Annabella (Lydia Wilson), a young woman in black leggings, puts on rock music and dances to it. Wilson plays her as she might an insouciant high-fashion model. Men in suits come on the stage prancing, knees jutting up to the disco beat.
This is Parma and a bloody story of incest and revenge will be told, though not exactly as 17th-century author John Ford had in mind. It‘s a stunning campy melodrama by Britain‘s inimitable Cheek by Jowl company.
For me the most shocking moment in Katori Hall’s play, Hurt Village, was when two grungy teens amuse themselves with a nasty rap in which they cruelly and crudely insult each other and their families. In this down-at-the-heels housing project in Memphis, even these kids’ amusement is mean and self-destructive. Forget about normal civility. The people we meet address each other as nigger, bitch, and mother fucker.
100Reporters, March 19, 2012 – One could be forgiven for thinking that the New York State Legislature was a criminal enterprise. It had its mafioso style assemblyman, Democrat Tony Seminerio, telling a prospective “client” that he would “bury” him unless he paid off.
It had entrepreneurs like Democratic Senator Pedro Espada Jr., who set up a community health operation and, prosecutors say, looted it for millions.
It even had a comical nickel-and-dime guy, Democratic Assemblyman Brian McLaughlin, who sent one of his staffers driving on the New York Thruway with his E-ZPass so that McLaughlin could fake time in Albany and collect per diem payments.
New York State has rules against some of those practices, but rarely were they enforced against legislators who were collecting huge sums of cash from companies that wanted laws passed or state contracts awarded.
It has been reported today, March 17, that Mike Davey made up many of the details in his monologue about Apple and the workers who make its electronics at the huge Chinese factory, Foxconn, described in the review below. Some of those facts are true about dangerous working conditions are true, but not as he said them. He described meeting workers poisoned with hexane. In fact, such a problem occurred 1,000 miles away. There have been under-age workers at some Apple suppliers, but he didn’t meet a gaggle of them at Foxconn. His interpreter was reached by another reporter, Rob Schmitz, China correspondent for the radio show Marketplace, and she denied that Davey met 13-year-old workers or a man with a mangled hand. Davey’s response was that he is not a journalist.
March 12, 2012 – Mary O’Grady today used a killing in Haiti linked to bribery of former Haiti Teleco officials to attack the Democrats. She said investigators might uncover the details of the arrangement that Fusion Telecommunications”run by former Democratic Party Finance Chairman Marvin Rosen with Joseph P. Kennedy II and numerous influential Democrats had in Haiti during the Clinton years. She didn’t mention that there is much more evidence of Teleco bribery by IDT, then run by former Republican Congressman James Courter with a host of high-level GOP bigwigs.
Athol Fugard’s 1961 parable about apartheid South Africa, directed by the author at the Signature Theatre, blazes with its audacious concept and staging. It is one of those small number of plays that stand out for both their literary and political significance.
Marieann Meringolo’s rich mellow slightly jazzy alto voice presents Michel Legrand’s romantically charged music with almost theatrical intensity. Legrand, famous for music for such films as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The Thomas Crown Affair, and Yentl, needs someone like Meringolo to provide the necessary drama to his muse.
Feb 27, 2012 – A new documentary, The Wall Street Conspiracy by Kristina Leigh Copeland of Brown Saddle Films, has its premiere in New York March 1st. It exposes the massive scam of naked short selling.
I hated this 1956 play by John Osborne, one of the angry young men of England’s 1950s. That era was a bad time for women in the U.S. and according to the production directed by Sam Gold for the Roundabout Theatre Company, it was true in spades in England.
This pretentious play by the otherwise talented playwright Theresa Rebeck gives writers a bad name. Four wanna be novelists fork over $5000 to get ten lessons from Leonard (Alan Rickman), a failed writer turned book editor, who must represent every nasty, self-centered writer or editor Rebeck ever met.
This could almost be about any wealthy family, except it is not, because they are black. The Levays (we meet the father and kids but not the wife) are rich, because Dad is a neurosurgeon. So they’ve got a summer house on Martha’s Vineyard. In case you doubted his wealth, there is a Romare Bearden on the wall.
The irony of Vivian Bearing, a profession of John Donne’s poetry, fighting a futile battle against Ovarian cancer, is caught in Donne’s most famous work, Death be not proud. It is a challenge that says mortals will cheat death through eternal life. Pulling an IV pole or sitting in a hospital bed, a red baseball cap covering a scalp made bald from chemotherapy, Cynthia Nixon is cynical and acerbic as the 47-year-old professor. She expertly portrays this unflinching woman’s struggle to keep her soul.
