Cindy Sherman. (Adriel Reboh/Patrick McMullan)

“Look who it is: it’s Edwina, the Edwina,” Isaac Mizrahi exclaimed to The Observer this past Saturday, as he approached Edwina von Gal, the designer who, Ross Bleckner told us, “did the landscaping at my house in Sagaponack.”

We were at Cindy Sherman’s new East Hampton home at a benefit for the Azuero Earth Project, the Panama-based ecological nonprofit of which Ms. von Gal is president. It was a cozy beginning-of-the-end to the Hamptons summer season. Guests sat on benches under a white tent to eat empanadas and watch performances by Suzanne Vega, Rufus Wainwright, Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed. Children climbed into pendulous bamboo cocoons, stuffed with pillows, that swayed from the trees.

“I live just up the road,” Ms. Vega, who had been asked at the last minute to replace Rubén Blades, told us. “I originally came as a guest of Laurie’s, and I thought I was going to see Rubén Blades!” Wearing a top hat—a “tip of the hat to Marlene Dietrich”—Ms. Vega performed “Marlene on the Wall” and “Gypsy,” written when she was a “folk-singing and disco-dancing counselor” at a summer camp in the Adirondacks. She had M.C. Bob Balaban serve as an impromptu music stand, holding a handwritten lyric sheet for a new Dylan-inspired number about the tarot’s Queen of Pentacles.

“I probably shouldn’t have kissed her,” Mr. Balaban confided to us afterward. “It’s rude to kiss somebody you’ve just met.” Mr. Balaban told us about his upcoming appearance as Lena Dunham’s psychiatrist on Girls, and recommended we visit Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner’s former home down the road. “It’s just a little hut,” he explained. “They didn’t have any money.” (We read that Ms. Sherman paid $4.65 million for her estate, though we weren’t invited inside.)

Gorgeous in two shades of blue mufti (a baby blue wrap over a navy dress), the chameleonic Ms. Sherman told us that though she had just moved in a month ago, “There’s just a few little things that need to be tweaked, but I’m pretty settled.” Was this party a little housewarming, then? “A big housewarming,” she corrected us. Ms. Sherman also talked about transplanting her career retrospective from New York’s Museum of Modern Art to San Francisco’s MOMA, where it’s currently on view. “The space is different; it was hard to edit out some of the work.”

We watched Gina Gershon and Martha Stewart, both in pre-Labor Day white, run around taking pictures, and stood by as Mr. Mizrahi introduced Mr. Bleckner to his husband, Arnold Germer.

“We’re married, you know,” said Mr. Mizrahi.

“I didn’t know!” Mr. Bleckner replied

“Now we’re moving in together,” Mr. Germer went on.

“That’s exactly what married people do!” Mr. Bleckner pointed out. “Usually it’s the step before, but I guess you’re playing it safe.”

Messrs. Germer and Mizrahi (whose bandana matched that of Bruce Weber, also in attendance) weren’t the only couple at the party to have taken advantage of New York’s new same-sex marriage laws. David Maupin and Stefano Tonchi brought their twin girls, Maura and Isabella.

We asked Mr. Tonchi about changes at The New York Times’s T Magazine, which he left two years ago to edit W, specifically about the recent departure of his successor, Sally Singer. “Oh, please. Old news,” Mr. Tonchi answered summarily.

Mr. Wainwright brought his husband, Jörn Weisbrodt, whom he had married the week prior. He opened his performance with what he called a “really Hamptons-y song about a bored housewife ... which I have become. Love it!” Later, he sang about his own Hamptons domesticity in “Montauk”: “This next song is about my daughter, Viva Katherine Wainwright Cohen, and also my incredible new husband, Jörn Weis-” he caught himself and laughed. “Jörn Wainwright. Or Rufus Weisbrodt, however you do it. In fact, his name is Weisbrodt, which means ‘white bread’ in German, and what is it, there’s something about a honeymoon? In Dutch, a honeymoon is called a ‘white bread,’ white bread weeks. You can get fat, basically, now that you’re married.”

Lou Reed, married for four years but with his wife for a decade prior, came off a little less enchanted. “Are you done? Jesus. And we’re related,” Mr. Reed muttered jokingly, as Laurie Anderson plugged in her violin next to him, generating a loud electronic buzz.

“I would cut my legs and tits off/When I think of Boris Karloff,” Mr. Reed sang, in a song from last year’s much-maligned Metallica collaboration Lulu. He next performed a monologue in the voice of his mentor Andy Warhol: “Lou Reed got married and didn’t invite me ... you know I hate Lou, I really do.”

Ms. Anderson performed a monologue of her own, about observing the Amish in Western Pennsylvania—“Gee, I wonder what it’s like to live that way,” she mused—which nearly cleared the tent, though her political criticism drew some laughs. “Ever since hearing Clint Eastwood talk about optimism the other night at the Republican Convention,” Ms. Anderson narrated, her voice electronically shifted several octaves down, accompanied by slow synth chords, “I actually became extremely pessimistic about the future. I mean, look at the odds for a second. You have more chance of getting hit and killed in a car crash than dying in a plane crash.” (Here, she lost us again.)

As the wind off of Accabanac Harbor picked up (“I’m getting the best hairdo of my life thanks to this body of water,” Mr. Wainwright joked), guests began to wrap their shoulders in complimentary green picnic blankets.

