Gossip Central

Hamptons Journal: McArthur Binions at the Peter Marino Foundation, the LongHouse Gala, and Daniel Humm at Guild Hall

The work is detailed and geographic, tonal, you might say, like bop graffiti on brick in a Detroit abandoned building. The artist, McArthur Binions, in fact, comes from Detroit but spent a lot of time in New York meeting Thelonius Monk and Miles Davis, moving on to Chicago where he now lives and works. Artist Rachid Johnson was his student, so favored that he became part of the family, taking care of the kids. At a recent "Brunch with Bob," at the Peter Marino Foundation, he told a packed crowd awed by Binions' art, Binions refused to sell his work at the time, proclaiming it would be worth a lot someday. And Johnson who knew him only in that school setting as his teacher, thought, "This guy is crazy." Yeah, as the saying goes, crazy like a fox. This was the talk's great takeaway.

In the foundation gardens for brunch, Prudence Fairweather asked McArthur Binions if he had ever met her husband, John Chamberlain. Oh yes, that was at the Fanelli Bar. He had a large vial of cocaine. I ask, did he share? "Yes he did. It was very good."

A who’s who of artists show up at the LongHouse gala every year. The evening, honoring Kenny Scharf and Tony Bechara, is always an homage to Jack Lenor Larsen, its founder, and a celebration for nature enthusiasts who love the combo of gorgeously curated outdoor art in the leafy setting: Robert Wilson, Ned Smyth, Joan Semel, mingling among many others. The much-awarded “Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” costumer Donna Sakowska said she’s been living in Paris developing a ballet series called “Etoile” with the Palladinos.

Tammy Faye: Finding Religion on Broadway

Before becoming the pioneering televangelist power couple, Jim Bakker and his enterprising wife Tammy Faye Bakker sold God using puppets out of the back seat of a car, creating an industry and an empire. Religion, as we know, is big business. Limning their rise—and fall-- in fame and fortune, the new Elton John musical, Tammy Faye, puts them onstage at the newly refurbished Palace Theater, set against a wall of television monitors. The usual ministry of heavy-weights—Billy Graham (Mark Evans), Jimmy Swaggart (Ian Lassiter), Pat Robertson (Andy Taylor), Jerry Falwell (Michael Cerveris)-- pop up like the stars on Hollywood Squares. The story doesn’t get more American than this.

Except this is Broadway, and it’s Tammy Faye whose arc we follow. Before feminism was a thing, she master-minded much of the God-selling program. A wronged woman once Jim strayed with Jessica Hahn (Alana Pollard), Tammy Faye went off her own rails, spending excessively, downing drugs in her own tearfully sad journey--all to great spectacle; she’s accompanied by Elton John’s tunes—“He’s Inside Me,” “Look How Far We’ve Fallen,” “If You Came to See Me Cry,” “See You in Heaven”--with Jake Shears’ lyrics, book by James Graham, under Rupert Goold’s direction.

Opening night had Extravaganza written all over in sequins and glitz, from Jake Shears’ multicolored track suit to Elton John’s pearls. A Tammy Faye look-alike played the red carpet, batting winged eyelashes. We met Tammy Faye’s son, Jay Bakker, and his BFF Jeanette at the Tavern on the Green afterparty. No, he doesn’t see his dad, who seems to be in hiding. The great Christian Borle is in his glory portraying a hammy Jim Bakker. Jay Bakker was thrilled to hear Katie Brayben portraying his mom, and meet Michael Stipe who told Jay that when he started out recording in a studio, he was on the same microphone as Tammy Faye, a big moment for the REM singer/ lyricist. Meantime, young Jay said he was listening to “Losing My Religion.”

Julianna Margulies and Peter Gallagher in Left on Tenth: A Rom-Com on Broadway

Forget “meet-cute,” the winning rom-com trope that made writer Delia Ephron’s career. In Left on Tenth, Ephron’s play based on her memoir at the James Earl Jones Theater about finding love after her husband died, we get the more powerful “Bechert.” As Peter Gallagher, in the role of Peter explains, it is Yiddish for fated, --much more cosmic and explosive. That’s how he defines finding love with Delia, Julianna Margulies of ER fame in her Broadway debut, after decades, marriages, and emails. This is more than You’ve Got Mail. What could go wrong?

Well, as fate would have it, Delia’s watching her blood count after losing her older sister, writer, director Nora Ephron to leukemia. Following many reassuring doctor visits, Delia’s told, it’s not looking so good today. Delia in disbelief exclaims, But I’m falling in love.

