Gossip Central

David O. Russell’s Amsterdam Premieres

“I’ve gone epic,” exuded the director David O. Russell at the lavish premiere of this movie Amsterdam at Alice Tully Hall this week. Epic and a surprise, Drake, one of the producers, introduced the screening. Epic might also refer to the scope of the film, set in World War I, the so-called Great War, The War to End All Wars. Or epic could refer to his characters, fictional representations of historic or quasi-historic figures performed by an epic cast: Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, the two Mikes, Myers and Shannon, Alessandro Nivola, Matthias Schoenaerts, Rami Malek, Anya Taylor-Joy, Timothy Olyphant, Taylor Swift—yes, that Taylor Swift, and Robert De Niro, many of whom joined Russell in a post screening Q&A with Ben Stiller. Of course, Ben Stiller being Ben Stiller, his first question was: wasn’t Flirting with Disaster—in which he had starred-- your favorite film? 

Everyone got the joke, warmed up by having seen the new film, Amsterdam. History-based, it is also funny. Turns out, David O. Russell loves history, and over the past six years enlisted Bale and Robbie to help him write a script unearthing little known events involving war, espionage, exploitative leaders of finance and industry, democracy, and all matters on the idea of history repeating itself. Rami Malek said that making this film with David O. Russell made him think of that saying in a less negative way, not so much doomed, as the values of love, friendship, and optimism prevail, also repeating themselves.

Salman Rushdie in Public

In one of the great Curb Your Enthusiasm vignettes, Larry David wanted to make a musical called “Fatwa,” the word itself giggle-worthy. But the fatwa on Salman Rushdie was no joke. Last week a lone, determined man got past light security at Chautauqua, a famous writers conference and knifed the author of Midnight’s Children and an Islam-offending novel called The Satanic Verses. As the story goes, without having ever read the book, the Ayatollah declared a bounty on Rushdie who had imagined mortal qualities in the prophet Mohammed. A translator was murdered in the ensuing outrage. 

Meanwhile, Rushdie had been in hiding in safe houses in England and the States for decades. In the 1980’s, someone sent the book to the American writer Paul Bowles who resided in Tangier, and worried about his expatriate status there if the authorities found out he possessed such a book. One year a hushed event brought the writer to the New York Public Library’s main branch for a PEN forum, an affirmation of freedom of expression; many celebrated Rushdie and the daring it took to pull this off. Needless to say, security was tight. And over time, Salman Rushdie let his guard down.

Ragtime at Bay Street Theater: Listen to Mother

The heart of the dazzling revival of Ragtime at Bay Street Theater is Mother, a character of enormous compassion. As played by Lora Lee Gayer, she’s a lovely presence who saves an abandoned black baby and his mother Sarah (Kyrie Courter), and navigates her well-to-do New Rochelle family through the vagaries and scandals of early 20^th century American life. Mother is part of an ensemble with talented actors performing the roles of Harry Houdini, Emma Goldman (Victoria Huston-Elem), Evelyn Nesbit (Cathryn Wake) and Booker T. Washington (Davon Williams), to name just a few of the famous personages populating E. L. Doctorow’s historic novel Ragtime, the musical’s epic source. Limning the current cultural territory of “Black Lives Matter,” the plight of the working class, and of newly arrived immigrants, Bay Street’s production seems especially fresh from beginning to teary-eyed end. Mother singing, “We Can Never Go Back to Before,” becomes an anthem for change-- in her marriage, and to the hopes and dreams of Americans—such as the play’s Coalhouse (Derrick Davis) seeking equality, justice, and democratic values. 

At Ragtime’s ebullient opening night, the audience leapt to their feet as the ensemble took their bows. Of course, it seemed to all that Ragtime’s intertwining stories were timeless, with love and compassion the only curing force. With music by Stephen Flaherty, lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, book by Terrence McNally, and under Will Pomerantz’ expert direction, Ragtime underscores—no pun intended: the power of a great night of theater holds its own curing magic.

