The Gemignani family. (Linda Lenzi/BroadwayWorld.com)

Move over Michael Kors – there’s a new indoor-aviator-toting man in town. Last night, legendary Broadway musical director and conductor Paul Gemignani received the Lifetime Achievement in Musical Theater Award at the 21^st annual Oscar Hammerstein Gala, where the cream of New York’s stage crop came out to celebrate his remarkable oeuvre. Speaking to The Observer on the red carpet, Tony award winner Paul Gemignani revealed that he was “terrified” about the evening’s entertainment – a veritable selection of Broadway treats hosted, and in part performed, by his son Alex.

“We don’t go into this industry for awards,” Paul Gemignani continued, “so when it happens, it feels like an out of body experience.”

But one stage and screen stalwart who did have awards on the brain was Mario Cantone, who divulged, “At the moment, I’m working on my new one man show for Broadway, which will debut in fall 2013. Or summer, because guess what, I’ll do it anytime! But it’s a one man show so it won’t get nominated for a Tony.”

Mr. Cantone, who opened the tribute, said that everyone, including him was in for a surprise. “I have no idea what I’m going to do up there - I never prepare!” he said before taking the stage. The crooner began with a faux eulogy to the honoree, which he assured the crowd he had been put up to by Alex Gemignani and then, without missing a beat, he quickly changed his tune – literally – with a number from Assassins.

Following Mr. Cantone's performance, everyone from Brian Stokes Mitchell to Marin Mazzie poured out in honor of the great MD. There was singing, there were speeches – there was even a sumptuous meal put on for the guests. The dimmed lighting and slew of champagne did almost have us nodding off in the comfy seats, but Alex Gemignani’s sweet compering skills managed to coax us out of our near slumber.

The junior Gemignani said he was hoping for high emotion from the evening’s proceedings, and his aims were certainly achieved. Performances by himself, his father’s wife Derin Altay and a step out of musical retirement from director Lonny Price had the honoree wiping the tears from under his shades. Indeed, the younger Gemignani’s rendition of former Oscar Hammerstein Award recipient Cy Coleman’s The Legacy was amongst the star performances of the night. Occasionally, the celebrations did feel a touch like an excuse for the honoree’s son to run amok in a candy store of his favorite Broadway greats, but the sentiment made up for the mild self-indulgence in an evening where a man used to working below the stage rightfully earned his time in the spotlight.

An unnamed source tells the magazine, "Not all the contracts are signed, but everyone is on board. It just happened."

The last of the many SATC promotional events that the Daily Transom attended was the DVD release party in September. On the red carpet that night, Ms. Cattrall didn't deny the possibility of a sequel or confirm it. She simply told the Daily Transom, "Samantha is single so the sky is the limit! I love Samantha single."

Meanwhile, Charlotte's gay wedding planner Mario Cantone said at the time,  "In the sequel, I want Brad Pitt to play my boyfriend! Why not? He gave $100,000 to turn over the California gay marriage law. So, there! He should play my boyfriend."

But perhaps we should have known that a sequel was a done deal even then, especially after speaking with Willie Garson, the actor who plays Stanford Blatch, Carrie's gay best friend.

"We are so grateful!" said Mr. Garson. "To take a $60 million movie and make it into $500 million, I'll give the fans whatever they want. That's why we're hustling out this DVD, we're done torturing them."

But it seems that the torture was far from complete, because even Mr. Garson was already thinking of plot points for his character.

"I'd like Stanford to find a life partner or at least find a very old woman to take care of him," he said.

Last night marked roughly four months since the release of the undead franchise Sex and the City: The Movie, which means it was time for the release of the DVD, and therefore time to stretch a pink carpet the length of a city block down which stars Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon and Kim Cattrall—even Lynn Cohen, who plays Magda the maid--could march to the bloodcurdling screams of their obsessed fans.

Such was the scene last night outside of the New York Public Library to celebrate the fact that we can now go home and watch the movie over and over again. Magda was popular! And she and the rest of the girls seemed cheerfully resigned to signing yet more pieces of Sex bric-a-brac.

"What did you think of the fashion?" the red-carpet reporters belted out to the actresses as they made their way up the pink carpet, just as though they could still break news about the movie everyone has seen. "What was the set like when you were filming?"

