Gossip Central

Chita Rivera Remembered at the Café Carlyle: Putting on her Vamp

Broadway musical legend Chita Rivera takes the narrow strip of stage at the Café Carlyle, maneuvering her sequined body strategically so she won’t end up in your vodka tonic. Nobody moves like Chita Rivera. The consummate showwoman, she gives a great, not to be missed night, starting with “A Lot of Living to Do.” For her West Side Story medley, in honor of its 60^th anniversary, she tells of Leonard Bernstein teaching her the role of Anita, and sings “A Boy Like That,” and “America.” With stories galore, and memories of performers who inspired her, such as Rosemary Clooney from whom she learned she could just stand there and sing, and then of course defying that she shimmies through “Sweet Happy Life,” advising, “It’s great when your spirit and body get together.” When she sings “Where Am I Going?” from Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields’ Sweet Charity, you feel grateful to have her right here, coquettish as three hookers, “Camille, Collette, Fifi” and wistful singing the ups and downs of Jacques Brel’s “Carousel.”

With all due respect to Catherine Zeta-Jones who earned an Oscar for her film role as Velma in Chicago, Chita Rivera blows away all competition. Of course she originated the role of Velma in 1975, opposite Gwen Verdon, only one of her iconic Broadway performances in a career that includes Bye Bye Birdie, The Rink, Kiss of the Spider Woman, as well as West Side Story. Accompanied by an expert band, with music director Michael Croiter on guitar, Jason Loffredo on piano, Jim Donica’s bass, and Dan Willis reeds, she samples from her Broadway hits including the show-stopping vamp for “All That Jazz,” top hat, cane, and all.

The Jonathan Larson Project: His Words, His Music Downtown

A new musical revue, The Jonathan Larson Project, at the Orpheum Theater on Second Avenue is proof of a simple fact: there’s never enough Jonathan Larson. Sure, opening night was a fan fest, with many having sampled the work the writer/ composer left behind after his truly untimely death on the eve of his Rent’s downtown debut. Now assembled for its own entertaining evening, conceived by Jennifer Ashley Tepper, his compositions remind us all of his awesome talent.

“Not a word has been changed,” says the program. His lyrics remain topical, whimsical, pure joy. A standout was Lauren Marcus’ hilarious romp around the stage, hose in hand for “Hosing the Furniture.” Larson had contributed the song for a 1989 revue about the 1939 World’s Fair, imagining the future. According to the notes, Larson knew Stephen Sondheim would be there at the premiere. Working hard, he won the Stephen Sondheim Award. The number comes close to a forgotten American musical genre, the art song. Silly and fun, it hearkens back to an era, to a lyric like Paul Bowles’ “the best part of a picnic are the napkins.”

Larson’s “Casual Sex, Pizza, and Beer” had been written on “a junky spinet piano with missing keys that he found on the street and rolled into his first apartment.” In performance, the ensemble featuring Adam Chanler-Berat, Taylor Iman Jones, Andy Mientus, Jason Tam, and Marcus makes the song a youthful, raucous anthem. Echoes of Rent abound. Bittersweet hints of the show’s various permutations, making it to Broadway and beyond were noted, all limned in the hit 2021 movie, "Tick Tick . . . Boom" with Andrew Garfield as Larson.

Michael Moore: Pennebaker Career Achievement Award at Hamptons DocFest: Unleashed and Undeterred

Even Covid could not keep Michael Moore back. Of course, everyone at Hamptons DocFest was disappointed the irascible filmmaker could not make the scene for his Pennebaker Career Achievement Award—named for D. A. Pennebaker and presented by Chris Hegedus--, but show up he did, larger than life on Zoom. “Now everyone can see I really have hair,” he said, with a head shake. Usually tamed under a baseball cap, his ample head of hair was making a rare, tousled appearance. Hamptons DocFest would be screening his now classic ROGER & ME, his 1989 confrontational view of GM outsourcing their production from his hometown Flint, Michigan. All a young Moore wanted was to take CEO Roger Smith on a roadtrip around Flint to show him the impact of his business decision. His thwarted attempts are satiric, a sad laugh at his America—and ours-- on the decline. How timely!

