NEW YORK — Liquor works wonders for a lot of plays. It does for Sam Shepard’s “Ages of the Moon,” a bourbon-soaked reunion between good buddies, old friends who sit on the front porch, drink (a lot) and await a lunar eclipse. In between, they kibitz, talking of life, love, the Kentucky Derby and a meeting with country superstar Roger Miller. As character sketches go, “Ages of the Moon,” which opened Wednesday at off-Broadway’s Atlantic Theater Company, is small and narrowly focused in its tale of male camaraderie. Its slight story stretches for barely 80 minutes. Yet the dialogue is tangy and twangy, particularly as delivered by its two fine actors, Stephen Rea and Sean McGinley, who first played these roles last year in Dublin at the Abbey Theatre. Shepard has a way of packing a lot into the often elliptical conversation, revealing character with just a turn of phrase and, in the process, delivering a surprising amount of laughs. Ames, portrayed with a restless likability by the shaggy Rea, does most of the talking. “We’re not exactly spring colts anymore,” he announces and then proceeds to be quite frisky, careering about the stage and talking of his unhappy marriage. And watch how this emotionally volatile man deals with a recalcitrant ceiling fan that seems to have a mind of its own. It is Ames’ troubles that have brought Byron out to help – primarily as a listener – but he, too, can be cantankerous. McGinley has the orneriness down just right. Their bickering recalls the arguments between another pair, the two tramps in Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” And just as Beckett’s characters fret over the elusive Godot, Shepard’s characters mark time in anticipation of the eclipse. “There’s nowhere to go. Just stay right here. This is good. This is perfect,” says Byron, sounding as if he could have just stepped out of “Godot.” But not only is the talk spot on in “Ages of the Moon,” so are the silences, which pepper the spasms of conversation, particularly when Ames and Byron down that bourbon, gulping in unison. Jimmy Fay has staged the play with extraordinary precision, but the action doesn’t seem forced. And there’s one big difference between “Godot” and “Moon.” That lunar eclipse does make an appearance, with the moonlight fading to black as the Ernest Tubb version of the blissfully sentimental “Waltz Across Texas,” helps bring the play to an end. “Ages of the Moon” may not have the ambition of such Shepard classics as “Buried Child,” “Fool for Love” or “A Lie of the Mind,” but it is a tantalizing appetizer for what one hopes will be a the playwright’s next project: a full, two-act evening of theater.
January 29, 2010 | Posted in
Entertainment |
Read More »
NEW YORK — Martha Stewart is heading to cable. The lifestyle queen has signed a deal to move her daily program to the Hallmark Channel, effective this September. “The Martha Stewart Show” is currently syndicated to broadcast channels across the country. The announcement was made Tuesday by Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc. and Hallmark. After Stewart’s show, Hallmark will air 90 minutes of programming created by Stewart’s production company. Stewart’s move echoes that of fellow daytime star Oprah Winfrey, who is leaving her syndicated show next year and will set up shop at a network created for her by Discovery Communications. Stewart won’t get her own network, but her company will control two and a half hours of programming in daytime each weekday.
January 26, 2010 | Posted in
Entertainment |
Read More »
NEW YORK — Verizon Communications Inc. on Tuesday posted an unusual loss for the fourth quarter, as a charge for layoffs in its shrinking landline business caught up with the growing, and profitable, wireless business. The nation’s second-biggest phone company lost $653 million, or 23 cents per share, in the quarter. In the same period a year earlier it had a profit of $1.24 billion, or 43 cents per share. Excluding one-time items, mainly consisting of a $3 billion charge for severance and other costs associated with layoffs, Verizon says it earned 54 cents per share. That was a penny below the average analyst estimate, as polled by Thomson Reuters. Those estimates were already reduced, after Verizon warned early this month that it paid higher-than-expected subsidies to put phones in the hands of customers. Verizon Wireless is fighting to attract high-paying subscribers away from AT&T Inc. and its exclusive iPhone. AT&T reports earnings Thursday. Verizon’s revenue rose 10 percent to $27.1 billion, largely due to the acquisition last January of Alltel Corp. Analysts were expecting $27.3 billion. Verizon shares fell 59 cents, or 1.9 percent, to $30.68 in pre-market trading. New York-based Verizon ended the quarter with 222,927 employees, 7,413 fewer than it had in September. The layoffs have come on the traditional phone-company side, as many customers give up their lines in favor of using only cell phones or phone service from cable companies. Verizon Wireless, already the largest cell phone carrier in the country, added 2.2 million customers to end the year with 91.2 million. However, 1 million of the new customers signed up through a reseller such as Tracfone LLC rather than directly through Verizon. Such customers generally pay much less than customers who sign contracts under the Verizon brand. Higher subsidies for phones meant that Verizon Wireless’ operating margin shrank 2.6 percentage points to 27.3 percent. The competition in the wireless market has only gotten tougher since the quarter ended: Two weeks ago, Verizon cut the price of unlimited voice service to $70 per month from $100. AT&T quickly made a similar move. Both carriers are betting on making back the money through higher charges for data service. It’s not clear when AT&T’s exclusive hold on the iPhone ends, and Verizon might get an Apple device to sell this year. In the meantime, it’s pushing phones running Google Inc.’s Android software as its main alternative to Apple’s phone. Verizon Communications owns 55 percent of Verizon Wireless. It counts all the wireless revenue on its books, but 45 percent of the profits flow to joint venture partner Vodafone Group PLC of Britain.
