Gossip Central

James Earl Jones Honored at the American Theater Wing Gala

Broadway luminaries attended the American Theater Wing gala on Monday night at the Plaza Hotel to honor James Earl Jones: Angela Lansbury, Tony Bennett, and Cecily Tyson, who is starring with Jones in The Gin Game. The annual event always features performances in the Plaza’s Grand Ballroom: among other performers, Norm Lewis blew everyone away with a medley from Les Miserables. American Theater Wing chair William Ivey Long took the stage to introduce the award presenters George Lucas and Samuel L. Jackson. “No,” said Long, “I never costumed James Earl Jones.” Jackson paid tribute saying he tried out for Ragtime because Jones, an actor of color, was out there. He didn’t get the job. George Lucas—Jones was the voice of Darth Vader, the unforgettable villain of Star Wars-- proclaimed, “If you want to make a strong movie, you have to make a strong theater.” 

Roger Waters The Wall Premieres Rock-Style

Defying categorization, Roger Waters The Wall premiered this week, not just a rock concert filmed, although it is that; even more, in a classic Oedipal journey, Roger Waters seeks his paternity, the father and grandfather he did not know. The casualties of the two world wars, these men become the objects of a quest in a 1961 Bentley Waters bought specifically for this odyssey. The elongated vehicle snakes comically on winding cliff-side roads as he travels from France to Italy, to the battlefield at Anzio where his father fell. Driving, he waxes philosophic with his passenger Willa Rawlinson, who proclaims in poetic heaviness, the two wars erased any memory of fathers, and, the smell of one’s grandson and the blessing of Zeus, the king of gods, are one and the same thing.

The Walk Opens the New York Film Festival

When James Marsh’s Oscar winning documentary Man on Wire premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2008, it seemed like a miracle, not only Philippe Petit’s stunning walk across wire 110 stories in the air, but the image of the World Trade Towers from August 7, 1974, as their destruction was fresh in everyone's mind. Now recreated in a fiction film, The Walk, in Real3D, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the role of Petit, the story goes from historic to mythic, with a huge WOW factor:  the magic of Robert Zemeckis’ technical expertise puts viewers are up there with him. You know how this mad caper is going to end, and yet The Walk is the thriller of the season.

Robert DeNiro: Who Wouldn’t Want this Intern? The Intern Premieres

You have to love Nancy Meyers for her happy endings, and her optimism about women’s lives. In her latest film confection, The Intern, a laugh-out-loud, melt-in-your-mouth bonbon, the adorable Anne Hathaway plays Jules Ostin, a workaholic founder of a successful women’s wear Internet business housed in a chic downtown loft. Launching a senior intern program for retirees, her company gets Robert DeNiro as Ben Whitaker to play her right hand man. He’s good: patient, kind, understanding, confident, mature, requiring little maintenance except for a foot massage. He solves all her troubles both in and out of work. She learns, in the ultimate women’s fantasy of our time, how to have it all.

Nancy Pelosi Stops by 21, at a Luncheon for The Armor of Light

Rifle wielding right-to-lifers hell bent on violence. Sounds like an oxymoron. But as illustrated in a powerful new documentary, The Armor of Light, a directorial debut for Abigail Disney, guns and God can make strange bedfellows. This week at a luncheon at 21, the movie’s key figures, an Evangelical reverend and anti-abortion activist Rob Schenck, and a remarkable grieving mother turned anti-gun activist Lucy McBath, spoke on a panel, raising the film’s issue: can you be both pro-gun and pro-life?

Café Carlyle @ 60: Brian Stokes Mitchell Opens New Season

A consummate showman, the Broadway star, Brian Stokes Mitchell took the stage at Café Carlyle this week as if he were born to perform at the iconic supper club. His debut show there, “Plays With Music,” might be a pun on plays, as in dramas (think Man of La Mancha), or plays as in how he accompanies himself on instruments from simple pipes to one that has piano keys called the melodica. Accomplished as he his on these, his instrument, his voice, is perfection itself. Backed by a first rate band, Mark McClean on drums, Gary Haase on bass, and Tedd Firth’s piano, he began his set with “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” and made this Irving Berlin standard sound like you’ve never heard it before.

Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin, and Benicio del Toro in Sicario

By the time I got home from the Sicario premiere at MoMA this week, the film’s star Emily Blunt was trading puke takes with Stephen Colbert on his Late Night Show. The vomiting is not as random as you’d think: the new movie directed by Denis Villeneuve has such grim imagery, the characters, FBI agents raiding a house in the Arizona desert double over in wet heaves in the dry courtyard. That’s just the beginning; when we first see Emily Blunt’s Kate, she’s almost too pretty and too vulnerable to do this job. “This took off layers of skin,” Blunt said at The Modern after party, in her poised British.

The Legend of Georgia McBride: Drag is the New Black

MCC’s production of Matthew Lopez’ The Legend of Georgia McBride at the Lucille Lortel in the village, like Kinky Boots on Broadway, features stunning high heeled footwear and over-the-top pastel wigs. Add to that padded rumps and sequined brassieres, sized triple D! Backstage at the Cleo bar in Florida’s Panhandle, a sweet-faced Elvis impersonator, Casey (David Thomas Brown) re-fashions his studded jumpsuit into a dress and under the tutelage of the divine Tracy Mills (Matt McGrath), transforms. Voila! Dull as “The King,” he’s a dynamite Queen in drag. A Star is Born!