Ken Dilanian, William Browder and State Dept analyst Robert Otto in photo.
Dec 4, 2024 – Maybe you’ve heard of William Browder and his alleged “lawyer” Sergei Magnitsky, who he says the Russians murdered in 2009 after he exposed a multi-million fraud by officials. Browder has told the tale all over the U.S. and Europe. But MSNBC reporter Ken Dilanian had proof it was a fabrication.
Nov 29, 2024 – It’s the 100-year anniversary of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade but there were no floats or remembrance of how it started. It was organized by eastern European immigrants working at Macy’s who recalled the winter festivals of their own lands. Immigrants not noticed here.
The best thing about the revival of “Sunset Boulevard” is the singing by Nicole Scherzinger as the faded film star Norma Desmond. The second best is her famous final line: “I’m ready for my closeup,” now in common parlance. Not so good is the over-the-top camp acting or script.
Film director Joan Micklin Silver once told me that making a film from a book, she had to pull the movie out of the book. But here director John Collins has run the entire text of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby as a reading of Nick Carroway’s narrative and as drama only when dialogue pulls in the dozen actors. Even so, GATZ grabs you so you cannot leave a 6 1/2-hour production. At the end, I saw no empty seats.
“Edges of Ailey” at the Whitney Museum of American Art is a fascinating juxtaposition of videos of the great choreographer’s dances with art works that inspired him.
Louis Armstrong was a sublime performer. This play is a great recreation of his music with terrific dancing, but it’s more vaudeville show than drama. It shifts quickly through his career as a black artist. Some interesting stuff about dealing with gangsters and Hollywood racism but too much about his four wives. Best is James Monroe Iglehart as Armstrong who has brilliantly copied his gravelly voice.
Director Kenny Leon has cut Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play from 3 hours to 1 hour 40. I was grateful. The play on the life of small-town America covers the years from 1901 to 1913. For the period, gas lamps are hung out over the orchestra. The set is made of wood chairs, a weathered wall, an old spinet piano. But the town seems sealed in glass, with no references to the outside world.
The hills of California in Jez Butterworth’s engrossing feminist play are not real but mirages in a story of working-class dreams and desperation. It’s 1955, and Veronica (Laura Donnelly) is consumed with making her four young girls a world-class music success. Like many a Mama Rose, her chief goal appears to be liberation from her own life, which is a running a Blackpool B&B called “Seaview,” from which you can’t see the sea. I say “feminist” not because I think the author claims that but because it is about the destruction of women by the patriarchy of the time.
This powerful musical drama is about a group of artistic friends – musicians, wall spray painter, photographer – who, prompted by the political radical among them, organize participation in the 2011 “Arab Spring” movement in Egypt that brought down U.S.-supported dictator Hosni Mubarak. It was written by Daniel and Patrick Lazour, brothers who grew up in Massachusetts.
Every fall over three days, some of the best cabaret artists in the country appear at the Mabel Mercer Cabaret Convention at Rose Hall at Lincoln Center. If you never go to any cabaret in the year, you must go to this one. Which of course will hook you on cabaret forever!
It was glorious in New York for the Halloween Parade, temperature in the 70s. And here’s what I loved, some politics, some immigrant culture (if I can say “immigrant”), music and dancing. And always great puppets, as you recall that’s how it started with the Bread and Puppet Theatre.
Good propaganda is subtle. You don’t know it’s propaganda. Erika Sheffer’s play “Vladimir” is as subtle as a sledgehammer. She and her family immigrated to the U.S. from the Soviet Union in 1975, 15 years before Glasnost. She hates the new state of Russia with a passion.
“To Claude AI: Please write this theater review in the style of critic Lucy Komisar.”
Lucy Komisar’s Theatre Review: “The Plagiarist’s Dilemma.” [My comments in italics.]
Jacob McNeal’s latest play, starring Robert Downey, attempts to grapple with the thorny issues of AI, plagiarism, and literary integrity, but ultimately falls flat in its execution. [Well, not totally flat.] The production, which feels more like a disjointed television serial than a cohesive theatrical experience, meanders through a series of scenes that fail to captivate or provoke. [Not true by the end.]
The under-story of David Henry Hwang’s play is more important than the obvious story line.
In this compelling autobiographical work, DHH (a strong Daniel Dae Kim, playing Hwang), tells how he challenged a decision to cast white British actor Jonathan Pryce as the Eurasian pimp in “Miss Saigon.” Pryce is shown with taped Asian-style slanted eyes. In the play, a Vietnamese woman, 17, who turned to prostitution to survive, kills herself so the child she had with a soldier can go to America. How racist is that! Send the kid to the wonderful country that destroyed yours!