Patrizia Pinzon, visiting from Panama, bemoaned the absence of Mr. Blades, the one Panamanian who had been scheduled to perform. “Everybody’s here, but they don’t know what it’s about.”

Al Pacino

“We have a Shakespearean, Elizabethean temper,” Al Pacino informed a seated crowd Monday evening in Central Park. As part of its 50th Anniversary Gala, the Public Theater was honoring Mr. Pacino with an award, in the form of a prop rapier he had once wielded on stage, “I’m a little nervous,” he laughed. “I wish I had water, but I have a sword,”

While the audience of hundreds listened to Mr. Pacino with rapt attention, a secondary scrum gathered across the fence. What appeared to be backup pitchers on a hapless softball team abandoned their game to listen to the famed thespian. Soon, a quintessentially New York amalgam of dog-walkers, skateboarders and bright-eyed Broadway hopefuls paused their iPods, essaying to hear Mr. Pacino over the Central Park din.

Earlier, as guests arrived, many seemed to materialize suddenly from the Where’s Waldo-esque ether of the park. From the throngs of sunglassed and unknowing denizens, Julianna Margulies and husband Keith Lieberthal appeared, followed by Chelsea Clinton and Mac Mezvinsky, Kathleen Turner, Julia Stiles and Lily Rabe.

The red carpet, positioned on the West side of the theater, was situated atop a blind hill. With clipboard in hand, one unlucky PR staffer was tasked with running up and down the escarpment, alerting her superiors when the VIPS arrived—the Public’s own Paul Revere. (Listen, dear readers, and you will hear, her stage-whispering celebrity arrivals from far and near!)

Returning to the Delacorte theater was a sort of homecoming for Ms. Rabe, who acted alongside Mr. Pacino last year in The Merchant of Venice. “Working with Al Pacino was one of the great privileges of my life,” she told The Observer. “He’s a wonderful human being, and being able to spend a year of my life, a very complicated year of my life, with him through all of that was something that I’m very grateful for.”

She insisted she wasn’t nervous when she first met the actor, however, and made no special preparations for the occasion. “I didn’t do anything. I probably, I don’t know, I rolled out of bed and took a shower,” she laughed. (Such élan!) While meeting her idols does not make her ill at ease, other things certainly do: “You know, snakes. Snakes not for me. People, more for me.”

As Ms. Rabe headed toward dinner, Steve Martin appeared wearing a fedora. He rushed towards his seat, and declined to be interviewed, with an unconvincing half-apology. “But I like The Observer!” he called over his shoulder, “It’s a great paper!” God bless you Mr. Martin! Don’t worry, we’ll talk next time.

Bob Balaban, however, proved perfectly chatty when asked which of the Bard’s characters he most identifies with. “Easily Caliban, because no other Shakespearean character is almost my name. It’s the only one!” he exclaimed gaily. “What could it be, Richard III? No. That doesn’t sound like Balaban.” The actor went on to describe his busy summer, which includes a book tour for his upcoming title The Creature from the Seventh Grade. “Its completely autobiographical,” he said. “But in this case the boy turns into an eight and a half foot reptile, which I didn’t do.” Describing himself as “shortest, skinniest, most-incompetent boy in his class,” Mr. Balaban professed that he has “fabulously good and fabulously horrifying memories of the seventh grade.”

At dinner on the Delacorte’s northeasterly lawn, guests toasted the Public’s half-century of free plays. White lanterns bobbled in the slight breeze as Christine Quinn saluted the organization.

As the main course was being served, Tony Kushner shared his favorite Shakespearean play. “For various reasons, Midsummer, because I think its about theater itself. So it seems like to me it’s sort of at the center of things.” Sadly, we didn’t have the opportunity to press him further, as we were overwhelmed by hundreds of passing chicken breasts.

After the meal, the crowds sought their seats for the evening’s reading of Romeo and Juliet. Attempting to avoid the clogged corridors, full of chatting and meandering guests, many attendees hoofed it across the lawn, only to find they had to mount a thigh-high fence to access the stage. Revelers young and old, spry and not so spry, heaved legs over the railing in an show of theatric acrobatics. Several sets of unmentionables were unwittingly flashed.

Before finding our seat, we ran into Cynthia Nixon, whose fire-red hair is growing back after her stint as a cancer-stricken professor in the Broadway show Wit. The actress, however, doesn’t know if she will keep her tresses short. “People keep asking me that. I’m getting a lot of positive reinforcement about the length,” she said, pulling at the still downy strands.

Inside the theater, guests rose for a standing ovation as the cast took the stage. Meryl Streep larked a lighthearted vision of Juliet, while Kevin Kline read opposite, as Romeo. Christopher Walken earned the most laughs as a sometimes Queens-inflected Mercutio, and Christine Baranski appeared as the nurse. Throughout the reading, flashing, fluorescent underbellies of passing planes reminded viewers they were sitting beneath the midsummer Manhattan sky.

After the performance, we found Ethan Hawke. Asked what he would ask Shakespeare if he had one question, Mr. Hawke thought for several moments, before offering a response. “What happens when we die?” he concluded. Genius or cheeky (or both), we have not yet decided. We’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.

After the reading, guests returned to the Delacorte’s front lawn, and enjoyed dancing, desserts and drinks. “Can I get champagne and wine? Is that bad?” one guest asked her friend guiltily.

