Jon Hamm with a mustache. (YouTube)

— Mindy Kaling was spotted pleading with John Mayer to give his expert opinion on her love life at Koi in the Trump SoHo. We can only speculate that his answer involved calling her genitals racist.

— Jon Hamm plays Aimee Mann's director in her new music video for Labrador:
http://youtu.be/XA1cX-wgMdM

— A bevy of musical greats made a show last night in memorial of Broadway composer Marvin Hamlisch. Barbra Streisand, Liza Minnelli, Aretha Franklin and Itzhak Perlman performed for VIPs including Mike Nichols, Nancy Pelosi, Regis Philbin, Susan Lucci, Sarah Jessica Parker, Alan Cumming, Sheldon Harnick, Mary Rodgers and Paul Shaffer.

— Eva Longoria and Mark Sanchez were spotted holding hands while leaving a romantic dinner at Daniel. You know, if you care about that kind of thing.

— And in chair-related news, Clint Eastwood feels bad about making fun of the president, and calls himself a Libertarian. Also he has no respect for tables.
http://youtu.be/7mIC8Nw7LqI

Garfield, Wittrock, Hoffman and Edmond in Death of a Salesman.

Philip Seymour Hoffman is too young to play Willy Loman, the worn-out failure in Mike Nichols’s new revival of Arthur Miller’s masterful tragedy Death of a Salesman. Despite his drooped posture, crippling exhaustion and inability to stand proud—not to mention his preppie haircut, white as snow—he often looks no older than the two actors playing his sons. Still, he’s such an inventive and resourceful young character actor that he is never less than fascinating. To paraphrase the most famous line in the play, attention must still be paid.

Thank goodness Mr. Nichols is so obviously respectful of this high-water mark in American theater that he is reluctant to change, modify or jazz it up in any way to suit contemporary audiences. He has even restored much of Jo Mielziner’s moody set design, Alex North’s somber music and Elia Kazan’s electrifying direction from the original 1949 Broadway production starring the incomparably powerful Lee J. Cobb—all to brilliant effect, illuminating a sad, deeply analytical portrait of the death of the American Dream. And if Mr. Hoffman is not Lee J. Cobb or even Brian Dennehy in the latest Broadway revival, he serves the play in an oddly benevolent way. There’s something doubly touching about a bulky, overweight, bone-weary Willy at the end of his rope, fortified by aspirin and arch supports. The wrenching picture of failure resonates deeper. Mr. Hoffman is acting on pure instinct, not living the part the way Cobb did. But he still made me believe he was too old to drag himself through life selling clothes off the line on the road, winter and summer. He is equally matched by his two sons, the 34-year-old Biff (Andrew Garfield from the great, underrated film Never Let Me Go), once so full of confidence and personality but now—his promise as a football hero dissipated—unfocused and without ambition, with a string of failed jobs and some jail time behind him, and his younger brother, Happy (a terrific Finn Wittrock), a ladies’ man who attends the weddings of girls he’s discarded. And then there is Willy’s brave, struggling wife, Linda (played by Linda Emond with more toughness and resolve than the fragile but magnificent Mildred Dunnock showed in the original production and the 1950 film with Fredric March). My heart always throbs with compassion when Willy first appears in shadow, returning to the empty house and a sleeping Linda who loves him unconditionally in spite of what he’s put her through. She’s the eyes and ears of the play. When Willy daydreams about easier days and friendlier times when he was loved by buyers and storeowners all over New England, it is Linda who listens reverently. But she knows the truth, and it comes out in the flashbacks. Willy brags and lies, but it was always Linda who overlooked her husband’s faults while scrimping and saving to pay the bills. Willy was never popular on the road. The buyers laughed at him. Now, argumentative and short-tempered, he still embellishes his stories of past success. It is Linda who knows the man she chose was neither a great nor an important person. Now he drives 700 miles and nobody knows him anymore. There’s still not enough money to fix the water heater. He’s reached the age of 63 and the two sons he adored have turned into aimless losers, too. The future is an exhaust pipe in the garage.

