Latest news with #Greenberg
Sydney Morning Herald
7 days ago
- Business
- Sydney Morning Herald
Top Cricket Australia execs out as Greenberg swings the axe to save cash
Fifteen staff members have been axed and the head of the national teams removed from the executive team as Cricket Australia CEO Todd Greenberg tightens the belt in his first few months in the job. CA staff were informed of the changes on Tuesday, with two executives – head of people and culture Allison Robison and head of technology Don Elliott – to depart the organisation and Ben Oliver removed from Greenberg's executive team. Most redundant employees will leave CA by the end of the month. A CA spokesperson confirmed the changes to this masthead, which are the biggest cutbacks since a raft of staff were made redundant during COVID-19. The overhaul, which comes just months after Greenberg started in the top job, was the result of long hours that he spent in Jolimont in April, during the customary office shutdown at the end of the cricket season. He was sequestered with members of the finance team, looking for ways to take costs out of the CA balance sheet. The CA board, chaired by Mike Baird, has a strategic goal of restoring the governing body's cash reserves to the kinds of $100 million-plus levels it enjoyed before the pandemic. The 2024 annual report stated that CA had around $25 million cash and cash equivalents up its sleeve. Loading Also leaving CA is Megan Barnett-Smith, the head of social impact and sustainability. Her areas of responsibility, including the governing body's Indigenous reconciliation action plan, will be spread across the remaining executives. Longtime head of sports science and former men's team physio Alex Kountouris is another significant figure to exit. His role will be restructured. Oliver, who remains a key link man between the No.1-ranked men's and women's national teams and the top levels of the organisation, will no longer be on the executive. He will report into the executive general manager of cricket, James Allsopp, who had his role expanded last year to cover all levels of cricket, not just junior and community participation.
The Age
7 days ago
- Business
- The Age
Top Cricket Australia execs out as Greenberg swings the axe to save cash
Fifteen staff members have been axed and the head of the national teams removed from the executive team as Cricket Australia CEO Todd Greenberg tightens the belt in his first few months in the job. CA staff were informed of the changes on Tuesday, with two executives – head of people and culture Allison Robison and head of technology Don Elliott – to depart the organisation and Ben Oliver removed from Greenberg's executive team. Most redundant employees will leave CA by the end of the month. A CA spokesperson confirmed the changes to this masthead, which are the biggest cutbacks since a raft of staff were made redundant during COVID-19. The overhaul, which comes just months after Greenberg started in the top job, was the result of long hours that he spent in Jolimont in April, during the customary office shutdown at the end of the cricket season. He was sequestered with members of the finance team, looking for ways to take costs out of the CA balance sheet. The CA board, chaired by Mike Baird, has a strategic goal of restoring the governing body's cash reserves to the kinds of $100 million-plus levels it enjoyed before the pandemic. The 2024 annual report stated that CA had around $25 million cash and cash equivalents up its sleeve. Loading Also leaving CA is Megan Barnett-Smith, the head of social impact and sustainability. Her areas of responsibility, including the governing body's Indigenous reconciliation action plan, will be spread across the remaining executives. Longtime head of sports science and former men's team physio Alex Kountouris is another significant figure to exit. His role will be restructured. Oliver, who remains a key link man between the No.1-ranked men's and women's national teams and the top levels of the organisation, will no longer be on the executive. He will report into the executive general manager of cricket, James Allsopp, who had his role expanded last year to cover all levels of cricket, not just junior and community participation.