The clock neared midnight. The softball team had long since packed its bats (after yet another loss, it seemed), and the Great Lawn was quiet once more. The party at the Delacorte continued, however. With glasses in hand guests danced into night, ill-chosen spike heels sinking into the new summer sod.

editorial@observer.com

Ms. Streep looked years younger than her character in a chic blazer over a white blouse, with her hair tied back in a simple ponytail. Ms. Adams was glam in a floor-length gray and white halter dress.

Director Nora Ephron said, “Unlike most romantic comedies, which are about people falling in love, this is about people who are already in love.” When asked who she thought should take over Frank Bruni’s spot as food critic at The Times, Ms. Ephron replied, “Maybe Meryl should do it!”

“If anyone can look like they know how to cook, it’s Meryl Streep,” said chef Anthony Bourdain.

“I am so excited about Meryl Streep, I can’t even think!” said guidebook mogul Tim Zagat. “I was once working for a company that owned Paramount, and Meryl was in a movie, and they said, ‘You’ve got to come down.’ I didn’t know she was there, and I sat down and I realized I was sitting next to her. I couldn’t remember anything after.”

Patrick Martin, executive chef of the Cordon Bleu, mused about how Ms. Child would fare in today’s competitive kitchens: “At the Cordon Bleu, Julia learned a lot of things in terms of techniques—if she was here today, she would have the same talent! Things change, food changes, but not Julia!”

The Transom also caught up with Top Chef Masters host Kelli Choi, who said the celebrity she’d most like to see in a kitchen is “President Obama! If he was cooking up a burger or something—I think he’s really into food.”

“You’re on the wrong side!” someone shouted at Martha Stewart, who stood behind the press to get a picture of her friends strolling down the carpet. “I know! I’m blogging!” she shouted back, snapping pictures of Atlantic Monthly food writer Corby Kummer.

Actor and comic genius Bob Balaban, meanwhile, discussed the perils of eating on film. “In a movie, they show you taking one bite, but you ended up taking 150 bites!” he said. “You have rehearsal, there are 15 angles, you have to eat a lot!” Mr. Balaban, who has a few dietary restrictions (“I don’t eat meat, I don’t eat dessert, particularly—I don’t eat butter, cream or cheese. It’s impossible to feed me!”), said cooking at home can be difficult.

Luckily, he added, “My wife is a really, really good cook!”

“I don’t really feel like talking,” the actor said when we got alongside him early in the evening. “I just kind of want to relax with my friends and family.”

Being neither, the Daily Transom took our seat at the table adjacent to Robbins’s, where he sat with Mort Zuckerman and Bob Balaban and people we assumed were his family (Susan Sarandon was not present, unfortunately), looking relaxed.

Later, we spoke with an equally weary-looking Michael Pena, who acts alongside Mr. Robbins in the film (Rachel McAdams, who was filming in Canada last night, also stars).

It’s a movie about three soldiers returning home from Iraq—a mix of farce and drama with a distinctly political bent. So, we thought we’d ask Mr. Pena for his thoughts on the most recent absurd political development--the Sarah Palin e-mail hack.

It turns out Mr. Pena hadn’t even heard about the scandal. Feeling guilty for fanning that particular flame, we were preparing to change the subject when Pena explained, “It’s just that my wife just had a baby … And we’ve been doing press, so I don’t hear stuff like that. I’d like to!”

Pena listened as we described what had happened, nodding interestedly and finally suggesting, “You should ask Tim what he thinks about it.”

We told him about that situation, too.

“But he’s talking to a reporter right now,” he replied, gesturing to our voice recorder. “He’s got one of those, anyway.”

Like a jealous ex-girlfriend, we attempted to glance casually across the room where, indeed, Mr. Robbins, flanked by director Neil Burger, was speaking into a microphone.

We spoke with Mr. Burger first, who told us about his intentions with the film: “The movie is really about America now, where we are as a country, where the conversation is. Most importantly, it’s funny and it’s funny for a reason, because laughter can make certain truths hit with more impact. When an audience puts up a wall to any serious issue, the humor becomes like a Trojan horse that gets through the wall.”

Speaking of walls—Mr. Robbins had come around. Well, what did the famously politically active actor think about the goings-on of the past week?

“It’s a distraction. That was the whole strategy of the Republican party--how do we get people talking about something that is irrelevant for three weeks, four weeks out of the election cycle. It distracts from what we should be talking about, like the economy and the difference between the two candidates.”

Now we felt bad again.

"I didn't want to go back into my cave right away, if you know what I mean. I'm sure I will do another book, but I just wanted to give myself the fall to cruise and play a little bit, because it's been a long time," said Ms. Brown, 53. She was speaking to The Transom in the Jazz at Lincoln Center's sixth-floor reception hall, where Events of the Heart-a charity for women with or at risk of contracting heart disease-threw a benefit gala on Monday, October 1.

"I actually don't want to go back into that bit of a cave just yet," she said again, with added emphasis.

While Ms. Brown is apparently enjoying the time off, she did say that she plans to a sign another book deal in the next month or two. Another biography, perhaps? "Maybe, I'm not sure. I'm playing at the moment," she said.

A few yards away, actor Bob Balaban, wearing his signature circular specs, stood dishing with power publicist Peggy Siegal. He said he was thrilled to begin filming an HBO project called Recount, about the 2000 presidential election fiasco in Florida, in a few weeks. Recount aside, he was most eager to talk about this year's Bernard and Doris (about tobacco billionaire Doris Duke's relationship with her gay butler), which he directed and produced. The film costars Susan Sarandon and Ralph Fiennes.