Peter Gallagher, among his many theater credits including Guys and Dolls, is perfect in a lover role he nailed as Jane Fonda’s younger man in Grace & Frankie. Here, as Peter, he helps Delia through the arduous ordeal of cancer. We should all have such a handsome and handy lover helping us through hard life passages. Still, however based on true events, this is a rom-com in high Broadway form, and with Stro directing (that’s Susan Stroman to you), Left on Tenth features dancing. Margulies does a little tap, a little soft shoe, a happy dance. And some old school ballroom dips have the audience kvelling.

And laughing. When Delia compliments the doctor’s shoes, she says she got them ages ago at a sale at Barney’s. The audience lets out a collective sigh. Barney’s! The name evokes unspeakable loss. Forget cancer! The memory of a beloved department store has us where it hurts, the very heart of elite New York City shopping. This play knows its people! Does this spontaneous expression of deep loss happen every night?

Bob Balaban Directs Blythe Danner, Edie Falco, Alec Baldwin for 2024: The Pursuit of Happiness at Guild Hall

Begging the question: is it too soon to laugh about the pandemic year, 2020, a collection of short plays by masterful playwrights, did just that in a one-nighter at Guild Hall, directed by Bob Balaban. That was July 2021. Now for July 2024, as we ponder where we are in an arguably post-pandemic year, Balaban assembled a collection of short plays to consider “The Pursuit of Happiness” starring Alec Baldwin, Edie Falco, Blythe Danner, Jim Bracchitta, Steven Wallem, and Richard Kind.

Baldwin kicked off the staged reading with “Mr. Happiness” by David Mamet, a Dear Abby meets Miss Lonelyhearts, an advice guru which he performed with a stagy voice only Alec Baldwin could muster. Blythe Danner, for a Neil la Bute piece from his “10 x 10 Monologues,” about a woman of a certain age contemplating her current plan to go off for a weekend with a handsome stranger, said after in Guild Hall’s green room, that she merely read it straight, not trying to act at all. The result was so wistful and moving that even this playwright’s words which are often not respectful to women came off as a true insight into the female psyche.

Lynn Grossman’s play “The Keepsake” took on the subject of memory and its lapses during the COVID era. As performed by Richard Kthis was the longest and most direct evocation of the virus and its aftermath, still uncharted. Grossman said she wrote the play with Richard Kind in mind as perfect to perform its manic ins and outs of memory and ending with a recitation of a Shakespeare sonnet.

Sigourney Weaver in Christopher Durang’s Whimsical Take on Chekhov: Celebrating Theater at Lincoln Center

Some of the original cast of Christopher Durang’s Vanya, Sonia, Masha, and Spike brought this theater gem to life for the Theater at Lincoln Center gala this week, where the show began over a decade ago, before it made its logical move to Broadway’s Golden Theater winning a TONY award for Best Play. Now, taking over the Vivian Beaumont stage on a set designed for the current production of Uncle Vanya, this Chekhovian mash-up retains its brilliance, even gaining some according to Sigourney Weaver, reprising her role as Masha, a narcissistic actress returning to her ancestral home in Bucks County, PA, in time for a neighborhood costume party.

Whenever I am blue, I can snap out of it conjuring Sigourney Weaver’s image as Snow White. Act I is a sendup of Chekhovian tropes with prescient views on real estate and familiar philosophical exclamations like “I’m in mourning for my life!” In Durang’s whimsical mix master, here directed by Bartlett Sher with a scant three-day rehearsal time, the tragic—and neurotic-- circumstance of everyday life turns to high hilarity.

Weaver’s character, Masha, in fact a superstar action hero like Weaver herself (think Alien, Avatar), makes for a most vulnerable Snow White, too tall, her lips too thin, mistaken for Norma Desmond, BoPeep, a Meissen figure. Coming home to the house in which she was raised with her boy toy, Spike (Billy Magnussen in the original but in this production a fine David Hull); this cougar is at the cusp of keeping up the sexual acrobatics, humping him, while suffering this shallow hunk’s wanderlust.

Jeff Bridges Brings his Dude-ness to Lincoln Center: The Chaplin Awards

Named for the first recipient, Charlie Chaplin, this yearly Film at Lincoln Center honor was the place to be this week to honor Jeff Bridges. Of the Bridges family of actors—with dad Sea Hunt’s Lloyd Bridges, mom Dorothy, big brother Beau Bridges, and sister Cindy, Jeff famously would not embrace being an actor until his 10^th movie. Blase, is not the word; “relaxed” was on every presenter’s lips.

Those included Barbara Streisand, videoed in to pay tribute to Bridges. She directed and starred with him in THE MIRROR HAS TWO FACES. Because she loved that he insisted on dancing with her every night of shooting, she made that the ending of the movie.

