Gossip Central

Hamptons Journal: Bob Colacello at The Peter Marino Foundation/ Hanzhi Wang at LongHouse

Writer Bob Colacello is the best kind of gossip; he observes people with a big heart and humor. In his latest book, an art volume of vintage New York photos by David Jimenez, accompanied by his text—a forgetting, as Colacello told a packed house at the Peter Marino Foundation in a conversation with Ivorypress publisher Elena Ochoa Foster, who flew in from Madrid for this occasion. He was inspired by the poet Joe Brainard who wrote a memoir listing his remembrances. For his own take, titled New York Memories, Colacello lists all that he had forgotten about New York in the 1970’s and 1980’s, when, as he was “forgetting,” downtown and uptown arts met at happy studios, galleries, discotheques, especially Studio 54, Steve Rubell’s place in midtown, and Eric Goode’s more artsy Area in Tribeca.

The conceit works well to dispel the impulse toward nostalgia, as Elena Ochoa Foster noted, even as Colacello records a bygone world. Going back to his childhood, he told the crowd that included Francesco Clemente, Vito Schnabel, his mother Jacqueline, Zac Posen, Vincent Fremont, and an artworld elite, in the upstairs space where the Israeli artist Michal Rovner’s brush strokes migrated against austere backdrops, it all started out when he came into “the city” as a boy:

“I forgot the awe and wonder I felt as a child arriving at the old Penn Station, which had been designed by McKim, Mead, and White in 1910, and was torn down to make way for the new Madison Square Garden in 1963.

“I forgot Woody Allen always sat at the most visible table at Elaine’s, pretending to be invisible.

“I forgot Malcom Forbes told me his old money friends like Doris Duke and the Mellons asked to be taken off the [Forbes 400] list, claiming they were worth much less than Forbes thought, and the only friend who insisted he was worth a lot more was Donald Trump.

“I forgot going to Andy Warhol’s Memorial at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on April Fool’s Day, 1987 with Sao Schlumberger, and thinking the huge crowd was testament to his greatness.

“I forgot that no matter what happens New York goes on, feet on the ground, head held high, heart and mind open.

Rufus Wainwright Celebrates 50 at Montauk's Historic Lighthouse

On the brink of 50, legendary Rufus Wainwright’s music genre is hard to pin down. But one thing’s certain: he’s got lots of friends, family, and fans, all in full display at his birthday concert bash to benefit Montauk’s historic lighthouse, now turned 227 years old. Maintaining this edifice takes more than a village, and from the looks of the slopy grounds outside, everyone was pitching in. The same could be said of the performances, featuring Tig Notaro, Katie Couric, Jimmy Fallon, Jenni Muldaur, Laurie Anderson, Chris Stills, Chaim Tannenbaum, G. E. Smith, Rufus’ sisters Martha Wainwright and Lucy Wainwright-Roche, daughter Viva Wainwright, and more. Hosting or just hanging around for the first-rate music were Liev Schreiber, Ross Blechner, Bruce Weber and Nan Bush, Christy Brinkley and Cynthia Nixon. Many spirits hung around too: many of Rufus’ mom Kate McGarrigle’s songs were sung, Laurie Anderson performed a song by Lou Reed about how to see in the dark.

Wainwright started off the generous three-hour concert with Irving Berlin’s “How Much Do I Love You?” Who knew that Berlin actually spent time in Montauk? Wainwright does the American songbook, folk, jazz, rock with ease. Everyone waits to hear Rufus’ cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Halleluliah,” which he dedicated to the artist Eric Freeman who recently died and who is scheduled to have an exhibition at Guild Hall in the coming year. After a duet on Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon,” Rufus congratulated Chris Stills on his marriage to Stacy. They had just flown in from the Vineyard for the occasion. I am still not over G. E. Smith’s guitar solo on “Memory Motel.” And Amber Martin led everyone in a rousing “Higher.”

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.

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.”

Sean Hayes in Good Night, Oscar: Hallucinating on Demerol and Demons

Unreliable and often hospitalized and drugged, if Oscar Levant hadn’t been a musical genius, he might have been a bum. At least that’s how he’s portrayed by a terrifically transformed Sean Hayes at the Belasco Theater in Good Night, Oscar. Themes of mental illness being all the rage right now, Levant is a dynamic subject, beloved by his wife June (Emily Bergl who does a stunning turn here and on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) and popular talk show host Jack Paar (Ben Rappaport), despite Levant’s many issues. (Now we have names like OCD, bipolar disorder, although severe depression worked then as now.) Many who saw him as a talk show guest, or on his own television show, knew him as a brazen comic and a raconteur. Being very funny in the early years of television, he was responsible for immigrants learning the language just to get his jokes. He was a wit, when such a thing had cache.

Glimpses of television in those golden years are a highlight of Good Night, Oscar, as they are of the series, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, now in its last season. Midge Maisel breaks through on The Gerald Ford Show. Hired as a writer, she finagles her way to “the couch” –not the casting couch but the couch where guests are interviewed by the host. In playwright Doug Wright’s conception of this single night when Oscar was scheduled to appear on Paar’s program and he has not yet left the hospital, Oscar Levant was all couch, cracking wise and off color as can be, unless he was seated at the piano when he would play George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” —even his auditory hallucination of the maestro (John Zdrojeski) who died at age 38, approves. Yet what haunts Levant even more than that smoky vision is his musical writer’s block, his anxiety of Gershwin’s influence. When does he get to play his own compositions? Putting himself down constantly, he despaired he was a mere clown.

