Gossip Central

Nathan Lane Leads a Star Studded “The Front Page” at the Broadhurst Theater

Wisdom has it, according to my dentist, the more star power a play has, the less it shines. Not so in the case of The Front Page revival at the Broadhurst Theater. Superbly cast with major Broadway veterans, Nathan Lane, Robert Morse, and Jefferson Mays, luminaries of stage and screen, John Goodman and Holland Taylor, and fine familiar faces: Dylan Baker, Dann Florek, Christopher McDonald, Halley Feiffer, Sherie Rene Scott, and Micah Stock, The Front Page is a laugh riot, with timely jibes at the print media. John Slattery, of Mad Men, as Hildy Johnson, a rising reporter about to be married, cracks everyone up when he says he’s looking at a career change, to advertising.

Jeremy Irons Does the Math in The Man Who Knew Infinity

At a special dinner honoring The Man Who Knew Infinity movie, and Academy Award winner Jeremy Irons at Bagatelle in the Meatpacking district this week, the discussion was on how you play a math geek. The answer: you have a secret weapon, a real math geek who can teach you how to scribble those equations effectively on a chalkboard. The man in question, Manjul Bhargava, was honored with a Fields Medal; Neil DeGrasse Tyson, “just your neighborhood astrophysicist,” as he describes himself, explained just how impressive the Fields Medal, is. It’s like the Nobel Prize.

Ana Gasteyer: So Hip at the Café Carlyle

Fans who loved Ana Gasteyer’s Saturday Night Live teacher trip with Will Farrell will find her cabaret show at the Café Carlyle a reminder, it’s just acting, or maybe just acting out. In the intimacy of this premiere supper club, located, as Gasteyer redubbed the neighborhood SoDal, that is South of Dalton, invoking the city’s most famous prep school, you know this funny woman, --remarking “It’s very fancy up here,” --is going to violate something sacred. That may be a response to her mother’s judging she’s developed into a “handsome woman,” whatever that means, and so she explains her act: “I’ll be working out my issues with you.”

Newtown: Sandy Hook Promise Infuses a Documentary

It’s been nearly four years since the Newtown Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting: 26 dead, 20 at age 6, and the memory is still green. Documentarians Kim A. Snyder and Maria Cuomo Cole went to Newtown, Ct. shortly after the event, and spoke to family, friends, and survivors to get a picture of how a community grieves. Their film Newtown barely mentions the shooter, a young man of no particular politics who was armed with an assault rifle that he took from his mother’s house after killing her. Newtown focuses on the community, detailing the aftermath for three families; we take in this tragedy’s particularity: Newtown stands out from other horrendous shootings that followed. This could be our town, our school, children we know and love. As one bereaved father asks, what did we do wrong that morning sending our children off? Nothing. The children were where they should be, safe at school.

Isabelle Huppert as the New Woman in Elle at the New York Film Festival

By the New York Film Festival’s final weekend, it felt like a French takeover: Isabelle Huppert was everywhere. Starring in two films, Mia Hansen-Love’s Things to Come, and Paul Verhoeven’s Elle, the actress went from press conference to dinner at Bar Boulud, her husband and son in tow. Elle is the French entry for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, and it is safe to say, it is out of the box. For a precursor out of Isabelle Huppert’s hundred or so films, think of Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, and Huppert’s frank portrayal of a woman’s sexuality. Elle opens with the unmistakable sounds of excessive breathing and violent wallops, in fact a rape as seen through the eyes of a cat.

Leonardo DiCaprio in Before the Flood: Our Last Best Hope

Leonardo DiCaprio’s Before the Flood, a documentary exploring this critical historic moment when we can actually do something about climate change premiered this week at the United Nations. Most compelling about this National Geographic film is its focus on the personal. Screened at the General Assembly Ecosoc Chamber with luminaries present, the film opens with Leo remembering a painting by Hieronymus Bosch from his childhood, “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” a triptych that goes from rich, saturated, edenic visions to bleak, scorched landscape. The focus on Leo’s journey is an effective way for viewers to grasp the immense problem of global warming.

Michael Moore’s Trumpland, Hillary, and Women’s Suffrage

Michael Moore is so passionate about America’s future, he had to make a movie converting Trump Republicans to Hillary. He’s never voted for her, he says to a select audience of about 700 at the Murphy Theater in Wilmington, Ohio, the birthplace of the banana split, and you can continue hating her if you already do, just vote for Hillary.

Mary-Louise Parker and Denis Arndt in Heisenberg: A New Science of Uncertainties

In the age of Internet dating sites, Manhattan Theater Club’s staging of Simon Stephens’ play Heisenberg, newly arrived to the Samuel J. Friedman Theater on Broadway after a successful off Broadway run, offers a unique point of engagement. Georgie (Mary-Louise Parker), a wacky, damaged young woman impulsively kisses a man on the neck on a London subway station. The man, named Alex (Denis Arndt), older (75!), a butcher by trade, and not a likely match for her at 42, becomes a verbal sparring partner, and bedmate. The title suggests science, a specific and famous theory related to uncertainty, but the real science here is chemistry. As odd as they seem together as a couple, a perfection develops, a negotiation of possibilities that may become a blueprint for alternatives to traditional girl meets boy, well suited to our times.

Christine Ebersole at Café Carlyle: After the Ball

Broadway diva is one name for Christine Ebersole, and at her sublime performance in the intimacy of the Café Carlyle, call her “working mom.” Her medley of “Inchworm,” “Autumn Leaves,” “(Have I Stayed) Too Long at the Fair” suggests a big-hearted view of love that could embrace children. She has three, adopted, and now finds herself an empty nester. Five years since her last run at the Carlyle, she’s looking for renewal, including in the mirror in the mash up of “Look at that Face/ What Did You Do to Your Face” which adds extra meaning to the Dorothy Fields and Jerome Kern classic, “The Way You Look Tonight.”

Riz Ahmed, Mahershala Ali, Aja Naomi King, Kara Hayward: Among the 10 to Watch at the Hamptons International Film Festival

The "10 to Watch" program at the Hamptons International Film Festival, used to be called “Rising Stars,” from which a very talented group of actors including Emily Blunt, Adam Driver, Alicia Vikander, and Dane DeHaan, rose. This year, the 4 of the 10 attending,  Riz Ahmed, Mahershala Ali, Aja Naomi King, and Kara Hayward, all have distinguished careers: Ahmed starred in HBO’s The Night Of, Ali in various television roles as a bad guy, King in How to Get Away With Murder, and Hayward, the envy of them all, landed a starring role in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom at age 12.