Dame Edna Everage and Michael Feinstein make a fine couple, if you enjoy a visual oxymoron: the former is the alter ego of the Australian Barry Humphries, known for his large outsized glamour. The latter is the charming song man of The Regency, diminutive, understated, elegant. Each a consummate performer, together they make for an entertaining evening combining highlights of the American songbook with Dame Edna's signature comedy, and somehow, by the end you find yourself happily in a sing along waving priapic gladioli and intoning, “Thrust, thrust, thrust.”
How did you get here? The show is based on the conceit that each has booked this space, and now, egos flair, the two vie for dominance. The brainchild of the stars plus playwright Christopher Durang and Lizzie Spender, the daughter of Stephen Spender and Barry Humphries' wife, All About Me, utilizes these talents for what amounts to a glorified high school sing, and yet, it is deliciously engaging, hilarious.
Dame Edna's wardrobe is a study in what to wear if you are insecure enough to have to prod the audience, you do miss me? She needn't worry, a man in the front row had on identical glasses with rhinestoned wings. Feathers, bling, one creation is more monumentally bedazzling than the last, as the lilac haired comic shows off her gams in red high heels. Backing her up are two buff bouncers who double in dance (Gregory Butler and Jon-Paul Mateo). Even the stage manager (Jodi Capeless) gets into the act. Exclaiming this a Sondheim-free zone, just as it's been announced, the Henry Miller Theater will be named for this Broadway great, Dame Edna does a fine “Here's to the Ladies Who Lunch.”
Michael Feinstein pays homage to comedian Paul Lind's turn on Hollywood Squares, recalled a seminal moment when the host posed this question, “Men reach their sexual peek as teens. At what age for women?” Lind replied, “Who cares?” You get that he's gay. But prepare yourself for this image, when Dame Edna offers to straddle his instrument.
On Wednesday, a posh crowd filed into MoMA for the opening night of the 39th New Directors/New Films series, a collaboration of the museum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. As he would for any such opening, the New York Times society and style photographer Bill Cunningham in blue jacket snapped away, capturing the well-turned out and a la mode.
Eschewing the red carpet where another type of party photographer had the likes of Anna Wintour and Carmen dell' Orefice posing, Cunningham waited at the entrance for a lady in a tiered hat, a brocade coat, some elegant, eccentric froufrou the merits of which only he could discern. New Yorkers are used to his trend spotting preoccupation, except that on this special night, the film was a documentary about him. And not only hadn't he seen “Bill Cunningham New York,” he disappeared before he could. As the producer knowingly introduced, “He's allergic to attention.”
Less biopic, more homage, this portrait of an artist, a first feature by Richard Press, is also a history of New York. One of its great pleasures is a subplot about the artists' residences above Carnegie Hall where Bill Cunningham, now 81, has lived in a file cabinet lined cubicle --bathroom down the hall-- for his entire career: as a milliner under the name William J, and fashion photographer for Details, Women's Wear Daily, New York Times, from the end of World War II till today, as those spaces are being converted to offices. We see footage shot by Andy Warhol of his neighbor Editta Sherman's private performance in tutu and feathers of “The Dying Swan,” as well as her photos of Warhol, Elvis and Dali. At 98, she will be the last to be relocated to some fine apartment elsewhere, but still.
Editta Sherman joined the MoMA celebration, carrying a 1978 publication, Facades, photography by Bill Cunningham with Sherman as model in period dress, bustled and corseted. On hand too: frequent Cunningham subjects Patrick McDonald and Kenny Kenny.
Bill Cunningham may be attention phobic but ladies who dress are not. Anna Wintour-Cunningham has been photographing the Vogue editor since she was a teen-- says, “One dresses for Bill.” Naturally the challenge of dressing for this night was nerve-wracking. Alas, my vintage Moschino cocktail number with Roy Lichtenstein print failed to catch his eye, even though it had others shooting throughout the night. An aficionado of haute couture, he must have known it was only the designer's bridge line, “Cheap and Chic.”
The films of Canadian Atom Egoyan can be political and intellectual, especially when his attention is on the Armenian genocide, but in his new movie Chloe, opening this week, he returns to the themes of an early work, Exotica (1994), in a Freudian teaming of mind and sex.
