Gossip Central

Cecily Strong at the Shed in The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe

A homeless woman who communicates with aliens, “Trudy” opens the show, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, created by Jane Wagner in 1985 for her then partner, now wife, Lily Tomlin. Revived at The Shed, under Leigh Silverman’s astute direction, the baton for dispensing planetary consciousness is passed to Saturday Night Live’s comedic virtuoso Cecily Strong. As Trudy, she wears an ill-fitting coat, its lining bedecked with post-its. How else will wisdom be saved in a world accustomed to one-liners? More aptly, how will this wisdom be communicated to the life beyond our atmosphere? A gimmick maybe, but at the show’s end, audience members picked up post-its on their way out. My bright green one reads: “Humanity’s biggest hurdle is human behavior.”

Bridget Everett Stars in HBO’s Somebody Somewhere: The Heart of Manhattan, Kansas

First aware of Bridget Everett as a mother in Patti Cake$, an indie hit of 2017, I met her on two occasions: she was a flamboyant speaker at the Nantucket Film Festival that year receiving an award. Trust me, you never want to follow her onstage. Second, at the Athena Film Festival, she attended with her pal Murray Hill, so named for the Manhattan, NYC neighborhood. Both make a big impression, HUGE, and now you can see for yourself as Everett stars in an HBO series, Somebody Somewhere, with Hill in a supporting role, directed by Robert Cohen and Jay Duplass. So full of heart, I would say, the series is a gift for Valentine’s Day.

Rural America is a foreign country to me, but Manhattan, Kansas is both strange and ironic given that you cannot imagine a place more remote from Manhattan, New York, ground zero for misfits seeking personal expression. And guess what, looks like Bridget Everett feels the same way. She’s from there, and as Executive Producer of the series featuring autobiographical details from her life, she’s crafted this location, and at least fictionally, finds a voice there. Manhattan, Kansas is to Bridget Everett as Baltimore is to John Waters.

Drive My Car: An Oscar Game Changer from Japan

Life moves slowly. Loss. Grief. So much happens in Drive My Car, Japan’s entry for the Best International Film Academy Award, it is amazing that the movie is only two and a half hours long. That it has been named Best Film by the venerable NY and LA Film Critics can make you think, Parasite all over again, but that Best Picture Oscar winner from Korea is action-packed, a satiric bloody nightmare romp, while the longeuers of Drive My Car drive home deeper, more difficult truths, and how we process them. An acclaimed theater director (Hidetoshi Nishijima) loses his beautiful wife. Two years into his grief, he takes a job directing Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima. A young woman (Toko Miura) from a remote mountain town Hokkaido, dour, her face expressing oceans of sadness, chauffeurs him around in his red Saab. Producing Chekhov in Japan may represent one aspect of multi-culturalism, but the players speak many languages, including sign. And perhaps most poignantly, it takes more than translation to make inner lives connect.

The Kinky Truths of Slave Play

Sex play informs Jeremy O. Harris’ Slave Play, a sensation when it opened prior to the pandemic, and now re-opened on Broadway at the August Wilson Theater. The fuss is understandable: The riveting drama opens with three interracial couples enacting slave-master fantasies in period dress. What follows is contemporary group therapy as each couple is  scrutinized, and evaluated by a team of analysts. In Harris’ drama, fitting in our moment of reckoning, text and subtext all come down to Race. As the slave-master scenario is so archetypical, you wonder, shouldn’t all sex deserve this clinical touch? “A Note on Your Discomfort” by writer Norman Parker in the Playbill is explicit: “Slave Play is a study in American memory: the psychologies of the prized and of the oppressed; the grateful and the entitled: who’s top, who’s bottom; who speaks, who can’t, and who betta listen.”

Candace Bushnell Dares to Ask: Is There Still Sex in the City?

The night before the HBO series she spawned reincarnated as And Just Like That at MoMA, Candace Bushnell signals, she has moved on. At the Daryl Roth Theater, she struts across a stage fitted with a hot pink couch and shelves lined with Manolos, recounting a stellar career as columnist, coming from Connecticut, modest suitcase in hand, sleeping around. This “having sex like a man” becomes material, and quite explicit. If you are a fan of Sex & the City, you know what I mean. Miraculously, in her tour de force hour and a half one-woman show—with the exception of a cameo by two dogs, the words “penis” and “vagina” are uttered once each, as Bushnell poses the question, Is There Still Sex in the City? Phone in hand, she converses with her Samantha, her Miranda, and her Charlotte, paragons of wisdom, as she navigates her rise as writer, all the while dumped by lovers including her ballet dancer husband. The men she mentions do not fare well—even her supportive father somehow lets her know her flat chest will get her nowhere in love. An exception is Darren Star, the series showrunner who attended the opening. I caught up with him over a gargantuan urn of guacamole at the Rosa Mexicana afterparty where a Covid test was now the new condom: “Yes, she got it right. She’s honest about Sex & the City and how we got it made. She would not have invited me if she was going to trash me.”

Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story: Get Ready to Rumble

You will not have to ask, do we need yet another adaptation of this classic? With Leonard Bernstein’s music and Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics firmly implanted in your head, a memory of the 1961 Jerome Robbins’ choreography and Arthur Laurents’ book, prepare to be delightfully shocked at how much this new version of West Side Story feels new. Maybe it’s Tony Kushner’s masterful script that takes us first into an image of urban renewal, the ‘hood, a battleground for the Sharks and Jets, being right here in Hell’s Kitchen cum Lincoln Center (shot on a lot in Paterson, New Jersey), and the wisdom we bring knowing the future: everything must change.

