There are voices and there are voices and, then, there is a woman named Brandie Inez Sutton. She made her solo debut at 54 Below last night and it just couldn’t have been closer to perfection. Eda and I had never heard of her, but we sure know who she is now and from here on out, you can find us following to wherever she performs. Entering in a stunning red dress, she hits the stage and then proceeds to deliver thrill after thrill with a voice that just does not stop. The instrument is trained and powerful, but, also, exhibits all the subtlety and nuance you can only dream of in a rich musical program like the one she delivered. Arias, pop songs, religious staples, Broadway, film, just all of it. Masterful at every turn. Add her beauty, warm personality and unique stories leading us in and out of the music, and you have a beautiful 80 minutes of a soul satisfying evening. It would appear that when Director Richard Jay-Alexander sets his sights on talent, he dives right into the soul of who he is working with. The two had met when she performed her first Bess in PORGY AND BESS with the South Florida Symphony, and Richard helmed the production. Add Musical Director Joseph Joubert and these two creatives seem to have no boundaries as to what can be accomplished in a musical evening. They have worked together many times and continue to find new and original ways to illuminate the way for artists and the music they can make. It’s, actually, a special kind of magic. Add stellar musicians like Lonnie Christian on drums and Parker McAllister on acoustic and electronic bass and versatility of sounds are limitless. The arrangements, by Joubert, each and every one, are perfection. I usually don’t divulge content of the material performed, but I must mention her performance and spin on THE LITTLE MERMAID’s “Part of Your World.” The soprano and her director engaged Miami’s David Sexton to write a specialty lyric (which Sexton seems expert at) which turned the song into a real “I Want” number to the delight of the packed house. Inspired by what Miss Sutton wanted to say about her “Opera Life” it was, once again, perfect. A little research led me to Brandie’s accomplished career and singing around the world including, right here, in New York City, at the legendary Metropolitan Opera. But, on this particular evening, the songbird escaped from the cage and owned all of our hearts and souls. You must go see and hear her. She is truly remarkable and has a 2^nd show on Sunday night at 54 Below. Because I get the opportunity to roam and mingle before and after the show, last night , it was a joy to see and meet Miss Sutton’s mother and son.

BRANDIE INEZ SUTTON & KEVIN JACKSON

BRANDIE INEZ SUTTON

BRANDIE INEZ SUTTON

JOSEPH JOUBERT & BRANDIE INEZ SUTTON

BRANDIE INEZ SUTTON

BRANDIE INEZ SUTTON

BRANDIE INEZ SUTTON

BRANDIE INEZ SUTTON

MOM

BRANDIE INEZ SUTTON

BRANDIE INEZ SUTTON

BRANDIE INEZ SUTTON & STEPHEN SOROKOFF

JOSEPH JOUBERT & BRANDIE INEZ SUTTON

BRANDIE INEZ SUTTON & RICHARD JAY-ALEXANDER

BRANDIE INEZ SUTTON & SON

BRANDIE INEZ SUTTON & DAVE QUINN

BRANDIE INEZ SUTTON &  GWENDOLYN QUINN

BRANDIE INEZ SUTTON & FRIENDS

JOSEPH JOUBERT & EDA SOROKOFF

EDWING D’ ANGELO & BRANDIE INEZ SUTTON

BRANDIE INEZ SUTTON,  MARK CORTALE, RICHARD JAY-ALEXANDER

54 BELOW

NORM LEWIS

54 BELOW

More than 75 original works celebrate the extraordinary career of an artist who has made caricature an art form all its own.

Some artists capture a likeness. Others capture a personality. Ken Fallin does something considerably more remarkable: he captures the entire performance of being someone, often with nothing more than a few beautifully placed strokes of pen and ink.

At Gallery New World Stages, located at 343 West 49th Street, ABOUT FACE: THE ART OF KEN FALLIN brought together more than 75 original works celebrating one of the most distinctive artistic voices in American entertainment. Curated by Bernard Stote, the exhibition offered a fascinating journey through Broadway, Hollywood, politics and Wall Street, with a collection of famous faces transformed by Fallin’s unmistakable wit, elegance and extraordinary eye for character.For those of us who have spent our lives in and around the theatre, Ken Fallin’s drawings are more than illustrations. They are part of Broadway’s visual vocabulary. His subjects may be actors, politicians, business leaders or cultural icons, but his genius lies in recognizing the detail that makes each individual unmistakably themselves. A raised eyebrow, an extravagant hairstyle, the angle of a chin or the particular way someone carries their importance becomes, in Fallin’s hands, an entire biography.

There is a wonderful theatricality to his work. He understands that a face is never simply a collection of features. It is an expression of ambition, vulnerability, humor, vanity, intelligence and sometimes magnificent absurdity. His drawings can be affectionate without becoming sentimental, pointed without becoming cruel and exaggerated without ever losing their essential truth. That balance is considerably harder to achieve than it looks.

