It starts with cavemen with bows and arrows. Stick and string become like bass. A stick turns into a musical pipe. A clap is rhythm. A move to wood and metal. Then a bagpipe with a symbol of the British lion. This production by Richard Navarro of Le Rouge Groupe at the Avignon Theater Festival OFF is delightful and fascinating and shows how music came from paleo grottos to the electronic sphere. It is clever, witty, and quite an original.
“Rosa Luxemburg Karabett” is an historical play with music about the life of the Russian revolutionary who became an activist in German politics, opposed WWI, was imprisoned and, after the war, was murdered. The production reflects the tradition of the German political cabaret.
For clarity about politics, “Brexit” at the Avignon Theater Festival does as well as any pundits. It‘s a clever mime and vaudeville comic take by a pair as a verbally dueling father and son.
The best production I saw at the 2018 Avignon Theater Festival was “Dance ˜n Speak Easy,” a stunning work by Wanted Posse set in the U.S. 1930s prohibition era. The mood is swagger, the language is hip hop, the undercurrent is aggression.
Aug 17, 2018 – The New Yorker story about Browder: How do you get credibility for a story that is mostly lies? You throw in a few negatives about the person you are going to white-wash. Then you repeat all his unproved assertions as if they were fact. And you don‘t bother to provide evidence. And you ignore the major story you ought to be telling.
William Browder sent you a letter before your meeting with President Putin, and I‘d like to offer you a perspective about Mr. Browder that you probably aren‘t getting elsewhere. I am copying the form of his letter, but substituting Browder where he wrote Putin, and including facts you and the public probably don‘t know. Though there are indications your State Department does know.
Brit Henry Naylor‘s play about the moral choices of people trapped in the Middle East horror and the western reporters of it could not be more timely, or more searing. The dialogue is stirring, often tough, and poetic. It is part of a series he has presented at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe the last few years about the human suffering and the ethical challenges posed by the region’s crises.
“Win That War!” sing workers in a parachute factory in a town about 1,000 miles south of Chicago. It‘s a striking transformation of Georges Bizet‘s opera “Carmen,” about a worker in a Spanish cigar factory in 1820, to wartime US in 1943 with a book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II.
Shakespeare‘s “Othello” at the Delacorte in Central Park seemed more about racism to me than it ever had before. Under the clear, commanding direction of Ruben Santiago-Hudson and featuring the mesmerizing, almost painfully gut-wrenching acting of Chukwudi Iwuji as Othello, you imagine what a lifetime of racial slights has done to his judgment and trust.
June 15, 2018 – Reuters announces that it has trust principles committed to unbiased reliable news. So how does it deal with the fact it subscribes to the Russophobic meme that leads to fake news like this?
More than 60 years after its charm overwhelmed the American stage, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s“My Fair Lady,” with revivals through the years, is back, and this time there‘s a feminist kick. And some class solidarity. They are changes from America’s reactionary 1950s when it premiered. Credit director Bartlett Sher. The street flower seller Eliza (Lauren Ambrose) is a sweetheart, and you get the sense of a supportive society among the sweepers and other night workers at Covent Garden
June 8, 2018 – This article by Michael Sainato in The Observer (London) recites the fake news we are used to: Magnitsky a whistleblowing Russian lawyer jailed after tagging officials for tax-refund fraud. However, there are some new elements in the story, about Renaissance Capital, which we have to assume are skewed by William Browder as he is the fount of all the media’s fake news about the Browder/Magnitsky.
June 2, 2018 – Radio interview on Fault Lines discusses arrest of William Browder in Spain and the meaning of Paul Manafort’s cryptic notes of the Trump Tower meeting when explained by the Judiciary Committee testimony of Natalia Veselnitskaya.
June 1, 2018 – Rolling Stone just posted some Bill Browder fake news in an article by stenographer Seth Hettena. Familiar fabrications: Browder‘s accountant Sergei Magnitsky is again a “lawyer” who was jailed after he blew the whistle on a $230m scam. Browder tracked every penny of it; it‘s a first time for that lie. Magnitsky was beaten with rubber batons and convicted after his death. Browder was expelled from Russia for exposing Gazprom corruption.