It’s a grim, reflective story with an episodic structure and a time-roaming nature (Miller didn’t title his autobiography Timebends for nothing) about the terrible self-delusions of a weak man whose faked, empty life has taken a devastating toll on his family. The postwar bleakness has, under Mr. Nichols’s guidance, found a modern relevance. In the sinking economy of today, we have the same working-class traps faced by blue-collar families in financial despair. The plumbing still leaks, they’re behind on their insurance premiums, even if their kids go to college they can’t find employment when they graduate, and the 25-year mortgage is still due. A lot of men are in the same boat as Willy Loman—34 years with the same company and there’s no place to go. No more perfect picture of a human being with his best years behind him and no future to look forward to has ever been written.

Mr. Nichols illuminates every shadow of this dark, trembling and resonant play. He gets the marrow from Willy’s bones until it hurts. Shabby, cheap, dishonest, insufferable and yet heartbreaking, Mr. Hoffman plays underappreciated and disadvantaged like few others can. Strangling on his aborted dreams, he doubles over in pain when he remembers the day Biff discovered him in a Boston hotel room with a cheap floozy—a shock that psychologically unhinged the boy, who never recovered his equilibrium. One of the best scenes is when Willy goes to his boss with his hat in his hands, begging for a desk job that will prolong his life, and gets not only turned down but fired in the bargain. Mr. Hoffman is uneven, but when he is red-faced with shame, sunken with exhaustion and then crumpled with resignation, he is nothing short of great. The rage when Biff yells, “I’m a dime a dozen and so are you!” and the final scene in the cemetery, when the tortured Linda realizes she has nothing to show for her wasted life but a family in shreds—the candor of these scenes still reduces me to a state of awe. This is great writing, burnished with the glow of perceptive direction that brings out a broader implication of the drama, filling out considerably the lack of humanity in Willy that makes him so symbolic of the frustrated “little man” so many productions overlook.

Theater this tender and important doesn’t come along often. I’ve seen many productions of Death of a Salesman, both weak and strong, but I have never seen one with more passion. Don’t even think about missing it.

rreed@observer.com

The Nicholses are leaving behind Greenwich Village, where they owned a duplex. Mr. Nichols had been selling the three-bedroom himself since September, asking $2.25 million; it slipped off the market in mid-January. A 718 number attached to the listing was disconnected and emails were not returned.

"A rare opportunity to own a two-story home... nestled inside a luxury building with a full staff, turnaround driveway, landscaped garden, 24-hour garage, exercise facility and so much more!" declared 10thStreetDuplex.com, the Web site Mr. Nichols launched to market the renovated home, which had been purchased in 2004 for $1.255 million, according to StreetEasy. Mr. Nichols has worked in the music industry, but it appears he has a future ahead of him as a broker.

As for the new home, it was purchased for $5.2 million from Edward and Sharon Kreps, doctors who had owned the mansarded beauty since 1970, according to city records. "In addition to six stories above grade, there is also unbelievable amounts of basement storage including a wine cellar," Lydia Rosengarten writes in her Leslie J. Garfield listing. Hope all that wine does not give the Nicholses Heartburn.

Read past Manhattan Transfers. >>

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

The news mix was titillating, dire and demographically on point. You could practically feel the collective anxiety emanating from the hundreds of thousands of middle-aged female viewers from around the country as Mr. Cuomo brought the roundup to a lighthearted close. The island nation of Samoa, he explained, had decided for the first time in 40 years to switch the side of the road their citizens drive on. Imagine the chaos of that commute! There was a clip of traffic run amok. “It’s a complicated transition,” Mr. Cuomo explained.

Ms. Sawyer sat a few feet away and listened to Mr. Cuomo’s report on the challenges facing Samoan commuters with a facial expression more or less passing for acute interest.

Six days earlier, ABC News executives had confirmed a scoop on the Drudge Report that, come December, Ms. Sawyer’s longtime colleague Charles Gibson would be retiring from the evening news program, World News. Ms. Sawyer would be taking over as anchor of that half-hour, as managing editor of the newsroom and as the unofficial public face of the network.

Like the sudden reversal of traffic laws, the changing of evening news anchors has historically resulted in complicated transitions. But so far, one week after the announcement, head-on-head collisions have yet to materialize. Most of the rubbernecking has been equally benign. A report in the Daily Beast suggested that Mr. Gibson was livid about something or other regarding the transition. Subsequently, a report in Newsday suggested that Mr. Gibson was upset about the timing of the announcement, coming as it did before Labor Day, when admittedly nobody much felt like whipping themselves into the paroxysms of giddy analysis that typically accompany word on an evening newscast succession. ABC denied both reports.