Fallin’s career began with the wonderfully irreverent Forbidden Broadway, where he created advertising campaigns and posters for the legendary theatrical revue. Inspired by the incomparable Al Hirschfeld, Fallin developed his own distinctive approach to capturing the larger-than-life personalities who inhabit the entertainment world. It was an ideal artistic marriage: a show that lovingly skewered Broadway’s biggest stars and an illustrator who could reveal an entire theatrical personality in a handful of lines.

Jim Kierstead, Richard Hillman, Lorna Dallas, Sal Viviano

What followed was a career that extended far beyond the footlights. A five-year association with the Sunday edition of the Boston Herald established him as a regular presence in arts journalism, while national advertising campaigns for American Express, Belvedere Vodka and CNBC’s Squawk Box demonstrated that his visual wit could travel effortlessly between entertainment, commerce and the financial world.

Ken Fallin and Lorna Dallas

His illustrations have appeared in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Hollywood Reporter, Chicago Tribune and The New Yorker. Since 1994, his work has been a regular presence in The Wall Street Journal, where his portraits have given personalities from business, politics and culture an unmistakable artistic identity. He has also chronicled the New York theatre scene through his illustrations since 2010, extending a tradition in which the artist becomes an essential witness to theatrical history.

Ken Fallin and Sal Viviano in deep conversation

That is precisely what makes Fallin’s work so important. Photography documents how someone looked at a particular moment. A great caricature tells us how that person occupied the world. It catches the public persona, the private eccentricity and the quality that makes an individual memorable long after a performance has ended or a headline has faded.

Fragrance designer Sue Phillips was also there and showed me her caricature when she was an actress

The comparison with Hirschfeld is inevitable, but Fallin has long since earned his own place in that distinguished artistic tradition. Where a lesser caricaturist might settle for an oversized nose or an exaggerated smile, Fallin understands composition, movement and the almost musical rhythm of a line. His drawings are deceptively economical. Nothing feels accidental, and very little is wasted. Each flourish has a purpose, whether it is revealing a performer’s flamboyance or exposing the carefully cultivated authority of a Wall Street titan.

T2C owner Suzanna Bowling who wrote the books forward and Ken Fallin

His achievements have received recognition well beyond Broadway. In 2010, Fallin earned an Emmy Award nomination for an animated CNBC commercial, and in 2012, his first one-man exhibition, Ken Fallin Draws Hollywood, was presented at the Hamilton Selway Gallery in Los Angeles. His work is included in the permanent collection of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, an extraordinary distinction that places his drawings within one of the world’s great institutions devoted to art and design.

Chita

Then there are the private collectors, a roster that reads like a particularly glamorous opening-night party. Bernadette Peters, Angela Lansbury, Bob Avian, Sir Cameron Mackintosh, Sir Patrick Stewart, Marlo Thomas, Helen Hunt and Norbert Leo Butz are among those who own his work. It seems entirely appropriate that performers who have spent their careers interpreting characters should appreciate an artist who can interpret them so brilliantly.

My personal favorite Katherine Hepburn

New World Stages has given this remarkable body of work an ideal theatrical setting. Gallery New World Stages occupies 150 linear feet of exhibition space across two floors of the New World Stages complex, offering audiences an opportunity to encounter Fallin’s work in the heart of the neighborhood that has inspired so much of his career. Surrounded by five theatres and the constant energy of New York’s performing arts community, the gallery provides a fitting home for an artist whose imagination has been so closely intertwined with the stage.

The King is back

There is also something especially satisfying about seeing caricature celebrated in a gallery rather than treated merely as an accompaniment to an article, advertisement or theatrical production. Illustration is too often regarded as a supporting art, even when the image becomes more memorable than the words it was created to accompany. Fallin’s work makes a persuasive argument that a great caricature deserves to be experienced as art in its own right.

Audra as Lady Sings The Blues

For Broadway lovers, the exhibition is an opportunity to revisit the faces that have shaped our theatrical memories. For those interested in Hollywood, politics and popular culture, it offers a reminder that fame is as much about personality as achievement. And for anyone who appreciates extraordinary draftsmanship, it is a chance to study the remarkable precision behind drawings that appear almost effortlessly spontaneous.

What Ken Fallin has accomplished over the course of his career is more than the creation of an impressive collection of portraits. He has developed a visual record of the people who have entertained us, challenged us, influenced us and occasionally made us roll our eyes. His drawings preserve not simply their appearances but something of the cultural moment in which they mattered.

Long after a Broadway marquee goes dark, a television series ends or a political figure leaves the spotlight, Fallin’s lines remain, capturing the wit, extravagance and unmistakable humanity of his subjects.

