Gary Tischler • January 16, 2013

You might be hearing media chatter around town that the upcoming second-term inauguration of President Barack Obama is not as much excitement this time around, that there’s very little scuttlebutt surrounding the event on Monday, that it’s, well, no big deal.

For sure, this inauguration will not have any of the historic drama and precedent of Pres. Obama’s first inauguration four years ago when he became the first African American to be inaugurated as President of the United States and drew the largest crowds in the history of such events in Washington, D.C.

Don’t believe that blasé is king this time around. In this town, and in our country, and perhaps the world, the event itself has always been a big deal, a marker, an occasion full of certain kinds of majestic traditions and rituals, omens and portents, comings and goings, beginnings, endings and continuations, invocations and marching bands, cheers and cheerleaders. People always come by the thousands and people always remember.

If you have lived in Washington for any length of time, the presidential inauguration becomes a personal kind of occasion and memory, depending on the extent of your participation. There will be parades. There will be inaugural balls. There will be speeches and swearing in and perhaps even some swearing.

We live in an information age where we seem to know an awful lot about historic events, as if we’d been there and known the presidents personally—these days Ronald Reagan’s joke that “I knew Thomas Jefferson. He was a friend of mine,” seems not just a reference to an old campaign anecdote, but a state of mind.

For certain, the most romantic, most resonant, echoing imagery for almost any presidential inauguration was the one surrounding John F. Kennedy. The occasion—full of snow and cold and wintry weather and youthful optimism—spoke to just about everything in our political history and our feelings about our democracy. You could be forgiven if you think you remember just how cold it was, or still hear the stories of Kennedy’s resounding challenge to American citizens to “ask not what your country can do for you”, and the image of JFK and the older, serious Eisenhower riding together, top-hatted in the cold air. You think you remember the pre-eminent shaman poet of our times, Robert Frost, wintry hair, wintry voice, trying to remember the poem he wrote for the occasion, and you remember Jackie Kennedy, the first lady, fulfilling the promise of youthful, graceful, just plain high class beauty that was almost royal.

The longer I live in Washington, the more I can sometimes talk myself into thinking I was here for that cold January day in 1961. Watching Daniel Day Lewis in “Lincoln” makes me think I actually heard Lincoln’s second inauguration speech line that began “With malice toward none and charity toward all”. He opened his second term near the end of the war not far in time from his assassination.

These things matter, and not just if the president catches a cold. Until inaugurations were televised, people who did not attend, learned about them only through reportage. Now we know everything there is to know, but perhaps not as much as we should.
Let me be honest—I have never attended an inaugural ball, but I remember how they looked, the glow, the dresses, occasions where even presidents not known for their romantic images can look endearing. Here, we got to see that Richard loved Pat, and George loved Laura and Nancy was crazy about Ron, and Barack and Michelle locked eyes to “At Last”. That music, that dance, those balls are part of inaugural lore. It’s where we first saw Nancy Reagan’s utterly genuine and adoring look.

I remember the cheers at the news of the release of the hostages when Reagan took the oath, remember the jeers as crowds noted the helicopter departure of George W. Bush. I remember turning around near a press section in front of the podium last inauguration and seeing those multitudes stretching energetically to the Washington Monument.

That was a big deal.

This will be too, differently, smaller, perhaps, but all the same a big deal, because all the same history is present, on this Monday, the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., it’s present with this man who gets to say again, “I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear …”
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Gary Tischler • January 15, 2013

Richard Nixon was never easy to dismiss, forget, defeat, or ignore even unto death.

For a brief time last week, there was a flurry of articles, reports and buzz in what passes for our muddled media mass today—news stories in newspapers, passing comments on the network news, buzz, buzz, buzz on the internet. Richard Nixon was, for a short time, back in the news, because some 400 of his friends, staffers, family members, loyalists and prominences during his not-quite completed two terms of office as President of the United States gathered to celebrate what would have been his 100th birthday.

Henry Kissinger was there, Tricia and Julie, the daughters were there, at the Mayflower, were, ironically during this time of the upcoming inauguration, Nixon balls were held in the same venerable space. We read the reports in various places, including the Washington Post, where the occasion made the Reliable Source, not the front page. Pat Buchanan, the pugnacious Nixon speech writer famous in later life for outrageous to the right of Nixon punditry, was the most tenacious defender of Nixon and his legacy and Kissinger, the man most elevated to prominence by Nixon as his National Security Adviser and Secretary of State back in the day, extolled his foreign policy greatness, not the least of which was Nixon opening China to the U.S. and vice versa, because, as the saying went then, “only Nixon could go to China.” This was after all still a country led by Mao Tse Tung back then.

Nixon’s brother showed up to give a victory sign, his daughters praised their dad, and Buchanan talked about the “old jackal pack” who brought Nixon down. Somewhere, Woodward and Bernstein were talking about Watergate and the Nixon tapes, which Woodward once called the “gift that keeps on giving.”

Nixon, famously, infamously, of course was the only president of the United States to resign his office to avoid impeachment a result of the umbrella scandal called Watergate, which included dirty tricks, a burglary of the DNC offices in the Watergate, a coverup, firings, resignations, jail time for some, and the wholesale destruction of careers. Forever after, scandals would have a gate tied to their names as in Irangate, Whitewater gate, and so on. All this, after Nixon, a former U.S. Congressman, Senator and two-term vice president under President Dwight Eisenhower, made a remarkable political comeback, winning one of the closest elections ever by defeating Hubert Humphrey in 1968, then again by scoring the biggest landslide win in the history of presidential elections over George McGovern in 1972. Talk about rescuing defeat from the jaws of victory.