Inside ABC News, the announcement was met with more shoulder shrugging than teeth gnashing. Several sources told The Observer that, if anything, they had expected Mr. Gibson to have retired sooner after last year’s election. Others were surprised that Mr. Gibson would give up such a cushy position for no apparent reason other than his stated desire to spend more time with his wife, who is likewise retired. Nobody seemed at all shocked that Ms. Sawyer was being given the job.

Instead, much of the water-cooler talk focused on speculation about what would happen next at Good Morning America. Would ABC find a replacement in time for the November sweeps? Or would they use the sweeps as a farewell tour for Ms. Sawyer?

Which is not to say that the newsroom was free of anxiety. Whereas Mr. Gibson is said to work well with whatever producers happen to surround him, Ms. Sawyer has a reputation for being particular. Will she overhaul the World News roster? The general sense, among The Observer’s sources, was that much of the inevitable drama of anchor succession still lies ahead. “They have four months to figure this out,” said one source. “But four months can go by awfully fast in television.”

OUTSIDE THE NETWORK, media critics have struggled to work up much of a frenzy over the appointment. “Why the 63-year-old Sawyer would want to enter this dying news genre confounds reason—unless she’s simply weary of rising in the early a.m. to appear on Good Morning America, which she’s co-hosted since 1999,” wrote Slate’s Jack Shafer.

Ms. Sawyer may be tired of the early-morning drudgery of her current job. And, to be sure, audiences for the broadcast evening newscasts continue to shrink and get older. But to say that the job of anchoring the evening news is not what it once was—that it’s a throne diminished—is to miss the point of the attraction for Ms. Sawyer.

Everything in modern media is diminished. So what else should one of the last remaining TV news superstars of the late 20th century aspire to do for her final act?

“Even though it’s fast declining, the evening newscasts collectively still get almost 25 million people a night,” said The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta. “This is a smart woman who suffered the indignity of morning news. You’re doing a lot of Michael Jackson stuff. Sometimes she did it too gleefully, which hurt her. Now it’s a chance for her to do what she’s been trying to do in the morning—that is, show off her serious side.

“It’s not just being the anchor,” he added. “It means that at any special breaking news event, she’s there. She’s the boss.”

World News is currently in second place in the ratings, but in her new job, Ms. Sawyer will have some relative advantages over her competitors at NBC and CBS. NBC, for instance, according to Jeff Zucker, is fast becoming a cable company with a broadcasting unit—not the other way around. During big news events (such as the 2008 presidential campaign), NBC News reporters fight for airtime on MSNBC. The relative importance of getting on the evening news is diminished by proximity. For the time being, ABC News has no such internal cable competition. Airtime on the broadcast news remains of utmost importance. Soon, Ms. Sawyer will largely control it.

And when it comes to landing the top hard news exclusives, Ms. Sawyer should face minimal competition within ABC. Barbara Walters has The View. George Stephanopoulos has carved out his territory inside D.C. Otherwise, there aren’t too many rival power centers within the organization. While Katie Couric must continuously keep an eye on her fellow megafauna at 60 Minutes, Ms. Sawyer should face little resistance in pursuing whatever piques her interest. And whereas it took Ms. Couric a long stretch before making an alliance with 48 Hours executive producer Susan Zirinksy—thereby opening the door to regular prime-time appearances—Ms. Sawyer will walk into her new job, keys to ABC’s prime time in hand.

“SHE’S THE LAST one standing of Roone Arledge’s college of cardinals,” said encyclopedic TV critic Andrew Tyndall. “She’s the last superstar that he threw money at in the late ’80s and early ’90s to assemble what was a fantastic operation and is now something of an anachronism. Peter Jennings, Ted Koppel, David Brinkley, Barbara Walters, Sam Donaldson, Hugh Downs—she’s the last one, right?”

Although, Ms. Walters remains a force of nature at ABC, her role on The View for the most part keeps her far away from hard news. As for the other talented prodigies of Mr. Arledge, Ms. Sawyer has outlasted them all. How did she manage to hang around long enough to land the top reporting job in the news division, long after the likes of Ted Koppel and Sam Donaldson had been voted off the island?

