Gossip Central

SNL’s Hal Willner Produces Music for A Great Night in Harlem at the Apollo

It’s always Howdy Doody time in music producer Hal Willner’s workspace at the Film Center building in Manhattan. Best known for producing music for Saturday Night Live, Willner shares his lair with many antique puppets, Jackie Gleason memorabilia including a Ralph Cramden bus driver’s suit, as well as DVD’s of Shoah and other Holocaust films. He jokes, “My work sounds like a Warner Brothers cartoon or the soundtrack to a movie about Dachau.”

Dishing with Bette Midler as Sue Mengers in I’ll Eat You Last

One of super agent Sue Mengers’ many rules for dealing with divas is never remind them of the beginning when you are walking them down the red carpet on the way to the Oscars. For example, do not say to Diana Ross, we are a far cry from when you were giving Berry Gordy blowjobs in the back seat of a limo. Taking that cue, it would be just wrong to remind the Divine Miss M of her work at the Continental Baths backed by the Harlettes before her Broadway revue, Clams on the Halfshell. Then again, she was so fabulous back in the day, and incarnating Sue Mengers, in I'll Eat You Last, a show that does not even touch her mega singing chops, she’s fabulous now.

Sting, Trudie Styler Honored at We Are Family Foundation Benefit, with a Little Soul from Sam Moore

Fresh from D. C., from a concert at the White House, Sam Moore performed his “Hold On, I’m Coming,” “Something is Wrong with My Baby,” “Soul Man” revue at the We Are Family Foundation Benefit on Thursday night, a tribute to Sting and Trudie Styler for their humanitarian efforts. An impassioned Slater Jewell-Kemker (20) and an equally impressive young man Ndaba Mandela, yes, Nelson’s grandson, spoke about the rock couple’s work as founders of their Rainforest Foundation, as did Caryl M. Stern, President and CEO of U. S. Fund for Unicef. Then Sting and Trudie accepted their award, with Trudie doing all of the talking, explaining how, on a trip to Brazil, they learned that the logging industry was stripping indigenous peoples of their home, burning down the rainforest. They set up their foundation to help save the land from private, commercial interests and are now operating in 23 countries. Trudie Styler affirmed their mission, “Compassion for one another makes us special. Our destiny on this planet is a common destiny.”

Kinky Boots: High Kicks for Everyone

Here is a musical on Broadway with a philosophy a girl can love: Kinky Boots starts with a rousing tribute “The Most Beautiful Thing,” to shoes. On a pedestal sit a pair of red patent leather pumps to die for. Fetish, to be sure—“Sex is in the Heel”, Kinky Boots, at the Al Hirschfeld Theater, is comprised of music by rocker Cyndi Lauper with book by Harvey Fierstein based on a charming and memorable British film of the same title, Kinky Boots is also a feel good extravaganza of leggy drag queens and divas including two major talents, Stark Sands and Billy Porter, who as Charlie Price and be-sequined performer Lola, dare to ask the quintessential Fierstein question: what is a man? (This may not be simply a matter of footwear.)

Herb Alpert’s Déjà-Vu at the Café Carlyle

If “This Guy’s in Love with You” means anything, Herb Alpert and Lani Hall’s show at the Café Carlyle offers, in Alpert’s words, “music that is very déjà-vu.” Performing several decades worth of their hits and American songbook classics like “Close to You,” “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” “Let’s Face the Music and Dance,” this couple of 39 years, go through their signature repertoire sprinkled with anecdotes and backstory, backed by a first-rate band: Bill Cantos on piano, Hussain Jiffry on bass, and Michael Shapiro on drums. And because the Carlyle is such an intimate room –(I enjoyed seeing it on this week’s episode of Girls)--Alpert likes to kibitz with the audience, asking for questions—this is the ultimate in interactive, with one caveat, no requests. But that didn’t stop first-nighters, including Regis and Joy Philbin and producer Tommy LiPuma and a fan all the way from Korea among them, from shouting out favorites anyway. “Rise,” yelled one enthusiast, and they did.