Towering over the steps of the library as you entered the party was a model on stilts dressed in a 12-foot-tall version of Carrie Bradshaw's Vivienne Westwood wedding gown. She greeted the guests pretty much for the duration of the party.

So, do the stars of the movie ever get sick of this?

"No, we are so grateful!" said Willie Garson, who plays Stanford Blatch. "To take a $60 million movie and make it into $500 million, I'll give the fans whatever they want. That's why we're hustling out this DVD, we're done torturing them."

Or are they? Fans twittered--well, they probably Twittered, but twittering existed before Twitter!--about a sequel that either hopefulness or movie-studio publicity canniness had catapulted into full-on rumor status. The latter, probably, since the actresses happily engaged in counterfactual speculation about the "future" of their characters.

"Samantha is single so the sky is the limit!" squealed Ms. Cattrall, outfitted in a purple velvet pantsuit that made her look a little bit like Prince. "I love Samantha single."

"I'd like Stanford to find a life partner or at least find a very old woman to take care of him," said Mr. Garson.

"In the sequel, I want Brad Pitt to play my boyfriend!" said Mario Cantone. "Why not? He gave $100,000 to turn over the California' gay marriage law. So, there! He should play my boyfriend."

But even more of a topic of conversation was perhaps the young-adult novels that Candace Bushnell has just signed on to write for HarperCollins' children's division. It's the prehistory of Carrie.

"It's too soon to talk about it," said Ms Bushnell rather sensibly when Daily Transom stopped her on the carpet last night.

But Mr. Cantone already had some idea of who should and shouldn't play the young Carrie.

"I hope it's not Miley Cyrus. I don't get her, but I'm like 90 and I'm not a little girl," he said. "I think Lindsay Lohan is really, really talented. It's upsetting that she's clumped in with those other girls. She's a really good actress. I mean it!"

One reporter asked if Mr. Cantone might find his way into the prequel.

"I'll be too old, they'll have to animate me," he said. "Maybe I'll play my father. Ha!"

Casey Basden, the 25-year-old in charge of the entertainment section of the city's paper, The Park Record (circulation 7,500), was being trailed by a crew from the Sundance Channel at the event, held at Village at the Lift in Park City, Utah. The crew was documenting the young reporter's introduction to the glamour and gore that is celebrity journalism, and in the end produced a two-minute day-in-the-life segment on her.

"It was my first conversation with big stars …. you know, Hollywood–New York celebrities. Those kinds of people," Ms. Basden told The Transom. The event was held round-table style. "The celebrities-or I guess you'd call them cast members-moved from table to table," Ms. Basden explained. At least one of the celebrities-or "cast members"-wasn't digging the attention surrounding the young Lois Lane. Actress Naomi Watts' press people asked the Sundance cameraman and the production entourage to leave midway through the shoot because it was a print-only event. Although the Sundance Channel team explained that they were there to shoot Ms. Basden and weren't seeking footage of whichever legends of the silver screen might be present, the flacks were adamant, and so they graciously departed.

The other actors (Laura Dern, Mark Ruffalo, Peter Krause) seemed unfazed by the one small digital camera, and it's unclear why Ms. Watts objected to such an extent. A representative for Ms. Watts said her publicists didn't recall the incident. Perhaps she didn't feel well-groomed enough?

"I thought she looked fine," Ms. Basden said. "She's a very cute girl."

-Anna Jane Grossman

Pass On The Dutchie

Probated publicist Lizzie Grubman was abiding all laws at a party on Jan. 29 celebrating her 33rd birthday-even if her fellow revelers were not. Among the guests there to toast her at Marquee were basketball bad boy Dennis Rodman, musicians from the Wu-Tang Clan (a.k.a. "Wu-warriors"), punky fashion designer Richie Rich, Playboy model and celebrity mom Jaid Barrymore, and a lot of scantily clad women who were smoking. While club staffers upstairs ran around getting guests to put out their cigarettes in empty glasses, club staffers downstairs tried to tame partiers strutting around on the furniture. Their main problem seemed to be January 2004's "It" boy, Fabian Basabe, who was gyrating on top of a large speaker and tossing around a pretty long-haired girl like the guy who dances with the doll in the subway. When approached by the club's staff, he stopped for a moment to make a call on his cell phone to someone in authority, then said to the large Marquee men, "See?" Amazingly, it worked-they backed off while he went back to boogying.