January 26, 2010 | Posted in
Tech |
Read More »
BEIJING — China sharply rebuked the United States on Monday, denying involvement in any Internet attacks and defending its online restrictions as lawful after Washington urged Beijing to investigate an attack against Google. The search engine giant announced on Jan. 12 that it would pull out of China unless the government relaxes its rules on censorship. The ultimatum came after Google said e-mail accounts of human rights activists critical of China had been hacked. Since then, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has criticized the censorship of cyberspace, drawing a strong counterattack from Beijing. The Foreign Ministry on Friday said her remarks damaged bilateral relations, while a Chinese state newspaper said Washington was imposing “information imperialism” on China. On Monday, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology went on the offensive again, saying the country’s anti-hacking policy is transparent and consistent. “Any accusation that the Chinese government participated in cyberattacks, either in an explicit or indirect way, is groundless and aims to discredit China,” an unidentified ministry spokesman said, according to a transcript of an interview with the official Xinhua News Agency posted on the ministry’s Web site. The increasingly heated environment is likely to pose challenges to negotiating an arrangement that would suit both Google’s and China’s interests. The company says it remains optimistic it can persuade China’s ruling party to loosen restrictions on free expression on the Internet, so it can keep doing business in the country. However, China’s government has given little indication it’s willing to budge. “Increasingly, the line emerging from the Chinese government is harder and less open to compromise,” said Russell Leigh Moses, an analyst of Chinese politics based in Beijing. “Hillary Clinton’s speech was seen by many officials here as the United States’ laying down a marker and put matters in a more confrontational mode.” The Communist Party’s official People’s Daily newspaper also accused the U.S. government of strictly controlling the Internet at home on Monday while urging other countries to build an “Internet freedom utopia.” “In reality, this ‘Internet freedom’ that it is marketing everywhere is nothing but a diplomatic strategy, and only an illusion of freedom,” the paper said. Xinhua also cited the State Council, China’s Cabinet, as criticizing what it called interference in the country’s domestic affairs. Internet control is considered a critical matter of state security in China. Beijing promotes Internet use for commerce, but heavily censors content it deems pornographic, anti-social or politically subversive and blocks many foreign news and social media sites, including Twitter and Facebook, and the popular video-sharing site YouTube. Google said it had uncovered a computer attack that tried to plunder its software coding and the Gmail accounts of human rights activists protesting Chinese policies. The company traced the attacks on its computers to hackers in China, but hasn’t directly tied them to the Chinese government or its agents. A Chinese Internet security official questioned the allegation, saying Google had not reported its complaints to China’s National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team. “We have been hoping that Google will contact us so that we could have details on this issue and provide them help if necessary,” Zhou Yonglin, the team’s deputy chief of operations, said in an interview with Xinhua posted on the team’s Web site. Zhou said the team logged attacks on 262,000 Chinese computers last year by hackers implanting malicious software such as Trojans, which can allow outside access to the target’s computer. More than 16 percent of the attacks came from computers located in the U.S., he said.
January 25, 2010 | Posted in
Business,
Tech |
Read More »