Like any good political operative, Ms. Sawyer employed an instinctive mix of charm, flattery, opportunism, self-sacrifice, hard work and cunning. And she made the right alliance with the right person at the right time.

It would have been easy, when the moment arrived in 1998, to sit back and watch David Westin, the newly appointed president of ABC News, struggle. At the time, his grip on the position was perilous. From the get-go, the fresh-faced career lawyer–turned–TV executive looked like a fawn next to his predecessor, Roone Arledge, a swaggering buck of bluster, who had previously chased off a handful of heirs apparent. 

To make matters worse, shortly before taking over as president, Mr. Westin got caught in a scandal. His affair with the head of ABC’s public-relations department, Sherrie Rollins, then the wife of political operative Ed Rollins, became public. Paparazzi swarmed. His survival at ABC News came into question.

It can be fun to watch your new boss flounder. And there were some seasoned veterans at ABC news who no doubt did just that. But not Ms. Sawyer. She never underestimated Mr. Westin, who is said to enjoy a strong relationship with Disney chief Bob Iger as well as Anne Sweeney, the head of the ABC/Disney television group.

Prior to Mr. Westin’s arrival, Ms. Sawyer was already friends with Sherrie Rollins. Now, she went about becoming friends and allies with her new boss, her friend’s lover.

In the end, it was Ms. Sawyer and her husband, the writer, director and producer Mike Nichols (and not, say, Sam Donaldson or Hugh Downs), who threw an intimate wedding party for Mr. Westin and Ms. Rollins at their house on Martha’s Vineyard, far from the gnawing jaws of Manhattan gossips. It was Ms. Sawyer and her husband who welcomed Mr. Westin into the protective harbor of their social circle. And it was Ms. Sawyer and her husband who warded off the circling buzzards.

The growing friendship was on full display back at ABC News, according to a source who worked with executives at ABC in the late ’90s. “I got the sense that David was more social with Mike and Diane than he was with most of the other talent,” said our source.

The courtship worked in two directions. Mr. Westin grew up in a religious family in Ann Arbor, Mich. As a young man, he did not have the opportunity to watch Mr. Nichols’ films. Now he went back and worked his way through the oeuvre, marveling at the genius of Carnal Knowledge and The Graduate. When Mr. Westin and his new wife eventually got a puppy together, they named the newest member of their family “Nichols,” after Ms. Sawyer’s husband.

Indeed, the bonds between Ms. Sawyer and Mr. Westin run deep. Some TV news executives who spoke to The Observer in recent days speculated that Ms. Sawyer saved Mr. Westin’s job in 1999 when she agreed, along with Charles Gibson, to co-host GMA, which was tanking at the time. (In reality, Mr. Westin deserves much of the credit for saving GMA, the news division’s most lucrative franchise, by smoothly pulling off the tricky solution.) Mr. Westin owed her, goes the theory. And now, at long last, that debt has been repayed.

THE JOB OF evening news anchor is one of the last great solo gigs in broadcast television, along with that of talk show host. Over the years, Ms. Sawyer’s career has almost always been yoked to the gravitational pull of some larger-than-life, usually volatile male news anchor. In 1984, when Don Hewitt tapped her to become the sole female correspondent on 60 Minutes, she worked alongside a pack of alpha newsmen, including Mike Wallace and Ed Bradley. In 1986, when her contract was up, her agent Richard Leibner pushed to have her hired as a co-anchor of the evening news at both NBC and ABC. At the time, Peter Jennings reportedly said that he didn’t “go through all the crap” over the years “in order to divide up 22 minutes.” Tom Brokaw’s reaction, according to the 1992 book Three Blind Mice, by Ken Auletta: “No way. If that happens, I leave.”

Eventually, in 1989, Arledge lured her away from CBS News and promptly paired her up with the über-cantankerous newsman of the era, Sam Donaldson. Later, she was briefly teamed up on a newsmagazine program with Barbara Walters. For the first seven years of her current stint on GMA, she sat alongside Charles Gibson.

In other words: No one should appreciate the autonomy of a solo anchor job more than Ms. Sawyer.

There will be other perks. When the 2012 election rolls around, it will be Ms. Sawyer who gets to moderate whatever debates ABC News stages (an opportunity she missed out on in 2008). And, in general, her regal bearing will no doubt be better suited to the Voice of God evening newscast than the Everyman banter of morning news.

When she first took the GMA gig 10 years ago, it was supposed to be temporary. A decade later, Ms. Sawyer looks more than ready to say goodbye to the teeny-bopper summer bands, the insta-famous reality stars, the self-help gurus, the fad diet proselytizers and the relationship czars, all of whom make up the daily plankton on which morning news programs feed. The evening news, by contrast, remains one of the last bastions in TV news that is more or less free from the hell broth of tabloid reporting.

Back in the ABC studios on Tuesday morning, Mr. Cuomo was explaining that a big issue with the traffic transition in Samoa was that buses would now have doors on the wrong side of the street.

On cue, Ms. Sawyer snapped to life. “So they’re switching so that they can get easier access to automobiles there because they’re so near Australia,” said Mr. Sawyer. “But 70 percent of the world’s population”—comedic pause—“drive on our side of the street.”

She emphasized the “our side of the street” with a playful wag of her blond hair and an exaggerated finger point. Such are the demands of journalism at 7:15 in the morning.

There were smiles all around. Things were coming to a happy end. Ms. Sawyer, in a singsong voice, called out to meteorologist Sam Champion. It was time for another look at the morning weather.

fgillette@observer.com

The film follows the recording and reception of Mr. NDour's Grammy-winning album Egypt. The album presents a peaceful side of Islam, fusing secular and spiritual traditions, and the timely screening coincided rather fortuitously with U.S. President Barack Obama’s Cairo call for tolerance.

“I wanted to make a big, beautiful, happy film about Africa that a lot of people would see,” Ms. Vasarhelyi explained. Her first film, A Normal Life, following the lives of Kosovar refugees, won first place at the Tribeca Film Festival when she was just 24.

The only person in a floor-length gown, she seemed charming if a little shy—charmingly shy!

Mr. NDour was initially reluctant to participate in the project. “In the beginning, I was really protecting my privacy, and what interested me was that she tried to have a relationship [with] the members of my family,” he told the Daily Transom. “Everybody. And by the end, the members of my family said, ‘You have to get to know her.’”

Making a documentary about a fellow artist can be tricky, but Ms. Vasarhelyi said she thought the undertaking had been a true collaboration. Of course, Mr. Nichols took a different outlook when he introduced Ms. Vasarhelyi, saying that he was tempted to quote David Mamet: “Film is a collaborative medium; bend over.”

Documentary film seemed to be the unifying theme among the unlikely mix of personalities in attendance. Portrait photographer and documentarian Timothy Greenfield-Sanders (Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart) posed gamely while holding up a point-and-shoot. Philippe Petit, whose 1974 walk between the former World Trade Center's twin towers was chronicled in last year’s Man on Wire, hobnobbed in solidarity with a fellow documentary subject.

“Oh, hi, guys and gals,” Dick Cavett greeted the press. “I’ve been told not to talk when my picture’s being taken,” he added, but not before swapping stories with a photographer about Marlon Brando punching people.

The subject of the most pre-arrival speculation was Lou Reed. “Lou Reed’s gotten really into it,” claimed one photographer, wryly joking about the legendary guitarist's typical red carpet antics. The grizzled speaker was a cartoon paparazzo, chomping a toothpick and wearing orange-lensed sunglasses and an earring.

“Really?” replied a colleague. “He used to be terrible.”

Indeed, he still is. She had been taken in by her colleague’s rascally wit. “The only way Lou Reed’ll pose is if Laurie tells him to,” he explained.

This prediction proved accurate. The former Velvet Underground frontman attempted to march, zombie-like, into the theater until wife Laurie Anderson coaxed him to pause. Ms. Anderson’s tremendous dimples may or may not have compensated for Mr. Reed’s stony-faced surliness.

Tolerance, it seems, is all well and good, but it only barely extends to the press.