Nathan Lane Gets A Guild Hall Lifetime Achievement Award/ Cinderella on Broadway

The award season is all about superlatives and thank you speeches but for East Hampton’s Guild Hall Lifetime Achievement Awards it is about community and family. Marshall Brickman, Master of Ceremonies at a most packed ballroom at the Plaza for the annual Lifetime Achievement Awards on Monday night, paid homage to Peter Stone who held this honor for years. Of course, in theater Brickman is known for Jersey Boys and The Addams Family, and so, when he introduced Nathan Lane, winner for Performing Arts, he knew from what he spoke as Lane had originated the role of Gomez Addams: for rehearsal, he was off book, that is, knew his lines by heart, and knew everybody else’s lines too. Director Jack O’Brien screamed a cathartic scream realizing that their new play, The Nance, starring Lane, was only three weeks away from opening. That work, which he will direct from a script by Douglas Carter Beane, should be wonderful, if his work on the new book of Cinderella, which opened on Sunday night at the Broadway Theater is any indication, but more on that later. Ever charming, ever quipping, Nathan Lane took the stage retooling the award season bromide: “I didn’t prepare a speech. I didn’t think I would win.”

John Lloyd Young’s “My Turn” at the Café Carlyle

From beginning to end, John Lloyd Young’s performance at the Café Carlyle was a love affair attuned to the Valentine’s Day of your youth. “You’re Just Too Good to be True,” the Tony winning original “Frankie Valli” from “Jersey Boys” crooned, to “How Can I Be Sure,” followed by an homage to the room itself. Richard Rodgers lived here, Elaine Stritch still lives here, now it’s “My Turn.” Noting too the canvas murals by costume designer Marcel Vertes who died in 1961, the dimple chinned Young seemed to be pinching himself that he would now be working in such a swell place.

Jack Kerouac’s Mother Tongue: On the Road and The Voice is All

Kerouac aficionados will have a fine time teasing out details director Walter Salles and scriptwriter Jose Rivera took from the 1957 On the Road publication vs. the 1951 scroll text, the ur-Road first published in 2007. For example, the first line of the new movie focuses on the father, but then the story flips to the fictional characters familiar to readers since 1957. In a further innovation, viewers will note that Sal Paradise (Sam Riley) talks to his mother (Marie Ginette-Guay) in a curious French, referencing Kerouac’s French Canadian roots. The writer, from an ethnic neighborhood in Lowell, Massachusetts, spoke a dialect called joual.

Interviewing surviving members of the beat generation in their research, the filmmakers spoke to Joyce Johnson, Kerouac’s girlfriend at the time that On the Road was published to become an overnight bestseller. The author of the memoir Minor Characters told them about her own study of Kerouac’s language. Looking for ways to give Sal speech, the filmmakers incorporated this source, reaching outside Kerouac’s text in creating French dialogue between mother and son. Recently published, Joyce Johnson’s new biography,The Voice is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac, traces the development of Kerouac’s prose style, showing how his French freed him to create his famous spontaneous narrative.

Quartet: Dustin Hoffman as Breakthrough Director

Fresh from Kennedy Center Honors, the actor Dustin Hoffman was promoting his new movie, Quartet, his directorial debut. At a Q&A following a screening last week, the Academy Award winning actor noted the relationship between acting and directing. When he was starting out, he wanted to direct. He had a dream: You could be the next Kazan, he was told, and he looked for projects to direct. He was supposed to direct Dead Poets Society and be in it. When he hesitated, the role went to Robin Williams. Decades later, he directs Quartet, and was named Best Breakthrough Director at the Hollywood Film Awards.Given that producers have been reluctant to allow him to direct without acting in the movie, he is vindicated, even though at 75, he would fit right in.

Les Miserables: Singing For Supper

Squalor, sewers, Dickensian suffering, a splendor of operatic riches! If you are director Tom Hooper, how do you follow the drama of last year’s multi-Oscar winning King’s Speech? A film of one of the most beloved Broadway musical epics, Les Miserables, set in the days of the French Revolution a la Victor Hugo might not be the obvious choice. Then again, Hooper is a filmmaker who has challenged himself with every project. The John Adams series for HBO comes to mind. So a musical? Why not.