recent posts
- Adrien Brody and Tessa Thompson Debut on Broadway in The Fear of Thirteen
- Lorne Premieres at Lincoln Center: Glimpsing Lorne Michaels Backstage at Saturday Night Live
- Alden Ehrenreich and Patrick Ball: The Men in Becky Shaw on Broadway
- Audra McDonald and “Original Nepo Baby” Gwyneth Paltrow: Honorees at the NYWFT Muse Awards 23 March 2026
- Zach Bryan Buys the On the Road Scroll/ Happy Birthday, Jack Kerouac!
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Sir Howard Stringer introduced Nora Ephron at the Julie & Julia premiere at the Ziegfeld Theater on Thursday night, calling the writer/ producer/ director who is also a dynamite cook as readers of her best seller “Heartburn” know, “a woman for all seasonings.” Little wonder that she would concoct a most delicious movie combining the memoirs of the legendary Julia Child and Julie Powell, an aspiring writer who in a year cooked all of the recipes contained in Child's classic “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” and blogged about it along the way. Fans of “Sleepless in Seattle” and “You've Got Mail” will be happily enchanted with Ephron's new romantic comedy, with the twined love stories of Julia and her husband Paul, and Julie with Eric (Chris Messina), where the worst that happens is a fight, resolved the next day. Ah, if only all marriages were so smooth. The casting of Meryl Streep and Amy Adams is perfection. Stanley Tucci in a sly performance as Child's husband from heaven characterizes him as one of our very best comic actors. He and Streep were sublime in “Devil Wears Prada,” as were Streep and Adams in “Doubt.” You simply never grow tired of them. Streep actually outdoes herself as Julia Child. Wearing period hats, ensembles with a strand of pearls, designed by Ann Roth, she's so obviously having the time of her life, as she did in last year's best bad movie ever, “Mamma Mia!” Licking beurre blanc, flipping frittatas, towering over everyone else (Child was 6'2''), affecting the weird cadences of Child's accent-it doesn't get better than this. The after party at the Metropolitan Club featured various restaurants' excellent attempts at Julia's signature dishes. Toni Morrison, Patricia Clarkson, Marshall Brickman, Mira Nair, Barbet Schroeder, Ken Auletta, Hannah Pakula, Sally Quinn and Ben Brantlee, Nan and Gay Talese, were in the crowd sampling Tribeca Grill's beef bourguignon and Mary's Coquilles St. Jacques. Perhaps Streep will be adding this one to her long roster of Oscar nods. She received very high accolades indeed: two officials of Paris's Cordon Bleu Culinary School who knew Child quite well deemed Streep a “superb fake;” she beamed with pleasure.
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The six Saturdays of the polo matches in Bridgehampton are more than just sports. Viewers sip champagne or Stoli cocktails, munching on popped potato chips and mini-Crumbs cupcakes, and mill around looking for A-listers. Yesterday, some actually attended to the players: Black Watch vs. Great Oaks, while I chatted with John Gruen of Optyx, one of the sponsors, who is so kind and clever, an artist in the eye glass world, and, wanting to upgrade the shades I bought at Loehman's, I tried on Persols and Ray Bans. Sunglasses with decent protection seemed a healthy purchase I could easily justify in this economy. When I was introduced to Todd Rome of Blue Star Jets,however, it was hard to say I would be in need of a personal jet any time soon. But wanting to be hip and nice, I pointed out my hat, acquired at the polo event some years ago, to which he gently hmmmed and said I should throw away this relic from a long defunct company and get one of his immediately. Oops. Scrambling with both feet in my mouth, and while photographers were now shooting Todd Rome with Bravo's Real Housewives of New York, I snagged a new hat, which except for the name looked very much like the old hat, navy with white logo, happy that there are some people left who can enjoy his services.
