Gossip Central

Hamptons Journal: Double Helix at Bay Street Theater and Summerdoc’s The Eternal Memory

Can science define a musical? Bay Street’s season opened with Madeline Myers’ Double Helix, starring Samantha Massell as Rosalind Franklin, one of the scientific researchers who discovered the DNA helix. As it starts out, tuxedoed men at a podium receive the Nobel Prize for their groundbreaking research. If you know the history, you know someone vital to the discovery is missing. The show seems to follow a predictable scenario: the lab as a male dominated workplace, with the women lunching in a separate cafeteria. Soon, though, because of Myers’ excellent music and book, Scott Schwartz’s fine direction of an excellent cast, the story lifts off from the feminist formula to the particularities of this woman, her dedication, love life, sacrifices, and science. Yes, the Nobel Prize should have gone to her too.

In lieu of that, her story was so well played at Bay Street, Double Helix should be picked up for Broadway immediately.

Summerdocs kicked off its season with a Chilean movie, The Eternal Memory, directed by Maite Alberdi. The story of a couple, Augusto Gongora a historian of his country, covering the horrors of Pinochet’s regime, and Paulina Urrutia, an actress and activist journalist. As we meet them onscreen, she wonders if he knows who she is. Frail, he is not so sure, and she reassures him, they’ve been married for twenty years. Flashbacks to this couple in better times juxtaposed with archival footage of Chile’s difficult political scene provide a background for this story of a marriage, the ravages of his developing dementia, set against the large canvas of Chile’s past.

John Slattery, Steve Buscemi, Michael Shannon at Tribeca: Actors Direct

Among the pleasures of Tribeca this year, actors have taken the helm of movies, working well with other actors, and finding stories that reveal their strengths as directors.

Actor John Slattery, well known for his role in Mad Men, is not just another pretty face. He premiered a film at the Tribeca Film Festival as director: Maggie Moore(s), scripted by Paul Birnbaum, could not be funnier given that two, not one, women named Maggie Moore are murdered. Slattery’s Mad Men pal Jon Hamm—let’s just say he’s not the Don Draper heart throb we knew, --leads a cast of loony characters. Hamm plays a lonely widower who works as the cop on this bizarre coincidence of a case. SNL alum Tina Fey, nutty as a peeping tom neighbor, is divorced and their relationship grounds the dramatis personae, including a pedophile, a dumb fast-food store manager, a closeted Nazi freak, and a large, scary deaf man for hire.

Sad things happen and make you laugh but no one you really know and love gets hurt in the making of this madcap movie. Well, maybe except one.

And, big reveal, Slattery does fine work making all the comedy and poignance land.

Patricia Field Inspires Happy Clothes at Tribeca

Invited to a party to celebrate designer/ costumer Patricia Field and the fine documentary about her life and career premiering at Tribeca, one ponders the question: what to wear? After the Tribeca screening of Happy Clothes: A Film About Patricia Field directed by Michael Selditch, a colorful romp through her decades-long career in the business of fashion: the 8^th Street retail shop, her genius pattern combinations (plaids with florals that work) and accessories for the cultural icons starring in Sex & the City and The Devil Wore Prada, the better question is, is my outfit happy enough?

We all accepted Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw in a tutu, making it New York street attire no less, awkwardly avoiding a splashing puddle; that image adorned the sides of buses for years, and the tasteful matching of Anne Hathaway’s dressy shirts with giant cuffs and mini-pleated skirts, curated by Stanley Tucci for the pleasure of a white haired Miranda Priestly—that is, Meryl Streep styled to look like the supermodel Carmen dell Orifice, not Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Even the detail-oriented Darren Star capitulated to Field’s eye, her unique combos and stylings—for the diva and Everywoman, trans or not.

Unscripted: The 76th TONY Awards

The Writers’ strike was on everyone’s mind at the 76^th annual TONY awards on Sunday night. Opening with a gorgeous dance number on the expansive United Palace Theater stage, the TONY show was its own Broadway show on upper Broadway that is, in the heights, Washington Heights. We do know that Lin-Manuel Miranda has enormous influence in the theater community, and he also has some inspiring ideas. Ubering in, guests missed Radio City Hall for a moment but took in the glamor and glitz of this spectacular venue. TONY host Ariana DeBose welcomed everyone in her own language of movement, with that exuberant dance opening, breathless as she welcomed everyone, acknowledging writers— the lack thereof, --and saluting Puerto Rican day. This was the quintessential New York night.

