“Sondheim’s Old Friends” is producer Cameron Mackintosh’s love letter to Stephen Sondheim’s greatest shows. Which he had produced. Better than a memorial service. For the rest of us, it’s also a chance to see Lea Salonga, a brilliant actor as well as singer.
May 22, 2025 – The NYC Dance Parade held every May is a glorious tribute to dance from kid culture to ethnic dance, to the professionals and fans who march and kick or watch along Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street.
At the Council on Foreign Relations May 14, 2025, I asked Ed Luce, author of new book about Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, who admitted he supported the mujaheddin in Afghanistan to draw in the Russians and make it “their Vietnam” – though in the end, after the Russians left in a year, the US went in and it was their Vietnam for 20 years — whether his Polish hatred of Russia became a permanent element of U.S. foreign policy.
It’s the Marilyn Monroe story, “Bombshell,” no really her story. Though it takes a while to figure that out. (Clues abound.) It starts in typical Broadway musical fashion with dance to jazzy music, with the Marilyn figure Ivy Lynn (Robyn Hurder), doing a “Let Me Be Your Star” number. Seems cliché. Disappointment. But wait!
At a time of book-banning, what could be more timely than a look back at the trial of nearly 100 years ago where earlier yahoos were upset at the 4-letter words in James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” That probably got a lot of people to read, or at least start the book. And it is the basis for an engrossing and very entertaining reenactment by Colin Murphy.
Kimberly Belflower’s takedown of “The Crucible” is clever and sophisticated with a dénouement that will take you by surprise even if the parallel story has been out there all along to be discovered.
Sarah Snook is brilliant as Dorian Gray and all the other 25 characters in this morality play about the decadent British upper class.
The Oscar Wilde novel, written in 1890, is about a young self-centered fop who doesn’t want to grow old, and, after his portrait is painted by a friend, makes a pact with the devil (as it were), to have his face stay the same while the ravages of time and his excesses are shown on the painting secreted in his childhood playroom.
“Good Night, and Good Luck,” the smartly-staged story of how news reporter Edward R. Murrow helped bring down the malicious “junior senator from Wisconsin,” Joseph McCarthy, occurred in the early 1950s but could have been set today.
Written by George Clooney and Grant Heslov, directed by David Cromer, it’s about how a powerful political figure targeted people he charged were communists or sympathizers and destroyed their lives. How the country’s politicians stayed silent. How he was abetted by malevolent media figures and their cowardly supporters. And how citizens were smothered into lethargy by TV’s breads and circuses.
I’ve been on a lot of Key West sunset cruises but a moon cruise was a first! Boats at night are more relaxing, easier on your eyes. Key West is lit up by the moon which brightens everything. A full moon happens once a month.
The now iconic painter of Key West is Mario Sanchez, whose folkloric style captured the old town he grew up in. He was born in 1908 in Key West, the descendant of Cuban immigrants. He was self-taught and his works, labeled “primitive,” are complex, charming and, fortunately for aficionados, in the permanent collection of Key West’s Art and History Museum. His work spans 70 years; he died in 2005. Currently, the museum features a major exhibit of Sanchez’s work. Here are some of my favorites, inspired by the island’s people, history and culture.
Amy Sherald’s exhibit at the Whitney Museum is a collection of portraits of people who are black but who could be anyone from the nature of the lives they project: a worker, a tractor driver, a lady with a bicycle, an equestrian. And Michele Obama, which is what got Sherald some fame. The faces are flat, the flesh colors are black but cool. Sherald, born 1993 in Columbus, GA, shows what black people would look like sans racism. Workers. Doing sports. Being the smartly dressed wife of a president. (She also has a painting of Breonna Taylor.)
“Glass,” “Kill,” and “What If If Only” are smart Caryl Churchill plays, surreal metaphors of how people live as individuals and in societies. Of course, they are metaphors, and it takes Churchill’s inventiveness and director James MacDonald’s direct realistic portrayals to make them engage you. They were first presented in London at the Royal Court Theatre in 2019.
Moral hypocrisy never goes out of style, and Norwegian playwright Hendrik Ibsen was a master at demolishing it. “Ghosts,” then called Gengangere (“the ones who return,”) published in 1881 and presented at that time in Norway and the US, aroused the fury of the smug burghers on both sides of the Atlantic with its searing portrait of an honorable gentleman as sexual predator. Perhaps because Ibsen not only took on forbidden subjects such as sexual abuse and venereal disease, but because pillars of society such as clergy were shown to share guilt for the evil done to “polite” society’s victims.
