Shakespeare certainly understood the neurotic jealousy of husbands. In this play, a very foolish man named Leontes locks up his wife and orders the death of his infant daughter out of belief the child was fathered by his best friend. His metaphor is of a man who has his pond fish’d by his next neighbor.
Consider a play where the villain is a Jewish banker who demands the murder of a client who couldn’t pay his debt. Is this a TV crime show picking up on the current hostility toward Goldman Sachs? No, take it back more than four centuries. Shakespeare’s play is believed to have been written between 1596 and 98, so there wasn’t any financial crisis going on, that we know about. What’s fascinating about the play and Al Pacino’s dazzling portrayal of the banker, Shylock, is the sociological take of a time when Jews were reviled; Jews were bankers (money-lenders) because Christians were told by their church they couldn’t do it; Christians borrowed from the Jews when they needed money; and Christian reviled the Jews for lending to them
July 21, 2010 –
The global food services company Sodexo, which I exposed last year for exacting rebates from suppliers and charging clients full price, has agreed to a $20 million settlement with NY Attorney General for that illicit practice.
I’m usually suspicious about people who do plays about themselves. But this autobiographical cabaret was a lot better than I expected. Sherie Rene Scott is certainly very self-involved, perhaps par for the course among performers, but she’s also got something interesting to say and, directed by Michael Mayer, an appealing way of saying it. Everyday Rapture is what happens when godliness turns into show biz.
June 30, 2010 – Last night I accepted a Gerald Loeb award trophy for the Allen Stanford investigation. The Loeb awards are the highest honors in U.S. financial journalism. I and my colleagues, Miami Herald reporters Michael Sallah and Rob Barry, won in the category of medium & small newspapers. The prize submission was entitled Keys to the Kingdom: How State Regulators Enabled a $7 Billion Ponzi Scheme.
What happens when the victim becomes the victimizer? When a man’s spirit is so thwarted that he turns hard in his soul and becomes so self-centered that he can’t love or care for anyone else? It’s the message of August Wilson’s tough 1983 play set in the late fifties that attempts to explain the dysfunctional working class black men who were being studied to death.
June 25, 2010 – Another award for the Stanford investigation, this time from the National Press Club in Washington DC, bestowing the prize for Newspaper Consumer Journalism.
The NPC award categories are consumer reporting, Washington correspondence, press criticism, regional, diplomatic and environmental reporting, online journalism, freedom of the press, political journalism, animal reporting, and geriatric writing.
Can an art lecture in the form of a theater piece push you to the edge of your seat? This rich, engrossing play by John Logan does! Painter Mark Rothko’s inflated sense of self collides with the challenges of youth’s new visions in Logan’s fascinating pas de deux about the meaning of art and its indelible connection to commerce.
Alex Timbers’ play is a stunning satirical revisionist history of America’s seventh president Andrew Jackson as a genocidal Indian killer. It’s done in a rock idiom that takes the edge off and makes him seem almost a man of his time as well as/rather than a political murderer. But with some present day vernacular, it takes on immediacy. It’s a commentary on the past and also on the present day politics of state killing that is rare in its gut-wrenching toughness.
A stage musical/documentary may be a new genre and this one, created and directed by Stephen Sondheim’s longtime collaborator James Lapine, works smartly and engagingly to provide a tour through the life and works of the master songwriter. The man who is known for sustained peaks of imagination comes to life through a very innovative combination of video and musical numbers, with an appealing cast led by Vanessa Williams and Tom Wopat.
This almost tongue-in-cheek celebration of sex would imply that passion begets foolishness, especially among men. As we watch the absurdly shifting liaisons and desires among the mostly upper class protagonists, we understand the genesis of the play’s famous song performed by the actress Desirée (Catherine Zeta-Jones), Quick, send in the clowns. Don’t bother, they’re here.
Dreariness is the design motif of Gordon Edelstein’s persuasive staging of Tennessee Williams’ 1944 memory play about a family trapped in unhappiness and illusion. Dreary dark wallpaper hovers over the single bed with a rose spread in the New Orleans hotel room that the writer, Tom (Patch Darragh), Williams’ alter ego, inhabits. The same claustrophobic space becomes the St. Louis tenement rooms he shared with his mother Amanda (Judith Ivey) and sister Laura (Keira Keeley) .
A table is set with bread and cakes, back-dropped by a forest created from a jumble of cross-hatched planks painted and splotched to suggest leaves. A servant is angry at the housekeeper who enters the space without warning. Do we barge in on you? Class stratification and conflicts ripple through this richly comic production of Alexander Ostrovsky’s satire of a Russian aristocracy high on self-importance and low on cash.
The American Interest, July-Aug 2010 (online May 18, 2010) –
As I write this, the U.S. Senate is debating a major financial reform bill in which the credit default swap, a kind of derivative, plays a significant part. An amendment to that bill, proposed by Senators Carl Levin (D-MI) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR), would ban banks from proprietary trading. There are a lot of high-rolling bankers who do not want that amendment to pass, because it will mess up their plans to repatriate foreign profits into the United States, untaxed, by trading in derivatives on their own accounts. The clearinghouse ICE Trust U.S. forms a central part of these plans.
