Donna Karan Brings Halston’s Story to Life on Stage

For the better part of two decades, Donna Karan has been living quietly in the Hamptons — spotted only occasionally here and there, in Sag Harbor at Le Bilboquet or at Vera Wang’s Manhattan townhouse to celebrate Gene Pressman’s Barneys book — mostly keeping to herself since selling her namesake brand in 2001. 

This summer, she’s back.

Karan, who pretty much ruled Seventh Avenue in the 1990s, is exec producing Mister Halston, a new play about her old pal Halston, the swashbuckling Studio 54 habitué whose spectacular rise and even more spectacular fall is getting the stage treatment for the first 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, of course, practically in Karan’s backyard.

The two go way back. They met at 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, where Karan was then working as an assistant). No winner was declared, but Halston, who died in 1990 of AIDS, brought the house down by arranging a showstopping turn by Liza Minnelli.

Written by Raffaele Pacitti and directed by Michael Wilson, Mister Halston is set in the decadent decades 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 dark rom-com, has a serious problem.

This story appeared in the April 8 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.