USA Today
11-07-2025
- Business
- USA Today
Louisville, PGA of America, First Tee make $1.1 million investment in youth golf course
LOUISVILLE — Various improvements will be coming to the Seneca Youth Golf Course thanks to a $1.1 million investment from the city and several investors, Mayor Craig Greenberg announced earlier this week. Greenberg said in addition to $200,000 designated for the project in the city's budget, several stakeholders — including the PGA of America, philanthropist and community leader Jimmy Kirchdorfer, First Tee of Louisville and Louisville Parks and Recreation — will also contribute $900,000 toward revamping the facility. Seneca's youth course will receive various enhancements, including a redesign of the layout to "optimize safety and flow," a new practice area with putting and chipping greens and an updated 10th hole to allow for larger training spaces, according to a news release. First Tee of Louisville President Swain Beard said the initiative is about more than just the game itself. "Our mission is to serve more than 1,700 children in our community to be a part of helping develop the future leaders of Louisville," Beard said. Kirchdorfer, chairman and CEO of ISCO Industries, said he's hopeful the upgrades will have a positive impact on junior golfers in the area. The announcement came in advance of the PGA Tour's 2025 ISCO Championship, being played at Louisville's Hurstbourne Country Club for the first time. Hosted at the Keene Trace Golf Club near Lexington for the last six years, this is the first time this PGA Tour event has come to Louisville.
Boston Globe
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Richard Greenberg, whose plays probed love and baseball, dies at 67
'Among his peers,' New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley wrote in 2003, 'only Tony Kushner matches Mr. Greenberg in linguistic richness and playfulness.' Profiling Mr. Greenberg in 2020, The New York Times style magazine called him 'the Bard of American Privilege.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Mr. Greenberg's characters were snobbish but self-aware, with a tendency to speak in pithy one-liners and epigrams. In his breakout hit 'Eastern Standard,' which opened on Broadway in 1989, two siblings discuss their mother, who is said to be so conservative that 'there's not a revolution in history that would have failed to execute her.' Advertisement Another of his Broadway plays - 2013's 'The Assembled Parties,' which brought him his second Tony nomination for best play - was set at a family's lavish Upper West Side apartment, taking place across two Christmas celebrations 20 years apart. Advertisement Although he often returned to elegant and urbane settings, Mr. Greenberg ranged widely, taking inspiration from historical figures while telling stories about self-invention, obsession, or deceit. In 'Night and Her Stars' (1994), he dramatized the quiz show scandals of the 1950s, using real-life celebrity Charles Van Doren as a central figure. 'The Dazzle' (2002) was inspired by New York City's most famous hoarders, the Collyer brothers, who were found dead in their overstuffed home in 1947. 'The Violet Hour' (2002) centered on an upstart book editor modeled after Maxwell Perkins, who discovered and published F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. 'We're always trying to make a cogent story out of our existence,' Mr. Greenberg told a Princeton University interviewer in 2013, 'and people in my plays often feel they have the story, but almost invariably they're wrong.' Two of his plays, 'Three Days of Rain' and 'Take Me Out,' were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for drama. The first, a study of familial disconnection, featured a trio of actors playing parents as well as their children. It ran off-Broadway in 1997 and became what Mr. Greenberg described as 'my cash calf,' appearing in theaters around the country and coming to Broadway in 2006, with a cast featuring Julia Roberts, Paul Rudd, and Bradley Cooper. In 'Take Me Out,' Mr. Greenberg explored racism and homophobia more than a decade before same-sex marriage was legalized nationwide. The play imagined what would happen if an active major leaguer publicly announced that he was gay - a moment that Mr. Greenberg, a gay man who steadfastly rooted for the New York Yankees, was still waiting for when he died. Advertisement After premiering in London in 2002, 'Take Me Out' transferred to the Public Theater in New York and moved to Broadway in 2003, running for 355 performances. Its cast was led by Daniel Sunjata as Darren Lemming, a beloved and biracial center fielder for the fictional New York Empires, and Denis O'Hare as Mason Marzac, Darren's new accountant, who is also gay. The play won Tony Awards for Mr. Greenberg, O'Hare, and director Joe Mantello. A much-lauded 2022 revival also won Tonys, including for actor Jesse Tyler Ferguson, who delivered one of Mr. Greenberg's most acclaimed monologues while playing the role of Marzac, who comes to love baseball while working with his new client. 