The premiere of Wild West epic “Jane Got a Gun.” Star and producer Natalie Portman. A cinema princess with perfect makeup, with hairdresser’d tendrils framing a porcelain face, with minders hovering around minding, with professionally done lips — from which came this regal pronouncement:
“I’m just basically your average everyday Jewish mother.”
OK, right. In a floor-length Valentino gown yet.
So this basic average everyday Jewish mother, what’s she know from the Wild West? She’ll shout from her horse: “Throw me down the stairs my hat?”
“I knew nothing. I was sent a script. I’d never read anything like this feminist story about a woman in those old days, making her way in the unforgiving, tough Wild West. Toting a rifle,
husband riddled with bullets, shooting bad guys, baking bread, washing children, surviving.
“I did research. I took a crash course. I studied books. Read diaries. But there were so many obstacles. We lost the director early on. Actors changed. We suffered financial and legal challenges. We endured so many replacements. There were delays. The weather was unforgiving. Sandstorms. Rains in April.
“That’s why I, just basically your average everyday Jewish mother, would go around asking everyone, ‘You OK? . . . You all right?’
“I have a child. I know what it’s like to care for a baby. But to do that with the civilization’s surrounding toughness, to make that journey and survive it. That’s the story.”
Get to know these candidates
Puffed-up Bernie Socialist, who guarantees to defend our capitalist nation against Iraq? This yutz can’t even pronounce Iraq. On TV he said “Eye-Raq.” His lone attribute? Ability to work for us 24 hours a day — because he’s up making at least four bathroom runs a night.
Little boy Marco Rubio? I have blouses older. His lone positive is the ability to always carry around the hot-button red phone in his pencil box.
Choose Cruz who screws New York, home of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, President Theodore Roosevelt, President Martin Van Buren, President Millard Fillmore? There are clues this snooze rhymes with lose.
B’way A-list
Stars are giving more than just their regards to Broadway. Next season, it’s the Great Watt Way.
Ralph Fiennes is in London’s Old Vic playing the lead, Halvard Solness, in a juiced version of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s 1892 life and death and power masterpiece “The Master
Builder.” Nobody confirms it’s coming here or when or where. But nobody denies theater owners have big mouths.
Coming up, Bette Midler’s new hello to Dolly Levi in composer Jerry Herman’s “Hello, Dolly!” Carol Channing, now 95, originated the role in the ’60s when producer David Merrick had wanted
Ethel Merman or Mary Martin. Both said no. Gene Kelly was in the movie. Streisand did the title song.
Also coming back is Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s terrific play about newspapers, “The Front Page,” with always terrific Nathan Lane, who’s already done a workshop.
The season’s newies are mostly oldies. Again, again it’s “The Glass Menagerie.” By now that glass is more than half full. The star? “You-like-me-you-really-like-me” Sally Field. Every 10 minutes there’s another revival. Everybody’s been in it but Donald Trump.
Ta-da! One newie. Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” out of famous writer Sorkin and superproducer Scott Rudin, who has created almost everything but Planet Earth.
Nobu 57 manageress Sharon Hofstetter to a lady patron: “You should never leave a full drink or an attractive man.”
Only in New York, kids, only in New York.