Gossip Central

August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson: Samuel L. Jackson, Danielle Brooks, John David Washington in an Homage to Ancestors

The piano at the center of August Wilson’s wise play The Piano Lesson is an object of beauty and resilience. Carved of a family history, this piano is a remnant of slavery, of ancestors being bought and sold, children separated from parents and siblings. Which is why the fight between Boy Willie (John David Washington) and his sister Berniece (Danielle Brooks) is so resonant, beyond property division. She and the piano live in Philadelphia with their uncle Doaker (Samuel L. Jackson); Boy Willie comes north, wanting to sell the piano so he can buy land. She’s hanging tough.

Now closed, the play packed the Ethel Barrymore Theater for its entire run, and its not just because of the starry nature of the players, but the artifact itself. Announced this week: The piano will go into the Smithsonian.

Yes, we’re talking family here: John David Washington is Denzel Washington’s son, and we’ve seen him in movies such as Spike Lee’s Blackkklansman. Denzel Washington starred in the recent Broadway of August Wilson’s Fences and in the film, vowing to ensure the revival of all of Wilson’s work. This revival of The Piano Lesson was directed by LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Samuel L. Jackson’s wife. Under Jackson’s superb direction, Washington’s Boy Willie is a jittery, fast-moving, fast-talking wannabe mover and shaker. As the lovelorn Berniece, Danielle Brooks can do much with a roll of an eye, wearing her hair in curlers or dressed for church. And Jackson’s Doaker provides wisdom as brother and sister duke it out verbally, evoking the supernatural. A fine supporting cast adds to the brilliance of this revival, probably this year’s Tony winner. Just saying.

Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin in 80 for Brady: Ageless Football Fans

It is a truth widely acknowledged, don’t mess with gray haired ladies, (and others in Barbarella wigs). Based on a true story of four fans in love with Tom Brady, the new movie, 80 for Brady, features the Frankie & Gracie team, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda, plus Sally Field and Rita Moreno; these women look good at any age. One way or another, they are determined to make it to the Superbowl. Winning a contest, they now have tickets, and this being a road movie with some action-packed scenes in the field, albeit geriatric style, the comedy comes in how they get to Houston and make the big football scene.

Mishaps abound: lost and counterfeit tickets, slow movement as desire demands speed, life’s thornier issues of health, death, --and then there’s the question of how do you kidnap someone napping from a nursing home? Only Sally Field, an academic, has a partner, a fellow academic played by Bob Balaban, who insists that she advise him on a speech, oblivious to where she has fled, and so needy, he forgets to put on his pants. Forgetting is a good part of the joke.

Oscar Nominations: The Andrea Riseborough Upset

Oscar watchers did not see Andrea Riseborough coming, even though she was on the tip of Cate Blanchett’s lips as she accepted a Critics Choice award for Best Actress for her tour de force performance in Tar. In almost a whisper, the formidable Blanchett, a frontrunner who has already won a slew of awards, noted Riseborough, not even mentioning a movie she leads, To Leslie. A hugely solid actress, Riseborough is in the back story of many films, a minor character or supporting role. A British actress, she was a factory worker in Made in Dagenham. She’s played Wallis Simpson. Reaching back to the biopic about Billie Jean King, she played a sly, deceitful love interest to the tennis star with Emma Stone in the lead. She’s in David O. Russell’s most recent film Amsterdam, and when the premiere took over Alice Tully Hall, she graced the long cast line onstage. Present for a long time, in To Leslie, an indie film celebrated by a Hollywood elite, Andrea Riseborough finally leads.

Unseated is a list of fine actresses including Danielle Deadwyler, Viola Davis, as many have noted. Many ponder how this nomination will affect the Best Actress win, but for now, whatever conversation the Oscars inspire, this nod has mixed up a predictable roster that includes Michelle Yeoh, Michelle Williams, and Ana de Armas for her heartbreaking turn as Marilyn Monroe in Blonde.

