Gossip Central

Real Estate Mogul/ Film Industry Impresario Charles S. Cohen Honored at the French Consulat

This week Charles S. Cohen was presented with the insignia of Chevalier of the Legion of Honor at the Payne Whitney mansion, home of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy. Gerard Araud, Ambassador of France, conferred the honors, proclaiming, “I’m an ambassador so I’m not supposed to be funny.” Yet, he was. Following a speech by Mayor Bill De Blasio celebrating Cohen as a great New Yorker, Araud explained his levity, this was his last such ceremony as he was leaving office. Filmmaker Agnes Varda sent salutations via video, and Isabelle Huppert, currently in The Mother, an off-Broadway play, mingled with a delegation of French filmmakers and Unifrance, dedicated to promoting French culture on these shores. Unifrance partnered with the Film Society of Lincoln Center this week for the annual Rendez-Vous with French Cinema. The best thing about Charles S. Cohen vis a vis film: he has good taste.

Rendez-Vous with French Cinema Opens with Pierre Salvadori’s The Trouble with You

The annual fete de films, Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, a collaboration between Unifrance and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, opened this week with a comedy, The Trouble with You. Director Pierre Salvadori introduced the film noting that most filmmakers in France are French New Wave influenced, but he is more inspired by Hollywood. “It’s more about my love of stories, of fiction, of Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder,” he explained. “My film is funny and sad. Feel free to laugh and cry.”

And so when the Trouble with You opens with a violent police action, the movie seems a startling homage, until the realization hits: a police procedural is appropriated for farce as only the French can do. Salvadori brought with him his leading man, Pio Marmai, with whom he has worked in the past. In fact, the last time he came to New York to promote a Salvadori film, he—in a drunken state— got a tattoo, the word for fighter misspelled.

Transit: From There to Here in Cinema

What does exile look like? What does geographic displacement do to identity, and to the psyche? These were dilemmas addressed in much midcentury fiction, found in the writings of William S. Burroughs, Paul Bowles, and others. Now Anna Seghers’ 1944 novel Transit is brought to the screen from the German filmmaker Christian Petzold. When we meet Georg (Franz Rogowski) he is on the move, a witness to war, blood, and death. Unwittingly taking on the identity of a dead writer, he lands in the port city of Marseille, an “Interzone” of sorts, as part of France’s “free zone,” Marseille interchangeable with Tangier, another evocative port city where people hung out waiting for papers, exit visas, boat tickets, “transit.” Cue Casablanca, the classic film an illustration of Tangier’s midcentury international zone.

My Fair Lady: Transformation in our Trans-Age

Even if Lerner & Loewe’s My Fair Lady were not one of the most crowd-pleasing musicals, the revival at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater would be a must-see. Featuring Broadway royalty, not only the amazing Laura Benanti as Eliza Doolittle whose voice alone is worth the price of admission, but the exquisite Rosemary Harris, who, at the performance we attended did not get the customary applause upon entrance. Her subtleties as Professor Henry Higgins’ mother may have caused her to slip by the notice of the attentive crowd in ways that Danny Burstein’s Alfred P. Doolittle, Eliza’s attention-grabbing drunk dad does not. But these great stars, joined by Harry Hadden-Paton as the stern, conceited Higgins, Christian Dante White as the besotted Freddy and Allan Corduner as the deliciously impish Colonel Pickering, under the consistently good direction of Bartlett Sher, make for a great night at the theater.

John Lloyd Young Sings Songs of Love at the Café Carlyle

Photo: David Andrako

“You’re just too good to be true,” goes the lyric of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” a signature hit for John Lloyd Young. Now in his eighth residency at the Café Carlyle, the line, the first of the night, also describes his dreamboat performance. Some men just don’t get old: Dark glasses cannot hide John Lloyd Young’s dimple-chinned prom date good looks, but then again, his music does not age either. Just ask his fans who follow wherever he plays, and return to the Carlyle night after night.