Beyond “relaxed, add:” “He’s a good man.” Coming from Sharon Stone, that’s a lot. At last year’s NYWFT Muse Awards luncheon, the Basic Interest actress spoke at length about the horrors of men in the industry back in the day. Offering only kudos to Bridges, she said she saw him in STARMAN and wondered if such a kind being would fall her way from the sky. She starred with Bridges and Nick Nolte in a Sam Shepard Play, and felt lucky to be with such good men.

Rosie Perez raised a glass from the Alice Tully Hall stage, in remembrance of a drink she did not have with him when he championed her for a role in FEARLESS. He was so relaxed, “it pissed me off.” And, get this, she said, they were reluctant to have an interracial couple. “Jeff,” she addressed him, “it would be so easy for you to be an asshole.”

Blythe Danner, who can go ditsy on cue, forgot some details about the film she did with Bridges, and when he shouted out the references from the audience, she was impressed by his good “projection”—given he’s a movie actor. Ditto, John Lithgow on video sang his praises. But it was Chris Pine, most hilarious, on their friendship after making the film HELL OR HIGH WATER, quoting some of Bridges’ signature lines.

“Ok, if I quote you?”

“Go for it man.”

And he did THE BIG LEBOWSKI’s Dude speech: “Yeah, well, . . . that’s just your opinion.”

Alex Bornstein at the NYWFT Muse Awards: “You Are Enough.

“Do not fuck with a woman from NYC,” exclaimed comedian/actress Alex Bornstein, accepting her award for The Mayor’s Office of Media & Entertainment Made in NY Award at this year’s NYWFT Muse Awards.

The “Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” star reminded 700 guests seated for a sumptuous steak dinner at Cipriani 42nd Street this week, she was not actually “made in New York,” but everyone seemed to think she was, maybe because as Susie Myerson, she epitomized the brash, pushy person who could be a New York bred talent agent.

Her parents never called to congratulate her for any of her work, but they did for “Mrs. Maisel.” “You were good,” said her mother, while her father asked, “Why weren’t you the lead?” Her mother replied, “Because the skinny one with the perfect tits is the lead.” This may have bothered her growing up, but as the Muses dispense advice, now she knows: “You are enough.”

Canadian actress Tantoo Cardinal whose personal story informed Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-nominated KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON, had gratitude to family, particularly her grandmother who picked her up from the “dregs of genocide.” When her grandfather spoke her name, she said, “I knew he knew me.” And when he died, she wore an eagle feather in her hair for him. That was brave, she told the crowd. Of indigenous descent, she was taught to be ashamed of who she was.

The WONDERSTRUCK and A QUIET PLACE actress Millicent Simmons accepted the Loreen Arbus Changemaker Award. Her mother was discouraged from learning to sign by doctors who thought that would slow her, a deaf baby, in learning to speak. A riveting performer, in A QUIET PLACE II, she leads the cast including writer director John Krasinski and Emily Blunt, often giving them notes. Actress Kyra Sedgwick has taken on directing. Her husband Kevin Bacon advised her: she was great at directing, if only she would never say “I’m sorry,” as she worked—as in, I’m sorry but we’re doing another take. This gave the audience a hearty, knowing chuckle.

Harmony on Broadway: The Pre-Show Schmooze

The Ethyl Barrymore Theater was abuzz: Michael Feinstein, Brian Stokes Mitchell, and Lorna Luft were among the theater elite at Harmony’s opening night. Sutton Foster said she was ready to be evil, stepping in to bake meat pies as Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd. Judd Hirsch sat with Marilu Henner, the Taxi team to appear on The View later this week. Remarking that she last saw Chip Zien, Harmony’s narrator, on July 15, 1974—exact in her memory as she has one of those special gifts—"It was an audition,” Henner said. All this before the evening’s star, Barry Manilow, arrived.

Memory is a key ingredient of Harmony: The Holocaust’s mantra, Never Forget—echoed, asserted—but in a musical! Yes, Barry Manilow wrote the songs for this show, many years in the making about a hugely successful sestet of singers in Europe as Hitler was on the rise. Are the songs of the Comedy Harmonists ones that the whole world will sing—yes, many will live on, material for vocalists everywhere. First-rate Broadway tunes are not the only reason to see Harmony. Accompanied by his longtime lyricist Bruce Sussman, and director/choreographer Warren Carlyle, Manilow framed a tale well-timed for this moment, a memory play that insists upon an individual’s reckoning with totalitarian regimes and war. Bad things happen when bystanders say nothing.

