GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY and Junior's

Girl from the North Country, with a book by Conor McPherson, using the songs of Bob Dylan, was tried out to success in London. It opened here and, with the pandemic, closed and restarted a couple of times, which is to say, few will have seen it, before it collects Tony awards and closes at the Belasco.

Nineteen songs are from Dylan’s early canon, mostly. Are they unfamiliar or just new in this context? “Sweetheart Like You” is a revelation. The musical is set in a flophouse during the Great Depression, in Duluth, near Dylan’s hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota. The Midwestern accent comes and goes. All the women are strong: Jeannette Bayardelle, Kimber Elayne Sprawl, Luba Mason (pictured). Jennifer Blood, the matinee understudy for Tony-nominated Mare Winningham, was graceful and hilarious, then sang a gorgeous “Like a Rolling Stone." Whereas, the male characters lean toward sinister, with the exception the paroled convict, a boxer, who is gentle and sweet, played by Austin Scott. In a musical break, Ben Mayne shook off the pathos of his character, Elias, with full-on charm and musicianship.

 

There was enough going on in the 1930s without the sleazy preacher and the shady ancient suitor. In spite of broad characters, the actors have chemistry and the world onstage is real. So different in nature from his Irish plays, Conor McPherson's book of Girl from the North Country delivers the dramatic shocks he is known for. One wonders what McPherson would do with, say, the canons of Neil Young or Patti Smith.

 

Bob Dylan has released stunning music just since the pandemic began. Should Conor McPherson write a sequel, please let it be set in the freer and happier 60s, 70s, 80s, or 90s.

 

 

Junior's Times Square had outdoor seating before it became popular. Visitors to New York remember the club sandwiches and pickles Some people dream about the cheesecake and strawberry milkshakes. Junior's initiated an effort to buy back guns. To quote Grub Street: Allan Rosen of Junior's "donated $20,000 to the event, which went to the NYCPF, which in turn used the money to purchase iPads and offer larger-than-usual sums for the guns: a $200 bank card and an iPad for assault rifles and handguns, a $25 bank card for air guns, rifles, and shotguns. ‘Like everything else, guns cost a lot more now than they cost in the past, [Brooklyn DA, Eric] Gonzalez said of the higher totals being offered. ‘So we needed to induce more people to turn in the guns.’”

The Poetry Garden is said to be better in summer and fall, but it’s pretty great in winter, under heat lamps. On the fourteenth floor, attached to Bookmarks lounge, the garden is surrounded by spectacular views of midtown architecture.  

 

It makes one hungry! Meatballs in mushroom gravy, with garlic bread on the side, was a large small plate. A charcuterie platter came with truffle honey, cornichons, and good baguette. Truffled popcorn was freshly popped. (The ground floor of the Library Hotel has a full restaurant, Madison & Vine.) Cocktails include Tequila Mockingbird and Gone With the Gin, with Dorothy Parker Rose Petal Gin. 

 

At the bar, in the hotel reception, and on every floor, are packed bookshelves, but with an occasional gap between books, as though it were permissible to borrow and return, like at the Midtown library a couple of blocks west. The books are not matchy-matchy, arranged by color, yet they are consigned to be ornamental. The constant reader finds herself poring over the bindings for hidden gems—an unappreciated Victorian romance or murder mystery—to borrow and of course return, perhaps with late fees due. Don’t worry, I’ll be back to the Poetry Garden before the seasons change. Happy hour is weeknights, four to six, with $9 wine.  As the several Japanese maple trees turn bright orange, a mulled wine cocktail is added to the drinks menu, and when flowers bloom, frosé. 

 

Pascalou is one of the city's gems and the best restaurant on the Upper East Side. Across from the Corner Bookstore it was a weekend brunch destination well before the pandemic. The menu is varied and always offers something new. Congratulations to consistently high performing Pascalou for moving with the times, and long may you flourish. @carnegiehillneighbors

THE LIFESPAN OF A FACT and 21 Club

Cherry Jones, Bobby Cannavale and Daniel Radcliffe (Photo Caitlin McNaney)

In the name of accuracy, a piece of reporting goes through a fact-checking process that roots out fabrication and plagiarism. A writer may try to deny what the fact checker turns up. The one in the witty The Lifespan of a Fact does that, and the editor is forced to intervene. With the magazine’s deadline on Monday the article must be fact checked over the weekend.

To study for his role, Daniel Radcliffe embedded with The New Yorker’s brilliant fact-checking team, much to their delight. Radcliffe makes a credible journalist, no mean feat, who gets so far into the article that he can propose a different lede and better title, which his editor approves.

As the editor, Cherry Jones is a boss. (Did Cherry Jones embed at The New Yorker too?) Her bristling “Norman Mailer” (Bobby Cannavale) turns out to live in a seedy apartment in Las Vegas that he shared with his mother until she died, in her chair.

