Wrapped in a white gown, an iconic white gardenia in her hair, Audra McDonald channels Billie Holiday — her voice, her accent, her manner — till you believe you are sitting in the slightly tacky Philadelphia dive where Holiday sang her last songs. “What a little moonlight can do” becomes a magical mood changer. It‘s helped by the dreamlike direction of Lonny Price.
One great –McDonald — sings another great, Lady Day. Her imitation is brilliant. She has mastered Holiday‘s accent, a slight trill, a broad vowel. Lady Day did blues with a jazz beat, following mentors Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong.
The Edinburgh Fringe in August, the largest theater festival in the world, presents hundreds of plays as well as musicals, dance, comedy, cabaret and spoken word performances.
I chose political plays, and nine out of ten I saw were excellent. I divided them into three groups, repression, war and politics. Here‘s the third group, party politics. The parties ought to be the solution to the first two. But maybe not so much.
The Edinburgh Fringe in August, the largest theater festival in the world, presents hundreds of plays as well as musicals, dance, comedy, cabaret and spoken word performances.
I chose political plays, and nine out of ten I saw were excellent. I divided them into three groups, repression, war and politics. Here‘s the second group, about war. “The Bunker Trilogy” and “Private Peaceful” about World War I and “The Collector” about more organized cruelty in Abu Graib.
The Edinburgh Fringe in August is the largest theater festival in the world, with hundreds of plays as well as musicals, dance, comedy, cabaret and spoken word performances.
I chose political plays, and nine out of ten I saw were excellent. I divided them into three groups, repression, war and politics. Here‘s the first group, about repression.
These riveting plays dealt with periods centuries apart. They are “A Players Advice to Shakespeare” set in the 1600s, and two mirror plays of the 20th century, “Animal Farm” in Stalinist Russia and “Chaplin” in McCarthyite 1950s America. In each case, the playwrights and actors bring out the psychology of repression and rebellion.
“Violet” is like an expressionist painting with brush-stroked characters. We see the visual depth of the central character (Sutton Foster), and the others that interact with her add bits of color.
It is a picture with sound. The production by Brian Crawley (book and lyrics) and Jeanine Tesori (music) is a chamber operetta, with Foster‘s strong, rich voice underpinned by deep sweetness. The score moves through a terrific panoply of southern music, from country in Nashville, to blues in Memphis and gospel in Tulsa.
July 25, 2014 – Anyone who had read the two-part series published here, Fees for our friends: the scandal that taints Andrew Cuomo and Fees for our friends, Andrew Cuomo’s vendetta, both published in 2006 — eight years ago — and ignored by the mainstream media, would not be surprised about the Cuomo corruption just revealed by the New York Times. Cuomo‘s Office Hobbled Ethics Inquiries by Moreland Commission.
Too bad reporters and readers didn’t focus on my story detailing Cuomo’s corruption. The candidate for governor was an attractive guy with a good-looking girlfriend and an articulate ex-governor father. So why look further? Why even do an internet search? But better late than never. (For the corporate press, it’s usually later.)
John Steinbeck‘s play, which he adapted from his novel, is a poignant narrative about human connections among people leading lives of what is wont to be called quiet desperation.
Sensitively directed by Anna Shapiro, it tells the story of George (James Franco), a California ranch worker who in the Depression has hooked up with Lennie (Chris O‘Dowd) a mentally retarded fellow who is too strong for his own good. They work as itinerants on farms and ranches. They stay together out of undefined affection that defeats the loneliness that would otherwise engulf them. (It was first produced on Broadway in 1937.)
Gerard Alessandrini is the best musical theater critic in New York. Incisive, clever, right on the mark. And he does it in the idiom of the productions he critiques!
By now, everybody knows that since 1982, Alessandrini has produced nearly yearly revues that satirize Broadway musicals. He does it with a cast of four performers, different ones through the decades, whose voices are as good or better than most of what you find on Broadway. The numbers are enhanced by brilliant costume and wig designers. And by David Caldwell on piano.
The stone-faced women who anchor this play are as flinty as the rocks that litter the landscape and pile up to create the rough walls of people‘s houses. The young, tough, fierce, violent Helen (the excellent Sarah Greene) tells of being groped by a priest. She kills a duck and a cat on order; she smashes eggs on the head of her brother Bartley (Conor MacNeill).
Faces appear in permanent frowns. Where the climate and scenery is harsh, so are the relations between people. But curiously all of them have a warmth they do their best to hide and which playwright Martin Donagh pulls inevitably out. A hidden sympathy and compassion.
It‘s a dark comic look at the cruelty and caring that exist side by side in barren seaside place in Ireland.
There‘s nothing like providing a sense of place by starting out a play in Italian when the director has set it in Sicily. Don‘t worry, the dialogue switches to Shakespeare‘s English soon enough. But Jack O‘Brien‘s touches do a lot to mix fantasy with reality. Like the vegetable garden where Beatrice (Lilly Rabe) and Benedick (Hamish Linklater) meet. And where he picks a carrot to munch on. (And there are some nice looking tomatoes.)
