Nathan Louis Jackson’s play about a black family in Kansas City struggling to achieve a middle class life avoids the pitfalls of sitcom due largely to the four accomplished actors and director Thomas Kail, who breathe life into what on its face is a rather predictable story.
It hangs on whether Malcolm King (an appealing Alano Miller), who has managed to get a masters degree in Connecticut, will give up chances of a good university teaching job under his mentor, an environmental professor, or will he stay home to care for his father William (a warm-spirited Wendell Pierce) who has muscular dystrophy.
Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage smartly shows the disintegration of the thin veneer of civilization that keeps people civil. Reza, perhaps coming from the salon culture of France, has a habit of locating her dramas in living rooms. These tête-à -têtes ought to show the height of culture. Instead, they display the dark sides of polite society.
This story begins with a touted civilized meeting between two couples, one clearly upper class, the other middle class, one couple chic, the other dowdy, to deal with fact that son of the first hit the son of the second. They start out honest, each admitting the family faults. As the evening gathering of nice people progresses, they descend from throwing words into throwing things. Taken further, we see the basic failure of ethical man. It is a fascinating transformation.
Back in 2004, when Chris Christie was the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, his office first heard allegations that IDT Corporation, a Newark, N.J.-based global telecommunications company, was involved in a case of international bribery. No federal criminal case was ever brought against IDT, in contrast to several successful federal prosecutions in similar cases elsewhere. The company is run by James Courter, a former Republican congressman from New Jersey.
Fast forward to the present, and Christie is now the Republican candidate for the governor of New Jersey. And, an examination of campaign finance records shows, Christie has thus far racked up $26,800 in campaign contributions – earning him a total of $80,400 including state matching funds ” from 27 individuals who could have a direct interest in the IDT case.
Oct 17, 2009 – When he was interviewed for the investigative story I did in March on Sodexo’s practice of demanding rebates (ie kickbacks) from suppliers, Sodexo deputy counsel Tom Morse argued that working only with “compliant” vendors was necessary to assure health and safety. (Compliant means they pay rebates.)
He said that “the first thing we vet our vendors for is safety” against food-borne illnesses …”
This charming, vivid musical biography tells the story of two American composers who changed the idiom of western popular music. The curious parallel personal tragedies of Scott Joplin and Irving Berlin exist in contrast to their generally upbeat lively sounds.
In the early 1900s, the two musicians created musical sounds that established a new American music that would echo across this landscape and the world. Both were consummate outsiders: one the son of a slave, the other a Russian immigrant who had escaped the anti-Jewish pogroms with his parents. Mark Saltzman’s play – with the stunning music of Joplin and Berlin – is a lively, appealing, often fascinating look back at what motivated these American musical giants. The motivations and the men were quite different.
In January 1986, I went to the Philippines to chronicle the growing movement against the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship. I was there for the people power revolution, a non-violent massive street protest that in February finally drove Marcos from power. I remember being outside the presidential palace that night and racing through the streets when gunfire erupted. The U.S., which had supported him for decades, flew him and his wife Imelda to Honolulu. Along with documents that detailed how they had looted the country and where the money was.
About the political and personal struggle between Queen Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots, the play underlines the eternal reality of struggles for power. Written by Friedrich Schiller in the 18th century and adapted by Peter Oswald, it is a political thriller that gets a memorable staging by Phyllida Lloyd.
Inter Press Service (IPS), July 14, 2009 – At a recent conference in Miami organised by Offshore Alert, a specialised media organisation focused on financial crime, IPS sat down with veteran investigator Bob Roach to discuss the hurdles facing regulators trying to crack down on tax havens, which cost the U.S. alone an estimated 100 billion dollars annually.
Alan Ayckbourn’s play is an ultra-sophisticated comedy that verges perilously close to sitcom, then skirts around it. The round-robin of three plays is what the clever British author posits against the normal sequential serial, a Rashomon style
The idea behind Noel Coward’s play is quite promising. Charles Condomine (Rupert Everett), a middle-aged murder mystery novelist – obviously quite successful in writing or marriage, from the country villa he inhabits – invites a medium (Angela Lansbury)
Winner of the Gerald Loeb award, the most important prize in financial journalism
Years before his banking empire was shut down in a massive fraud case, Allen Stanford swept into Florida with a bold plan: entice Latin Americans to pour millions into his ventures ” in secrecy.
From a bayfront office in Miami in 1998, he planned to sell investments to customers and send their money to Antigua.
But to pull it off, he needed unprecedented help from an unlikely ally: The state of Florida would have to grant him the right to move vast amounts of money offshore ” without reporting a penny to regulators. He got it.
The mystery of Samuel Beckett’s play about two down-at-the-heels hobos who watch an overbearing master abuse a pathetic slave is the division of the audience into those who laugh and those who don‘t.
Simon Cato (Gavin Lawrence) in his gold and purple stripes is cheeky, witty, a charmer as a jockey. Step back. This is 1861 and he is black; cheeky translates to impudent, (a challenge to power). A witty black man probably had no translation. Colonel Wiley Johnson (Chris Mulkey), who has hired Simon to ride his racing horse, pleads, Will you try and behave like a slave for just a few minutes!
