Summer Performing Arts Preview
By • May 24, 2017 0 442
In the summer, the venues change, the interests change and the sound changes. Below is a by-the-numbers guide to some of the performing arts pleasures of the coming summer season.
THREE FESTIVALS
Next month, the DC Jazz Festival (June 9 to 18) will stretch out across the city, with some 90 bands and 300 artists performing at more than 40 venues. Among the top acts: Pat Metheny, Gregory Porter, the Robert Glasper Experiment, Lalah Hathaway, the Kenny Garrett Quintet, the Roy Haynes Fountain of Youth Band, the Ron Carter-Russell Malone Duo, Black Violin, the Odean Pope Saxophone Quartet, the Sun Ra Arkestra, the Princess Mhoon Dance Project and the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra.
Melodically bridging June and July will be the Serenade! Washington D.C. Choral Festival (June 28 to July 3), a feast of choral works sung by groups from all over the world. Best of all, Serenade! will take place on the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage, which means that the performances are free.
More details to follow, but the Capital Fringe Festival (July 6 to 30) is a monthful (is that a word?) of seemingly hundreds of performances: plays, musicals, one-man and one-woman shows, comedy and much that is unclassifiable. One play, intriguingly called “Crazy Mary Lincoln: A New Musical” (June 1 to 18) is running at the Logan Fringe Arts Space, the Trinidad Theatre, before the official start of the festival. Other interesting titles: “The Dream Dancer,” “Clara Bow: Becoming ‘It’” and “In the Company of de Sade.”
NUMEROUS MUSICALS
Increasingly, and noticeably, summertime is the best time for musicals. Especially, as it turns out, at the Kennedy Center, which has bookended two unlikely pairs of popular Broadway musicals. In each case, the two shows, one in the Eisenhower Theater and the other in the Opera House, are essentially opposites: Rodgers & Hammerstein meets not-Rodgers & Hammerstein.
The cultish, punkish, identity-broaching and by-now-classic “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” (June 13 to July 2) has been matched with what is perhaps the purest form of inspirational and rousing G-rated musical theater, Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “The Sound of Music” (June 13 to July 16).
A similar happy dissonance exists in the pairing of “Cabaret,” the Kander and Ebb classic of Berlin cabaret decadence by way of the Sam Mendes and Rob Marshall production (July 11 to Aug. 6), with “The King and I” (July 18 to Aug. 20). Wilkommen indeed.
A little more turbocharged are “Jesus Christ Superstar” at Signature Theater, lean and streamlined with that big-time rock score by Andrew Lloyd Webber (through July 2), and “Rent,” the great rock musical about artists, performers and drifters living on the edge in New York (think a punchy “La bohème”), coming soon to the National Theatre (June 20 to 26).
Finally, at Olney Theatre Center, where they’ve been doing great work with musicals the last several years, there’s Lerner and Loewe’s “My Fair Lady,” that obscure show with the George Bernard Shaw pedigree, directed by Alan Souza (June 21 to July 23).
THREE ACTORS
Rush to Studio Theatre while you can to see Florian Zeller’s play “The Father,” starring Ted van Griethuysen as a man struggling with dementia. I would go see van Griethuysen, who received a Helen Hayes Tribute this year, recite the minutes of a school-board meeting. He is a Washington treasure as much as or more than any monument (through June 18).
Ed Gero is another Washington actor of master-class stature. This summer, he will return to Arena Stage to reprise his role as the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in John Strand’s stirring “The Originalist” (July 7 to 30).
Speaking of Supreme Court justices, talented film and television actor Brian Anthony Wilson will take on Thurgood Marshall in “Thurgood” by George Stevens Jr. at Olney Theater Center (July 19 to Aug. 20).
FIVE MORE PLAYS
“Hir: A Play,” by Taylor Mac, seems like classic Woolly Mammoth material: a black comedy about revolution, change and gender (through June 18). Speaking of Woolly, check out the return of “An Octoroon,” Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s audacious take on race in America (July 18 to Aug. 6).
And speaking of race and other matters, MetroStage will present “Anne and Emmett,” a play which imagines a meeting and conversation between Anne Frank, the most famous Holocaust survivor, and Emmett Till, the black 14-year-old lynched in Mississippi in 1955 (July 28 to 30).
Also of note: “When We Were Young and Unafraid,” a Washington premiere at the Keegan Theatre, in which a woman in the 1970s offers a place of shelter for victims of domestic violence (June 17 to July 8).
Photo © Tony Powell. Shakespeare Theatre Company School for Lies. May 4, 2017
Opening right around the corner is the last production of the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s season, “The School for Lies,” in which playwright David Ives and STC Artistic Director Michael Kahn — masters at adapting classic French comedies — team up again for a show based on Moliere’s “The Misanthrope” (May 30 to July 2).
THE ONE AND ONLY WOLF TRAP
Wolf Trap’s summer season gets going full-blast in June, with big names such as Bernadette Peters (June 3), Joe Jackson and Mavis Staples (June 10), Sheryl Crow (June 21), Elvis Costello (June 22), Diana Krall aka Mrs. Elvis Costello (June 24) and Lionel Richie (June 27). More stars in July and August: Diana Ross (July 25), Aretha Franklin (July 29), The Beach Boys (Aug. 20) and Kenny Loggins (Aug. 22).
On the opera side, Philip Glass’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (June 17) will be presented at Union Market (June 17); Rossini’s “The Touchstone” at the Barns (June 23, 25 and 28 and July 1); Puccini’s “Tosca” at the Filene Center (July 14); and, back at the Barns, a double bill of John Musto’s “Bastaniello” and “The Juniper Tree” by Glass and Robert Moran (Aug. 11, 13, 16 and 19).
ONE MORE THING
For old time’s sake, check out the tribute to Bob Dylan and the Band at Gypsy Sally’s in Georgetown, with the The Band band (is that clear?) keeping alive the sounds of a legendary collaboration (June 24).
