plaques in Union Square

There are over 50 brass tablets in a circle right round the Square with historical incidents commemorated. here are a few.

lillies again

around e11th

all things fall

A touch of home

Surprise visitors after today's matinee...Australian theatre legend Robyn Nevin and her partner Nicholas Hammond, probably best known as Friedrich in the film of THE SOUND OF MUSIC. They're looking at buying an apartment here. The Aussie dollar must be healthy!

A Broadway Century

Tonight was our 100th show on the Great White Way (and my 1302nd).

Naturally, it was a photo op.

It was also nice to see an ad with our own faces in it this week. Progress!

Micki Grant

Teddy Williams escorted theatre legend Micki Grant to PRISCILLA. A multiple Tony nominee for her musical DON'T BOTHER ME-I CAN'T COPE which she wrote and starred in (it came to Australia featuring the unknown Nell Carter), Ms Grant also provided two of the finest songs in the fab musical WORKING..."Cleaning Women" and "If I Could Have Been".

florent for rent

This is a great doco about another piece of New York that  has gone to God.  Named after its owner, Florent  Morellet, 

 it was the place to eat in the meatpacking district in the eighties and nineties. High rents forced it to shutter in the summer of 2008 which prompted a series of parties to mourn its passing. Florent was an out gay activist who championed gay rights and fought the gentrification of the area...to no avail

The staff were as wild and individualistic as Florent and every year there were mad celebrations on July 14th .
with mock executions and recreations of Versailles.


Many celebs frequented the joint from Amy Winehouse, Johnny Depp, Julianne Moore and Keanu Reeves to a whole room full of HIV positives for a photo shoot for Spencer Tunick

So she has gone. The last thing to be taken down was this neon sigh which probably blinks on Florent's apartment wall. There was no place like it

an explosion of beauty at the Met

(tt) Here are a few of the mind blowing garments that smack you in the gut, heart and mind from a genius who was taken from us far too soon. They are grotesque, macabre, frightening and disturbing but never less than astonishingly beautiful.  You couldn't wear most of them as you would remove the eyes of your date or risk cutting your own head off. The exhibition is brilliantly presented in a maze of  gothic mirrored galleries with weird soundtracks of howling wind, bird cries and far off screams.   No photography was allowed because some of the items were from private collections. That didn't stop the fuckers from openly filming and snapping away. I was the soul of discretion and now I regret it.

This was my personal fave and have already ordered a copy.

No this one and I have ordered this too

Sorry this one. Two coming. One for best.

Replacing my Birkenstocks with these

This is one of his homages to Jack the Ripper and human hair constitutes some of the construction.

Totally visceral and sexual and shocking and drop dead gorgeous

The bodice and wings are balsa wood

This was one of the most moving art exhibitions I have ever seen and I think I might have to go back

Do look at one of the the Kate Moss holograms on Youtube if you want a moving impression of his work.

Lost Bohemia

Another film on the must see list. This is about the destruction of the artists colony who lived in ateliers above Carnegie Hall. Almost all the spaces are offices now. None of the atmosphere was retained or is able to be returned to its former glory.  The list of those artists who lived and studied there includes Brando, Monroe,  Caruso, Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, Lee Strasberg, Bill Cunningham, Isadora Duncan, Agnes De Mille, Bob Fosse, Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, John Turturro and Joanne Woodward. Every space was completely different to accommodate light for the painters and sound proofing for the musicians. It was a vertical village that should have lived forever.

Editta Sherman, the duchess photographer and stylist who was the last to hold out, well into her nineties.

 The film's director, Josef Astor's studio

Acting teacher, Robert Modica

Perhaps the most haunting images are those of a  fabulous pipe organ belonging to a  late music teacher, smashed and crammed into a dumpster. And a  tiny, aged homeless woman, Star, who regularly sneaked in to use a landing for her barre work, terrified she will be discovered and turfed out.  An angel dancing teacher, soon herself to be displaced, gives the 80 year old a scholarship so that she can attend classes. We see her dance like a freed bird, alive to her soul with the joy of movement. She strikes attitudes of beatific bliss in her pursuit of perfection. When they closed the studio she disappeared, only to die alone in a womens shelter.

Another sad story is that of Jeanne Beauvais, French-born soprano and voice teacher (she played Mme Dubonnet in THE BOY FRIEND both on and off-Broadway) who lived above Carnegie Hall for almost seven decades and was instrumental in the fight to retain the apartments as an artist colony. Her joyous Bastille Day parties for the tenants were renowned. Beavais succumbed to cancer during the making of the film and did not live to see her friends evicted. A storage space containing all the historic costumes from her illustrious career was turned into a men's toilet.
The voice of a poet who had lived there for years is heard throughout warning of the coming deluge. He says that evil is real and it is unstoppable and growing globally. Evil is alive and well in the board members of Carnegie who did everything to illegally destroy the artists community set up by the original benefactor, Andrew Carnegie, and the City of New York who did nothing to stop it.  You sit there cursing them all to hell.

Marilyn Maye

A return visit to Feinstein's nightclub to see the stupendous Marilyn Maye who was a mainstay of the Steve Allen and Johnny Carson tv shows and had enormous hits in the late 60s with her recordings of "Cabaret" and "Step to the Rear".

Now a glamorous 83, warm and wry, impish and sexy, her voice is unchanged, still with a jazz singer's phrasing, a music theatre belt and a cabaret artist's sense of intimacy in the Rosemary Clooney/Margaret Whiting vein. She must have been a marvellous Sally when she appeared in FOLLIES in Houston with Juliet Prowse, John Cullum and Harvey Evans (who was in tonight's audience). With musical direction by the expert Tedd Firth leading a three piece band, highlights were the ballads "It Might As Well Be Spring" and "When I Look into Your Eyes" (from DOCTOR DOLITTLE), a swinging "Butter Out of Cream" from CATCH ME IF YOU CAN and a series of medleys based on the music of Fats Waller (including the most incendiary version of "Honeysuckle Rose" I've ever heard), Richard Whiting and Johnny Mercer (with a showstopping "Blues in the Night"), selections from MY FAIR LADY and a grouping of "Look to the rainbow", "Over the rainbow" and "Rainbow Connection". The evening's climax was a heartfelt "I'm Still Here" which proved she's obviously going to be around a whole lot longer.

cooper hewitt

The Andrew Carnegie mansion on Fifth Ave is now the Cooper Hewitt collection and there are two fab exhibitions on at the moment

and

We hadn't even gone in and Sheldon's relief that there was a gift shop was palpable.

Here is the larvish ixtariar

After a while the sumptuousness got a bit sick making but the craftsmanship..even for the very tacky stuff where glorious gems were wasted on hideous designs..was fantastic.

This is a zip necklace form the forties from an idea by Wallis Simpson. . It transforms into a bracelet.

Wonder if we are getting something like these from Brooks Brothers for the Tony Awards night.