Gossip Central

Hitler’s Tasters at Guild Hall: A Fresh Take on the Evil Men Do

After writing a play about German girls tasked with tasting food prepared for Hitler, Michelle Kholos Brooks worried about using der Fuhrer’s name in its title. She asked her father in-law, who just happens to be Mel Brooks, who famously featured Hitler in the title of a musical within the iconic musical The Producers: “Springtime for Hitler,” you may recall—in the attempt to be as offensive as possible. His answer: “You must.” He insisted.

The playwright told this story following a production of her play at Guild Hall this weekend, in a conversation with The Producers’ director/choreographer Susan Stroman. Scheduled for a run at 59 East 59, Hitler’s Tasters, based on a little-known pocket of World War II history, was put on hold, as were so many projects when COVID hit. Of the 15 girls made to risk their lives for the good of Germany, only one, Margot Woelk, survived. The others, murdered as the Allies advanced—well, they were just on the wrong side of history. Woelk was raped, but lived on till her mid-90’s. From this slim account, Michelle Kholos Brooks embroidered the story of five such girls, dancing, dreaming, fantasizing about boys, rejoicing as they lived another meal.

Hamptons Journal: Susan Stroman Weekend at Guild Hall: Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick, Brad Oscar, and Mel Brooks Zoomed, Little Dancer Preview

Starved for Broadway’s reopening, a happy crowd packed Guild Hall for an evening of clips and anecdotes about The Producers, the winner of the most Tony awards of any musical in history. On a panel introduced by choreographer Susan Stroman, a winner of 5 Tonys herself, the show’s stars Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick, and Brad Oscar quipped and reminisced about the play’s Chicago debut, and the run on Broadway, shut down for 3 days in the aftermath of 9/11, but then it was Rudy Guiliani who urged everyone to get back to work. People did not know whether it was appropriate to laugh, said Oscar. And of course, the show offered the audience a way to grieve less for a two-hour period, Stroman remembered. Nathan Lane performed, but scheduled for a vacation he decided to take, he joked, “If I cancel my vacation, the terrorists won.”

And so the evening went with Lane recounting his first encounter with Mel Brooks in a swimming pool at the Ritz in Paris. Anne Bancroft, finished with her swim, went up to her room, and Lane thought, Mel Brooks is in the pool with me instead of with Anne Bancroft. He also remembered that it was Harvey Weinstein, a backer at the time, who read the all-important New York Times review at the opening night party . . . “and then went off to pee in a flower pot” . . . conflating the producer’s crimes with another #Metoo accusee. Matthew Broderick remembered people coming to the door, every performance someone else would show up, Al Gore, for example. Lane said Bill Clinton came, shook hands, but kept his eyes on Cady Huffman, the show’s splendid Ulla. But they were all in awe when Gene Wilder, the original Leopold Bloom, stopped by.

Kathy Hochul: At Brunch at Patti Kenner’s

When Patti Kenner sent out the brunch invite with Kathy Hochul for a date in early August, this seemed like tour-stop as usual for the lieutenant governor--to a lovely aged-cedar house just a stone’s throw from the legendary Maidstone Club and golf course in East Hampton. Even the postponement till today seemed normal, until the governor stepped down and, now we were greeting the first female to hold the highest spot in the state, the 57th governor of New York.

Her theme –breaking the glass ceiling—went from goal to fait accompli—as she spoke about her realization early in political life that little girls were looking at her. “Of course, I am ready on day one,” she told the enthusiastic crowd sipping fresh squeezed orange juice and munching on lox and bagels, “that’s what lieutenant governors do”—train for this moment. This was indeed the historic moment--she will get to summon all that leadership strength and moxie for a year before New Yorkers get to vote her in.

Hamptons Journal: Authors Night: One Cocktail Party Plus a Four Day Festival of Books

Weary of pandemic year lockdown, I was pleased to attend Authors Night 2021 in person under a tent on the East Hampton Library grounds, a scaled back celebration of books and the people who write them. Gone (temporarily) is the voluminous tent in a large field that could hold150 authors. Twenty sat at a long table behind their books in piles: Robert Caro with Working, film critic Jeffrey Lyons’ Hemingway and Me, a memoir of his bonding with the legendary author over bullfights, the latest cookbook from Florence Fabricant (The Ladies’ Village Society Cookbook) seated near the team Hillary Davis and Stacy Dermont, writers of The Hamptons Kitchen. What could be more geared for the pairing of land and sea?

