Gossip Central

At Lunch with Michelle Dockery at the Lotos Club: The Sense of an Ending

The Sense of an Ending, a Man Booker prize winning novel by the British author Julian Barnes, has at center a protagonist, Tony Webster, an uninteresting man with a vastly interesting past. In Ritesh Batra's movie The Sense of an Ending, intertwining narratives of past and present meet at a point of mystery: a suicide haunts in the way all suicides leave ultimate questions with no possible answers. At lunch at the literary Lotos Club this week, just before the film’s release, Michelle Dockery, Jim Broadbent, Harriet Walter, joined director Ritesh Batra for a panel moderated by Amanda Foreman, to ponder this puzzling story; it’s the sense of an ending, right?

Sweeney Todd: The Barber of Fleet Street’s Revenge Tragedy

It is a tribute to the brilliance of Stephen Sondheim’s art that two so different productions of his work are now staged in New York. Uptown on Broadway, Sunday in the Park with George illuminates the creative mind of Georges Seurat, and downtown on Barrow Street, at the Barrow Street Theater, The Tooting Art Club’s production of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street inspires terror. With the theater tricked out as a pie shop, the audience seated at long tables designed for pub dining, the actors maneuver in your face, no matter that the play is essentially about a serial killer, a decent man brought low by the vagaries of Dickensian fate, his sidekick a woman trading in meat pies and, eh, alternate truths.