Meanwhile, upstairs, one guest reported that when musician Ja Rule started smoking a joint, Ms. Grubman-who was sentenced to five years' probation in 2002 after using the back of her S.U.V. to introduce herself to a bunch of Hamptonites in 2001-bolted downstairs away from the smoke.

"Absolutely not true," said Ms. Grubman, when contacted about the incident. Conveniently, her publicity company represents Ja Rule's label Def Jam, so she could speak for him, too. (Def Jam's in-house publicists did not return calls.) "Ja Rule was not smoking pot. I never smelled weed at all," she said.

However, she did acknowledge that at one point late in the evening, she fled to the club's lower level, away from most of the cool kids. "What happened was, I don't like the smell of alcohol," she said, "and the group I was with [upstairs]? Their breath really stank."

-A.J.G.

The Booby Trap

Comedian Joy Behar had plastic surgery and politics on her mind Monday night at the "Comedy Cares" benefit at Caroline's on Broadway. "Haven't had a face lift yet," confessed The View's co-host and Jenny Craig spokeswoman. "You know, once you lose weight, everything starts to droop. My doctor told me, 'You know, a smile can be a natural face lift,' and I said, 'Well, then I wish my ass had a sense of humor!'"

After the show, which benefited Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, Ms. Behar hung out in the lounge area with fellow performers Mario Cantone of Sex and the City and comedian Judy Gold, a former writer and producer for the Rosie O'Donnell Show. Saturday Night Live's Darrell Hammond, who had the crowd roaring with his dead-on impressions of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Sean Connery, left early due to a 6:30 a.m. call time for SNL rehearsals the following morning.

The skinsanity continued post-show, when Ms. Behar reflected on Janet Jackson's "Lil' Kim moment," when her surgically enhanced breast (she's had implants since 1993) made a guest appearance at the Super Bowl. "Staged it! She's 37 years old and she's got a CD coming out. She learned from Madonna and Britney, and the girl staged it! Don't bullshit, bullshitter! That tit came out at exactly the right moment …. What aggravates me is, terrorists are watching this. This is being satellited-or whatever the word is-to millions and millions of terrorists, who are watching Janet Jackson take her boob out. This is what makes them hate us-this decadence, this displaying of boobs. They think we're just like a bunch of animals. Except for France. In France they're saying, 'What a nice teet she has! Where is zee other one?'"

Ms. Behar then paused and, while a friend took a photo of her with her tablemates, let out a good-natured bark: "Don't get so fucking close! What did I tell you?" She continued, "I hope that Kerry can, like, get in touch with his charisma gene, because certain people want a very charismatic President. You know, maybe he needs to expose his boob like Janet Jackson! I hope that Kerry has the internal fortitude to deal with these Republicans, because they can be very evil. They're evildoers! Already they're on Kerry about the Botox. I think that it's O.K. if he does it, as long as he doesn't overdo it like Joan Rivers did. Even her clothes don't wrinkle!"

-Noelle Hancock

The Transom Also Hears …

… That some stars never let you see them cry. Security was tight around the Soho location where Sex and the City was filming one of its last episodes on Monday, Feb. 2. "It was probably somebody's last day," said Mario Cantone, who plays Charlotte's bitchy friend and two-time wedding planner. "I had my last day Tuesday, and the crew applauded for, like, five minutes after my last shot. I cried like a baby. That's why there's high security-you don't want anyone seeing you cry besides the crew and the cast! I'm very sad about it."

But unlike actor Chris Noth, who has complained that his stint as "Mr. Big" on the show has stuck to him like glue, Mr. Cantone is all smiles about having starred on a popular, long-running television show. "It's only been a one-sided sword for me. A great one. A long, sharp, silvery, shiny one!" He pulls it out of its sheath again as early as this fall, when his one-man show hits the boards. "It's on Broadway. It's stand-up, music, family stuff. It's about everything. It's about my whole friggin' life."

-N.H.