were gleeful. That's part of the film, the political blood sport. And al ot of the people who went after him, as with Clinton, were guilty of the same or similar crimes. Eliot Spitzer didn't corner the market on hypocrisy.

    RW: What about the other films that are part of this year's Tribeca Film Festival?

    AG: My Trip to Al Qaeda, Lawrence Wright's journey into the Middle East shows the threat that we face, the threat that we are becoming more like the terrorists than we imagine. 

    Freakonomics is about corruption. The subject of my segment is sumo wrestling. I love the spectacle of these huge men in loin clothes, but there's something this subject has to say about corruption in human behavior. As a filmmaker, shooting those sumo wrestlers is fantastic.

  • At the Brooklyn and Metropolitan Museums/ IFP Gala

    BrookFashionShow When last I ran into her, Diane von Furstenberg was photographing an antique shoe with curlicue heel-I imagine for inspiration– at the Brooklyn Museum's excellent new “American High Style: Fashioning a National Collection.” Sibling to the Metropolitan's “American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity,” viewed this week, the show features masterworks from the Brooklyn Museum costume collection: fashion as fine art in the work of Charles James, Charles Frederick Worth, Madeleine Vionnet, Steven Arpad, and many others. 

    The shoe collection is one of the most unusual, with Ferragamos, Delmans and Valentinos. And a display at the Met features a rack of extraordinary lacy footwear. But as anyone-even the likes of Anna Wintour who wore a Proenza Schouler day dress to the press conference, posing for the discerning lens of Bill Cunningham– will tell you, women do not live by shoes alone.

    Wednesday night in the DVF Design Studio in the meatpacking district, Diane von Furstenberg hosted the annual Independent Filmmaker Project gala in honor of daughter Tatiana von Furstenberg and Fransesca Gregorini's movie “Tanner Hall” to open this fall. Sipping champagne and red bull cocktails, New York's downtown film community and well wishers including Blythe Danner, Mamie Gummer, Uma Thurman, Ed Burns, Mira Nair, Alexander Olch, Jean Doumanian, Christine Vachon, Cynthia Rowley, to name a mere few, watched clips of the film. Patricia Clarkson and Amber Tamblyn wore hot pink look alike sheaths and first mocked shock and dismay and then a forgiving embrace. Anthony Bregman came from the Westchester shoot of his new movie “Oranges” starring the winning “Please Give” actors Oliver Platt and Catherine Keener. 

    Dressed in hippie chic, DVF huddled in deep talk on a banquette with talented young photographer Francesco Carrozzini whose giant portraits of Keith Richards and Scarlett Johansson with Liev Schreiber hung over the elegant dinner.

  • Iconic Denzel Washington: Tribeca Film Festival / Fences

    Denzelwashington3 Last week at the Tribeca Film Festival's premiere of Alex Gibney's documentary based on the play, My Trip to Al-Qaeda, author Lawrence Wright's explained how he found himself in the midst of controversy after having scripted the 1998 action adventure, The Siege, proclaiming the true threat of terrorism. And then: 9/11 elevated his words to prophesy. A clip of Denzel Washington appears in the film within the film carrying the weight of this message, of a demonic scheme: fear becoming the instrument of our demise. A day later, Denzel Washington was carrying another kind of weight at the Broadway revival of August Wilson's Fences. 

    An Everyman to whom attention must be paid, to echo Arthur Miller's words about his salesman, the character Troy Maxson is the center of a domestic drama, a sanitation worker in 1957 Pittsburgh with a house and yard, a wife ( a stunning performance by Viola Davis), struggling with parenting, his loss of dreams, and a secret life; ultimately through August Wilson's genius, he struggles with his position beyond the titular fence. While James Earl Jones is memorable from the original, Washington's swagger and frailty, his timing with Wilson's poetry, makes this Troy Shakespearean.

    Among those reveling with Washington's family, and the Fences cast and crew, on that rainy night at the Bryant Part Grill: Chris Rock, Spike Lee, Jessica Lange, Harry Belafonte, Mike Nichols, John Patrick Shanley, Emily Blunt and her beau John Krasinski, and Courtney Vance from the original Broadway cast. Without a doubt, as Tony time approaches, watch this play garner every award, Best Actor and Actress, Best Dramatic Play.