Sept 26. 2024 – Hello. I’m Lucy Komisar. I’m a journalist.
So, I wanted to ask whether any of these things had led to the situation now: First, the NATO expansion to the east, against the promise made to Gorbachev. The support of the 2014 coup against an elected government of Ukraine because it wanted an economic deal with Russia instead of the EU. Eight years of Ukraine bombing the breakaway Donbas of Russia(n) speakers who were opposed to the coup. And then the U.S. supporting the military that ended up on the border, about to invade, in the Donbas that caused the Russian invasion. Did any of this happen? And by the way, you mentioned the Minsk Accords, and those were violated because the U.S. and the U.K. told Zelensky don’t do it. So it seems to me, from my vantage point, that NATO and the U.S. have been using this war as a proxy war against the Russians, and the poor Ukrainians have been the cannon fodder.
This play unintentionally exposes the mainstream political fakery about the January 6 protest by Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol. And also the treachery of a son who turns in his father to the FBI even though he knows the father, distraught at a downturn costing his job, drinks, takes Zantac for anxiety and is prone to exaggerate.
The performers in Gerard Alessandrini’s “Forbidden Broadway” are routinely as good or better than those they mimic and satirize, and this year’s is no exception.
In “The Roommate,” by playwright Jen Silverman, we are thrust into a mismatched living arrangement that teeters on the precipice of absurdity, leaving audiences questioning the credibility of its characters and narrative. Directed by Jack O’Brien, this production features the formidable talents of Patti LuPone as Robyn and Mia Farrow, splendid as Sharon, yet even their seasoned performances struggle against a script and mood that often feel more suited for a sitcom than a stage play.
In the latest Broadway revival of “Once Upon a Mattress,” Sutton Foster reigns supreme, solidifying her place in the pantheon of American musical theater greats. This whimsical take on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Princess and the Pea,” with book by Dean Fuller, Jay Thompson, and Marshall Barer, adapted by Amy Sherman-Palladino, lyrics by Barer, music by Mary Rodgers, proves the perfect showcase for Foster’s incomparable talents.
Aug 10, 2024 – This story tells of a conflict between a couple in the Bahamas who claim that UBS scammed them by taking their money and making fake trades into U.S. markets. They base their claim on UBS’ failure to supply required trade confirmations. However, some of the documents they supply do show money going in and out of their account for securities trades. The couple speak volumes about their charge and UBS declines to comment, saying only, “We believe these allegations have no merit.” And they have spent ten years fighting the couple in court to deny them a trial on the merits. There the evidence is strong that UBS can be abusive toward small clients and that the Bahamas court system is corrupt.
Max Wolf Friedlich’s “Job” is a riveting psychological detective story that blurs the lines between truth and deception, sanity and madness. And evil. This taut two-hander, subtly directed by Michael Herwitz, keeps the audience on edge.
With a book by Kristoffer Dias and music and lyrics by singer Alicia Keys, this is presented as Keys’ own story. At least that her “songs and experiences growing up in NY inspire a story made for Broadway.” It turns out “inspire” can be interpreted many ways.
Ali (Maleah Joi Moon) plays Alicia Keys. She is black. Moon’s voice is strong and rich in the show’s jazz, soul and rock. Her mother, Jersey (a fine Shoshana Bean), is white. Davis, her father (a realistic Brandon Victor Dixon), is black. Ali and Jersey live in the huge artists’ cooperative on West 42nd Street near the Hudson River in the neighborhood called Hell’s Kitchen. Davis has nothing to do with the family.
“The Outsiders” by Adam Rapp and Justin Levine is based on a novel written for teenagers by a teenager (she was 16) and tells of kids full of angst. The youths are poor, some suffering from addiction, and they resent kids of their age with money. Some still have dreams of getting out to a better life. So this is about class. And turns out the rich kids don’t feel all that better off.
If you plan only one thing for your visit to Key West, it should be a sunset cruise. It is the iconic experience going into the Atlantic Ocean in the late afternoon in time to catch the 6pm sunset.
If you took the white cards explaining many of the “art” works (some colorful shmattas, geometrical designs, my favorite fake art, a display of medicine cabinets), threw them in the air and then attached them haphazardly to any of the works, they would be the same: “this work is about the oppression of (fill in the blanks) and the destruction of (the environment or fill in the blanks) by predatory capitalism.”
