Gossip Central

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.”

Remembering Aline Kominsky-Crumb

The Crumb documentary is ruining my life, complained Aline Kominsky-Crumb in 1993, as Terry Zwigoff’s biopic about Robert Crumb, her husband, gained acclaim, becoming a darling on the festival circuit. “Next thing you know, we’ll be invited to the Jerusalem Film Festival.” All of this drama was played out in a comic strip that appeared in The New Yorker magazine. Festival director Leah von Leer saw an opportunity and wrote to the Crumbs. “Your nightmare has come true. You are officially invited.”

Nominated for an academy award for best documentary feature, Crumb was a revealing look not only of this famous cartooning couple but Robert’s unusual family, capturing his highly eccentric and artistic brothers just before one committed suicide. Passionate for jazz, Robert had a huge record collection. Vinyl filled a room. Fearing an atmosphere of violence in their area of California, where gun ownership was de rigeuer, the Crumbs left for the south of France and lived in a multistoried house carved out of the rock on the banks of the Vidourle.

This much I knew when I encountered Robert and Aline in the lobby of our hotel in Jerusalem; I too came with a film, a documentary about the writer/composer Paul Bowles who lived in Tangier. “Did your records make it across the Atlantic?” I asked him as a way of saying hello. The Crumbs and my family—my husband Bob Salpeter, our two daughters, and my mother aged 73 and a survivor of Auschwitz --hung out. While Aline and I gabbed away getting to know one another—we had grown up in the New York City boroughs, finding our escape to Manhattan; we had ties to the Soho Weekly News-- Robert was helping my mother navigate the streets, gentle as could be. Aline dubbed her own mother Blabette, but genuinely liked mine grasping her spirituality.

Gotham Awards Celebrating the Best of the Indies

“Ooh, what’s that?” Adam Sandler ogled my pasta as he breezed by our table at Cipriani Wall Street for the Gotham Awards. “I’ll eat that,” the funny man made a bee-line to his table. Later on, well fed, he brought the cavernous house down accepting the Performer Tribute Award from the Safdie brothers, his Uncut Gems directors, a thank-you monologue created, he said, by his Youtube and Lululemon loving teen daughters, delivered in a strange Southern accent. Just what you’d expect at the Gotham Awards!

Jennifer Lawrence—here to present Best Feature-- called this special night a bellwether for the film award season! This annual celebration of Indie films honors non-Hollywood fare; then again, every year the lines blur, as this gorgeous filet mignon dinner becomes more and more elegant, hmm, upscale—i.e. with sponsors including Variety and Cadillac (yes, a sedan was parked outside the restrooms), the program now printed on gloss, it is always a wonder that the downtown vibe remains: it’s industry insiders just happy to be clinking glasses, be they of Fuji water and Blue Moon beer, catching up.

Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan in She Said: Naming Predators’ Names

As Harvey Weinstein sits in court in California on charges of rape and the former president Donald Trump, an alleged abuser, announces he will run again, the new movie, She Said, is a ripped-off-the-headlines thriller, telling the story of two investigative journalists who exposed the practice of abuse in the workplace. Of course, for Weinstein, co-founder of Miramax, that would be the movie business. You could say that New York Times reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor are the Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein on this issue, as She Said shows their dedication to hearing victims’ accounts, and the exhausting, exhilarating process of getting them to go on record. No, this is not Watergate, but a system far more insidious in its established acceptance worldwide, undermining women and their dreams.

The She Said casting is exceptional: two of the women hurt by Weinstein are played by Samantha Morton and Jennifer Ehle. Great actresses, their characters meet with the reporters. Their careers broken, they have moved on, haunted by their anguished past. They go public at great risk. For many who have never experienced assault by a boss, it may be easy to dismiss their sensitivity, to say, get over it. But the movie makes it clear that powerful predators are enabled by others. After Rose McGowan and others came forward, 86 women finally accused Harvey Weinstein, enough to make you wonder how this family man and astute film professional with an amazing success story had any time for luring young, naïve women to his hotel room for work related meetings, where he insisted upon sexual favors while clad in a bathrobe or naked. An army of helpful assistants and lawyers, eyes wide shut, covered up the tracks, leading women
on, or paying them off for their silence, forcing them to sign impenetrable non-disclosure agreements.

