Donna Karan Brings Halston’s Story to Life on Stage

For the higher a part of twenty years, Donna Karan has been residing quietly within the Hamptons — noticed solely sometimes right here and there, in Sag Harbor at Le Bilboquet or at Vera Wang’s Manhattan townhouse to have fun Gene Pressman’s Barneys guide — largely conserving to herself since promoting her namesake model in 2001. 

This summer time, she’s again.

Karan, who just about dominated Seventh Avenue within the Nineteen Nineties, is exec producing Mister Halston, a brand new play about her outdated pal Halston, the swashbuckling Studio 54 habitué whose spectacular rise and much more spectacular fall is getting the stage therapy for the primary time. “I saw a workshop staging of Mister Halston last summer at Bay Street Theater and liked it so much, I wanted to get involved,” Karan, 77, tells Rambling. The world premiere runs June 2-21 at Sag Harbor’s Bay Street Theater, which is, in fact, virtually in Karan’s yard.

The two go manner again. They met on the 1973 Battle of Versailles — the legendary showdown between French couture royalty (Saint Laurent, Cardin, Givenchy, Dior, Ungaro) and their American upstarts (Blass, de la Renta, Burrows and Anne Klein, the place Karan was then working as an assistant). No winner was declared, however Halston, who died in 1990 of AIDS, introduced the home down by arranging a showstopping flip by Liza Minnelli.

Written by Raffaele Pacitti and directed by Michael Wilson, Mister Halston is about within the decadent many years of ’70s and ’80s New York. Says Karan, “He paved the way for what was to come.”

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Also in Rambling Reporter:

The Drama, the just-opened Robert Pattinson–Zendaya darkish rom-com, has a significant issue.

This story appeared within the April 8 situation of The Hollywood Reporter journal. Click here to subscribe.