Playwright Athol Fugard is most known for distilling into intimate personal stories the physical and spiritual struggles against apartheid in South Africa. In this engrossing play he plies the same theme, but this time it’s not about blacks and coloreds, but about women and non-conformists. A society that keeps the former in thrall will without too much difficulty stomp on the latter. And Fugard asserts that they have to fight back as much as the racial victims.
David Henry Hwang’s Chinglish is a highly improbable but entertaining diversion about a U.S. sign-company owner from Cleveland who goes to China to persuade government tourism officials that they need better translations. For example, Deformed men’s toilet doesn’t quite cut it for handicapped men’s toilet. The play benefits from comic, fast-paced direction by Leigh Silverman.
100Reporters, Jan 19, 2012 — Mitt Romney, who makes his hands-on business experience a talking point in his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, was a member of the board of directors and audit committee of a global company when it paid millions of dollars to settle charges of extracting kickbacks that cheated clients.
The company is Marriott International and the accusers were hotel owners who had hired Marriott to manage their properties under the Marriott name.
In recent weeks, Romney has come under fire for his role at Bain Capital. But his actions as an independent director at Marriott in the late 1990s and again just two years ago open another window on the candidate‘s record in business and leadership qualities.
Eric Schaeffer’s moving, elegant production of Follies is dramatic proof of Steven Sondheim’s brilliance – the subtle combination of emotional focus and scintillating musical panache and wit. It is said best by the show’s name, Follies, which has a double meaning. It refers to the high-kicking vaudeville show the women of the show danced in their youths and to the foolish decisions of human beings. The book is by James Goldman, who is perfectly attuned to Sondheim’s sensibility.
Weird is relative, you might say about the characters in these three rather bizarre comedies about relatives as a connecting theme. The self-involvement of a wife when her husband dies, the revelations set off by a couple who flee a wedding at which one was to be wed, the impact of marital conflict on an unborn son, everything turns on the unexpected, which of course is what makes memorable comedy.
In the mid-1980s I went to Peshawar on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan to write about the war between the Russians and Afghans going on across the divide. It all came rushing back during J.T. Rogers’ gripping theatrical docudrama of what went wrong then (and it was virtually all wrong) with American policy in Afghanistan.
Sutton Foster’s performance in Cole Porter’s frivolous, sophisticated Anything Goes glitters as much as the gold sequins on her clothes. She is one of the great musical actresses of our day, and she has a field day showing it in this 1934 musical, featuring a scintillating score with, in addition to the title song, numbers such as I Get a Kick Out of You, You’re the Top, Easy to Love, and It’s De-lovely. Porter’s music and lyrics are still unmatched for invoking the spirit of light-hearted romance.
Cynical and romantic, Noël Coward manages to be both in this charming pas de quatre about the impossibility of love. And this was in 1930!
Two couples find their honeymoons in the south of France held hostage to the marriage that one of each duo had with the other five years before. Might not be a problem, except the sparks that ignited the earlier romance have not been quenched. In fact, it doesn’t take much for the smoldering embers to ignite.
An increasingly cozy alliance between companies that manufacture processed foods and companies that serve the meals is making students ” a captive market ” fat and sick while pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars in profits. At a time of fiscal austerity, these companies are seducing school administrators with promises to cut costs through privatization. Parents who want healthier meals, meanwhile, are outgunned.
Each day, 32 million children in the United States get lunch at schools that participate in the National School Lunch Program, which uses agricultural surplus to feed children. About 21 million of these students eat free or reduced-price meals, a number that has surged since the recession. The program, which also provides breakfast, costs $13.3 billion a year.
Mary Testa is thrilling in Michael John LaChiusa’s cantata about the true-life Anna Edson Taylor, a gutsy, idiosyncratic woman who in 1901 went over Niagara Falls in an oak barrel she had designed. She was 63, had an overwhelming sense of self and saw this as the defining moment to prove there was greatness in her.
I saw Maureen McGovern at Birdland, the iconic jazz club on West 44th Street in New York. It always amazes me to hear her smooth mix of jazzy, a soupçon of folk, and lyrics that are as smartly political as they get. These are not the standards you might expect at a cabaret. At 61, McGovern channels the 60s and 70s, and her rendition of the Beatles When I’m 64 is the best I’ve ever heard. She presents an ethereal version of Up, Up and Away (Would you like to ride in my beautiful balloon.) She also conveys a feminist idiom: A woman is a fighter, a mighty force of nature. On the folk side of the era, this very versatile performer does a powerful If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song), noting that Pete Seeger has always been a hero of mine. And McGovern has long been a favorite of mine.
Michael West’s play is a charming, stylized, fantastical imagining of a Dublin theater troop that gets caught up in the Irish independence movement over a hundred years ago. It tells the story of some actors’ efforts to found the Irish National Theatre of Ireland and the conflicts and dangers that arise because some of them are also committed to the Cause.
