Gossip Central

Downton Abbey: The Movie Gets a Royal Premiere

Just as Lord and Lady Grantham are thinking of downsizing,
the King and Queen decide to visit, setting off the lavish fairy tale
that is Downton Abbey: The Movie. The smartly dressed crowd at Alice
Tully Hall cheered as John Lunn’s symphonic music swelled, a rich
reminder of what was left behind when the last PBS season ended in
Julian Fellowes’ extravagant entertainment, and what now, in the form
of a feature-length film, ushers in two hours of sheer pleasure.

Tom Hiddleston in Betrayal: Star Power on 45th Street

Marital infidelity is that slippery slope, just ask the characters in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal in a superb revival at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater. Coming from a fictional literary elite, meaning they are also verbally gifted, and would have to be for Pinter’s poetry, Jerry (Charlie Cox) and Emma (Zawe Ashton) think they’ve gotten away with a seven -year affair when they meet up two years after their trysts ended. A book agent and a gallerist, they’ve been cheating on Robert, her publisher husband (Tom Hiddleston), who is also his best friend. Got that? Famously for this Pinter play, the events unravel backwards in time, much being made of when and how the betrayed know what. The truth is slippery.

Jules Feiffer at 90: Guild Hall Celebrates with an All-Star Reading of A Bad Friend

Starring Oscar awarded F. Murray Abraham and Mercedes Ruehl, the reading of Jules Feiffer’s 2003 play A Bad Friend at Guild Hall, could not have featured more good friends. Under the expert direction of Harris Yulin who also read, along with the outstanding Tedra Millan, Dave Quay, and Josh Gladstone, one of the East End’s finest character actors, the reading thrilled an audience of Feiffer’s friends (Monte Farber and Amy Zerner, Audrey Flack, Susan Lacy, Celia Weston, among them), his wife Joan Holden, and the author himself.

Hamptons Journal: Jenni Muldaur/ Hearts Aflame at Guild Hall/ Bryan Adams Rocks Out at the Parrish

Singer Jenni Muldaur brought a party to Guild Hall for the holiday weekend, doing duets with performers who she’s assured the stellar crowd,are really truly her friends. What a night: the Wainrights, father and son, Loudon the 3^rd, and Rufus, plus Teddy Thompson, and Isaac Mizrahi who joined in—briefly-- for Leonard Cohen’s “Halleluliah!” We were witnessing music dynasties performing country, rock, iconic American music genres. I loved Jenni on the harmonica, covering Bo Diddley and Dylan, and the opening act, the ukulele stylings of Patty Marx and Roz Chast. This hilarious duet proves: it takes a special kind of chops to make music that off so funny.

Rob Reiner, Visiting the Hamptons, Reads Mr. T at Celebrity Autobiography

Photo: Roger Friedman

Rob Reiner was the surprise guest at Guild Hall for Celebrity Autobiography, a riotous show based on a single conceit. It’s not that the lives of celebrities are merely a hoot, but that read aloud, the unintentional humor is mind-blowing. Case in point, Tiger Woods’ sexual innuendo describing his golf strategies in Tiger Woods: The Making of a Champion. Or Reiner as Arnold Schwartzenegger’s dialogues with himself, emboldening the workings of an already outsized ego, or Joe Namath’s obsession with his hair, in Alan Zweibel’s voice. When performed onstage for an audience by first class actors, the results are laugh out loud good. That is the engine that fuels Celebrity Autobiography, a hit every year on and off Broadway, and at Guild Hall. The brainchild of playwright/actor Eugene Pack, who, upon reading Vanna Speaks, producer Merv Griffith’s miraculously talented letter turner on Wheel of Fortune, discovered that describing in detail what it is that Vanna White brings to the game, is its own game. And so he had Lewis Black reading White.