"When two great actors get together and spend a lot of time together on screen, it's a fine thing to watch. It's kind of like sex, but no sex happens, but it's kind of like sex," Mr. Balaban, 62, said with a giggle. But can we look forward to seeing him in another Christopher Guest mockumentary any time soon? "We don't know. They call us and then we find out and then we all leave. If [Mr. Guest] calls, oh yeah!" he said.

Later in the evening, playwright Doug Wright was stopping by the bar with his partner, David. Mr. Wright offered that he was thrilled to offer his support to the cardiac charity-he wrote a short play that would be performed later in the evening-but, apparently, that's all in a day's work.

"Most of my activism finds its expression in my work. I wrote a play called I Am My Own Wife, which advocates tolerance and it's just been played in Eastern Europe and its one of the first plays ever to be produced over there that actively addresses homosexuality, so that's been a great satisfaction!" he said.

For the moment, though, Mr. Wright said he is focusing on his work for the Broadway revival of Disney's The Little Mermaid. "It's the first time I've ever worked on a show that has a giant bubble machine and confetti canons, so you might say it's a welcome vacation from these weightier issues!"

“I tried sprinkling them with aluminum-chloride flakes,” he said woefully to the man from Hampton Irrigation. Mr. Balaban addressed him as “Steve.” Steve wore work boots, tube socks and a nametag that said “Ethan.”

Mr. Balaban, in a crisp white Banana Republic dress shirt, squired him through a tour of his unfinished country estate, a 6,000-square-foot Cape Cod that is, after five years of work, not yet fit for habitation. The lawn is flooded. The kitchen is cabinet-less. When in town, Mr. Balaban sleeps in the three-car garage.

“The ground simply doesn’t have enough aluminum in it,” he said, as if all things ultimately came back to the colors of his garden. Comedy, tragedy, horror, real estate: blue flowers, rust-colored flowers.

Mr. Balaban—an actor, writer, director, producer, children’s-book author, book-on-tape reader and all-purpose, soft-spoken, central-casting Semite—has been chronicling his domestic travails for a sporadic documentary television series. Bob Builds His Dream House airs with no warning or regularity on Plum TV, a toity cable network that broadcasts only in six of America’s luxury vacation destinations—the Hamptons, Aspen, Martha’s Vineyard, the like. It is hardly Mr. Balaban’s highest artistic achievement, and in that regard it is a perfectly representative one: understated, clever, nicely shticky like the rest of his career and also, in its way, classic. Some people buy a giant house in the Hamptons and pay cash. Bob Balaban—and his wife, the screenwriter Lynn Grossman—spent more than 20 years looking for real estate and then sacrificed five agonizing years—so far—with building it themselves.

(Before “Steve” came over, Mr. Balaban had driven NYTV about the Hamptons in his black Volkswagen sedan. There had been a falafel sandwich at Bridgehampton’s World Pie. From the driver’s seat, Mr. Balaban wandered his way through descriptions of his innumerable upcoming projects. One of them is a children’s book, disturbingly called Do Not Open This Book. He described it as “my Slaughterhouse Five for the 12-to-16 set.” He thought for a while about being the sort of man who starts more things than he finishes. “I have a fabulous—I love my ideas for certain things,” he said. “I’m sort of an idiot savant.”)

Ten years ago, he settled on a plot located just off Sagaponack Road, opposite an open field, surrounded by heavy brush and next-door to the family that built either the Suez or the Panama Canal, Mr. Balaban can’t remember which. Sometime between then and now, someone built a 20,000-square-foot spec house, the largest in the Hamptons, right across the street.

His contractors turned out to be trouble. His landscaper couldn’t agree with the irrigation specialist. Last winter, despite extensive grading, lumping and topsoil-compacting countermeasures, the swimming pool filled with mud.

“But I’m very fond of our tile people,” Mr. Balaban said. He declined to discuss many of the unaired frustrations that have delayed his construction effort. “I will just say this was not about how fun it is to build a house,” he said. “I have to be judicious about this so as not to incur any further wrath.”

The half-decade of construction has yielded so far just two half-hour episodes for Plum TV. He is “in the process of accumulating material for No. 3.”

So perhaps Ethan, or Steve, could give him some narrative for that third episode. “What seems to be the problem?” the drainage specialist asked at the start of their meeting.

“When they came to put in the irrigation line,” Mr. Balaban said, gesturing wearily at a nondescript bit of greenery by the guesthouse, “they moved the plant—I must say very badly, but that’s O.K.”

Steve nodded. George, his assistant, scuttled off to the truck to get a “sleeve,” which Steve promised would protect the irrigation tubing without disturbing the shrubs.

“I’m in a constant state of worrying about these plants,” said Mr. Balaban, who sometimes refers to his plants as “these guys.”

Mr. Balaban’s phone rang. He scrambled to untangle the headset cord and began to yank the BlackBerry out of his shirt pocket. It wouldn’t come. He gave up, then decided to try again, then gave up, then tried again. “Could you just tear off my shirt?” he asked Steve.

“Maybe pull the cord out first,” Steve said.

“That’s a brilliant idea,” Mr. Balaban said. “It’s just like irrigation.”

