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.
Taking a sunset cruise is a terrific way to get a sense of Key West as an island . You pick up a Sebago catamarin sailboat on the Harbor Walk in the north of town, and as it moves out, you see people lined up on shore to see the sunset from a less exotic angle. Later on the two-hour trip, you pass near Sunset Key, a private island you can visit if you reserve at the restaurant, Latitudes.
Lynn Nottage who wrote the book for “MJ” is known for serious plays about the black experience, and this fits that bill as a struggle against the system. Director Christopher Wheeldon, also the choreographer, is the perfect helmsman. The show is about movement and the choreography is overwhelming.
Part romance, part con game. Both require some self-deception. So, therefore a classic American musical. A corny hit when it premiered on Broadway December 1957, a time more naïve than now. Today, it’s not dark enough.
Robert Icke’s “Oresteia” is a brilliant takes-your-breath-away modern version of the Greek narrative of Athens’ war on Troy which, at its center, is about male warmongering and sexism. It makes you realize that little is new about rulers who would sacrifice their own children as well as masses of citizen subjects to maintain their power over other lands. The universality is made clear when Calchas (Michael Aabubakar), a Greek god and seer, intones names of god Zeus, and then goes on to name two dozen others, Allah, Apollo, Buddah…, because military in every land called up gods to bless their marauding.
It’s interesting to see how political art changes. This year’s Whitney Biennial, rather than in-your-face commentary on American injustice here and abroad (including at the 2019 biennial black football players taking the knee), my favorites here were more subtle takes, one on the consumer culture, another on the military and a third that rivets your eyes on U.S. corporate destruction abroad.
When you’re talking about a musical theater genius such as Stephen Sondheim, it’s hard to pick favorites among his oeuvres, but “Into the Woods” is high on the list. Because with Sondheim’s music and lyrics, and James Lapine’s book, this staging by Lear deBessonet infuses joy. Because Sondheim-Lapine (who directed the original in 1987) take some vintage western fairy tales and, mining recognition for surprise, turn them magically into witty morality tales.
Billy Crystal’s story, book by Crystal, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, based on the 1992 film, requires you to believe that Buddy Young, a washed-up comic got a new start when an Emmys broadcast mixed up names and announced he had died and the Today Show invited him on to show it wasn’t true. Maybe this worked 30 years ago. Now the book is silly, often crude, a bit vulgar, a bit TV, with jokes as dated as the Borscht belt routines he started out with.
“POTUS,” which I am surprised to find on Broadway, is misogyny masquerading as feminism. It is crude, vulgar, at the intellectual level of 13-year-old boys, or maybe a local sex-themed comedy club that serves up booze and cheap laughs. Harriet (Julie White), the president’s top aide, reports to staff that he has just said at a press conference, “Please excuse my wife’s absence. She’s having a cunty morning.” You heard that right.
What’s amazing about Shakespeare is that directors can do a complete change of time, venue, mood and still the magic works. The trick is to pull you into the story.
Robert Icke’s “Hamlet” at the Armory starts with a video, could be the news, the funeral of the king of Denmark. The backdrop is a foreign military conflict. Then back at the palace we see 12 surveillance screens watched by security. Suddenly there’s an apparition: the ghost of Hamlet’s father.
When you first see Fanny Brice (Beanie Feldstein) she is shown in a very covered up outfit, looks matronly, and she is of that middle age. Later it’s clear in a flashback that the story begins with her as a young girl – and that she was always fat. That blocked me from believing her portrayal of the story of Fanny Brice – who had been a lithe dancer as well as comedienne – and the romantic connection with her lover, the gambler Nick Arnstein (Ramin Karmiloo), a suave charming David Niven type who had squired gorgeous long legged chorus girls.
