It is Aug 13 2021. Henry Naylor is a topical comedian looking back at the Taliban departure from Afghanistan a decade before. Naylor was a writer for the British TV satire show “The Spitting Image” and a stand-up comic. He likes satires on war like Mash, Catch 22, Dr. Strangelove. A decade earlier, he had a chance to do a show on BBC comedy radio, and he wanted to talk about the Afghanistan conflict, but the state-funded broadcaster said Afghanistan is not funny. Too many dead bodies. He noticed that journalists talking about Afghanistan were not really there. They gathered on the border. Including a BBC reporter who faked reports. Yes, the BBC was full of fakery. Naylor wanted to expose the media lies. So, flashback.
A history of American jazz in 90 minutes? The Anderson Brothers’ “The Journey of Jazz” does so in fascinating pastiche of music and visuals, starting with Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,” smartly performed by pianist Dalton Ridenhour, and finishing with Henry Mancini’s “Pink Panther Theme.” They show along the way how styles evolved, how jazz composers were affected by classical music (think Thelonious Monk) and went on to influence the music of Broadway and popular culture (Richard Rodgers).
I choose to lead my parade with the Women in STEM float. It means science, technology, engineering and mathematics. It was the only float I saw (maybe I missed earlier ones) that dealt with serious issues of the time.
In 1918, at age 18, Noël Coward wrote a feminist play about a novelist who gave up working to be wifely support for her less talented playwright husband. Coward was a great admirer of George Bernard Shaw, and this is due homage. It is an amazing feminist play for the time. And gets a fine production from the Mint Theatre which specializes in bringing out plays of many years past.
It’s not quite Mel Brooks’ “2000 Year Old Man,” but Ed Weinberger attempts a take with two 3500 year-old geezers wandering in the desert on Moses’ famous trek to “the promised land.” Lou (Josh Mostel) complains his boots are too tight and “How come in all these 30 years, not once has anybody — ever — had the decency to tell us the truth? We’re lost…. We’ve been lost ever since we left Egypt.”
Bud (Richard Masur) red robe, black glasses, tells him to have faith in God’s miracles.” Who dropped manna from Heaven? Who brought forth water from a rock?”
What’s better than seeing an artist’s work at a museum? There are some event promoters who would like to persuade you that it’s even better to experience an “immersive” event, meaning you are surrounded by huge blow-ups of the painter’s works as in this exhibit of Claude Monet’s art.
That doesn’t cancel out museums, but it has some advantages.
We know Edward Hopper’s iconic “Early Sunday Morning,” the low red buildings. But at the Whitney Museum’s Hopper exhibit, there are paintings most of us have never seen before.
August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” is not about learning how to play the piano. It is about the powerful lesson an old ornately carved piano teaches about history and about the respect and honor one owes one’s forbears, especially when they suffered greatly to preserve the dignity they bequeathed to their children. It’s about slavery.
KT Sullivan, a doyenne of jazz through the Mabel Mercer Foundation she heads, presented the Cabaret Convention’s Great “American Songbook: American Standards,” at the three-day event’s finale at Jazz at Lincoln Center on Oct 28. This thrilling event brought singers from the U.S. and abroad to an annual gathering of cabaret fans. And as they are standards, it’s worth noting who wrote them.
Suzan-Lori Parks’ plays is about fantasy and fakery, the desperation and dysfunction of the underclass. The brothers Booth (Yahya Abdul-Mateen H) and Lincoln (Corey Hawkins) had parents who cheated on each other, left when the sons were 13 and 16. He had women on the side, she had her “Thursday man.” “Why do you think they left us? They were struggling.” Well, a lot of parents are struggling.
Nov 5, 2022 – Canadian journalist Matt Ehret interviews Lucy with details that the naive or corrupt Chartered Financial Analysts of Canada, meeting in Toronto, might like to know about their conman guest speaker. With links to documents that legitimate accountants might want to examine before they honor an infamous tax fraudster.
Yip Harburg (1896-1981), was a socialist song writer born on the Lower East Side of New York, where he was named Isidore Hochberg. He changed that to the “American” Edgar Harburg, which would turn into “Yip” Harburg. Yip stood for Yipsel, the acronym of Young Peoples Socialist League, the youth group of the Socialist Party. How did he know that in some future years, that would label him “un-American”!
Nov 1, 2022 – Some things stay the same in this 49th year of the Halloween Parade, started by Ralph Lee and his iconic skeleton puppets in the courtyard of Westbeth artists’ housing in the West Village. It was moved to the street when it got too big, now Sixth Avenue from Canal to 15th Street. Thousands line up behind police barriers, many don costumes and participate, others just hang out in the streets and local restaurants. The whole neighborhood is filled with Halloween revelers.