'Baseball is better than democracy - or at least than democracy as it's practiced in this country - because unlike democracy, baseball acknowledges loss,' he says. 'While conservatives tell you, leave things alone and no one will lose, and liberals tell you, interfere a lot and no one will lose, baseball says: Someone will lose. Not only says it - insists upon it!' 'Democracy is lovely,' he adds, 'but baseball's more mature.' The younger of two sons, Richard Greenberg was born in the Long Island suburb of East Meadow, N.Y., on Feb. 22, 1958. His father was a movie theater executive, and his mother was a homemaker. In high school, Mr. Greenberg played viola and acted in plays, winning a local theater prize for his performance in Jean-Paul Sartre's 'No Exit.' He majored in English at Princeton, where he wrote his senior thesis - a 438-page novel titled 'A Romantic Career' - under Joyce Carol Oates. She gave it an A. After graduating in 1980, he enrolled in an English PhD program at Harvard. He soon grew bored and, on the side, wrote a play that won him admission to Yale's playwriting program. By the time he received his MFA in 1985, one of his plays, 'The Bloodletters,' had been staged off-off-Broadway. Advertisement Mr. Greenberg gained a wider following with 'Eastern Standard,' which premiered in Seattle in 1988 and soon moved to Broadway. The show followed a quartet of young New York City strivers whose lives are upended when one of the group is diagnosed with AIDS. By Act Two, the friends have decamped to a summer house in the Hamptons and, partly out of guilt, invited a homeless woman to join them. The play found a high-profile champion in Times critic Frank Rich, who said it 'captures the romantic sophistication of the most sublime comedies ever made in this country.' Yet it also came in for criticism from detractors who argued that Mr. Greenberg, in writing a screwball comedy, failed to address AIDS with the seriousness it deserved. 'That was both the best-and worst-reviewed play of the season,' Mr. Greenberg told the Sunday Times of London in 2002, 'and, at the time, I had no idea who I was; I only knew myself by the way I'd been reviewed.' In the aftermath, Mr. Greenberg faded from public view, sticking mainly to his Chelsea apartment and a nearby diner he used as an office. In part, he told The New York Times, he avoided the spotlight because he wanted to focus on work. He had successfully battled Hodgkin's lymphoma in his 30s, and the illness left him with a newfound sense of his mortality. In addition to working on original plays, Mr. Greenberg adapted August Strindberg's 'Dance of Death' for a 2001 Broadway production starring Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren. Advertisement He also wrote the book for the Tony-nominated 2008 revival of 'Pal Joey,' a Rodgers and Hart musical, featuring actors Stockard Channing, Martha Plimpton, and Matthew Risch; adapted Truman Capote's novella 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' for a short-lived Broadway play starring Emilia Clarke in 2013; and wrote the book for a musical adaptation of 'Far From Heaven,' filmmaker Todd Haynes's homage to the 1950s melodramas of Douglas Sirk, which ran off-Broadway the same year. Before his death, Mr. Greenberg was working with director Robert Falls on a contemporary adaptation of Barry's play 'Holiday,' the basis of an acclaimed 1938 film starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. The play is slated to premiere in January at Chicago's Goodman Theatre. 'His plays held a mirror up - not just to society but to the strange inner workings of the human heart,' Falls wrote in a tribute on Bluesky. 'He wrote about baseball and betrayal, family and fame, loneliness and grace - always with elegance, irony, and a touch of something ineffable.'
