Artist Judy Chicago is known for her feminist work “The Dinner Party” (1974-79), plates depicting women’s lives, on permanent exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. Not as well known, but very pertinent now, a few decades later, she created another dinner, “Rainbow Shabbat,” challenging hostilities between religious partisans.
Patrick Page’s brilliant one-man show on how Shakespeare invented the villain is a combination of theater piece, master class and college literature lecture. In a purple pullover and vest, before a red curtain, through his acting and explanations, he shows how William Shakespeare developed his villainous characters from crudely evil to confounded with moral dilemmas, even if they defeated conscience and killed at the end. And how he dealt with the mythology of evil in popular culture, such as the Jew as rapacious money-lender and Lady Macbeth conjuring evil spirits.
Reading another of the “Kissinger the killer” stories, I came across a link in Rolling Stone to a piece I wrote in 1999 that revealed for the first time how Kissinger met with Pinochet and told him he though what he was doing was great to fight the Communists. I had discovered links to documents in the Ford Presidential Library and gotten them through a FOIA request.
“Spamalot” was a 1975 Monty Python film and a 2005 Broadway play famous for offending particular sectors of society. Does that hold up? Can you still insult significant groups without being cancelled? Can you attack sacred cows (vaches) without being de-platformed? On the other hand, has book and lyric writer Eric Idle taken the easy way out by sucking up to the groups that wield power in the theatrical system? And can I get away with suggesting it?
Nov 24, 2023 – This is my favorite float of New York’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, a charming snowflake train trailed by clowns. I like it not just because of the elegance, but because it is not selling something. Not a kids cartoon show or movie. Not fast food or bad food.
Nov 2, 2023 – Today is the United Nations International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists. A week ago, at the Council on Foreign Relations, I asked Suzanne Nossel, CEO* of PEN and a former State Department official, why she has not led a campaign to free Julian Assange, who I described as the world’s most famous journalist political prisoner, imprisoned by the U.S. and UK.
Nov 1, 2023 – The annual Greenwich Village Halloween Parade is like a movie you’ve liked a lot, repeatedly. Maybe the “Casablanca” of parades. It is led by the giant skeleton stick puppets created by the late Ralph Lee, who started the parade as a small event in the 1970s. From the artists’ residence Westbeth at Bank Street and the Hudson River, it flowed out into the streets and took over the Village. Alongside the skeletons are just as giant billowy puppets.
This play is about class and feminism, and also about the corruption of capitalism.
It is a smart satire by British playwright Elizabeth Baker staged in London in 1917. Baker started out as an office typist and wrote about office workers and shop girls and their struggles for emancipation against the bonds of class and gender. She was a supporter of the suffragist movement.
Oct 29, 2023 – I wrote about Israeli apartheid over 40 years ago. I visited Israel and the West Bank in 1981. Egyptian president Anwar Sadat had just been assassinated, though my visit had been planned before that. First I went on a trip organized for journalists by the Israeli government. Then, believing I hadn’t been shown the full story, I went months later on my own. This is what I wrote for The Nation, prescient in the title, “The West Bank as Bantustan.”
This annual series by the Mabel Mercer Foundation presents a selection from among the most talented and interesting established and new cabaret singers in the U.S. And occasionally a few from abroad. People attend as if it were an annual family event. And indeed, at intermission and after the show, the singers come out to the large entrance hall to hang out and chat with the cabaret community.
“Purlie Victorious,” playwright-actor Ossie Davis’s surreal satire about racism in the Jim Crow South, was first produced in 1961 at the cusp of the new civil rights movement. The Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, NC, had just taken place in February 1960.
Sept 28, 2023 – Lucy Komisar asks Irish PM Varadkar about Ireland as a tax haven to which American corporations transfer intellectual property so that Ireland helps them cheat the U.S. of taxes. He punts.
Sept 23, 2023 – My question to NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg at the Council on Foreign Relations meeting Thurs Sept 22 elicited his lies about NATO’s “not one inch East” agreement and the US-sponsored 2014 coup against elected head of Ukraine. I was stopped before talking about Ukraine shelling of Donbass from 2014 and Ukraine forces massed on Donbass border that provoked Russian to move troops in. Stoltenberg’s response is a defense of U.S. hegemony.
