Gossip Central

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.

Some Like It Hot: “Nobody’s Perfect,” But Maybe This Musical Comes Close

The musical Some Like It Hot, based on the beloved movie, tweaks its source, seeing in the original the chance to be both color and gender savvy. To recap the basic storyline, Joe and Jerry are a couple of working musicians who land a gig at a swank Chicago joint run by the mob. In between sets, they witness a gangland rub out, and now they are on the run for their lives. Hiding in plain sight, they dress as women and join an all-girls touring band heading for California. In the movie, Tony Curtis, Joe, and Jack Lemmon, Jerry, are pretty in disguise. Here, Joe (Christian Borle), not to face-shame, is goofy on a good day, but Jerry, redubbed Daphne (J. Harrison Ghee) looks as gorgeous and glamorous as Diana Ross. As Daphne, Jerry finds new depth and does not shy from engagement to Osgood (Kevin Del Aguila)—just because he was born a man. Osgood is understandably crazy about Daphne just the same. And boy, can these hoofers tap!

Sugar Kane, --that’s the Marilyn Monroe character-- still drinks and distrusts sax players. Here, a wonderful Adrianna Hicks, fresh off Six, shows ample song and dance chops; a sexy Sugar, she forms a tapping trio with Josephine and Daphne to lead the band, kept in check and on schedule by Sweet Sue (NaTasha Yvette Williams). Wise, she knows her mixed race band might not fare well in the South.

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.”

Remembering Aline Kominsky-Crumb

The Crumb documentary is ruining my life, complained Aline Kominsky-Crumb in 1993, as Terry Zwigoff’s biopic about Robert Crumb, her husband, gained acclaim, becoming a darling on the festival circuit. “Next thing you know, we’ll be invited to the Jerusalem Film Festival.” All of this drama was played out in a comic strip that appeared in The New Yorker magazine. Festival director Leah von Leer saw an opportunity and wrote to the Crumbs. “Your nightmare has come true. You are officially invited.”

Nominated for an academy award for best documentary feature, Crumb was a revealing look not only of this famous cartooning couple but Robert’s unusual family, capturing his highly eccentric and artistic brothers just before one committed suicide. Passionate for jazz, Robert had a huge record collection. Vinyl filled a room. Fearing an atmosphere of violence in their area of California, where gun ownership was de rigeuer, the Crumbs left for the south of France and lived in a multistoried house carved out of the rock on the banks of the Vidourle.

This much I knew when I encountered Robert and Aline in the lobby of our hotel in Jerusalem; I too came with a film, a documentary about the writer/composer Paul Bowles who lived in Tangier. “Did your records make it across the Atlantic?” I asked him as a way of saying hello. The Crumbs and my family—my husband Bob Salpeter, our two daughters, and my mother aged 73 and a survivor of Auschwitz --hung out. While Aline and I gabbed away getting to know one another—we had grown up in the New York City boroughs, finding our escape to Manhattan; we had ties to the Soho Weekly News-- Robert was helping my mother navigate the streets, gentle as could be. Aline dubbed her own mother Blabette, but genuinely liked mine grasping her spirituality.

Tangled Up in Tulsa: Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song

Bob Dylan’s massive archive is now on view in Tulsa, at the Bob Dylan Center right next door to the Woody Guthrie Museum. Artifacts of these two music giants make a must-see stop on any American culture tour. But Tulsa? Why there, everyone asks. For his stuff to be situated next to his hero’s, Dylan would have agreed to any place. Tulsa is not particularly relevant to his biography, but, as his new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, illustrates with great gusto, his sources and inspirations can be far-ranging, and belong to one place in particular—here, the place where democracy lives. They belong where, in a Whitmanesque sense, people of all stations in life can sit side by side—at least theoretically. An homage to a highly idiosyncratic American songbook, Dylan revels in behind-the-scenes stories of the famous as he honors the work of less well known artists.

Yes, he goes deep into how Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night” had its lyrics adjusted. Referring to The Who’s “My Generation,” he proclaims, “Every generation gets to pick and choose what they want from the generations before with the same arrogance and ego-driven self-importance that the previous generations had when they picked the bones of the ones before them.” Yes, he calls Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again” “an update of the iconic beat generation masterpiece by Jack Kerouac.” Maybe taking a cue from Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues which in other places he calls an important influence on his writing, each entry reads like a satori, a nugget of supreme wisdom. Short and to the point, each might follow a Kerouacean writerly strategy to simply fill up the page, like a jazz riff, stopping “where the page stops.” But Dylan doesn’t let his ideas spill one to the next.

Lea Michele in Funny Girl: Hello Gorgeous!

 

At the August Wilson Theater last night, Gleeks and theater geeks gathered for the re-opening of Funny Girl, that classic 1964 Broadway musical so identified with its original star, it was a challenge to find the right actress to make it new. The new production’s first night for the cast change, featuring Lea Michele as Fanny Brice and Tovah Feldshuh as her mother, was such a major event, fans flew in from across America, some paying more than your usual markup, just to see the star of Glee work her ample chops around the performance originated by Barbra Streisand. It may take a star of the small screen to create such excitement, but with long, standing ovations rewarding a cast that now rocks, delivering as well as having the time of their lives, Funny Girl feels just right.