The Return of Showtime’s The Affair: Preview at Gurney’s

Photo: Nina Salpeter

Showtime’s The Affair returns to Montauk for its final season, to a preview decktop screening at Gurney’s. With the drizzle and ocean breezes, fans felt right at home with the first episode: Helen (the remarkable Maura Tierney) ministers to both the death of Vic (Omar Metwally) and the birth of his son, Ed. Noah (a quizzical Dominic West) lends a helping hand. And in mini segments Noah discusses the film of his roman-a-clef, Descent, with its star; Joanie Lockheart (Anna Paquin), at a moment in the future, deals with family and missing her mother and father. The question is, do we miss them too?

Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo: Purist’s Connect 4 Brother Act

If you ask me what is the funniest show I have seen all summer, it is Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo at Purist Magazine’s Connect 4 Ideas Festival. The CNN commentators, brothers in arms, told how they got to where they are, even as Cuomo was wrapping up a week of scandal involving an Italian-American putdown turned violent. Without recounting the experience, let us just say, the media star did not shirk the subject, hit it straight on, as he and Lemon went through their bona fides through the lens of loved ones shown onstage behind them in photographs, from the bittersweet loss of Lemon’s sister Lisa to Cuomo’s dad Mario. This deft taming of the elephant in the room at Guild Hall took place in the company of family and friends, and in something unusual in the media, with the support of another kind of bond through CNN.

Ugo Rondinone at Guild Hall: Here Comes the Sun

Come out of the dark: Ugo Rondinone’s work at Guild Hall lifts us in radiant shots of sunlight. In the two large gallery spaces the walls are bare, lit by fluorescen fixtures. You might be mistaken to think you are in Walmart under this austere light, but the effect on the art is, well, looking in full sun, stunning. In one gallery, a series of graphic yet shimmering circles in gold and yellow are juxtaposed with Guild Hall’s regal space. In another gallery, large hoops made of twigs work as frames, and the few hung on the wall with nails suggest Christ’s crown of thorns, a beatific sight. In a third gallery, hung shingle style, are hundreds of children’s drawings of the sun, some in blazing color. Everywhere at Guild Hall, the suggestion of hope offers a glimpse of a better future.

Remembering D. A. Pennebaker: Through a Beat Lens

Back in 2002, the one and only time I attended the Cannes Film Festival, I was at dinner with D. A. Pennebaker, his wife and film partner Chris Hegedus, and my friend Roger Friedman who had made a film with the documentary team called Only the Strong Survive, an important historical exploration of R&B and soul music that was premiering at the festival. I was attending as a journalist, but Pennebaker knew I was a scholar of the beat generation literati, and as he did with every subject you
could mention, he had a story to tell.

On this occasion, he recounted his having talked to Kerouac about doing a film of On the Road, that is, Kerouac asked him to do it, just as he imagined Marlon Brando starring. Penny, as he is known, was going to start the film with the character of Dean, the legendary “son of a Denver wino” stealing cars, maneuvering them around a parking lot. It was Penny who gave me a new window into the subject I thought, after having written several books on Kerouac, I knew very well: how the newly created highway system in America promoted the fantasy of fast car escapes from the restrictions of society: Huck Finn’s raft supplanted by the automobile. The film never left their machinations.

Annie Get Your Gun at Bay Street Theater: Can You Get a Man With a Gun?

Even before its third show of the season opened this weekend, Bay Street’s revival of the 1946 musical Annie Get Your Gun was extended. The demand was that great, for Irving Berlin’s classic songbook score, and Dorothy Fields’ clever lyrics for such standards: “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” “Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly,” and many more, in a show that on the surface is a show within shows, featuring lead characters who are competitors and who, natch, fall in love. That winning formula cannot be beat: Bay Street’s first-rate production does it proud!

Set against a backdrop of rolling hills with fine musicians nestled in, the play is funny, charming; every song, dance and scene rises above the noise of our current events. When Annie and her love-at-first-sight beau/ foe Frank Butler sing, “They Say It’s Wonderful” in Act 1, I was melting in my seat. A leitmotif for Act 2, their romance holds sway, much because of the talents of the two leads, Matthew Saldivar as Frank Butler and especially Alexandra Socha as Annie Oakley. A coming of age story too, this is her show.