Richard III, the evil scheming murderous soon-to-be king of England, after he kills the competition, was obsessed with his deformity, now believed to be a disease of the spine, which has been portrayed in Shakespeare’s play over the centuries as a hump or a withered arm. In the vision of director Robert O’Hara, that essential part of the play is turned on its head. Richard, portrayed by the fiery Danai Gurira, is damaged only in his mind, his ethic, his soul. When he speaks lines about his infirmity, it makes no sense.
Larry Kirwan’s “Paradise Square” is a smart, entertaining, serious, important musical about a real time in America, a look at the role of capitalism in slavery, whites and blacks running the underground railroad, and how capitalists divided them. Director Moises Kaufman knows how to make a show suffused with music into a riveting dramatic play.
It’s snowy outside probably someplace north of New York City. The guests, most in their 40s and 50s, are artistic or professional, and the conversation, which is the centerpiece, is the kind that wafts around New York parties when people show off their knowledge or talents or, no talent needed, loneliness and the need for other people. They mostly talk past either other, but it doesn’t matter, because nothing new is said. Maybe this is satire.
A few years ago I wrote about French actress Nathalie Schmidt appearing in a web series, “I DO,” which was getting a lot of attention from web festivals around the country. The prizes keep coming.
If you want to see a serious, piercing, unforgettable play about America, see Tracy Letts’ “The Minutes.” It could be subtitled “The American Killing Fields.” The expansion of colonial America to the West, its manifest destiny, a myth we’ve all learned in school, was a cover for genocide. The U.S. was built on savagery, a holocaust, the slaughter of Native Americans, and Tracy Letts tells it brilliantly, with Anna Shapiro’s direction emphasizing the banality that covers up horror.
Igor Golyak’s adaptation of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” stars a brilliantly effervescent Mikhail Baryshnikov, a fine dreamy Jessica Hecht, talented supporting players, a giant robotic arm topped by a ring-lit camera and a cute scampering robotic dog. And that’s only the half of it, since I saw the in-person play but not the virtual on-line version. Golyak also directed, marshalling good performances and pulling out a plot from what could have gotten lost in a three-ring atmosphere.
Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite is a collection of sitcom sketches that worked in 1968 but a lot less so in 2022. The last about the parents of a young woman terrified of getting married is very funny, the middle extended bit about fans of the celebrity culture is so-so, and the first about an unhappy wife who discovers her businessman husband is having an affair with his secretary is so dated it should have opened with a time lapse warning.
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).
“The Lehman Trilogy” by Stefano Massini appears to be a love song to American capitalism, though if you look carefully, you will see some tarnishings and even betrayals. It starts with Henry Lehman (Simon Russell Beale), a German-Jewish immigrant, arriving in Montgomery, Alabama in 1844, nervous in his best black suit and coat.
I thought this was going to be a tacky, yellow press redux of the paparazzi chasing Diana. I was wrong. It is a terrific feminist, anti-royalist story (book by Joe DiPietro) of what happens when a woman, facing a powerful institution (the “Royal Family”), has the gumption to stand up and fight for her dignity.
“Cullud Wattah” by Erika Dickerson-Despenza is billed as about “three generations of black women living through the water crisis in Flint, Michigan,” where community water was poisoned because the Republican governor, Rick Snyder, wanted to save money and in 2014 switched from Port Huron water to contaminated Flint River water. He was backed up by key state and city environmental “regulators.” In quotes, because they didn’t seem to think contaminated water came under their remit. Or lacked the courage to challenge the governor.
