Feb 8, 2026 – See the key takeaways of brilliant James Rosen exposé in NYT that just revealed Pentagon threat to America in seven pages of a sealed Watergate file. Not revealed until now.
The key point of this stunning story based on documents which were sealed for 50 years, is that President Richard Nixon testified under oath that the most serious threat to his presidency came not from political opponents or the media, but from a covert espionage operation run by the U.S. military’s top commanders—the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Feb 3, 2026 -Of course there is an Epstein-Browder connection! It runs through the corrupt Robert Maxwell, father of Ghislaine and first employer and mentor of tax fraudster William Browder in London in 1991 when he worked for Maxwell’s investment bank focusing on Russia and Eastern Europe. (Browder never mentions Maxwell.)
Jan 29, 2026 – At a Council on Foreign Relations reception last night I met Therese Marie Postel, who told me she worked at the UN for the U.S. State Department. We were at a drinks table before a meeting. She said she wrote the Board of Peace (ie the U.S. seizes Gaza) UN Security Council resolution. (Three others heard the conversation.) I said, “But the Palestinians…” She grabbed her wine and beat a hasty retreat. But now history knows who wrote that imperialist decree: it was crafted by Therese Marie Postel. (Po******@***te.gov as posted by www.securitycouncilreport.org/). She smiles, Palestinians die.
Tracy Letts’s psychological thriller, under David Cromer’s masterful direction, turns a motel room into a terrifying laboratory of American anxiety.
The true horror in Letts’s “Bug,” now receiving a skin-crawling and brilliant revival directed by Cromer, does not scuttle in on six legs. It enters softly, politely, a shy man emerging from a motel bathroom asking for a friend. The terror is in the quiet click of a mind latching onto an explanation—any explanation—for the pain of a lonely, battered life. By the final, frantic scene, the Manhattan Theatre Club stage has become a shrieking, tin-foiled monument to the American need to believe, even in monsters, if it means not being alone.
Jan 11, 2026- About two hundred protesters stood along Truman Avenue, a main street in Key West, to add their signs and voices to the national protests against Donald Trump’s ICE death squad execution of Renee Good. Cars passing on the road created a cacophony of horns to signal their support. Even the iconic Key West rooster paid attention.
There is a moment in Bess Wohl’s new Broadway play “Liberation” when the characters—a consciousness-raising group in 1970 Ohio—discuss the upcoming Women’s Strike for Equality. One of them, Celeste, a black feminist scholar, scoffs: “I don’t really know that protesting changes anything… It sort of feels like they just laugh at everyone marching around and waving their signs.”
The bread crisis in the small Provençal town of Concorde is urgent, existential and entirely self-inflicted. This is the buttery premise of “The Baker’s Wife,” the charming, stubbornly hokey, and ultimately satisfying musical that has rolled into the Classic Stage Company with the comforting aroma of a warm baguette.
Talene Monahon’s piercing new play, “Meet the Cartozians,” is not merely a family drama; it is a forensic and often ferociously funny excavation of the American experiment itself. Under David Cromer’s meticulously calibrated direction, the work dissects a century of racial bargaining, cultural performance, and the enduring ache of identity forged in the crucible of a hostile state.
This play about a politically fraught chess match between an American and Russian champion in 1979 lasted only two months on Broadway in 1988, when Ronald Reagan was president. The time of the “evil empire.” (Plus ça change.) So maybe even then it was a wrong call.
Robert Icke at only 43 solidifies his place among Britain’s theatrical greats with his stunning new production of Oedipus at Studio 54. A master of turning classic plays into modern parables—from Hamlet to The Doctor— Icke now takes Sophocles’ 2,500-year-old tragedy and forges it into a riveting, contemporary political thriller.
The Macy’s thanksgiving day parade started 100 years ago. Yes this is the centenary. Immigrant workers at Macy’s department store wanted to recreate the parades that they and their families produced in this season in their home countries. But alas, Macy’s, now a corporate operation that has no interest in their workers’ history, did not commemorate the event’s origins. Most of the floats are commercial — buy this, watch this on video.
“Queen of Versailles” – Book by Lindsey Ferrentino — starts out feminist, about a working-class girl who struggles to get an education, makes a bad marriage choice and pulls out of it. Then she becomes so entrapped by the lure of riches and conspicuous consumption that she devotes her life and sacrifices her daughter to it. I’d want to see that straight play.