Ben Platt in Parade: Lynching a Jew in the American South

Looking mild-mannered, even Evan Hanson-ish, Ben Platt plays the real-life historic figure Leo Frank, a Jew who was lynched in the early 20^th century in Atlanta. Lynching, a gruesome act of violence performed in the American South, illustrated by Billie Holiday’s “strange fruit,” is not the customary way of doing away with Jews as we think of it. Still, this really happened. As the musical Parade—yes musical—moves on to its climax, we see how justice works when zealous prosecutors force witness testimony serving their agenda, however racist. And, when an antsy mob takes over. Or maybe that’s the easy excuse for getting rid of “others.” Chilling, riveting entertainment, Parade, now revived at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre is so fiercely good, a highlight of this Tony award season, it defies you to turn away.

Leo Frank from Brooklyn as conceived in Alfred Uhry’s excellent script and music, written with Jason Robert Brown, seemed secular enough to endure the south with its worship of confederate ideals. The play opens with a celebration of those who fought and died for this land. Anyone wondering about sources for white supremacy, see it here, in the exuberance of those who fought the war—the civil war of course. Leo Frank’s story takes place some fifty years after, with aging soldiers, soil still blood-soaked, and blacks finding their way. A proverbial fish out of water, Frank manages a factory. A little girl not yet fourteen working there, is murdered. Accused and found guilty, innocent Frank is set to die. Prodded by Frank’s wife Lucille, a stunning performance by Micaela Diamond, the governor commutes his sentence, and that’s when the mob hits, completing their blood lust, as Frank says the “Shma,” (Hear O Israel, the Lord is One) prayer to God, questioning what purpose this death serves HIM. Very Job-like—it’s a heartbreak.

Guild Hall Celebrates Peter Marino: Renaissance Man

“I hate it,” architect Peter Marino exclaimed surprising even himself, as he noted Gotham Hall, a cavernous former bank on Broadway, decorated for the 350 guests arriving for a tribute to him, and to art collectors Tom Roush and LaVon Kellner. This was Guild Hall’s winter gala, celebrating too the venerated East Hampton art institution’s emergence from a long renovation. Can it be that Peter Marino, clad in his hard-to-miss signature head-to-toe leathers and silver rings, all his own designs, is oddly demure? A video featured his many achievements and talents: architect, painter, sculptor, potter, gardener, collector with an impeccable eye. It finally took the Israeli artist Michal Rovner, a longtime friend, to underscore his bold innovations with a telling anecdote: In Tokyo, at the opening of a Chanel store he designed, he found the perfect use for the building’s façade, projecting her art on it.

This was not a boast. An internationally renowned multimedia artist, Rovner will be featured at Peter Marino’s art foundation housed in Southampton, as part of a series, “Brunches with Bob,” the Bob being writer Bob Colacello who was part of Marino’s entourage, with his daughter Isabelle Trapnell Marino, who, despite her valuable input quips, she’s the “Vanna White” of the conversation series. The culture-packed room also included Michael Halsband, just back from his opening of his iconic sparring Basquiat/ Warhol photos at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, April Gornik, Blythe Danner, Lisa Perry, Iris Smyles, Alice Aycock, and many more to honor their East End neighbors, Tom Roush and LaVon Kellner. A retired doctor, he used to treat many artists when they occupied lofts in Soho, before they became big names.

Kurt Vonnegut Remembered at Birdland

The iconic American satirist Kurt Vonnegut might seem an unusual inspiration for a jazz suite but composer/ pianist Jason Yeager brought the Slaughterhouse Five author live in a musical homage at Birdland this week. Originally performed in tandem with Vonnegut’s centennial year at the Kurt Vonnegut Museum & Library in Indianapolis in November, the show featured Yeager’s quintet—multi-reedist Patrick Laslie, trumpeter Alphonso Horne, trombonist Mike Fahie, vibraphonist Yuhan Su, bassist Danny Weller, drummer Jay Sawyer, and two guests, Miguel Zenon on alto sax and Yeager’s partner, singer Julie Benko, currently wowing audiences as Fanny Brice on Broadway in Funny Girl.

Entitled “Unstuck in Time: The Kurt Vonnegut Suite,” Yeager’s playlist followed his new CD by the same title, the “unstuck in time” metaphor working well to describe the medium of jazz. As Yeager aptly put it, Vonnegut loved jazz, and the American songbook in particular. Punctuating Yeager’s improvisations on his work, Benko sang the standards “I’ll Be Seeing You,” and “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.” A charming presence, she helped her flustered spouse light a Kurt Vonnegut candle, with a prayer from their rabbi who was seated nearby.

It was that kind of a night, intimate with great music. “Now It’s the Women’s Turn,” an homage to Bluebeard, “Unk’s Fate,” referencing a character in Sirens of Titan, “Kilgore’s Creed,” for the protagonist of Timequake, and “Blues for Billy Pilgrim” honoring Slaughterhouse Five. Fans will immediately see the connections to their Vonnegut favorites.

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.