CNBC interviewed Tinsley Mortimer as the "socialite-turned-entrepreneur," who designs handbags, lip gloss and clothes. Apparently she's huge in Japan! [Park Avenue Peerage]

Anna Wintour has offered to "discuss her career, stories of former successful Vogue interns and give advice on how to do well in the business of journalism" with current Vogue interns. [The Cut]

New teasers are out for the upcoming season of Gossip Girl and from what we can tell, everyone is in the Hamptons, Serena seems to be dating a lifeguard, and Nate is running from someone's house in his boxers. Countdown to September 1 begins! [Radar]

Al Reynolds, who hasn't been in the news in months, has posted YouTube videos of himself insisting that he's not gay and pleading for everyone to please stop talking about it already. [NY Daily News]

Director Mike Nichols reportedly had a coronary bypass surgery over the weekend; he is now recuperating in an Upper East Side hospital with wife Diane Sawyer. [P6]

And, click on the video below to see our own Simon Doonan on the topic of ... clutches!

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In the current Broadway revival of Odets’econd to last play, The Country Girl, it shows too much. Odets himself described the play as superficial, and he is correct. Even Clurman, who first produced the revolutionary conscience plays of Odets in the 1930s when they worked together at the Group Theatre, conceded that The Country Girl is more about the actors in it than the play—or potboiler—itself.

A popular Broadway success in its day, it’s a backstage story, and it’s an actor’s piece. In the 1950 premiere, Uta Hagen played Georgie Elgin, the long-suffering wife of Frank, the alcoholic actor who’s making a comeback. In the London premiere—under the title Winter Journey—Michael Redgrave played Frank. In the wrecked Hollywood incarnation in 1955, Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly starred. In the 1972 Broadway revival, it was Maureen Stapleton and Jason Robards.

Which brings me to the current revival directed by Mike Nichols—an iconic name that’s widely believed to guarantee high quality, but in fact his stylishly shallow theater work is more like show business mistaken for Art. Star casts are his calling card. (The Nichols motto: “Don’t ask for the moon; we have the stars.”) In that sense The Country Girl—lowbrow Odets masquerading as highbrow—is perfect for him.

The famous director has cast the famous Morgan Freeman as washed-up Frank, the famous Frances McDormand as his wife, and the nearly famous Peter Gallagher as the ambitious theater director who’s worshiped Frank since childhood and offers him a last chance to return to the stage in a starring role.

Mr. Nichols has also brought in the quite famous playwright Jon Robin Baitz as an uncredited script doctor. May it never happen to the lesser plays of Mr. Baitz! Mr. Nichols has been working in Hollywood too long. He obviously thinks The Country Girl needs a little improvement for today’s audiences—tinkering adjustments, cuts, whatever. Either Mr. Nichols believes wholeheartedly in the integrity of Odets’ play, or he doesn’t. If he doesn’t—don’t direct the play.

THE COUNTRY GIRL remains second-rate just the same. It pales in comparison to another backstage story of 1950 (the movie All About Eve). It has none of the natural street poetry of Odets’ early Awake and Sing (“Cut your throat, sweetheart. Save time”), or the incendiary conscience of his one-act agitprop Waiting for Lefty. (Both were written in 1935.) The Country Girl wasn’t created by Odets the lyrical prophet of theater, but the conflicted Odets of Hollywood and moral compromise.

He hadn’t lost his talent (two years after The Country Girl, he co-wrote the screenplay for the masterly film noir Sweet Smell of Success); he just wrote a bad play. Its bloated themes—salvation and redemption through Art; the venality and mystery of theater—come on the cheap and are plain unbelievable.

At the outset, we’re asked to believe that a young, passionate director would stake his career on hiring a former leading actor to star in a Broadway play even though he’s been on a bender for a decade and can no longer memorize lines.

The director blames the actor’s wife for his alcoholism, and they battle backstage for control of his soul. (“He has the magic to transform a mere show into Theater with a capital ‘T’!”) Without warning—or sense—they fall in love late in the second act. She resists. (“You can’t believe that, can you, you goddamn man! You can’t believe a woman’s crazy-out-of-her-mind to live alone! In one room! By herself!”) He learns something about her (she isn’t really the former runner-up to Miss America who slit her wrists twice that Frank says she is).

Finally—against the steepest odds!—all is well on Frank’s big opening night when he miraculously recovers his talent and triumphs on good old Broadway. His wife—the well-read country girl who, it turns out, sacrificed her life for him—will stick by her man, as always.

Yesterday’s saint is today’s enabler.

THE RETRO PRODUCTION isn’t helped by Mr. Nichols’ ponderous scene changes as a stately red velvet curtain unfolds. The director’s choice of background music for Odets’ emotionally turbulent drama is wrong. (The soothing Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby and “Satchmo.”) More to point, his three stars aren’t acting on the same planet.

