Gossip Central

Ben Affleck and Matt Damon in Air: Courting a Legend

Who knew basketball great Michael Jordan had a secret weapon? I don’t mean the Nike Air sneaker, the subject of a compelling, smart new movie, Air, but his mom Doloris Jordan who brokered the Nike endorsement deal and championed her son, when he was a rookie, to the top. Under the superb direction of Ben Affleck, Air tells the story of the making of that famous deal starring Matt Damon as Sonny Vaccaro, the persistent Nike exec who made it happen, giving the first heart-felt Oscar speech of the new season. Equal and opposite to that is a second speech, performed by Viola Davis. Believing in her son’s potential, she takes a risk in insisting the athlete get a percentage of the sales of the shoes with his name on it. She knows his worth. Phil Knight, with Affleck playing the Nike CEO, goes for it, making history.

Ben Affleck has his own not-so-secret weapon, his decades-long friendship with Matt Damon. They won Best Screenplay Oscars for Good Will Hunting. The shorthand between them as they fielded questions during a post-premiere Q&A this week, made the filmmaking look like a breeze to the crowd attending. Viola Davis and her husband Julius Tennon were also onstage, talking about how their marriage informed the onscreen marriage. When Sonny makes the trip to visit Michael Jordan’s parents, to say why Jordan should go with Nike over Adidas and New Balance, the other hot sneakers of the 1980’s, Doloris takes him ‘round the back of the house to talk. With a mere gesture, James Jordan, Sr. lets her know, he’s got her back.

Andre Royo in Drinking in America: Heads of a Bygone Era

A glass of wine with dinner, or a joint if you are so inclined, might be a good idea before meeting the array of characters who so imbibe in Eric Bogosian’s award-winning one-man tour-de-force, Drinking in America, a production of Audible at the Minetta Lane Theatre. Performed to wiry perfection by Andre Royo, the assorted men he plays hale from the 1980’s. You might want to consider this background, drinking in American culture, to understanding the male toxicity—and fragility-- of our moment, decades later. And let’s face it, the drugs are different now.

Which may explain why the jokes landed askew at the performance we attended, even though Royo could not have been more appealing—as a talent agent, for example, doing lines of coke to wake up, trying to book Lee Marvin, but Richard Chamberlain would do. Or vice versa. It would be good to know the young folk in the audience could get these references.

Or the traveling salesman, on the road hawking industrial ceramic tile, wasted in a hotel room with an unseen “Cheryl.” The vignette starts with his paternal, fatigued request: “Cheryl, keep your rubbing to yourself,” as he passes out in an easy chair. The ending is less than happy; getting his money’s worth, he advises her, “There’s no future in the escort business.”

Afterthoughts: Kudos to An Oscars with Class

Even the pre-Oscar buzz augured a return to old-school. The academy had its wits about them awarding Everything Everywhere All at Once, which, for the most part, swept the earlier awards. When that phenomenon began, the world seemed divided: some could not understand its metaverse. Others said, it spoke to them. Because the latter group included some younger film enthusiasts I respected, I understood, attention must be paid. I finally saw the film. I tried to keep an open mind as I guffawed at visual effects, spinning, lurching, the hotdog fingers, and just the look of Jamie Lee Curtis, and the verbal jokes too, losing it at the everything bagel. Within the chaos, the tender moments floored me: the struggle of a mother/daughter relationship, the love. A most unusual film, EEAAO hit many bases resolving them in simplicity: Nothing Matters.

If you think Best Supporting Actor Ke Huy Quan was exuberant for the Oscars, let’s just say, his manic enthusiasm—reminiscent of Roberto Benigni from another time—was consistent throughout the long season. At the NYFCC awards, he made sure to greet everyone, hugging, telling his American Dream story. Unstoppable. He launched his own campaign, but guileless, sincere. You had to adore him.

Kudos for Jamie Lee Curtis. I instantly remembered her in the first Knives Out movie, thinking then that she had transformed, returning to her True Lies serious comedic chops, that it was all a late life career shift from the horror flicks. And the look of Sarah Polley in a tux, eschewing the froufrou of some of the bouffant fare. Another great win: Adapted screenplay for Women Talking. We can talk about the representation due women.

