Gossip Central

Niccolo Paganini’s Violins and a Night of Pink Martini

Stradivarius comes to mind when you think of special violins, but Niccolo Paganini preferred the strings of Guarneri Del Gesu. This week, in honor of the virtuoso’s 237^th birthday, his ancestor Maria Elena Paganini orchestrated a huge celebration, ushered in with cocktails at Ascent Lounge overlooking Central Park featuring a performance by some extraordinary players, music director Edmond Fokker van Crayestein, Elly Suh, Kevin Zhu, Sabrina-Vivian Hopcker, and followed by a spectacular concert at Carnegie Hall. But the violins were the special guests, each one valued at roughly $10 million. Undaunted by their luxe value, the violinists took their instruments in stride: “They must be played.”

Me Too, Megyn Kelly, and Bombshell

The women in the Roger Ailes story are fierce, ambitious blonds, at least those in the forefront of the movie Bombshell, a truthful account of the demise of the Fox News CEO: Truthful, because, at a recent screening of Bombshell, many close to the story of how Gretchen Carlson refused to compromise in her lawsuit against Ailes cheered at the recognition of the scandal depicted just the way they remembered it.

The Cave: What Will Happen to Syria?

The stakes could not be higher in Feras Fayyad’s relentless documentary The Cave. Set in an underground hospital on the outskirts of Damascus, the sounds of classical music juxtaposed with the thunder of bombs give you the yin and yang of experience in Syria under siege, the forces of life competing with those of death. With Dr. Amani Ballour in charge, a young woman with nerves of steel who must face evil as well as the distrust of men in a culture where a mother who cannot feed her children fears the societal norms that prevent her from taking a job more than imminent death, “the cave” becomes a last refuge of humanity. Speaking about his focus on women in this culture, the director becomes tearful thinking about his mother. This week at the movie’s premiere at the Walter Reade theater, he sat between his producers, Sigrid Dyekjaer and Kirstine Barfod from a Copenhagen based production company, and spoke about the horrors faced in his country, worsened in the last week with the American pull out of troops: he admitted for the first time that his mother was a Kurd.

Brian De Palma Receives the Hamptons International Film Festival Lifetime Achievement Award

Putting a new spin on Hitchcock, no one does horror with the class of Brian De Palma. At the Hamptons International Film Festival this weekend, the man who gave us Dressed to Kill, Scarface, and The Untouchables, among other classics of American cinema, sat for a conversation with Alec Baldwin, an actor who has worked with many a director and could add his observations, anecdotes, and impersonations to liven up a discussion with a master about such topics as the choice of D.P. for various films. As a result, Baldwin’s comments come to the fore, and De Palma’s extensive career was elicited in waves. No matter, that was the best way to do it, said Piper De Palma, the director’s daughter, named after the actress Piper Laurie (so sinister as the mother in Carrie) who presented her father with the crystal award for Lifetime Achievement.

It’s Time to End Lyme: Global Lyme Alliance Gala at Cipriani 42nd Street

A glamorous crowd packed Cipriani 42^nd Street for the fifth annual Global Lyme Alliance gala: sparkly gowns and tuxes for a stellar event put together by the incomparable Larry Scott. Hosted by Rosanna Scotto, the benefit, to end the insidious Lyme epidemic, featured speeches from Lyme survivors and performances by a Big Apple Circus juggler who did amazing work with pink umbrellas, and by Tootsie Tony winner Santino Fontana accompanied by newcomer Ashley Kobre, a graduating senior from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, singing “I’m So Pretty” from Cinderella.

Downton Abbey: The Movie Gets a Royal Premiere

Just as Lord and Lady Grantham are thinking of downsizing,
the King and Queen decide to visit, setting off the lavish fairy tale
that is Downton Abbey: The Movie. The smartly dressed crowd at Alice
Tully Hall cheered as John Lunn’s symphonic music swelled, a rich
reminder of what was left behind when the last PBS season ended in
Julian Fellowes’ extravagant entertainment, and what now, in the form
of a feature-length film, ushers in two hours of sheer pleasure.

Tom Hiddleston in Betrayal: Star Power on 45th Street

Marital infidelity is that slippery slope, just ask the characters in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal in a superb revival at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater. Coming from a fictional literary elite, meaning they are also verbally gifted, and would have to be for Pinter’s poetry, Jerry (Charlie Cox) and Emma (Zawe Ashton) think they’ve gotten away with a seven -year affair when they meet up two years after their trysts ended. A book agent and a gallerist, they’ve been cheating on Robert, her publisher husband (Tom Hiddleston), who is also his best friend. Got that? Famously for this Pinter play, the events unravel backwards in time, much being made of when and how the betrayed know what. The truth is slippery.

Jules Feiffer at 90: Guild Hall Celebrates with an All-Star Reading of A Bad Friend

Starring Oscar awarded F. Murray Abraham and Mercedes Ruehl, the reading of Jules Feiffer’s 2003 play A Bad Friend at Guild Hall, could not have featured more good friends. Under the expert direction of Harris Yulin who also read, along with the outstanding Tedra Millan, Dave Quay, and Josh Gladstone, one of the East End’s finest character actors, the reading thrilled an audience of Feiffer’s friends (Monte Farber and Amy Zerner, Audrey Flack, Susan Lacy, Celia Weston, among them), his wife Joan Holden, and the author himself.

Hamptons Journal: Jenni Muldaur/ Hearts Aflame at Guild Hall/ Bryan Adams Rocks Out at the Parrish

Singer Jenni Muldaur brought a party to Guild Hall for the holiday weekend, doing duets with performers who she’s assured the stellar crowd,are really truly her friends. What a night: the Wainrights, father and son, Loudon the 3^rd, and Rufus, plus Teddy Thompson, and Isaac Mizrahi who joined in—briefly-- for Leonard Cohen’s “Halleluliah!” We were witnessing music dynasties performing country, rock, iconic American music genres. I loved Jenni on the harmonica, covering Bo Diddley and Dylan, and the opening act, the ukulele stylings of Patty Marx and Roz Chast. This hilarious duet proves: it takes a special kind of chops to make music that off so funny.

Rob Reiner, Visiting the Hamptons, Reads Mr. T at Celebrity Autobiography

Photo: Roger Friedman

Rob Reiner was the surprise guest at Guild Hall for Celebrity Autobiography, a riotous show based on a single conceit. It’s not that the lives of celebrities are merely a hoot, but that read aloud, the unintentional humor is mind-blowing. Case in point, Tiger Woods’ sexual innuendo describing his golf strategies in Tiger Woods: The Making of a Champion. Or Reiner as Arnold Schwartzenegger’s dialogues with himself, emboldening the workings of an already outsized ego, or Joe Namath’s obsession with his hair, in Alan Zweibel’s voice. When performed onstage for an audience by first class actors, the results are laugh out loud good. That is the engine that fuels Celebrity Autobiography, a hit every year on and off Broadway, and at Guild Hall. The brainchild of playwright/actor Eugene Pack, who, upon reading Vanna Speaks, producer Merv Griffith’s miraculously talented letter turner on Wheel of Fortune, discovered that describing in detail what it is that Vanna White brings to the game, is its own game. And so he had Lewis Black reading White.