Chip Zien’s character –based on the real-life cantor in California called Rabbi who recently died at age 98--escaped the Nazis, the only Harmonist to live to old age. Survivor guilt is the occasion for telling the past, mulling over the possibilities for a different ending. Harmony starts with the group’s auditions, youthful aspirations, and love. Beowulf Borritt’s sets form backdrops for the entertainers’ singing their way through Europe, and for the repression of Jews. But the danger, palpable now, will pass, right? Two of the Harmonists marry, Rabbi to Mary and “Chopin” to Ruth, a Bolshevik activist and a Jew. A joyful double wedding, disrupted by thugs breaking glass, recalls a Fiddler on the Roof scene. At the height of fame, they came to New York and might have performed with Josephine Baker. Onstage, in a fantasy, they do.

A highlight is a duet sung by the wives, Mary (Sierra Boggess) and Ruth (Julie Benko), “Where You Go,” after their husbands try to persuade them to leave, hoping to ensure their safety. The song, referencing the Old Testament’s Book of Ruth, resonates of the fragility of love, and their dire choices. Foils, the Catholic Mary sticks with Rabbi (his younger self Danny Kornfeld); Ruth lets Chopin (Blake Roman) know that while she may leave—better for him as a non-Jew, she will haunt him always. Played by Benko, she’s an irrepressible memory.

Yoshiki at Carnegie Hall: The Unexpected Pleasures of Loss

The international superstar, Yoshiki, celebrated a 10^th anniversary “World Tour with Orchestra 2023 ‘Requiem,’” its final leg at Carnegie Hall this week. Displaying awesome musical chops at piano and drums in the separate genres of classical and rock, Yoshiki, clad in red lame coat, dedicated the tour to the passing of his beloved mother who raised him after his father’s suicide when he was 10. The drums, he explained to his many fans—some clad in full kimono and obi bearing flowers to throw onstage--, allowed him to express the extremes of his despair. Even after he performed for Japan’s emperor, his mother would ask whether or not he had slept the night before, had he eaten breakfast. He missed these nurturing flourishes even when his hands were imprinted in cement at L. A.’s Chinese Theater. Launching a clothing line in Paris and a new champagne with Pommery, he misses her mothering more.

He also dedicated some songs to two bandmates who committed suicide, and for much of the concert he admonished the audience to cherish every day. “We are here,” he kept saying, also acknowledging the pain and suffering in our world. Conductor Ward Stare led the full orchestra featuring many strings, underscoring a sorrowful tone even when the sounds soared. Singers Beverly and Ai Ichihara added to the emotional experience. After Intermission, Yoshiki, now in silver lame, performed Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake accompanied by dancers from the American Ballet Theater. Three screens projected family photos and clips from his film debut as director, YOSHIKI: Under the Sky. The next day the film, to be released this month, was screened in full at the Roxy Hotel, followed by a performance at Django.

The Gilded Age: Season 2 on HBO: The Opera Wars

Nothing says high hauteur like new money. In season 2 of HBO’s grand series, The Gilded Age, “the new” hits its stride. Forget Stanford White’s magnificent design for the newly completed Russell mansion on-turn-of-the-century Fifth Avenue, its façade built in Newport, its queen of decadent display, Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon) has empires to build ascending the social strata. Snobbery, of course, does not work. Readers of Henry James and Edith Wharton fiction know how the hierarchies among the rich work, their laws finite. Christine Baranski as Agnes van Rhijn looks her chiseled nose down on her neighbors, nailing the divide between Old New York and New. But Bertha surprises us; aided by her husband George (Morgan Spector) and his fortune, she shows what does the trick: research, preparation, the drive to roll up satin sleeves, and grit to get the job done. For this season, we learn the “true” origins of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Metropolitan Opera House. There will be blood.

Fellowes was brilliant with the splendors and spectacle of Downton Abbey, both upstairs and down. Add to that the lives of Blacks, North and South. As we know from season one, Peggy Scott (Denee Benton), an aspiring young black writer works at the van Rhijn house as her career rises at The Globe. Turns out she has a backstory, explored tenderly in Season 2 as is the plight of our heroine, Marion Brook (Louisa Jacobson, a daughter of Meryl Streep), Agnes van Rhijn’s niece, an innocent, who has been jilted. Disgraced? Never. This season takes a more positive view: she’s merely rescued from marriage to the wrong man.

Satisfying a (guilty) itch for gossip, who’s marrying who, The Gilded Age features a dazzling cast of American stage actors: Audra McDonald and Kelli O’Hara head the long list that also includes Laura Benanti, Kristine Nielsen, Celia Keenan-Bolger, Donna Murphy, a wildly over the top Nathan Lane, to name a few. Robert Sean Leonard is a particularly cool choice for the clergyman Luke Forte, having performed in Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of The Age of Innocence.

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.