It’s a pleasure, even so, to see Morgan Freeman, now 70, onstage again. There has been some controversy about a black actor playing a white one in a white milieu. But Mr. Freeman is a master, I believe, at playing human beings.

Alas, his innate humaneness and dignity are his undoing here. Cast against type, Mr. Freeman never unravels enough to reveal the terror of an actor on the brink of self-destruction. His mild Frank Elgin is more inconvenienced than soul-sick. Even when he’s abusively lying through his teeth about his wife, Mr. Freeman charms us. He has the magic his character is supposed to have lost.

Frances McDormand’s performance is self-conscious and strangely flat in her predictable notion of frumpy stoicism. She delivers the curtain line “The theater is a mystery” as if saying “Life sucks and what’s it to you?” She conveys the right note of toughness and resignation, but there’s no subtext in her, no secrets.

The Act II scenes between Peter Gallagher’s manic, chain-smoking theater director and Ms. McDormand kick some life into the production. Mr. Gallagher’s old-style director would make an excellent Julian Marsh in 42nd Street (“… you’ve got to come back a star!”). But I’m afraid the stars of The Country Girl never look like saving the play.

AND SO IT'S back to the ’50s again—positively for the last time this season! Cry-Baby, based on the John Waters’ movie, an unswervingly ironic musical spoof of romance across the tracks in the Elvis era, has opened at the Marquis on Broadway.

Why?

Despite dropping 50 percent of its receipts, I Am Legend (No. 1) also managed to out-gross Treasure—by over $250,000. With a $67,000 per screen average, it was also the most popular film. Bing Crosby needs change his tune: I’m dreaming of a shit-in-your-pants Christmas …

Legend just barely had a better average than Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd (no. 4), which averaged $58,000 on just seven screens. The grim musical starring Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter was able to out-sing Alvin and the Chipmunks (no. 6), which returned the favor nationally.

Both Juno (no. 5) and Atonement (no. 7) continued their strong runs, despite the increased competition, with the former averaging $37,000 and the latter $24,000, both in their third weeks. Believe it or not, this means that Ellen Page and Michael Cera are the hotter couple (not Kiera Knightly and James McAvoy). See what a pair of sexy gym shorts can do?

Walk Hard (no. 9) is Judd Apatow’s first taste of failure in 2007. (Just in time!) It failed to even outgross PS I Love You (no. 8), which did marginally better with a $14,000 average on nine screens. Both of these will hang around a bit longer—big stars, big marketing budgets—but it’s clear that the most they can hope for now is to earn a spot in your Netflix queue. Happy holidays!

List of theaters: Paris, Zeigfeld, Oprheum, East 85th St., 86th St. East, 84th St., Lincoln Plaza, 62nd and Broadway, Lincoln Square, Magic Johnson, 72nd St East, Cinemas 1, 2 &3rd Ave, 64th and 2nd , Imaginasian, Manhattan Twin, First and 62nd St., Angelika Film Center, Quad, IFC Center, Film Forum, Village East, Village Seven, Cinema Village, Union Square, Essex, Battery Park 11, Sunshine, 34th Street, Empire, E-Walk, Chelsea, 19th Street East, and Kips Bay.

Manhattan Weekend Box Office: How moviegoers in the multiplexes of middle America choose to spend their ten-spot is probably a big deal in Hollywood. But here in Manhattan, the hottest movies aren't always the ones making the big bucks nationwide. Using Nielsen numbers for Manhattan theaters alone and comparing them to the performance of the national weekend box office can tell you a lot about our Blue State sensibilities. Or nothing at all! Each Monday afternoon, we will bring you the results.

Julia Roberts is not a fan of showing her naked bod in front of the camera. But those who enjoyed getting a good, long look at the actress’ legs peeking out of a bubble bath in Pretty Woman (all “nude” scenes came compliments of a sultry body double) will want to see director Mike Nichol’s forthcoming Charlie Wilson’s War. In an interview with E!, Ms. Roberts makes her serious sentiments on skin known, saying, “Listen, there's a reason why you don't see me naked me in movies, you don't see me running around in bathing suits in movie”—that is, until Charlie Wilson’s War opens on December 21—“It’s just not my thing.”

