City of Angels

Right outside the City of Brotherly Love, “City of Angels” offered devilishly good entertainment that tackled both film noir and comedy. The superb cast and crew at Eastern Regional High School did a bang-up job with this murderous musical.

Bringing a taste of Hollywood to Broadway, City of Angels snagged the 1990 Tony Awards for Best Musical, Book, and Score. In this multifaceted show, protagonist Stine busily adapts his novel about private detective Stone for the big screen, while Stone pursues the case of a wealthy woman’s missing stepdaughter. Blurring the lines between reality and fiction, Stine’s everyday companions mirror their celluloid alter egos, and his troubled life unravels as his script simultaneously unfolds.

Eastern Regional put on a riveting production, bolstered by the cast’s striking vocals in challenging, jazzy numbers. The company stunningly meshed the black-and-white realm of film with the colorful world of the 1940s, and adding to the inventive nature of the show, actors skillfully portrayed dual parts as "real" and "reel" characters.

Anchoring the musical as Stone, Jonathan Harris mastered the archetypically slick detective with velvety vocals and convincing acting. Opposite Stone as Stine, strong belter Dante Brattelli struck a chord with his impressive range in songs such as “Funny.” Together, the two wowed in their duet “You’re Nothing Without Me.” In the roles of producer Irving and insufferable movie maker Buddy, Jeremy Gubman flaunted his delightful comic chops.

Stabber

A teenager who killed her boyfriend found out she was pregnant with his child on the night she stabbed him with a kitchen knife.

The offender was sentenced in the Northern Territory Supreme Court in Alice Springs last week after pleading guilty to manslaughter.

The court heard the teenager was treated in hospital for injuries sustained from payback, after she stabbed her partner in the left thigh, severing the femoral artery.

The wound was 11cm deep.

Defence lawyer Tania Collins said it was then, in November 2011, the offender was informed she was pregnant.

Ms Collins said it was one of the most tragic cases to come before the Supreme Court in Central Australia.

On the night of the stabbing the offender had been drinking with friends when she and the deceased, who had been in a relationship for about six months, had a jealous fight at Hidden Valley Town Camp.

The court heard the deceased told the offender he did not want to continue the relationship, and would return to Willowra, 340km northwest of Alice Springs.

The offender then fatally stabbed her partner. He collapsed and an ambulance was called by his father who witnessed the attack, but attempts to revive him failed.

Brossard

In the spring of 2009, the French were mesmerised by a murder trial that had everything needed to whet Gallic appetites: a glamorous mistress, a billionaire victim, and more than a whiff of kinky extramarital sex. Cécile Brossard was judged guilty and sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in prison for shooting her lover Édouard Stern, a respected banker and the 38th richest man in France. He had been found dead in his luxury Geneva flat wearing a bullet-riddled, all-in-one latex sex suit; she had fled to Australia.

Régis Jauffret's Severe takes the facts of the case as the starting point for his fiction, but pitches his work as an imaginative investigation rather than a straightforward novelisation. He never names his protagonists. "Don't believe this story is real," he insists, "it is I who invented it." Jauffret's disclaimer, however, did not prevent the Stern family, citing invasion of privacy, from trying to get the book banned.

Jauffret wields his pen like a torch to illuminate a human drama behind the public facts. It is his sparse prose that makes this novel compelling. There is a stylish blankness to the mistress's first-person confession, as she recalls fragments of the affair through a haze of champagne and antidepressants.

This numbness of expression is at odds with the gritty, frequently visceral detail of the story. Her testimony recounts her time as a high-class prostitute before becoming the lover and ultimately "sexual secretary" of the ruthless businessman; he leads her towards dark complicity in shady encounters with politicians, bisexual orgies, and ever more violent S&M roleplay.

Tanya

Forty year old Tanya Doyle admits killing Paul Byrne at their house in Pairc Gleann Trasna, Aylesbury in Tallaght, on September 4 2009 but denies his murder.

Dr Paul O'Connell said he originally formed the view from interviews with Tanya Doyle that she suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and was insane at the time she killed her husband.

He said he revised that opinion on the basis that she knew what she was doing, knew it was wrong and could have refrained from doing it as she had had a meal and engaged in conversation with Paul Byrne before stabbing him more than 60 times.

 

Hiding

{EAV:b536bc8e7469c824}

Martinez asked Arias yet again to take the court through the act of killing Alexander. She contended that she killed Alexander in self-defense when he became enraged and attacked her during a nude photo shoot at his home. While taking the photos, Arias says she accidentally dropped Alexander's camera, he became infuriated, and the next thing she knew, he slammed her into the floor of the bathroom. "At that point, Travis flipped out," Arias said, and called her a "stupid idiot," USA Today reported.

Soon after, Arias said, Alexander was chasing her down the hall of the bathroom and she ran into a walk-in closet where she remembered he kept a gun. "He had already almost killed me," she said. "I was terrified."

Martinez then noted photographs taken by police of the crime scene seemed inconsistent with her version of the killing. He drew the court's attention to the fact that nothing in the crime scene appeared to have been disturbed by what Arias has claimed was an extremely violent "frantic" brawl that led to Alexander's killing.

Arias has already admitted to lying about Alexander's death to just about everyone. She first claimed she was never at Alexander's home the day he was killed, then she invented the masked intruder angle, and finally she backtracked to admit she killed the victim, but claimed it was in self-defense, as he attacked her in the shower, forcing her to fight for her life.