Onto the home of art dealer Louis Meisel and his wife Susan. hosts of the annual fund raiser for Samuel Waxman's Cancer Research Foundation in their sculpture garden. I was pondering an irony: my mother, the late Pola Weinreich died in the care of this world-renowned oncologist at Mount Sinai in 1996. Should I say something, remind him of an event commonplace to him and devastating to me? A sign of a good doctor, he very much wanted to talk about her demise and the deadly disease that he was hoping to cure in his lifetime with the foundation he created 30 years ago. Amidst the gambling tables and set up for the silent auction, well-wishers greeted him as we chatted. Restaurants offered their wares: Bobby Van's served steak sandwiches with creamed spinach, Shun Lee had Peking duck, Town Line BBQ had ribs. Annie's Organic Café and Market had scrumptious tofu topped with peanut sauce, and some handmade fruited and nut morsels from Chocolate Infusions to die for. Most surprising, Susan Meisel, the hostess herself served up her signature pigs in blankets and yummy chicken fingers. “You'll be back for more,” she grinned. They say she's vegan. -
The documentary “Yoo Hoo Mrs. Goldberg” is a heimish and a fascinating trip down memory lane for those of us who remember Gertrude Berg on television, schmoozing with her neighbors, her ample arms perched on the windowsill. Before her success in the salad years of television, she and her fictive family “The Goldbergs” were on radio, giving voice to the early version of the family sitcom that became the meat and potatoes of programming. This fine biopic limns that career, revealing the elegant Park Avenue businesswoman behind the scenes. No surprise that the originator of the uber-Jewish mom, Molly Goldberg, was a model of multitasking, creator, writer, producer, and star. To make a feminist statement would be beside the point. She was a mensch. Ambitious and talented, Berg saw media as a frontier during the early part of the 20th century when America saw the stock market crash, ignored the plight of Jews during the Holocaust, and witnessed the witch-hunt known as the McCarthy era. Berg's character is best seen when she stood by her co-star Philip Loeb when he was black-listed; losing sponsors, she refused to fire him until she could no longer keep him on the show and survive. A heartbreak to everyone, Philip Loeb later committed suicide. And the slot held by “The Goldbergs” went to a new show, “I Love Lucy.” “Yoo Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg” follows upon Aviva Kempner's distinguished achievement in “The Partisans of Vilna” and “The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg.” Already a hit where it is screened in Manhattan, “Yoo Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg” opens this week in Sag Harbor. Don't miss it
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If you are old enough to remember the tv show Flipper, featuring a dolphin jumping high out of the water and sporting a shit-eating grin, you will be amazed at the documentary, The Cove, which tells the story of how the show's host, Richard O'Barry after years of buying new Porsches on his earnings, turned his life around. When Cathy, the main “star” died in his arms, he realized the cruelty to creatures inherent in dolphin entertainment, and became an activist in preserving dolphins' right to swim the oceans wild. But the sad story does not end with freeing these “entertainers” from stressful captivity. As founder of the Dolphin Project, O'Barry delved further into ocean life and found out that in Japan, the government sponsors the killing of thousands of dolphins per year in a remote cove in Taiji. A driving question becomes: why would anyone want to kill these intelligent, human friendly fish-eh, actually a kind of whale? He assembled divers, fellow activists, and filmmakers. With cameras hidden in fabricated rocks, his team filmed the killing so that people could see exactly what is going on, even as the media attempts to hush what is tragic not only for this species, but for our planet. One of the many reverberations of this dolphin slaughter is how the government made dolphin meat part of the mandatory school lunch program, even knowing the high percentage of dangerous mercury found as a result of industrial plants dumping waste in the world's waters. Mindful of the health risks to children, two Japanese local politicians bravely defied the government. Producers Jim Clark, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Fiisher Stevens spoke at a Q&A following a special screening last Wednesday hosted by Ben Stiller who attended along with his dad, Jerry Stiller. Jane Hightower, author of “Diagnosis: Mercury: Money, Politics & Poison” also spoke, and Ric O'Barry got a standing ovation from a crowd that included Nora Ephron, Nick Pileggi, Matthew Modine, Griffin Dunne, Famke Janssen, Adrien Grenier, Josh Bernstein, among many others. Guests filed out of the movie sheepishly remembering Flipper and other amusements like swimming with dolphins, hoping fish would not be on the menu at the after party. In fact, many who had also seen the documentary “Food, Inc.” despaired there was nothing left healthy to eat. Fortunately, the nutrition conscious and very fine restaurant Rouge Tomate did not disappoint, serving salads prepared with seasonal, locally available produce and delicious duck, excellent cheeses and filet mignon.