And that, ultimately, is the magic of ABOUT FACE. We recognize the famous people on the walls, but we also recognize the extraordinary intelligence of the artist who saw them so clearly.

Because in Ken Fallin’s world, everybody has a face. But only a true artist knows which lines tell the story.

ABOUT FACE: THE ART OF KEN FALLIN is presented at Gallery New World Stages, 343 West 49th Street, New York City and is open daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Thornton Wilder’s holiday classic gets a nationwide celebration, with more than 30 organizations joining a theatrical feast that spans 90 years in just 40 minutes.

Forget the turkey, the awkward family conversations and the relative who insists on bringing up politics before dessert. This Christmas, Thornton Wilder is inviting America to a dinner that lasts ninety years, and some rather extraordinary guests are pulling up chairs.

Thortan Wilder

The Thornton Wilder Estate has announced The Long Christmas Dinner Festival, a nationwide celebration of Wilder’s beloved 1931 one-act play, with more than 30 theatres, schools, colleges and independent bookstores presenting the work throughout November and December. The ambition is as charming as it is audacious: to make The Long Christmas Dinner a holiday tradition alongside A Christmas Carol, The Nutcracker and Handel’s Messiah. Considering how many of us already spend the holidays revisiting the same beloved stories, there is something wonderfully appealing about adding another place at the table.

The festivities begin Monday, November 2, at New York City’s Public Theater, where Ethan Hawke and Jose Llana will be among the performers bringing Wilder’s extraordinary little play to life. Joining them is Tappan Wilder, the playwright’s nephew and managing member of the Wilder Family LLC, making this particular family gathering rather more authentic than most. Additional casting will be announced.

Chicago is getting its own star-studded dinner at the Goodman Theatre, with original RENT cast member Anthony Rapp and Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy joining the celebration. It’s not every day that a Broadway original and an alternative-rock icon find themselves seated at the same theatrical Christmas table, but Wilder has always had a way of bringing seemingly different worlds together.

And what a remarkable piece of theatre this is. First produced in 1931, The Long Christmas Dinner takes place during one continuous holiday meal, yet somehow carries its audience through ninety years of a family’s existence. Generations arrive, grow older, fall in love, quarrel, celebrate, disappear and are replaced by those who follow. The dining table remains, but the people around it change. In a mere forty minutes, Wilder captures the comedy, tenderness, absurdity and heartbreak of being human.

It is a theatrical conceit of astonishing simplicity, and one that feels particularly appropriate for the holidays. After all, Christmas dinner is rarely just about the people sitting at the table. It is also about those who once occupied the empty chairs, the traditions we inherited without remembering who began them, and the children who will eventually become the keepers of those same memories. Wilder understood that a family gathering is never really confined to a single day. Every holiday carries the ghosts of Christmases past and the promise of those still to come.

What makes this festival especially intriguing is its refusal to confine Wilder to the grand theatrical institutions. The first wave of participants includes 31 organizations across 20 states, stretching from Alaska to Florida and California to Maine. Alongside such distinguished companies as The Public Theater, Goodman Theatre, Seattle Rep, Miami New Drama, Pasadena Playhouse and Rude Mechs are high schools, colleges and independent bookstores. Vassar and Yale are also participating, with Yale holding a particularly meaningful connection to the work: students there collaborated on its original 1931 premiere.

That mixture is precisely what gives the festival its heart. Wilder’s work has never depended on elaborate scenery or theatrical machinery to reveal something profound. His genius lies in stripping away the unnecessary until the audience is left confronting the things that matter: time, love, mortality, family and the extraordinary significance of ordinary life. A school auditorium or bookstore can become as fitting a home for this play as a celebrated professional stage.

There is also something rather refreshing about a holiday theatrical event that doesn’t require a sleigh, a dancing snowflake or a miser visited by three ghosts. Wilder gives us something at once simpler and more unsettling: the realization that life moves with breathtaking speed, even when the days themselves seem endless. One moment we are children waiting impatiently for Christmas morning; the next, we are the adults remembering the people who made those mornings magical.

The Wilder Estate’s hope is that this nationwide celebration will become an annual tradition, encouraging families and friends to experience the play together and discover something new in it as their own lives change. That is an especially lovely idea for a work whose entire meaning deepens with the passage of time. The person who sees The Long Christmas Dinner at twenty will not experience quite the same play at fifty, and certainly not at eighty.

With its combination of celebrated performers, community participation and a story that has quietly endured for nearly a century, The Long Christmas Dinner Festival offers an unusually thoughtful addition to the holiday season.

And unlike most family Christmas dinners, this one promises to take only forty minutes, cover ninety years of family history and leave you with something considerably more lasting than leftovers.

