Gossip Central

Terrence McNally’s Valentine to The Pearl Theater Company

Onstage backstage, at the Pearl Theater’s production of “And Away We Go,” six actors celebrate theater history. Set in the detritus of years of costumes, props, deflated dolls, and chandeliers, this new play by the venerable Terrence McNally sits on the most cluttered set north of 14^th Street. (Small Engine Repair’s garage at the Lucille Lortel gets the prize south.) The lived-in look works well to convey an atmosphere of well-worn theatrical mayhem. The Greek plays such as Aeschylus’s “Oresteia,” an actor’s dream to perform Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” Chekhov’s “Seagull,” Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” all evoked, all supply a turn of phrase, a dramatic diva in this Dionysian and clever pastiche, under Jack Cummings III able direction, featuring the Pearl regulars Carol Schultz, Sean McNall, Rachel Botchan, and Dominic Cuskern, and a pair of newcomers, Donna Lynne Champlin and Micah Stock.

Ethan Hawke’s Macbeth and the Small Engine Repair: Among Men

Ethan Hawke is a manly Macbeth in a leather skirt. The men in “the Scottish play” look good in skirts, even John Glover’s “weird sister,” with pendulous breasts. At this stylish “Macbeth” directed by Jack O’Brien, you pause wondering: Alexander McQueen? Gaultier? Marc Jacobs? Catherine Zuber’s costumes, like the regal sets by Scott Pask, lighting by Japhy Weideman’s, the dark, elegant look of this production throughout including the tinged with blood roses (as if competing with the color tones of “Twilight”) signal the other worldly and worldly at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater. Hecate is a Goth goddess. When Lady Macbeth (Ann-Marie Duff) asks to be unsexed, any gloss will say, for Elizabethans that means to be released from the cares of women. And indeed, childless, murderous and ambitious, she is in every way manly in that sense except for her pale bony back in strapless. (You could see her as Marin Ireland’s Marie Antoinette counterpart; in a recent downtown production, that doomed queen wore red.) Here, in black, this fated queen’s as stylish as this production is sleek, and the effect is thrilling, if not exactly like the more classical approaches to this most often produced of the bard’s work.

Sarah Jessica Parker and Blythe Danner’s Frozen Assets in “The Commons of Pensacola”

In Amanda Peet’s fine playwriting debut for Manhattan Theater Club at City Center, “The Commons of Pensacola,” Sarah Jessica Parker and Blythe Danner are daughter and mother locked in a domestic dilemma: Judith (Danner) is forced to scale down as her husband has been jailed for a Madoff-mode crime. Becca (Parker) arrives for Thanksgiving with a boyfriend much her junior. Her sister Ali (Ali Marsh) has broken off from their mother for mysterious reasons, so her daughter Lizzy (Zoe Levin) must sneak a visit to grandma now residing in a generic Florida condo. All would be cozy, complete with a fold out couch, except that the wrong couple ends up sleeping there.

Stanley Tucci, Anne Tatlock, and Michael D. Eisner Honored for Their Contributions to Theater

Two benefits this week featured a back stage glimpse into how theater is made: on Sunday night, Stanley Tucci, along with Anne Tatlock, was honored at the Plaza Hotel, at the New York Stage and Film Winter Gala for his contribution to theater. Fitting, the presentation included performances: Li-Manuel Miranda and Anika Noni Rose sang from Miranda’s work in progress, The Hamilton Mixtape. Peter Gallagher sang Cole Porter’s “I Happen to Like New York.” Guests for this event which focused on the organization’s important work in developing and nurturing young theater artists included Patricia Clarkson, Steve Buscemi, Oren Moverman, Jon Tenney, and Oliver Platt who presented the award to Stanley Tucci. While the new Hunger Games: Catching Fire opened this week, with Tucci reprising his role as Caesar Flickerman, he was looking forward to directing theater as he did most recently in Lend Me A Tenor on Broadway.

Survival in Pre-Civil War South: 12 Years a Slave Honored at the Lotos Club

The subject of race was addressed head on at a luncheon celebrating the film “12 Years a Slave,” easily the film of the year in an awards season gathering momentum. “I’m a black man, as if you didn’t notice, and part of the global identity of slavery” said director Steve McQueen on a panel led by Amanda Foreman at the Lotos Club on Tuesday. The director was seated between two of his stars Chitwetel Ejiofor and Lupita Nyong’o and in front of guests who included the luncheon’s host George C. Wolfe, Geoffrey Fletcher, Spike Lee, Thulani Davis, Walter Mosley, and many more of the city’s cultural and industry elite, but the context of McQueen’s remark was an answer to a question about his being a British citizen making art of a particularly American experience, and embarrassment. With family from the West Indies, he pointed out, we are all part of a diaspora, and that understanding makes the horrors of plantation life witnessed in his powerful movie all the more dreadful, and close to home no matter what your color or ethnicity.

