Gossip Central

Peter Beard in That Summer, a New Grey Gardens Documentary

That Summer, the summer of 1972, Peter Beard and Lee Radziwill had the idea to make a film about East Hampton. On the Memorial Day weekend, a crowd of East Enders attended a private screening of That Summer in East Hampton. Director Goran Olsson was not present, nor was Lee, but Peter Beard and his wife Nejma Beard, a producer of this film attended, along with Bruce Weber, Joy Behar, and many others, to hear Vincent Fremont and Bob Colacello, experts on Warhol, tell stories about Andy Warhol and visitors Truman Capote, Bianca Jagger and many others to the Montauk estate back in the day. The film serves as a history of those heady times, of a great group of artists who came to Montauk in 1972.

Joe Pintauro Finds Salvation at the Parrish Art Museum

If Sag Harbor based playwright Joe Pintauro is serious about not always wanting to be identified as a former Catholic priest, he is going to have to stop focusing his consciousness on the human foibles of men of the cloth. While that is impossible, let’s hope he never does, because Pintauro’s work asks us to engage more deeply with our core beliefs, and our identity as human beings. On Friday night, the Parrish Art Museum in Watermill staged Salvation, an art song trilogy based on three of Pintauro’s one-acters, published in 1997. Kevin Jeffers composed the book, music and lyrics, having discovered Joe Pintauro’s work as he was looking for plays to put to music. The ethical and spiritual dilemmas of Salvation speak to faith in the unknowable, the divine.

Lesley Manville in Long Day’s Journey Into Night at BAM

In one scene in the excellent BAM’s Harvey Theater production of Eugene O’Neill’s epic-length, Long Day’s Journey into Night, you see Lesley Manville as Mary Tyrone preening in front of a mirror, as if she were in the fitting room of the movie, The Phantom Thread. The British actress was nominated for an Oscar for her role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie. Here in this play, it is an animated moment when Mary Tyrone shows the girlish whims she once had, and it is startling, commanding the Connecticut sitting room, taking center stage from the alcoholic men, her husband James, a miserly matinee idol played to perfection by Jeremy Irons, and their two sons, James, Jr. and Edmund (Rory Keenan and Matthew Beard). Her plight, after all, wrenches this drama, written in the 1940’s and hewn so close to the playwright’s life it was not produced till after his death, into the Zeitgeist: conjuring #MeToo moments, not to mention the opioid epidemic. You get her immediately; forced to go on tour with her husband, waiting in fleabag hotels and “one-night stands,” losing a child, and treated by doctors with morphine; this is not a role for sissies.

Wim Wenders’ Pope Francis: A Man of his Word at its World Premiere

All I ever knew of Saint Francis of Assisi was that he talked to animals, said filmmaker Wim Wenders this week, at a special screening of his latest film Pope Francis: A Man of his Word at the Whitby Hotel, just a stone’s throw from Trump Tower. The current pope is the first to call himself after the saint who lived 800 years ago, loved nature and the earth, and is said to have charmed a sultan of Egypt. If you think of the church only in terms of the gold threaded, bejeweled capes on view at the MET’s Costume Institute exhibition, you will find Pope Francis of another cloth.

Annette Bening in The Seagull

As guests filed into the room for a special screening of The Seagull at Lincoln Center, Patti Smith was enthusiastic for Chekhov, and Christopher Walken nodded hello to guests that included John Cameron Mitchell, Lena Hall, Ben Shenkman, Patricia Bosworth and A. M. Holmes. Stephen Karam who adapted the classic for director Michael Mayer brought Jayne Houdyshell. Playwright of The Humans, Karam had not yet seen The Seagull with an audience, and seemed thrilled: everyone laughed in the right places. The Seagull is, of course, a tragedy.

Always at the Carlyle: Then, Now, Let’s Hope, Forever

The specialness of the Carlyle Hotel, as landmark and cultural shrine to old New York, cannot be overestimated. So says a documentary film, Always at the Carlyle, directed by Matthew Miele and executive produced by the Carlyle’s own Jennifer Cooke, that premiered this week at the Paris Theater, itself an old New York cultural shrine. With many patrons such as Anthony Bourdain and George Clooney (they know a thing or two about hotels) extolling the hotel’s virtues, and Jon Hamm’s gentle critique of its prices--$10, 000 for one of the suites—yikes, and homages to legendary guests like Jacqueline Kennedy, and the scandals of a secret tunnel Marilyn Monroe is said to have used to enter for a tryst with John F. Kennedy—more yikes!

Linda Lavin’s Debut at the Café Carlyle

Beloved Broadway and television star Linda Lavin plays the Café Carlyle as if she is the most gracious host, inviting guests into her living room for an intimate soiree. One of those guests on the night we attended was Hal Prince who directed her in Candide, a reminder that though she’s known more for dramatic roles, and comedy, she can sing. As chanteuse for her Café Carlyle debut she is warm, charming, providing a distinct comfort zone of classic tunes. Age-less in sparkling blue, she wants to know, “I look pretty good, don’t I?” as if she needed to ask!

Heavenly Bodies: The Metropolitan Museum’s Religious Commitment

To say the latest MET Costume Institute exhibition, “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” is up there, as gorgeous, generous, and sumptuous as these yearly shows get, is to flirt with the ethereal. The Catholic imagination, as His Eminence Timothy Michael Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York, stated in his remarks at the MET’s Temple of Dendur, where divine cookies and coffee approached the sacrament, is testament to Christ’s art. The church is about truth, good, and beauty in praise of God, he said. One part Vatican, and another Versace, with gem-stones and jewels, capes threaded in gold juxtaposed with modest peplum monk-styled couture and almost no skin-revealing gowns and wedding dresses, the fashion inspired by Catholicism is a revelation.

Helen Mirren Honored at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Gala: Sashaying from Wild Child to Dame

“F-U-C-K,” Helen Mirren let out a primal scream from the stage of Alice Tully Hall, receiving her Film Society of Lincoln Center Chaplin Award from Jeremy Irons. “I just had to get that out of my system,” Mirren started the long version of her career history beginning with acting as the Virgin Mary at age 6. Well known for bawdy humor, she’s also known to have played the Queen “more times than RuPaul,” quipped speaker Robert DiNiro, who also noted, see what happens when you have weak immigrant laws. Isn’t it great that this award was given to both Charlie Chaplin and Helen Mirren, he went on, before launching into a commentary on the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner: seeing her look mildly hurt, he almost for a moment thought Sarah Sanders was human. And so a night dedicated to great acting over decades took a turn into the immediate and timely.