NEW YORK--Even with his credibility in tatters, actor and Apple critic Mike Daisey received a standing ovation today following the final New York appearance of his one-man show, "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs."

"He was really, really good," said Jane Glucksman, 50, at the conclusion of today's matinee at The Public Theater. "I came here sort of skeptical after reading about what was going on, but his show made me want to re-examine everything I've heard about Apple."

Many of the people interviewed by CNET as they left the theater raved about Daisey's performance, and to beat all, many of them were also aware to varying degrees that Daisey may not have been telling the truth, or at least not the kind of truth based on facts. Several performers and authors argue that they adhere to a another kind of truth, one that gives them license to free stories from rigid facts. We've all seen movies that write in the prologue "based on actual events."

That's the kind of reporting Daisey suggests he does.

These "true stories" can include hearsay, vague recollections, and the stitching together of disparate anecdotes and different characters. But here's the rub: Nobody who saw Daisey perform on Sunday seemed to mind that the accuracy of his Foxconn story was under scrutiny. There's lots of media pundits ripping Daisey now for lacking respect for facts and his audience. Some members of his audience are telling the pundits to shut up.

"He was very entertaining," said Diane Eisenstat, following the sold out show. "He's very perceptive. It was a great performance. He really makes you think."

Daisey has helped whip up condemnation of Apple and Foxconn, the company contracted to help build iPads and iPhones in China. He did that by writing a monologue into his show about a 2010 trip he made to China where he says he witnessed all kinds of sad and desperate displays of human suffering, indirectly caused by Apple. They included underage workers, people poisoned by industrial chemicals, and workers crippled by unsafe equipment.

In January, when the radio show This American Life used an excerpt of Daisey's monologue for a news story, the actor vouched for the veracity of what he says in the show. Then, producers of the radio show began to investigate his claims. They spoke with the woman who worked as his translator during his visit and when informed that she disputed his version of events, Daisey began backtracking on all manner of details. In interviews with Ira Glass, the show's host, he acknowledged some of the facts were made up.

On Friday, the radio show issued a retraction. Glass said the show is committed to presenting factual reports and that following the investigation, the producers no longer believed Daisey's story.

His theater gig was more forgiving. Last night, before beginning his show, Daisey told his audience that he had revised the script to make it more accurate. He also told the crowd that he stood by his work as a whole and that Apple's failure to provide adequate working conditions was verified by The New York Times and other news organizations. That part is true.

But he continued to present as fact some of the information that was disputed by his former translator. He dealt with that by telling the audiences at what parts she remembered it differently than he.

Eisenstat, 62, said she would have liked him to offer more of an explanation about the discrepancies but added that overall she left the theater satisfied. She and her husband, Barry, who also attended the show, are MIT graduates. They consider themselves tech savvy.

Their feeling was that if the conditions were confirmed to be bad at the Foxconn factories, then an artist should be allowed to dramatize a story to make an impact. Art is not journalism.

Not everybody agreed. Some of the people who had seen Daisey's show previously said they were angry that he had misled them.

Apparently, Daisey is going to be a controversial figure for some time to come. His show is scheduled to appear next in Washington, D.C.

Authorities in New Zealand have acknowledged making a procedural error prior to seizing property belonging to MegaUpload founder Kim DotCom and the mistake could mean the government will now be required to return them.

Police arrested DotCom at the mansion he lived in outside Auckland on January 19 at the request of the United States government. The U.S. Department of Justice alleges that DotCom is the mastermind of a criminal enterprise designed to help the masses pirate music and movies. U.S. officials say he made millions from piracy and seek to extradite DotCom to this country to stand trial.

Following the raid on DotCom's home, police were photographed removing cash, Cadillacs, jet skis, artwork and scores of other valuables from his home. In addition, they also shutdown the MegaUpload site and threw DotCom into jail where he stayed until being released on bail a month later.

New Zealand police filed for the wrong kind of restraining order--the kind that didn't allow for DotCom to have a court hearing prior to the seizure--and that was a mistake, according to a report in the New Zealand Herald.

A court has now ruled that the restraining order that enabled police to seize his assets is "null and void," and a review of the mistakes made will soon be conducted by New Zealand's attorney general, according to the Herald.

The paper noted that there's no guarantee that DotCom will prevail. His lawyers must prove the absence of good faith when the procedural error was made.

There was no word on when a decision on this may come down.

Because people are sadly imperfect, cell phones ring at the most inopportune times.

It happens in the movies. It happens in the opera. Rarely, though, does the art come to a halt because of a recalcitrant marimba.

And yet MSNBC intones with the tale of an
iPhone that rang, kept on ringing and interfered so much with Mahler's Ninth Symphony that the conductor downed his baton and the fiddlers dropped their bows.

It was last Tuesday night. It was the New York Philharmonic. And it was, allegedly, an elderly man with a ringer on loud.

It was near the end of the symphony--one, like most of Mahler's, full of dramatic chapters.

This was a symphony that Mahler never heard performed. Please imagine what he must have thought, looking down from a heavenly cloud, to hear a digital marimba wreck the mood.

The Superconductor blog-- of course it's about music, not tech--offered, with additional evidence from the ThousandFold Echo blog, that people in audience shouted "$1,000 fine." Which was surely someone from Wall Street.

It being New York, some also shouted "Kick him out!"

The conductor, Alan Gilbert, halted the performance. He reportedly asked the gentleman whether it would go off again. The gentleman replied that it wouldn't.

Gilbert then reportedly addressed the audience: "I apologize. Usually, when there's a disturbance like this, it is best to ignore it, because addressing it is sometimes worse than the disturbance itself. But this was so egregious that I could not allow it."

The problem, of course, is leniency.

More artistic establishments should follow the example of America's greatest movie theater, the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas. It believes in the Texan style of threat. It tells people not to so much as think about cell phone use during a movie.

It emphasizes its point by declaring in advance: "Follow our rules, or get the hell out and don't come back until you can."

Last year, one young lady thought she'd flaunt her arrogance. She texted. The Alamo shamed her in a quite brilliant ad.

Though the Philharmonic might think itself beneath such aggression, perhaps it ought, in advance of every performance, to explain quite forcefully what might happen should a cell phone interrupt the bassoons.

Instead of merely threatening to eject anyone who interferes with the artists, better it should threaten to lock them in a cloakroom, insert some white headphones into their ears, and subject them to a couple of hours of the early works of the Mutants.

I feel sure that such severe action might preserve the integrity of live classical music in the face of all the digital threats that currently face it.