[ad_1]
I have to tell you, after a long rehearsal in five-inch heels and a photo shoot posing side-by-side and half-back on a corner banquette, the woman who made the cosmopolitan drink the most famous drink is Candace Bushnell. From pre-Y2K New York, he slid into a chair in the Carlyle Hotel’s gallery and ordered a modest pot of Earl Gray tea. With lemon slices to soothe your throat.
Bushnell, 62, debuted as a sex and relationship columnist for The New York Observer in the mid-’90s and focused her columns on a character named Carrie Bradshaw, a stylish replacement for Bushnell. He collected these pieces in his 1996 autofiction book “Sex and the City” before it got even cooler. HBO aired a series adaptation two years later. It ran for six seasons. This was followed by two movies, licensed scents, bus tours, and fudge.
Bushnell’s life was different from Carrie’s. He turned his talents into fiction. Her marriage to ballerina Charles Askegard, nicknamed Mr. Bigger, ended in divorce. After escaping from Manhattan to the Hamptons and giving up on dating, “Is There Still Sex in the City?” He wrote another novel.
I couldn’t help wondering: Has Bushnell adapted this novel into a one-man show? Her. Inside “Is There Still Sex In The City?” Beginning pre-screenings at the Daryl Roth Theater on Saturday, Bushnell makes her debut on stage, following her life from her Connecticut childhood to her party-girl peak, marriage, divorce, and beyond—like a fire painting painted with tasteful pink lipstick. Is this fiction, autofiction, or memoir?
“I’m not trying to play a character,” he told me. “But maybe I feel like I’m a character. It’s like natural.”
A few blocks from her Upper East Side apartment, Bushnell arrived at Carlyle in a sensible gray sweater dress and a completely pointless pair of new shoes—red satin Manolo Blahniks with diamond buckles—and slipped in with impossible ease. (A line I heard during rehearsal for the show earlier that day: “Do I have a shoe obsession like Carrie Bradshaw? No. Carrie Bradshaw has a shoe obsession because of me.”) Personally, I like her wide-eyed and porcelain stance of a Meissen statuette. Set conversation as polished as Carlyle’s silverware.
As a child in Glastonbury, Conn., Bushnell acted erratically, although he spent most of his spare time scribbling short stories and riding his horses. When she moved to New York at age 19 – “wild and full of philosophies,” she said – flirting with acting (it’s her moving verb), she studied at HB Studio.
“I didn’t really think I was very good at this, which I probably shouldn’t say,” she said.
Also, he never loved to write as much as he loved to write. “I really had to be a writer, or I felt like I was going to die,” she said. So he wrote, signing the theatrical rights to each new book. But a few years ago, he decided to keep the theatrical rights to himself, while dividing the rights to “Is There Still Sex in the City?”.
He wasn’t sure what to do with them. But then she met Marc Johnston, a talent manager at Carlyle, whom Bushnell saw as her bonus living room. He had helped create a travel show for his client, composer and incidental reality TV star David Foster. He thought he could do the same for her.
This time he rewrote stories from his books, life, conference trips in monologue format. This first draft ran about 200 pages. To shape the script, Johnston and fellow producer Robyn Goodman introduced Bushnell to director and choreographer Lorin Latarro.
In June, the show had a trial run at the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, Penn. Set in nearly a replica of Bushnell’s apartment, which includes her real sofa, real rug, and real poodles, the movie turns out to be a chatty girl’s night out.
Although Bushnell is a seasoned stewardess, these first performances were frustrating. “Oh my god, that was really like acting,” Bushnell said. Gradually the script was shortened and Bushnell relaxed and improved.
“It really is miraculous,” Goodman told me in a phone call. “She was determined to understand acting, and she did it.”
Understanding it meant hiring an acting coach and a voice coach and doing Pilates three times a week to build her core strength for the show. So Bushnell takes her rehearsal and performance work seriously—hence Earl Gray in the afternoon—comparing it to the dressage exercises she’d practiced as a girl, repeating the same little moves until she got it right.
“There is an aspect of my personality where I would spend hours and hours and hours trying to make something better,” she said.
I joked that this didn’t make her look exactly like a Carrie. “I don’t even know what Carrie is,” he said.
HBO is busy portraying Carrie in a new series, “And Just Like That…”, which follows many of the original “Sex and the City” characters into her 50s, but Bushnell is not included. The stage show highlights the differences between Bushnell and Carrie in several places, but these differences are about men and fashion issues, not ideology or temperament. Carrie flies; Even without Bushnell’s heels, his feet are firmly on the ground. While Carrie’s story eventually turns into a romance, Bushnell is extremely ambivalent about romantic relationships.
Her feminism lurking in the margins of her books comes up in conversation convincingly and shamelessly. He speaks convincingly of the deforming effects of patriarchal power and the need for, in his own words, equality of “mind, body and earning potential” – a welcome surprise from a woman once known for table dancing at Da Silvano.
Page Six darling, Bushnell has rarely been widely acclaimed for his politics, obvious wit, and psychological acuity. (Let’s say that when I read his last book, I found a few pages describing my collapsed marriage in such detail that I had to text half a dozen friends and lie down for a while.) And it’s always been like this. somewhat deliberate.
She remembered as a child her father, angry at gender inequality, seated her and said that even though people had ideas that they needed to hear, no one would listen if she shouted. “So I learned very early on to cover everything with a candy-colored, candy-coated message. Because that’s how you get society moving,” he said.
Latarro agreed during a pre-rehearsal conversation. “She writes feminism in a way that makes it delicious for many women who have internalized misogyny and for many men who think everyone looks great in their sexy dresses.”
Rich in quips and a pop song snippet, the stage show is also candy-colored—a chocolate martini with a sugar rim. Bushnell is recognizably himself, at least I saw during rehearsal hour, but it was polished and polished: a person reimagined as a fun and gorgeous character. I asked him why he didn’t try something sharper, more bitter. He said earlier drafts had darker elements. But these have been discontinued.
“My message is probably risky enough. I just sit there and say, ‘I’m not married, I don’t have kids.’ And I’m grateful.”
Not wanting to bother her audience with too many messages, that’s probably why the producers created Candi Bar, a post-show nightclub in Daryl Roth’s basement.
“All night cosmos!” Johnston was fascinated in a phone call.
Bushnell expressed it more practically while drinking his tea. “People just want to feel good,” he said. “And I want to have a good time with them.”
[ad_2]
Source link