Cannavale’s monologue about the chair is an unexpected tearjerker—and makes you question your own hold on truth. “I’m not interested in accuracy,” his writer says. “I am not beholden to every detail.” However, the sources for his feature article on deadline are “the homeless lady” and “the woman at the Aztec Bar.”

You’d think these three stunning actors could camp it up more. Directed to play it straight, perhaps it’s a given, because the ending will have the hairs standing on the back of your neck.

Hurry to see Lifespan of a Fact before it closes, and while Time magazine honors the noble journalist as their Person of the Year.

Frank Sinatra is the soundtrack at 21.

In Hitchcock's “Rear Window,” Grace Kelly orders lobster carryout from 21 Club to share with wheelchair-bound photojournalist James Stewart. In “Sweet Smell of Success,” memorable for such lines as “I love this dirty town!” the talent agent and gossip columnist played by Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster cut deals at 21. The restaurant is in more classic Hollywood movies than any other. Few restaurants come with higher expectations.

The food is good. To be specific, better than average. Truth is, we’ve been there but once, for the lunch special, not for the long menu that lists Dover sole for $76. In fact, that price is an anomaly, but how can one truly enjoy the perfectly fine prix-fixe salmon against the looming possibility of that stupendous Dover sole? The best part was that our kind old waiter could tell us exactly where Joan Rivers used to sit.

Cast iron jockeys at the entrance to 21 Club were facing sideways, until someone noticed in “All About Eve” that when Margo Channing, Bette Davis, rolls up to 21 Club, the jockeys are facing the street. Today, the jockeys face the street.

THE PARISIAN WOMAN and La Bergamote

Uma Thurman in her Broadway debut

 A tax lawyer with no experience on the bench aspires to land a seat on the highest court in the country. (Sound familiar?) But what if the apparently GOP appointee were a secret Democrat. An insurgent on the Supreme Court could eliminate gerrymandering and voter suppression. Idealism dates this new five-character play in our more cynical age.

The judgeship may yet come about thanks to the tax attorney’s wife, who works both sides of the aisle in DC. Chloe, played by Uma Thurman in her Broadway debut, once bravely moved to Paris for a while, thus her husband thinks of her as the Parisian Woman of the play’s title.

Thurman is a screen actor of the magnitude that you rarely get to see on Broadway. Thurman is almost always onstage, and you feel you get to know her through her unique body language. She is very tall. But the playwright gives her little to do. Chloe herself explains that she is unemployed and without interests, in a scene with the amazing Blair Brown, fully expressed as the new Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Brown’s legendary major stage magic outshines Thurman, but she also has a better part, with more authority.

The Chloe part is never given the chance to shine—or to seethe, as Uma Thurman does so well in a Lars von Trier film for which she should have won an Academy Award. She never shows anger in this play, when her anger has lit up and focused the Time’s Up movement in Hollywood to which she gave a well thought out response. But like most of the characters in The Parisian Woman, she is made to spend most of the play with the tired prop of a glass of wine in her hand.

Not coincidentally, theatergoers are allowed to bring cocktails and wine to their seats, even to bring a whole bottle of wine, as the couple beside us did. This is highly unusual on Broadway, and we were distracted during suspense onstage by the glug-glug-glug of wine poured.

French bistro La Bergamote, a ten minute stroll from the Hudson Theatre, has a long showcase of pastries and a good wine list. It’s a quiet place to talk pre-matinee. Salads are fine but the pastas and egg dishes, superior. The eggs Benedicts include a version with crab cakes. Croque Monsieur and Croque Madame look almost conjugal. You may find a chic Parisian woman at La Bergamote, or that je ne sais quoi in a chic Argentinian woman and her handsome son (pictured). 

AINT MISBEHAVIN and Marcus B&P

The dazzling Ain't Misbehavin', Newark Performing Arts, photo by Yasmeen Fahmy

Thomas Fats Waller was born in Harlem in 1904. The son of a minister, he turned his abundant talents to songwriting, piano, singing, recording, radio work. He was a great hustler. New York producers must have loved to see him coming to demo a song and take his payment in cash. They said he would sell a song more than once, and other artists had big hits with songs they stole from him. Waller died at 30 of pneumonia on a train in Kansas, and thousands of people lined the streets outside his funeral. 

Forty years ago “Ain’t Misbehavin’”, the Fats Waller revue, rocked Broadway. I jumped at the chance to see it again in a production directed by original cast member André De Shields at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC) in Newark. In ‘78 four of the five “Ain’t Misbehavin’” actors were so evenly matched that they were pitted against each other for Drama Desk and Tony Awards. The show won for best musical in both.

