| The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. - George Bernard Shaw | | Posted Friday, November 10, 2006 10:49:06 AM by Blog57 Team | | There will be enough pundits commenting on what the U.S. election results mean, but IMHO, voting this year is really in the end picking your own poison. The results can only lead to more division at a time when the world no longer wishes it had an Uncle Sam. Rest assured the "talking heads" on Tout-TV (CNBC-TV) will spin the elections to satisfy the "Don’t Worry, Be Happy" crowd on Wall Street. But, like the Roman Empire, the beginning of the end of the United States’ reign as the #1 world power is well under way. Economic Overview – I’ve used one sentence to paint the picture I see in the U.S.: "Americans have been robbing Peter to pay Paul but Peter is tapped out." Not a week or so goes by when I don’t meet another family that has been caught on the treadmill of keeping up with the Joneses on the false Madison Avenue/Wall Street tale that more money equals more happiness.... | |
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| | | Sharp cast, plot make 'Arms' worth watching | | Posted Tuesday, October 31, 2006 6:47:48 PM by Blog57 Team | | "Arms and the Man" is one of George Bernard Shaw's earliest and most popular plays, and it's easy to see why. It's one of his less winded and more engaging anti-heroic comedies. It was first produced in London in 1894 just a few years before the outbreak of the Great War, and it proved ironically prophetic. The cast of this production of "Arms and the Man," at the Seaside Music Theater (and there is currently a New York revival as well) under the direction of Lester Malizia, turns Shaw's script into a stylishly campy farce. The action takes place in a small town in Bulgaria during the Serbo-Bulgarian War, and centers around beautiful and strong-willed Raina Petkoff, whose father, Major Petkoff, is Bulgaria's highest ranking military officer. Her mother, Catherine, is the typical military wife, and her fiance, Major Sergius Saranoff, already is regarded as a war hero, fending off the Serbs almost single-handedly, or so it seems.... | |
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| | | Seen and Heard | | Posted Sunday, October 29, 2006 12:48:38 PM by Blog57 Team | | The Live Design Wire provides weekly updates on all aspects of the live entertainment design and technology industry, including business news, people and project profiles, trade show updates, product reviews, and Seen & Heard, our journal of events and shows seen by the Live Design staff. • View Sample • Subscribe Live Design TQ Now Live Design's TQ Now offers up to date information on designers, technicians, and manufacturers involved in all aspects of theatre--lights, sound, sets, costumes, projections, makeup, etc--from around the world, with special emphasis on project profiles and technical how-tos. • Subscribe .... | |
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| | | "Someone" pulls its punches | | Posted Sunday, October 22, 2006 6:47:28 AM by Blog57 Team | | The sad, seductive promise of running away is the opportunity to leave your past behind and reinvent yourself from scratch. To meet new people with no opinion of you yet. The yoke of unresolved conflict, regret, past mistakes, failed or unrequited love - gone. A fresh start, as anyone you want to be. This is what the intriguing title of Scott Gibson's new play, "Someone Else's Life," promises. Haven't we all reached that point of such despair or envy that we'd just rather be living someone, anyone, else's life? And where else but among strangers does one get the chance to be so desperately dishonest - and get away with it? The playwriting possibilities are endless. But "Someone" is one of those promising, problematic new plays that's always threatening to become more interesting than it ever quite does.... | |
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| | | South Africa: Don't Write Off Buthelezi - Yet | | Posted Friday, October 13, 2006 2:47:05 AM by Blog57 Team | | GEORGE Bernard Shaw might have had in mind the Inkatha Freedom Party's (IFP's) three-day annual conference, which started in Ulundi on Friday, when he wrote: "If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance." How else would one explain the party's devotion to its founding leader, Mangosuthu Buthelezi? Buthelezi has gambled with his position in the past, noticeably around local and national election time. He has offered to resign as the party's support at the polls continues to wane. But delegates at party conferences have repeatedly re-elected him, unopposed. This behaviour is indicative of a deep-rooted fear of a future without Buthelezi at the helm; a fear that rears its head every time the issue of leadership is raised at the conference. In the end, delegates end up deciding that they are better off with the devil they know than the one they don't.... | |
