It could be the corruption of a convention where Bernie Sanders is set against a corporate Biden. State signs are set behind banks of seats. The music is of the 40s. Flags on the wall have 48 stars. Author Danny Rocco and director Shannon Fillion create an ambience that makes you think you are there.
A large banner on the brick house says “Stacey Abrams 2020.” It‘s next spring. Abrams, who last year lost a close race for governor of Georgia amid reports of voter suppression, had talked then about running for president. The relevance of the sign is that Abrams is a black woman, and this version of Shakespeare‘s play about love and trust – or mistrust — sets it not in Messina, Italy, but in modern-day Atlanta, with a black cast speaking in familiar accents.
This “Lear” with Glenda Jackson as the king is sometimes brilliant, sometimes annoying. Jackson is a brilliant actress, her voice and demeanor might be male, but she didn‘t persuade me she was a king. Or perhaps she was on the edge of madness very early in the plot, after her daughters‘ duplicity. As the play went on, I wasn‘t sure if she would shrivel or explode.
June 1, 2019 – This is a new and startling Russian charge that William Browder orchestrated the $230 million 2007 tax refund fraud. It claims that Browder organized the use of Hermitage shell companies to claim a fake tax refund in December 2007. He has blamed Russian tax officials for the scam, saying their collaborators re-registered the companies and carried out the legal scam.
May 31, 2019 – What happens when a US lawyer files a court statement that is perjured? Jonathan Winer, a Washington DC counsel to convicted tax evader William Browder, filed a declaration this week supporting a legal petition of Browder‘s Hermitage Capital Management to get banks operating in the US to provide documents he says he needs to defend himself against Russian charges of tax evasion.
May 29, 2019 – William Browder, the owner of the Hermitage Fund, who was run out of Russia in 2006 for tax evasion, is still battling Russian law enforcement authorities attempting to collecting on multi-millions of dollars of tax he failed to pay during his decade as the country‘s largest foreign investor. He has just gone to court in New York to counter yet another Russian indictment for tax evasion. Case 1:19-mc-00262-JMF Document 6-1 Filed 05/28/19
You are hit by the overwhelming sadness of everyone involved in Hillary Clinton‘s 2008 New Hampshire primary campaign against Barack Obama. Playwright Lucas Hnath and director Joe Mantello create a landscape of utter sleaze and despair. It‘s January. Even the hotel sitting room seems chill and desolate. There‘s one chair and the floor.
This is a feminist theatrical. A very political play. If you don‘t want to go to a lecture about what is wrong with how the US government treats women and minorities, it‘s more interesting to go to a play. Such as “What the Constitution Means to Me,” Heidi Schreck’s take on how the Constitution is honored in the breach, “rigged” as the copy she carries says. Adult audiences in New York and other liberal enclaves nod their heads, and it‘s a good teaching moment for kids. Higher marks for politics than for drama.
“The Sun” is a popular newspaper for the undereducated British masses. It was a broadsheet started in 1964, then reinvented as a tabloid five years later by the Australian Robert Murdoch and Larry Lamb, a North Englander he named as editor. They were outsiders to the London Fleet Street crowd and felt it.
Jack O‘Brien‘s crisp staging of Arthur Miller‘s iconic 1947 American morality play lays bare the corruption underlying the normalcy of American society. This story of 70 years ago could be easily replicated today. Oh, so easily.
How do you take a 40s musical built around a sexist Shakespeare play and make it delight today‘s audiences? With pizazz and charm, if you are Roundabout Theatre director Scott Ellis. In this version of Cole Porter‘s and the Spewacks‘ “Kiss Me Kate,” the feisty heroine gives as good as she gets, and she and her erstwhile spouse playing Katherine and Petruchio land some good kicks to the others‘ derrieres.
May 13, 2019 – I pay attention to political art, but I was amazed at an exhibit at the new Whitney Biennial which not so subtly attacks the museum’s board of trustees vice chair as the owner of a company that builds weapons that target civilians!
May 11, 2019 – The Tax Justice Network, organized in 2003 to fight offshore tax evasion and corruption, has censored a podcast its founding director recorded when I spoke at the Offshore Alert Conference in November in London. I didn’t write about this before now, because I though the TJN leaders might change their minds. But it turns out they are either cowardly or corrupt.
May 7, 2019 – The OCCRP, a Bill Browder acolyte and stenographer “news organization,” just got me kicked off, GLOBAL-L, a supposedly nonpolitical journalists‘ list, because I quoted from Browder‘s 2015 deposition in US Federal Court SDNY (Southern District of NY) in the Prevezon case showing OCCRP is a Browder collaborator.