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The photo on her debut CD “So Sure” shows Meryl Romer with a knowing, come hither look, deep cleavage, saying she’s got the goods. As a vocalist, she’s new but her sound rooted in jazz traditions makes you think, where has she been? But that is the story of her music. In three original songs, by writer/producer Casey Collins and composer Eric Moon, “I’ve Waited Long Enough,” “Right on Time,” and her signature “So Sure,” Romer recounts a personal saga that explains the right turn she took somewhere in her ripe ‘50’s to pursue the passion for music that was lurking within her since childhood. Covering Sinatra-famed standards like “Big Spender” or “Lady is a Tramp,” or Cassandra Wilson’s “Solomon Sang” and Toots Thielemans’ “Bluesette,” Romer suggests her jazzy influences. With “You’re a Big Boy Now” from Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks,” she spills into rock with a new arrangement. Backed by a first-rate band: Erik Deutsch on piano, Bill Kopper on guitar, Jonti Siman on bass, Marc Dallo on drums and Mike McGuinness on tenor sax, Romer knows how to put on a great show. As the packed room at Iridium could hear last week, any time might have been “right on time,” and this time is more than good.
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Last night, Williams's “Sweet Bird of Youth” had a one-night performance in Provincetown at Norman Mailer's house starring legendary actress Sylvia Miles as the Princess. This must be Tennessee's year. In East Hampton,Guild Hall, Tennessee Williams's “Glass Menagerie” opened for its 3 week run of a stunning production directed by Harris Yulin featuring
Amy Irving as Amanda Wingfield, a role that rivals “Gypsy”'s Mamma Rose for iconic American uber-mom. Fine-boned Irving in her lace dancing dress captures the delicacy and tough-as-nails spirit of this character as she cripples her children in her ambition for them. Irving makes us understand why this woman does what she does, nattering at Tom, spousifying him in the absence of the husband who abandoned them many years before. Grooming the painfully shy and limping Laura for her gentleman caller, the very handsome John Behlmann, becomes her life's mission. We watch Laura, played beautifully by Louisa Krause, as her prospects diminish. What makes this production so special is Ebon Moss-Bachrach's portrayal of Tom, son, brother, narrator of this memory piece-most of all a writer re-imaging his youth. This actor made me understand what was so off in the recent Broadway revival with Christian Slater miscast, slick in this role. Ebon Moss-Bachrach as stand in for the artist himself speaks William's poetry, his translucent eyes reflecting thwarted hope and misery: he wants to please mom and help sis, he is not a bad person but emotionally frail as Laura is, he lets them down, taking his only way out when he can. This is a family story, a tragedy of the decline of Southern refined values, auguring the speed and flash of the American future. The humble candles go out in their St. Louis flat, with its view of the neon Paradise Dance Hall, and as Tom reflects, the light coming is lightening by comparison. Paul Bowles's original incidental music is among this production's many joys.
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“There's food, water, and stories,” said Cedering Fox, producer of Los Angeles based Word Theater on Saturday night at Guild Hall in East Hampton at a program featuring a dozen actors reading short stories. “I believe that storytelling is a primary need.” The daughter of the late poet/artist Civ Cedering whose Sagaponack home was the impressionable site of artistic gatherings, Cedering Fox met renowned poets as well as Bill Henderson, founder/publisher of The Pushcart Prize. In 1975, Henderson wrote to Anais Nin, Paul Bowles, Ralph Ellison and others for suggestions of accomplished young writers. Thus began Pushcart Prize, dedicated to publishing the best of the small presses. Saturday's program, a collaboration of Fox's and Henderson's passion for literature included readings by Lynn Whitfield, Samantha Mathis, Amber Tamblyn, Linus Roache, Darrell Larson, Edi Gathegi, Nicole Ansari, and Janel Moloney. Brian Cox read a story by Marvin Cohen called “The Human Table” with relish. Now he is eager to meet the New York based writer who famously cruised New York cocktail parties just to eat. Sean Young who seemed to disappear from Hollywood -she says she's been blacklisted- read Janice Eidus's “Not the Plaster Casters” with fervor for the protagonist who makes casts of rock stars' privates. Jackson Rathbone traveled 5 hours from the set of a film he's making in Philadelphia, just to read “The Bank Robbery” by Steve Schutzman, and then performed with Ben Graupner of the 100 Monkeys after the readings. Amy Irving who is starring in the upcoming Guild Hall production of Glass Menagerie read, as did John Heard, from Ian Frazier's “Tomorrow's Bird.” “Cedering suggested I read it as if I liked the idea of crow dominance of the bird species,” he told me, providing some insight into Fox's directing technique, how she blocked each story with each reader, getting the beats. “I've seen Cedering put together a lot of these events,” said Heard, “but this one was the best yet.”
