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

The original cast of 'Seminar' takes a bow (Getty)

Despite rave reviews for Alan Rickman and the cast of Theresa Rebeck's caustic comedy of literature and sex, Seminar, the Broadway show shuttered last Sunday in a whimper, not a bang. This blow came one month after an almost complete turnover in the cast, with new members Justin Long, Zoe Lister-Jones, and Jeff Goldblum taking over from Hamish Linklater, Lily Rabe, and Mr. Rickman, respectively.

Seminar, a five-person play about privileged creative writing students receiving private lessons from a washed-up, curmudgeonly ex-literary superstar named Leonard, may have suffered with the casting overhaul, though an insider told The New York Observer that the show was axed after receiving zero Tony nominations. (Though it has been nominated as Best Play of the 2011/2012 Season by the Outer Critics Circle and The Drama League.)

Forty-Five! That was the approximate tardiness of Prabal Gurung's runway show at the Gehry-designed IAC building. The Observer, having misread our schedule, arrived on time (that's a first). We even had a few moments to kiss-kiss Mary Alice Stephenson and compliment her Naeem Khan. Who to blame? Surely not front-of-house PR behemoth KCD, they have their shit together more than a Swiss bank.  Zoe Saldana, colorfully festooned in a phenomenal liquid Prabal paint suit took her seat relatively on time. Lily Rabe sat quietly en attente. Buyers are never late. Cross off Anna Wintour, style.com's Nicole Phelps, and Paper's Kim Hastrieter… hell they've never been late! Best-dressed contender, Kate Lanphear of ELLE magazine arrived with time to glare vacantly at her smart phone.

We couldn't tell why Michelle Harper was just shy of tears. The passing of H.R.H. Whitney Houston occurred after this fashion frenzy... perhaps she was suffering from a panic attack or mal au ventre in row one? Frankly not our business.

In the meantime, we decided to get social. Seated betwixt team WWD, we gave it a go gingerly... The Observer had the good fortunate to sit behind the poised Executive Editor, Bridget Foley. "Will you be going to Milan and Paris for the shows?" she sang. Mais oui! Paris! We chirped.  KCD founder and gentlemen, Ed Filipowski whisked over and assured the WWDs that the show would start soon! Sincere apologies. Foley's response was so graceful many churlish divas should have taken note.

Thankfully, he need not apologize, because the clothes made up for all the delay.

Patent leather and black black fur by day; add white tulle and gold embellishments for night. Signature Gurung color schemes and patterns, reminiscent of an iridescent oil spill, were wondrous. Brocade, techno fabrics, appliqué, volants: all there! Look number 28-- a hand-embroidered, black tulle gown with with Fabergé cutwork on Joan Smalls drew gasps. If it's edge, yet feminine elegance that starlets and statuesque first ladies want… look no further!

The clock had barely struck 1pm and our Burberry-clad feet hurt like hell! By the grace of God VPL was just across the way. Whew!

Later, the chaos and disarray at Dream Hotel's Electric Room (ROOM! Try complex) for Mr. Gurung's after party was indescribable. Praise Syndicate's Anuschka Senge, who ushered The Observer past the riff-raff at the door. Inside, we spotted Candice Swanepoel and Rose McGowan, whilst slurping up delicious Belevdere cocktails and dancing to DJ Mia Moretti's fab beats.

Watts and Schreiber.

On what could only be described as a glorious midsummer night, the Public Theater celebrated its annual summer gala in Central Park. A sit-down dinner preceded a star-infused performance of All’s Well That Ends Well, one of Shakespeare’s lesser known works, directed by Daniel Sullivan.

Players from the worlds of Broadway, Hollywood and New York’s social strata mingled on the Central Park lawn adjacent to the Delacorte Theater before sitting down to a three-course dinner in a picturesque and perhaps even whimsical mise-en-scène.

Tony-nominated actress Lily Rabe and veteran actor Martin Short swept by groups of perplexed nannies whose charges tottered and played tag in the late afternoon sun, blissfully unaware of the surrounding glamour.

Liev Schreiber, who has long been involved with the Public, attended the gala with his longtime date, Naomi Watts, who wore a long, red and pink striped Marc Jacobs dress. The couple, both New York transplants, gushed about their adopted home and the Public Theater’s special niche with Shakespeare in the Park. Ms. Watts explained that the evening was really a “celebration of the city.” “It’s a testament to this one truly remarkable park,” Mr. Schreiber added. The couple said they look forward to bringing their two sons, Sasha and Sammi, to performances in the future, but as the children are just 3 and 2 their parents admitted it might be a little while before they introduce them to the Bard.