Los Angeles Times
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Playwright Richard Greenberg, the Mozart of verbal arias, brought an exquisite fluency to the American stage
Playwright Richard Greenberg was the maestro of shimmering verbal arias. His well-born characters spoke as if they had been transplanted against their will from a Henry James novel to the later 20th century. Their circumlocutions were as entrancing as their ability to find the most precisely ironic words for difficult-to-name realities. Greenberg, who died on July 4 at 67 from cancer, shot to the theater world's attention with a rave New York Times review of 'Eastern Standard.' Of the play's 1988 New York premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club, Frank Rich wrote, 'If Mr. Greenberg's only achievement were to re-create the joy of screwball comedies, from their elegant structure to their endlessly quotable dialogue, 'Eastern Standard' would be merely dazzling good fun. But what gives this play its unexpected weight and subversive punch is its author's ability to fold the traumas of his own time into vintage comedy without sacrificing the integrity of either his troubling content or his effervescent theatrical form.' There was tremendous excitement when 'Eastern Standard' moved to Broadway, where I saw the play as a student the following year. My experience didn't quite live up to Rich's lavish praise, but I was indeed dazzled by Greenberg's New York wit, which struck me as an acutely sensitive, off-angle version of George S. Kaufman's Broadway brio. Anne Meara was the talk of the town in the role of a bag lady who spurned the self-congratulatory charity of guilty swells. But the play also showcased a new generation of acting talent, including Patricia Clarkson and Dylan Baker, two classmates of Greenberg's from the Yale School of Drama who, having been steeped in Shakespeare and Shaw, had no problem delivering the rapid-fire repartee of the play's carefully sculpted dialogue. But it was years later, in 'Three Days of Rain,' that Greenberg more fully realized his gifts. I'm referring, of course, not to the 2006 Broadway premiere that occasioned the publicity earthquake of Julia Roberts' Broadway debut, but the 1997 New York premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club, where I saw its unparalleled cast, Clarkson (in even more mesmerizing form), John Slattery and Bradley Whitford. 'Three Days of Rain' was commissioned and first produced by South Coast Repertory. Greenberg, in fact, received more commissions than any other playwright in SCR's history, 10 of which were produced by the theater, along with other of his plays. 'When we made a commitment to undertake a program to support new American playwrights and produce their work, Richard's work stood out,' David Emmes, SCR's co-founding artistic director with the late Martin Benson, said by email. 'This was a writer with extraordinary capability who had great potential. Whatever the subject matter, it was always dealt with in an unexpected way, but always brimming with intelligence and wit.' The characters in 'Three Days of Rain' talk their way into theatrical existence — as much for the audience's benefit as for their own. The adult children of renowned architects who had tragic lives, they're struggling to find a path forward from the wreckage of the past. Slattery's Walker, brilliant and unbalanced, with shades of his mentally ill mother, is the most troubled. He's a constant source of worry for his sister, Nan (Clarkson), who hasn't time to dwell on her own fragility with her brother hyper-articulating his nervous breakdowns. Pip (Whitford), the son of the architectural partner of Walker and Nan's father, is a daytime television actor who has made peace with being highly successful rather than a genius. His ostentatious well-being is scorned by Walker, who equates equilibrium with compromise. But Pip rebukes Walker for 'changing the temperature' of every room by 'tyrannical, psychosocial … fiat.' The play, a diptych, has a second act in which the same actors play the roles of the parents of their first-act characters. Greenberg ironically examines the inscrutability of the past, whose main connection to the present may live in the shared vulnerability to 'error' — the final word in this gorgeously written play. The Broadway revival of 'Three Days of Rain,' not being as confidently performed, revealed a common frailty in Greenberg's dramaturgy — the tendency toward structural abstraction. His plays are held together by thematic ideas James would have put to good use in his novels but are harder to build a dramatic world upon. (Greenberg told me that he dropped out of Harvard's grad program in English and American literature after not finishing James' 'The Princess Casamassima' for a seminar, but his sensibility was the most Jamesian of all contemporary American playwrights.) There are two moments in 'Three Days of Rain' where conversation on artistic matters reveals quite a bit about Greenberg's own relationship to his chosen art form. Nan, invoking Goethe (something not anomalous in a Greenberg play), refers to architecture as 'frozen music' (a lovely description of the play's