A visit to the Central Park set of 'Maestro,' starring Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein. JDavidsonNYC reports 📷: Andres Kudacki
Photo: Andres Kudacki/Andres Kudacki Though he was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Leonard Bernstein was always a New Yorker, from his first cigarette of the morning to his last dying day. More than 30 years after his death, he’s ambling through Central Park in the person of Bradley Cooper, who is playing him in the forthcoming film Maestro.
He was most famous for composing West Side Story, for conducting the New York Philharmonic, and for lecturing kids about sonata form on TV, but none of these was the key to his celebrity. A public figure from earliest adulthood, he bore the spotlight with casual ease. He was cool, with the masculine allure of a ’50s movie star. He wore ordinary clothes like costumes: rolled-up shirtsleeves in his young hotshot days, turtlenecks in his leonine middle age.
He was also hot. Bernstein managed passions for a living — performers’, composers’, his own — and he wanted the world to know it was an intense business. He always seemed disheveled and battle weary, as if being Lenny were one ceaseless endurance test. The performances he conducted, full of character and snap, were extensions of his personality, the numen that he spread over the orchestra whenever he was on the podium.
I’m not sure I envy Cooper the task of getting into that storm-strafed mind or giving vent to Bernstein’s complexities. He’ll need to balance the generosity and nastiness, the narcissism and refined vulgarity, the magnetism and repulsiveness, the energy that outlasted everyone until he collapsed in a depressive heap. Maestro will also have to navigate the worshipfulness that surrounded him during his lifetime and the stories told by those who loved him but suffered his more piggish proclivities.
Mulligan and Cooper get touch-ups. Photo: Andres Kudacki Bradley Cooper on the set of Maestro in Central Park. Photo: Andres Kudacki Photo: Andres Kudacki Photo: Andres Kudacki On West 108th near the park. Photo: Andres Kudacki Photo: Andres Kudacki Mulligan and Cooper on the set of Maestro in Central Park. Photo: Andres Kudacki Photo: Andres Kudacki Mulligan and Cooper catch the eye of a passerby. Photo: Andres Kudacki Photo: Andres Kudacki Extras resting.
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