What is ICE Trust U.S., and who owns it? ICE US Holding Co., which was established in 2008 as the parent of ICE Trust U.S., is located in the Cayman Islands. Yet none of the owners of ICE US Holding Co. are based in the Caymans. Among the owners of the Cayman‘s company are Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, which are headquartered in New York. Bank of America, which now owns Merrill Lynch, is based in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Martin McDonagh takes weird to new levels in this ultimate shaggy dog story. It’s bizarre and funny and if you suspend disbelief and don’t take it too seriously, you will have a good time. It seems that a 17-year-old kid was playing catch in Spokane, Washington, when six hillbillies dragged him to the railroad tracks, forced his hand on the rail and watched while a train sped by and sliced it off. Then they used it to wave him good-bye. He, Carmichael (Christopher Walken), decided if he didn‘t die he would retrieve his hand and pay them back. He has spent the ensuing 47 years doing just that.
May 5, 2010 –
I have won the Sigma Delta Chi journalism award for Non-Deadline Reporting (Daily Circulation 100,001+) for “Allen Stanford’s Miami Connection.” This is the exposé I brought to the Miami Herald that told how the Florida Banking Department allowed Stanford to set up an unregulated office to move money offshore. I worked with two Herald reporters, who shared the award. It is one of the country’s major journalism prizes.
According to the Society of Professional Journalists, which presents the award, Judges chose the winners from over 1,300 entries in categories covering print, radio, television and online. The awards recognize outstanding work published or broadcast in 2009. They will be presented Oct. 2 during the 2010 SPJ Convention and National Journalism Conference in Las Vegas.
RALEIGH, North Carolina, Inter Press Service (IPS), April 27, 2010 – Robert Moses, 75, a legendary leader and organiser in the 1960s U.S. civil rights movement, was huddled with a dozen people discussing plans for a campaign to make quality education a constitutional right. On one side was his son Omowale, 38. Next to Omo was John Doar, 89, head of the civil rights division of the U.S. Justice Department in 1960-67 and prosecutor of the major civil rights cases of that era.
The age differences were noticeable at the conference they attended this month in Raleigh, North Carolina, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. It was a moment for the elders – as high school and college students at the conference called them – to pass the torch to a new generation of activists.
April 19, 2010 –
Last week, I was at Shaw University in Raleigh, NC, for the 50th anniversary conference of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which led the sit-in movement of the 1960s. I attended SNCC’s founding conference at Shaw in April 1960.
That meeting had been called in response to the February 1,, 1960 protest in Greensboro, NC, when four black students sat at an all-white Woolworth’s lunch counter, demanded to be served and were arrested.
Million Dollar Quartet is hot on music and slight on story, the latter a chance 1956 gathering of country and rock innovators Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis at a Memphis recording studio. Fans will like the stars’ doubles’ performances of the songs that made them famous. And this jukebox musical jumps off the charts whenever Levi Kreis, who plays Jerry Lee Lewis, dominates the stage with his wild jazzy piano playing and furious rock lyrics.
Creating a richness in their arrangement that adds to the beauty of each poem, director Peter Brook has ordered 31 Shakespearean sonnets, dramatically recited by Natasha Parry and Michael Pennington, to create a striking theater piece. It elegantly expresses love as it consumes men and women in the highs and lows of their relationships and into their later years. The poems are grouped to praise love that lasts through time;and to plumb the pain of separation; the torments of jealousy, self-deception, and guilt; and the sorrows of older age. That doesn’t quite make a play, but it’s more than a poetry reading.
This is not the kind of black tie London cocktail party that Noel Coward was wont to attend. There may be champagne poured and secret infidelities going on, but the darkness that bubbles out of those glasses up reminds one of Albee or Pinter. The Actors Company Theatre has mounted a striking production of T.S. Eliot’s 1950 play that one won’t soon forget.
Horton Foote’s story of a young boy growing to manhood in rural Texas in the early decades of the last century is so gripping, and elegantly performed, that it’s hard to acknowledge that the mundane events of family interactions, marriage, divorce, illness and death in the extended Robideaux clan are in themselves, presented with great subtlety by Michael Wilson, understated and sometimes almost without great drama. Or else, they are the drama of the every day.
Valerie Harper channels Tallulah Bankhead. Her acting is so on the mark, so mesmerizing, that you would swear that the 30s stage and screen actress had come back to life. Her wit biting and risqué; her intelligence sharp; her vulgarity in your face, her talent opulent make you wish you had lived in her time.
Helen (Abigail Breslin) is 10, a wild child, throwing tantrums, screaming. Annie (Alison Pill) is 20, saucy and opinionated. She says, The only time I have trouble is when I’m right which is so often.
Both of them are whip-smart as well as strong-minded, and William Gibson’s 1985 play tells the fascinating story of how teacher Annie Sullivan got Helen Keller, deaf and blind since infancy, to understand, to touch-sign, and to express herself so brilliantly that she became a world-famous traveler and lecturer. The fact that all this occurs in a small town in 1880s Alabama makes it the more astonishing.
This Kander and Ebb show, given an astonishing and dazzling staging by director Susan Stroman, tells the story of what happens to nine blacks accused of collaborating in the rape of two white women in Alabama in 1931. The mood is a jazzy operetta. The dramatic vignettes of the story are interspersed with numbers of a minstrel show, which allows you to catch your breath between horrific events and adds the element of satire.
Who better to craft a political musical than John Kander and Fred Ebb, who wrote the 1993 classic Kiss of the Spiderwoman, about the movie fantasies of a prisoner tortured by the Argentine dictatorship that brutalized the country nearly half a century ago. And director-choreographer Susan Stroman stages this in a cutting, jazzy minstrel style that takes irony to new levels.
