A dance event of the main Avignon Festival featured two productions about words and language, “Prononcer Fénanoq” and “Long Time No See.” Maybe there‘s a reason why dance is about movement, not words.
The place is elegant, the courtyard of the Palace of the Popes, where Popes of the Catholic church held court. The surrounding six-story palace walls are beige brick with Roman arches and a rose window. An amazing venue. The state took it over after the 19th century Napoleonic revolution, and later it became a state museum. The huge courtyard reminds one of a Greek outdoor theater. So, for that reason alone, one goes to any event the Avignon Festival holds there.
A marvelous new Paris art place to visit is the Giacometti Institute‘s recreation of sculptor Alberto Giacometti’s studio, with exhibits of important works. It‘s in the 14th arrondissement neighborhood where he worked, though this art deco townhouse was the studio and apartment of designer Paul Follot.
The Key West Botanical Garden is a gorgeous gem unknown to many visitors because it is on the adjacent Stock Island. But it‘s easy to get to by car or bus. It is a brilliantly organized garden of local vegetation, with signs to point out important and sometimes dangerous plants and an audio setup where you can use a cell phone to get voice explanations at numbered stops.
Kurt Vonnegut‘s 1970 surreal satire dissects the extreme alpha male, a 40ish guy who sometime, in his breathing, his grunts and body movement, seems to turn into an ape. It connects machismo to violence to war. It gets a very good production by the Wheelhouse Theater Company, directed by Jeff Wise.
Glen Close is a terrific actress. Too bad she is starring in such a bad play. She makes it worth watching, even if you cringe at Jane Anderson‘s hokey script that walks straight out of television, dumbing down events of the 15th century so viewers can connect as they do to their favorite sit-com. Anderson has done a lot of TV, and we see the result.
Nov 2, 2018 – This year’s Halloween Parade in Greenwich Village was a glorious event, partly for the good-spirited humor, sometimes political, often artistic or hokey, and also for the unusually warm weather that allowed marchers and spectators to soak in the artistry without shivering in cold.
Nov 2, 2018 – I spoke today on Fault Lines radio about how Mikhail Khodorkovsky and William Browder scammed Russian energy sector companies by Khodorhovsky getting control of Yukos oil through rigged auctions in the corrupt Yeltsin regime and then using transfer-pricing to cheat minority shareholders and Russian taxpayers and Browder buying shares in Russian energy conglomerate Gazprom through cutout companies to evade rules that banned purchases of its stock in Russia by foreigners.
It‘s 1981 in Northern Ireland. The body of an IRA militant who disappeared ten years before has been found, preserved in a bog. An IRA chief, Muldoon (the threatening Stuart Graham) is worried how Quinn Carney (Paddy Considine), the man‘s brother, will react, because he is a former IRA activist and knows or suspects how the victim died.
“The Nap” is about a championship game of snooker, a game that’s a variety of billiards or pool. The nap is the pile on the surface of the table. But that’s not really what this play is about. That’s only on the surface. Think hokey comic mystery.
Howard W. Campbell, an American-born Nazi propagandist and double agent, served evil too well and good too secretly. That is the subtle moral of the Kurt Vonnegut story adapted by Brian Katz in a fascinating albeit not totally successful stage presentation. Still better than most of what you will see in New York theater at the moment.
Oct 24, 2018 – Waiting for William Browder’s Red Notice to be listed as fiction. Red Notice, p 276-7: “That night, at 12:15 a.m., the voice mail alert on my BlackBerry vibrated. Nobody ever called my BlackBerry. No one even knew the number. I looked at Elena and dialed into voice mail.…I heard a man in the midst of a savage beating. He was screaming and pleading. The recording lasted about two minutes and cut mid-wail.”
Janet McTeer is a charmer with ego as Sarah Bernhardt the greatest actress of the 19th century who performed on the Euro-American stage. And to bring the story up to date, her artistic challenge is a feminist one. We see it as a play within a play, and Theresa Rebeck‘s script sticks closely to reality, except for an affair with French playwright Edmond Rostand, who was a friend but not necessarily a lover.