But come back to that era: to the cars and shops declaring poverty, ethnicity, the warehouses, crumbling buildings—the boys styled like mid-century heroes, a bit of Marlon Brando and Jack Kerouac. Enter the sweet-faced Polack Tony for Anton (Ansel Elgort) and the Latina ingenue Maria (newcomer Rachel Zegler). Justin Peck updates the original choreography without upsetting Robbins’ vision. And then there’s Rita Moreno, the Oscar-awarded Anita in 1961, now near 90 and getting ready to be celebrated at the Museum of the Moving Image. A widow, perhaps an oracle to the young, as Valentina, Moreno bridges past and present: Spielberg has her singing “Somewhere,” and your heart aches.

Gotham Awards: The Film Season’s Coolest Kick Off

At the annual New York City event at Cipriani Wall Street, bestowing serious awards and spreading unexpected intimacy, Maggie Gyllenhaal swept the Gotham Awards in her directorial debut for The Lost Daughter. Her adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s short story won Best Screenplay and Best Feature; and, ç1 shared the award for Outstanding Lead Performance with Frankie Faison, star of The Killing of Kenneth. Traditionally the start of the award season for films, the Gothams prides itself on indie selections, and still manages to honor major stars.

Kristen Stewart introduced by Julianne Moore and Pablo Larrain who directed her in Spencer, his take on Diana, managed to keep it real deploying an occasional if authentic “f” word. As Moore, asked, “Who is cooler than Kristen Stewart? Well maybe Ethan Hawke who shared a prize for Outstanding Performance in a New Series for his work on The Good Lord Bird with Thuso Mbedu of The Underground Railroad, and then was right back onstage to introduce Peter Dinklage. “He contains multitudes,” Hawke quoted Walt Whitman, praising Dinklage’s acting chops. Bonding in praise of John Malkovitch, actor to actor, well, they should know.

Faith Salie Off the Air: Approval Junkie at the Minetta Lane Theater

That voice. I’d know it anywhere, and so would you if you’ve been attuned to NPR. You could say I’m a junkie for talk radio, and “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” is a particular addiction. A news quiz cum comedy revue, the show has gotten me from here to there, as I drive in traffic along Montauk Highway. One star, Faith Salie, has taken her story on the road, so to speak, landing at the Minetta Lane Theater with “Approval Junkie.” A monologue (co-written with Amanda Watkins) about career, marriage—she’s especially funny about her ex, “wasband,” as she dubs him, nurturing mom and dad, disparaging career coach—who while encouraging she cut bangs, basically says without saying it, she has a face for the radio.

The Lehman Trilogy on Broadway: American’s Magical Music Box

The epic length evolution of three brothers from Bavaria becoming Americans, immigrants in the 19th century coming by boat, would be one kind of story, maybe a sequel to “Fiddler,” picking up when the family leaves the shtetl. That this is the Lehman family, who go from textile merchants in the south to the Lehman Brothers—yes, those Lehman Brothers— bankers at the heart of the giant financial debacle of 2008,--spins this saga: the dream that arcs and declines to dust. This awesome dramatic work, The Lehman Trilogy by Italian playwright and novelist Stefano Massini, a pre-pandemic hit at the Park Avenue Armory, is now neatly performed in a rotating crystal cube—"a magical music box”-- at the Nederlander Theater, lauded and playing to packed houses every night—to masked, vaxxed, avid theatergoers. It’s still a hot show.

The trilogy may rival Angels in America as a large and unique variation of the dream. Under Sam Mendes’s fine direction, the British actors are the main event. Simon Russell Beale, the eldest brother, Haim becomes Henry upon reaching these shores. An alpha male, the actor dissolves effortlessly into the girl he will marry, illustrating just how split-second, unexpected and witty the actors’ performances are, and how the principal cast of three occupy a world. As the middle brother Mendel now Emmanuel, Adrian Lester, so evocative when he starred in Red Velvet is a distinguished presence and Adam Godley, —the tall third brother Mayer nicknamed Spud—his angles, physicality, amaze. Each—likable in this context-- becomes a wife, a son in this portrait of capitalist success, despite their casual disregard of slavery, the poor, how they and their children step on their way up. Well, that’s American too, through a European lens.

JR’s Spontaneous Poetics: Paper and Glue

JR, French  graffiti artist and Agnes Varda collaborator on Faces, Places is infectious. His virus, a matchless enthusiasm for the creation of art, is impossible to describe: his energy is a force. Burroughs/Gysin had their Third Mind, Ouevres Croissees in French, a roadmap to artistic creation through collaboration, and JR inherits their spirit along with Varda’s. In his new documentary, Paper and Glue, he takes us to the US/Mexican wall, a California prison, the banlieu of Paris, favela of Rio, places we would never think to want to see. Infusing them with his je ne sais quoi, voila, they become the only places that matter, sites with superstars among the disenfranchised, the movie’s inscription from Varda: “If we opened people up, we’d find landscape.

His pal Bradley Cooper introduced the nomadic JR at the MoMA premiere this week, hosted by MSNBC whose filmmaking arm funded the film. Cooper, a bona fide movie star in awe, seemed happy to just to be in JR’s posse, a growing populace of fans and volunteers helping to build his outrageous installations. At the wall—yes that wall—someone even jokes about who is going to pay for it--JR erected a structure to paste a giant-sized photo of a small Mexican boy, waiting for the authorities to shut him down. Instead, they arrived and shared tacos. That’s just what you want to do with the irresistible JR. “Kevin,” a prison inmate sporting a swastika tattoo on his cheek, calls collect and JR picks up wherever he is. He sends Kevin a signed copy of Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Now, the prison system provides a tattoo removing system.