Gossip Central

Woman’s Day Red Dress Awards: Seeing Red on Heart Disease

“I see a sea of red,” became the cliché of the night at Lincoln Center’s Appel Room for the Woman’s Day Red Dress Awards. Indeed, red was encouraged for stars on the red carpet, Angela Bassett, Susan Lucci, and everyone else, and it seemed a giant homage to Valentine’s Day and the Chinese Lunar New Year celebration all wrapped in one. But the unifying image was the heart, meaning heart health for women. Lucci, the queen of soap operas, told a story of being the picture of health and suddenly feeling pressure in her chest in October, averting a heart attack. Bassett, the queenly Ramonda in Black Panther, lost her mother in 2014 to heart disease. She wanted to create awareness for the link between Type 2 Diabetes and heart disease. Each speaker, and including doctors Dr. Sharon Hays and Mary N. Walsh, had a message: these episodes are preventable.

Song of Parkland: Surviving the Valentine’s Day Massacre

When we ran into Melody Herzfeld at the Tony Awards, she seemed stunned at the place history had taken her. This week at a special screening of Song of Parkland, an HBO documentary directed by Amy Schatz, she had her Tony Award by her side, still stunned, and feeling guilty. She would have preferred a prize for merit, she said. Instead she was honored for her heroism in a tragedy, coolly ushering 65 students into a back storeroom closet for two hours as a gunman murdered 17 at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida where she taught drama. At HBO, dozens of her former students attested to her epic qualities as a teacher. While she was not falsely modest, part of her charm is a self-effacing humor worthy of Joan Rivers. Then again, as she told us at the Tony’s, she was from these parts, from New Jersey.

Eco Village is no Utopian Vision

Among the many fascinations of Eco Village, a new play by a gifted young playwright, Phoebe Nir, in production at the Theater at St. Clement’s Church, is a revision of communal life from the ‘60’s, reimagined for this generation of millennials. For many of us who remember our youthful era of sharing resources, it was an edenic time for those who had little to share, welcoming the bounty of those more prosperous. In Eco Village, that ethos takes on current trends, toward ecology, conservation, and respect for the earth. Keeping a small footprint, so to speak, is a goal. But humans being, well, human, loyalties shift among the fictive characters in this alternate world, in ways that make Eco Village register more cynical than utopian. But then again, how do you change the world?

True West: Sam Shepard’s Bad Boy Pas de Deux

I have always thought of Sam Shepard’s True West as a two-hander. The brothers at the center of this heated drama, the screenwriter Austin and ne’re-do-well Lee, are entwined physically and spiritually; it’s their tension that enthralls. At the American Airlines Theater in a thrilling Roundabout production, they are Paul Dano and Ethan Hawke respectively. Of course there is a producer, Saul Kimmer (Gary Wilmes) ably aiding, abetting, and underscoring their sibling dis-function, and their dithering mother (Marylouise Burke), at least one half of the source. The other is the unseen father, allegedly a drunk who some time ago receded from society into the Southern California desert. Needless to say, the fruit does not fall far from that tree.

Beethoven for the Rohingya at Carnegie Hall—and David Amram

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? It’s an old, corny joke, and here’s an alternate answer. Get the incomparable composer and ethnomusicologist David Amram to conduct. And then a world unfolds: The Concert of Solidarity for the Rohingya Refugees at Carnegie Hall this week featured an orchestra comprised of musicians from 33 countries, stellar soloists, and a chorus from Montclair State University. The orchestra performed Amram’s “Elegy for Violin and Orchestra,” and he conducted, featuring soloist Elmira Darvarova on violin. This divine performance was followed by Beethoven, “Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125” culminating in “Ode to Joy,” with George Mathew conducting. The evening was to benefit the Rohingya refugees and the important work of Doctors Without Borders. Carnegie Hall was packed for this extraordinary night of music and moving accounts from Rohingya survivors.

Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists on HBO: Virile Prose and the Value of Truth

There aren’t any more Breslins or Hamills, exemplars of a masculine New York postwar street journalism. Now these superstars of newsroom culture star in a state of the art documentary, Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists, to air this week on HBO. At a star-studded premiere at the Time Warner Center with dinner at Porterhouse, they were celebrated in high style—Jimmy Breslin died in 2017, and a frail Pete Hamill could not attend-- even as the world they brought to life feels like a near forgotten memory of a bygone era.

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Never Look Away Gets an Oscar Nomination

Now that the Academy Award nominations are out, with Roma, Capernaum, The Shoplifters, Cold War and Never Look Away the academy’s picks for Best Foreign film, the winner in this category will be hard to predict. Opening in theaters this week, Germany’s Oscar entry, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Never Look Away, provides a glimpse into an artist’s life against the backdrop of the Nazi’s declining power in Europe, and the advent of the Communism in Germany. Based loosely on Gerhard Richter’s career, his coming of age in Dresden, escape to the West, painting studies in Dusseldorf, and phenomenal professional and personal success, this epic length movie moves briskly through its three hours plus: it’s a love story with a potent villain played by Germany’s uber romantic hero, Sebastian Koch, with young lovers Tom Schilling and Paula Beer. Schilling’s Kurt makes his breakthrough discovery of collaging gauzy images of photos from the past. In a traditional movie narrative, this filmmaker depicts Europe’s destruction by the Nazis, euthanasia of mental patients, political loyalties and injustices and its aftermath. As in his Oscar winning The Lives of Others (2006), a potent message comes forward: Yes, Germans suffered too.

Cinema Eye Honors: Are These Awards Predictors of Best Documentary Oscars?

Non-fiction films take center stage at the Cinema Eye Honors, awards for the art of documentary filmmaking. At the Museum of the Moving Image this week, pioneers and newcomers to the field, gathered to recognize achievement in editing, directing, graphic design or animation, cinematography and other aspects of story-telling craft. Oscar voters have their own list; the Cinema Eye nominees, and winners, coming from theatrical, television, and streaming venues, may not be your most familiar movies, such as this year’s Free Solo, Three Identical Strangers, and Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, but they are the ones most admired by industry insiders. Academy Award winner Morgan Neville said he was attending: because his documentary about Mister Rogers was nominated, and because he loves the documentary community.

Love Fest for Green Book at Patsy’s Restaurant

The road movie Green Book, winner of numerous awards this week, is also shadowed by controversy. Are recent discoveries of racist tweets an attempt to bring down what is for many the Oscar film of the year?

At a celebration for Green Book at Patsy’s Restaurant this week, friends and family of both jazz pianist Dr. Don Shirley and his driver Tony Lip gathered to remember the real life characters of this crowd-pleasing road story. Daniel Craig hosted, and stuck around just long enough for the movie’s star, Viggo Mortensen, to arrive. As he left, a waiter requested a selfie with him, and the Bond actor obliged.

Golden Globes to New York Film Critics Circle Awards: How to Travel Light During the Award Season

With this year’s Golden Globes in Hollywood preceding the New York Film Critics Circle’s annual award dinner by a night, the big question was how did directors like Alfonso Cuaron (Roma) or actors like Regina King (If Beale Street Could Talk), winners at both events, traverse the country with such speed, looking fresh as can be? Imagining private jets, I was briskly informed by an insider, they were on a 7 A. M. flight out of L. A. this morning, arriving in New York in the afternoon. At Tao Downtown, Roma was honored: while our president looks to make a wall, Roma gives us a window. Roma won not only for Best Film and Best Director, but Best Cinematographer: that would be Alfonso Cuaron himself, so for sure, he’d make every effort. The transition West to East may have looked seamless, but the Golden Globes, so green in everyone’s memory, made a lingering impression.