Rajiv Joseph’s “Archduke” at the Roundabout is a surreal and entertaining take on an attempt to assassinate Archduke Ferdinand of Serbia organized by a soi-dissant military leader who wants to derail the Austro-Hungarian empire and achieve Serbian independence and Slavic unification. oseph is masterful at historical plays, and this is directed with a combination of realism and absurdity by Darko Tresnjak, who was born and raised in Zemun where some of the action takes place.
Jamie Lloyd’s vision of Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” is set in the opening of a huge round tunnel where the protagonists Estragon/Gogo (Keanu Reeves) and Vladimir/Didi (Alex Winer) hang out, sometimes climbing up and sliding down the circular walls. The set is by Soutra Gilmour. Usually, one begins by talking about the text of the play and the acting. In this case, the set overwhelms all.
Yasmina Reza’s superb surreal comedy takes aim at her favorite subject, the pretentious French bourgeoisie. (Another fine play of the genre is her “God of Carnage.”) I admit to liking this play’s target, the ridiculous one or two-color paintings that hang in galleries (and museums) with bloated prices and pompous wall labels and the arty “intellectuals” who admire them.
As the 30th international conference on climate change takes place in Belém, Brazil, — which the U.S. refuses to attend — this Royal Shakespeare Company production at Lincoln Center is a devastating exposé of how the American government run by the corrupt Democratic and Republican uniparty has brought the planet close to destruction. It is a brilliant play, telling you more than you will read in the American corporate media.
What happens when you mix the characters of a late 18th century novel by Jane Austin with the sensibility of modern teenage girls who spend their time on dating apps and 20-something boys who seem stuck in a past century or are confused about the current one? Inspired by “Pride and Prejudice,” Emily Breeze’s musical plays a bit loose with the text but is a happy romp that could have been set in a sorority house as much as at a modest estate in the English countryside. It’s a satire, a spoof. Or a sitcom. This is not your Cliff Notes “Pride and Prejudice.”
One of the few places in America where free speech is glorified (I didn’t see any ICE agents handcuffing marchers), this year’s Greenwich Village Halloween Parade still had only a handful of political themes compared to the past. A yellow-haired prison orange-suited Trump, a couple of blow-up dolls labeled Frog and Ampifa (a misspelling I am sure) and U.S.A. v Epstein (was that satiric?)
“The Best is Yet to Come, Celebration of Cy Coleman,” the first night of this year’s Cabaret Convention, put on by the Mabel Mercer Foundation, could have been called “the best is on these stages”– for all three evenings. Out of the 60 singers that appeared, I’ve picked what I thought were the best!
Oct 20, 2025 – The only official signs in the No Kings march were the anodyne “No Kings Since 1776” and “We Have Friends Everywhere.” They could have been for a TV sit-com series or a new breakfast cereal. Because the neo-con Democrats who organized the events in NYC and across the country were against Trump but not for anything.
Oct 19, 2025 – Ironic that the Indigenous Peoples Parade in New York this year took place the same time and a few blocks away from the massive New York “No Kings” demonstration. On Saturday there were probably fewer than 50 dozen marchers and performers among the Native Americans gathering at Madison Square Park and marching from 27th Street inside unnecessary metal police barriers down Broadway at 12 noon, compared to the estimated 100K that took off from Times Square down Seventh Avenue at 11 am. I went to both.
It’s the “melting pot” of 1906, but the melt isn’t easy. A few heroes and many moral cowards move in a swirl of racism and anti-immigrant abuses. Based on the stunning novel by E.J. Doctorow, a century later, one can say plus ça change.
Oct 12, 2025 – Hillary Clinton a few days ago replied to my question about Ukraine at the Council on Foreign Relations. She and colleague John Sullivan are revealed as either liars or so ignorant of reasons for the U.S. Ukraine war as to be utter fools.
Oct 9, 2025 – This Whitney exhibit of the Surreal Sixties show a time of art that existed alongside a political movement against the U.S. imperialist attacks on Vietnam that were also part of repressive attacks earlier against indigenous Americans and later against people of color. In other word, these paintings showed a history of murderous repression that continues to the present.
Oct 5, 2025 – Why would the Council on Foreign Relations host a public meeting in Washington with Reza Pahlavi, son of the Shah of Iran
deposed in 1979? And what might that have to do with indications he is part of a movement to restore the monarchy?