Steven Spielberg at the Golden Globes: The Awards Season Heats Up

Everyone gets a kick out of Jennifer Coolidge’s loopy discourse. As demonstrated at the Golden Globes ceremony this week, nobody does it better, but the antic Ke Huy Quan, whose award for Best Supporting Actor-Motion Picture for his work in Everything Everywhere All at Once started the evening off, comes close. In a flash of serious reflection and gratitude, he shouted out to Steven Spielberg for casting him in his debut movie, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Seated closeby, with his new movie’s cast and crew, Spielberg looked genuinely pleased. While Quan went on to a few more roles—in Goonies, for example—the young actor could not get work for decades until the Daniels put him in their new movie, such a mash up of martial arts and narrative high jinks, there’s never a dull pause in the multiverse. Quan’s heartfelt speech became a bookend to the historic Globe’s night that, in the end, honored Steven Spielberg for Best Director-Motion Picture and Best Picture-Drama for his quasi-autobiographical The Fabelmans.

Picking up his statue for directing, Spielberg spoke about his movie, what it meant to finally address his own story. His words struck a chord. Having thought about it for years, he hit 74. What was he waiting for? True, not everyone has a mother who danced provocatively at family camping trips, or brought home a pet monkey, or who, so utterly free, went off with her husband’s best friend. That’s one part of his origin story. Another, the anti-Semitism Spielberg endured as a teen struck another chord. He did what he had to do, discovering that story-telling—for him with his camera—could make him popular. Or at least respected. Or at least keep him alive. The parameters are emblematic of what it took in his era for Jewish kids to survive, and speaks to the larger story of how the young come into their own next moment.

Martin Scorsese to Cate Blanchett at the New York Film Critics Circle Gala: Where Are You Going with This?

Joining the party at Tao Downtown on a screen, Martin Scorsese looked genuinely bewildered as he presented the Best Picture award to the movie Tar, noting the extraordinary performance of its star Cate Blanchett. As Lydia Tar, a genius orchestra conductor, Blanchett rages and purrs, at times in impeccable German. Scorsese has indeed worked with an actor or two but seemed awed over Blanchett: given she can do anything, and is, perhaps the actress of her generation: how far is she willing to go? Tar is on many “best” lists as it turns the cliché of the toxic male around, but the question is not how far Lydia Tar can go, but, for me, how far she has come.

The standout scene is when she returns home to Staten Island, as Linda. Here was the modest provincial place she had to flee to self-invent, to flourish in her music, and, horrifically, to nurture a monstrously warped ego. Discussing the film with its director Todd Field, I mention this resonant film moment. In writing it, he said, he was exploring, how does a talented person break into the elite cultural world of orchestras. He was thinking of Billy Strayhorn and how he fixed himself up to see Duke Ellington, into his idea of the cool Manhattan jazz society, and how everyone then looked to copy his style, his idea of how to be cool.

Common’s Broadway Debut in Between Riverside and Crazy

The play Between Riverside and Crazy at the Helen Hayes Theater opens on the Tony awarded actor Stephen McKinley Henderson seated in a wheelchair in a well-worn kitchen at breakfast, looking like a black Buddha in a flannel shirt. The audience silently takes in the clutter of appliances and china laden cupboards. It is multi-Grammy-winner Common, making his Broadway debut, who arrives to great applause. It’s the kind of topsy turvy posturing that occurs often enough in theater. Not everyone is a Common-like instantly known star, but, by the time the play twists and turns to its conclusion, well, we know where the high wattage is coming from.

It helps that Common is soft-spoken as Junior. Piping down as the menage in this sprawling Riverside Drive apartment cranks up is just the right volume. Junior’s girlfriend Lulu (Rosal Colon) is a loud piece of work dressed in butt-cheek-exposing cut offs. We’re not quite sure what granola munching Oswaldo (Victor Almanzar), a drug addict, is doing squatting here, but that’s okay. Henderson’s character, Pop, likes his company. In fact, this place is Pop’s, and since his wife died, everyone is welcome. That includes a former colleague, Detective O’Connor (Elizabeth Canavan) and her fiancé Lieutenant Caro (a splendid Michael Rispoli) who come to dinner with an agenda. They need Pop to sign some papers.