Viewers may want to see Chloe for the unusually sensitive attention to feminine detail: shapely ankles in strappy stilettos seen from underneath adjacent toilet stalls, lacy lingerie as the mature Julianne Moore as Dr. Catherine Stewart, a gynecologist, makes her toilette, juxtaposed with the young Amanda Seyfried as Chloe, a call girl, readying for a client, or just the voyeuristic thrill of seeing these two women in bed.Liam Neeson is Professor David Stewart, the role interrupted by Natasha Richardson's death. He's involved with Chloe too, but in this suspenseful story, not the way you think.
Chloe is the first of Egoyan's films to be made from someone else's script, in this case the writer has a resume of controversial and kinky screenplays to her name: Secretary (2002) and Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus (2006), both directed by Steven Shainberg. So I was curious to talk to Erin Cressida Wilson. The following takes place in a Thai restaurant on 8th Avenue and 23rd street, just before the film's New York debut.
RW: One thread uniting your work is the sexual freedom and expression of the women. How and when did you know that sexuality for women was such a frontier?
ECW: It was a process. I grew up in San Francisco, a very sexual and expressive environment. Then I went to Smith College, an all-woman college, as you know, and they have a tee-shirt, “A Century of Women on Top.” I started to ask this question: do I have to be an aggressive on top woman to be a feminist? I was a feminist by the fact of my upbringing. My mother is a very independent woman who did what she wanted to do.
In the '80's there was political correctness about women, so when I went into the theater at that time, I was suddenly being told, you're a woman, you can work with this female director, and then I would write about something and she would say, but that's abuse. I don't know if that's abuse. I am writing about complex feelings between people that don't fall into a category. I struggled in the 80's: doesn't anybody agree with me that I can write about the complexities of human desire without being political? My political agenda is, let's not be political about this. At one point I just said, I give up. I'm just going to write dirty books.
I'm going to write what I want to write. I met Lillian Anna Slugocki who had just started producing a radio show of erotica on WBAI. You could say anything you wanted except for the swear words. These radio performances were eventually picked up by the Public Theater, becoming one of the first shows at Joe's Pub and a total success. We made a book of this material called The Erotica Project. At the same time I started to do Secretary and people at Sundance said, I'm not sure what I think about it. That was the moment when what I had been saying and praying for, for over a decade, suddenly landed. Steve [Shainberg] and I created a way to make sexual politics topical, Okay, women have desires and they may not be what's on the political agenda for feminists, and it doesn't mean she's not a feminist, but this is what we want to say. And since then, it's been infinitely easier.
RW: Of course, your characters would be championed as feminists now by intellectuals like Camille Paglia.
ECW: Yes, I didn't have those people to look to in my young 20's. Of course when I was a young child none of this mattered: It was free love, do what you want. My mother was an extremely free woman with her self, intellect and body. I knew people at Smith who said you can't be a feminist unless you are a lesbian--radical statement, perhaps important for people to move forward, but it didn't jive with my psyche.
RW: How did you get to Fur?
ECW: Secretary had just come out. And Steve said, how'd you like to look at Diane Arbus? I spent a lot of time alone looking at her photographs, and Patricia Bosworth's biography. We didn't want to do the usual thing. I wanted to write a fantasy about the birth of an artist. I took images from her work and facts from the book and created a fantasy of the birth of an artist, to create my portrait of Diane Arbus.
At the same time as I was writing I was pregnant and I had an upstairs neighbor whose noises I fell in love with. I loved my Manhattan apartment, and its sounds. I lived next door to Jeremy Steig for 20 years; his flute would basically make love to me day and night. In my fantasy about her, Arbus found her higher self, psyche and artist's mind in the man in the beast upstairs.
RW: Who is Chloe?
ECW: She's me. It took 4 years to write because I made Fur and Chloe producer Ivan Reitman-a wonderful, sensitive and great guy--was making another film. He worked very closely on the script with me. My joke is, I started out as Chloe and I ended up as Catherine. I related to Chloe, the young woman who loved to seduce people; I felt incredible empathy for her, and in the first draft she was totally fleshed out, but Catherine was middle aged and I didn't know if I could write a woman of that age. Wait, I thought, remembering a boyfriend sleeping with a 21 year old. I re-birthed myself into a woman who is no longer a little “flibbertygibbet.” I started to feel for Catherine and knew her.