Jennifer Connelly’s Good Hair and Tight Sails in Top Gun: Maverick

One of the highest grossing films in the history of movies, Top Gun: Maverick, a sequel decades after the first 1986 Top Gun film, exemplifies why old-fashioned story-telling wins. As producer Jerry Bruckheimer said following a special screening at the Whitby Hotel this week, it’s an action movie wrapped around a love story. You cannot beat the aerial sequences, sleek planes on a mission to destroy an enemy arsenal. But the Top Gun team, led by “Maverick,” Tom Cruise at his best, heroic and sensitive, features pilots you can love. Particularly fine are “Rooster,” a son-surrogate played by Miles Teller, “Ice,” a touching Val Kilmer, his character, a rival to Cruise in the original, so debilitated by terminal throat cancer he communicates by texting, and “Hangman,” a fresh, snide Glen Powell. And, who knew Maverick had a woman in the wings? And what a woman! Jennifer Connelly is stunning as Penny who tends her own bar.

Director Joseph Kosinski said it’s her intelligence that made him want her for the movie, and that unbelievably, Jennifer had never worked with Tom Cruise before. Their chemistry is visceral as she flips her auburn mane, bringing out something in Cruise we’ve never seen before, and it’s thrilling. Jennifer Connelly said it was all in the wig.

Tangled Up in Tulsa: Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song

Bob Dylan’s massive archive is now on view in Tulsa, at the Bob Dylan Center right next door to the Woody Guthrie Museum. Artifacts of these two music giants make a must-see stop on any American culture tour. But Tulsa? Why there, everyone asks. For his stuff to be situated next to his hero’s, Dylan would have agreed to any place. Tulsa is not particularly relevant to his biography, but, as his new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, illustrates with great gusto, his sources and inspirations can be far-ranging, and belong to one place in particular—here, the place where democracy lives. They belong where, in a Whitmanesque sense, people of all stations in life can sit side by side—at least theoretically. An homage to a highly idiosyncratic American songbook, Dylan revels in behind-the-scenes stories of the famous as he honors the work of less well known artists.

Yes, he goes deep into how Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night” had its lyrics adjusted. Referring to The Who’s “My Generation,” he proclaims, “Every generation gets to pick and choose what they want from the generations before with the same arrogance and ego-driven self-importance that the previous generations had when they picked the bones of the ones before them.” Yes, he calls Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again” “an update of the iconic beat generation masterpiece by Jack Kerouac.” Maybe taking a cue from Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues which in other places he calls an important influence on his writing, each entry reads like a satori, a nugget of supreme wisdom. Short and to the point, each might follow a Kerouacean writerly strategy to simply fill up the page, like a jazz riff, stopping “where the page stops.” But Dylan doesn’t let his ideas spill one to the next.

Michelle Williams in The Fabelmans: Steven Spielberg’s Bildungsroman

Taking liberally from his own biography, Steven Spielberg creates a portrait of the artist as a young man in his latest film, The Fabelmans. It is no accident that the word fable echoes within this title, nor that the child to adolescent to teen and adult depicted is on a journey to discover his unique voice—through a moving picture camera lens. But the real star of this fictive tale is his mother called Mitzi, tremendously appealing with Michelle Williams in the role. An elfin creature with talents beyond her burnt eggs and salami, Mitzi is a soak-up-all-the-oxygen-in-the-room sort, and the epicenter of Sam’s consciousness. Flirting, even with Sam, Mitzi sings and plays the piano for her family and remains an unfailing support to her son’s filmmaking ambitions. Michelle finesses Mitzi even at her most wacky. Yes, his father (Paul Dano, excellent) plays an important part too--as does his best friend Ben (Seth Rogen, wonderful) who, by the way, makes off with his mother; that story underpins much of Sam’s emotional energy without undermining his gifts as a visual artist.