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One line from “Twelfth Night” seemed prescient: “The rain it raineth every day” got a big laugh this week at The Public Theater's outdoor Delacorte venue, this viewer's second venture through Central Park to the idyllic staging of Shakespeare's comedy. Rained out one night, threatened another, such is the magic of Shakespeare in the Park. Is it worth it? The play's Illyria could be paradise, so green and hilly is this mythic place, and the mayhem and mirth wherein: a shipwreck, mistaken identity, cross dressing, swordfights, Shakespeare's signature off-color sight gags delivered by a first-rate ensemble cast led by Anne Hathaway, Audra McDonald, Raul Esparza under the fine direction of Daniel Sullivan, accompanied by the folksy music of the band, Hem. Once the show goes on, even the weather does not dampen the spirit of this play's whooping and wooing. Hathaway, so charming in “Prada,” and sarcastic in “Rachel Getting Married,” is sweetly innocent onstage as Viola/ Cesario, agile when she commands a sword, and dodges a stolen kiss. As she demonstrated at this year Academy Awards ceremony, the girl can sing. Of course she is no match for the monster musical talent of Audra McDonald, who as Olivia only sings a little. You want more of her, but that would upset the careful balances of this play's couplings. The ribaldry of Jay O. Sanders as Sir Toby Belch, Julie White as Maria, and Hamish Linklater as Andrew Aguecheek, and Michael Cumpsty's pouting and posturing in ridiculous yellow socks as Malvolio deserve mention. As all identities are revealed at play's end, and true lovers wed, moisture may come from the audience's tears of joy.
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To call Marilyn Maye a saloon singer is like calling a Rolls Royce a car. This chanteuse, elegant at 81, likes her martinis straight up, and favors Johnny Mercer tunes made famous by Frank Sinatra like “Summer Wind,” and especially “Drinking Again,” and “One for my Baby and One More for the Road,” songs that speak to late night lonely whisperings to a bartender. Saloons, she informed the uninitiated, were called “upholstered sewers.” She's just completed a run at New York's Metropolitan Room, 9 sold out nights celebrating Mercer's centennial, “Mercer, the Maye Way,” with standards like “Too Marvelous for Words,” “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby,” “Jeepers Creepers,” “I'm Old Fashioned,” “That Old Black Magic,” “I Wanna Be Around,” “Goody Goody,” and more. A knowing crowd, including cabaret insiders like piano man Ray Cohen and crooner Steve Ross, stood and cheered after the generous hour plus set that also featured Tedd Firth at the piano, Tom Hubbard on bass, and Jim Eklof, her drummer for over forty years. Maye's East Coast tour ends on June 26 when she will perform in East Hampton at Guild Hall. Don't miss her show there, but if you do, don't despair. She promised to be back at the Metropolitan Room in October.For Father's Day, the Museum of Natural History offered the hottest ticket in town: Disney Channel's Dan Zanes and Friends, an intimate concert for 300 under the belly of the whale. By the second song, gyrating tots gravitated toward the stage. Most were boogying along to signature tunes including “Strike the Bell” “Sloop John B,” “How Do You Do,” and “Fare Thee Well My Own True Love.” Zane who sports a groovy gray fro also offered a drinking song. He assured the grown ups, he checked with his mom and she gave him the thumbs up. Spotted among the dads was Matthew Broderick, his mutton chop sideburns, leftover from his starring role on Broadway, in “The Philanthropist.” Could Sarah Jessica be far behind?
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If you had asked documentary filmmaker, Harvard professor Richard P. Rogers what he was working on in the 1980's or '90's, he would have told you, a movie about the place where he grew up, Wainscott. When he died of cancer in July 2001, that decades-old project remained in an attic in numerous boxes marked “windmill.” While we will never know how Dick Rogers would have assembled his material, a completed film, “The Windmill Movie” is now playing at Film Forum, preceded by his short film “Quarry” (1970). A fascinating narrative of Dick Rogers' life, “The Windmill Movie,” formed of the unfinished footage, excerpts from completed work, Super 8 home movies by Rogers' father, and new interviews, fulfills the post-college plan of his former student, director and necktie mogul, Alexander Olch, and the wish to ensure Rogers' legacy for the producer, his longtime partner, Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas, who he married as his illness progressed.