Steve agreed. Then several of the surrounding sprinklers clicked on, spraying Mr. Balaban and his BlackBerry and Steve. The section of grass being doused was already under an inch of water. Mr. Balaban deflated.

Steve promised to reset the timers on the irrigation system. “You’re Ethan,” Mr. Balaban said, noticing the man’s shirt. “I’ve been calling you Steve.” He apologized and apologized.

“Better than late,” Ethan said. Mr. Balaban nodded solemnly and apologized some more.

A Chicago native and permanent resident of the Upper West Side, Mr. Balaban is an entertainment-industry Renaissance man and a member of one of the great American show-business families. The seven sons of his Russian émigré grandmother came to own more than 70 movie theaters in the Midwest. Later, the eldest, Barney, ran Paramount Pictures for nearly 30 years. Elmer, Bob’s father, invented pay cable. Robert Elmer Balaban was born in 1945 and is the only member of the family to cross over to acting. He began his film career in earnest in 1969, when he played the young student who blew Jon Voigt in Midnight Cowboy.

His television career has been more wide-ranging. He has twice played the president of NBC—once as his friend Warren Littlefield in HBO’s The Late Shift, and again, as a generic network executive, during a five-episode stint on Seinfeld. He has developed countless pilots over the years, including one called Deadline, in 2000, that featured his friend Oliver Platt as a conniving but lovable New York tabloid reporter. He did an animated dating series for VH1, a postmodern love story for FX and a science-fiction project that has not yet found a home. Hopeless Pictures, a cartoon spoof of the independent-film world he did in 2005 for the Independent Film Channel, is a point of particular pride—not just for its takedown of weepy indies, but also for its sexual explicitness. “We had penetration,” he said proudly.

Mr. Balaban’s talents extend to the theater and to precisely two other areas of life: the checkout line at Costco, where he can guess the total cost of purchases, without tallying, to within a dollar; and to distance, which he said he can measure mentally to within an inch. He has a terrible sense of direction and a lousy memory. “I know only half the names of everything,” he said, “so I’m useless to an interviewer.”

This is true. His faulty memory omits the names of many of his current and former projects, co-stars, directors and favorite films. His first made-for-TV movie was The Brass Ring, or Only My Mouth Is Smiling, “one or the other.” One of his favorite movies is a Hungarian film called Time Stood Still. Or maybe Time Stands Still? Another is a French movie Toto le Héros, directed by …. “We’ll IMDb it.” He is in the process of recording a book on tape written by some guy—Lawson?—whose first book “had the color white in the title.” He has a movie coming out soon “that I think could be very good. It involves that man who’s so nice—Jim? I forget his name. He did In the Bedroom with Sissy Spacek.”

It’s not that Mr. Balaban is uncaring or oblivious; if anything, he’s over-attentive. Later that day, long after the unexpected lawn-soaking and after a dinner in Westhampton with Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen and his girlfriend Mona Ackerman, Mr. Balaban placed a call to NYTV. It was 11:30 p.m. After apologizing profusely, he asked if it would be O.K. if Jennifer Coolidge—his co-star in Best in Show and the forthcoming Christopher Guest mockumentary For Your Consideration—phoned. She called at midnight.

“I just love him to death,” she said, and went on to list Mr. Balaban’s virtues, including his modesty, charm, profound ability to multitask and the fact that he “busts ass, except he’s so much more gentlemanly than that word.”

Told of Bob Builds His Dream House, Ms. Coolidge expressed interest. “Ooh!” she exclaimed, with her trademark off-key musicality. “Does it have Bob acting all nervous with contractors?”

Cyndi Lauper avoids red wine. It turns her teeth an unsightly hue, she said. Someone handed her a goblet of the stuff shortly after she arrived at Tony’s Di Napoli restaurant on 43rd Street on the night of Friday, March 24. She accepted it with grace—but then, in a slick maneuver involving a dip, a smile and a swivel, she slipped it to Alan Cumming. “Honey, can you please take this?” she said to him softly, their faces very close. The glass passed from him into the charge of a third party and Ms. Lauper and Mr. Cumming hugged.

At 52, Ms. Lauper’s smooth alabaster complexion and narrow figure allow her to wear such a thing as a blouse cut all over with revealing eyelets and still make a fine entrance. Though she’s acted on-screen before and won an Emmy, this revival of Threepenny Opera marks her debut on Broadway, hence tonight’s party in honor.

“She’s sort of ageless,” said Alan Markinson, theater manager of the Helen Hayes Theatre, whose own playhouse is currently running Sarah Jones’ Bridge and Tunnel.

“She’s got that great role of Jenny the prostitute,” said Ms. Lauper’s cast mate, Brian Butterick. “It’s definitely not an ingénue role; it’s a woman of experience.”

Ms. Lauper’s portrait had been painted by resident caricaturist Daniel May for the occasion; it was in a nook of the room, draped in velvet. Later, it would be unveiled and fastened to the establishment’s fabled wall of fame, alongside past Broadway queens.

“I’m in awe of this picture business,” Mr. Butterick said. “Twenty years ago, I bought a picture of Brecht and put it on my wall. I’m a real Brecht wanker.” Carlos Leon, also a cast member, sat at the same table. He wore a beard and a leather wristband.

“I play a guy called Charles Filtch,” Mr. Leon said. “He’s one of Peachum’s beggars. We all beg in our life somehow, so you can always work on that.”

