Gossip Central

Candace Bushnell Dares to Ask: Is There Still Sex in the City?

The night before the HBO series she spawned reincarnated as And Just Like That at MoMA, Candace Bushnell signals, she has moved on. At the Daryl Roth Theater, she struts across a stage fitted with a hot pink couch and shelves lined with Manolos, recounting a stellar career as columnist, coming from Connecticut, modest suitcase in hand, sleeping around. This “having sex like a man” becomes material, and quite explicit. If you are a fan of Sex & the City, you know what I mean. Miraculously, in her tour de force hour and a half one-woman show—with the exception of a cameo by two dogs, the words “penis” and “vagina” are uttered once each, as Bushnell poses the question, Is There Still Sex in the City? Phone in hand, she converses with her Samantha, her Miranda, and her Charlotte, paragons of wisdom, as she navigates her rise as writer, all the while dumped by lovers including her ballet dancer husband. The men she mentions do not fare well—even her supportive father somehow lets her know her flat chest will get her nowhere in love. An exception is Darren Star, the series showrunner who attended the opening. I caught up with him over a gargantuan urn of guacamole at the Rosa Mexicana afterparty where a Covid test was now the new condom: “Yes, she got it right. She’s honest about Sex & the City and how we got it made. She would not have invited me if she was going to trash me.”

MJ: The Musical: The Art of Michael Jackson

If you love Michael Jackson, you will love MJ—it’s that simple. The musical limns the controversial performer’s rise to “King of Pop,” avoiding the more difficult challenges of his personality in favor of music and dance—it’s that simple. Not that the star’s dependence on pain killers is not a significant plot issue—it’s that plot is not really significant. You do hear the word accusers—once—but that particular untoward issue is not a part of Lynn Nottage’s book either. If you are of the mind that he should be cancelled, shove it. MJ is not about that, but about his art. 

Taking place in a rehearsal studio in 1992 Los Angeles, --along with an ensemble of talented singers and dancers—Michael Jackson is rehearsing for his “Dangerous” tour. A film crew follows him around, hoping to get more of his personal side in an interview. Everyone’s concern for his demons is out front, getting at his opioid consumption and how that’s wrecking the schedule, not to mention the budget—but wisely, the music and dance, everything you know and love, shapes the origin myth, with first-rate staging, and Christopher Wheeldon’s brilliant choreography and direction.

Celebrating Guild Hall at Cipriani 42 Street

Many revelers at this week’s Guild Hall winter gala remembered that before Covid locked everyone down, they were celebrating the premiere East Hampton cultural institution at its 2020 annual gala. And while much has changed in these two years—the venue was now the cavernous Cipriani 42^nd Street—and, the 2022 honorees were Board Chair Marty Cohen and Michele Cohen without the customary Academy of the Arts recipients—the mood was exuberant, as this huge, yet intimate event of East End neighbors chatting, catching up has not lost any of its warmth. Academy president Eric Fishl recalled that in that pre-pandemic limbo, no one knew whether to fist or elbow bump but preferred to kick one another in the ankles. All these dressed up people kicking the s__t out of each other, he laughed.

Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster in The Music Man: “There Was Love All Around”

Harold Hill, a talented conman, who wants to swindle the Midwest town of River City, Iowa, had me at hello. That may owe to the fact that “The Music Man” is played by Hugh Jackman. Arriving on a train, bumping along with salesmen grousing about Hill’s wiles, Hill pays them no mind, singing and dancing his way into the townsfolks’ hearts. All except Marian, the librarian, who is onto him from the start. It does not take the signature “Seventy-six Trombones,” to know he will win her over too. That’s the stuff of the American musical, and especially a revival as juicy as this one is, at the Winter Garden Theater. It helps too that Marian is that darling of this classic genre, Sutton Foster, who when she is won over by Hill can cast a look of epiphany as no one else can.

Black No More: A Skin Deep Musical Fantasy

A new “The New Group” production, Black No More, a musical adaptation of George S. Schuyler’s Afrofuturist 1931 Harlem Renaissance novel, has the feel of something special, theater that may go off the charts in the manner of Hamilton. Black No More opened this week at the Pershing Square Signature Center.

Featuring a stellar Broadway cast led by powerhouse Tony winning vocalist Lillias White, and Brandon Victor Dixon, of Hamilton and Jesus Christ Superstar fame, the show’s ensemble of excellent singers and dancers tell a tale of contrasts: the exciting free, artsy denizen of Harlem vs. the racist crackers of Atlanta and how they handle their black folk. Needless to say, whites do not fare well in this scenario, even as the fine performances by such actors as Theo Stockman as chief villain Ashby Givens beguile us with their villainy.

The Gilded Age on HBO: Oh, the vulgarity of the rich in America!