Using his mentor's footage of Wainscott, Olch said when his movie premiered at the 2008 New York Film Festival: “A film about the beaches at Georgica is inherently a lot less interesting than a film about Richard P. Rogers. Incredibly charming, funny and intelligent, Dick had to be the center.” Olch melds Rogers's footage with the story of his own process in working with oftentimes confusing, conflicting material, or filling in the gaps. Onscreen interviews with Wallace Shawn and Bob Balaban are attempts to tell Rogers' story with actors, but ultimately, “There was nothing like the raw power of seeing this guy pointing a camera at himself in the mirror,” said Olch. A young Richard P. Rogers thus confronts himself: “This is a cliché, the stock material of a personal documentary. Why is it so hard to make a film about yourself?” he asks. An experimental filmmaker, a documentarian for PBS, with little interest in Hollywood, his career angst sets in: why isn't he Steven Spielberg. And the burden of his WASP upbringing: So privileged, so rich, so white: “Isn't it infuriating to bitch in theHamptons?”
Bitching in Paris, Tangier, San Francisco or anywhere was never a problem for Brooklyn-born poe Harold Norse, who died last week at age 92 in his Mission neighborhood. Often associated with the beat literati, Norse, who was also associated with W.H. Auden and William Carlos Williams, lived at The Beat Hotel, that is, 9 Git-le-Coeur near the Seine in the early '60's when Brion Gysin famously invented the cut-up, a collage technique for writing perfected by William S. Burroughs. His own cut-up novel is called “Beat Hotel.” You can read about his unusual life in his “Memoirs of a Bastard Angel.” Lovable and curmudgeonly, Norse will be missed.
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NYWIFT's annual Designing Women event to honoring behind the scenes artists in makeup, hair, and costumes for film and television is traditionally warm, informative, with a lot of laughs. This year, John Turturro, proclaiming himself a woman in film trapped in a man's body, presented an award to his Yale Drama School classmate, Donna Zakowski, Sam Waterston to Marianne Skiba, and Gossip Girl'sBlake Lively amidst a sea of screaming girls gave the plaque to Jennifer Johnson, whose hairstyles-up, down, or with a strand of pearls woven through– then become a world wide trend. All are extremely talented women who work in this tough business, often having to be on the set at 4 A.M., to make the glamorous look even more so. Donna Zakowska said that for her work on the HBO miniseries John Adams, she had to find the hero in the unattractive, referring to the title role, the complex character played by Paul Giamatti. And, their job does not end with the flourish of a blush brush. So much depends upon person-to-person chemistry, preparing actors psychologically to shine. Sam Waterston quipped, “hair and makeup should be called the mental health department.” Saturday Night Live's Ana Gasteyer hosted the Q&A announcing how hard it was to prepare for this particular evening. As an actress she often takes free-bees and said she was wearing 6-year-old foundation from SNL, and now worried that her face was caking. But not everything was free. She assuring the amused crowd, her blowout cost plenty.
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The creative collaboration of those two whiny masters of comedy, Woody Allen and Larry David, seems like a no-brainer. So it was a surprise to learn at the press conference for Allen’s new film “Whatever Works,” in which David stars as the Woody surrogate, that he had originally written this comedy with the late Zero Mostel in mind. Think of “Fiddler on the Roof” with an axe to grind and I do not mean Russian pogroms, just the normal vicissitudes of life. Though Allen has performed as the much older lead to a beautiful and hot young thing in some of his films, he never intended to play Boris Yellnikoff himself, he said. Larry David plays this curmudgeonly former physicist/ chess teacher as an extension of his “Curb Your Enthusiasm” persona. His twenty-something sweet Southern wife Melody is Evan Rachel Wood, the young actress who got raves for playing the daughter in “The Wrestler,” and who in real life has been romantically linked to Marilyn Manson. All goes well in this improbable marriage until Melody’s mom Marietta, the superb Patricia Clarkson, shows up all big-haired and huffy, and seizing the New York moment, turns hip and artistic, starting a career in photography and a domestic ménage a trois. At the movie’s premiere, a sublime New York night at Brooklyn’s River Café where the Moet et Chandon was poured with élan, the exquisite food featured ice cream cones, and guests included Stanley Tucci, Dana Delany, and Jay Mcinerny, I asked Clarkson–so sleek in a red satin Dolce and Gabanna sheath–about working with Woody, this being her second film with him. (She was in Vicky Christina Barcelona last summer.) “We just clicked,” she told me. “I don’t know what it is.” I do. She may be blond but intelligence always attracts.