Woman’s Day Red Dress Awards: Seeing Red on Heart Disease

“I see a sea of red,” became the cliché of the night at Lincoln Center’s Appel Room for the Woman’s Day Red Dress Awards. Indeed, red was encouraged for stars on the red carpet, Angela Bassett, Susan Lucci, and everyone else, and it seemed a giant homage to Valentine’s Day and the Chinese Lunar New Year celebration all wrapped in one. But the unifying image was the heart, meaning heart health for women. Lucci, the queen of soap operas, told a story of being the picture of health and suddenly feeling pressure in her chest in October, averting a heart attack. Bassett, the queenly Ramonda in Black Panther, lost her mother in 2014 to heart disease. She wanted to create awareness for the link between Type 2 Diabetes and heart disease. Each speaker, and including doctors Dr. Sharon Hays and Mary N. Walsh, had a message: these episodes are preventable.

Song of Parkland: Surviving the Valentine’s Day Massacre

When we ran into Melody Herzfeld at the Tony Awards, she seemed stunned at the place history had taken her. This week at a special screening of Song of Parkland, an HBO documentary directed by Amy Schatz, she had her Tony Award by her side, still stunned, and feeling guilty. She would have preferred a prize for merit, she said. Instead she was honored for her heroism in a tragedy, coolly ushering 65 students into a back storeroom closet for two hours as a gunman murdered 17 at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida where she taught drama. At HBO, dozens of her former students attested to her epic qualities as a teacher. While she was not falsely modest, part of her charm is a self-effacing humor worthy of Joan Rivers. Then again, as she told us at the Tony’s, she was from these parts, from New Jersey.

Eco Village is no Utopian Vision

Among the many fascinations of Eco Village, a new play by a gifted young playwright, Phoebe Nir, in production at the Theater at St. Clement’s Church, is a revision of communal life from the ‘60’s, reimagined for this generation of millennials. For many of us who remember our youthful era of sharing resources, it was an edenic time for those who had little to share, welcoming the bounty of those more prosperous. In Eco Village, that ethos takes on current trends, toward ecology, conservation, and respect for the earth. Keeping a small footprint, so to speak, is a goal. But humans being, well, human, loyalties shift among the fictive characters in this alternate world, in ways that make Eco Village register more cynical than utopian. But then again, how do you change the world?

True West: Sam Shepard’s Bad Boy Pas de Deux

I have always thought of Sam Shepard’s True West as a two-hander. The brothers at the center of this heated drama, the screenwriter Austin and ne’re-do-well Lee, are entwined physically and spiritually; it’s their tension that enthralls. At the American Airlines Theater in a thrilling Roundabout production, they are Paul Dano and Ethan Hawke respectively. Of course there is a producer, Saul Kimmer (Gary Wilmes) ably aiding, abetting, and underscoring their sibling dis-function, and their dithering mother (Marylouise Burke), at least one half of the source. The other is the unseen father, allegedly a drunk who some time ago receded from society into the Southern California desert. Needless to say, the fruit does not fall far from that tree.

Beethoven for the Rohingya at Carnegie Hall—and David Amram

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? It’s an old, corny joke, and here’s an alternate answer. Get the incomparable composer and ethnomusicologist David Amram to conduct. And then a world unfolds: The Concert of Solidarity for the Rohingya Refugees at Carnegie Hall this week featured an orchestra comprised of musicians from 33 countries, stellar soloists, and a chorus from Montclair State University. The orchestra performed Amram’s “Elegy for Violin and Orchestra,” and he conducted, featuring soloist Elmira Darvarova on violin. This divine performance was followed by Beethoven, “Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125” culminating in “Ode to Joy,” with George Mathew conducting. The evening was to benefit the Rohingya refugees and the important work of Doctors Without Borders. Carnegie Hall was packed for this extraordinary night of music and moving accounts from Rohingya survivors.