The festival, well underway in Sag Harbor, had screened UNION the day before, a look at Amazon and the ongoing protests of workers, underpaid and overworked. Fulfillment indeed! Now on the Oscar docs shortlist for Best Documentary, the film makes you want to say, I thought slavery was ended in America. Think again. Think of the history of unions in America, democracy writ large. Where are you, Jeff Bezos? Attention must be paid!

Between DOCNYC and Hamptons Doc Fest with the inevitable overlap of non-fiction films, truly stellar work emerged: BLUE ROAD: The Edna O’Brien Story opened DOCNYC. Sinead O’Shea’s doc illuminates the transgressive sexual boldness of the Irish writer. Jill Campbell’s BEYOND THE GAZE: Jule Campbell’s Swimsuit Issue, an inside glimpse into the woman who made the Sports Illustrated’s most financially successful and most anticipated magazine of the year.

RaMell Ross’ The Nickel Boys: Re-Viewing Racial Injustice

Harrowing tales of black boys and men during the Jim Crow era are the meat and potatoes of Pulitzer Prize winning author Colson Whitehead’s fiction. When filmmaker RaMell Ross, who made the acclaimed 2018 documentary “Hale County, This Morning, This Evening,” was given an advanced reading copy of Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, he was working on an exhibition in New Orleans on the history of the American South and its imprint on the Black soul. His installation and the novel, about two boys in a barbaric reform school serving time for arbitrary crimes—essentially because they were Black and vulnerable-- seemed to put the filmmaker on a thematic path toward his exploration of Black identity.

The result is an edgy film, arty in the best sense. Innovative, the movie takes a novelistic approach to visual storytelling. About a real-life reform school, the fictive Nickel Academy, is grim --and even grimmer for its Black population. Punishment, perhaps a turn on a torture device meted out by Spencer (Hamish Linklater) may also extend to murder and burial in an unmarked grave. Given the disquieting details, as viewer, you may find yourself looking up at a face, the sky, the branches of an orange tree, the interior of a dorm or cafeteria from an unexpected angle, and wonder, how did they get that shot?

At the premiere screening, on the New York Film Festival’s opening night, Ross spoke about not wanting to overburden the actors with concepts but to have them experience each other. He fitted the actors with camera rigs literally strapped on. In more traditional filming, you always assume the camera is there. With the rig on, actors have always to be more aware. Daveed Diggs spoke about wearing the heavy rig all day for fear of losing perspective. Fred Hechinger observed that actors and cameramen seemed to exchange roles in the filmmaking. The result is as close as I’ve ever seen to a novel-to-film adaptation that translates technique as well as story. Already nominated for top awards, RaMell Ross and “The Nickel Boys” are high on the lists predicting Best Director/ Best Film Oscar nods.

The Commandant’s Shadow: Rudolf Hoss’ Secondhand Smoke

“I had the best part of my life in Auschwitz,” says Hans Jurgen Hoss, son of the killing camp’s commandant, Rudolf Hoss—without a trace of irony. A fictional version of his time there can be seen in the Academy Award winning, THE ZONE OF INTEREST; he’s one of the five children who frolicked in the garden beside the camp’s walls, oblivious to what was going on. As he says in the documentary, THE COMMANDANT’S SHADOW, he thought it was a prison and was happy to be able to live where his father worked. In his late ‘80’s, taking the filmmakers around the house, he shows where the crematoria could be seen from an upstairs window, noting there were fewer trees then. He does not recall a stench. His son Kai, Rudolf Hoss’ grandson says, understating the difficult matter of his father having been a child next to the murder of millions, “I think my father has repressed memories.”

Astonishing but true, awaiting trial for war crimes in Nuremburg, Rudolf Hoss wrote his autobiography, segments of which form a compelling narrative of what exactly went on in Auschwitz, providing a detailed account and perhaps varnishing his reputation, a confession. He watched as children were torn screaming from their mothers and thought of his own family, he writes. Director Daniela Volker was amazed that his book was not more widely known. Even Hans only read it for the film.

