Gossip Central

Oscar Nominations: The Andrea Riseborough Upset

Oscar watchers did not see Andrea Riseborough coming, even though she was on the tip of Cate Blanchett’s lips as she accepted a Critics Choice award for Best Actress for her tour de force performance in Tar. In almost a whisper, the formidable Blanchett, a frontrunner who has already won a slew of awards, noted Riseborough, not even mentioning a movie she leads, To Leslie. A hugely solid actress, Riseborough is in the back story of many films, a minor character or supporting role. A British actress, she was a factory worker in Made in Dagenham. She’s played Wallis Simpson. Reaching back to the biopic about Billie Jean King, she played a sly, deceitful love interest to the tennis star with Emma Stone in the lead. She’s in David O. Russell’s most recent film Amsterdam, and when the premiere took over Alice Tully Hall, she graced the long cast line onstage. Present for a long time, in To Leslie, an indie film celebrated by a Hollywood elite, Andrea Riseborough finally leads.

Unseated is a list of fine actresses including Danielle Deadwyler, Viola Davis, as many have noted. Many ponder how this nomination will affect the Best Actress win, but for now, whatever conversation the Oscars inspire, this nod has mixed up a predictable roster that includes Michelle Yeoh, Michelle Williams, and Ana de Armas for her heartbreaking turn as Marilyn Monroe in Blonde.

Steven Spielberg at the Golden Globes: The Awards Season Heats Up

Everyone gets a kick out of Jennifer Coolidge’s loopy discourse. As demonstrated at the Golden Globes ceremony this week, nobody does it better, but the antic Ke Huy Quan, whose award for Best Supporting Actor-Motion Picture for his work in Everything Everywhere All at Once started the evening off, comes close. In a flash of serious reflection and gratitude, he shouted out to Steven Spielberg for casting him in his debut movie, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Seated closeby, with his new movie’s cast and crew, Spielberg looked genuinely pleased. While Quan went on to a few more roles—in Goonies, for example—the young actor could not get work for decades until the Daniels put him in their new movie, such a mash up of martial arts and narrative high jinks, there’s never a dull pause in the multiverse. Quan’s heartfelt speech became a bookend to the historic Globe’s night that, in the end, honored Steven Spielberg for Best Director-Motion Picture and Best Picture-Drama for his quasi-autobiographical The Fabelmans.

Picking up his statue for directing, Spielberg spoke about his movie, what it meant to finally address his own story. His words struck a chord. Having thought about it for years, he hit 74. What was he waiting for? True, not everyone has a mother who danced provocatively at family camping trips, or brought home a pet monkey, or who, so utterly free, went off with her husband’s best friend. That’s one part of his origin story. Another, the anti-Semitism Spielberg endured as a teen struck another chord. He did what he had to do, discovering that story-telling—for him with his camera—could make him popular. Or at least respected. Or at least keep him alive. The parameters are emblematic of what it took in his era for Jewish kids to survive, and speaks to the larger story of how the young come into their own next moment.

Martin Scorsese to Cate Blanchett at the New York Film Critics Circle Gala: Where Are You Going with This?

Joining the party at Tao Downtown on a screen, Martin Scorsese looked genuinely bewildered as he presented the Best Picture award to the movie Tar, noting the extraordinary performance of its star Cate Blanchett. As Lydia Tar, a genius orchestra conductor, Blanchett rages and purrs, at times in impeccable German. Scorsese has indeed worked with an actor or two but seemed awed over Blanchett: given she can do anything, and is, perhaps the actress of her generation: how far is she willing to go? Tar is on many “best” lists as it turns the cliché of the toxic male around, but the question is not how far Lydia Tar can go, but, for me, how far she has come.

The standout scene is when she returns home to Staten Island, as Linda. Here was the modest provincial place she had to flee to self-invent, to flourish in her music, and, horrifically, to nurture a monstrously warped ego. Discussing the film with its director Todd Field, I mention this resonant film moment. In writing it, he said, he was exploring, how does a talented person break into the elite cultural world of orchestras. He was thinking of Billy Strayhorn and how he fixed himself up to see Duke Ellington, into his idea of the cool Manhattan jazz society, and how everyone then looked to copy his style, his idea of how to be cool.

Common’s Broadway Debut in Between Riverside and Crazy

The play Between Riverside and Crazy at the Helen Hayes Theater opens on the Tony awarded actor Stephen McKinley Henderson seated in a wheelchair in a well-worn kitchen at breakfast, looking like a black Buddha in a flannel shirt. The audience silently takes in the clutter of appliances and china laden cupboards. It is multi-Grammy-winner Common, making his Broadway debut, who arrives to great applause. It’s the kind of topsy turvy posturing that occurs often enough in theater. Not everyone is a Common-like instantly known star, but, by the time the play twists and turns to its conclusion, well, we know where the high wattage is coming from.