There is also a stone villa that belongs to Leonato (John Glover), the governor of Messina, circa 1900, with an orange tree and white wrought iron tables and chairs. As the Delacorte stage is in the middle of Central Park, the set blends in nicely.
There‘s nobody better than the Brits to do plays about class. And in this case, also male/female. Ayckbourn, who is 77, gets it. I think he always has.
These three very different plays at 59E59 Theaters all deal with personal crises, but do them as a thriller, a melodrama and a farce. Not bad. And they use Ayckbourn‘s theatrical tricks to do reversal/mirror image and time shifts. We see things happening from different viewpoints and in different times. And we have the good fortune that the plays are directed by the master himself, with just the right bits of sorrow, tragedy, comedy, silliness.
In Arrivals and Departures, the most powerful play, Ez (a terrific Elizabeth Boag), is a soldier assigned to protect Barry (also brilliantly played by Kim Wall), a provincial traffic warden who has been brought to London to identify a terrorist who is expected to arrive at the train station.
“If/Then” (book & lyrics by Brian Yorkey) takes up life‘s “fork-in-the-road” problem. What if a person takes this job instead of another, goes out with this guy instead of another, gets married or doesn‘t.
Elizabeth (Idina Menzel) 38, an urban planner, is the subject of this non-scientific experiment, or fantasy. Menzel is a fine performer, with presence and pizazz, if a little loud in the vocal department. She is unfortunately burdened with a confusing, let‘s-put-in-the-kitchen-sink plot.
This is a gorgeous, moving play by Terry Teachout, who we know as the theater critic for the Wall Street Journal, but who is obviously a cut above most of the playwrights he reviews.
It‘s helped, of course, by the brilliant performance of John Douglas Thompson, an accomplished Shakespearean actor. Thompson is known for a memorable Othello as well as the title character of Eugene O‘Neill‘s “Emperor Jones.”
Thompson plays two characters, the performer Louis Armstrong and his agent, Joe Glaser. Armstrong, like Thompson, of course is black. Glaser is Jewish. Thompson shifts seamlessly between the two. Thompson does a great tough New York-accented Glaser.
The story moves back in time from 1971 when Armstrong is waiting in his dressing room to go on at the Waldorf in New York. The dressing room has bright light bulbs and a large recorder. But it‘s not a musical play. It‘s a drama about a gifted musician who had to maneuver through the world of segregation and racism.
How Browder & friends cheated Russian tax authority and minority shareholders
100Reporters, May 21, 2014 –
How William Browder & friends cheated Russian tax authority and minority shareholders.
As U.S and European governments impose sanctions on bankers, businessmen and officials close to Vladimir Putin to pressure him over Crimea, the asset freezes will lead investigators not to the Kremlin alone, but to the western-built offshore system that has helped the Russian leader and friends loot their country and consolidate power.
A case – details not public before – shows how westerners – lawyers, accountants, bankers, investors”used the offshore system to facilitate and benefit from Russian corruption.
It involves William Browder (opposite), self-described anti-corruption fighter, known in Washington for winning passage of 2012 “Magnitsky Act,” which presaged current law by blocking visas, freezing assets of Russians accused of rights violations and corruption.
Browder and fellow investors stole funds diverted via an Isle of Man shell from a Russian company they controlled.
Ionesco‘s absurdist satire is a vivid dark commentary on the popular refusal to acknowledge the horrors of the rise of Naziism. And the belief of some Germans that Hitler was ushering in an era of shining, sparkling glory. They could ignore that some people were disappearing, perhaps murdered.
Director Darko Tresnjak staging is part straight, part bizarre, to make every line resonate in contemporary reality.
Desperate, full of hope and dreams, wracked by despair, succored by religion, the members of the Younger family spill their humanity in various ways in Lorraine Hansberry‘s 1959 play about a black family‘s struggle. The work is based on the experience of her own family, who moved to a white Chicago neighborhood, was attacked by neighbors, and won a 1940 Supreme Court decision ruling restrictive covenants – agreements not to rent to blacks – illegal.
Kenny Leon‘s smart direction elevates to realism what might have been sentimentality and melodrama. The story is gripping and richly presented.
It starts in a Georgetown drawing room. Now you already know half the juicy story by Anthony Giardina, presented by Lincoln Center Theater. It‘s Washington politics. Insider stuff. In this case, as usual, a conflict between liberals and conservatives. With a little morality thrown in. You know which ones are moral and which are opportunists, right? (They say that liberals become playwrights and conservatives become bankers.)
Giardina‘s play, directed with panache by Doug Hughes, is a very clever and entertaining take on dealing in Washington over the decades from Jimmy Carter to the inauguration of Barak Obama. With a family drama to tie up the loose ends. Accomplished director Hughes keeps it this side of TV drama, of which there are now several of the genre.
