Gossip Central

Sophie B. Hawkins: A Free Spirit at Café Carlyle

Sophie B. Hawkins is the real deal: she composes her own songs and sings her heart out. At Café Carlyle, she channels Janis Joplin, whipping her mane around for a medley of “Ball & Chain /Piece of my Heart,” and goes nasal for Bob Dylan’s “I Want You.” Promising only one cover, she performs George and Ira Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me,” and gives the stage to John DeLay, for a piano solo, and a nod to the American songbook. But mostly, her brief Carlyle tenure features her new stuff, and it is well worth the trip.

Mike Birbiglia’s Sperm and Dana Delany’s Orgasm: Comedy at the Nantucket Film Festival

Comedy is rich, relevant, and raunchy at the Nantucket Film Festival. It helps that Ben Stiller is on hand for hosting awards nights, and for the annual comedy roundtable. Never mind that, as Mike Birbiglia aptly pointed out, there is no round table. On Saturday night, the ‘Sconset Casino was the site for stand-up with a theme of love letters. The conceit was this: Readers starting with hilarious host Ophira Eisenberg to comedic actors such as Kristen Schaal read letters from the likes of Oscar Wilde to Danny DeVito’s mother, and then followed up with a story of their own. If this were a competition, which it is not, Mike Birbiglia would win hands down for his reading of Tina Fey, and his depiction of forcing a sperm sample into a tiny paper cup, proclaiming, “My boys don’t swim.” If that does not sound funny to you, you had to be there.

An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power Closes the Nantucket Film Festival

Al Gore’s follow up to the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, brings climate change up to the present moment, or at least up to events before President Trump’s pull out of the Paris Accord. Under the fine filmmaking of a team, Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk, the documentary goes beyond the terrors of witnessing our ice melting to show what Al Gore has done in training an army of climate leaders to spread the message, and offer solutions. Of course the film goes into the Paris Accord and Gore’s work, along with John Kerry and others in forging a global unity regarding our carbon footprint. The film also shares Gore’s concerns over the Trump election and the people he has put in office surrounding him, many of them climate change deniers, showing footage of Al Gore entering an elevator at Trump Tower, when he met with Trump to discuss his concerns. But the film does not reveal what went on behind closed doors.

Nick Broomfield Brings Whitney: Can I Be Me to the Nantucket Film Festival

Nick Broomfield will receive the Special Achievement in Documentary Filmmaking Award at this year’s Nantucket Film Festival. The festival will also honor Tom McCarthy with a Screenwriters Tribute Award and David Crane and Jeffrey Klarik for Impact in Television Writing. As a documentarian, Broomfield is known for putting himself in his films. While some of his influences, especially D. A. Pennebaker, prefer a “fly on the wall” omniscience, Broomfield is noted for creating a detective suspense in his storytelling: His latest film Whitney: Can I Be Me, about Whitney Houston, will screen at the festival.

I caught up with Nick Broomfield by phone, prior to Nantucket. He was on his way to Lewes, near Brighton in the UK where his family has a house. It was boiling hot, he said, “but this is one of my favorite parts of the world.”

Taryn Simon and Tony Vaccaro: Photography on Long Island’s East End

At a grand exhibition at Guild Hall of Taryn Simon’s photography, a man of color looks out from his seat at a bar. The site could be the iconic American working class watering hole in Lynn Nottage’s Sweat on Broadway, with Christmas lights dangling down. But it is the American Legion Post 310 in San Diego, California, and according to the wall text this photograph documents the location where 13 people placed this man, Frederick Daye, but he was convicted anyway of rape, kidnapping, and vehicle theft and served 10 years of a life sentence. This color photography exhibition, “The Innocents” is Taryn Simon’s earliest work, from 2002, and from the look of the stunned faces, it could be plucked off today’s headlines, except that today, and here’s a sinister thought, many of these wrongly accused and convicted individuals might be shot first.

