Gossip Central

Tony Nominations: A Reflection

Wow! No Glenda Jackson for being Lear, nor Mockingbird for Best Play! What are they thinking? Frankly, the list is good and thoughtful, and pleasing for a critic who studies the scene, and wonders from some reviews, did they see the same play as I did?

First, Annette Bening in All My Sons, brilliant! And the play, nominated for Best Revival, is explosive. What makes it so great is her characterization as a woman who willfully pretends a truth about the death of her son in war. Arthur Miller’s play questions the high-minded motives for putting young men and women in harm’s way when governments wage war. The truth: industrialists win. For her to acknowledge this reality splits her in two. And it takes an actress at the level of Bening to get both sides of that personality. As director Jack O’Brien said, “There was no word for bipolar in the 1950’s.” That said, Janet McTeer deserves her Tony nod too, Sarah Bernhardt playing Hamlet.

Joel Grey Takes the Stage at Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish

Oy! The Cossacks are coming! In the essential viewing Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish at Stage 42, as we know, the Jews in the fictional town of Anatekva are threatened by pogroms. Eventually the lives of Tevye and Golde, their five daughters, and all town-folk are disrupted; they are forced to take refuge elsewhere. Could the creators of this marvelous 1964 play, Joseph Stein’s book, Jerry Bock’s music, Sheldon Harnick’s lyrics, have realized the extraordinary resonance of this story? Director Joel Grey’s genius, rendering it in the dying language of Yiddish, -- (even the actors don’t know it)-- is to make audiences consider this a blueprint of exile: perhaps, a “heimish” combination of old world sound in sepia tones against a threatening, violent outside world, one’s own family history. And no matter where you were born, it is.

Nathan Lane in Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus: Clowning with Corpses at the Booth Theater

Can you imagine a premise more ridiculous than a play featuring maids tidying up at a dump? Nathan Lane and Kristine Nielsen perform a comedic pas de deux, squeezing the gas out of dead Roman corpses in a giant heap in Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus at the Booth Theater. Cadavers require care: servicing them, Gary and Janice, (Lane and Nielsen) suck body fluid, and tend to erect penises, lucky to have jobs. What a dump!

Echoing ancient politics: Gary proclaims, the mind has a lot to clean and organizes a coup, plotting to save the entire world and put an end to tragedy. Nielsen as Janice provides the appropriate skepticism, doing her signature grimaces and ambling among the bodies as choreographed by Bill Irwin and directed by George C. Wolfe. An optimist joins the couple: Carol (the adorable Julie White) in a lovely pink dress (Ann Roth’s costumes are superb), surely the color of high hopes as opposed to Gary and Janice’s hobo wear.

Halley Feiffer’s “The Pain of My Belligerence:” Reality Bites

At Playwright’s Horizons, Halley Feiffer, author and actor is making it with a serial adulterer, with Hamish Linklater in the role, in her comedy “The Pain of My Belligerence.” A master at creating young women who laugh at themselves, Feiffer explains in her program note, her plays skim the neurons of her life, and they are funny until they speak sad truths. In this case her character Cat falls for Guy, who seduces by taking nips at her exposed shoulder on their first date, and in classic wrong guy mode, makes promises that he will not keep. The narcissistic fatuous Guy is especially good at being this “monster” man. Director Trip Cullman keeps their love story zipping along. We, her audience, are privy to Guy’s double talk, of course; he’s seducing us too. (Caution: there’s partial nudity too, and the players are very attractive.) But Cat suffering undiagnosed Lyme’s Disease, reflects Feiffer’s obsession with illness as metaphor, to borrow from Susan Sontag. What can be more physical than the deterioration of one’s body?

Food Bank of New York’s Can Do Dinner

The carpet was orange at Cipriani Wall Street, for the annual Food Bank of New York’s Can Do Dinner this week. The Four Tops in white sequined jackets as well as Neil Patrick Harris and his partner David Burtka basked in its glow. One prize auctioned at the gala was a meal cooked by Cordon-Bleu trained chef, Burtka for your guests at your home. The couple would take over your kitchen, Harris acting as mixologist. With Christie’s Lydia Fenet keeping it fast and funny, that item went for a tidy $30,000 with the money going to help the hungry. Among the honorees, Jose Andres was feted for the great work he’s done this year, particularly in bringing food to Puerto Rico still recovering from two hurricanes two years ago, when the island suffered food and electricity shortages. You do remember a certain orange person tossing some Bounty to the hungry populace.

Leonard Cohen: A Crack in Everything at the Jewish Museum: A Way to Say Goodbye

The Jewish Museum opens a dynamic homage to Canadian poet/ songman/ novelist/ cultural icon Leonard Cohen this week, focused on his art, and work from others inspired by his life and oeuvre. Staring up at an image of myself reclined comfortably, I experienced his “Famous Blue Raincoat” with words projected on the walls as well as images inspired by the song. This was Ari Folman’s contribution, “Depression Chamber,” an installation, like a therapy session, that must be experienced one person at a time. I anticipate lines, even with a timed reservation. It is just one piece from artists such as Christophe Chassol and Tacita Dean occupying three floors of the museum. Taryn Simon’s “New York Times, Friday, November 11, 2016,” the newspaper displayed in plexiglass illustrates the timing of Cohen’s death just a few days before our current president’s election to office. There is some symbolism there, especially in the juxtaposition of Obama and Trump’s first meeting, and an advertisement for Bernie Sanders’ book, Our Revolution.

Cradle Will Rock at Classic Stage Company: The Workers of Yesteryear

Nothing says worker like hair tied up in Rosie the Riveter do-rag. The Classic Stage Company’s revival of Marc Blitzstein’s 1937 song cycle, Cradle Will Rock, hits a proletarian note. The talented ensemble, led by Tony Yazbeck as Larry Foreman, made up of steel workers, cops, newsmen, church officials, or factory owners, attempt or resist unionizing. Not your typical subject for a musical, this leftist cry was very much reflective of between the wars issues.

The genre of “art song,” with composers Ned Rorem, Paul Bowles, Blitzstein, and others using song whimsically or politically, was quintessentially American. At CSC, with only a piano (played by four actors) accompanying, characters emerge, all in service to Mr. Mister (David Garrison). This way, a lot gets rationalized, thrashed out, manipulated into “fake news” in song.

Aretha Franklin at 29 Stars in Amazing Grace: “She Turned Your Ears into Eyes”

At the New York premiere of the documentary Amazing Grace, the recording session for Aretha Franklin’s historic 1972 gospel album, Clive Davis told an audience of many who knew the iconic singer, she invited him to dinner 40 years ago and asked, Could she be a hit?

From this auspicious beginning, at a screening room near the Freedom Tower, Dr. Amos C. Brown, pastor of the Third Baptist Church in San Francisco, provided a context for the church concert, backed by the Southern California Community Choir led by Anthony Hamilton, with James Cleveland accompanying Franklin at the apex of her singing chops: “People escaping lynching in Mississippi, at the height of despair, got the gift of music from Aretha Franklin.”