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In his Los Angeles theatrical debut in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Tom Hanks proves he is as talented a stage actor as he is on the screen in Saving Private Ryan, Forrest Gump, The Post, etc. Wearing (I hope for Rita Wilson’s sake) a fat suit, bearded and with long flowing grayish/ whitish hair, Hanks - almost unrecognizable as the portly, comic character Sir John Falstaff - not only opened the epic about England’s power struggles but rescued the play during a “medical emergency.”
When the action during the first act of this Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles production was interrupted due to an ailing theatergoer, Hanks took to the boards, good-naturedly waving his sword at viewers, “ordering” them back into their seats and so on. Hanks’ improvisational panache saved the moment and in that hallowed show biz tradition, eventually the show went on, performed under the stars at the West L.A. V.A. Campus’ Japanese Garden. (Although the delay added time to the play’s already three hour-plus length, putting me in mind of the title of Orson Welles’ 1966 Falstaff film Chimes at Midnight).
amantha Bee is a smart, talented, funny, incisive, edgy, 48-year-old Canadian/American mother of three. She is also the star of the TBS show “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee,” now in its third year. In 2017, Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
I don’t blame all of the planet’s ills on the Republican Party, but I find hope in the possibility that it’s on the verge of collapse.
I’m not talking politics here. I’m talking deep vision of humanity: a sense of who we are and how we impact Planet Earth and all its occupants. A smallness of mind has a chokehold on American political power and awareness. Maybe what I mean is that it has control over the money.
“The money just isn’t there” — to provide universal healthcare, to create environmental sustainability . . . to ensure that everyone has clean drinking water. I could name dozens more “nice ideas” that are financial impossibilities, relegated to the trash bin of wishful thinking. We all could.
But “the money,” whatever that actually is, remains quietly, unquestionably present to maintain a suicidal status quo of expanding war, prisons, border “protection” and, of course, environmental exploitation.
Is it simply human stupidity that’s at the center of such irony?
Minnesota’s Republican Party is hoping that good-hearted, environmentally-conscious Minnesotans who appreciate clean drinking and fishing water will subvert their ideals, ignore their better angels and vote for the Republican Party’s “red state” agenda next fall.
Supporters of America’s current “Polluter-in-Chief” Donald J. Trump, whose environmentally-destructive policies could literally turn the waters of northeastern Minnesota’s Partridge, Embarrass and upper St Louis Rivers into red, highly acidic, sulfuric acid-contaminated water that cannot support activities of normal life, (including fishing, boating, swimming or the growing of wild rice).
<<<The Hector Mine Earthen Dam Rupture>>>
Note that the break in the abandoned Hector mine pit near Biwabik on April 24, 2018 discharged massive amounts of toxic red-stained water into the Embarrass River, which then emptied into the Embarrass Lake, with uncertain, but probably devastating long-term consequences. See photo below.
Join in five full days of gaming from June 13-17 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center. Events include collectible and trading card games, eclectics, live action role-playing, miniatures. tabletop games, and True Dungeon. There will be an Art Expo, costume contest, film festival and live podcast.
You can sign up for games on-site as part of your registration, (or if you pre-register, as a separate action), but you can also purchase any number of generic tokens to use as you wish. Generics come in $2.00 increments, and they match up with the cost of our events. If you see a game you want to play, and there is space available, you can just sit down and join in! You simply give the appropriate number of Generics to the game organizer. You will want to pay particular attention to three pieces of information that each game will have listed: Minimum Age, Experience, and Complexity.
Registration runs from $35-$70. See http://originsgamefair.com/registration/ for more information.
On October 25th, 2002 the last great hero of the common people in the US Senate was very likely murdered by agents of the shadow US crime cabal government otherwise known as the Bush-Cheney regime. His wife and daughter and two pilots also died in the air crash. Paul Wellstone’s story deserves to be retold and Americans need to be reminded that criminals in and out of our government still need to be punished for their unindicted crimes. This article was written as both a tribute to an outstanding American patriot and a reexamination of his probable assassination by criminals still on the loose.
Rogue Machine, which earned the Best Season Ovation Award for 2017, is known for pushing the theatrical envelope with edgy, often hard-hitting shows. These hot potato topics range from Western colonialism in Africa in Lorraine Hansberry’s Les Blancs to racism at home in Mexican Day, Dutch Masters and One Night in Miami to contemporary anti-fascism in Daytona to psycho-sexual angst in bled for the household truth and Cock, et al.
But with its world premiere of 100 Aprils Rogue Machine is tackling its heaviest topic yet: Genocide. Playwright/co-star Leslie Ayvazian's one-acter takes a deep dive into the 1915 ethnic cleansing of Armenians and the trans-generational PTSD that is passed down to its characters in a 1982 psychiatric ward of a hospital. Well, it’s not exactly a musical comedy - in dramatizing the mass murder of Armenians 100 Aprils is unrelentingly depressing.
The Bristol Old Vic Production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night is a masterful rendition of Eugene O’Neill’s masterpiece about the human condition. The British cast is led by the venerable thesp Jeremy Irons, who won an Oscar for 1990’s Reversal of Fortune, and Lesley Manville, who was Academy Award-nominated this year for portraying Daniel Day-Lewis’ sadistic sister in Phantom Thread.
The approximately three and a half hour two-acter is the stuff of Greek tragedy and Shakespearian drama, as it follows the descent of the Tyrone family into the long night of the soul. All of the onstage action is set at the Tyrones’ coastal cottage in Connecticut, where the fog rolls in and out as a foghorn sounds in the background. (Ask not for whom the foghorn tolls - it tolls for thee!) Joining James (Irons) and Mary Tyrone (Manville) are their sons, James Jr. (Rory Keenan, who has appeared often at Dublin’s fabled Abbey Theatre) and Edmund (Matthew Beard), who proceed to tear one another - and their selves - to pieces, like birds of prey in a familial feeding frenzy over faults and flaws, real or imagined.