  • The Week in Burlesque: Behind the Burly Q/ La Cage aux Folles on Broadway/ Joey Arias at Dominion

    Burlesque
    In 2008, a performer named Runaround Sue told me she made the call to the 150 burlesque artists in NYC and got Jonny Porkpie, Legs Malone, and Nasty Canasta to join her for a raunchy romp: tassels spinning from every body part, stripping down past the bikini line, peek-a-boo fan dancing, and serious body contorting illustrating that sound business advice from “Gypsy,” “You Gotta Have a Gimmick.” Remember, Mama Rose resisted the degradation of her child vaudeville act into burlesque. Now, a new documentary directed by Leslie Zemeckis, “Behind the Burly Q,” reveals a history of this corner of show business. 

    Gypsy Rose Lee gets a moment or two in this film, noted for her oratory skill, but the film's real stars are the flaming redhead Tempest Storm, the demure Blaze Starr, Kitty West who was in her heyday Evangeline the Oyster Girl performing on the half shell, Sherry Britton, Margie Hart, Rita Grable, Lili St. Cyr, and Dixie Evans, billed the “Marilyn Monroe of Burlesque.” Alan Alda speaks about his childhood as a form of child abuse-for what he was exposed to behind the scenes, as the son of Robert Alda, a “straight” man who warmed up the audience for the steamy acts to come. Burlesque comes off as a sociological event, offsetting the poverty of the Depression era, in a pre-feminist world, where, as one star put it, “Nothing is sexier than a woman crawling, if she knows how.” 

    Sharon Stone introduced a special screening this week, saying she had this in common: nudity and sex. That got a laugh from the crowd at MoMA who remember her crotch flashing moment in “Basic Instinct.” In fact co-star Michael Douglas joined the celebrants for dinner at the legendary 21 along with Brian Koppelman, the producer/director of his new film “A Solitary Man.” In homage to the stars of her film, Leslie Zemeckis and her producer wore glamorous gold lame gowns. Thanks to the superb seating skills of Peggy Siegal, our table had a high concentration of documentarians with Kate Davis whose “Stonewall” is soon to open and Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker, who reminisced about the stripper he worked with in the '50's: “Ah Gyps, I miss her.”

    St. Tropez may be far away from early 20th century America, but the fabulous Cagelles in the Broadway revival of “La Cage aux Folles” at the Longacre Theatre certainly took their cues from burlesque. In the musical's denouement, Jean-Michel's future mother-in-law (Veanne Cox), a prude in French twist lets her hair down as a dancer to avoid the gendarmes; burlesque-like, her silver skirt is snatched as she bumps and grinds, and a long glove is sexily cast to the side. She is having “The Best of Times,” as is the audience. Kelsey Grammer (Georges) and Douglas Hodge (Albin/ Zaza) make for a gorgeous couple. Albin appears to be a mere scene stealing drama queen at first, but her cunning saves the day. When Georges and Albin kiss, ooh la la.

    And last night, after the Tribeca Film Festival premiere of the docufantasy, “Arias with a Twist,” burlesque meets camp as the flamboyant entertainer, Joey Arias performed at Dominion. Pal Sherry Vine sang “I Just Shit My Pants” and Raven Oak, “Fly Me to the Moon.” Then Arias performed “Don't Explain,” accompanied by Alex Gifford on piano and the dazzling, elegant puppetry of Basil Twist. Pulling off her jacket and leathers down to black lace, Joey took some deep crotch flashing bends for the joyful crowd.

  • Following my Nose to the Brooklyn Ball

    BrooklynSmall The Brooklyn Museum has my number: fashion and food, making their Brooklyn Ball The Party of the Season.
    The spectacle starts with an olfactory assault on the 5th floor for cocktails. Pursuing the nose-pinching yet oddly enticing stinky pong, we see yellow waxen masses hanging from the ceiling with heat lamps: an elaborate cheese drip is underway, eight feet above a monumental wooden crate festooned with Carr's crackers. 

