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.
This is a stunning political thriller and a true story. “Let‘s make a bonfire of the truth” starts out as a song. Smoke and flames. The character William MacRae (Andy Paterson) is about 40, a Glasgow lawyer, square faced, serious. It‘s 1985, and he is being watched by spies. He will take us back to 1974. Paterson is stunning as the character he has written. And the story is as powerful as anything (not) written in the media.
When I go to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, as I have for the past five years, I know I want to see Mark Thomas at the Traverse. That theater is Edinburgh’s most politically important year ˜round stage, and Thomas is always the most prescient writer/perfor
Le Temps, Geneva, Aug 23, 2018 – (English translation follows French.) Le rapport de l‘ancien parlementaire socialiste sur l‘affaire Magnitsky a été jugé partial et inutilisable par le juge new-yorkais William H. Pauley III. Une passe d‘armes qui illustre le gouffre entre systemes judiciaires américain et européen. (English translation follows.)
How does a sports champion deal with political morality? What does she care about? Personal achievement? A sense of justice? How does she ignore that her sponsors are killing her people?
“Quand le Piano Fait son Cinéma” is a charming, clever production in which two talented pianists in a four-handed recital make you think there‘s an orchestra on the small stage. Doing four-handers takes some alacrity as the hands repeatedly cross each other.
It‘s an imaginary master class named in homage to Nijinsky, choreographed by Faizal Zeghoudi, text by Marie-Christine Mazzola, danced by four fine interpreters of his art, and narrated by Bernard Pisani, once a dancer, now an actor. I loved the dance. I was less entranced by the pretentious text.
I liked this clever pas de deux. But don‘t think classical ballet, think very contemporary male-female dance. “Et Si” means “And if.” First you see a table, and under that legs. Everything above the table is blacked out. He is twisting. She kicks off red spike heels. You use your imagination. Very smart. She is cool. The twists are erratic, movements are jagged. Like the relationship.
Aug 21, 2018 – This is my interview today on Fault Lines with Garland Nixon and Lee Stranahan. I took the open letter in Time that William Browder wrote to President Trump before his meeting with Russian President Putin and simply transposed it. For example, Putin values money far more than human life became Browder values money far more than human life.
The Tjimur Dance Theatre of Taiwan presents a finely designed contemporary dance inspired by the culture of the Païwan tribe, an aboriginal group of the island‘s south. Choreographed by Baru Madiljin, “Varhung – Heart to Heart” is slow, expressive, angular. It tells stories of people‘s lives, loves, difficulties though the cultivation and harvesting of the ginger plant.
Fascinating to see play written in 1925 that has the politics of a play that could be written today. It was penned by Miles Malleson, a prominent playwright, screenwriter and actor of the time who used his work to promote progressive politics. He was a socialist, pacifist and supporter of women‘s suffrage. This is very finely, subtly directed by Jenn Thompson.