Is it merely a German boast when Kai Hoss asserts repeatedly, “My grandfather was the most successful mass murderer in human history?” Tasked with creating an efficient killing machine as the Fuhrer demanded the Final Solution for the Jews, Hoss was hands on. Now a man of the church, his grandson Kai copes with this legacy through scripture, God’s grace, and his ministry to others in Stuttgart, he tells me at the film’s New York premiere at the Whitby Hotel.

Also present was Maya Lasker-Wallfisch, the daughter of Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who, as a young woman transported to Auschwitz, was in luck. The orchestra needed a cellist; playing music kept her alive. In the film we see her celebrating her 98th birthday in London. Distant and tough on her daughter, Anita’s mothering was no-nonsense. Now a psychoanalyst, Maya sees her life as a mess.  Moving to Berlin, she memorializes her murdered grandparents who she never met in the effort to reclaim what might have been-- had life in Germany been possible. Despite a hopeful and generous world view, Anita’s open hyper-criticism of Maya is evident. “Your Auschwitz is different from my Auschwitz. I did not know if I would live another hour,” she tells her daughter even as Maya is desperate to know more. Anita triumphs hosting Hans Jurgen Hoss for coffee and fruit pie in London—an utterly remarkable, historic meeting, given the sides of the wall each occupied in the war years. This coming together is the film’s climax, and summing it up, Anita delivers the film’ zinger: “Isn’t that beautiful?”

Jennifer Holliday at the Carlyle Café

Tony award winning Jennifer Holliday makes her debut at the Café Carlyle, not far from where she starred on Broadway as Effie in 1981 in “Dreamgirls.” Singing “I’m Still Here,” Holliday channels ancestors—Barbra Streisand among them-- in a set that features selections from the American songbook. But more, she evokes a prior Café Carlyle resident, the legendary Elaine Stritch, who made this Stephen Sondheim “Follies” hit her signature song. Holliday now makes it her own, and ends her generous set with her “Dreamgirls” anthem, “And I’m Telling You—I’m Not Going.”

Great news! At 63, Jennifer Holliday in a magenta sequined sheath, uses the intimacy of the Carlyle stage to sing about love, and honor her muses, Michael Bennett and Marvin Hamlisch. Their advice brought her to the standards that make this show so special—“Taking a Chance on Love,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “In a Sentimental Mood,” “Caravan,” “Body and Sou,” to name a few. Working in a jazz idiom –scatting like Ella Fitzgerald and mixing in her R&B chops-- she’s backed by an excellent band: music director Shedrick Mitchell on piano, Eric Wheeler on bass, Charles Haynes on drums, and Jarien Jamanla on sax.

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.”

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s Final Season: Tits Up!

In fact, two tits up! The stunning final season makes for a picture of life as a stand-up comic for Mrs. Maisel and her agent Susie, or Susan, depending on your history with her. Our heroine is now gainfully employed: she’s a writer on the evening’s popular celebrity television talk program, The Gordon Ford Show. The season flips through time periods, juxtaposing Midge’s rise to comedy superstardom with her rookie warm-up to fame. Both Midge (Rachel Brosnahan) and Susie (Alex Borstein) learn on the job, the hard way. Mutually dependent, they have each other’s backs—except when the mob’s involved—becoming an object lesson in female friendship. Working on television, on a popular evening talk show, Midge writes for Ford, and though there’s a taboo on actually getting on the show if you are a writer, well, you can guess that Midge gets there. And, having delivered a great speech to her boss about how if she slept with him, she would never know if she got the job by her talents or some casting couch. It’s a proto-feminist monologue that would work in our day.

Susie becomes a famous agent, roasted at the legendary Friars’ Club. Danny Strong gives an outstanding performance as a rival agent, and fills everyone in on her backstory. Susie’s sister gushes and soaks up the air in the room, refusing to leave the podium. [An aside: Show biz being what it is, she played by Emily Bergl, the very actress who is currently on Broadway playing Sean Hayes’ Oscar Levant’s wife in Good Night, Oscar, a drama that similarly offers a glimpse of television’s salad years.] As to the Friars, the whole set up is a piece of New York history, playing out in real time; faced with financial ruin, the Friars’ Club is about to end if someone doesn’t come up with a way to save it—soon.

