Gossip Central

Pushcart Performances at Guild Hall

“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.”

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

Twelfth Night

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.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

    

Marilyn Maye at the Metropolitan Room/ Dan Zanes at the Museum of Natural History

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?

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

Richard P. Rogers and Harold Norse Remembered

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 the

Hamptons?”
    

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.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

NYWIFT Honors Designing Women

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.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

Woody and Larry: Whatever Works

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.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

Eric Schlosser's Naked Lunch: Food, Inc.

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?

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

Youssou Ndour's Grandmother

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

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura