New York

Elaine’s the Musical, From the People Who Drank There

Published

3 years ago

April 14, 2022

Elaine’s the Musical, From the People Who Drank There

In March 2020, the pandemic shutdown in New York Metropolis darkened Broadway and sidelined its many artists, together with Robert and Steven Morris, pit musicians and equivalent twins.

However there was an upside for the Morris brothers, 53, and their writing associate, Joe Shane, 49, whose musical gigs additionally dried up.

The songwriting trio, which has a handful of Off Broadway and different reveals to its credit score, refocused on a longtime undertaking: a musical about Elaine’s, the Higher East Aspect nightspot that for almost a half-century attracted well-known writers and different celebrities.

The musicians had been toying with Elaine’s-themed tunes going again to the Nineties once they turned regulars there and befriended the restaurant’s temperamental proprietor, Elaine Kaufman, whose demise in 2010 led to Elaine’s closing a yr later.

However within the early day of the pandemic, over Zoom, they started fleshing out the present, “Everybody Involves Elaine’s,” including new songs, tweaking current ones and dealing with the present’s ebook author, Asa Somers, who as an actor in “Pricey Evan Hansen” was additionally sidelined by the lockdown.

“As horrible because it was, the pandemic gave us a possibility to mirror — we simply Zoomed day-after-day for 4 hours writing songs,” Mr. Shane stated.

In a abruptly silent metropolis reeling from hundreds of virus-related deaths, they sought solace by summoning a time of teeming nightlife earlier than masks and social distancing.

“It lifted our spirits throughout a darkish time,” Mr. Shane stated.

With many different Broadway actors equally sidelined, the writers simply recruited a working forged for on-line readings. The Morris brothers additionally organized recordings of the songs whereas separated by emailing audio recordsdata backwards and forwards.

“It was a time with out distractions that allowed us to show our vitality towards this undertaking and go deep into this story that we actually believed in,” Robert Morris stated.

An in-person studying deliberate for final December was disrupted by the Omicron outbreak, which contaminated Mary Testa, a adorned Broadway actor who was studying the position of Ms. Kaufman.

When the studying was lastly held final month, she was again, together with a forged of ringers from prime Broadway reveals being overseen by a Tony-nominated director, Jeff Calhoun, whose résumé consists of “Newsies” and “Huge River.”

Among the many 150 attendees, the present writers stated, have been potential traders and producers, a number of of whom expressed curiosity in making an attempt to assist the present develop into a Broadway manufacturing.

Anita Waxman, a producer who has gained three Tony Awards, attended the studying and stated of the present’s Broadway potential, “I feel it’s obtained a extremely good likelihood, however it must proceed its improvement as a result of it’s actually good.”

Ms. Waxman, herself an everyday herself at Elaine’s, stated she was too busy with different initiatives to get entangled with the present however would possibly be part of on sooner or later.

The present begins with an Elaine’s patron being ejected by way of the entrance window, a nod to Ms. Kaufman’s famously prickly angle towards some prospects and an exaggerated model of an actual altercation for which Ms. Kaufman was arrested in 1998.

The opening quantity, “Everybody Involves Elaine’s,” notes the restaurant’s notoriously “crappy entrées” and Ms. Kaufman’s strict “Don’t hassle Woody” rule relating to Woody Allen, an everyday who had his personal desk and filmed a scene for his 1979 movie “Manhattan” at Elaine’s.

Different Elaine’s luminaries, reminiscent of Frank Sinatra and Truman Capote, are referenced within the track “My Home, My Guidelines,” Ms. Kaufman’s musical assertion of her dominance over her restaurant realm.

The present mentions storied Elaine’s episodes, like when the New York Rangers stopped by the evening they gained the Stanley Cup in 1994.

It additionally consists of the songwriters’ private recollections, like Steven Morris’s story about standing at a urinal subsequent to James Earl Jones, who appeared over and intoned the phrases “candy reduction” in his inimitable baritone.

The musical’s plot facilities on a interval within the early Nineteen Eighties — not lengthy after the Billy Joel hit “Huge Shot” got here out, mentioning “the individuals that you just knew at Elaine’s.”

Lengthy single and one thing of a den mom to a coterie of primarily male writers, Ms. Kaufman was in the midst of a short-lived, tumultuous marriage that was endangering her enterprise.

“It was a gap she fell into that threatened the whole lot,” stated Steven Morris.

Her troubles led to a soul-searching second and finally to a recommittal to her “restaurant household,” as one track says.

On the studying final month, Ms. Testa drew a rousing ovation from the viewers, which included quite a few Elaine’s regulars. One in all them, the author Homosexual Talese, approached Ms. Testa afterward.

“He stated ‘I’ve to inform you, you actually nailed her,’” recalled Ms. Testa, a three-time Tony Award nominee who lately performed Aunt Eller in “Oklahoma!” on Broadway in addition to different Broadway productions of “On the City” in 1998 and “forty second Avenue” in 2001.

“I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a musical primarily based on a restaurant,” Mr. Talese, 90, stated later in an interview. Then once more, he added, the true Elaine’s itself was fairly a nightly present.

“It was a revue, with characters coming out and in,” recalled Mr. Talese, a longtime good friend of Ms. Kaufman whom he referred to as “an American Gertrude Stein” for her position internet hosting writers, albeit in a saloon reasonably than a salon.

The present has its earliest traces within the Nineties when the three musicians started frequenting Elaine’s by happenstance.

Mr. Shane, 49, from Queens, was residing in an house above Elaine’s in a constructing owned by Ms. Kaufman. The Morris twins — Staten Island natives who’ve performed within the pit orchestras for Broadway reveals like “Hamilton,” “Hairspray” and “Mamma Mia!” — lived close by.

They started frequenting Elaine’s and “for some bizarre purpose, she took a shine to us,” Mr. Shane stated, letting them nurse beers on the bar after which inviting them to prime tables normally reserved for well-known and high-spending regulars.

They rubbed elbows with regulars, together with the actors Alec Baldwin and James Gandolfini and the director Robert Altman. They knew sufficient to depart the Joe DiMaggios and Woody Allens alone, however loved encounters with extra approachable celebrities, like Don Rickles and Keith Richards.

“As New Yorkers, we caught the tail finish of a New York that doesn’t exist anymore,” Mr. Shane stated, “and it allowed us to put in writing a love letter to Elaine.”

5 years in the past, the three creators introduced their songs and idea to the outstanding playwright Tom Meehan, who wrote the books for Broadway productions together with “Annie,” “Hairspray” and “The Producers.”

Mr. Meehan was enthusiastic concerning the present, and earlier than his demise in 2017, he advisable they possibility the rights to the 2004 ebook “Everybody Involves Elaine’s,” a portrait of Ms. Kaufman and the restaurant by the author A.E. Hotchner, an Elaine’s common who died in 2020.

The musicians did so and in addition took on as a artistic and enterprise associate the creator’s son, Timothy Hotchner, 50, who in an interview stated of the songwriters: “They’re among the many final bastion of individuals she took underneath her wing earlier than she died.”

This isn’t the primary try and take Elaine’s to the stage or display. A memoir, “Final Name at Elaine’s,” by Brian McDonald, a former Elaine’s bartender, was optioned as a attainable TV sequence that was described as “‘Mad Males’ meets ‘Cheers’” however was by no means produced.

Mr. Hotchner wrote a musical with the late songwriter Cy Coleman, additionally an Elaine’s common, that featured the actress Lainie Kazan as Elaine.

Ms. Kaufman attended a 2005 studying of that present, “Elaine’s Area,” and promptly employed a lawyer to have the undertaking killed. She banished A.E. Hotchner from the restaurant, Mr. Talese recalled.

“Elaine didn’t like the best way she was being portrayed,” Mr. Talese recalled, “and I feel she walked out earlier than it was over.”

New York

Trump Argues That His Immunity Extends to E. Jean Carroll’s Lawsuits

Published

3 weeks ago

January 28, 2025

Press Room

Trump Argues That His Immunity Extends to E. Jean Carroll’s Lawsuits

President Trump and the writer E. Jean Carroll are arguing over whether a Supreme Court decision affording him substantial criminal immunity also shields him from having to pay tens of millions in damages for insulting her and saying she lied about his sexually assaulting her.

Mr. Trump made his arguments last year in his appeal of the $83.3 million verdict by a jury that found him liable for defaming Ms. Carroll in 2019 after she accused him of a decades-old attack. On Monday, Ms. Carroll pushed sharply back.

Her lawyer, Roberta A. Kaplan, argued in a brief that Mr. Trump’s view of the Supreme Court’s ruling, which protected him from charges that he tried to overturn the 2020 election, was too expansive. His statements calling Ms. Carroll’s accusation “a complete con job” and “a Hoax and a lie,” were strictly personal, she wrote. She said they fell far outside the boundaries of the official acts that presidential immunity protects.

“If there were ever a case where immunity does not shield a president’s speech, this one is it,” Ms. Kaplan said in her brief.

The dispute over the Supreme Court’s landmark decision, which addressed the scope of a president’s immunity from prosecution, comes as Mr. Trump has seen criminal cases against him in two states come to an end, and a third delayed indefinitely. In a fourth case, in New York, after Mr. Trump was found guilty of 34 counts in a trial stemming from a hush-money payment to a porn star, the judge imposed no jail time.

But Ms. Carroll’s legal battle with Mr. Trump — fought in two lawsuits spanning more than half a decade and now based in the federal appeals court for the Second Circuit in Manhattan — continues to move forward.

“Presidential immunity forecloses any liability here and requires the complete dismissal of all claims,” Mr. Trump’s lawyer, D. John Sauer, said in an appeals brief in September, citing the Supreme Court decision of last summer. (Mr. Trump has since chosen Mr. Sauer to serve in his administration as the U.S. solicitor general.)

Last month, the Second Circuit appeals court upheld a $5 million judgment against Mr. Trump in the other lawsuit that Ms. Carroll filed against him in Manhattan.

In that case, a federal jury in May 2023 found Mr. Trump liable for sexually abusing Ms. Carroll in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s. It also found that he had defamed her when, in 2022, he said on Truth Social that her case was a hoax and a lie.

Ms. Carroll testified in the 2023 trial that she ran into Mr. Trump at the Fifth Avenue department store, and he asked for her help buying a present for a female friend. She said they ended up in the lingerie department, where Mr. Trump forced her into a dressing room and shoved her against a wall. He then pulled down her tights and inserted his finger and then his penis into her vagina, she testified.

Ms. Carroll had accused Mr. Trump of rape. The jury of six men and three women found that she had been sexually abused by Mr. Trump, but did not find he had raped her. The jurors have never said why they selected the lesser offense of sexual abuse over rape, which under New York law at the time was defined as sexual intercourse without consent that involves penetration of the penis in the vaginal opening.

The trial judge, Lewis A. Kaplan of U.S. District Court, ruled that Mr. Trump had waived any immunity argument when he did not raise it early in the litigation.

The $83.3 million jury verdict against Mr. Trump came in Ms. Carroll’s second trial, held in January 2024. That case stemmed from comments Mr. Trump made in 2019, when he was still in office during his first term, after Ms. Carroll first accused him, in a New York magazine book excerpt, of raping her in the dressing room.

Mr. Trump called her allegation false and said he had never met Ms. Carroll and did not know who she was. He continued to attack her in social media posts and at news conferences.

Ms. Carroll kept the assault a secret for years, telling only two close friends, before she disclosed it in the magazine excerpt.

New York

An Anne Frank Exhibition in New York

Published

3 weeks ago

January 27, 2025

Press Room

Good morning. It’s Monday. We’ll look at a new Anne Frank exhibition opening in the city today, which is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

A new Anne Frank exhibition will open at the Center for Jewish History in New York today, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and will remain there for three months before moving on to other cities.

“Anne Frank the Exhibition” is a full-scale re-creation of the annex where Anne and her family hid from the Nazis from July 1942 to August 1944 in Amsterdam, and where she wrote her diary. The show has more than 100 original artifacts and examines Anne’s life and death. This is the first time the annex has been completely reconstructed outside Amsterdam, my colleague Laurel Graeber reported.

The exhibition aims to show “how this history, how this memory will go into the 21st century,” Ronald Leopold, executive director of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, said in an interview with Laurel. It comes to New York as antisemitism is rising in the United States and abroad.

The reconstructed annex has five rooms. Each room has the exact details and dimensions as its counterpart at the Anne Frank House, which more than 1.2 million people visit each year. Unlike the original space, which has been intentionally left empty, each room in the exhibition is filled with furniture and possessions, including books and a board game. It also has a facsimile of the diary; the original is in Amsterdam.

The presence of furniture and other possessions in the exhibition could stir controversy. Agnes Mueller, a professor and fellow in Jewish Studies at the University of South Carolina and a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, said her instinct told her that when Otto Frank, Anne’s father, decided to keep the original annex empty, he was worried about commercialization and universalization of her persona.

“He actually emphasized absence as a way to represent that which is not representable,” Mueller told Laurel. The sight of an annex room filled with possessions, she said, “might induce us to feel way too good about things that we should not feel good about.”

Anne was 13 when she went into hiding, and the installation follows a chronological path, tracing her family’s life in Frankfurt, Germany, in the 1920s through their flight to Amsterdam. One of its introductory rooms uses a montage of film and photos to recreate the atmosphere of Amsterdam in the early 1940s. After that, visitors enter the annex.

“We all know that the diary is about the two years in hiding,” said Tom Brink, the head of collections and presentations at the Amsterdam house and the traveling exhibition’s curator. “But of course, the story is much bigger than that. It starts earlier, it ends later, and that entire story and entire journey deserves to be told.”

The exhibition also chronicles Anne’s father’s return from Auschwitz. He was the sole survivor of the eight Jews who hid in the annex, and pursued the publication of Anne’s diary. In the New York installation, 79 editions of it in different languages are on display, along with memorabilia from theatrical and film adaptations.

Leopold said the immersive elements of the show were meant to take people, especially youths, back in time. The Center for Jewish History has already booked more than 250 school tours of the show, and weekday tickets for visitors under 18 years old are available for $16. The exhibition, a nonprofit venture whose revenues support the missions of its two presenting partners, also provides curriculum materials to classes and free admission to students attending as part of New York City public-school field trips and to those from schools nationwide receiving federal education funding.

There will be programming for adults as well. Tomorrow evening, the author Ruth Franklin (“The Many Lives of Anne Frank”) will be interviewed at the center. On Feb. 9, the novelist Alice Hoffman (“When We Flew Away”) will appear there, and the center will also host a film series. (An extension of the show in New York is under consideration; more venues will be announced in the spring.)

Leopold said that he hoped the show would inspire engagement as well as reflection.

“If this exhibition is doing anything, it’s not just teaching history,” he said. “It is also teaching about ourselves.”

Weather

Expect sunny skies with a high near 39; the wind will make it feel colder. Tonight, there will be high winds with a cloudy sky and a low near 32.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until Tuesday (Lunar New Year’s Eve).

The latest New York news

Dear Diary:

Now he’s sleeping the sleep of a dead man,
In a flat on the Lower East Side.
Oh, we tussled and wrestled,
Then we spooned and we nestled.
He’s a master of love, and I’m satisfied.
But I’m leavin’ that boy on 10th Street,
There is something that I cannot ignore
Much too glaring and numbing,
Has to do with the plumbing.
Turns out it’s an undeniable flaw.
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He’s got best sellers and electronic toys,
He likes clean fun and connubial joys.
Now I don’t care he’s not rich an’ —
Still it breaks my heart.
He’s got a bathtub in the kitchen.
(I have to wash my back with a roasting rack.)
What a daunting dilemma,
After scarfing up the lamb vindaloo.
It just isn’t nice ’cause when I scrape off the rice,
Gotta move all the sponges and the Prell shampoo.
Yeah, we like our sushi and our bagels and lox,
Our steaming pizza fresh right outta the box.
All of our dinners are quite bewitchin’
But it tears me up —
He’s got a bathtub in the kitchen.
(Gotta wash my toes with a rinsing hose.)
It doesn’t matter that he’s great in the sack,
I know for sure that I won’t ever be back.
He’s intelligent and kind, but I still have my gripes,
Don’t want bathroom water in the kitchen pipes.
Now, I’m no stranger to heartache,
Trouble has knocked at my door.
But I’ll go it alone and I won’t answer the phone,
Leave his gritty Ajax and his strange décor.
Adios my man, keep your fryin’ pan.
Later for you bachelor and your ladle and your spatula.
You’ve got a bathtub in the kitchen.
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— Lou Craft

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.