Jessica Chastain in A Doll’s House: Ibsen for our Time

Revolving on the barren Hudson Theater stage in an expansive orbit for 20 minutes before the first words of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll’s House are spoken, Jessica Chastain as Nora Helmer sits stationary as she in her chair marks the periphery. The edgy blacks and whites are not the way you imagine this classic Ibsen drama from 1879 would be set—more likely in the well-appointed, tastefully muted parlor of a proper home. In Jamie Lloyd’s revival, you have to see the living space in your mind’s eye, and ask yourself, why are the virtues of women in marriage so compelling a subject for men? Think Honore Balzac, Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy—and Ibsen: why do him now?

Amy Herzog’s fine adaptation distills Ibsen’s play to its essence: ditsy and chirpy, --a “femme enfante,” as the French would say--Nora keeps up her marital façade. Wife to Torvald Helmer (Arian Moayed), she’s his precious bird. But she’s more complicated than she looks; she’s mired in deception, and a naïve trust that her marriage is solid enough, that Torvald loves her enough, that he, though perhaps tarred, under the generous blanket that love weaves could bear any fault that she might present. Well, you know there’s trouble when only he has the key to the mailbox. Especially this mailbox!

Among a pared down roster of minor characters, a nanny for the children (Tasha Lawrence), a schoolmate (Jesmille Darbouze), a wealthy, devoted best friend who might be called upon (a wonderful Michael Patrick Thornton), Nora seems well-situated in her world. And then there’s Nils Krogstad (Okieriete Onaodowan) with whom she’s bonded by a loan. Visually, when he comes to her, they are seated back-to-back, as though, pale as Nora is, and shadowy as Krogstad is lit, they form a single unit.

A Rendez-vous with Virginie Efira: The French Film Festival Returns

While many quibble with this year’s Oscar list for its lack of female directors, this year’s Rendez-vous with French Cinema; a yearly event hosted by Film at Lincoln Center and Unifrance, features two women with superb films. For Opening Night, Alice Winocour’s Revoir Paris, translating to Paris Memories, stars this year’s Cesar winner for Best Actress, Virginie Efira. As Mia, she is the survivor of a terrorist attack in a Parisian café where nearly everyone was murdered. Mia, understandably, cannot return to life as usual, to her apartment, her boyfriend, her job in media, a Russian translator. Rather, haunted, she revisits the scene finding healing as she bonds with other survivors. While these emotions are tenderly evoked, Winocour does not skimp on the violence, the shooters seen from Mia’s eye view as she somehow fails to be hit. These scenes are nail-bitingly intense, explosive.

Introducing her movie, Alice Winocour explained, she was not just exploring a random moment in the Zeitgeist. Who has not imagined oneself in such a terrifying circumstance? Her little brother was present at the Bataclan on November 13, 2015, when hundreds were gunned down. Interviewing many survivors, Winocour knew Mia’s trauma all too well.

George Condo at The Morgan Library: Looney is a State of Consciousness

At the Morgan Library last week, in celebration of a show of his drawings, painter George Condo spoke about knowing he was an artist at age 4. It took a while before language kicked in; enrolled in school, he said, he responded to lessons with artwork. As he matured, so did his influences: French writers: Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Celine. Jack Kerouac’s “automatic writing,” the spontaneous writing Kerouac used in composing his Book of Sketches made a big impression. Among Condo’s many credits, he wrote the introduction to the Viking Penguin publication in 2006. Beguiled by Picasso when he lived in Paris, Condo made several portraits in a cubist mode. Music brought Condo to Jean-Michel Basquiat—when they met, they talked about electronic music—but Basquiat was most inspiring in insisting Condo move to New York.

At a dinner in Watermill, at the home of agent Andrew Wylie, Condo met novelist Salman Rushdie, who wrote about a Condo painting in his 2001 novel Fury. Titled “Psychological Puppeteer Losing His Mind,” (1994), Condo’s painting of Akasz Kronos, as Rushdie describes it, features “the puppet … broken free of the puppeteer’s control.” Rushdie’s writing here seemed most prescient as we think about Rushdie today, with a new novel, Victory City, even as the long-forgotten fatwa returned most unexpectedly, in all its horror this past summer, when a young man jumped the stage at a famed writers’ colony, badly knifing Rushdie.

Charlie Mackesy’s Journey: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse

Jet-lagged as you might expect for a British writer/illustrator just arriving from L.A., having promoted his film, and looking as you might imagine a mad scientist crossed with Gene Wilder, Charlie Mackesy held forth at a luncheon at the Whitby Hotel, signing cupcake boxes, posters, copies of his book, and telling a story about how his teaching drawing to a Holocaust survivor helped the man, now 100, unleash painful memories. His energy seemed remarkable, but the occasion, a celebration of the film adapted from his beloved book, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, was nominated for a Best Animated Short Film Oscar. Then you realize he’s fueled by the film, a fable with a fresh message. Starting with an encounter between a boy and a mole who is looking for cake in a snowy landscape—(well, isn’t everyone?)—the film addresses a fundamental question: the mole asks, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” The boy answers: “Kind.”