You have to believe that Fanny, a “mieskeit,” from Brooklyn, an ugly duckling, can capture the attention of Nicky Arnstein, a famous player and heartthrob. Can such a handsome guy fall for a “funny girl?” You bet. The chemistry between Michele and Ramin Karimloo made the audience swoon and leap to its feet. The mother, as in one number, “Who Taught Her Everything She Knows?” should appear to know a thing or two. That person is Tovah Feldshuh, a Jewish mother who supports her awkward daughter, having been around the block herself, and remarkably for a Jewish mother, doesn’t mess with her marriage. The adorable Feldshuh shimmies and taps, and with a mere shrug and eye roll, has the audience in stitches.

Cyndi Lauper in the Hamptons: Girls Just Want to Have Great Reproductive Health Care.

That was Cyndi Lauper’s message when she gave a rare charity performance at Northwell Health’s 4th annual Summer Hamptons Evening (SHE) which raised nearly one million dollars for the Katz Institute for Women’s Health. Playing only five songs, clad in a leopard print summer suit, the rocker/ activist proclaimed her disgust at watching “women’s civil rights stripped away. Safe access is for our health,” she affirmed launching into “She Bop,” “Time After Time,” “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” “True Colors,” and a song that spoke to the moment, “Sally’s Pidgeons.” Bringing action to words, Lauper’s own charity, True Colors United, works to bring an end to homelessness among LGBTQ youth. This fall, she will launch a new foundation to bring OB-GYN care to women in need across the country. And still: a hit on Broadway with Kinky Boots, she is now composing for a new Working Girl musical, collaborating with playwright Theresa Rebeck. Her dedication is limitless, as is her heart.

The evening at Vicki Moran Furman’s stunning Watermill estate and emceed by Rosanna Scotto, featuring Drs. Tara Narula and Stacey Rosen speaking on the importance of heart health for women, was held in a poolside tent decorated in pink, a quintessential production by Lawrence Scott Events.

Hamptons Journal: Longhouse’s Artistic Legacy as the East End Expands as a Destination for Fine Art

Wood stitched with wire does not sound like an ideal way to structure an outdoor shed, but that’s what Steven Ladd and his brother William Ladd used to create one of the masterful works showcased at this year’s Longhouse Benefit. As Steven guided visitors through this piece, open on both ends, he explained how he learned to sew using his grandmother’s sewing machine, and in fact, the upstate New York resident wore slacks and a shirt that he had made himself. It defied the imagination to think how that textile practice might be translated to their sculpture titled “Right Here, Right Now.” Similarly, Taiwanese artist Cheng Tsung Feng invited celebrants into an airy bamboo pavilion, “Fish Trap VI.” The spirit of Longhouse founder Jack Lenor Larsen could be felt in these works on this annual occasion with Robert Wilson, Nathan Lane, Alice Aycock, and many others celebrating his legacy at the best art party of the summer.

Newer art venues in Montauk flourish: The Ranch, the site of the famed Deep Hollow Ranch, where for years a summer concert would bring hoards to the East End, to be seated on haystacks and hear, for example, Paul Simon one year, The Eagles the next, and James Brown. Repurposed barns featured Frank Stella’s sculpture at the early part of summer. His larger pieces were spread out on the immense, now grassy field. Currently, in The West Barn, hangs, Jo Messer’s “Whale Tail,” a presentation of nine new paintings of women emphasizing limbs and gesture in incongruous position saturated in monochromatic palettes. The exhibition title comes from “a resurgent trend of hiking a g-string thong above the waistline as overt provocation.” Yes, provoke it does.

Marilyn Maye at Bay Street Theater: Ageless

Quip for quip, tune for tune, Marilyn Maye does not miss a beat. People will remember this one-night only performance at Bay Street Theater for a long time—this chanteuse, a queen of cabaret, elegant in her mid-90’s in a blond bouffant, and black sequined ensemble with bling at her wrist and throat, sang Cole Porter followed by Johnny Mercer with a bit of Sondheim –songs we all know and love: “I Get No Kick (from Champagne) . . .” flows into “I Concentrate on You” . . . goes to “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” and “Don’t Nobody Bring Me Bad News” before she launches into a story of staying in bed during the pandemic period when her date with Bay Street was, like everything else, cancelled. She watched old movies and ate gummy bears, she claimed, baiting the crowd. Not those, she gave a sly look, wait, maybe I should try those. Of course, everything she says comes with a jolt: she is 94 after all.

Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song Plus a Concert and a Tribute to Hal Willner at the Tribeca Film Festival

Music docs at Tribeca have a common thread, record producer Hal Willner. In Angelheaded Hipster, about Mark Bolan and T. Rex, and Hallelujah, a Leonard Cohen biopic through the lens of his now classic song, Willner provides vital information on recordings. His presence in these films prior to his untimely death in the earliest wave of Covid shows how much his career spanned these eras of contemporary music. 

I used to visit him in his toy packed studio on the West side. Howdy Doody dolls, Pee Wee Herman figures grinned into the room from packed shelves where he’d be mixing a tape of poet Gregory Corso reading, or reminiscing about his good pal Lou Reed. The title Angelheaded Hipster comes straight out of beat lore. Bolan may have been a beat contemporary, but his glam persona matches more directly with David Bowie, Klaus Nomi, and Freddy Mercury. 

Hallelujah had a special opening at the Beacon Theater, followed by a concert. Judy Collins met Cohen in 1966 and immediately fell in love with “Suzanne,” recording it that year. On stage, her crystalline voice resonated, capturing Cohen’s special talent and a sense of loss, just as the many covers of Hallelujah in the film brought home its deeply spiritual quality, even as some made the lyrics more secular. As beat muse Neal Cassady used to say, “Sex is holy.”