    Needing a drink immediately, we grab from an assortment of glasses on yet another crate and look for a bar, weirdly absent. Blandly monochrome canvases have spigots with wall text: screwdriver, lemonade, white wine, rum & coke. Filling up with dirty martini (sans olive), we find a side room, a slanted wooden floor with a small island of greens, a landscape out of Waiting for Godot. Plucking a parsnip, we enter another room with water basins and paper toweling to rinse. Chloe Sevigny is among the veggie washers.

    This interactive dining experience, a combination of installation and performance art called “Icons,” is the work of Jennifer Rubell.

    BrooklynFashionsMALL Descending the stairs to 4, for a preview of the exhibition “American High Style: Fashioning a National Collection,” is the Metropolitan Museum's Harold Koda. This show, presented in partnership with the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute, begins with footwear. A woman after my own heart, Diane von Furstenberg in a gold evening coat takes a shot of a 1939 Steven Arpad shoe, the curlicue carved heel forming a wedge. Zac Posen holds court near a trio of manikins in Schiaparelli and Charles James. He is celebrating his new collaboration with Target. Former hat designer turned photographer Bill Cunningham snaps the fashionable ogling fashion: Norell, Valentino, Balenciaga.

    Brooklyn Food Next, dinner on 3 in the Beaux-Arts court: those massive crates: giant thighs of beef on one, a dozen turkeys, rabbit, whole pigs with tools for hacking off and slicing. Piled high accompaniment: romaine lettuce on one, asparagus, radish and bean combo on another, fava beans. Mario Batalli serves rabbit.

    “Which are the best bits,” we ask. “Right here,” he says, pointing out the chest. “This is most crispy.” We fill our plates and join a museum-length communal table, seating for hundreds.

    Pinata4 The after party on 1 features a tarot reader, an origami artist, the Bumby's, a masked couple who could tell you about yourself by merely observing, for example accurately saying a particular guest had a strict Catholic upbringing. A trio of drag queens beckons to tell me how to improve my look: six foot tall “Donatella” suggests I wear bigger shoes and dye my hair platinum (like hers?). 

    Dessert is in the piñata of Andy Warhol's head, and promptly at 10, the most aggressive swing baseball bats. Out come Ring Dings, Snow Balls, Twinkies in their plastic wraps. Few scramble for these nostalgic sweets, what one curator called “the most vernacular of desserts.”
     
    Photos Nina Salpeter
     

  • PEN/ Academy of American Poets / Burroughs in Sartasota

    Latt2 The annual PEN World Voices Festival gears up in New York, with visiting literati arriving despite volcanic ash and house arrests from repressive governments that fear how their most creative minds will represent them. A Burmese blogger will receive top honor at the gala scheduled for this coming Tuesday, at the Museum of Natural History. Needless to say, the imprisoned Nay Phone Latt won't be attending, which is reason enough to cherish our constitutionally sanctioned creative freedoms. 

    Indeed, the freedom to write was celebrated at Alice Tully Hall this week, when the Academy of American Poets had its annual benefit on Tuesday. Theodore Sorenson, Frank Bidart, Rosanne Cash were among the readers of verse from the Roberts, Frost, Burns, Lowell, Frank O'Hara, Pablo Neruda, Galway Kinnell, and Matthew Arnold. 

    Gabriel Byrne read a poem in Gaelic, Alan Cummings from Yeats and Tennessee Williams, Julian Schnabel-what else? Auden's “Musee des Beaux Arts,” Matt Dillon from Bukowski noting that he had played the bad boy poet in the film Factotum. Jhumpa Lahiri read poems of Cape Cod by Stanley Kunitz, Mark Doty and Mary Oliver. Sting performed Philip Larkin's “The Whitsun Weddings” and Meryl Streep, one of the evening's chairs with Rose Styron incarnated Frost's “Witch of Coos” and “A Cold Spring” by Elizabeth Bishop. Alec Baldwin and Marie Ponsot were among those privileged to hear this night of verse.