Okay. Simple enough. The mole voiced by Tom Hollander thinks he sees a cake, and even when he discovers it is a tree, there’s no disappointment, well, not really, because the tree is the most perfect tree, just as the boy, the mole, the fox, and the horse they encounter on their journey are drawn with a romantic perfection, becoming kind together, and yes, a family. The fox—gently voiced by Idris Elba—bares his teeth. He could just as easily have eaten the mole who saved him from a trap—but he doesn’t and saves him right back from drowning in fast-moving icy waters.

Nathan Lane in Pictures from Home: Triumph of a Salesman

In the avocado and sea greens of a suburban development décor, the Sultans, Irving and Jean, entertain their grown son Larry most weekends in Pictures from Home. A play version of photographer Larry Sultan’s 10-year project to capture his parents, posed and documented, so he can examine the sinews of their marriage and parenting strategy, Pictures from Home at Studio 54, is the story of the making of his celebrated photo project, and so Irving (Nathan Lane) and Jean (Zoe Wanamaker) “entertain” Larry’s (Danny Burstein) ambition more than amuse him, although they amuse him and the audience plenty in Sharr White’s dramatic adaptation.

Irving’s life as a salesman meets a fate close to Willy Loman’s, except that here we see the demise pass through retirement to the desert, to a house with a pool looking onto a golf course. As Irving surveys his American Dream, he only hopes to live long enough to enjoy it. The familial patriarch, Nathan Lane is serious, and funny even as he attempts to hide his limp, hoping no one will notice he has one. Bartlett Sher directs his actors well. A master of physical humor, Lane is also adept at cutting down a son, and a wife, as needed. To these parents, Larry is pathologically intrusive, until his book is published with accolades galore, openings, parties, notoriety. Watch Nathan Lane beam.

Billy Crudup Does Not Age: Celebrating The Vineyard Theatre @ 40

Billy Crudup "has the kind of good looks that appeal even to straight guys,” quipped Bill Irwin, setting off the evening’s theme. Jokes about Billy Crudup involve his handsome, age-defying movie star mien. As the actor was honored and roasted at the Edison Ballroom this week by longtime friends and co-stars, among them Sam Rockwell, Jon Hamm, Victor Garber, and Jennifer Aniston, it was clear: no one was letting up on either the praise or the envy. The occasion was the 40^th anniversary of The Vineyard Theatre, celebrating its longevity, mission to support theater and the artists who make it, and the long awaited post-Covid coming together at last. Vineyard did it up in grand style.

Speakers included Deirdre O’Connell, who dazzled everyone in Lucas Hnath’s Dana H. and playwright Paula Vogel, whose How I Learned to Drive starred Crudup’s erstwhile girlfriend, Mary Louise Parker with whom he has a child. Both plays are reminders of the truly game-changing drama so valued at the Vineyard. Asking the dinner crowd to call out old New York favorite venues now vanished, Vogel mentioned her own, The Gotham Book Mart, before launching into a pitch for Vineyard support. Playwright David Cale, onstage with her, spoke about his play Harry Clarke, a brilliant tour de force one-man show performed by the guest of honor that proved above all else, Billy Crudup is not just another pretty face.

Julie Benko at Birdland: No Rain on her Parade

Photo: Kevin Alvey

Birdland became Preservation Hall North as Julie Benko marched her band on stage for a set called Euphonic Gumbo. The performance, inspired by the French Quarter of New Orleans, was hardly a random soup, but more of a well thought out, scenic visit to the Crescent City, beloved by Benko and her husband, jazz pianist Jason Yeager who makes her arrangements of classic tunes entirely fresh for her.

It helps that the seven-piece band includes first rate players: including Michael O’Brian on bass, drummer Jay Sawyer, Andy Warren on trumpet, Evan Christopher on clarinet and Ron Wilkins on trombone. Mixing up the music and her story-telling, Benko created a quiz with prizes that include Café du Monde chicory infused coffee, her CDs, and a return to her next Birdland gig—all great because, as she demonstrates amply, she is a master at the cabaret genre, her theme enabling her to provide a history of the beloved Louisiana city, as well as lovely renditions of the tunes.