RW: As Catherine develops, Chloe becomes less of a character and more emblematic.
ECW: Yes, she's a fantasy. She's a woman who makes herself a fantasy and she is a fantasy. She re-eroticizes the family and makes them fall back in love, but they have a strange incestuous secret now; in a way it is an incest story of mother and son. A mother brings in a nightmare situation to her son.
RW: How did this project come to Atom Egoyan?
ECW: I met him at a party when we did Secretary. I gave him my Book of Erotica. He said, how can we make this? And then Ivan brought up his name-they're both Canadian.
RW: You run the Dramatic Writing Program at University of California, Santa Barbara. What advice do you give your students?
ECW: Be yourself. Keep mistakes. That mistake can be the key to telling the story. If I had told the story of Fur to a normal executive they would have said no to everything. A guy upstairs covered in fur! In a way it's all a mistake. Pay attention to what falls into your life. Let it be more than an intellectual experience. I don't understand writers who don't like to write. Why do they do it? Writing is like having the greatest lover in the world. It will do exactly what you want.
RW: What's next for you?
ECW: Untitled Woman Walks Out, a pilot for HBO. Growing up, I saw a lot of women walk out on their families with devastating results. I want to follow the devastation and that woman. I am also adapting Lisa See's book, Peony in Love, for Tony and Ridley Scott at Fox 2000. Taking place in 16th century China, it's about a girl who falls in love but can't have the man she wants. She starves to death and comes back to him as a ghost.
RW: Are you happy with Amanda Seyfried's performance as Chloe?
ECW: Joyous. I saw Mamma Mia! after shooting Chloe. I used to be an actress and I know that playing the happy, simple, girl-next-door can be incredibly difficult. It takes guts to run around and sing those songs, and I know her now and she's not that giddy girl. Her acting chops in Mamma Mia! are equal to that in Chloe.
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A few days later at the Chloe premiere party, Thompson Hotel on the Lower East Side, Erin Cressida Wilson wanted me to meet Amanda, surely the picture of an open, free new woman. Seyfried was toying with the top of her electric blue cocktail dress, grousing that she could not wear a bra, and had to be reminded that Chloe in various stages of dress and undress, didn't wear one either.
Today Tallulah is synonymous with drama queen. In “Looped” on Broadway, you learn why: the first glimpse of Valerie Harper, television's soft, Mary Tyler Moore sidekick Rhoda, as screen legend Tallulah Bankhead, wearing a full length mink, blue satin dress, diamond brooch, and crocodile bag screams it, as she enters a recording studio late for a looping session-- indeed loopy, bellowing “Fuck Los Angeles!” Her Bentley minus GPS as this is 1965 got lost in the canyons.
Referring to one advantage of the East coast: New York is built for idiots, she presses on, referring to numbered streets, and then brings the joke home: “If you get lost in Manhattan, you don't deserve to be found.”
Deploying one zinger after another-“Bisexual: Buy me something and I'll be sexual”-- Harper's Tallulah tosses her head coquettishly, bats her false lashes, vamps and grimaces, kicks back some scotch, snorts cocaine, and befriends the film editor named Danny, a character invented by the playwright Matthew Lombardo, shaping a drama out of her drama. Just getting this uber-diva to deliver a single line of garbled dialogue from “Die! Die! My Darling!,” her last film, a flop that is now a cult classic, Danny verges on a nervous breakdown.
Delineating two kinds of men, “those who want to fuck me and those who want to be me,” she asks Danny, “Which one are you?” Neither, he replies, losing it. Brian Hutchison as Danny does exasperated very well. In his limited role as foil for what is essentially a one-woman show, he prods, remembering her in “Streetcar,” and she delivers. Bankhead may be remembered as a monster of bad behavior in real life, but under the direction of Rob Ruggiero, this weirdly affecting caricature gets a lot of laughs.
