Gossip Central

Hamptons Journal: Susan Stroman Weekend at Guild Hall: Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick, Brad Oscar, and Mel Brooks Zoomed, Little Dancer Preview

Starved for Broadway’s reopening, a happy crowd packed Guild Hall for an evening of clips and anecdotes about The Producers, the winner of the most Tony awards of any musical in history. On a panel introduced by choreographer Susan Stroman, a winner of 5 Tonys herself, the show’s stars Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick, and Brad Oscar quipped and reminisced about the play’s Chicago debut, and the run on Broadway, shut down for 3 days in the aftermath of 9/11, but then it was Rudy Guiliani who urged everyone to get back to work. People did not know whether it was appropriate to laugh, said Oscar. And of course, the show offered the audience a way to grieve less for a two-hour period, Stroman remembered. Nathan Lane performed, but scheduled for a vacation he decided to take, he joked, “If I cancel my vacation, the terrorists won.”

And so the evening went with Lane recounting his first encounter with Mel Brooks in a swimming pool at the Ritz in Paris. Anne Bancroft, finished with her swim, went up to her room, and Lane thought, Mel Brooks is in the pool with me instead of with Anne Bancroft. He also remembered that it was Harvey Weinstein, a backer at the time, who read the all-important New York Times review at the opening night party . . . “and then went off to pee in a flower pot” . . . conflating the producer’s crimes with another #Metoo accusee. Matthew Broderick remembered people coming to the door, every performance someone else would show up, Al Gore, for example. Lane said Bill Clinton came, shook hands, but kept his eyes on Cady Huffman, the show’s splendid Ulla. But they were all in awe when Gene Wilder, the original Leopold Bloom, stopped by.

Kathy Hochul: At Brunch at Patti Kenner’s

When Patti Kenner sent out the brunch invite with Kathy Hochul for a date in early August, this seemed like tour-stop as usual for the lieutenant governor--to a lovely aged-cedar house just a stone’s throw from the legendary Maidstone Club and golf course in East Hampton. Even the postponement till today seemed normal, until the governor stepped down and, now we were greeting the first female to hold the highest spot in the state, the 57th governor of New York.

Her theme –breaking the glass ceiling—went from goal to fait accompli—as she spoke about her realization early in political life that little girls were looking at her. “Of course, I am ready on day one,” she told the enthusiastic crowd sipping fresh squeezed orange juice and munching on lox and bagels, “that’s what lieutenant governors do”—train for this moment. This was indeed the historic moment--she will get to summon all that leadership strength and moxie for a year before New Yorkers get to vote her in.

Hamptons Journal: Authors Night: One Cocktail Party Plus a Four Day Festival of Books

Weary of pandemic year lockdown, I was pleased to attend Authors Night 2021 in person under a tent on the East Hampton Library grounds, a scaled back celebration of books and the people who write them. Gone (temporarily) is the voluminous tent in a large field that could hold150 authors. Twenty sat at a long table behind their books in piles: Robert Caro with Working, film critic Jeffrey Lyons’ Hemingway and Me, a memoir of his bonding with the legendary author over bullfights, the latest cookbook from Florence Fabricant (The Ladies’ Village Society Cookbook) seated near the team Hillary Davis and Stacy Dermont, writers of The Hamptons Kitchen. What could be more geared for the pairing of land and sea?

Night life and the social scene! Noel Hankin with his wife Gwen sat behind piles of After Dark:Birth of the Disco Dance Party, about the clubs in midtown that inaugurated the era of Studio 54and celebrity culture. An homage to one person who never missed the party scene, Gwenn & Steven Stolman’s Bill Cunningham was There: Spring Flings and Summer Soirees, sold out almost immediately. Stolman explained how he helped Kurdewan, Bill Cunningham’s editor at The New York Times, assemble this collection of the photographer’s work after they toured the photographs cross country. As  Anna Wintour so aptly put it, “Everyone dressed forBill.” The Vogue icon is a star of Thomas Maier’s All that Glitters: Anna Wintour, Tina Brown,and the rivalry inside America’s Richest Media Empire.

Hamptons Journal: Bay Street’s Camelot, Robert Longo at Guild Hall, Diana Frank at Tripoli Gallery

Legends of King Arthur and his court are having a moment: The Green Knight in theaters, and out east, Bay Street Theater’s production of Lerner & Loewe’s Camelot --under the stars! Now a classic, its signature song “If Ever I Would Leave You” sends a particular nostalgic chill—ah love—especially for the musical theater genre that Bay Street does so well! Remember the glorious revival of Annie Get Your Gun, Bay Street’s very last production before the COVID shut down? Or the intimate production of Evita a year before? With Camelot--outdoors—BayStreet’s setting conveys less castle and more country as Camelot wields its special charms.

King Arthur in this imagining is a fair and just ruler, looking for equal representation in his governance, hence the knights’ round table. His liberal ideas come after he meets and weds Guenevere; at first, a dated gender bias marks the musical’s first act, especially brow-raising in our current discourse on the roles of men and women. The king’s attitudes progress when Sir Lancelot enters the story, as Arthur (Jeremy Kushnier), “Jen” (Britney Coleman), and “Lance” (Deven Kolluri) sing about good leadership, marriage, and loyalty, all performances solid and square. But, in this three-way expression of courtly love, a stylized representation of king and his knight/ knight and the queen --where the younger pair fall in love at their own peril, heat would be good. But that does not come till the second act.