Mountains of gorgeous food: lobsters, roasted meats, salads, caviar. The eye filling opulence of Julian Fellowes’ Downton Abbey follow up series, The Gilded Age on HBO more than sates any desire for decadence. Forget Stanford White’s magnificent design for the newly completed Russell mansion on turn of the century Fifth Avenue; nothing says conspicuous consumption more than the spread Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon) hoped would lure the city’s elite to her home to solidify friendships in wealth. Not surprisingly, snobbery does not work that way. No one shows up. Any readers of the novels of Henry James and Edith Wharton would 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. And viewers are left to look on hungrily at the grandeur, and guffaw at the Russell’s servants’ dumping amply piled silver platters into garbage bins.

Audible’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night: What’s Your Poison?

The Tyrones in lockdown look a lot like you and me. Amazon boxes, Chinese takeout, Starbucks, not to mention the Purell. Never mind that Long Day’s Journey Into Night, the classic 1912 American play by Eugene O’Neill, features another kind of affliction than the one we are experiencing. The scaled down version of O’Neill’s play, an Audible production directed by Robert O’Hara at the Minetta Lane Theater, neatly conflates what’s ailing us. The title says much about the longeuers, the boredom, the stasis that forces this family—and us-- to relive sad pasts. The Tyrones in seaside residence make the best of it at first. James (Bill Camp in cut offs) flirts with Mary (Elizabeth Marvel in workout tights), his wife of many years, remarking to their two sons at how great she looks—a picture of health doing yoga. Before too long the tippling begins. Never too early to take a shot: James, the sons Jamie (Jason Bowen), not doing much, and Edmund (Ato Blankson-Wood), ambitious with a bad cough—whiskey is their medium. Mary’s something else, retreating upstairs, visibly tying up her arm, shooting up.

Cecily Strong at the Shed in The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe

A homeless woman who communicates with aliens, “Trudy” opens the show, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, created by Jane Wagner in 1985 for her then partner, now wife, Lily Tomlin. Revived at The Shed, under Leigh Silverman’s astute direction, the baton for dispensing planetary consciousness is passed to Saturday Night Live’s comedic virtuoso Cecily Strong. As Trudy, she wears an ill-fitting coat, its lining bedecked with post-its. How else will wisdom be saved in a world accustomed to one-liners? More aptly, how will this wisdom be communicated to the life beyond our atmosphere? A gimmick maybe, but at the show’s end, audience members picked up post-its on their way out. My bright green one reads: “Humanity’s biggest hurdle is human behavior.”

The Kinky Truths of Slave Play

Sex play informs Jeremy O. Harris’ Slave Play, a sensation when it opened prior to the pandemic, and now re-opened on Broadway at the August Wilson Theater. The fuss is understandable: The riveting drama opens with three interracial couples enacting slave-master fantasies in period dress. What follows is contemporary group therapy as each couple is  scrutinized, and evaluated by a team of analysts. In Harris’ drama, fitting in our moment of reckoning, text and subtext all come down to Race. As the slave-master scenario is so archetypical, you wonder, shouldn’t all sex deserve this clinical touch? “A Note on Your Discomfort” by writer Norman Parker in the Playbill is explicit: “Slave Play is a study in American memory: the psychologies of the prized and of the oppressed; the grateful and the entitled: who’s top, who’s bottom; who speaks, who can’t, and who betta listen.”

Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story: Get Ready to Rumble

You will not have to ask, do we need yet another adaptation of this classic? With Leonard Bernstein’s music and Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics firmly implanted in your head, a memory of the 1961 Jerome Robbins’ choreography and Arthur Laurents’ book, prepare to be delightfully shocked at how much this new version of West Side Story feels new. Maybe it’s Tony Kushner’s masterful script that takes us first into an image of urban renewal, the ‘hood, a battleground for the Sharks and Jets, being right here in Hell’s Kitchen cum Lincoln Center (shot on a lot in Paterson, New Jersey), and the wisdom we bring knowing the future: everything must change.

But come back to that era: to the cars and shops declaring poverty, ethnicity, the warehouses, crumbling buildings—the boys styled like mid-century heroes, a bit of Marlon Brando and Jack Kerouac. Enter the sweet-faced Polack Tony for Anton (Ansel Elgort) and the Latina ingenue Maria (newcomer Rachel Zegler). Justin Peck updates the original choreography without upsetting Robbins’ vision. And then there’s Rita Moreno, the Oscar-awarded Anita in 1961, now near 90 and getting ready to be celebrated at the Museum of the Moving Image. A widow, perhaps an oracle to the young, as Valentina, Moreno bridges past and present: Spielberg has her singing “Somewhere,” and your heart aches.

Faith Salie Off the Air: Approval Junkie at the Minetta Lane Theater

That voice. I’d know it anywhere, and so would you if you’ve been attuned to NPR. You could say I’m a junkie for talk radio, and “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” is a particular addiction. A news quiz cum comedy revue, the show has gotten me from here to there, as I drive in traffic along Montauk Highway. One star, Faith Salie, has taken her story on the road, so to speak, landing at the Minetta Lane Theater with “Approval Junkie.” A monologue (co-written with Amanda Watkins) about career, marriage—she’s especially funny about her ex, “wasband,” as she dubs him, nurturing mom and dad, disparaging career coach—who while encouraging she cut bangs, basically says without saying it, she has a face for the radio.