Valerie Harper's stand-out performance is the reason to see “Looped.” The iconic screen legend, she epitomizes a Tallulah.
As the key players were introduced at the premiere screening of “The Runaways” on Wednesday night at the Sunshine Theater, my heart leapt up: wow! Look at that girl power: Joan Jett, Cherie Currie, the young actors who portray them onscreen Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning, and Floria Sigismondi, the writer/director, a young woman with her front lock teased high, a boyish pompadour over an evening gown. And then the movie had me by the throat: evoking the menace and creepy dark side of the 'seventies, the drugs and sex and lack of guidance for independent minded talented girls as it limned the rise and demise of the all-girl rock band, The Runaways.
Agreeing that the '70's were scary, Joan Jett, an executive producer on this project, noted, they were also fun, and while she is having fun now, it's different, more controlled. Drummer Thommy Price who has worked with Jett on her band Blackhearts loved the movie and said, “I kind of wonder what might have been,” had Cherie not burnt out. “Runaways” is based on her memoir.
For her debut feature film, Floria Sigismondi, a director of music videos for 15 years was sure that shooting in Detroit was a bad idea. Her attention to period detail is so exact, California was key, finding there, as is, she said, those seedy bathrooms and kitchens, places that usually are the first to be renovated surprisingly intact. Yes, Dakota Fanning was really singing “Cherry Bomb” with Kristen Stewart really playing electric guitar: “She is so natural; she really knows how to put her self there,” Sigismondi lauded Stewart's work.
Remarkably a near Joan Jett look alike, Noomi Rapace stars in a Swedish movie based upon the best-selling first book of Steig Larsson's Milennium Trilogy, “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” At a special screening at Scandinavia House, director Niels Arden Oplev, introduced his movie modestly, noting that it would be just your normal everyday family story of decades old deep dark secrets that come to the surface-eh, serial murders-Nazi affiliation-except for the character Lisbeth Salander played by Rapace, who joins a journalist in an investigation about the case of a missing niece long ago. The rogue Goth girl rises up as she's having sex; on her back the title dragon curls up, lifting the material and making it fascinate.
Rosie O'Donnell tells pals she has deal to return to daytime TV in 2011. Roger friedman reports that Rosie Will replace Oprah as talk show queen.
Rosie was overheard at Bway watering hole Joe Allens telling friends her return deal is almost signed for syndicated show. Would be biggest deal ever. More to come
Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall was packed for the opening night of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema; in 2008, you may recall, the opening night featured Marion Cotillard's Oscar winning turn as Edith Piaf in “La Vie en Rose.” This year's opener, a Cold War espionage thriller, Christian Carion's “Farewell” stars the actor/ directors Emir Kusturica and Guilllaume Canet, with cameos by the Americans Fred Ward and Willem Dafoe, illustrating something of the synergy of world cinema.
Antoine de Clermont Tonnerre, President of French Unifrance introduced the elegant evening recounting a scene from Woody Allen's “Happy Ending,” where the film within the film was trashed by American critics for its incoherence, and loved as genius by the French. His punch line: Thank goodness for the French.
With Rendez-vous, Americans may agree, but in reverse, observing the special qualities of these French offerings: Francois Ozon's “The Refuge,” for example, is the story of a pregnant ex drug addict and the gay brother of the baby's father, suggesting open possibilities for parenting. Christophe Honore's “Making Plans for Lena” stars an excellent Chiara Mastroianni as a divorced mother of two who unravels emotionally during a summer holiday in Brittany.
A James Bond spoof, Michel Hazanavicius's “OSS 117-Lost in Rio” may challenge many Americans' sense of humor about the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, racism, and sexism. As my child observed about “The Producers,” “it offends everyone.” Hazanavicius, in town to introduce his film had no problem with possible rancor. What's next for him? The director said he is scripting a silent movie.
One powerful message of the play Next Fall is contained in its title. Simply, don't put things off: life may not wait till next fall. Or, as one character Holly (Maddie Corman) says, “One minute you are doing the crossword puzzle, and the next you are here.”