August Wilson’s powerful, moving play conjures up a mood that is both poetic and surreal, though on the face of it, it is completely naturalistic. Perhaps it’s the distance of time, nearly a century ago, 1911, when blacks, only 50 years away from the start of the Civil War, were living on the border between slavery and freedom. Or it could be the ethereal staging by director Bartlett Sher, who excellently follows Wilson’s intent to turn the characters into symbols of their kind as well as real people. Sher starts that by showing the characters first in silhouette.
Key civil society criticisms are that the OECD standards require bilateral agreements for information on request, not automatic multilateral tax information exchange; that they call for only 12 such agreements to be signed by each tax haven; and that getting off the blacklist entails only promises, which have not been kept by tax havens in the past.
Exit the King is Ionesco’s witty satire on the corruption of those in power, given a tongue-in-cheek staging by Neil Armfield with a bravura performance by Geoffrey Rush as King Beringer, the man with only 90 minutes to live. Berenger loves parties. Well, the party’s over. Or about to be. The party, of course, is life.
Inter Press Service (IPS), April 30, 2009 – The U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is hitting pay dirt with a novel legal tactic designed to catch tax evaders. And it’s going to use it to force international banks to give up the names of tax cheats. It’s called the John Doe summons. Using John Doe means the IRS doesn’t know the names of the suspected tax evaders. So it sends a summons to a bank or credit card company that says, Give us the names and account information of all your U.S. clients with secret offshore accounts. Daniel Reeves, an IRS agent in charge of the tax agency’s offshore compliance initiative, afforded an unusual look into the broad swath of projects that seek tax-cheating John Doe’s every place from accounts of the giant Swiss bank UBS to the records of Pay Pal.
I have never seen anything like the three acrobatic contortionists who twisted and bent to the sound of Indian music under the Cirque de Soleil tent on Randall’s Island. Their movements created living sculptures that shifted and held and then moved to another pose. Clad in colorful, patterned skin-tight leotards (costumes by Marie-Chantale Vaillancourt), they were stunning. Memorable.
How can you satirize torture and torturers? If you’re comically stinging playwright Christopher Durang, you stick pretty close to the truth till weirdness and absurdity overtakes the brutality. In this brilliantly funny play, Durang blunts the edge of what might appear to be gruesomely violent by turning reality into farce. He gets a lot of help from director Nicholas Martin who transforms right-wing psychopaths into figures of comedy.
Stanley (Hunter Foster) was an investment banker, a master of leveraged buyouts. As Foster tells it in song and dance, he was an overachiever of insider trading, moving a step up the ladder of legalized crime. Then, at 42, he had a massive heart attack. And died.
Now he’s the conductor on the train in this whimsical pastiche by John Weidman (often clever lyrics by Michael Korie, tuneful music by Scott Frankel) about people on the way to the netherworld – via a New York subway car with silvery benches — instructed to remember the best moments of their lives. It’s where they will spend eternity.
Take an environmentalist attacked by thug hired by a corrupt New Jersey mayor and thrown into a vat of that state’s famous pollutants so that he comes out dripping with green sludge. Add a blind librarian who, when she return books to the shelf, lets go in mid-air so that they fall to the floor. She also writes porn, samples of which we hear. Nothing’s better than a clever political satire, and The Toxic Avenger is the funniest I have seen in many a year.
Tina Howe’s bittersweet look at a tough, smart, legally blind and aging painter railing at the indignities of being warehoused in a Riverdale nursing home is sensitive and often funny. Jane Alexander shines as the painter, Catherine Sargent, who feels suffocated, blocked from her past life and surrounded by people who’ve gone senile.
The Classic Stage Company’s bold mounting of three Greek playwrights’ visions of one of the most famous ancient myths lurches from melodrama to vaudeville and gives audiences some diverting hours in the modern theater.
Three directors have taken on the task, Brian Kulick and Gisela Cardenas staging Agamemnon and Elekra and Paul Lazar helming Orestes. The contemporary translation and adaptation is by Anne Carson. A mostly expert cast moves through the dramas, with special praise deserved by Stephanie Roth Haberle for an in-your-face Klytaimestra, Steve Mellor as the to-the-manor born Agamemnon and then his brother Menelaos, and an astonishing Annika Boras as Elektra, who asserts a daughter’s revenge with studied passion.
This could be the moment when a fatal blow is delivered to the world’s tax havens. Or it could be another largely cosmetic change that allows offshore financial centres such as Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and Liechtenstein to deflect attacks on the system by sacrificing the few tax miscreants that governments catch in their nets.
Decisions at the G20 government leaders meeting in London Apr. 2 will set the direction.
Offshore centres, worried what may happen in London, are falling all over themselves promising to cooperate with the major powers on the trail of tax cheats. But the holes in the tax havens’ promises are as big as those in Switzerland’s famous cheese.
Many believe that automatic exchange of information is the only really effective way to end pandemic tax evasion. Some very good proposals are made in a leaked French paper which is linked to the full story.