The Anderson Brothers’ performances at Birdland and other venues are more than just jazz. They have become icons of jazz history performance. They delight audiences with the stories of the jazz eras and musicians that they then bring to musical life. The other night at Birdland, Will and Peter on the horns went through decades from Dixieland to Coltrane.
“The Buena Vista Social Club” is about a Cuban band founded in 1996 made up of musicians that had played decades earlier, in the late 1950s, importantly on the cusp of the 1960 Cuban revolution. Their album released in 1997 became an international success. Some performed in the U.S. and Europe, and the band was the subject of a Wim Wenders documentary in 1999.
Usually, I don’t like family dramas. But this one is different, not hokey or predictable. “Purpose” by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has more twists than a corkscrew. Though the drinks here are hard liquor, not wine. And director Phylicia Rashad, also a fine actor, keeps the pace so fast but smooth that you almost run to keep up. It is a not-to-miss play by an author who has become one of today’s not-to-miss playwrights.
“Vanya” is a gay play imagining the characters of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” where the men are somewhat interesting and the women are pseudo females that no real women would ever recognize.
This slow-moving political thriller sets a State Department official in Senegal (or does she work for another agency?) against young Peace Corps volunteer who “reallocated” U.S. government bags of concrete to help build a community garden instead of fortifying his house against deep state expected Muslim terrorist attacks. (They haven’t happened.) She will send him home unless he cooperates on a plan to catch a purported terrorist. It builds slowly and gets exciting only in the last third of the 80-minute show.
The best part of “Redwood” is the realistic climbing and aerial dancing off and around the trunk of the massive tree. The vertical movement that blends contemporary dance and climbing was created by Melicio Estrella of the dance company Bandaloop. The performers use harnesses and ropes and instead of just climbing up, they move out and soar and twist like circus acrobats. The moments when Idina Menzel and other actors climb and fly out over the audience are thrilling.
This is the most pretentious and boring show I’ve seen in years, sometimes seeming to last as long as the span of years 1816 to 2240 when the actions take place. For a science fiction play about artificial intelligence, it is utterly devoid of imagination.
The women have head scarves and speak Farsi in “English” by Sanaz Toossi, an Iranian-American who won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for drama with this play. Set in 2008, the characters are taking a class in Iran to perfect their English to go to America. The story is about language as identity — to speak to our souls.
Feb 3, 2025 – A key operative behind years of attacks on Tulsi Gabbard, now focused on her nomination as Director of National Intelligence, is a corrupt Democratic Party collaborator, William Browder, who played a role in the 2016 Russiagate attacks falsely accusing Donald Trump of conniving with Russia in his campaign against Hillary Clinton. Browder is a conman whose attacks on Tulsi are part of a story he invented to get the U.S. government to protect him from Russia going after him for some $100 million in evaded taxes and financial fraud. It’s known as Browder’s Magnitsky hoax.
From the moment Audra McDonald enters to blasting horn music this is her show. Forget the great actors of the past, Merman to LuPone. With superlative acting and a stunning soprano, in every number her voice soars. McDonald is not just a singer who acts, with deep feeling and expressive moods, but an actor who sings, and it takes the play to a whole new dimension.
Dec 19, 2024 – British journalist Ross Ashcroft did an interview with me in 2019 about Russiagate and the William Browder Magnitsky hoax called The Crumbling State of Propaganda. But he never posted it. contacted him repeatedly and he did not reply. He had asked me to redo the April interview because his lawyers blocked the piece as too “tough.” I did in November and toned it down. Not facts, just attitude. Did Browder make threats, as is his habit, or were they just fearful of his animus? But, finally, Ashcroft is responsible. He has just died. Here is the video and the transcript. You decide if a good journalist would have agreed to kill it. This is why the truth about conman and fraudster William Browder does not get out: he is protected by the self-described alternative as well as the legacy media. It matters as the Browder hoax is the Rosetta stone for the U.S. demonization of Russia.
“The Village Gate Reunion Show” at Urban Stages pulled together singers that met and performed on the “patio” of that famous Greenwich Village jazz club and theater when they were young, about 40 years ago. Not all have seen each other since then. You could hear the talent some had, still have. It’s a nostalgia show.
