June 30, 2010 – Last night I accepted a Gerald Loeb award trophy for the Allen Stanford investigation. The Loeb awards are the highest honors in U.S. financial journalism. I and my colleagues, Miami Herald reporters Michael Sallah and Rob Barry, won in the category of medium & small newspapers. The prize submission was entitled Keys to the Kingdom: How State Regulators Enabled a $7 Billion Ponzi Scheme.
What happens when the victim becomes the victimizer? When a man’s spirit is so thwarted that he turns hard in his soul and becomes so self-centered that he can’t love or care for anyone else? It’s the message of August Wilson’s tough 1983 play set in the late fifties that attempts to explain the dysfunctional working class black men who were being studied to death.
June 25, 2010 – Another award for the Stanford investigation, this time from the National Press Club in Washington DC, bestowing the prize for Newspaper Consumer Journalism.
The NPC award categories are consumer reporting, Washington correspondence, press criticism, regional, diplomatic and environmental reporting, online journalism, freedom of the press, political journalism, animal reporting, and geriatric writing.
Can an art lecture in the form of a theater piece push you to the edge of your seat? This rich, engrossing play by John Logan does! Painter Mark Rothko’s inflated sense of self collides with the challenges of youth’s new visions in Logan’s fascinating pas de deux about the meaning of art and its indelible connection to commerce.
Alex Timbers’ play is a stunning satirical revisionist history of America’s seventh president Andrew Jackson as a genocidal Indian killer. It’s done in a rock idiom that takes the edge off and makes him seem almost a man of his time as well as/rather than a political murderer. But with some present day vernacular, it takes on immediacy. It’s a commentary on the past and also on the present day politics of state killing that is rare in its gut-wrenching toughness.
A stage musical/documentary may be a new genre and this one, created and directed by Stephen Sondheim’s longtime collaborator James Lapine, works smartly and engagingly to provide a tour through the life and works of the master songwriter. The man who is known for sustained peaks of imagination comes to life through a very innovative combination of video and musical numbers, with an appealing cast led by Vanessa Williams and Tom Wopat.
This almost tongue-in-cheek celebration of sex would imply that passion begets foolishness, especially among men. As we watch the absurdly shifting liaisons and desires among the mostly upper class protagonists, we understand the genesis of the play’s famous song performed by the actress Desirée (Catherine Zeta-Jones), Quick, send in the clowns. Don’t bother, they’re here.