Moms Mabley: I Got Somethin’ to Tell You on HBO

Among the many ways the pioneering comedienne Moms Mabley was a pioneer was that she performed at the Apollo in 1939, five years after the Harlem theater opened. In her signature hats, mismatched housedresses, and gummy lips, she was a hoot, although her jokes consisted mostly in telling the truth. Her deadpan was killer. She came from North Carolina, and avowed, she had no use for older men. Often escorted about by younger men, she was happiest in the company of women. Dressed most elegantly in tails, she was a sharp contrast to her stage look. A mystery endures as to whether or not she was raped, twice. As a teen she had two children who were given up for adoption. A veteran of the “Chitlin’ Circuit” of black vaudevillians, she influenced every comic today, especially Whoopi Goldberg who produced and directed this documentary portrait, “Moms Mabley: I Got Somethin’ to Tell You,” to air on HBO on November 18.

Hillary Rodham Clinton at MoMA’s White Gold Premiere

Even by Peggy Siegal’s usual high celebrity quotient, the event was a coup: Hillary Clinton’s introduction of a short documentary, White Gold, at its premiere at MoMA. Last Wednesday, she addressed a packed screening room: Candice Bergen, Christie Brinkley, Chuck Close, Albert Maysles, Barbara Kopple, Lawrence O’Donnell, David Schwimmer, and many others. The film’s subject, the dire plight of Africa’s elephant population would serve as horror enough. Images of elephants mutilated for their tusks are graphic, potent reminders that attention must be paid, not just for preservation of a magnificent species, but as a deterrent to something close to Clinton’s office: Security. As the documentary narrated by Clinton makes clear, the tusks are coveted by a growing middle class in China, eager for the trinkets carved out of the valuable ivory. But utilizing more and more sophisticated techniques for the plunder, terrorist groups benefit from the economics of this big business. As she suggested, director Arne Glimcher and others like Sigourney Weaver who starred as Dian Fossey in Gorillas in the Mist, a 1988 feature shedding light on the poaching of Africa’s wildlife, the market for ivory should end.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

 

How Jewish Is It? Art Spiegelman at the Jewish Museum and Lost Childhood opera in Bethesda

Puffing vigorously on a cigarette substitute, Art Spiegelman addressed journalists at the Jewish Museum at a recent opening of an exhibition “Co-mix: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics and Scraps.” Referring to his most potent inspiration for subversive art, “Mad Magazine,” he jokes, he’s convinced, the Viet Nam War protests would not have happened had it not been for the influence of this satirical comic magazine on Spiegelman’s generation. What, me worry? Alfred E. Neuman’s laugh line teased young readers to check between the words and pictures for hidden truth. The sumptuous retrospective of Spiegelman’s career at the Jewish Museum including his work in underground Raw, to book covers as in his Paul Auster New York Trilogy art, to the highbrow and controversial The New Yorker covers, illustrates a much wider range, but he is best known for his Pulitzer Prize winning Maus, based on his relationship with his father Vladek, a Holocaust survivor. Whatever else the artist has done, including an upcoming collaboration with Phillip Johnston, “Wordless!” at Brooklyn Academy of Music, his work is overwhelmed by Maus: “Holocaust trumps Art,” he laughs in mock ruefulness.

The Great Beauty: The Glory That is Rome:

In The Great Beauty, a gorgeously shot picture of contemporary Rome, albeit fictional, it is refreshing to see that this tourist mecca of monumental historic significance has a shallow center just like all the other important world cities of note. You could say this movie whose central character is a writer of one novel so many years ago who has evolved into a journalist of art, parties, and society gossip is like the visual equivalent of T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” with references to a glorious cultural past that now simply exists in fragments. When he is charged with being a misogynist, that character, Jeb Gambardella, corrects the accusation: No, I am a misanthropist. And while he wears this name as a badge of honor to go along with his impeccably tailored suits, fortunately the film does not agree with him. Within this engrossing spectacle, some of the most dramatic faces this side of Fellini scowl and grin. You have to love them.

Saving Mr. Banks Singalong at The Four Seasons

Disney scores again! First it was multi-Oscar winning Mary Poppins, now Saving Mr. Banks, a biopic of Mary Poppins writer P. L. Travers. In the person of Emma Thompson she’s stern, a bit of a frump, Britishly out of step, yet endearing as she comes around giving Walt Disney the rights to make this classic musical. Let’s face it: who can say no to Tom Hanks? Set in two time frames, the 1960’s when Disney finally got Travers to agree and the 1930’s back brush Australia where Travers nee Helen Goff grew up, a daughter of an alcoholic with lofty dreams played movingly by Colin Farrell. Featuring a stellar supporting cast of Jason Schwartzman, Paul Giamatti, Rachel Griffiths, Kathy Baker, B. J. Novak, the miracle of this movie is its tone: with sad and funny in equal measure, Saving Mr. Banks will surely top award season lists.