Night life and the social scene! Noel Hankin with his wife Gwen sat behind piles of After Dark:Birth of the Disco Dance Party, about the clubs in midtown that inaugurated the era of Studio 54and celebrity culture. An homage to one person who never missed the party scene, Gwenn & Steven Stolman’s Bill Cunningham was There: Spring Flings and Summer Soirees, sold out almost immediately. Stolman explained how he helped Kurdewan, Bill Cunningham’s editor at The New York Times, assemble this collection of the photographer’s work after they toured the photographs cross country. As  Anna Wintour so aptly put it, “Everyone dressed forBill.” The Vogue icon is a star of Thomas Maier’s All that Glitters: Anna Wintour, Tina Brown,and the rivalry inside America’s Richest Media Empire.

Hamptons Journal: Bay Street’s Camelot, Robert Longo at Guild Hall, Diana Frank at Tripoli Gallery

Legends of King Arthur and his court are having a moment: The Green Knight in theaters, and out east, Bay Street Theater’s production of Lerner & Loewe’s Camelot --under the stars! Now a classic, its signature song “If Ever I Would Leave You” sends a particular nostalgic chill—ah love—especially for the musical theater genre that Bay Street does so well! Remember the glorious revival of Annie Get Your Gun, Bay Street’s very last production before the COVID shut down? Or the intimate production of Evita a year before? With Camelot--outdoors—BayStreet’s setting conveys less castle and more country as Camelot wields its special charms.

King Arthur in this imagining is a fair and just ruler, looking for equal representation in his governance, hence the knights’ round table. His liberal ideas come after he meets and weds Guenevere; at first, a dated gender bias marks the musical’s first act, especially brow-raising in our current discourse on the roles of men and women. The king’s attitudes progress when Sir Lancelot enters the story, as Arthur (Jeremy Kushnier), “Jen” (Britney Coleman), and “Lance” (Deven Kolluri) sing about good leadership, marriage, and loyalty, all performances solid and square. But, in this three-way expression of courtly love, a stylized representation of king and his knight/ knight and the queen --where the younger pair fall in love at their own peril, heat would be good. But that does not come till the second act.

Hamptons Journal: Graham Nash in Montauk/ Longhouse/ Chuck Manion’s Paintings at Duck Creek

OM—though that’s not my mantra. Dan and Maureen Cahill hosted an event for the David Lynch foundation to support veterans by providing them with TM—transcendental meditation-- life changing according to most practitioners, some of whom attended the concert and sit-down dinner on a gorgeous property between the old and new highways leading into the town of Montauk, with an ocean view, a large vegetable garden, and a chicken coop. 

Milling about on the manicured lawn, drinking wine, munching on canapes, attendees—among them Drew Barrymoore in an oversized hat pulled down (I took her for Julianne Moore at first, who really does live in Montauk) and Paul Jarrod Frank, MD, author of The Pro-Aging Playbook—(can’t miss the irony of that)--the night recalled Edenic times. Bob Roth led a meditation.

Bob Balaban Directs 2020 at Guild Hall: Laughing Off COVID

Begging the question: is it too soon to laugh about the pandemic year, 2020, a collection of short plays by masterful playwrights, did just that in a one-nighter at Guild Hall.‘Some of the actors are serious,” warned Bob Balaban, a tad nervous as he greeted giggle-ready well-wishers. “I hope you like this experiment.” Under his fine direction, Paul Hecht, Susie Essman, Talia Balsam, Mercedes Ruehl, Isaac Mizrahi, and Ben Shenkman performed works by Sarah Ruhl, Lynn Grossman, Jon Robin Baitz, Paul Rudnick, Simon Rich, and R. G. Masons.

The pairings were perfect: In Rudnick’s “Play Bills,” Mizrahi camps his quarantine, imagining Hugh Jackman, Patti LuPone, Audra McDonald, Nathan Lane coming to his apartment to sing for him, a collision of Broadway talents vying to perform. Ruehl stole it in Jon Robin Baitz’ contribution, “All the Old Familiar Places,” as a woman desperate for contact, and vital ç gloss, in an eternal loop with the pharmacy’s phone voice recording. Who could play that unseen role? Balaban, of course. Did the order go through? The pandemic may have pushed this woman over the brink, but this engagement with the automated world finished the job. Who among us has not suffered that?