A Standing Ovation for a Life of Service: FDNY’s Daniel Flynn Honored at New York Rotary’s Distinguished Dinner

An extraordinary career, a remarkable speech and a heartfelt tribute: First Deputy Commissioner Daniel Flynn receives honorary Rotary membership as New York celebrates his dedication to its people. A brilliant man with values, charisma and outstanding leadership skills – and a world class public speaker!

NEW YORK, The applause became a standing ovation at the Union League Club of New York as the legendary Rotary Club of New York, Club #6, honored FDNY First Deputy Commissioner Daniel Flynn: a public servant whose career embodies courage, commitment and a profound respect for the people beside him.

At the club’s Firefighter Recognition Dinner, Flynn delivered a compelling speech that offered guests a glimpse into the responsibilities, and the human relationships, behind one of the world’s most respected emergency services. The gathering continued a Rotary tradition of recognizing distinguished FDNY members stretching back more than 50 years. (nyrotary.org⁠)

The evening’s warmth reflected the impression Flynn made on his audience. Following his address, the club awarded him honorary membership, while the Rotary Club of New York and its foundation presented a check in support of the fire department’s foundation.

It was a fitting recognition of an outstanding leader whose dedication extends from the demands of daily operations to the trust that holds an emergency service together.

Leadership Built on Trust

As First Deputy Commissioner, Flynn manages the FDNY’s day-to-day operations across its offices and bureaus, reporting directly to Fire Commissioner Lillian Bonsignore. The department’s workforce comprises ten thousands of employees, including firefighters, emergency medical professionals and civilian personnel.

For guests listening to his address, the scale of that responsibility was striking. Equally memorable was his emphasis on support and confidence in his people and the trust they place in one another.

In a profession where colleagues depend on each other under extraordinary circumstances, that trust carries immense weight. Flynn’s remarks brought the audience closer to the people behind the uniforms, revealing the teamwork, judgment and dedication that underpin their service.

His presentation also explored the surprising breadth of the department’s work, with examples of unusual assignments – including shark watch – or dogs detecting arson proof, drawing particular interest.

“We learned so much,” was the attendee’s enthusiastic verdict.

A lively question-and-answer session offered further insight, prompting another appreciative description: “Fabulously interesting Q&A with such a distinguished leader.”

A Career Dedicated to Protecting New York

Flynn’s commitment to New York began well before his appointment to senior leadership. He served with the NYPD from 1999 to 2005 before joining the FDNY at Ladder Company 114 in Brooklyn. His career subsequently took him through fire investigation and supervisory roles to Chief Fire Marshal, a position he held from April 2021 until February 2026.

As Chief Fire Marshal, he helped shape the department’s response to the growing danger of lithium-ion batteries, supporting public education and legislative efforts to keep unsafe products out of the city. His investigative work also earned numerous distinctions, including the Deputy Commissioner Christine R. Godek Medal.

Behind that distinguished professional record is a husband and father of two sons, residing with his family in Brooklyn. At the dinner, his engaging personality added a personal dimension to the evening’s tribute.

A Legendary Club Honors an Exceptional Public Servant

Founded in 1909, the Rotary Club of New York brings together civic-minded business and professional top leaders to support communities in New York and around the world. Its foundation provides financial and practical assistance to worthwhile organizations, continuing a longstanding relationship with the city’s police officers and firefighters. (nyrotary.org⁠)

That spirit of service found a natural expression in the recognition of Daniel Flynn.

His remarkable speech gave guests a deeper understanding of the FDNY.

His dedication gave them reason to rise for his ovation.

And the honorary membership and charitable presentation ensured that an evening of admiration also became an evening of meaningful support for those who protect New York.

Thank You for Your Service, and we New Yorkers can be very proud and grateful for such a fantastic leader!

H.H. Dr. Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe.

Live From The Hotel Edison Times Square Chronicles Presents, is filmed from the Hotel Edison and is a podcast extension of T2C. We are back after a small hiatus.

Today on Live From The Hotel Edison Times Square Chronicles Presents, we meet Alyssa Wray. Alyssa is a singer, actor, artist, and extremely clumsy romcom enthusiast from small town Kentucky, currently residing in NYC. You may have seen her in 2021 on ABC’s “American Idol” where she was a finalist (Top 9). Her regional credits include: Rocky Horror Picture Show (Magenta) at Bucks County Playhouse, Rent (Maureen) at the Palace Theatre, Murder Ballad (Narrator) at Prima Theatre, Songs for a New World (Woman 1) at the Gateway Playhouse. Other favorite performing credits include her New York City debut solo show at 54 Below, Alyssa Wray: Songs that Speak to Me. She is extremely grateful for her agents at DGRW, Sarah & Dave at Creative Talent Company, Link ’21, and my entire family and community back home as always.

See Alyssa in Going Bacharach at the Marjorie S. Deane Little Theatre running through November 29th.
I am so grateful to Alyssa Wray for her conversation, his joy of life and his art that captures the imagination.