Anna in the Tropics at Bay Street Theater: On the Virtues of Adultery

Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy knew something about women’s discontent in marriage. One of his greatest creations, the character Anna Karenina in his classic novel of that name, fuels the animus felt in the family in Nilo Cruz’s 2003 Pulitzer Prize winning play, Anna in the Tropics, now in production at Bay Street Theater. Set in 1920’s Tampa, Florida, the drama involves a Cuban-American family working in their cigar production factory. When a new “lector” arrives, a handsome young man who reads literature to the workers as they pull and wind the tobacco into smokable cylinders, his reading of Anna Karenina, all 1000 pages, makes a big impression—on both the women and the men. A huge turn-on becomes tragic.

As the play’s characters come under the spell of romance, Anna’s love for Vronsky in the Russian work, they examine their own marriages. Under Marcos Santana’s direction, the ensemble plays this conceit with few laughs, taking seriously the power of art to transfix. In the play, Christian Barillas is CheChe, who cannot get over his wife’s having left him with a “lector.” The reader becomes a catalyst for magic, as Moscow in the snow appears in the tropical windows while he reads. The character of Paloma, husband to Chiquita, one of the sisters working in the family business, does grow and change as a result of this literature. I caught up with the actor Guillermo Ivan who plays this husband, whose jealousy transforms him into a husband who listens, caring for his wife’s needs. On opening night, Ivan said he is now reading Anna Karenina—all of it. 

James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni: Lesson in Survival: 1971 at the Vineyard Theater

A young poet, Nikki Giovanni interviewed an elder statesman of letters, James Baldwin, on television in 1971. Enacted, voiced onstage at the Vineyard Theater, Lessons in Survival: 1971, joins a series of plays produced at this downtown venue that makes use of actual words uttered in real life situations to create a theatrical experience: Tina Slatter’s Is This a Room and Lucas Hnath’s Dana H. Deirdre O’Connell won the Best Actress in a Play Tony Award for her performance, after the work transitioned to Broadway. Bringing true words to theater turns out to infuse otherwise merely remarkable events with even greater power. 

Calling Baldwin (Carl Clemons-Hopkins) Jimmy, suggesting an informality that seems unimaginable today for such an austere figure, Giovanni (Crystal Dickinson) first wants to know why he expatriated to Paris for much of his writing life. To anyone’s ears, then and now, the loaded question would trigger a discussion of the largest subject in American history, the subject of slavery, and though 1971 was well after the emancipation of African Americans, the untoward legacy is foremost still in today’s reckoning for both blacks and whites.

Lost Illusions: A Classy Take on a French Classic

The French can be vicious, bringing backstabbing to a fine art. Just look at les Liaisons Dangereuses. This year’s winner of seven Cesars, including Best Film, went to Xavier Giannoli’s adaptation of Honore Balzac’s Lost Illusions, a splendidly captivating romp through 19^th century Paris via the extravagant “illusions” of a young, determined, and talented poet, as his ideals are bought and sold by alluringly fancy vipers of the first order. 

Fresh from the rural fields, the ambitious newbie makes his way to the big city’s swank salons, taking journalism as a day job. Needless to say, the work consumes him. He falls for a beautiful kept woman/would be actress, a lover of exceptional skill, who is ill (a little “la Boheme”). Lucien appears to have it all—acclaim, love, all except title, --until he does not. The Devil exacts his price. At Lucien’s inevitable fall, editors, rivals, --everyone exclaims, “Well, who do you think you are?” His shifting identity is just one of his conceits. In the French court of commerce and public opinion, betrayal –and its sister, humiliation--rule.

Weaving such tales of the ups and downs of Fortune’s Wheel with finesse and finery—with cunning contrasts in temptation and scandal, the French are masters. This is great work for an ensemble of actors starting with Gerard Depardieu, Cecil de France, Jeanne Balibar, Xavier Dolan, Salome Dewaels, and more. As Lucien, Benjamin Voisin plays the poet as pouty, seductive, and naïve.