    William-S-Burroughs-w-gun As reported, the spirit of “literary outlaw” William S. Burroughs was everywhere last week in Sarasota, in a superb staged reading of Oren Moverman's script based on William S. Burroughs' Queer, in the music performed by Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye, and particularly in a fine documentary portrait, William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, directed by Yony Leyser. John Waters, Patti Smith, Genesis P. Orridge, Victor Bockris, Barry Miles, Anne Waldman, and -full disclosure-yours truly, provide personal anecdotes about this important American satirist, most famously the author of Naked Lunch, the notorious novel that stood trial on obscenity charges, making history as it was threatened with censorship. For National Poetry Month and beyond, Hail to our First Amendment!

  • On the Front at the Sarasota Film Festival

    Landis2 Volcanic ash from Iceland may have paralyzed air traffic in Europe preventing honoree John Landis from reaching the west coast of Florida for his tribute, but at the Sarasota Film Festival, the show must go on. “What should we do?” asked the affable Mark Famiglio, festival president who playfully is listed as “Head Poobah,” half joking, knowing that attendees would opt to party hearty anyway.

    In its 12th year, the festival is much like many, screening top notch films in a gorgeous location, here among palms and marinas, golf courses and gulf beaches, but this festival has a twist attempting to redefine the business of how films are financed. A group of successful producers and other industry leaders in the world of independent filmmaking, “hand picked” by the festival board's vice president Robert Warren, among them Ted Hope, Mike Ryan, Ira Sachs, Anthony Bregman, Josh Braun— convened yesterday for the festival's Investment Lab. “Material, material, material,” said Rich Jaycobs evoking the language of real estate, is still the starting point for decision making on any film project.

    Most interesting was the trajectory of the day, from conference to the evening's staged reading of Oren Moverman's screenplay for a movie version of the book Queer by William S. Burroughs, to be directed by Steve Buscemi.

    You wouldn't expect a film on this material, so fascinatingly subversive, based on the life of the American writer and beat era culture icon who happened to be homosexual, a heroin addict, and who by the way accidentally killed his wife in a William Tell routine in Mexico City, to be the centerpiece of a mainstream enterprise, a showcase for the business of film.

    So the magic, the blend of inspiration and talents, that made the reading work so well came as something of a happy surprise. With rocker/ poet Patti Smith introducing, Buscemi's Olive Productions partner Stanley Tucci narrating, Buscemi as Lee, Lisa Joyce as the ill-fated Joan, Ben Foster as Allerton, and John Ventimiglia in a variety of roles, the audience had the privilege of being in on the early stages of a film in process. And the result was thrilling. Investors must be lining up.

  • Triumph Over Hitler: Holocaust Remembrance

    YehudaFound  “I will protect you,” sings Father in the opera The Lost Childhood to comfort his son Julek, the tragic irony being that shortly thereafter he, emblematic of so many Jewish fathers, will be marched out of his Lvov, Poland home and murdered by the Nazis.

    Last Thursday, young Julek, now Dr. Yehuda Nir, a prominent Park Avenue psychiatrist and author of the memoir The Lost Childhood on which the opera, composed by Janice Hamer with libretto by Mary Azrael, is based, celebrated his 80th birthday at The Box on Chrystie Street. A hundred or so guests, family and close friends, rejoiced in his “childhood found,” listening to selections sponsored by the American Opera Projects in a lavish celebration, the brainchild of his daughter Sarah Maslin Nir, a writer for the New York Times.

    Dr. Nir endured these terrible times posing as an altar boy in a story that has as many twists as an action adventure thriller, defying the concept of survivor. As he often says, his life is a triumph over a million Nazis who set out to kill a 10 year old boy.

    The Holocaust is further remembered this weekend with screenings of Blessed is the Match, Roberta Grossman's fine documentary portrait of the poet Hannah Senesh at the Center for Jewish History and an Anne Frank twitter campaign: http://twitter.com/UNandHolocaust .

    The publication of A Jew Must Die, a novel based on a true story about a murder in his small town of Payerne by the Swiss Goncourt Prize winner Jacques Chessex (Bitter Lemon Press), underscores the Holocaust as a frontier of perspectives on what it means to be human. Now 65 years after World War II's end, the door does not close on the Holocaust, a subject that only continues to resonate, fascinate, and perplex.