May 31, 2018 – Major media reporting that William Browder was detained in Spain, supposedly on Interpol red notice, but Interpol then said it didn’t put one out. So maybe it was an old one. Browder tweeted, of course, got lots of ink in the western media, and the story was over. Except it shouldn’t be.
“Travesties” is a glorious kaleidoscope of famous people, fiction and events that converge in Zurich during World War I and raise questions about radical politics, the meaning of art, and the validity of memory to link it all. Tom Stoppard pays homage to and questions absurdist and revolutionary art in a play which presents three of the great figures of the time through the clouded memory of a retired British diplomat posted in Zurich during the Great War. It is a brilliant historical fantasy directed by Patrick Marber.
Where to go before or after a play in New York‘s midtown west that is smart but gives you a choice of snacks or full dinner? It‘s called Rummy‘s Tavern, on West 53rd Street, west of Eighth Avenue. And in good weather you can sit at tables in a back garden!
This Saint Joan (Condola Rashad) is a charmer. At the same time, she is no farm wench but a tough young woman of 17. She hears voices. She vows to make the English occupiers leave France.
May 22, 2018 – The Senate Judiciary Committee’s Trump Tower meeting testimonies were released May 16th. So far, a week later, the mainstream media has not analyzed Paul Manafort‘s “cryptic” cell phone notes. Not hard if you look at Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya‘s testimony that presents in more detail what she said at the meeting. Which the media ignore. Perhaps because it would spotlight inconvenient truths about Bill Browder and his major client, Ziff Investments.
May 21, 2018 – The people who put up this poster at New York’s CooperHewitt Museum, which I saw yesterday, must be millennials or younger! It’s a critique of US foreign policy mostly in the 1980s. War in Vietnam, invasion of Grenada, Contras in Nicaragua and death squads in El Salvador, US bombing of Libya, invasion of Panama. But blurb says the poster was created in ca (about) 1980! How can a poster that references those events be created before most of the events occurred? Curators appear to know nothing of the US 1980s war crimes the poster attacks!
May 15, 2018 – Michael McFaul, President Obama’s senior director of Russian affairs at the National Security Council and then ambassador to Russia, gave a neocon tour d‘horizon at the Council on Foreign Relations May 11. [Republicans/Democrats, they are all neocons now.] He was there to promote a new book. I asked him about the Magnitsky hoax. I got expected evasions at the Council, but later found revelations in the book. Here’s the Q & A.
May 13, 2018 – The latest William Browder acolyte in the mainstream press is Tunku Varadarajan, a former Wall Street Journal opinion editor now at the right-wing Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His May 11th WSJ story is a web of fabrications, so let‘s take them one-by-one, with links to the evidence. I love when Varadarajan refers to Browder as “an Anglo-American businessman.” Really, does that mean that one parent was American and the other British? No, it means he repudiated his US birth citizenship in 1998 so he wouldn‘t have to pay taxes on the money he was making in Russia and which he stashed in an offshore network set up by the infamous Mossack Fonseca.
Marin Ireland is compelling in the Transport Group‘s minimalist production of Tennessee Williams‘ “Summer and Smoke.” Her lovely slow southern accent is all the decoration the stage needs. Director Jack Cummings III does a fine job in evoking time and place with no accoutrements required.
May 6, 2018 – I just saw Mikhail Khodorkovsky‘s Wall Street Journal April 23, 2018 article How to Stop Vladimir Putin‘s Mafia. Among other things, he promotes the Magnitsky Act “to stop Putin‘s Mafia.” But now see how golden boy MBK made a deal with William Browder and colleagues Kenneth Dart (Dart Cups) and Francis Baker (Andersen Group) to sell them the Russian firm titanium Avisma complete with a transfer-pricing investor & tax-cheating scam.