Remembering Anthony Bourdain in Morgan Neville’s Roadrunner

The Oscar-winning documentarian Morgan Neville assembled much evocative footage of his latest subject, Anthony Bourdain for his movie Roadrunner, even controversially putting words in the celebrity chef’s mouth—literally using A. I. While the film’s critics are abuzz over this technique, Anthony Bourdain’s life and work are overall well served in Neville’s treatment as he tries to untangle Bourdain’s sad demise. Bourdain was first a writer, and sadly, a suicide. If the viewer had not read the 2018 headlines, that news comes at the movie’s start. This is not going to end well, he says, and by the documentary’s end, there’s not a dry eye on the screen.

Bourdain’s taste for artistic bad boys--Burroughs, Genet,--- was not merely literary. You get a sense of his lust for extreme states of consciousness. He disparaged Kerouac, by the way, who might have been a forebear for a man on the road. Beyond his work in Les Halles’ kitchen, his distinct writerly voice, and penchant for drugs, Bourdain played a role as a subversive food ambassador. What I liked best about his sensibility was his sly political slant. In 2014, at Guild Hall, when NYT food writer Florence Fabricant asked CNN’s Anthony Bourdain, which country was most surprising, he quickly answered Iran. Most Americans had not been there, and he seized a moment of opportunity. Now, he said ruefully, would not be the time. That was the Anthony Bourdain everyone fell in love with, the celebrity food maven who sniffed out countries for his “Parts Unknown” series, favoring smelly dysfunction over orderly functionality. Iran surprised him with a people that had the attitude, “Are you American? We don’t care what the government is doing; welcome, we want to know you. In a Teheran restaurant where they put flags on diners’ tables, they apologized, Sorry, all our American flags were burnt.”

Hamptons Diary: Samuel Waxman Benefit and Mike Birbiglia at Guild Hall

After a year and a half of sussing out a pandemic, surge-no surge, vax-no vax, mask-open face, it was refreshing to actually hear that cancer kills more Americans per year than Covid did in its tragic scourge. Not that anybody wants to hear about a deadly disease of any kind—or killing. In fact, it was a happy moment to be in a somewhat crowded Bridgehampton tent with glamorously dressed Hamptonites some of whom were wearing high heels as they tread across the grass, the property of the Fishel family for the annual Samuel Waxman’s Cancer Research Foundation Benefit. As I do every year I attend this fun party, I pondered 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 when I see him, remind him of an event commonplace to him and devastating to me? A sign of a good doctor, Samuel Waxman always very much wants to talk about her demise and the deadly disease that he was hoping to cure in his lifetime with the foundation he created so many years ago. “Did we do whatever we could for her,” he asks, caring. “Thank you for coming.”

The Garden as Art: Longhouse/ The Return of Guild Hall’s Popular Tour

Textile designer Jack Lenor Larsen died in December of 2020, but Longhouse, the spectacular arts reserve off East Hampton’s Northwest Woods continues his tradition with an exhibition of his work. Influenced by his travels, the show is a glimpse into the adaptation of worldly visions into a uniquely American aesthetic. Of course, that’s only one reason to visit Longhouse, which features sculpture throughout, such as an iconic geodesic dome from Buckminster Fuller and Yoko Ono’s “Wishing Tree.” And what about the gardens, and arches of bright baby pink roses!!!!

Guild Hall returned to its tradition, “The Garden as Art” tour featuring artists’ work on the grounds of their East End sanctuaries. I’d like to tell you that Tony Ingrao and Randy Kemper’s gorgeous grounds with its statuary and expert landscaping was my favorite. Or the artist Ross Bleckner’s studio left open for all to see, particularly showcasing the paintings so influenced by gardens. The “best” distinction goes to Tucker Marder who took visitors around his “Folly Tree Arboretum,” speaking of each tree and its specific ecological distinction: the “Moon Tree,” for example, a clone of a Sycamore that went to the moon as a seed with astronaut Stuart Roosa in 1971 as part of the Apollo 14 mission.