May 20, 2014 – Rudolf Elmer is a Swiss whistle blower who has been persecuted by the Swiss justice system for revealing tax evasion facilitated by the Julius Bär Bank in Zurich. He comments on the Justice Department deal with Credit Suisse, whose egregious money-laundering for 22,000 U.S. tax-evading accounts was exposed by Senate hearings led by Sen. Carl Levin. The settlement requires Credit Suisse to pay $2.6 billion in penalties, with no requirement that it turn over the names of U.S. tax evaders. The U.S. could have withdrawn the bank‘s license to practice in America. It declined to use that leverage.
Robert Schenkkan has written a drama that should be performed in every city, every school and college in America. This play is both a stunning history lesson and a thrilling reenactment of one of the most exciting and important moments of recent American history. It‘s the struggle to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 at the moment when the civil rights struggle was roiling the south and capturing international headlines.
The flawed hero of the drama is President Lyndon Johnson – LBJ – whose re-election slogan was “All the Way with LBJ.” The time was 50 years ago, and a lot of people who see the play and read this review may have only a vague memory of that time. It was vivid to me. I had just returned from a year in Mississippi where, as a northern civil rights supporter, I edited the “Mississippi Free Press.” I knew the black and white activists portrayed in this play.
The greeting is “Meine Damen und Damen.” In German, it means “My ladies and ladies.” Amaluna in Latin means mother and moon. Clearly this is a woman‘s show, by and about women. There‘s even a moon goddess. It‘s not feminist in the sense it has a political message.
But showing women circus performers in roles other than their bodies being tossed around by men is certainly feminist and very welcome. Comparing this to other Cirque du Soleil production‘s I‘ve seen, the distinction was that the women exhibited grace above proficiency in tricks. They are aerialists, trapeze artists, acrobats, tumblers, balancers.
Can an early 18th century French play be hysterically funny and up to the minute in New York? Yes, if the author is David Ives who has turned a 1708 restoration comedy by Jean-FranÒois Regnard into a very witty commentary on greed, including the ethics of cut-throat capitalism. Plus Òa change…
The masterful director is John Rando, who gave us the political satires “Urinetown,” “The Toxic Avenger” and Ives‘ “All in the Timing.” This is one of the best plays of the season.
Ives has crafted a broad modern on a tale about greed written in rhyming couplets at the turn of the century – that is the 17th-to-18th century. It‘s aristocratic (1%) France. Gilt chandeliers adorn a rich man‘s sitting room. His nephew, Eraste (an appealing Dave Quay) in an aquamarine velvet coat, has been waiting around for years to collect a lucrative inheritance. He wants to marry the fetching Isabelle (charming Amelia Pedlow in violet gown), but her mother Madame Argante (a tough, take-no-prisoners Suzanne Bertish) won‘t consent unless he has ready cash.
The Stolen Chair Company did last year‘s brilliant (and Drama Desk nominated) production, “The Man Who Laughs.” So it is no surprise that this season‘s offering is a supremely inventive and clever site-specific production at a Soho bar. It takes place in the People Lounge on Allen Street south of Delancey Street. The admission includes three very exotic, interesting, tasty cocktails!
But more than that, the production is an intimate look – from your fly-on-the-wall vantage point – of what happens at a bar between the bartenders and the patrons and, especially, their romantic connections.
Cabaret singer/song-writer Bonnie Lee Sanders is fanciful and moody. She begins rather optimistically at the second-floor cabaret at Pescatore on Second Avenue singing “Spring is Here,” but then moves into musical angst, of loves that are gone.
She creates an ambiance with songs you haven‘t heard before. They are dark, sometimes French. Of course, you note a Piaff inspiration.
Sanders is inventive, not slick or predictable. I especially liked her “My Tommy, My Bobby And Me” and “Broadway Moon” – both her own smart lyrics
Sarah Ruhl is a very funny clever playwright. Her Stage Kiss is a witty play about acting, especially what happens when two ex-lovers get cast in a play that requires a lot of kissing. That‘s a physical “mannerism” that has a lot of physical impact. I mean, even staged fights don‘t land real blows.
The two actors, She (Jessica Hecht) – is this a satirical jab at Albee? – and He (Dominic Fumusa), both now in their mid-40s, are doing a play from 1932 Broadway. Hecht, one of my favorites, seems always slightly mentally off-key, a comic pose, and Fumusa is a very good slightly angry romantic lead. Angry at this impossible woman, but still turned on by her.
Clever, charming, sometimes funny, this show is always schmaltzy and delightful. I should connect to Carole King, since we both went to Queens College in the early 60s, but I admit I didn‘t know her then. Maybe she was one of the arty folks who hung out in the small cafeteria. Like Paul Simon.
But I connect now! King was an icon of her time, getting past the limitations set for her (˜be a teacher,‘ said her mom), reflecting women‘s desires and hurts, and then great talents. The play is fascinating not only as King‘s story, but as a look into the status of women and the music business of the time.
