Social Justice Magazine
Joe Nocera, a New York Times business writer, complained recently that Oliver Stone’s new movie, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, fails to instruct audiences about the villainous greed that produced a crash. Stone should have given audiences better insight into causes of the financial disaster, argues Nocera. That instruction was workable, Nocera asserts, because events that took place on … [Read more...]
Add Limelight: The Story of Charlie Chaplin to the Left Coast’s growing trend of left-leaning stage productions. This musical stresses the personal in the first act and the political in the second act, and brilliantly, dialectically reveals the relationship between the two. Young Charlie’s (Jake Schwenke, who appeared in another play about an oppressed British boy, Billy Elliot) trials and … [Read more...]
In this prison drama Robert De Niro plays probation officer Jack Mabry, who must rule on the upcoming possible release of the quirky, tattooed, cornrow-ed Stone (Edward Norton). During their first meeting, Stone discusses what a Rick James-like super sex freak his wife is, and how he can’t wait to rejoin her on the outside so he can get his freak on again with Lucetta. As a critic, I try to … [Read more...]
There must be something in the zeitgeist: Voices: A Legacy to Remember is the fourth L.A. play I’ve seen recently that takes a sort of “people’s history” look at America, with an emphasis on the role Blacks played on this Continent. However, unlike the Actors’ Gang’s Break the Whip and the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum’s Carry It On!, but like the Stella Adler Theatre’s The Good … [Read more...]
Writer/director Chris D’Arienzo’s Barry Munday is a droll sex comedy minus sex with a gifted ensemble cast that’s extremely enjoyable to watch. Patrick Wilson, who was so good opposite Kate Winslet in 2006’s heavy sex drama Little Children, takes a comedic turn here as the title character, an unrepentant male chauvinist pig whose objectification of women is derailed by a quirky quirk of … [Read more...]
The night after I saw Il Postino, Pablo Neruda, was back in the news: While barricaded in his hospital room during a coup attempt mounted by rightwing policemen, Ecuador’s embattled left-leaning President Rafael Correa quoted the people’s poet: “You can cut the flowers, But you can’t stop the Spring.”In the opera Il Postino Mexico-born composer/librettist Daniel Catan adapts Antonio … [Read more...]
Every once in a while there’s an uplifting work of art that makes one feel glad to be alive. L.A. Opera’s exuberant production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s 1786 The Marriage of Figaro (Le Nozze di Figaro), conducted by none other than Placido Domingo himself, is one of those rare artistic experiences that enable audiences to walk on air and be grateful to be living, if only so they can … [Read more...]
Legend has it that Cervantes was locked in a jail cell when he began to write the adventures of Don Quijote and Sancho Panza. Centuries later, exiled Argentinean theatre artist Arístides Vargas linked the Spanish classic of rejecting and transcending reality to the experience of his brother Chicho, imprisoned during their country's brutal military dictatorship and dirty war, who told how the … [Read more...]
Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is a bold, visually stunning movie and the best critique of the capitalist system and its 2008 financial meltdown since Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story. It opens with uber-financier Gordon Gekko’s (Michael Douglas) release from prison, where he has served around eight years for insider trading and other crimes he perpetrated in … [Read more...]
Add a quart of Commedia dell’ Arte masks, an epic cup of Brechtian alienation effects, a pint of Vsevolod Meyerhold’s biomechanics, a dash of Indonesian shadow puppetry, a tablespoon of Eugene Ionesco-esque Theatre of the Absurd, an ounce of African Djembe drumming, a soupcon of slide whistles and slapstick plus a gallon of radical politics, sprinkle liberally with Howard Zinn and Yogi Bear, … [Read more...]
I learned a new term this year that made me conscious of my age. I have two children. They’re both grown now. I had them during an era when half the women I knew were getting C-sections and breast-feeding was frowned upon but you could light up a cigarette in a restaurant – no problem.But the times have changed and in some ways for the better. Today, there are accommodations in many public … [Read more...]
The wait is over, and Theatre West’s revival of Clifford Odets’ Waiting For Lefty is the most important play currently being presented in L.A., and possibly the best production of 2010. Odets’ one-act play, originally presented by the fabled Group Theatre on Broadway in 1935, is one of the classics of the Depression era movement of proletarian drama, and perhaps the most successful of that … [Read more...]
Bran Nue Dae and Neshoba, The Price of FreedomI recently reviewed two plays that had Civil Rights themes, The Good Negro and Carry It On! Now two films have opened on the same day in L.A. that both deal with Black liberation struggles. The two works are stylistically and geographically poles apart but united by a common theme.Neshoba, The Price of Freedom is a straightforward documentary … [Read more...]
In previews now at the Geffen Playhouse, Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Ruined,” tells the improbably uplifting story of a tawdry haven from an unimaginably cruel world where soldiers and the rebels they fight routinely rape, mutilate, and murder women for sport, sometimes chaining them like goats to stakes and taking their pleasure in turn as if having “soup before … [Read more...]
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