Will Lola—Lourdes Maria Ciccone Leon, Mr. Leon’s daughter with Madonna—be attending the show?

“I see her all the time,” he said. “I’m a very active father.”

This must be difficult, what with she being in London and he in New York.

“Well, that works easily,” he said. “I mean, if you’re a good father, you make the effort to see your child. No matter what. Even if she’s in Finland, it doesn’t matter—or Australia, which is 10,000 miles away. I would go see her because she’s my daughter. I love her. That’s the way it’s going to stay.”

And how would he describe his relationship with Madonna?

“Madonna’s a great friend of mine.”

Had he heard the whispers that her passion for England—and her English husband—were on the wane?

“I don’t believe any of it. Her husband’s amazing, by the way. He’s an amazing guy, so they make an amazing couple.”

“I loooove playing your music,” crooned radio personality Valerie Smaldone, the night’s hostess, from the front of the room. She introduced Ms. Lauper as a “hometown girl” from Queens—who needed a reminder?—and herself as hailing from the Bronx. “Big up the borough girls!” she said. Ms. Lauper approached the mike and said a quick thank you. Hearing her thick Queens cadences fill the room, everyone laughed warmly.

Unveiled, the portrait showed Ms. Lauper, head several sizes bigger than her body, kneeling in a long red dress and light-blue Dorothy-from-Kansas shoes. On the ground before her were a few pennies spilled from a tiny pouch.

“Oh, it’s great!” said a tall man, drink in hand. “But the body’s scaring me a little bit.”

—Nicholas Boston

Shrunk

Huff stars Hank Azaria as another one of those analysts who are put upon by life, so, at Showtime’s second-season premiere party, Bob Balaban was taking a minute to discuss mental hygiene.

“Therapy’s really interesting,” Mr. Balaban said into a breadstick microphone he had just used on Oliver Platt. “Network television never, ever, ever has shows about therapy.”

Does Mr. Balaban watch network television? “No.”

Does he remember a show called Frasier? “Two or three really successful shows about therapists,” he said, “and now there won’t be any more, because people in television think everything is the same.”

Just then David Hyde Pierce appeared in the distance. He was talking colorfully to an alm

ost-recognizable young man—the party, held in the lobby of the Museum of Television and Radio, was full of them—about a play he attended with Baz Luhrmann, and how they started a standing ovation at the end because what the hell was the rest of the audience thinking? “It was fucking great,” he said.

Mr. Pierce stars with Mr. Azaria in Spamalot. Other cast members were in attendance to show their support, as were David Schwimmer, Fred Armisen and Oliver Platt’s parents, whom he hustled past Mr. Balaban just before the start of the premiere. Mr. Balaban, in green Merino wool and tortoise-shell glasses, was unruffled.

“I believe that a good therapist is like a good anybody,” Mr. Balaban said. “They’re well trained, except they have a gift. If you really have a gift, you probably don’t have to go to school for it. And if you don’t have a gift, you can study for a million years and get a million degrees and still be a bad doctor. And that’s my theory of the universe.”

—Rebecca Dana

People Disappear Every Day

At 8 a.m. on Saturday, March 25, on the eighth floor of Macy’s in the human-resources department, the first job interview began. The candidate, a woman from Arkansas, walked through the maroon door marked “Training Room B” as the lenses of two cameras followed her. Inside the room were: Parsons fashion-department chair Tim Gunn; Project Runway Season 2 runner-up Daniel Vosovic; Elle editor Joann Pailey; and Gen Art fashion director Mary Gehlhar.

The first candidate was but the first to disappoint.

“Today’s a desert, to be honest,” Mr. Gunn said later on his lunch break. He had seen and rejected nearly 60 hopefuls. “If I were a good, young designer and I were confident about my abilities, I wouldn’t have come here at 2 o’clock in the morning and stood in line. It demonstrates that I’m committed, I’m eager, and I really want this badly—but for me, that’s compensating for things that they don’t have. And that’s really what we’re seeing today: things they don’t have.”

The average waiting time was four and a half hours for Project Runway Season 3 contestants to either a) defend their work in front of the panel for two minutes, b) walk into the room and get rejected before even reaching the “T” taped to the carpet, or c) get rejected at the pre-screening table, never making it before Mr. Gunn’s intimidating gaze.

Sidney Maresca had arrived at 7:30 a.m., followed by her three models, friends of hers. They changed clothes at Dunkin’ Donuts and joined Sidney on line. She did their makeup. One wore a strapless evening gown made of men’s suiting with a flowing aqua chiffon band beneath the bust. Another wore a bright purple knee-length satin dress with knotted straps and exposed hot-pink satin lining. The last wore a black suit jacket and dark green skirt with a heavy multicolored bobble-bead choker.

How long had Ms. Maresca been preparing for this?

“My entire life,” she said. Her own label, in existence since 2001, was “on hiatus” while she paid off debts and regained financing. She works now as an administrative assistant at a cosmetics company.

“I don’t watch the show because I don’t have cable—I can’t afford it,” she said.

That might not be a bar to entry. Mr. Gunn and Mr. Vosovic agreed that the recipe for a Project Runway cast member has four main ingredients: a passion for fashion, experience, talent and personality.

“I want to be excited when you walk into this room,” said Mr. Vosovic. He deserved it; it was his birthday. “You have to be excited for this, because this is what you do. Especially in Project Runway—it beats the hell out of you, believe me.”