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You are what you eat, is the simple way to say it. The writer William S. Burroughs called his iconic examination of literally what is at the end of your fork “the naked lunch.” As a student of anthropology, Burroughs was referring to addiction as an aspect of science, as in the human organism's need for air. Try to live without it. You can extend the metaphor to the food we eat. “Food, Inc.” a new documentary directed by Robert Kenner opening this Friday, explores the food industry, how our current situation with something so vital to the human organism, our food, is now a nightmare of corporate control with the dire results of increased e-coli contamination leading to disease and death, genetically altered meat and poultry sources. Produce like the tomato, now available year-round, is practically a virtual entity. Food, Inc. tells the truth about a business that conceals its methods of mechanizing the production and sale of food, and to become really paranoid, has endangered the human species by fostering a brutal spiral from seed to supermarket. Here is why so many Americans are obese and one out of three children has early diabetes. While we have the illusion of inexpensive food, says journalist Eric Schlosser, who is executive producer and is interviewed in the film extending his ideas developed in “Fast Food Nation,” what about the costs later on, putting all those people on dialysis. Schlosser was on hand for a special screening at Soho House hosted by Coralie Charriol Paul inaugurating her new series React to Film. Daughter of the famous watchmaker, she is a jewelry designer and more importantly a mom highly concerned with how we feed our families. After attending an early screening of this provocative film, she created her series to show documentaries, to focus on issue-based films and moderate discussion between audiences and filmmakers. Said Schlosser in the Q&A attended by actor Samantha Mathis, documentary filmmakers Robert Richter and Robin Leacock, we have the opportunity to make a change: every time we shop, we vote. Buy organic. Lobby for greater food safety measures in government. Implement Kevin's Law, named for a two-year old who died in less than two weeks after eating a contaminated hamburger. Demand proper labeling in food packaging as in the tobacco industry model. If you had the warnings that appear on cigarette cartons, that use of this product could endanger your health, would you buy it?
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Senegalese singer Youssou Ndour, a Sufi Muslim with a soulful sound has a secret weapon beyond the spirit of Allah: his grandmother who died shortly after being filmed in the documentary “I Bring What I Love,” opening this Friday. Introduced at the Paris Theater last week, at a special screening hosted by Mike Nichols, Ndour said he has always kept his family private, but his grandmother allowed this young filmmaker Chai Vasarhelyi into her bedroom where the ancient archetypical figure, feeble and gnarled, lay enrobed and headdressed, clearly a powerful inspiration for Ndour's life and music. This cinematic journey is not your ordinary music film, although the concert footage alone should thrill audiences. Daring to perform on Ramadan, his album “Egypt” condemned as blasphemous, Youssou Ndour enraged religious elders in his country. This scandal could have been Salman Rushdie Satanic Verses redux, however the film follows Ndour for two critical years as he brings this potentially volatile issue around through the power of his art and intense confidence in his vision. The Plaza's Oak Room was packed for an after party: John Patrick Shanley, James Toback, Carol Kane, Christine Baranski, Dick Cavett, Daphne Merkin,Ben Gazara, Julie Taymor, and Philip Pettit were among the well-wishers. Legendary documentarian D. A. Pennebaker who has “Only the Strong Survive” and “Don't Look Back” among his music film credits, congratulated the radiant Chai telling her that he showed his first ever film at the Paris
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If you ever find yourself in a hospital emergency room, will you want Nurse Jackie tending to your wounds? Showtime's new series starring the intelligent, non-Carmela Soprano coiffed Edie Falco gives you enough behind the scenes black humor in the form of snappy dialogue and sight gags to make anyone think twice about being in a hospital at all, even to visit, except from the safe remove of one's television. We've seen quite a bit of drama from the ER, but there hasn't been a vision like a human ear floating in a flushed toilet since the mind imagined the plight of Van Gogh. In the season's premiere, screened for an audience that included the show's stars Falco, a scene stealing Anna Deveare Smith, and many well wishers including Debra Winger, Richard Jenkins, Aida Turturro, Victor Garber, Juliana Marguiles, Stockard Channing, Griffin Dunne, Dick Cavett, Swoozie Kurtz, Ann Jackson, Eli Wallach, Lynn Cohen, Tova Feldshuh, that ear belonged to a diplomat who had cut up a call girl, an un-pretty sight preceding him into the hospital on a gurney, so we get a bit of Jackie's moral stance. The guy was loathsome, a scumbag who deserved another body part be severed if justice be served. But you cannot think Jackie a saint. A mom of two, she snorts pulverized Percosets and cheats on her pancake wielding husband, removing her wedding band on the job. Eve Best, whose leg was featured in last season's hit