Oct 28, 2022 – I am publishing this important article by investigative journalist Adrian duPlessis just before CFA/Toronto, a woefully ignorant Canadian accounting organization, presents as speaker William Browder, one of the most infamous tax fraudsters of our time. He notes, “gnorance – be it in a naive or willful state – is form ill-fitting to a Chartered Financial Analyst and/or any other financial, legal+ professional worth their salt. Chronic toxicity of Hermitage networks’ false narratives – abundantly evident through review and analyses of public-record documents+ readily-accessible globally via court, police, corporate, press and other filings – prompts this letter.”
It’s not really Chekhov’s first play. It a clever take-off on a manuscript discovered in a Russian safe deposit box in 1921, the 19-year-old Chekhov’s first try and justifiably never staged. Overabundance of characters, themes and action; it needed an editor.
Author/directors Ben Kidd and Bush Moukarzel of the Irish experimental theater group Dead Centre took up the challenge. But rather than simply winnow away the chaff (it ran five hours) and present the rest onstage, they have helped make Chekhovian sense by unpacking everything to the audience as the play unfolds. And not just this play, but the playwright’s famous memes, such as the iconic gun. All done through headsets!
The best thing about “1776” is Peter Stone’s script, which will never change. The controversy about this production staged by Jeffrey Page and Diane Paulus is about casting the men of this Continental Congress as female, including whites, blacks and transgenders. The play would be better with actors believable in their gender. Fortunately, there is some good acting that makes you accept the play on its diminished level.
Tom Stoppard’s brilliant play is about the self-delusion of upper-class Jews who thought their absorption into Austrian culture meant that in spite of years of anti-Semitism and rising Nazism they would not be in danger. Read European Jews for Austrian Jews. And after that, the corruption of the Austrian Socialists and Social Democrats who joined the Nazi rallies. Also of the “Collective West,” including Roosevelt, who refused to take in more than a handful of Jewish refugees and left millions to perish.
Oct 15, 2022 – It takes a long time to raise consciousness! Americans have been celebrating Columbus Day since October 12, 1792. Organized by the Society of St. Tammany, also known as the Columbian Order, it commemorated the 300th anniversary of Columbus’ landing. Not mentioned it was the anniversary of the American genocide of the people who happened to be living there. For a long time called “Indians” because Columbus though he had fought a route to India’s riches, but now known as Native Americans. Meaning they were there before most “Americans'” ancestors.
The reenactment of the 1965 Cambridge University debate between James Baldwin and William Buckley is an interesting if minor moment in civil rights history, but a disappointment as theater. That is partly because two long monologues (not really a debate) and two short introducers don’t provide enough dramatic tension for theater. You want a real interaction. And partly because two of the actors are fine but the other two are middling to mediocre.
Sept 22, 2022 – Lucy Komisar talks to Hrvoje Morić about the Browder hoax, including Browder’s start as a crook skimming profits from Russian titanium company, Avisma, illicit buys of Gazprom shares for himself and the Ziff Brothers, the role of the Trump Tower meeting, proof Magnitsky wasn’t murdered, how Magnitsky Act was passed in a deal for the Jackson-Vanik trade amendment repeal and why Congress and the media lie about it all.
Sept 12, 2022 — Some of Wall Street’s biggest firms are using accounting gimmicks in life insurance companies to bolster their profits by overvaluing their assets and holding risky investments on books in secrecy jurisdictions, according to government, trade union and financial regulatory experts.
Oct 2, 2022 –Paul Best, reporter for Fox News, takes stenography from William Browder. Everything he writes is easily refuted by evidence that he failed to examine.
Sept 9, 2022 – Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) asked some tough questions at a Senate Banking Committee hearing yesterday about the danger to millions of Americans having their pensions transferred to private equity firms. She got a “no problem” response from the Treasury Department representative and, not surprising, the same from an insurance commissioner speaking for the association that generally goes along with the interests of the industry.
I was going to ignore what follows, but then, on top of so many stories about the “cancel culture” (person disagrees with you, banish them!) and today’s article in the NYTimes about the issue of masking or not masking at theater, I thought it worth adding this story to the conversation.
The McKittrick Hotel is known since 2011 as the home of “Sleep No More,” the interactive “Macbeth” in which the audience wanders through rooms in which scenes of the play are enacted. But it also has a rooftop restaurant, Gallow Green, a place of rustic elegance and five-star ambience on Manhattan’s West 27th Street, steps from The High Line.
