Gossip Central

Rita Wilson at the Café Carlyle: Picturing Tom Hanks

“I’m in a roomful of people I know,” Rita Wilson began her intimate set at the Café Carlyle on Thursday. Though this was not opening night, the room took on an extra glow: on one side sat Michael J. Fox, on the other, Tom Brokaw, Carolina Herrera, Ken Auletta, Richard Cohen, and William Ivey Long who told me he dressed Wilson for her role as Roxy Hart in “Chicago.” Sprinkling her songs with anecdotes involving her husband, she’d say, “Picture Tom Hanks,” and you could see him trying to mollify a disgruntled guest at the hotel. Though she claimed he’s the opposite of every thing she thought she wanted in a man, you could see he’s the love of her life. Another refrain was the unforgettable title of her new album, “Rita Wilson.”

Carol Composer Carter Burwell: An Interview

Todd Haynes’ film Carol, an evocative love story set in the 1950’s, adapted from an edgy Patricia Highsmith novel, The Price of Salt, is nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Original Score, composed by Carter Burwell. His music can be heard in several current movies including the Oscar nominated animated Anomalisa, and the Coen Brothers’ Hail, Caesar!. I caught up with the Carol composer by phone in early February, when he was in Hollywood for the pre-Oscar luncheon for those nominated, to talk about Oscars, his work on Carol, and the Motion Picture Academy. 

“Til it Happens to You:” Diane Warren’s Oscar-Nominated Collaboration with Lady Gaga

The Hunting Ground, a powerful documentary from filmmakers Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, shines a light on the widespread phenomenon of rape on college campuses. The film’s music supervisor Bonnie Greenberg called Diane Warren to write the music. The prolific and popular songwriter with 7 Oscar nods immediately said yes. Now, with “Til it Happens to You,” that makes 8 nominations for Original Song. In a recent phone interview, I asked her about this song, and collaborating with Lady Gaga.

“This Place” at the Brooklyn Museum: Outsiders Photograph Israel

In the fall of 2012, the French-born photographer Frederic Brenner took me to a swimming hole in the Bet Shean valley in Israel. Crowds sat on the edge of rocks waiting to jump in. Brenner exulted in the place, where the Romans, he told me, came in ancient times, a site I “dare not miss.” He had taken a hand-picked group of photographers there, as part of a briefing for a grand project he had devised. The photographers were then commissioned to take pictures of Israel. After exhibitions in Prague, Tel Aviv, and West Palm Beach, this project reaches its next great moment at the Brooklyn Museum in “This Place.”

Simple Song #3 in Youth: An Interview with Composer David Lang

In Paolo Sorrentino’s movie Youth, Michael Caine plays a retired composer on holiday at a spa in the Swiss Alps. He hears a young student practicing the composition for which he is best known. The precocious boy says his professor finds it easy to learn, and continues, “It’s more than that. It is beautiful.” Caine’s character replies, “I composed it when I loved.” The music, “Simple Song #3,” is now nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Song. Last week the Pulitzer Prize winning composer David Lang, known for his work in classical music, stepped out of the class in music composition he was teaching at Yale to talk to me about making music for movies.

Linda Lavin in Our Mother’s Brief Affair

At first inRichard Greenberg’s Our Mother’s Brief Affair, as described by her son Seth while she is on her deathbed, Linda Lavin’s Anna appears to be cut from the familiar cloth of Great Neck moms, ambitious for their children and somewhat lost in suburban torpor. But Anna has a secret, actually two, that she needs to impart to her children. Abby (Kate Arrington) flies in from California, and the siblings learn about their mother, the narcissistic woman with great gams, they’ve grown to distrust—she was nostalgic for a time that never happened, says Seth (Greg Keller). Well, according to Anna, a great adventure enlivened her boring past.

John Lloyd Young at the Café Carlyle: A Jersey Boy Goes Rogue

Trading in the tux for leathers, John Lloyd Young used aviator glasses to hide his prom date good looks, but this makeover did not deter his devoted fans on opening night of his set, “Yours Truly,” at the Café Carlyle. Yes, there was no shortage of Jersey Boys hits with “Sherry” and “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” but first he opened with a warbling “Stardust,” then to “My Prayer,” before he talked tough to his music director and keyboard man Tommy Faragher, “Let’s open a vein,” he said, leading to “Hurts So Bad” and channeling Roy Orbison for “Say No More.” 

Jane Fonda at Caroline’s Comedy Club: Championing the Equal Rights Amendment

Photo: Paula Schwartz

Sunday night’s Superbowl may have been the focus for a majority of Americans, but a rival event took place at Caroline’s Comedy Club, with Jane Fonda as M. C., introduced by Gloria Steinem. Calling herself a quintessential late bloomer to feminism, Jane Fonda recalled that she really did not understand what it was till she was 64, when she saw Eve Enssler in The Vagina Monologues. “I cried and laughed. How can you be a feminist, leaving the essential part of yourself behind as I did with my father, husbands, and lovers? My feminism dropped from my head into my body.” And so began a night of comedy featuring Rosie O’Donnell, Gina Brillon, Michelle Buteau, Judah Friedlander, Wyatt Cenac, Sarah Jones, and Sasheer Zamata, who riffed with Fonda in several personae, including a character named Bella, named for Abzug.

Christopher Plummer in Remember: The Uses of Dementia

In Atom Egoyan’s new feature, Remember, Christopher Plummer, more commonly seen as a German—think The Sound of Music—plays a Jew, a survivor of Auschwitz. In the assisted living facility where his wife Ruth has just died, a fellow survivor Max (Martin Landau) now asks him to live up to a promise, to avenge the concentration camp blockfuhrer who had murdered their families seventy years ago. So Remember becomes a rather unusual road movie, with Plummer’s aged Zev, a man afflicted with dementia, on a revenge mission. Not since Inglorious Basterds, to which this more somber movie should not be compared, have we had such a compelling fantasy plot seeking justice