A classic story, classically made! Yes, the French are great at tales of vicious misfortune, and that’s why we love them. 

Celebrating Guild Hall at Cipriani 42 Street

Many revelers at this week’s Guild Hall winter gala remembered that before Covid locked everyone down, they were celebrating the premiere East Hampton cultural institution at its 2020 annual gala. And while much has changed in these two years—the venue was now the cavernous Cipriani 42^nd Street—and, the 2022 honorees were Board Chair Marty Cohen and Michele Cohen without the customary Academy of the Arts recipients—the mood was exuberant, as this huge, yet intimate event of East End neighbors chatting, catching up has not lost any of its warmth. Academy president Eric Fishl recalled that in that pre-pandemic limbo, no one knew whether to fist or elbow bump but preferred to kick one another in the ankles. All these dressed up people kicking the s__t out of each other, he laughed.

Renee Zellweger in The Thing About Pam at the Whitby Hotel

Her spindly legs over sky high heels, Renee Zellweger, both star and a producer on NBC’s series The Thing About Pam, commanded the stage at the Whitby Hotel this week after a screening of the first two episodes of the 6-part series. Based on a true-life crime podcast, already well known, about a 2011 murder in small-town Troy, Missouri, The Thing About Pam is so tongue-in-cheek, you have to laugh at the shenanigans of bungling law enforcement and grieving citizens, as a beloved wife and mom—and daughter—is found dead of multiple knife wounds in her living room. The two-time Academy Award winning actress plays Pam, hardly recognizable with her pudgy face and physique, her legs like elephant trunks, who slurps endlessly on a giant sugary beverage further sweetened with cherry syrup. The camera can’t get enough of her fat face and squinty eyes as she figures out her next shady moves.

Freda Payne at The Cutting Room: What Love Could Be –And Is

An apt locale for a book party for a famed pop singer, the Cutting Room filled with well - wishers for Freda Payne’s memoir, Band of Gold, last week. Co-writer Mark Bego flew in from Tucson, wearing the most outstanding jacket, a print of black & white with sparks of bold color. Yes, it was rock n’roll --without the music. And Payne, resplendent in red, greeted everyone with a kiss and hug. Of course, I knew Freda Payne’s most famous pop tune, “Band of Gold,” grew up with its sound in my ears, her great voice on the proto-feminist lyrics: Left on her wedding night, she laments, all that’s left is a band of gold—and memories of what “love could be.” It did seem like a turning point in 1970. For Freda Payne, a jazz vocalist of note, this was a breakout, flying high on the pop charts.

Up next for her is a new release, “Freda Payne: Let There Be Love,” featuring duets with Dee Dee Bridgewater, Kenny Lattimore, Kurt Elling. With Johnny Mathis, her rendition of the Gershwins’ “They Can’t Take That Way From Me” is an inspiration. She is set to perform at Birdland on November 22.

Joel Coen’s Tragedy of Macbeth Opens the NYFF: Let It Come Down

As a tragic hero, a deeply flawed man, Denzel Washington was perfect for the role of Macbeth. He’d done downcast/larger-than-life before, say, in August Wilson’s Fences, and now in Joel Coen’s new film that opened the new season’s New York Film Festival, his Macbeth oozes Shakespeare’s eternal wisdom: It’s not that good to be king.

When Coen was asked whether Washington was his first choice for the role, his producer, Lady Macbeth herself, Frances McDormand said, “There’s no list for Macbeth. You must be born to it.” Seated between Coen and Washington, her two husbands so to speak, in life and in tragedy, on the Walter Reade Theater stage for a post-screening press conference, she professed to have instigated the project, having slept walked in Lady Macbeth’s shoes since she was 14. While there have been many Macbeths through the centuries, this one, in sumptuous and austere black & white most closely follows Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight, and yet Roman Polanski’s was referenced as well. Discussing the age of this murderous couple, the usual idea is to make them young and ambitious. McDormand and Washington make them older, passed over by the king, and wanting to get their due. We can attest to that feeling, Frances and Denzel, revel in a private joke.