Betty Friedan would have loved this musical, especially Brooke Dillman who plays O.F.G., the Original Fairy Godmother with wavy hair, a raspy voice and assertiveness that make her the feminist author’s double. I know, because I worked with Friedan in 1969 and 70.
David Byrne’s pop musical docudrama professes to be the story of Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos, their rise to power in the Philippines and the challenge to their dictatorship by Ninoy Aquino, who the Marcos government assassinated. It’s a smashing production. But a flawed history.
A non-salacious play about sex? Probably not these days. You’d have to go back to the last century. And that is just what Sandy Rustin does, to 1923 in fact, exactly a hundred years ago. Rustin’s sex farce, “The Cottage,” is a hokey funny slapstick shambles set in a gorgeous English country house where, instead of the ubiquitous moose head on the wall there is an end table atop the base of a stuffed dog. (Kudos for set designer Paul Tate dePoo III.) And for director Jason Alexander who manages the farce perfectly; it is very clever, never silly.
It’s a funny hokey clever story that catches you unawares with its smarts. Because it’s about corn. Which the folks in the story grow and is at the center of their lives. The residents of this corn town have chosen to be cut off from the world. They live in a huge wooded space and celebrate a chicken’s birthday and goats getting married.
Don’t ban great white male authors, rewrite them! What would happen if a feminist Anne Hathaway did a revision of husband Will Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”? Where Juliet and other female characters in the story turn out to have agency? It’s a musical delight (book by David West Read, music and lyrics by Max Martin), even for someone who is not a fan of pop rock. Match that with bravura performances by Lorna Courtney in a star-turn as Juliet and Betsy Wolfe as a tough, appealing Anne, add smashing R&B and rock dancing. I loved it.
British playwright-director Robert Icke is fast becoming one of the most important English-language theater makers. Taking the anti-Semitism at the center of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1912 play “Professor Bernhardi” to illuminate today’s identity madness, he has created an essential work.
What you have to understand about this play by Doug Wright is television. It’s not just about television, it is television. It’s not just about the Jack Paar Show of the 1950s, or much of it, it is the show. So, forget subtlety. Push up the jokes. And hit on celebrities. Jane Mansfield is not there, but let’s talk about her.
“Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground” is fake hagiography about a man who signed off on CIA coups that killed democracies and multi-thousands of people.
Dwight David Eisenhower was U.S. president from 1953 to 61. This play by Richard Hellesen fits perfectly into the 1950s media pablum of “Father Knows Best” and “Ozzie and Harriet” that spoon-fed audiences the fake lives of families without dark spots. This play invents a president who had a few minor defects, but nothing serious. Nothing that could be called violations of international law. Or define a war criminal of which the U.S. has had many.
This play is proof that Lorraine Hansberry had several lives, not just that of a black woman telling a civil rights story in her famous “A Raisin in the Sun,” but also a Greenwich Village bohemian among arty people, in this script an actress and wife of a would-be folk café impresario whose friends and neighbors include a playwright, painter, and a bookstore staffer.
May 21, 2023 – It rained on their parade, but the show went on for gutsy dance companies in this year’s New York City street dance event that moves from 17th Street down Sixth Avenue, east across 8th Street for performances on stages at Tompkins Square Park. It had stopped raining by then!
“Prima Facie” and “Walking with Bubbles” are about two women who get into terrible situations with men, a casual lover and a husband. In the first, a smart 20-something barrister at a London “chambers” routinely goes to bars with friends and gets drunk. After one drinking bout, she invites a colleague to her apartment. They previously had sex in his chambers office. She doesn’t want sex now; the booze made her throw up. He carries her from the bathroom to the bed and rapes her. It is fiction.
The opening is a rooftop that reminds one of an Edward Hopper painting. It’s New York post-war 1946. People are jitterbugging. Perched on fire escapes of tenements. There is a jazzy feel. A stunning number, a showstopper in a show that is full of them, features a dozen construction workers on a dizzying high girder in Hoboken with a view of the Hudson River and Manhattan skyline tap dancing along and around it. I don’t recall a dance number like it!