We asked Ms. Watts about working with Leonardo DiCaprio on their upcoming film, J. Edgar. “He impressed the hell out of me,” she responded. The Clint Eastwood-directed flick is set to be released in December. Asked which Shakespearean play the couple would like most to perform, Mr. Schreiber got a faraway look in his eye and said, gesturing to Ms. Watts, “I think you would make a great Lady McB.” Fearing bad luck, the superstitious actor refused to utter the word “Macbeth” within the vicinity of a theater.

We spotted the telltale red tresses of Mike and Molly star Swoosie Kurtz, who appeared looking, if we may be so bold, smoking hot. She wore Alice + Olivia (Newton Johnesque) leather pants and spike Louboutin heels. When asked which Shakespearean role she would like to perform, Ms. Kurtz echoed the sentiment of her fellow jinx-fearing thespians and quickly responded, “Lady McB. I dare not say it here. I don’t even say it at Macy’s, I just like to keep my bases covered.”

New York City Councilwoman and current it-girl of city politics Christine Quinn spoke at the dinner, waxing political throughout the entire address. Showing her own flair for the dramatic, Ms. Quinn lauded the Public as a place where any down-and-out New Yorker recently laid off from his job could go on a summer evening and find strength and solace watching the greatest drama of the English language. We looked around and couldn’t seem to make out any such characters betwixt the white linen and seersucker silhouettes.

After dinner the guests processed to the Delacorte Theater for the main event. Although All’s Well That Ends Well is one of Shakespeare’s more problematic pieces, the veteran Mr. Sullivan directed an accessible and funny show.

The cast included John Cullum, as the King of France, Annie Parisse in the lead role of Helena and Andre Holland as Count Bertram. The play focuses on the relationship between Bertram and Helena as she, a lowly but capable physician’s daughter, tries to win his high-society heart. After ruses and doppelgängers galore, Helena tricks Bertram into consummating their marriage after seducing him in the guise of another woman. Whew.

We caught up with Mr. Sullivan, who explained that it was the play’s rather obscure and abstruse nature that appealed to him. Indeed it was “the mysteriousness of it” that attracted him most, Mr. Sullivan claimed. However, his wife, Mimi Lieber, had a different view. “It’s the second play he has done about class this year. I think that’s interesting,” she added coyly.

After the cast took their bows to resounding applause, guests made their way to the Belvedere Castle for an elegant after-party overlooking the park. The treacherous stone steps leading to the castle were illuminated by Christmas lights and countless Public Theater interns, each dutifully double fisting flashlights and luminous cellphones to prevent any spills. Guests gorged on mini-deserts including cheese cake morsels and bite-size lemon whoopie pies while music, ranging from disco to Britney, blared from the speakers. Unlike their Champagne-sipping counterparts from Hollywood, the theater crowd was more laid back, sipping Stella from bottles and ordering large glasses of white wine late into the evening. Several older guests danced away unabashedly in front of the deejay booth while a group of younger, hip attendees looked on, wide eyes gawking over the brims of their ubiquitous nerd glasses, martinis gripped firmly in hand.

Guests began to slowly make their way down the Castle’s steps around midnight. Others stayed on the lower terrace and dragged on cigarettes in the dark or sat on the stairs gazing at the now-quiet park below. And so, everyone was in true form. The old acted young, the young acted old and a good time was had by all.

Paul Dano, Zoe Kazan, Carey Mulligan

THE SUN HAD NOT GONE DOWN outside the Gramercy Park Hotel when Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan started talking about their leather.

“It’s the fucking leather,” Ms. Mulligan said, touching Ms. Kazan’s slit-laden Valentino dress.

Ms. Kazan made a deep purring noise and knocked her pointed heels at the ground.

“You’ve never done that,” said her boyfriend, actor Paul Dano. “I like that…”

“You could do some serious damage with those shoes,” The Observer pointed out.

The actress flung a mischievous look back.

“Don’t you think I’m not thinking about it.”

“She’s so spiky when she’s wearing leather!” Ms. Mulligan, also in Valentino, said. “I’m wearing demure leather.”

“I’m demure with my—”

“There’s nothing demure about that dress.”

Ms. Kazan and Ms. Mulligan had come to the hotel for the Lincoln Center Institute’s Junior Spring Benefit, which they were hosting with Rightor Doyle, Mamie Gummer and Lily Rabe, other regally cumbersome names that catch eyes when they pop up in playbills and film credits.