May 4, 2019 – When journalists, pundits and analysts promote the Browder hoax, one usually has no chance to confront them with facts. They ignore emails. But April 15th, I had the opportunity to ask one. The speaker was Robert D. Blackwill, Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy, Council on Foreign Relations. It was an event to promote his report, “Trump‘s Foreign Policies Are Better Than They Seem.”
April 18, 2019 – Former Peru President Alan García, who just shot and killed himself as police were moving to arrest him for massive corruption, ran a killer paramilitary organization during the late 80s. The US knew about it but said and did nothing. I found and declassified a document in the Reagan Library revealing this and wrote about it for the Miami Herald in 2006. García was running for president again, and the Herald held the story till after the election so it would not affect the vote. So voters would not know García had run a paramilitary organization.
For 19 years, impresario Scott Siegel has been delving into the past of American musicals to put before theater and cabaret fans the best known and hidden gems of the decades. And also presenting some of the finest performers to them. He picks a couple of years. The years 1943 and 1951 in this show were typically marked by blockbusters and some shows I never knew.
This very funny, clever, often campy satire of black life and stereotypes by Jordan Cooper hits every button, starting with a noisy evangelical church service for Brother Righttocomplain who is being interred because he was murdered by the election of First Negro President of these United States.
Truth and a bit of fantasy. A quite extraordinary play of how generations of an immigrant family create a major financial institution that starts as a southern cotton farming supply shop and ends as a multinational bank whose crash helps bring on the Great Recession of 2008.
The story is contemporary, subtle and surreal. Anne (a brilliant Isabelle Huppert), who has done nothing in life except be a mother, plays out scenarios about her husband, her son and his girlfriend. The very inventive Florian Zeller writes this not as a narrative that moves smoothly through time, but as a time-shifting, repeating replay of the same events. Under Trip Cullman‘s smart, austere direction, it vividly becomes apparent.
March 5, 2019 – This is the audio of the panel on the Browder/Magnitsky hoax that filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov, Browder tax-fraud collaborator Jamison Firestone of Firestone Duncan, and I spoke at in November 2018 in London. It was called “The Sergei Magnitsky Case: Fact vs. Fiction.” Andrei and I spoke fact, Firestone repeated Browder’s fiction!
Feb 27, 2019 – This is my radio interview today on Fault Lines with Lee Stranahan and Garland Nixon, the latest in a series blowing the whistle on convicted tax cheat and fraudster William Browder. Browder, who used offshore shells to move and launder profits on which he evaded taxes, was invited by the tax committee of the European Parliament to talk about how to combat offshore tax evasion. French member of parliament Nicolas Bay, the only truth-teller there, asked why he had gotten Andrei Nekrasov’s film The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes banned from a screening at the parliament. Browder was enraged!
A satire about media ought always to be in fashion. The current revival of the film “Network” as a play works brilliantly to skewer corrupt television.
This revival of Sam Shepard‘s satire about the Hollywood movie business doesn‘t hit that mark. Maybe it worked in 1980 when it premiered, but nearly 40 years later, it‘s too over-the-top. Interesting as a piece of the times. The centerpiece is a faceoff between two brothers, one clean-cut Austin (Paul Dano) a screen writer with a mild, almost milquetoast demeanor. The other is scruffy bearded Lee (Ethan Hawke), who once made money with a pit bull in dog fights and talks in either a threat or a sneer.
Feb 19, 2019 – The European Parliament‘s tax committee a few weeks ago invited an admitted tax cheat, William Browder, and welcomed him as an honorable guy who could tell them how to solve the problem that he, evidence shows, represents. It seemed surreal.
The European Parliament created the Tax3 committee to deal with issues raised by the Panama Papers, Luxleaks, Paradise Papers and the like. And Browder, who set up his Russian investment fund on a network of offshore shell companies in Cyprus and the British Virgin Islands, including one listed in the Panama Papers, was the chief expert at the Jan 29 hearing.
Jan 22, 2019 – To Sven Giegold, German Green member of the European Parliament who heads the Greens-Left caucus on corporate, financial and offshore corruption. We met in 2003 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, when we both were founding members of the Tax Justice Network, set up to fight international tax fraud. I am concerned that the Parliamentary Assembly, a sister organization of the European Parliament where you serve, has Jan 22 adopted a major resolution to urge member countries to pass “Magnitsky Acts” of the sort the US passed in 2012 that would build higher the barrier to the Russians‘ attempt to collect on tax cheat William Browder‘s offshore tax scams.