Fully recovered from the disappointment and surprise of losing the show’s second season, Mr. Vosovic said he now has “a lot of offers on the table.” And, yes, he did call Michael Kors after the show, as Mr. Kors requested in the season finale, and even interviewed, but so far nothing’s been “cemented.”

“I wanted to see what he was offering, and to see not only if I would be good for their company, but if they would be good for me. So if he did offer, I’d have to see what else there is. But it’s a great offer—I can’t deny that,” he said. “In the next few weeks, I hope to have a job solidified.”

The other side of the audition-room wall looked like Disney World: a long line snaking through elastic ropes and peppered with characters. One young designer wore a backless and hooded black trash bag and ripped black tights. He was accompanied by two hipster-goth models, and all three wore matching makeup with heavy fuchsia body glitter.

“What do I do?!” he cried. He had realized he was next in line for the pre-screening. Since they had so much “personality,” he and his models had skipped the pre-test.

“Stay where you are,” said a crewmember. They plopped down in the dingy black chairs of the next holding area. One model started talking to another designer to her right.

“Do you remember [Daniel] talking about Santino? And he was playing with the spoon and the yogurt? I’m just like, ‘I hate you!’”

“This place is tapped, don’t you know?!” interjected Black Trash Bag. He gasped as he watched the contestant ahead of him get wired for the audition room. “The mike’s going to rip my garment!”

A crewmember hurried over with a small camera—footage for the Internet, a Bravo spokeswoman explained.

Black Trash Bag and his two models, all three of them Parsons students, were not camera-shy. “We love you, Tim!” they called to the camera, making heart shapes with their hands.

A bit later, Black Trash Bag emerged from the audition room—his “garment” was unharmed—angrily placing one foot in front of the other, as if the eighth floor of Macy’s were his catwalk. A maroon ruffled corduroy mini-dress on one of his models was now growing a hole at the seam.

“Daniel’s like, ‘How are you going to make your vision?’” Black Trash Bag explained to another rejected designer on the safety of the seventh floor. “And I’m like, ‘I don’t want a vision—I want art.’ And then they’re like, ‘Well, you’re not here for the right reasons.’ I’m like ‘Great! Bye!’”

“‘Keep working’—that’s what Tim said to me,” the designer replied. “Ugh, whatever. One of the ladies, that lady on the far left—”

“That blond bitch?” asked the model in the ripping dress, referring to the Elle editor.

“She was like, ‘You’re definitely not equipped for this.’”

“She’s just mad because she’s a junior assistant at Donna Karan.”

“And I was like, ‘Thanks,’” Designer No. 2 said sarcastically. “And Daniel’s like, ‘Thank you for being so pleasant,’ and I was like, ‘No problem.’ But then my stupid microphone popped out of my back, like, on the way out, and I’m like, ‘Oh, now they’re going to show me like, “O.K., we thought he was cool doing the show, and then his microphone’s hanging from his ass cheeks.’”

—Amy Odell

The period is deliberately set in November 1932, just before Hitler took power and made it impossible to treat the British aristocracy as the smug P.G. Wodehouse simpletons they were without also implicating them in the Holocaust. Gosford Park is the magnificent country estate to which nouveau-riche Sir William McCordle (Michael Gambon) and his wife, Lady Sylvia (Kristin Scott Thomas), have invited a slew of friends and relatives for a shooting party. These include Lady Sylvia's Aunt Constance, Countess of Trentham (Maggie Smith); the hosts' unmarried daughter, Isobel McCordle (Camilla Rutherford); and Lady Sylvia's sister Louisa (Geraldine Somerville) and her husband, Raymond, Lord Stockbridge (Charles Dance), who cannot forgive Sir William for having risen to the peerage through his vulgar moneymaking prowess in commerce.

Then there's Lieutenant Commander Anthony Meredith (Tom Hollander), desperately in debt, and his wife, Lady Sylvia's other sister, Lady Lavinia Meredith (Natasha Wightman), who stands by Anthony despite his difficulties; the Honorable Freddie Nesbitt, who has lost his job, and his wife, Mabel Nesbitt (Claudia Blakley), who Freddie mistakenly assumed was wealthy; Lord Rupert Standish (Laurence Fox), the penniless younger son of a marquess who is courting Isobel; and Jeremy Blond, a friend of Lord Rupert, whatever that means.

A touch of star power is provided by Jeremy Northam, who portrays Ivor Novello, the real-life British matinee idol, film star and musical performer and, just incidentally, Sir William's cousin. A faint hint of anti-Semitism is provided with the arrival of Morris Weissman (Bob Balaban), a friend of Ivor Novello and a producer of Charlie Chan movies.

If, by this time, you have problems keeping the guests all straight in your mind, Mr. Altman does very little to enlighten you about all the intrigues upstairs. You do get the feeling that England, like the rest of the world, was in a slump in 1932. Money and the lack of it is the main topic of conversation, but most of the "swells" seem indistinct and interchangeable.

Not so downstairs, where the bulk of the star power is concentrated in a roster of servants acted by Alan Bates, Helen Mirren, Eileen Atkins, Derek Jacobi, Emily Watson, Richard E. Grant, Kelly MacDonald, Clive Owen and a score more performers less familiar to American audiences. The way the film was shot, there is always a servant or two present in every "upstairs" scene. There were no extras in the film, so background hubbub had to be supplied by the actors themselves. The point of view is thus much more downstairs than upstairs. Mr. Altman's irreverence toward the former class has become an issue with which Americans seem to be having more trouble than the British themselves.