Nathan Lane in Pictures from Home: Triumph of a Salesman

In the avocado and sea greens of a suburban development décor, the Sultans, Irving and Jean, entertain their grown son Larry most weekends in Pictures from Home. A play version of photographer Larry Sultan’s 10-year project to capture his parents, posed and documented, so he can examine the sinews of their marriage and parenting strategy, Pictures from Home at Studio 54, is the story of the making of his celebrated photo project, and so Irving (Nathan Lane) and Jean (Zoe Wanamaker) “entertain” Larry’s (Danny Burstein) ambition more than amuse him, although they amuse him and the audience plenty in Sharr White’s dramatic adaptation.

Irving’s life as a salesman meets a fate close to Willy Loman’s, except that here we see the demise pass through retirement to the desert, to a house with a pool looking onto a golf course. As Irving surveys his American Dream, he only hopes to live long enough to enjoy it. The familial patriarch, Nathan Lane is serious, and funny even as he attempts to hide his limp, hoping no one will notice he has one. Bartlett Sher directs his actors well. A master of physical humor, Lane is also adept at cutting down a son, and a wife, as needed. To these parents, Larry is pathologically intrusive, until his book is published with accolades galore, openings, parties, notoriety. Watch Nathan Lane beam.

Julie Benko at Birdland: No Rain on her Parade

Photo: Kevin Alvey

Birdland became Preservation Hall North as Julie Benko marched her band on stage for a set called Euphonic Gumbo. The performance, inspired by the French Quarter of New Orleans, was hardly a random soup, but more of a well thought out, scenic visit to the Crescent City, beloved by Benko and her husband, jazz pianist Jason Yeager who makes her arrangements of classic tunes entirely fresh for her.

It helps that the seven-piece band includes first rate players: including Michael O’Brian on bass, drummer Jay Sawyer, Andy Warren on trumpet, Evan Christopher on clarinet and Ron Wilkins on trombone. Mixing up the music and her story-telling, Benko created a quiz with prizes that include Café du Monde chicory infused coffee, her CDs, and a return to her next Birdland gig—all great because, as she demonstrates amply, she is a master at the cabaret genre, her theme enabling her to provide a history of the beloved Louisiana city, as well as lovely renditions of the tunes.

Neil Diamond on Broadway in A Beautiful Noise: Portrait of the Performer in Treatment

Fans and first-nighters greeted Neil Diamond as he emerged from a black town car on West 44 Street at the Broadhurst Theater for A Beautiful Noise’s opening with a rousing “Sweet Caroline.” Who doesn’t love Neil Diamond? Well, it turns out from this jukebox musical about his life, he doesn’t.

As it begins, an old version of himself (Mark Jacoby) is seated in a large leather chair opposite a shrink (Linda Powell). They are trying to figure out how to work together; his song book becomes the scaffolding for a narrative that looks like it will yield the desired music, the occasion for how he wrote it, and a window into his life. Alas, Portnoy’s Complaint, another vehicle for a deep dive into a Jewish boy from Brooklyn’s psyche, this is not. But here’s the good news: Will Swenson, as the young songwriter, emerges, electrifying the audience with his renditions of Neil Diamond hits.

Well, it is useless to quibble about how a Broadway show misses the chance to tell a real story in its manner of shaping an entertainment-- unless you want to believe that Neil Diamond’s fame, like the sequined outfits he wore, was so blinding, he never actually got to know the source of his insecurities. Covering his auspicious debut writing songs for the Monkees, performing at The Bitter End, the show looks at his domestic life: only the first two wives are present onstage, performed by Jessie Fisher and Robyn Hurder, with various couches indicating home. Just as well because he was mostly absent, touring obsessively. In a Playbill note, he endorses this project as therapeutic, “wishing perhaps that only if I could make a few edits in the script, it would change some of the reality of what I was seeing.”