Wendell Pierce in Death of a Salesman: Attention Was Paid

Willy Loman, Arthur Miller’s Everyman, is a plum role for any actor: the character speaks to everyone. Wendell Pierce’s portrayal of this “salesman,” puts this emblematic character, the center of Death of a Salesman, through the Hudson Theater roof in this latest superb revival, recently moved from London. Back in the day, Miller oversaw a production in Beijing. Even under Communism, men, fathers, heads of households, could relate to the dreams that propel Loman’s arc, even if they are more fantasy than real. The play’s toxic male energy, passed from Willy to his sons Biff and Happy, is grounded by his wife Linda with Sharon D. Clarke doing the heavy lifting, guarding Willy’s illusions of grandeur even from their boys, who inherit and suffer his pathological delusions. All this is the play’s familiar territory, but now the family is black in a white community, spinning the story in a fascinating way.

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.

Bruce Weber’s Homage to Paolo di Paolo, Italian Master Photographer

If you think scenic Sicily is having a moment in this season’s White Lotus, check out the Italy of Bruce Weber’s ravishing The Treasure of his Youth: The Photographs of Paolo di Paolo. Opening with archival shots of children on the street, a girl on communion day, Anna Magnani with her dog, Marcello Mastroanni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, the documentary arrives at a provocative and hilarious clip of Sophia Loren in a striptease from Vittorio de Sica’s Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. Marcello howls with desire.

Illustrating his childhood love affair with Italy through Italian cinema, Weber in voiceover reveals a happy discovery: At a gallery in Rome, he and his wife Nan Bush were struck seeing prints from a prominent photojournalist of the late 1950’s, who, at the height of fame, after the breakup of a love affair in the ‘60’s, retired to the countryside. Signed Paolo di Paolo, the photos became the inspiration for this film.

When Weber called, Paolo’s daughter Silvia had to explain who this American photographer was. It was she who, rummaging through the basement looking for skis one day, found a chest full of negatives and pushed her father to tell his story. Charming and dapper, di Paolo at 94, recounts his life, living under fascism, leaving his home to find the world, his first commission photographing a debutante ball with 2,000 guests, and a welter of celebrity artists including Tennessee Williams, Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Taylor; Weber’s film was set to wrap after covering Paolo’s first ever photography retrospective, “Mondo Perduto,” when di Paolo was commissioned to shoot the Valentino couture fashion show in Paris. He speaks humbly of his art, “I did it as an amateur, because I loved it. My luck was to know important people.”

Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt: Again, The Holocaust

Those of us marked by a personal Holocaust history may be damaged by this cataclysmic event’s long shadow. Playwright Tom Stoppard evaded this essential legacy, as Hermoine Lee spelled out his background in her excellent recent biography. Beautifully staged at the Longacre Theater under Patrick Marber’s fine direction, Tom Stoppard’s fictional telling of his family story in his latest play Leopoldstadt raises a question: is assimilation good for the Jews? Is it ever possible to truly fit in?

I ask this way because as the drama opens, in an elegant living room, teeming with life, culture, and refined sensibility, a question is posed: what sort of ornament should top the Christmas tree? The Vienna depicted is modern indeed in 1899. Hermann (David Krumholz), a factory owner who has converted to Catholicism is in heated discussion with Ludwig, his brother-in-law (Brandon Uranowitz) on such topics as Jewish persecution in faraway places, numbers theory, Freud, Zionism; one might imagine the educated, wealthy class would concern itself with the issues of the day. The family settles on a Star of David.

Stoppard being Stoppard, sex and betrayal are part of the human-scale drama. The women, Gretl (Faye Castelow), Hermann’s wife, agrees to join Hanna (Colleen Litchfield), Ludwig’s sister, in a playful dalliance with men in uniform and ends up in an adulterous tryst. But as we are well aware, the consequences of these betrayals are trivial beside the larger story of Europe and fascism’s rise. Following the Anschluss in 1938, the family, now in drab dress is casually taunted by the Nazis who arrive at the stripped-down apartment to evacuate them. In the same drawing room, --after, in 1955--, a character named Leonard pared to Len (Arty Froushan), resembling a young Stoppard, meets with surviving cousins who tell him how everyone was murdered. Gretl’s portrait may stand for stolen property, but the very last word of the play says it all, “Auschwitz.”