Gossip Central

Bernadette Peters’ Joke: Posh Meets Borscht Belt as Guild Hall Returns to the Rainbow Room

Guild Hall Academy of the Arts President, the painter Eric Fischl got to hone his comedy chops at this year’s spring gala, fashioning a speech on a string of cliches—thanks to A. I. That set the night off in good spirits, against The Rainbow Room’s customary spectacular panoramic views of the city now fogged in, but as Board Chair Marty Cohen observed, “When it comes to Guild Hall, there’s no such thing as bad weather.”

Sure enough, we were expecting no shows but most showed: Neil deGrasse Tyson, Sunny Hosten, Fern Mallis, April Gornik, Ross Bleckner, Rufus Wainwright, and the robust theater crowd to celebrate Daryl Roth. That included her son Jordan Roth, head of Jujamcyn, clad in an elegant ensemble accessorized with his grandmother Sylvia’s matching clutch. He opened his speech with, “My mother loves gay people.” That broke the ice, as a proud, even gleeful son spoke of Roth’s collection of 13 Tony Awards and counting.

She had just signed Julianne Margulies and Peter Gallagher to a show adapted from Delia Ephron’s Left on Tenth she’s hoping to stage in the fall, with Susan Stroman—also present-- directing. As I congratulated her, Roth pulled me aside to say, she has yet to find a theater. Ah, the perils of producing!

Her pal Bernadette Peters took the stage and before singing two numbers from Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods told a joke about a frog who, upon getting a kiss from an elder gentleman, promised to turn into a gorgeous blond who would make love to him every night for the rest of his life. The man took the frog home and went to bed, explaining that at this point in life he preferred to have a talking frog.

The jokes did not end there. Howard Marks, who with his wife Nancy were also honored, with a Special Award for Leadership and Philanthropy told one about a boy who got a part in a school play. His mother asked, what part? The Jewish husband. Her reply: Couldn’t you get a speaking role?

The Mother of All Lies/ Down in Dallas Town: Truth in Documentaries

As the DOCNYC festival illustrated, the genre of non-fiction films remains a vibrant frontier. Asmae El Moudir’s THE MOTHER OF ALL LIES, awarded Best Documentary in Cannes and Morocco’s entry for the Best International Feature Oscar, tells a hidden history through clay figurines. The “Bread Wars” in Morocco in the early 1980’s garnered little attention internationally, but locally, in Casablanca and other cities, riots were brutally suppressed, and silence about the horror was enforced.

In filmmaker Asmae El Moudir’s home, where she lived with her parents and grandmother, a photograph of King Hassan II hung prominently, her grandmother’s favorite. Her father made clay figures that she used to dramatize—or speak of—the violence in her country’s past. Dividing her time between Rabat and Paris, but preferring home in Morocco, Asmae El Moudir attended a special screening of her film at the Quad cinema recently, navigating the enthusiastic crowd’s amazement at the subtle revelations of truth about an untoward political history.

On the anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the mysteries linger in the memories constructed of photographs, music, and the site itself. That is the subject of Alan Govenar’s latest documentary, DOWN IN DALLAS TOWN: FROM JFK TO K2. Govenar’s style segues on the slimmest of transitions from a famous Polaroid by Mary Ann Moorman, interviewed for the very first time, to American blues, to the homeless who house themselves in cardboard dwellings at Dealey Plaza, where JFK died in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

Hugh Jackman in Florian Zeller’s The Son: Dance Man in a Drama

It’s a far cry from The Music Man’s River City, Iowa to the swell NYC apartments and boardrooms of Florian Zeller’s The Son. The film is the latest in a trilogy that began with The Father, based on a stage play, with The Mother to follow. In The Father, you may recall, Anthony Hopkins won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance as a lovably demented dad to Olivia Coleman. You never quite know when he’s seeing/ hearing/ telling the truth. It’s a tour de force of the man’s inner mind, and it was riveting. 

In The Son, Hopkins appears again in a pivotal scene, stone cold as a father to Hugh Jackman, a father who is facing some parenting challenges. Jackman sang and danced his way into Marion the librarian (Sutton Foster’s) heart in the recent Music Man revival on Broadway. And in The Son, as Peter, he does a funky hip slide that looks like it will bond him to his teen son Nicholas (Zen McGrath) who is having mental issues related to his dad’s divorce from his mom, Kate (Laura Dern in a moving role). Until Beth (a superb and sexy Vanessa Kirby), his father’s new wife, gets into the act, and all sours.

Renee Zellweger in The Thing About Pam at the Whitby Hotel

Her spindly legs over sky high heels, Renee Zellweger, both star and a producer on NBC’s series The Thing About Pam, commanded the stage at the Whitby Hotel this week after a screening of the first two episodes of the 6-part series. Based on a true-life crime podcast, already well known, about a 2011 murder in small-town Troy, Missouri, The Thing About Pam is so tongue-in-cheek, you have to laugh at the shenanigans of bungling law enforcement and grieving citizens, as a beloved wife and mom—and daughter—is found dead of multiple knife wounds in her living room. The two-time Academy Award winning actress plays Pam, hardly recognizable with her pudgy face and physique, her legs like elephant trunks, who slurps endlessly on a giant sugary beverage further sweetened with cherry syrup. The camera can’t get enough of her fat face and squinty eyes as she figures out her next shady moves.

Rory Kennedy Premieres her NASA Documentary for Sarasota Film Festival’s Awesome Closing Night

Planet Earth was the star of the Sarasota Film Festival’s closing night film, Rory Kennedy’s Above and Beyond: NASA’s Journey to Tomorrow, just in time for Earth Day. Following up on an aspirational speech given by her uncle, President John F. Kennedy, about going to the moon at Rice University, Kennedy’s documentary tells the history of NASA from the ‘60’s to the present, how space, the planets, and the universe, have been explored and what scientists have learned about the Earth. David Bowie may sing his query, Is there life on Mars? And the answer is still looking for signs. For sure, the Earth is vulnerable. Global warming is irrefutable. Following the screening, a panel featuring Kennedy, Mark Bailey, her husband and the film’s producer, and scientist Dr. Ellen Stofan answered questions about the possibilities of life beyond our planet, and the excitement of continued exploration. What about space tourism?

An Enigma Wrapped in Inhumanity: The Imitation Games’ Algebra of Need

The story of a brilliant man, Alan Turing, brought to suicide after being disgraced for being gay, the movie The Imitation Game reflects the sexual politics of a bygone era. In the midcentury, homosexuality was a disease that could be cured, and surprisingly in the US Bible belt, some believe that canard today. In this riveting if conventional movie, directed by Morten Tyldum from Graham Moore’s screenplay, Benedict Cumberbatch plays Turing’s stunning mental power, bungling social grace, and naievete so compellingly, his demise at age 41 supplies an added irony to the history of his work in cracking the Nazi enigma code, using a machine that would be a forebear to the modern computer. But with all of his mind-bending intelligence, he lacked the resources to survive society’s ignorance.