Will Pomerantz’s staging of Chekhov’s “The Three Sisters” may be small in size, in a space with just a few sticks of furniture and runtime cut from 3 hours to 2, but the conception and production work grandly. The set by Brian Staton is fine and the cutting seems to leave nothing out. Bass, fiddle and guitar set a mood with evocative music by Nancy Harrow.
May 17, 2022 – The “money quote” in the documentary “Gaming Wall Street” by Tobias Deml, premiered on HBO MAX, is former stock trading executive Tobin Mulshine saying, “I would illegally naked short sale stocks every day. As long as I was collecting commissions, the bank did not care.”
Martin McDonagh is brilliant at dark surreal comedy. It’s 1963. The brick wall of a prison room. Hennessey (Josh Goulding) is going to be hung/ or hanged. For raping, killing a young girl. He protests innocence; he never even met the girl. The grammar becomes an issue which seems a misdirected concern when one is taking a human life. Hers? Maybe his.
Thornton Wilder’s 1942 play won a Pulitzer Prize the next year. I haven’t seen the play before or the 1983 film. So, I must assume it got the prize for this moment in wartime to tell people that humans have gone through worse times. Lileana Blain-Cruz’s direction is sometimes so hokey that you think you’re watching TV. But then she goes on target. The play at the end seems to show how the bad son represents the U.S. militarists now threatening America and the world through their “let’s destroy Russia” operation so we can be the hegemons/rulers of the world.
Shaina Taub’s “Suffs” is the play I’ve been waiting for about the too-little talked about struggle for American women’s* right to vote. Asterisk: American white women, but a massive achievement none-the-less. Taub makes clear the internal conflict of the movement’s failure to recognize black women as partners.
April 30, 2022 – April 30th is the 51st anniversary of the extraordinary 1971 Town Hall New York gathering of feminists (and a prominent antagonist). It was billed as a women’s liberation dialogue. D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hagedus filmed it and called their documentary “Town Bloody Hall,” after a comment by Germaine Greer.
April 28, 2022 – Here’s a story the New York Times just missed. U.S. politicians and corporate media are promoting the targeting of “enablers” of Russian oligarchs who stash their money in offshore accounts. A Times article March 11th highlighted Michael Matlin, CEO of Concord Management, as such an “enabler,” who handles money of Roman Abramovich. But it missed serious corruption Matlin was involved in. Maybe because it stopped with “he helps the Russian oligarchs we hate.” Looking further would have revealed how he cheated Russia with the help of William Browder, a hero of the NYTimes, which has never challenged the Browder/Magnitsky hoax.
April 23, 2022 – A story I wrote in 1966 was acknowledged this week at the unveiling of a plaque at Julius’ bar in Greenwich Village commemorating the day, April 21, 1966, when three members of the Mattachine Society challenged the New York State Liquor Authority’s rule banning homosexuals from bars.
April 10, 2022 – Today’s Dealbook article in the NYTimes “ ‘There Is No Reasonable Way for This to End’: Bill Browder on How to Stop the War” includes numerous fake facts that fact checking organizations devoted to exposing such media falsehoods should address. This article is going a number of them in the hope that some have the courage to examine this evidence at a time of extreme hostility to Russia.
April 8, 2022 – Read or listen, how William Browder’s Magnitsky hoax, supported by the Deep State, was the first pillar of Russiagate. That was 2012. And it’s brought us to today’s U.S./Ukraine (proxy) war against Russia.
St. Patrick’s Day 2022 – It was a bit chill in New York in spite of March 17th being a few days before the start of spring, but the marchers on Fifth Avenue didn’t seem to care. Even if many were bare legged with kilts. I loved the bagpipers, especially the ones in red jackets.
D.H. Lawrence’s 1913 “The Daughter-in-Law” is a classical misogynist play. The tired message is that to have a happy marriage, a woman must be subservient to her husband. This holds even if he’s below her in intelligence and ambition and disinclined to better himself by work. She should just move herself down a peg. And mothers are controlling harridans who spoil their sons’ lives if they can.
Feb 21, 2022 – John Helmer, a journalist in Moscow since 1989, has published a brilliant comic graphic-text primer about Russia, its outside enemies and corrupt insiders. In just over 100 pages of comment and vivid cartoons you will learn the stories of the major deep state inventions of most of the last decade or so: faked stories about Navalny, the Skripals, the downing of the MH17 in Ukraine, media propagandists, esp Russophobes Anne Applebaum and Canadian deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland. Also Russian inside-dealing including Putin’s gifts to some bigtime oligarchs. No surprise that Helmer got a death threat after that one.
This version of “Company,” 15 years after the last spare, stylized, sophisticated production, is a a mélange of pop and TV, with obeisance to current diversity rules. The main character is a girl and one couple is homosexual. And sophistication is traded for garish. But Stephen Sondheim’s music and lyrics are still brilliant.
LSD was supposed to make Aldous Huxley, Cary Grant and Clare Booth Luce burst into gorgeous new worlds, but as James Lapine imagines in this inventive, intriguing musical, it makes them more introspective, calling up pasts they cannot escape. As writer-director Lapine mixes that with their politics, I came away admiring the characters Huxley (Harry Hadden-Paton) and Grant (Tony Yazbeck), but had mixed feelings about Luce (Carmen Cusack).