The murder at Gosford Park and the bizarre solution to its mystery are not worth giving away in these circumstances. The true evil involved long predates the arrival of the first guest at Gosford Park, and Mr. Altman skillfully withholds the final tears of catharsis until all the guests are in the driveway on the way home, and the police are left clueless. Stephen Fry as the detective investigating the murder seems to be attempting a Jacques Tati imitation without much success or plausibility. This is the only serious failing I can find in the film. For the rest, Mr. Altman seems to be having a good time running his spectacular cast through its paces, and you will, too.

From beginning to end, Mr. Altman's Gosford Park is a textbook exercise in directorial dexterity. And for once, all the "inside" jokes about Charlie Chan movies and the blighted film career of the real Ivor Novello flow smoothly into the scenario, thanks to the expert timing under pressure of a marvelous ensemble.

A Study in Marriage

Ray Lawrence's Lantana , based on the screenplay adapted by Andrew Bovell from his play Speaking in Tongues , starts out as a moody film noir and ends as a passionate meditation on the deep mysteries of marriage. The lantana bush, on its surface, is a beautiful plant filled with exotic flowers, but underneath is a thick, thorny growth. The plant serves as a metaphor for the twists and turns in four marriages beset by the demons of desire and deceit.

Police detective Leon Zat (Anthony LaPaglia) becomes entangled in a missing-persons investigation in the midst of cheating on his wife, a betrayal that fills him with self-revulsion. Leon's wife, Sonja (Kerry Armstrong), feels that something is amiss with her marriage, but can't bear to think that her husband is deceiving her. Without his knowledge, she consults a psychiatrist named Valerie (Barbara Hershey), who has begun to suspect that her own husband, John (Geoffrey Rush), is having an affair with a gay patient, Patrick (Peter Phelps). When Valerie disappears after having left a desperate message on her husband's answering machine, the net of suspicion spreads wide enough to involve two neighboring couples, Jane (Rachel Blake) and her estranged husband Pete (Glenn Robbins), and-somewhat lower on the social ladder-Paula (Daniela Farinacci) and Nik (Vince Colosimo). To complicate matters for Leon in his investigation, Jane just happens to be the woman with whom he's been betraying his wife.

With such a complicated criss-crossing of relationships, the film tends to move slowly from blackout to blackout until the deeper feelings of the characters register. This is to say that Lantana finally delivers its emotional payoff with the resolution of four marriages with varying degrees of reconciliation and regret. Mr. LaPaglia, Ms. Armstrong, Mr. Rush and Ms. Hershey invest their roles with a profound humanity.

A Study in Marriage II

Two film adaptations of real-life marriages under agonizing stress-and two of the best films of the year-are Richard Eyre's Iris , from a screenplay by Mr. Eyre and Charles Wood, adapted from John Bayley's two memoirs, and Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind , sparked by Russell Crowe's extraordinary evocation of schizophrenia, which to my mind is by far the best performance of the year. I just hope that Mr. Crowe is not going to be penalized by the various award-givers simply because of his Bruce Willis–like bad-boy publicity.

As for Iris , it manages to overcome my long-held prejudice against two sets of actors playing characters at different stages of their lives. (I am still recovering from the substitution of Valerie Hobson-nice as she is, and even brilliant in Robert Hamer's 1949 Kind Hearts and Coronets -for the Vivien Leigh–like feline beauty of young Jean Simmons midway through David Lean's Great Expectations of 1946.) Kate Winslet as the younger Iris Murdoch and Judi Dench as the older version manage to bring the literary lioness to vibrant life: Ms. Winslet by the fruitful union of her voluptuous body with her hard-edged, impudently intellectual countenance, Ms. Dench by her magisterial mental authority slowly crumpling into the horrible confusion of Alzheimer's.

Incarnating the Job-like patience and forbearance toward the eternally impossible Iris Murdoch are Hugh Bonneville as the early John Bailey and Jim Broadbent the later one. In both periods, the Bailey-Murdoch marriage is sustained by the mystical bonds that, as W.H. Auden observed, make married couples so much more mysteriously interesting than unmarried ones.

Javier Bardem Return In a Love Triangle

Gerardo Vera's Second Skin presents a married couple in which the husband becomes infatuated with a gay surgeon. The husband is played by Jordi Mollà, the wife by Ariadna Gil, and the "other woman" by Javier Bardem, the Oscar-nominated star of Before Night Falls . The problem with this particular case of adultery-aside from the obvious one arising from bisexuality-is that the husband lies to his wife, lies to his male lover and lies to himself, until he's besieged from all directions.

One doesn't know how one is supposed to react to this once-taboo subject when the lovemaking is tilted in intensity and duration to the gay relationship rather than the straight one. I have always suspected, without the slightest bit of authority or research, that the distinction between gay and straight is one of compulsive hypersexuality on one side and repressive romanticism on the other. Of course, there are sex-crazy people in all behavioral groupings; what's interesting in Second Skin is that the committed homosexual played by Mr. Bardem is more comfortable with women than the married bisexual played by Mr. Molla. And with the film's striking ending, one realizes that we have a long way to go before we fully understand all the sexual permutations involved.