There‘s a difference between cabaret and just a singer on a stage warbling a melody. And there‘s a reason so many good cabaret singers come from Broadway. Cabaret is not just about the words and the music, it‘s about telling a story. Sometimes, it‘s even a mini-musical play. And that is what is good about the Cabaret Convention, in its 29th year, annually four nights in October, at Rose Hall at Jazz at Lincoln Center.
It‘s a working-class crowd and the talk is of neighborhood, the boundary of their lives. The scene is a bar and music place, the sounds are of the 50s and 60s, the voices are rich and jazzy. I never realized Leiber and Stoller created so many of rock classics, jazzy torch and doo-wap. I didn‘t like this music then: “Gonna Find Her,” “Jailhouse Rock,” the hokey “Poison Ivy.” I like it now. Most of it.
Here‘s a Cinderella story which would not quite make it today. Because it‘s about a prostitute who reforms her John. It was a movie hit 20 years ago, but that was an epoch away. So, suspend belief and politics. A story for our times about a billionaire Edward Lewis (Andy Karl) without morals, who would destroy a shipbuilding company and fire its workers, but learns something from a hooker.
Oct 4, 2018 – The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists which with 95 other media organizations last November published a major report known as the Paradise Papers about offshore corruption. Now it is asking “our much-valued readers, what do you want to know about the impact of the Paradise Papers? Do you have a lingering question?” Answer: That is part of your ongoing offshore corruption inquiry. This focuses on the first part, the Panama Papers. Why don‘t you investigate William Browder‘s Mossack Fonseca connections?
I‘m not too sure who the cursed child is. Albus (Sam Clemmett), the son of the grown-up hero Harry Potter (Jamie Parker), or Scorpius (Anthony Boyle), the son of his nemesis, Draco Malfoy (Alex Price). But mixed in with the magic and terrific scenery, there‘s a lot of stuff about fathers and sons, which is really the theme of the play, or the two plays which you can see on succeeding nights or a one-day marathon.
Take a luckless cowboy, his novitiate sister, a (mostly) upstanding sheriff, a saloon dancer with a sideline, a governor who demands sex for favors and a drunken priest who admires Nietzsche.
Oct 1, 2018 – On Fault Lines today I talked about how NBC-TV killed its reporter Ken Dilanian’s exposé of William Browder. That happened in May 2016, a month before the Trump Tower meeting that fueled Russiagate and jump-started the Mueller investigation. US media refuses to publish my investigation of what happened, so I have started a GoFundMe page and will post and make the story available when I reach $5,000.
I love jazz, I love jazz vocalists, so how could it get better? It does with the Anderson Brothers who add text and video to tell the stories of the composers, lyricists and performers they feature. You are pulled into not just the sounds but their personal and musical lives. In August they appeared at Symphony Space and one week after another they featured Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Hoagy Carmichael and Jimmy Van Heusen. I caught the Van Heusen show. It was a delight.
Edie Falco is powerful as the acerbic, in-your-face, sometimes crude-talking Polly Noonan, a real operator in Albany‘s Democratic Party machine politics for about four decades. She was the confident and advisor to long-serving Mayor Erastus Corning. The play takes place in 1977, five years before he died. Director Scott Elliott makes it a combination soap opera and political drama.
Lillian Hellman’s play about a labor conflict in a small town in Ohio in 1936 has some fine moments giving only hints of stronger plays such as “The Little Foxes” where she takes on the corrupt, manipulating rich who exploit workers.
John Rando is the best comic theater director I know. The creative wit who oversaw “Urinetown,” “The Toxic Avenger,” “The Heir Apparent” and “All in the Timing” takes a deliberately jokey rock musical by Ken Davenport and, with excellent timing and staging, pokes fun at the genre as well as the state of New Jersey. I don‘t much like rock. I liked this play.John Rando is the best comic theater director I know. The creative wit who oversaw “Urinetown,” “The Toxic Avenger,” “The Heir Apparent” and “All in the Timing” takes a deliberately jokey rock musical by Ken Davenport and, with excellent timing and staging, pokes fun at the genre as well as the state of New Jersey. I don‘t much like rock. I liked this play.
Every once in a while, you see an actor who could read the phone directory and make it a brilliant play. That is Patrick Morris, who portrays Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, in “Bloominauschwitz,” as he travels through history to investigate his identity as a Jew. And issues of identity.