It helps that Common is soft-spoken as Junior. Piping down as the menage in this sprawling Riverside Drive apartment cranks up is just the right volume. Junior’s girlfriend Lulu (Rosal Colon) is a loud piece of work dressed in butt-cheek-exposing cut offs. We’re not quite sure what granola munching Oswaldo (Victor Almanzar), a drug addict, is doing squatting here, but that’s okay. Henderson’s character, Pop, likes his company. In fact, this place is Pop’s, and since his wife died, everyone is welcome. That includes a former colleague, Detective O’Connor (Elizabeth Canavan) and her fiancé Lieutenant Caro (a splendid Michael Rispoli) who come to dinner with an agenda. They need Pop to sign some papers.

Wendell Pierce in Death of a Salesman: Attention Was Paid

Willy Loman, Arthur Miller’s Everyman, is a plum role for any actor: the character speaks to everyone. Wendell Pierce’s portrayal of this “salesman,” puts this emblematic character, the center of Death of a Salesman, through the Hudson Theater roof in this latest superb revival, recently moved from London. Back in the day, Miller oversaw a production in Beijing. Even under Communism, men, fathers, heads of households, could relate to the dreams that propel Loman’s arc, even if they are more fantasy than real. The play’s toxic male energy, passed from Willy to his sons Biff and Happy, is grounded by his wife Linda with Sharon D. Clarke doing the heavy lifting, guarding Willy’s illusions of grandeur even from their boys, who inherit and suffer his pathological delusions. All this is the play’s familiar territory, but now the family is black in a white community, spinning the story in a fascinating way.

Some Like It Hot: “Nobody’s Perfect,” But Maybe This Musical Comes Close

The musical Some Like It Hot, based on the beloved movie, tweaks its source, seeing in the original the chance to be both color and gender savvy. To recap the basic storyline, Joe and Jerry are a couple of working musicians who land a gig at a swank Chicago joint run by the mob. In between sets, they witness a gangland rub out, and now they are on the run for their lives. Hiding in plain sight, they dress as women and join an all-girls touring band heading for California. In the movie, Tony Curtis, Joe, and Jack Lemmon, Jerry, are pretty in disguise. Here, Joe (Christian Borle), not to face-shame, is goofy on a good day, but Jerry, redubbed Daphne (J. Harrison Ghee) looks as gorgeous and glamorous as Diana Ross. As Daphne, Jerry finds new depth and does not shy from engagement to Osgood (Kevin Del Aguila)—just because he was born a man. Osgood is understandably crazy about Daphne just the same. And boy, can these hoofers tap!

Sugar Kane, --that’s the Marilyn Monroe character-- still drinks and distrusts sax players. Here, a wonderful Adrianna Hicks, fresh off Six, shows ample song and dance chops; a sexy Sugar, she forms a tapping trio with Josephine and Daphne to lead the band, kept in check and on schedule by Sweet Sue (NaTasha Yvette Williams). Wise, she knows her mixed race band might not fare well in the South.

Bruce Weber’s Homage to Paolo di Paolo, Italian Master Photographer

If you think scenic Sicily is having a moment in this season’s White Lotus, check out the Italy of Bruce Weber’s ravishing The Treasure of his Youth: The Photographs of Paolo di Paolo. Opening with archival shots of children on the street, a girl on communion day, Anna Magnani with her dog, Marcello Mastroanni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, the documentary arrives at a provocative and hilarious clip of Sophia Loren in a striptease from Vittorio de Sica’s Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. Marcello howls with desire.

Illustrating his childhood love affair with Italy through Italian cinema, Weber in voiceover reveals a happy discovery: At a gallery in Rome, he and his wife Nan Bush were struck seeing prints from a prominent photojournalist of the late 1950’s, who, at the height of fame, after the breakup of a love affair in the ‘60’s, retired to the countryside. Signed Paolo di Paolo, the photos became the inspiration for this film.

When Weber called, Paolo’s daughter Silvia had to explain who this American photographer was. It was she who, rummaging through the basement looking for skis one day, found a chest full of negatives and pushed her father to tell his story. Charming and dapper, di Paolo at 94, recounts his life, living under fascism, leaving his home to find the world, his first commission photographing a debutante ball with 2,000 guests, and a welter of celebrity artists including Tennessee Williams, Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Taylor; Weber’s film was set to wrap after covering Paolo’s first ever photography retrospective, “Mondo Perduto,” when di Paolo was commissioned to shoot the Valentino couture fashion show in Paris. He speaks humbly of his art, “I did it as an amateur, because I loved it. My luck was to know important people.”

Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt: Again, The Holocaust

Those of us marked by a personal Holocaust history may be damaged by this cataclysmic event’s long shadow. Playwright Tom Stoppard evaded this essential legacy, as Hermoine Lee spelled out his background in her excellent recent biography. Beautifully staged at the Longacre Theater under Patrick Marber’s fine direction, Tom Stoppard’s fictional telling of his family story in his latest play Leopoldstadt raises a question: is assimilation good for the Jews? Is it ever possible to truly fit in?

I ask this way because as the drama opens, in an elegant living room, teeming with life, culture, and refined sensibility, a question is posed: what sort of ornament should top the Christmas tree? The Vienna depicted is modern indeed in 1899. Hermann (David Krumholz), a factory owner who has converted to Catholicism is in heated discussion with Ludwig, his brother-in-law (Brandon Uranowitz) on such topics as Jewish persecution in faraway places, numbers theory, Freud, Zionism; one might imagine the educated, wealthy class would concern itself with the issues of the day. The family settles on a Star of David.

Stoppard being Stoppard, sex and betrayal are part of the human-scale drama. The women, Gretl (Faye Castelow), Hermann’s wife, agrees to join Hanna (Colleen Litchfield), Ludwig’s sister, in a playful dalliance with men in uniform and ends up in an adulterous tryst. But as we are well aware, the consequences of these betrayals are trivial beside the larger story of Europe and fascism’s rise. Following the Anschluss in 1938, the family, now in drab dress is casually taunted by the Nazis who arrive at the stripped-down apartment to evacuate them. In the same drawing room, --after, in 1955--, a character named Leonard pared to Len (Arty Froushan), resembling a young Stoppard, meets with surviving cousins who tell him how everyone was murdered. Gretl’s portrait may stand for stolen property, but the very last word of the play says it all, “Auschwitz.”

Audra McDonald in Ohio State Murders: Yes, Bring on the Tonys

In a role that looks to garner a 7th Tony Award for Audra McDonald, the actress plays a poet returning to her school to give a lecture about her work. She must explain the source of her grim images. From this start, Ohio State Murders, a tight 75-minute tour de force from 91-year-old playwright Adrienne Kennedy, holds you in its grip. Yes, there is a murder—actually 2-- and the way a poet might narrate such a tale, in fragments, is breathtaking. 

Insanely, this is Kennedy’s Broadway debut—in the newly refurbished, sparkling James Earl Jones Theater. Where has she been, with her erudition, her language, her sharp focus on the plight of smart women, on race? The play is based on Kennedy’s own experiences with racism while attending the mostly white Ohio State University in the ‘50’s. A black woman, no matter how gifted, was never considered eligible to major in literature. So, as depicted in the play, when a young lecturer arrives and reads from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the part where a stunned Tess confesses to murder, Suzanne Alexander, as she’s called, is smitten. To be fair, we are too. Who has not had a crush on a charismatic prof? This one, Robert Hampshire, very white and wan-- with Bryce Pinkham in the role-- reads with passion. You can guess some of what happens here, in an outlying house near an abyss—but not the key, shocking details.

Neil Diamond on Broadway in A Beautiful Noise: Portrait of the Performer in Treatment

Fans and first-nighters greeted Neil Diamond as he emerged from a black town car on West 44 Street at the Broadhurst Theater for A Beautiful Noise’s opening with a rousing “Sweet Caroline.” Who doesn’t love Neil Diamond? Well, it turns out from this jukebox musical about his life, he doesn’t.

As it begins, an old version of himself (Mark Jacoby) is seated in a large leather chair opposite a shrink (Linda Powell). They are trying to figure out how to work together; his song book becomes the scaffolding for a narrative that looks like it will yield the desired music, the occasion for how he wrote it, and a window into his life. Alas, Portnoy’s Complaint, another vehicle for a deep dive into a Jewish boy from Brooklyn’s psyche, this is not. But here’s the good news: Will Swenson, as the young songwriter, emerges, electrifying the audience with his renditions of Neil Diamond hits.

Well, it is useless to quibble about how a Broadway show misses the chance to tell a real story in its manner of shaping an entertainment-- unless you want to believe that Neil Diamond’s fame, like the sequined outfits he wore, was so blinding, he never actually got to know the source of his insecurities. Covering his auspicious debut writing songs for the Monkees, performing at The Bitter End, the show looks at his domestic life: only the first two wives are present onstage, performed by Jessie Fisher and Robyn Hurder, with various couches indicating home. Just as well because he was mostly absent, touring obsessively. In a Playbill note, he endorses this project as therapeutic, “wishing perhaps that only if I could make a few edits in the script, it would change some of the reality of what I was seeing.”