Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who just won the Florida primary, will receive Secret Service protection. ABC News reports Mr. Romney will have protection by Thursday. There are no known threats to the candidate; unnamed sources told reporters that the decision was based on the increasing sizes of crowds encountered on the campaign trail. Read More
For years the operating assumption in Albany political circles on both sides of the aisle was that eventually, one day, Democrats would take control of the State Senate, thus completing the extermination of the Republican Party in New York State.
The logic of this argument was simple: A Republican had not been elected statewide since George Pataki won re-election in 2002, and even that was something of a fluke victory over scattered Democratic opposition. Democrats had a huge majority in the State Assembly. Democrats had a 5:3 advantage in the number of voters registering with their party, a ratio that was likely to increase as more immigrants and minorities came of voting age in the state. The GOP was becoming a party of guns and the God-fearing, neither of which had much traction among Yankee Republicans, or what was left of them. Read More
In traditional Chinese culture, the dragon is an auspicious creature, venerated as a symbol of wealth, imperial power and social prowess. Since 2012 marks the year of the dragon, according to the Chinese zodiac calendar New York society dutifully fêted the felicitous occasion with a grand party.
Lincoln Center (as ever) was aflutter with people Read More
Rhythm and bounce, tempo and pounce. Petula Clark has lost none of her fizz. Her warm, engaging new act at Feinstein’s at Loew’s Regency is the first time she’s appeared in a New York nightclub since the dear, departed and much-lamented days of the Waldorf-Astoria’s Empire Room. That was 1975, after she had already moved to Switzerland to get away from the punishing rigors of show business and escape the taxes, but she hasn’t been sitting around her home in Geneva knitting mittens. Read More
I’ve always regarded Carol Channing as a walking alarm clock—tall, cherry-lipped and dinner-plate-eyed with a head as big and yellow as a sunflower—tick tock, tick tock. But according to director Dori Berinstein’s new documentary, Carol Channing: Larger Than Life, the frazzled dodo captured best in legendary caricatures by her friend Al Hirschfeld was a superficial image she cultivated for the entirety of her professional life, aided enormously in the effort by the only two famous and important roles of her career—gold digger Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and meddling matchmaker Dolly Levi in Hello, Dolly! She invented them both, but her greatest invention has always been herself. Offstage, out of makeup and eyelashes and wigs like 20-pound piles of white farmhouse insulation, she was about as dumb as a brain surgeon turned rocket scientist, with a roaring IQ and a humanitarian heart as big as her bustier. Real life, as it turns out, was not always a turkey dinner. Like Judy Garland, she was no stranger to tears. Director Berinstein is too much of a fan to reveal it all. The result is cinematic Botox—a puff piece masquerading as a biopic, designed and edited for fans, drag queens and loyal chorus boys she always treated like family members because in reality she had none of her own. As a serious documentary, it is charming, sycophantic, peppy, endearing and, it must be admitted in all honesty, ultimately one-dimensional.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Carol Channing. Read More
Mitt Romney won tonight's Republican presidential primary in Florida, a victory that puts him in prime position to lock down his party's nomination. Fox News, NPR, CNN called the Sunshine State for Mr. Romney almost immediately after the last polls closed at 8 p.m. New York time.
After his victory in South Carolina, Mr. Romney's main opponent, Newt Gingrich, upset Mr. Romney's once ironclad lead in the Florida polls, but Mr. Romney got back on top after drubbing Mr. Gingrich in the most recent debate and dramatically outspending him on the airwaves Read More
You sense an instant prognosis of pretentiousness with the opening words of soundtrack narration in a horror called Perfect Sense: “There is darkness. And there is light. There are men and there are women. There is fruit. There are restaurants. Disease. There is work. Traffic.” And there is Ewan McGregor, who makes entirely too many movies and only occasionally makes an effort to speak the kind of English anyone can understand. Read More
It’s been a calamitous week off-Broadway. In the New Group production of Russian Transport, a loud, inconsequential play full of cussing and yelling at the Acorn Theater on West 42nd Street, a family of mewling, whining Russian immigrants in a cluttered two-story house in Coney Island are struggling to keep their car service business going. Read More
The best thing (correction: the only thing) worth remembering about Yosemite, a paralyzing bore at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater on Waverly Place, is the terrific set by Raul Abrego. On a stage the size of a forever stamp, we are in the middle of a snow-covered redwood forest. Gigantic trees grow into the ceiling, denuded shredded branches and fallen logs the size of Humvees litter the landscape. You can smell the evergreens and hear the wind. You reach for a sweater. Then a truckload of Valium by Daniel Talbott is dumped on the landscape while you try to stay awake, as three miserable siblings brave the cold and dig a grave to bury their baby brother wrapped in a garbage bag. Read More
The Yankee Pedlar Inn is a real hotel in Torrington, Conn., that is rumored to be haunted. The Innkeepers, a desultory indie-prod poorly written and lamely directed by Ti West, and filmed on the cheap at the actual location, is a poor-man’s rip-off of Stanley Kubrick’s hotel spookfest, The Shining, promising paranormal horrors to all who dare to enter. Where is Jack Nicholson when we need him? Read More
