My guest at Hair was an old friend who had been a leader of the 1968 protest movement in Germany. As we left the theater, he shook his head. He said, We were much more political. That said, and history corrected, Diane Paulus’s revival of the 1968 musical now on Broadway captures the mood of part of a generation of young people (a minority of their contemporaries) that helped change the culture.
Inter Press Service (IPS), Feb 3, 2010 –
The global bank HSBC may be running offshore accounts for central banks. According to a U.S. Senate investigation, an HSBC subsidiary in London called HSBC Equator Bank had a sister bank in the Bahamas.
According to an internal e-mail, the bank told HSBC USA it had been providing offshore accounts to central banks for 20 years, because the banks wanted to avoid Mareva injunctions, legally enforceable orders to freeze funds.
It was just a swatch of cloth, a fabric of golden yellow with eight rows of stars stamped in their outlines and waiting to be cut out. The stars were manufactured by the Berlin flag maker, Geitel & Co, and Jews had to pay 10 pfennig to buy them. Jews six and older had to wear them on their clothing.
From the horrifically mundane, to the surreally horrible, the Jewish Museum in Berlin, which opened in 2001, has an astonishing collection of exhibits. I thought I could do my routine two-hour walk-through, but I was so absorbed that I returned a second and third time. It is an extraordinary museum that uses photos, exhibits and audio to tell a fascinating and dramatic history of centuries.
The entrance is through the Collegienhaus, a baroque structure built in 1735 for the regal Court of Justice and rebuilt after its destruction in World War II. But most of the exhibits are in a postmodern building, a huge angular winding gray zinc structure that is said to have been inspired by a broken Star of David. It was designed by the American architect Daniel Libeskind and was completed in 1999. Inside now are exhibits that show two millennia of German Jewish history.
In David Ives’ ingeniously clever play, a feminist avenger turns the tables on a playwright conducting auditions for a work based on Venus in Furs, a novel of sexual domination and submission by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the 19th-century Austrian writer. An actress arrives in an audition studio. She’s wearing a black leather skirt and tight black lacey underwear top, stiletto-heeled boots, and a silver-studded dog-collar. She’s not on the audition list. But she persuades the playwright to let her read, and suddenly she is a 19th-century Austrian aristocrat, charming, articulate, and outrageous in the white flouncy dress she pulls over her grunge-wear. This play plumbs men’s psychological connections between sex and power and their view of women.
For about 20 years, from 1964, when Communists ruled Poland and dissidents went to jail, a very extraordinary underground theater troop bucked censorship and pelted the regime with avant garde works inspired by the director Jerzy Grotowski. It played to full houses at shipyards and churches and other opposition stages until the actors in 1985 were forced into exile.
Wormwood the name of a star, is a vivid, ironic and satirical attack on the Polish Communist system. First staged in 1985 at the church in Mistrzejowice, near Krakov, it is composed of pointed skits whose double meanings and metaphors were clear to audiences.
Jan 20, 2010 –
In September 2004, David Beringer, the tax director of the $20-billion Noble Group based in Hong Kong, wrote a memo to company officials, expressing concern that if Swiss officials discovered that a Noble subsidiary in Zurich was doing work that it pretended to contract to a fake company in Bermuda, the subsidiary might have to pay Swiss taxes. This story has not been reported before.
What follows are the heretofore secret details about how Noble, and global companies like it, use legitimate lawyers and accounting firms to create the fake structures used to cheat on taxes around the world. This story has not been reported before.
The Zurich company was called Noble Investments SA, Zurich (NISA). The Bermuda company was called Noble Investments Ltd. (NIL).
The Noble Group is the world‘s second-largest commodities trading and logistics company, after Cargill. It specializes in energy, agriculture, mining and minerals. It is listed on the Singapore stock exchange (NOBG.SI).
Zero Mostel — consummate actor, painter and personality — was a presence in American films and stage for decades, except for a brief hiatus called McCarthyism. Zero was cynical, iconoclastic and flip. He scowled and shouted in a voice that was stentorian. Jim Brochu’s one-man show, directed by Piper Laurie, brings him to life, eyes piercing out of a gray-bearded jowly face, recreating his physical presence and attitude, and most importantly his passionate political commitment to honor at a time when theater people and others were selling out their colleagues.
Director Ciaran O’Reilly has done a brilliant job in staging O’Neill’s 1920 psychological thriller about the self-appointed emperor of a Caribbean backwater whose subjects suddenly turn on him. John Douglas Thompson is overpowering as Brutus Jones, a black American who has fled from a southern chain gang and, persuading the locals that he can be killed only with a silver bullet, takes over in a revolution that removes the erstwhile chief.
This charmingly radical musical by Yip Harburg and Fred Saidy – given a smart, lively, delicious staging by Warren Carlyle — was a shot across the bow of conservative America when it opened on Broadway in 1947. It showed black and white sharecroppers in solidarity against the tax foreclosure sale of a farm. It depicted the corruption and racism of a white politician who is buying up local real estate so he can block cheap public electric power. And it satirized capitalism by declaring that digging up some gold buried in the ground would remove an incentive and wreck free enterprise. Even the famous If this isn’t love has the pointed line, If this isn‘t love, it’s red propaganda!
In Annie Baker’s fascinating play acting exercises morph into real life for an instructor and four people who sign up for a community theater workshop in Shirley, Vermont. Slowly, the theatrical games turn into life games. Director Sam Gold moves seamlessly between acting exercises and real life drama so that the characters’ stories, said by others, are expressed and acted out, as it were, by themselves.
I have to start out by saying that I despise everything about celebrity and the attendant fawning over people in the public eye, generally in movies or fashion, just because they are in the public eye. That doesn’t include criticism of their art – of acting or design, for example – just the intense interest over every personal detail of their lives. Get a life! I want to scream. Your own!
This gem of a play by Theresa Rebeck is a theater aficionado’s delight. A stage manager and two actors – one an overpaid film star and the other a struggling pure artist –connect in a rehearsal for a Broadway production of an undiscovered masterpiece by Franz Kafka. As the run-through proceeds, celebrity film actors who get starring roles in theater are deftly and comically skewered. The play, given light-hearted and subtle direction by Scott Ellis, is one of the best of the season. The cast is excellent.
It starts with a light ball setting off two figures; she is in black underwear. Hot Latin drums keep a frenetic double time. Then for a change of pace comes a Lady in white silk and a man in a tux; they waltz and execute twirls through the air in a way you hadn’t seen. After that, 20s/30s jazz dancing; the guy wears a fedora and vest. A sailor and his partner jitterbug. A woman in pink is squired by a guy in a black leather jacket. (Costumes are by Janet Hine.)
