Gossip Central

Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga in Macbeth: Dressed to Kill

A highly experimental Scottish play bloodies the Longacre Theater on Broadway. As the audience takes seats, cooks brew in pots (cauldrons) on a set that resembles a downtown city loft. Smoke blowers create a dreamy, sinister atmosphere. One actor, Michael Patrick Thornton, takes center stage, greeting the crowd, asking them to whisper the name of the play, Macbeth, to ourselves as if to expel the superstition attached to Shakespeare’s popular tragedy. This year brought us Joel Coen’s movie, Macbeth in abstract, in black & white, and this one contrasts in its specificity, red spots everywhere. Partly that’s owing to this Lady Macbeth, a dynamite Ruth Negga with sharply defined finger waves, a tiny frame, a bullet of a personality challenging her husband’s manhood. Would anyone doubt the potency of Daniel Craig as Macbeth? He’s a happy camper at the outset and as his life becomes more and more tarnished in blood: is it just a problem of laundry or just a change of expensive pajamas?

Out out brief spot. That’s a lot of blood, spurting from a man hoisted upside down, a pig releasing juices for an odd stew. Suttirat Larlarb’s costuming makes a splash. Craig is most stained, in white t-shirt, fur coat, brocade jacket, silk loungewear with armored vest. Negga dressed in a gold gossamer tiered gown, looking like Cleopatra, never has blood on her hands, but she’s busy scrubbing the floors. Till those woods encroach, --that’s always the opportunity for Macbeth’s greatest and most innovative dramatic spectacle.

A Holocaust Symphony Premieres at Carnegie Hall

Photo:  Aylin Tekiner

The Holocaust continues to unravel secrets. During this period of remembrance, a symphony by a survivor from Salonica, Greece pays homage to his community, its creative artists, and a little-known pocket of wartime history. You know the joke: how do you get to Carnegie Hall? Way more than practice! The music took a very long and arduous route by way of Auschwitz, culminating last week in an evening featuring Renan Koen on piano and a symphony conducted by Maestro Gurer Aykal from Turkey. Entitled “Hymns from Auschwitz,” the program, sponsored by Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County, was named for a newly composed piece by Elcil Gurel Goctu (b. 1979) for hazans, pianos, and orchestra, followed by the historic work, a symphonic postwar poem, whose composer Michel Assael (1918-2006) never heard his masterpiece performed.

As a researcher, renowned pianist Renan Koen was awed by the composers of Theresienstadt: how under the murderous conditions of the camp were they able to make art? Her work led to composer Viktor Ullmann who encouraged his fellow prisoners to write music before he was deported to Auschwitz, and murdered two days later. Michel Assael survived Auschwitz by playing in the orchestra there alongside Dr. Albert Menache who later wrote a memoir BIRKENAU (Auschwitz II): How 72,000 Greek Jews Perished. It may have been that Menache and Assael were performing when Ullmann was led to the gas chambers, as reported in the memoir. The music we were hearing at Carnegie Hall was Assael’s symphonic poem (1947-1948) inspired by Dr. Menache’s memoir.

How I Learned to Drive Comes to Broadway

Ewwww! That’s not my critique of Paula Vogel’s tight memory play, How I Learned to Drive-- rather the play, now having a Broadway debut after 25 years-- is brilliant. It’s the people: the family. At center, Uncle Peck and Li’l Bit (the sublime actors David Morse and Mary-Louise Parker) who originated these roles Off Broadway. You will wonder, what took them so long to get to Broadway? And you will marvel at how prescient the play is of the present moment. And then, you will realize just how normal and natural that “ewwww” factor really was all along.

Affable and courteous, Uncle Peck held Li’l Bit in his hand as she was born, he said, and from there he’s loved her every day, from that time, and when she was eleven, and he asked to unbutton her shirt as she sat on his lap. “Only if you want,” he said. And continues to say even when he courts her with gifts and encourages her martinis. And teaches her to drive. Which becomes a structural device marking scenes but also providing a nuanced and loaded language: avoid reverse gear and idling.

The Little Prince: An Intergalactic Journey on Broadway

Aerial feats, dance, a touch of Gaul—Antoine Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince at the Broadway Theater brings a beloved children’s classic to the stage with visual flair. Beginning as the book does with a crash landing in the desert, the show moves quickly from scene to scene as a boy in a yellow jumpsuit and yellow spiky hair from a nearby asteroid recounts his adventures to the downed aviator. Sort of a Candide meets Cirque de Soleil. 

One such encounter is with a beautiful rose (Laurisse Sulty), another with a wily fox (Dylan Barone), all of whom impart some wisdom to the boy (Lionel Zalachas). Chris Mouron, writer and co-director with the show’s choreographer Anne Tournie, does a fine job narrating these events. In green hair and tweetle-dum suit, she speaks with a heavy French accent, the story translated to English on both sides of the stage. My companion, 7-year-old Max Herman was grateful to be able to read her words, but was far more dazzled by a dancer with a toilet plunger, loving the spectacle—and proclaiming this part his favorite.

Ben Foster in The Survivor: The Camps Never Leave You

HBO launches its movie, The Survivor, with a lavish premiere just in time for Holocaust Remembrance Day. Barry Levinson’s latest stars Ben Foster as boxer Harry Haft, Auschwitz survivor and refugee. 

As Auschwitz stories go, Harry Haft’s exceeds the norm. Grasping his world in the camps and beyond in Brooklyn, Ben Foster, in the performance of the year, gets Haft --as boxer and as nightmare-ridden refugee-- in Barry Levinson’s adaptation of son Alan Haft’s book, The Survivor. Told in two-time frames, The Survivor pares down Haft’s experience: the Holocaust period in black & white when he is made to entertain the Nazis using his skill as a boxer. Nazi officer Dietrich Schneider puts him in the ring fighting fellow prisoners to their death. If you thought Billy Magnussen was “bad” in the recent James Bond movie, here he brings his super-bad game, “owning Haft,” as it were. In color, survivor Haft fights in the rings of Coney Island, fighting even Rocky Marciano, with one goal shaping his American existence. That is, to find Leah (Dar Zuzovsky), his love from before the war.

Picture Raging Bull meets The Pawnbroker. Imagine the violence, the searing impression of the blood oozing out of the fighters—with Haft so gaunt, so spent, you cannot even think of his having body fluids in his vividly depicted post-war visions, triggered even on his honeymoon when he marries Miriam, Vicky Krieps in a tender role. They go on as survivors do, having three kids, managing the past as best they can—singing “God Bless America” in Yiddish.

Clive Davis at 90

“The thing about turning 90,” quipped music impresario Clive Davis, “is I realized, last year I was 89.” The occasion was a birthday dinner at The River Café that was also a celebration of the Clive Davis Institute at New York University, an educational venue that also features studios where young artists can record their work. The pre-dinner opening of an exhibition of Davis’ archive showed off his gold and platinum records and a wall of artists Davis represented at Columbia, later Arista, J Records, and SONY: Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, Simon & Garfunkel, Barry Manilow, and so many more in Davis’ stellar career spanning six decades. Famously, Davis signed Janis Joplin after hearing her perform at Monterey back in the day. In one vitrine with personal correspondence a visitor can see invitations to concerts, such as one, to a supper at Davis’ home for Joplin following a performance at Madison Square Garden. Clive Davis has an ear. Has---he is still going strong.