Gossip Central

Nathan Lane Gets A Guild Hall Lifetime Achievement Award/ Cinderella on Broadway

The award season is all about superlatives and thank you speeches but for East Hampton’s Guild Hall Lifetime Achievement Awards it is about community and family. Marshall Brickman, Master of Ceremonies at a most packed ballroom at the Plaza for the annual Lifetime Achievement Awards on Monday night, paid homage to Peter Stone who held this honor for years. Of course, in theater Brickman is known for Jersey Boys and The Addams Family, and so, when he introduced Nathan Lane, winner for Performing Arts, he knew from what he spoke as Lane had originated the role of Gomez Addams: for rehearsal, he was off book, that is, knew his lines by heart, and knew everybody else’s lines too. Director Jack O’Brien screamed a cathartic scream realizing that their new play, The Nance, starring Lane, was only three weeks away from opening. That work, which he will direct from a script by Douglas Carter Beane, should be wonderful, if his work on the new book of Cinderella, which opened on Sunday night at the Broadway Theater is any indication, but more on that later. Ever charming, ever quipping, Nathan Lane took the stage retooling the award season bromide: “I didn’t prepare a speech. I didn’t think I would win.”

Harry Belafonte Waxes Historic at The First Time Film Festival

“This is a competition disguised as a film festival,” said First Time Film Festival co-founder Johanna Bennett, before introducing a panel featuring Harry Belafonte on Saturday morning at The Players Club. Twelve first films are screening and a winner will get distribution. Just when you thought the world had enough film festivals! But in addition to discovering new talent, the festival celebrates the old in a unique way. Successful filmmakers love their first films, and so, as a unique feature of this festival, Darren Aronofsky, Barbara Kopple, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Nancy Savoca, Hal Hartley, Christine Vachon, Melvin van Peeples, and Todd Solonz will show their debut work. On Friday night, Sofia Coppola screened The Virgin Suicides, with a Q&A that lasted twice the allotted time, illustrating that passion, First Fest co-founder Mandy Ward pointed out, surprised at how well this venture is going—after only one day. (The festival ends with an awards ceremony on Monday night at the Players Club, with Johanna Bennett’s father Tony, Ellen Burstyn, Martin Scorsese, and others.)

The Real Hunger Games: A Place at the Table

Sounds like a joke, but Hunger Games composer T Bone Burnett, took a break to record his own original music for the documentary, A Place at the Table, a film illuminating the problem of hunger in America. This subject is no joke. Directed by Lori Silverbush and Kristi Jacobson, this film follows a few emblematic young citizens, a Colorado fifth grader named Rosie, a Mississippi second grader with severe health problems named Tremonica, a Philadelphia mom named Barbie, determined, hard working good people, who happen to live outside the food eh, network. Food insecure, they don’t know where their next meal is coming from. Literally. Barbie has to travel by bus to find a market that sells fruits and vegetables. Local stores are stocked with processed items providing minimally nutritious calories for her children. And she is lucky she can feed them. Rosie in a ramshackle rural community in a gorgeous mountainous landscape, relies on donations. On a panel this week at The Crosby Hotel, spokesmen Jeff Bridges and the Silverbush’s husband Tom Colicchio, star of television’s “Top Chef” made a key point: here is one problem that is fixable.

Edie Falco in The Madrid: A Room of her Own

In a new play The Madrid, Edie Falco works with her Nurse Jackie producer, the playwright Liz Flahive. As Martha, Falco seems to be as self-medicated as she is in her Showtime role. The Madrid, a Manhattan Theater Club production at City Center Stage 1, opens in a classroom where Martha is animated and engaged, teaching her kindergarteners about family until one (Brooke Ashley Laine) asks, do you have children. Her eyes glaze as the scene changes. Under Leigh Silverman’s able direction, so does the play’s tone. Now a family is looking for Martha, or noticing she’s gone. Family members, neighbors (John Ellison Conley, Heidi Schreck, Christopher Evan Welch) react. Her husband wants to sell the furniture. Even her mother, a good Frances Sternhagen, gets into the action, but she doesn’t have much to do, except crash her car in the hope that Martha will return.