The new cast stays close to the delicious ‘70s interpretations. A lyric comes with a leer, a wink, and a double meaning. “Jitterbug Waltz” depicts the slow drag of a 1930s dance marathon. “Cash for Your Trash” – an ode to WWII rationing – doubles the tempo in the second half. It’s practically impossible to sing so fast. “The Joint is Jumpin’” scatters the cast as sirens blow. It’s Prohibition. Here come the cops.

The NJPAC production opened tentatively, but locked in early in Act I when the cast forms a chorus line to fervently demonstrate the manual and pedal sides of Waller’s stride piano – witty right hand over punching left. Rheaume Crenshaw sings a very simple “I’ve Got a Feeling I’m Falling.” Borris York draws out every word of “I dreamed about a reefer five feet long . . .” in “TheViper’s Drag,” De Shields’s big number on Broadway. David Samuel self-mocks with “Your Feet’s Too Big” and “Fat and Greasy.” And the entire cast becomes motionless to sing/ask “What did I do to be so black and blue?”

Guest writer Becca Pulliam was a Jazz Producer at WBGO 88.3 in Newark, NJ, for 30 years.

 

Three dishes at Newark's Marcus B&P

Two blocks from NJPAC, an early 20^th century department store is restored and lovely. Enter Hahne & Co. on Broad Street and walk west under the cast-iron-ribbed skylight to Marcus B&P, the new restaurant with the celebrity chef.

Marcus Samuelsson is a great catch for downtown Newark, now rising. After winning a James Beard Award at Aquavit in New York City, he opened Red Rooster in Harlem. At Marcus B&P, B is for  bar with local beers and Newark apple cider on tap, and P is for Provisions. Samuelsson teams Ethiopian cuisine with Swedish. Almost every item on the menu is locally sourced.

Fresh, long-stemmed greens in the appetizing Laurel Garden salad come from AeroFarms, a large-scale indoor grower in Newark. “The dressing has a little kick to it!” said my lunch companions, and they said it again upon tasting the fried chicken and plantain waffles with pickled red cabbage and hot, local Tassot honey. And again for the Dorowat rigatoni. (Dorowat is the classic Ethiopian chicken stew.) The brick-oven pizza is classic, with bubbling crust.

There’s contemporary African-American art on the walls and neo soul music in the air. As our waiter Markus Jackson told us, Marcus B&P stays busy straight through the weekend, beginning Thursday after work.

ILLEGAL HELPERS and Kalustyan's

Illegal Helpers at the Austrian Cultural Forum, is a new German play by Maxi Obexer about the refugee crisis in Europe. Dialogue is taken directly from transcripts of quiet activists who help terrified refugees cross borders and avoid deportation, plus one fictional character (Lukas, played suavely by Viennese Markus Hirnigel) who at first observes what is going on from a cozy bourgeois distance. The other characters tell their stories, including a beloved white-haired aunt (Vivien Meisner, riveting) who considers herself less an activist than one who considers refugees adoptive family. Un-didactically, the 1990 Dublin Regulation is evoked that requires EU countries to accept applications from asylum seekers, and the fact that one can get legal action without legal status. The play makes you demand a fairer, more humane world.

A half-cynical, pony-tailed lawyer played by Mark Byrne instructs a group in how to build a case for citizenship, which includes getting a good interpreter. Then, he lays out his astronomical charge (10,000 euros) for the process. Although this was only a staged reading (and barely staged—music might have helped), you can see the possibilities. The ideas stick. Obexer’s play doesn’t make you laugh, but on the other hand, it doesn’t try to wring tears.

In Germany, as the play points out, only 2% of asylum seekers get to remain. In this country, the crisis is deportation. Every American has a friend who has recently been deported without reason, dragged away in the night. Illegal Helpers has relevance everywhere now. Performances have been in Chicago, Washington D.C., Hungary, and Chechnya. New Yorkers will have another chance to see Illegal Helpers in late August. 

Kalustyan’s is a Little India food shop with a cafeteria serving mostly vegan food of rare deliciousness. Spinach, eggplant, lentil, and couscous entrees come with salad, pickles, olives, and pita. Mujadarah (spiced lentils and delicately fried onions) platter is a favorite. Available drinks are nonalcoholic at this small upstairs eatery, open from 11 a.m. to 7:30.

The megastore downstairs is open from 9:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. It is impossible to eat at the restaurant without wanting to do a little shopping on your way out. Bird’s nest pastries, halva, lentils of every shape and color, packaged snacks, nuts, dried fruit, herbed bread and samosas, stuffed grape leaves, curry pastes, chutneys, cookies, jams. Kalustyan’s house-made baba ghanoush is smoky and about the best in the world. The extensive tea section includes Lebanese love potion tea with 32 ingredients. People also come here for such health potions as fresh turmeric, senna leaf tea, gluten-free flours, spirulina, and neti pots.