revival of Pinter's “The Homecoming,” plays a doctor and Jackie's friend with style and a penchant for Manolo Blahniks. Those eye candy legs are put to good use. At last night's after party at Nicola's in the Parker Maridien, Good and Plenties and Red Hots were served in pill cups and waiters wore scrubs. Ironically, one elderly guest collapsed for real in this room fitted with hospital beds and oxygen. The dark humor of Nurse Jackie seems especially well suited to the quirky mind of actor Steve Buscemi who, it turns out, directed some of the segments to come. I'm addicted already.Meantime in midtown, HBO hosted a screening of its Oscar winning short, “Smile Pinki.” To some, a documentary is a message movie. Here, the narrative is propelled by great cinematography (by Nick Doob), excellent storytelling thanks to director Megan Mylan, and the movie's stars: a charismatic little girl of the title who, with several others whose stories interweave with hers, receive free cleft surgery provided by Smile Train. While the procedure to correct this severe disfigurement of a cavernous hare lip is simple, convincing families in rural India to bring their children, often traveling a distance, for this life-altering operation is less so. This season's feel-good movie airs tonight. Don't miss it.
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“Anyone who has married anyone knows you are going into a rival tribe,” laughed Colin Firth, explaining the theme of his new movie “Easy Virtue.” The handsome father-in-law in the venomous Whittaker clan in directorStephan Elliott’s remake of the 1924 Noel Coward play is married to a bitchy and funny Kristen Scott Thomaswho was directed to play her role more Disney witch. Firth has a thing for his son’s American bride, Larita, played ably, her performance evoking Kathryn Hepburn, by Jessica Biel. As the prince of period movies, the quintessential Darcy—see “Pride and Prejudice,” (and he’s pretty great in the Bridget Jones franchise), Firth has occupied many a fan’s dreams, but here he is “a fellow who has gone feral,” he says, he is out of step, like a Hemingway character with post- World War I scars and it isn’t until his son (Ben Barnes) comes to the country estate with Larita that he feels a zest for life beautifully illustrated in a sexy tango the two dance amidst the uptight others, jaws amply dropped. Together, Firth and Biel represent the future, characters liberated from ideals that no longer work. In this time of mortgage crises, the Whittaker’s attempts to hold onto their estate will be resonant. As to his film choices—and you have to think of his role in last summer’s “Mamma Mia”—he regrets only one he turned down: “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.”
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Playwright Joe Pintauro will have to stop hoping that critics forget he was a Catholic priest, especially when it comes to his excellent play “Cathedral” in current production at Manhattan Theater Source. Built upon the blueprint of an earlier work, “The Dead Boy,” “Cathedral” takes place in an entirely Catholic setting, limning a territory similar to that in John Patrick Shanley's “Doubt,” — with no more certainty, but plumbing the depths of a deeper guilt and emotional space. Pintauro's earlier play responded to the infamous improprieties at New York's Covenant House, a shelter for homeless boys, from the '90's. Pintauro's “cathedral” is more an emotive state than a religious edifice: a priest known as Jake (a fine Jon Ecklund) wants to leave the order after a sexual awakening with a young hustler Will (an engaging Cary Woodworth). Implied in the popular mind about such cases of abuse by the clergy is that the young are innocent. But what if the priest is the prey? Innocence among these characters is not the issue. No one, not even the cardinal, with Tom Godfrey in that role, is unblemished, that is, free of obsession with sin. As a damaged, reckless and needy liar for whom childhood never existed, Will shifts the conventional discourse. When a reporter (played by Kate Middleton) comes to investigate the subject, she too is subjective, her job as arbiter of facts compromised. If religions deal in absolutes, suggests Pintauro, man can only fail. Man's “cathedral” is mutable, which is why Jake must seek freedom elsewhere. This play is an ambitious query into the human psyche, and well worth the challenge.Only in Canada will you get money to write a play about the U.S. Supreme Court was the joke opening night of Epic Theatre Ensemble's “A More Perfect Union” by Vern Thiessen, a playwright from Alberta who now lives in Queens. A pas de deux of two Supreme Court law clerks, “Union” is a love story that plays with our notions of justice. Melissa Friedman and Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr. perform as the clerks, one to a conservative judge, the other to a liberal, reminiscent of the real life marriage of Republican Mary Matalan to Democrat James Carville. You have to wonder what that's like in bed. In “Union,” audiences will learn a great deal that will resonate with current events as Obama now must fill a Supreme Court seat. The title “A More Perfect Union” works for the love story as well as the ideals of American democracy that emerge and twist and turn as the clerks review cases in the law library to heated effect. Another phrase that comes up often in their well-timed comedic and very entertaining banter could have served this timely play as well: “Dirty Little Secrets.”
