Gossip Central

Duncan Sheik at Café Carlyle: No Exit for Confessional Rock

Duncan Sheik, composer of the musical, Spring Awakening, a huge hit on Broadway in 2007, takes the Café Carlyle stage this week for a brief run of his original songs. You may remember, the musical is based on a 19th century play about teens discovering their sexuality, portraying rape, suicide and abortion. “If you think it gets more happy and exciting than this,” he said at the opening, after singing some rather eh, moody songs about “losses I must bear,” “don’t hold your breath.” He thanked the audience, including a friend who was celebrating his birthday, for allowing him to test this material, and never thinking he’d be nostalgic for the “halcyon days of the George W. Bush years,” he became political with “Star Field on Red Lines.”

Noah Baumbach’s “Stories” Premieres at the New York Film Festival

At the Q&A following a recent screening of The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) at The New York Film Festival, viewers professed to have seen themselves and loved ones in the story of a family immersed in the elder care of their father, Harold Meyerowitz, a narcissistic sculptor played to perfection by Dustin Hoffman. To say that his sons, --brilliant performances by Adam Sandler as Danny, and Ben Stiller as Matthew, --are engaged in the Freudian paradigm as rivals to each other in the grip of questionable parenting, is to describe in broad terms the specificity of Noah Baumbach’s fine script, and superb direction. Baumbach has made many movies since his memorable The Squid and the Whale, and this film follows closely, a next step in fictionalizing his own family story. As the writer Paul Bowles used to say, fiction must be truer than the table you can touch. By any measure of literary fiction, this film is a masterful rendition of a New York based family of our time.

Curb Your Enthusiasm: Now More Than Ever

After a replay of the infamous “Palestinian Chicken” episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm on HBO last month, with a scene in which Larry David has sex with the gorgeous Arab restaurant hostess, professing his return to the homeland, so to speak, viewers thought they had seen the limits, but no, the new season features the no-boundaries curmudgeon in fresh forms of insult and hilarity. HBO hosted a premiere screening last week for a who’s who of television and comedy at the SVA Theater, including Amy Schumer, Steve Buscemi, Mark Feuerstein, Lawrence O’Donnell, Aida Turturro accompanied by Michael Gandolfini, and the cast Susie Essman, Jeff Garland, Cheryl Hines, and many more.