As the rest of the committee found their seats among the faux-botanical terrace above the penthouse, Ms. Mulligan and Ms. Kazan, along with extra man Mr. Dano, had happened to walk outside as The Observer made a late arrival.

“Is that a prop?” Ms. Kazan asked us, grabbing at the magazine in our jacket pocket.

The Observer explained that we were enjoying an article on Arthur Rimbaud.

“That’s pretty gay,” Ms. Kazan said.

“Carey,” The Observer redirected, “aren’t you in a book adaptation coming up?”

“What book adaptation?” Ms. Kazan gasped.

“Oh, I’m doing this little known thing, The Great Gatsby.”

“Oh my god that’s amazing!” she said. “Are you playing Gatsby?”

“Yes,” Ms. Mulligan said. “I’m playing Jay Gatsby. It’s a really big role for me, I’m gonna wear a sock down my trousers, give it everything.”

The future Daisy Buchanan said filming would start in September, in director Baz Lurhmann’s home country of Australia.

“In Australia, that’s where the book is set, right?” Ms. Kazan said.

Ms. Mulligan nodded.

“It’s a great Australian novel.”

Eventually, the crowd of women grew, all of them seemingly in Valentino. (Was that a photographer in Valentino? A server in Valentino?) They greeted their fellow league board members, hugged, pecked on the cheek. Lunch plans were made.

“Do you want to go to the Colony Club?” said a young woman to a few other women, over cigarettes. “We’ll have the best table. Considering you’re my only friends who are members, we should probably go.”

And later, The Observer found a piece of jewelry.

“That was my grandmother’s!” Ms. Kazan informed The Observer, as we plucked a silver and opal bracelet from the ground and fastened it to her wrist.

It was time for dinner, but before they could sit down, Ms. Mulligan and Ms. Kazan had to have one more talk about their Valentino dresses.

“You’re not allowed to wear anything but leather,” Ms. Mulligan said. “I really like leather, Zoe.”

She again started grinding and smacking her heels.

“Yeah, yeah, lean over,” Ms. Kazan said to Ms. Mulligan.

“I think it’s bend over,” said Mr. Dano, suggesting the more common parlance.

“Lean over!” Ms. Kazan repeated. “Lean over!”

“Bless you!” Ms. Mulligan said, in a high-pitched English church-girl voice. “Lean over, please.”

“Arch your back in the convex position!” Ms. Kazan said.

Mr. Dano, who had not yet addressed The Observer, bent near our recorder.

“Print all that,” he said, smiling.

Ms. Hubley, 50, a well-respected animation filmmaker who has been producing shorts and documentary inserts for more than 30 years, hopes The Toe Tactic will garner similar heartfelt responses at its New York premiere at MoMA/Lincoln Center’s New Directors/New Films Festival on March 29. The whimsical drama combines animation and real-life action to tell the story about Mona Peek (played by Lily Rabe, currently in Kathleen Turner’s stage production of Crimes of the Heart), who is finally coming to terms with her father’s death and hunting for her lost wallet among New York City’s tragic wonderland of loners, animated objects and a songwriting Elevator Man. A quintet of animated, shape-shifting dogs recite poems and serve as a kind of Greek chorus for Mona. They were voiced by Eli Wallach, David Cross, Marian Seldes and jazz musician Don Byron.

Originally, there wasn’t going to be any animation at all in the film. But Ms. Hubley hand-drew the dogs (with some help from animator Jeremiah Dickey) to help shepherd the short poems about love, life and mortality into the movie. “At the beginning [of the process] the dogs are just a joke, but then they nosed their way into the rest of the story,” she said. “Poetry is one thing that is very hard to put into movies. ... I just thought that the only way to keep it fun, or keep people from glazing over, or I guess to keep it from being too self-loving, would be turning it into something else completely.”

All together, the result is a highly emotional fable. “I want [the audience] to feel full when they walk away,” she said. “It’s really about personal art; it’s not a factory product.”

The Toe Tactic “product” was truly a family affair. Her brother, Ray Hubley, edited the movie. Her mother, whose animation films produced with her late husband John Hubley won three Academy Awards (and seven nominations), had oil paintings featured on the set. And her sister, Georgia, is the drummer and songwriter of indie-rock mavens Yo La Tengo, who provided the dreamy, plunking soundtrack. They weren’t “polished recordings,” according to Ms. Hubley. “But it didn’t matter because they had the spirit in there. Maybe just because I didn’t want to have to fake something, I would just put on [Yo La Tengo’s] music and dance on set.”