Pre-televised, some awards for lighting and sound design were given out, with a wonderful tribute to John Kander whose New York, New York is now wowing audiences. Beowulf Borritt won Best Scenic Design of a Musical for that show, explaining how the sets were hand-painted, not video screened in his acceptance speech. Both Kander (96) and Joel Grey (91) were celebrated with Lifetime Achievement Awards—Grey receiving his from his daughter, Jennifer Grey. A star from the very start of his career, winning his first TONY for Cabaret (and an Oscar for the movie), Grey was the son of a Yiddish actor which goes far to explain his pre-pandemic production of Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish. He said, you never know when something you are offered that you don’t think is right for you, is actually right, such as Anything Goes in which he starred with Sutton Foster.

Many such legendary figures were on hand. When Leopoldstadt won for Best New Play, writer Tom Stoppard joined the cast and crew onstage; similarly, when Parade won for Best Musical Revival, writer Alfred Uhry spoke, followed by the “In Memoriam” reel accompanied by Juaquina Kalukango, last year’s winner for Paradise Square, singing “Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again” from Phantom of the Opera. Without saying so, the performance was a nod to Andrew Lloyd Weber who would not have a Broadway show in production for the first time in decades. Even though Funny Girl was not eligible this year, Lea Michele’s “Don’t Rain on my Parade,” was irresistible. And Will Swenson, starring as Neil Diamond in A Beautiful Noise, led a sing-along to “Sweet Caroline.”

Vadim Perelman’s Persian Lessons: How Do You Speak Holocaust?

A hit at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival, Vadim Perelman’s Persian Lessons, a fiction film of a quasi-true story of Holocaust survival might have a hard time being made today. Perelman, a Ukrainian born Canadian filmmaker has been on my radar since his 2003 feature, House of Sand and Fog which starred Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly who forge an unlikely friendship. Based on 14 pages of notes for a short story by the German writer, Wolfgang Kohlhaase, Perelman’s Persian Lessons is similarly grounded in an unlikely frenemy-ship between a concentration camp inmate and the German head of the camp’s kitchen. As Perelman told me on Zoom recently, a co-production among Russia, Belarus, and Germany, would be impossible today, given the war. And yet, with antisemitism a continued issue worldwide, such stories are imperative to tell.

Persian Lessons might be considered a masterfully told fable. Gilles (Nahuel Perez Biscayart), a French-speaking Jew rounded up for execution improvises a survival strategy, guaranteed to give him one more moment of life. Claiming to be Persian just as the commandant is looking for someone who can teach him Farsi—for when the war is over, so he can open a restaurant in Teheran—this commander, Koch (Lars Eidinger) proceeds to take lessons in Farsi from Gilles, to tragicomic effect. A relationship ensues, life-saving, yes, comic at times, amidst the barbarity and random cruelty of concentration camp agenda, but mutually sustaining. The conceit of the film is how Gilles creates a language that does not exist.

Fat Ham: A Backyard Wedding Leading to the Tony Awards

Fans of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet will find James Ijames’ audacious reimagining, Fat Ham, a hoot. Set in a backyard barbeque, the play starts with a white-suited jive ass (Billy Eugene Jones) arriving in a whirl of sulphurous smoke to tell his son, a juvenile brooder called Juicy (Marquis D. Gibson in the performance I attended), about the wrong that’s been done him at the hands of his brother and wife. Well, we get every spectacle but those damned “incestuous sheets.”

Along the way, as the characters sashay and butt butts celebrating a suspicious marriage onstage at the American Airlines Theater, we even get some soliloquies such as the one that asks, “what is this quintessence of dust?” On the way to revenge, Fat Ham delivers much existential dread in this house in North Carolina, a “liminal space between the past and the present with an aspirational relationship to the future that is contingent to your history living in the South, . . . inside the second decade of the 21st century,” according to a program note. James Ijames is clearly repurposing whatever lay “rotten in the state of Denmark!” 

Tweaking Shakespeare, both Juicy and his “love” and childhood pal, Opal (Adrianna Mitchell) are queer; as a sort of Polonius, Rabby (Benja Kay Thomas) and “Gertrude,” now Tedra (Nikki Crawford) are excellent beefing up the female side of the story. But it isn’t until the staid, conservative Larry (Calvin Leon Smith) morphs into a dancing god that the show hits its spectacular stride, becoming an outsized Las Vegas (or Broadway) revue. What a play within a play!