Amy Schumer Presents at NYWFT Designing Women Awards

Not since the late Joan Rivers have we had a comedienne so adept at putting herself down as Amy Schumer. Introducing her makeup artist, Kyra Panchenko, at the recent Designing Women Awards Ceremony held at NYU’s law library, the Trainwreck star was convinced she was not Panchenko’s first choice, given that she also made up Nicole Kidman, Laura Dern, Jessica Chastain, Naomi Watts, Kirsten Dunst, and Emily Blunt, among other Hollywood A-listers. Schumer was further convinced that they used her skin for close-ups of Blunt’s character in The Girl on the Train when she was all reddened from drink.

D. A. Pennebaker’s Monterey Pop Has IT

Celebrating the 50-year anniversary of the Monterey Pop International Festival, D. A. Pennebaker’s newly restored film premiered on Wednesday at the IFC Center in New York, with further festivities to follow in Monterey this week. The film is now part of the prestigious Criterion Collection. According to the recent Clive Davis documentary, The Soundtrack of our Lives, it was at Monterey that the CBS executive signed Janis Joplin to a record deal, following instructions to look for something new and different. Janis Joplin’s vocals on “Ball ‘n’ Chain” in this state-of-the-art concert film are only one of its many revelations, its pure joy. The camera trains on her bell-bottoms and mules, her feet moving to the music much the way Monk’s feet shuffled under his piano. The camera cuts strategically to Cass Elliot’s enraptured face in the audience, and others sporting flower tiaras, tie-dyes, and flowing hair.

The Man in the Ceiling at Bay Street Theater

Based on a children’s book by Jules Feiffer, the musical “The Man in the Ceiling,” premiering at Bay Street Theater, celebrates creativity, and more specifically the art of cartooning. From the perspective of Jimmy, a kid whose father only wants him to play ball like the other kids, this is also a story about following your vision, and believing in yourself against all odds, a message pertinent to young people, and everyone. So how does that translate into a musical? “The Man in the Ceiling” has one of the most imaginative sets ever produced on the Bay Street stage, some really snappy tunes by Andrew Lippa, and talented actors, particularly Jonah Broscow as Jimmy—that’s how!

Bette Midler: Unstoppable at the 71st Tony Awards

That Bette Midler would not sing at the Tony Awards made news in the week running up to the Tony Awards. As disappointing as that announcement was, it did not stop the hope that she might change her plan—maybe, we hoped--once the huge crowd filing into Radio City Music Hall on Sunday night saw the proscenium normally associated with her show, Hello, Dolly! Ahh, we were all forgetting that another musical, Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, also crossed stage lines. And in any case, the walkway was used in many ways, but not for Dolly. Consequently, The Divine Miss M was indeed present, received by this discerning audience with some reserve, until her acceptance speech for winning Best Lead Actress in a Musical when she went on and on thanking everyone including her makeup artist, and the Tony voters, many of whom, she quipped, she dated. But if she could wax on in her speech, even calling out to “cut that crap” when the music came on to stop her: who muzzled Midler?

Maudie and The Hero: Antidotes to Summer Superheroes

Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke give stunning performances in the movie Maudie, a fictionalized account of the life of artist Maud Lewis. True eccentrics, Maud and Hawke’s Everett forge an unlikely coupling when he, the local fish peddler in Nova Scotia, advertises for a housekeeper and Maud, arthritic, limps over. She’s escaping her family: a rigid aunt and dreadful brother, and doesn’t mind the scandal of living with the odd and sometimes abusive Everett just to be free. As housekeeper she’s drawn to beautifying, and taking a brush she paints everything in sight, adding butterflies to drab walls, flowers to furnishings. By the film’s end, no space in the minute house is left unadorned. These characters are deeply affecting. And it is not just the superb acting. Sally Hawkins is to Maud as Eddie Redmayne was to Stephen Hawking, a tour de force of physicality. After a special screening this week, at a party at the American Folk Art Museum, Ethan Hawke deflected attention from the excellence of his own performance: “Sally just goes through the roof,” he said, still awed.