Ms. Hubley had been simmering the idea of The Toe Tactic since 2000. She explained that the “very first kernel of it” began with her short Pigeon Within, a four-and-a-half-minute animated film depicting a woman’s adventures exploring her own tunnels of doubt while walking along Park Avenue. She encounters her guardian angel and listens to the music of the city. “Pigeon is…sort of about figuring out the multiple realities we live in. But it’s also about the creative process, this form of communication that I’m trying to work out that at once exposes the internal life and the external life.”

Exploring the themes of Pigeon and then The Toe Tactic “was one of the most instinctive and scary things that I did,” Ms. Hubley said. “It was following some sort of small, scratchy feet ahead of you in the dark and not really knowing what they are or where they’re going. But I didn’t have anything else, so I kept following it. In the making of it, I thought it was about my worst, my most vulnerable aspects. But when people saw it and reacted to it, I was like, ‘Oh, this is just what you would hope for.’ Because everyone is involved. Everyone is in some state of mystery in their life, and when we can all relish that and feel around in that, that’s pretty interesting to me.”

Ms. Hubley grew up in Manhattan, attending Friends Seminary, a prestigious Quaker prep school on East 16th Street, and later, Hampshire College. She graduated in 1980. But she got her real education in her mother’s studio, in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, where she helped make one animation film a year as an associate producer from 1977 to 2001.

Ms. Hubley went out on her own with films like 1982’s Delivery Man, which screened at the Museum of Modern Art and the New York Film Festival and won the Best Film Award at the 1983 Ann Arbor Film Festival. She provided animation and artwork for John Cameron Mitchell’s 2001 cult classic Hedwig and the Angry Inch and several award-winning documentaries. She lives in Maplewood with her two teenage children and her husband, Will Rosenthal, a database and Web site developer. Together, they made the 1989 film Blake Ball, an examination of English poet William Blake’s beliefs in the journey of life, illustrated with baseball motifs.

Ms. Hubley developed her ideas for The Toe Tactic at Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute’s 2002 Screenwriters’ and 2003 Filmmakers’ Labs. In the early spring of 2004, Jen Small, a producer at a small Manhattan film company, Orchard Pictures, took on the project, and the film has been in the works ever since. “This project could never have been turned into some kind of big-budget movie," Ms. Hubley said. "No one would want to or be able to turn it into a plastic product. It’s just a living, breathing thing.”

As for the premiere on March 29 at the Walter Reade Theater, Ms. Hubley is just hoping festgoers will understand the film’s emotional investments.

“It would pain me if people were walking away short of shrugging and saying, ‘That was cute,’” she told The Observer. “Because so much went into it, not just for me, for everyone. It would be a disappointment if it didn’t resonate. … If people are responding to it, that’s the whole sort of point. You know, to vent and feel and not just have the audience be, you know, wowed.”

The New Directors/New Films Festival begins March 26 and continues through April 6. For more information and tickets to screenings, including The Toe Tactic on March 29, visit the ND/NF page on the Film Society at Lincoln Center's website.

That was the marketing tag line for the 1986 movie version of Beth Hanley’s play Crimes of the Heart, starring Diane Keaton, Jessica Lange and Sissy Spacek as three grown sisters. Sarah Paulson, 33, first watched it when she was living in Brooklyn, deciding whether to take the plunge into an acting career. Ms. Paulson, best known for her Golden Globe-nominated role as Harriet Hayes, the Christian comedian on the now-cancelled Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, has been too scared to rent the flick again since she started playing Meg, the character formerly inhabited by Ms. Lange, in the Roundabout Theatre’s production of the play, directed by that formidable, husky-voiced neo-grande-dame Kathleen Turner. “There’s no way I could anything that Jessica Lange could ever do,” Ms. Paulson said, calling from her apartment in the West Village (movin’ on up!), “so I was like, ‘Why don’t I not watch any of those films so I don’t feel like I have to live up to the expectation of that kind of genius?’”

Meg is a long-legged blond dreamer who makes her sisters jealous with her bewitching sexuality. “I think everybody has a little bit of Meg in them, it just depends on how much of it you’re willing to let out,” Ms. Paulson said. “She’s fiercely protective, fiercely defensive, fiercely afraid. She’s just everything fierce. One could spend a lot of time denying those parts, because she’s not always an attractive person. But I don’t think she thinks of herself as a colossal failure. She’s just a survivor, trying to make her way.” Aren’t we all, honey—aren’t we all.