Glad we could get together here. James Barron is back tomorrow. L.F.

P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.

New York

‘ I Heard a Man Behind Me Explaining the Work to His Group’

Published

3 weeks ago

January 26, 2025

Press Room

‘ I Heard a Man Behind Me Explaining the Work to His Group’

Artful

Dear Diary:

My trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art typically include a stop to see Seurat’s Study for “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,” a precursor to his much larger “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.”

That painting, almost certainly the artist’s best known, has been viewed by countless visitors to the Art Institute of Chicago, and by many others who have seen a certain popular 1980s movie in which the piece has a small, but meaningful, role.

On my most recent visit to the Met, I heard a man behind me explaining the work to his group: And there’s another one at the Art Institute of Chicago that’s three times as big as this one, he said.

I turned around.

“You really know your stuff,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I saw ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.’”

— James Devitt

Bathtub in the Kitchen

Dear Diary:

Now he’s sleeping the sleep of a dead man,
In a flat on the Lower East Side.
Oh, we tussled and wrestled,
Then we spooned and we nestled.
He’s a master of love, and I’m satisfied.

But I’m leavin’ that boy on 10th Street,
There is something that I cannot ignore.
Much too glaring and numbing,
Has to do with the plumbing.
Turns out it’s an undeniable flaw.

He’s got best-sellers and electronic toys,
He likes clean fun and connubial joys.
Now I don’t care he’s not rich an’—
Still it breaks my heart.
He’s got a bathtub in the kitchen.
(I have to wash my back with a roasting rack.)

What a daunting dilemma,
After scarfing up the lamb vindaloo.
It just isn’t nice ’cause when I scrape off the rice,
Gotta move all the sponges and the Prell shampoo.

Yeah, we like our sushi and our bagels and lox,
Our steaming pizza fresh right outta the box.
All of our dinners are quite bewitchin’
But it tears me up —
He’s got a bathtub in the kitchen.
(Gotta wash my toes with a rinsing hose.)

It doesn’t matter that he’s great in the sack,
I know for sure that I won’t ever be back.
He’s intelligent and kind, but I still have my gripes,
Don’t want bathroom water in the kitchen pipes.

Now, I’m no stranger to heartache,
Trouble has knocked at my door.
But I’ll go it alone and I won’t answer the phone,
Leave his gritty Ajax and his strange décor.

Adios my man, keep your fryin’ pan.
Later for you bachelor and your ladle and your spatula.
You’ve got a bathtub in the kitchen.

— Lou Craft

Sounds of the ’60s

Dear Diary:

I was taking an uptown express to the Upper West Side. A trim, older man with a well-worn accordion got on at 34th Street.

He immediately jumped into a set of ’60s rock classics. Man, he rocked. Among the highlights was his version of the 1966 Rolling Stones hit “Paint It Black.”

As we both prepared to get off at 96th Street, I gave him a nod of approval and put some money in his cup.

He grinned and rushed toward the uptown local that was waiting across the platform.

He said, “96th Street, ‘96 Tears.’”

— Chris Parnagian

Northbound Traffic

Dear Diary:

It was about 10 years ago. I was in the passenger seat of our Toyota, my husband was at the wheel and we were stuck in northbound traffic on the West Side Highway.

It was warm out, and we had the windows down. I had a copy of “Life of Pi,” with its distinctive blue dust jacket and orange spine, on my lap.

I heard a man’s voice that sounded like it was next to me but much higher up. It turned out it was coming from the open window of a cab on a tractor-trailer that was idling next to us.

“Great book,” the voice said.

I looked up and saw the truck’s driver looking down at me. His elbow was resting on the edge of the open window. Beneath it was a copy of “Life of Pi,” open so I could see the dust jacket.

“Great book!” I said.

Slowly, traffic began to move.

— Connie Beckley