dialogue) and talks about the way a great building contains something that can't be anticipated by the plan, no matter how scrupulously designed. Walker, finishing his sister's point, explains, 'There's an intuition held in reserve, a secret the architect keeps until the building is built.' Something similarly latent inheres in Greenberg's dramaturgy. Later, Nan, describing the type of play her mother favored when she first came to New York, allows Greenberg to indulge in some delectable self-irony. She tells Pip that her mother would attend one of those matinees 'you could never remember the plot of, where the girl got caught in the rain and had to put on the man's bathrobe and they sort of did a little dance around each other and fell in love. And there wasn't even a single good joke, but my mother would walk out after and the city seemed dizzy with this absolutely random happiness.' That is precisely how I exited Manhattan Theatre Club when I first saw 'Three Days of Rain.' My euphoria stemmed as much from the mandarin eloquence of the characters as from the unanticipated magic that can happen when a playwright finds his community of actors. Greenberg was a prolific writer, which may have been unfairly held against him. I think the bigger issue was that his enormous gifts left many admirers waiting impatiently for his American stage masterpiece, which never quite came together. 'Take Me Out,' about a star baseball player who breaks a cultural taboo by coming out as gay, is the most celebrated of Greenberg's works. Winner of the Tony for best play in 2003, it also won awards for Joe Mantello's direction and Denis O'Hare's performance as gay financial advisor Mason Marzac, who becomes an unlikely rabid baseball fan. There's a breathless monologue in which Mason deconstructs the art of baseball as 'the perfect metaphor for hope in a democratic society.' One of the great theatrical speeches written in the last 25 years, this vertiginous paean to America's pastime was no doubt a factor in O'Hare's win. Jesse Tyler Ferguson, who was in the Tony-winning 2022 Broadway revival, won a Tony for the same role, a testament to a supple comic performer and an evergreen part. I admire what Greenberg attempts in 'Take Me Out,' though I don't think he entirely succeeds. It's not just that the locker-room banter sometimes sounds like a faculty lounge at some competitive liberal arts college. It's that the swirling ideas of the play and the dramatic construction aren't a seamless fit. 'The Assembled Parties,' the title of Greenberg's 2013 Broadway play, is an apt metaphor for the challenge that playwright had in coalescing his sparkling chat-fests into satisfying dramas. So often the whole seemed slightly less than the sum of its scintillating parts. The smaller canvas of the one-act form allowed Greenberg to hone in his theatrical vision. Perhaps this accounts for the enduring success of 'The Author's Voice,' an early Kafkaesque work that literalizes the divide between an artist's primitive side that does the grunt creative work and the camera-ready side that basks in the empty glory. But Greenberg's disappointments could be worth more than other writers' triumphs. He wrote magnificently for actors, endowing them with powers of speech that surpass the capacities of most mere mortals. To hear Judith Light, Jessica Hecht, Linda Lavin, Peter Frechette, Slattery or Whitford converse in this heightened theatrical patois was to become instantly spellbound. Clarkson, in a league of her own, turned the gold of Greenberg's prose into embodied thought and feeling. But magniloquence was hardly the whole story. The vulnerable sound of Slattery's delicate stammer in the second half of 'Three Days of Rain' and the opinionated maternal astringency of Jenny O'Hara in 'Our Mother's Brief Affair' at South Coast Repertory point to the various registers of the playwright's wide-ranging vocabulary. Greenberg, a somewhat reclusive personality, stayed away from the spotlight, but was deeply connected to the community of artists who helped him find his voice. Among them, director Evan Yionoulis, another Yale School of Drama classmate, who directed 'Three Days of Rain' at Manhattan Theatre Club and shepherded many other of his plays from development to the stage. 'Rich was a gentle man with an acerbic wit,' Yionoulis wrote via email. 'A keen observer, he wrote about people negotiating their place in the American landscape. Under his always sparkling dialogue, there is a powerful undercurrent of loneliness and longing that reveals his characters' aching humanity — and our own.' The laughter echoes down decades. I can still hear the sisters in 'Everett Beekin,' one of those Greenberg's works I wanted so badly to like more than I did, talking competitively about their upwardly mobile dreams in their mother's Lower East Side tenement. Greenberg captures the postwar ethos in a single line when one of the sister's explains to a visitor that her family lives 'in Levittown for the time being, but later on, you never know.' Greenberg, a native son of Long Island, encoded his social observations about the frenzied real estate hierarchy in comic language that rarely if ever missed its mark.