Here is a hospital waiting room where Luke, a friend and employee at her flower shop, languishes in a coma after a hideous accident. As hope for Luke remains uncertain, we see him in flashback played energetically by Patrick Heusinger in this multilayered play by Geoffrey Nauffts and directed by Sheryl Kaller that had its world premiere in a sold-out Naked Angels production last summer. Extended several times, Next Fall --with its original ensemble cast --is now on Broadway in the intimate Helen Hays Theater. In the spirit of the title, see it now.
Waiting with Holly are several others: Luke's divorced parents, the racy Arlene (Connie Ray) and fundamentalist Butch (Cotter Smith), his agnostic Jewish boyfriend Adam (Patrick Breen), and another friend, Brandon (Sean Dugan), whose relationship with Luke is rather mysterious. The play deftly moves into scenes of Luke's life with these characters revealing his conflicts with his homosexuality (he prays after sex); his need to keep his life hidden from the aptly named Butch.
Especially poignant is Luke's relationship with Adam, a seeming mismatch, whose most immediate problem is, as non-family, his inability to see Luke at this critical time. The scenes that play out how they met, how Luke keeps the truth about Adam from Butch, are funny in the manner of Seinfeld episodes. Your laugh is bittersweet: these wonderfully drawn characters keep you painfully aware that the vibrant young man at center is in trouble.
As it prepares its ninth season, it is noteworthy that several movies opening theatrically in the next few weeks premiered at last year's Tribeca Film Festival, among them Conor McPherson's “The Eclipse' and Bette Gordon's “Handsome Harry.” Another is a sweet-hearted gem named for its primary location, City Island.
“City Island” is set in the small fishing community, a part of the Bronx that feels remote from New York City, providing a backdrop for a family story where each member has something to hide. Andy Garcia leads a cast that includes Alan Arkin, Julianna Margulies, Emily Mortimer. His own daughter Dominik Garcia-Lorido plays his film daughter, a college student who has a secret vocation as a stripper in a Bada Bing type bar.
Dominik said she refused to have her father on set for some of her scenes. Yes, there's one that any parent would find difficult: clad in a sequined bikini, the shapely Dominik pole dances upside down.
Julianna Margulies, this year's Golden Globe winner for her work in the CBS series, “The Good Wife” was having a good year indeed. Accolade after accolade, the actress perched on sky-high heels said, she promised her husband, it won't always be this exciting. Let me enjoy this now. You could say that “City Island” provides her a comic variation on the wronged spouse she plays on television, when she thinks her husband is cheating on her with a “Holly Golightly-” esque character played by Emily Mortimer.
New York may be the place to reinvent oneself, but on City Island people stay close to their roots. At the party, Andy Garcia shook hands vigorously with fellow Cuban American Narcisco Rodriguez and said, “I am so proud of you.”
Actor, writer, director Bob Balaban paced about the cavernous Cipriani 42nd Street, a wad of papers clenched in his hands, as only an accomplished professional with a speech to make could. One of the artists to receive Guild Hall's annual award for Lifetime Achievement, the bespectacled Balaban, who as a teen appeared in the classic “Midnight Cowboy,” flies off to Minnesota this week to act in a new film, “The Convincer” with Billy Crudup; the Bridgehampton part-timer also has a children's book series coming out, “The Creature from the 7th Grade.”
But now he worried that the philanthropic crowd including Michael Lynne and his wife Ninah, Patti Kenner and her 99 year old dad, previous recipient Sheldon Harnick, and many other East Enders would not be amply entertained by his words, so he had a secret. Shhhh, said his wife Lynn Grossman, pulling me aside: Balaban enlisted The Flying Karamazov Brothers to perform their juggling act, first with a fish, then with a ukulele, and finally with the award itself.
Wow. With the very funny Angela LaGreca as the evening's M.C., the benefit for this first-rate organization looked promising indeed. Previewing the summer season, Arts Director Josh Gladstone mentioned a new play directed by Tony Walton and starring Alec Baldwin.
Another award recipient for the evening, playwright Marsha Norman said she was working on a musical with Sheryl Crow. A Pulitzer Prize winner, Norman said she really wanted this Guild Hall award: “I always wanted to be in.” The third arts recipient, Richard Prince, never made it to cocktails.