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| | | PHOTO CALL: Heartbreak House | | Posted Tuesday, October 03, 2006 10:47:42 PM by Blog57 Team | | Philip Bosco, Swoosie Kurtz, Byron Jennings, Lily Rabe and Laila Robins star in the Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of George Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House. Previews began on Sept. 15, with an opening set for Oct. 11. Robin Lefevre directs the company's first entry of the new 2006-2007 season at the American Airlines Theatre. Penned by Shaw, Heartbreak House follows "the unlikely romantic encounters that occur in an estate on the English countryside." Kurtz recently played in Roundabout's The Mineola Twins. The actress won a Tony Award nomination for her last appearance on Broadway in Frozen. Other stage credits include Imaginary Friends, Love Letters, A History of the American Film, Tartuffe, Ah, Wilderness! and The House of Blue Leaves, Fifth of July. She earned Tony Awards for the latter two.... | |
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| | | Philadelphia real estate transactions | | Posted Sunday, September 24, 2006 2:47:46 PM by Blog57 Team | | These transactions, recorded Feb. 11 to Feb. 16, are compiled from information on file with the City of Philadelphia. They represent sales of $78,000 or more. 1115 N. 2nd St. unit 506 Timothy Welsh to Ahmed and Ashraf Fawzy, $310,000. 112 N. 2nd St. K. Hovnanian At Philadelphia I L.L.C. to Gary C. Smith, $420,540. 945 S. 2nd St. Paul Donohue and Steve Grandizio to Gregory Root and Danielle Audain, $425,000. 264 S. 3rd St. Donald C. Dafoe and Rhoda F. Leichter to Joseph L. Spaar and Zoraida M. Fiol Silva, $1,200,000. 1220 S. 4th St. Jefferson Square Cmnty. Development Corp. to Josephine O. Rivera, $225,645. 1215 S. 4th St. Jefferson Square Cmnty Development Corp. to Joshua Weiner, $254,669. 956 N.... | |
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| | | Alan Johnson's speech | | Posted Friday, September 15, 2006 2:48:07 AM by Blog57 Team | | I'm delighted to be here at this quiet and tranquil time in British politics and would like to use this, my first speech of the new term, so to speak, to discuss the enormous power of education as a force in the drive against poverty and the state's role in tackling poverty. But first, I would like to thank the Social Market Foundation and Working Links respectively for hosting and sponsoring this event. .... | |
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| | | `I Am My Own Wife' explores what it takes to survive | | Posted Monday, September 11, 2006 4:47:18 AM by Blog57 Team | | Survival can be a complex game, especially when you're a transvestite trying to live in Berlin through the Nazi and communist regimes. The 2004 Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning drama ``I Am My Own Wife,'' opening Friday, is an intriguing kickoff to the Whole Art Theatre's fall season. ``What makes it even more intriguing is that it's based on a real person and real events,'' director Art Nemitz said. Lothar Berfelde grew to being openly gay and wore women's clothing at a time when the Nazis were sending homosexuals to the gas chambers along with the Jews. As a teen, Berfelde clashed with his father, a member of the Nazi party, and ended up in a youth prison. After the war he became Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a well-known antiques dealer in East Berlin.... | |
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| | | South Africa: Wine - Sawis | | Posted Wednesday, August 30, 2006 8:47:55 PM by Blog57 Team | | WITHIN seven years of Jan van Riebeeck's arrival at the Cape, SA had its first bottle of locally produced wine. Soon after that the Lords Seventeen, who directed the affairs of the Dutch East India Company, were instructing their employees in the Cape to spend less time on wine production and more on growing vegetables. The lifestyle attractions of wine making seem to have encouraged producers the world over to approach grape farming from anything except an economically rational perspective. I think it was George Bernard Shaw who described second marriages as the triumph of optimism over experience. He might well have said that, if the worldwide wine glut is anything to go by, wine farming is the triumph of optimism over common sense. It's not as if the evidence of the potential difficulties associated with the wine industry is well concealed.... | |
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