Some other characters along the way need mention: Judd Hirsch as Uncle Boris, Jeanne Berlin as Hadassah Fabelman, and David Lynch as John Ford. The film engages in numerous ways, especially as it references many of Spielberg’s greatest hits: E. T., Jaws, among others. Serious matters: his parents’ divorce, the anti-Semitism he experienced in school, the beatings he endures facing the school’s jocks, and Jesus as a romantic rival—All are part of the journey as Sam makes movies featuring train crashes, blood spurting war battles, and teen beach parties.

Hugh Jackman in Florian Zeller’s The Son: Dance Man in a Drama

It’s a far cry from The Music Man’s River City, Iowa to the swell NYC apartments and boardrooms of Florian Zeller’s The Son. The film is the latest in a trilogy that began with The Father, based on a stage play, with The Mother to follow. In The Father, you may recall, Anthony Hopkins won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance as a lovably demented dad to Olivia Coleman. You never quite know when he’s seeing/ hearing/ telling the truth. It’s a tour de force of the man’s inner mind, and it was riveting. 

In The Son, Hopkins appears again in a pivotal scene, stone cold as a father to Hugh Jackman, a father who is facing some parenting challenges. Jackman sang and danced his way into Marion the librarian (Sutton Foster’s) heart in the recent Music Man revival on Broadway. And in The Son, as Peter, he does a funky hip slide that looks like it will bond him to his teen son Nicholas (Zen McGrath) who is having mental issues related to his dad’s divorce from his mom, Kate (Laura Dern in a moving role). Until Beth (a superb and sexy Vanessa Kirby), his father’s new wife, gets into the act, and all sours.

Topdog/Underdog Revival at the Golden: History Does Repeat

The stakes are huge for two brothers named Lincoln and Booth who live in a one-room fleabag joint with no running water. Carrying history itself, these brothers—well, living conditions are the least of their problems. Sibling rivalry aside, Topdog/ Underdog, Suzan-Lori Parks’ Pulitzer Prize winning play now in a superb revival at the Golden Theater, feels essential, as a game of one-upmanship, as “civil” war re-enactment, or a reckoning of what it means when members of the same family vie for dominance.

Opening with Booth (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) honing his three card monte skills, this play is hilarious. Soon, Linc (Corey Hawkins) interrupts, a black man in white face. His hat and waistcoat give him away—his job is portraying President Abraham Lincoln, shot constantly in an arcade show. That’s his day job. The doubling and tripling in this conceit are enough to give you dread as Linc practices his skills at dying. Skilled at shoplifting, Booth wears a big coat the better to bring home purloined goods, neatly padding him every which way. Clothes do make the man, and don’t forget the matching ties, the belt. Snip the label. The actors are particularly wonderful – however different—showing a comic physicality, without ever becoming slapstick. Director Kenny Leon milks these moments, dressing and undressing his actors, unpeeling memories of an untoward childhood. Abandoned by their parents as teens, at least Booth had older brother Linc.

Body Language: The Whale and Triangle of Sadness in the Hamptons

At this year’s Hamptons International Film Festival, blame it on the vagaries of programming, but on one day two films featured such egregious abuse of the body, as if to highlight human excesses of all kinds. I speak of copious consumption of junk food, fine champagne to wash down, and then up projectile vomit, and consequent brown spewing toilets. A coincidence?

In Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale, Brendan Fraser plays Charlie, a dying obese man. That’s too bad because he also appreciates his estranged daughter (Sadie Sink), and poetry, the true meaning of self in Whitman’s Song of Myself and the rhythmic cadences of Melville’s Moby Dick, about an obsessed sea captain on a death wish. In case you ever wondered how people can eat themselves to oblivion, you may find the answer here, but a whole lot more. As the classic literature suggests a spiritual component to the sins of the flesh, Charlie consumes pizza, meatball heroes with extra cheese, you name it. As a visual experience, it is painful to see him move around his drab, depressing apartment—until he achieves the transcendence he seeks.