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Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter with his ski slope sculpted white hair and Ecco Press's Daviel Halperrn in a halo of white frizz hosted a party for chef John De Lucie's “The Hunger,” at The Waverly Inn on Monday night. This book records his rise from low management head hunter, to cooking school, working through the kitchens and women of New York-with a detour to Nick & Toni's and Oceans in the Hamptons– to become co-owner of the hottest restaurant in the city. Adding to its allure, The Waverly Inn operates through a secret system of reservations. Packed every night, the restaurant has no phone, a fact that astonishes De Lucie even as he tries to explain this phenomenon. His rake's progress takes the reader into the behind the scenes grit of resto life as he finds his passion, with De Lucie's surprising self effacing humor, his bewilderment at diners like “Jenny from the block” and the “taxi driver” lauding his signature dishes like the mac and cheese with truffles and chicken pot pie. On Monday night, the diverse crowd chomping on hors d'oeuvres of filet mignon, jumbo shrimp cocktail, tuna tartare, and truffled pizza included Marty Richards, Harvey Weinstein, Jill Hennessey, and John Scotto of Fresco in a moment of one happy restaurateur celebrating another. A number of leggy celebrity models made it past the invisible velvet ropes. The real secret of The Waverly Inn is like the appeal of “The Hunger.” What it offers, you cannot put down.
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What an international mecca New York was last week, with Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda arriving for the premiere of “Still Walking,” for example, or the Irish playwright Conor McPherson in town-(his play “the Seafarer was all the rage on Broadway last season)– showing “The Eclipse,” both films part of the Tribeca Film Festival. Dovetailing with the film fest, novelists and poets were celebrated at the fifth annual PEN World Voices Festival. The party started on Monday night when the Cultural Services of the French Embassy hosted cocktails and a photo exhibition by Parisian Gerard Rondeau. An extraordinary portrait of Paul Bowles in his last years of life, hit you first as you entered the elegant Fifth Avenue townhouse. Pictures of Susan Sontag, Louise Bourgeoise, Carla Bruni. Joan Mitchell, Gore Vidal were among those gracing the walls. Salman Rushdie was on hand greeting the likes of Mary McFadden (before she sped off across the park to honor Tom Hanks at Lincoln Center). Daniel Menaker spoke about the Israeli writer Meir Shalev he would interview later in the week. We had not heard of him, but that was the point: to meet the writers and discover something new. And that's the way it went: under the title “Evolution/ Revolution,” a group program featured Edwidge Danticat reading from the Haitian poet Felix Moresseur-Leroy, to Quebecoise poet Nicole Brossard, to French Muriel Barbery, to Palestinian Raja Shehadeh imagining smoking a joint with an Israeli border guard; an appreciation of Kafka's “Amerika” with Colm Toibin (he has a new book called “Brooklyn”), Louis Begley, and Lynne Tillman.As to great writers: everyone is talking about New Yorker Daphne Merkin's article on her own depression in Sunday's “New York Times Magazine.” In my darkest moments, thoughts of suicide can easily be dispelled by a slice of cheesecake or some healthy retail therapy. Not so Merkin; even the love of her daughter could not rid her of suicidal episodes. Easy enough to distance oneself from Plath's bell jar. Merkin, a child of wealth and privilege, seemed to have it all. But following “Enchantment,” a novel revelatory on her relationship with her mother, and her many articles riffing on the taboo-on the secret pleasures of being spanked, for example, or the sexual implications of the purse in a piece about the accessory of choice. These mark the writer in risky territory-not a mere journalist of our time, as I had thought-but an artist.
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