It’s not Ocean’s co-star Brad Pitt’s thing either. After all, the dreamy do-good actor told the BBC last week that he would forego any future nude scenes. The reason? “I don't want to be embarrassed when my kids get old enough to see my films.”

Okay, so baring her own bum has always been off-limits for Ms. Roberts, 40, but apparently kissing Don Johnson on an episode of Miami Vice has not. When an interviewer recently raised the face-blast-from-the-past to the actress and mother of three, she demurred, explaining why the on-screen smooch never happened. “Let me tell you something: I was falling ill while in Miami and ended up with spinal meningitis. Got sick down there, the sickest I've ever been in my life. There's a little-known fact." And we can see why, frankly.

All of which was once thought to be the purview of youth. The rap on New York, in fact, at the turn of the 20th century was that the city of noise, money, sex-heavy bass and the Internet belonged to post-adolescent hordes personified in Page Six and on Thursday-night sitcoms.

But something changed, and only part of it was Sept. 11. For reasons that will take historians and sociologists years to analyze, power got older, the pursuit of pleasure younger; adults continued running the show, children danced their asses off in clubs. Youth, which had made such a hit in this city in the 1960’s and 1990’s, deferred. Youthful ambition, that cliché of the 1980’s, evaporated. Perhaps some of it was Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s valiant stewardship after 9/11, and a general feeling that it was better to let people who looked like Ray Kelly run the show. In a city under siege, the venturesome had to be put on hold.

And perhaps some of it had to do with the sense among those in power that they were needed, that they weren’t done.

Whatever it was, it made a difference: New York remained the City of Ambition, but the ambitious were older, and New York—where the young once ate seniors for lunch—found itself being run by a new, grizzled, tenacious protagonist: The Power Geezer.

In previous generations, the term “geezer” was to be avoided; it summoned the man on the Monopoly board. But the new Power Geezer was a person of drive and high purpose, someone achieving what the legendary psychiatrist Erik Erikson called “generativity”: the strength, wisdom and ability to guide the next generation.

At the age of 70 or 75, he or she has the energy, know-how, history, insight, perspective and ability to make things happen.

If you haven’t lost your fastball, why give up the game?

You’ll find the Geezers distinguished by both their inability to relinquish power and their general love of life. Sometimes they’ll let their children run a division of their corporation, but they do it with all the confidence of a naval commander giving the battleship to a 6-year-old with a sailor’s cap and party horn. Give up the wheel? And the table at the Four Seasons? For what? Are you mad? Haven’t you read King Lear?

Take a look around this town. Look at George Soros, Geezer Supreme; Mike Nichols, Geezer First Class; Si Newhouse, Super Geezer; Mel Brooks, Geezer Supreme. Look at Ralph Lauren, Sandy Weill, George Steinbrenner, Chita Rivera, James Wolfensohn, Phillipe de Montebello, Yoko Ono, Cindy Adams, Karl Lagerfeld, Stephen Sondheim, King Kong, the Morgan Stanley “Group of Eight,” Joan Didion, Sumner Redstone, Elaine Stritch or, needless to say, Geezer of the Year … Rupert Murdoch.

Look at some of our great Geezer Emeriti, like David Rockefeller, Kitty Carlisle Hart or the magnificent Brooke Astor.

Or some of our Baby Geezers, like Knicks coach Larry Brown, hobbling, full of beans, at 65 ready to build a new life for himself and his team.

There are Geezers and there are Dinosaurs. Dinosaurs may sleep their afternoons away, then sip martinis at 5; Geezers are sitting up late, thinking about sunrise on the East River. What is the main prerequisite for a Geezer? Listen, young man: optimism, ambition, pleasure in daily routine.

This issue is devoted to the Power Geezers of the greatest city in the world. Geezers who are committed to comprehending the past and building a future that is “generative,” and who have achieved, as well, that other most important of Eriksonian assets, wisdom. Geezers spawned by the 20th century, who are sculpting the New York of the 21st.

Of course, F. Scott Fitzgerald—who would have been a wonderful Geezer himself given the chance—wrote that “there are no second acts in American lives.” The Power Geezers, to a man and a woman, would not disagree. Their game plan is simple: Act III. And send the understudy home.

Hail, Geezers! Can we have a raise?