It would be easy to dwell on “Tricky Dick”, “Watergate”, the extension and escalation of the Viet Nam war by way of ending it, the “you won’t have Nixon to kick around any more” debacle in California, the bad diet (ketchup and cottage cheese), the betrayals, the denials and cover-ups, the Checkers Speech, to focus on that Nixon the press loved to hate—and the feeling was mutual.

But I’m more inclined to take the late Tom Wicker’s view in his more or less biography “One of Us”. Nixon is endlessly fascinating—like LBJ and not like LBJ—for his complexities, for his persona and his conflicting achievements. But if we are truthful, most of us—males—don’t look in the mirror and see JFK, but we might recognize aspects of Nixon’s flawed face instantly. His small beginnings in a small town in California, his love of his mother, being a manager, not an athlete, his outsized use of profanity as evidenced on the tapes, that strange awkwardness he carried around with him, even unto the presidency, were traits shared by many. He had no flash, no flair, no charisma except the kind of scowl that predicts bad weather.

And yet, no man was better prepared for the presidency, better ready to think in visionary terms—he created the EPA and his domestic and economic policies tended to benefit the middle class, not the rich. He was no ideologue (his anti-communism may have been fervent but it had its expedient political uses), no right wing fundamentalist, no Barry Goldwater, no Tea Party guy, who probably would have found him way too liberal for their give-no-quarter tastes.

Here was a man who endured a kind of paternal dis-respect from Ike, who saw fit to use his dog and his wife’s coat to stave off being dumped from the GOP ticket, who had to say as president that “I am not a crook”, who rashly ran for governor of California after enduring a heart-breaking, nail-biting defeat at the hands of JFK and yet, there he was, in 1968 and in 1972, winning the presidency.

He could have—given some of the more questionable aspects of vote counting in Illinois and Texas in the 1960 election—asked for a recount, so close was that election. He chose not to because such a challenge might have torn the country apart.

He showed courage often—getting into Chairman Kruschev’s face, enduring the mobs who rioted in Venezuela on his visit there. He was an awkward man, that’s easy to see, but he became, in the end, a grandee in one of those Wall Street law firms that practically says Wasp on its letterhead. He could be maudlin and sentimental, always considered cheap emotions by the intelligentsia of a better class but he had his loyalists and loyalties.

If you throw out Watergate, he might be counted as one of our more effective presidents—hard to say since you can’t throw out Watergate or Nixon. It’s not the only questionable thing he’s associated with, only the worst one.

For many of us, he remains the difficult ghost in the machine that we call democracy, and, like the man said, one of us. He does not speak to our better angels, but rather to our more complicated memories.

Gary Tischler • January 10, 2013

William Shakespeare was supposed to be a pretty fair story teller.

A blind poet by the name of Homer wasn’t so bad, either. His work—his one (two, counting “The Odyssey”) story, told over and over again—continues to compel attention and to bring us back to our core of hearing stories.

A teller, not a writer, Homer was an outloud poet, if he was anything—although we know even less about Homer than we do about Shakespeare.

Homer sang his tales, and they’re still around. “The Iliad” about the war between Greeks and Trojans, with the gods joining in like some Olympian pugilists, starring Achilles, Hector, Agamemnon, Priam, Helen and Paris, and a cast of thousands of warring combatants before the gates of the city of Troy—its other name is Ilium—about 4,000 years ago.

We all know the story. We’re familiar with it from tales told at school and books we were forced to read in college, and movies we saw and plays we saw that used the great war and the Greek warrior-king Odysseus’s eventful journey home as jumping-off points to tell us about ourselves. We saw Kirk Douglas sailing, Brad Pitt fighting and various Helens launching a thousand ships.

But it’s still the same old story—a real fight for love and glory—best told in the semi-dark, around, if not a campfire, at least on a bare and barren stage, by one man, who, if not blind, could pass for the real deal, if he had lived and told the same tale all over the world, on stages, on street corners, amid the tents of other warriors and fighters, in castles for a piece of lamb, in taverns for a drink and a memory

That’s essentially what’s happening at the Studio Theater where artistic director David Muse helmed a production of “An Iliad,” adapted by Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare from a Robert Fagles translation of Homer’s epic poem.

It features one man: a ragged man, the story teller, who speaks with such power and clarity, that you believe every word he says, because he sounds as much a witness as a poet—a witness, it should be made clear, to all the brave, ravenously courageous and horrifyingly destructive wars men have ever fought over things they’ve soon forgotten.

Scott Parkinson looks very much the part of a man whom you’d spot for a few drinks in a bar, just to listen to him talk. The talk is about the last weeks of the war, about Agamemnon’s destructive fight with the great warrior Achilles, about the loss of Achilles’s best friend, about his towering rage, about his foretold doom, about the Trojan warrior Hector, about loss and rage, and war’s discordant and affecting music.

It’s not much, and it’s everything. So scruffy-good is Parkinson, so casual, so many-voiced that soon enough you hear the clash of spears and swords, the screams of wounded men, and the anguish of people wounded to their souls with loss. “The Iliad” is as before and always, a great story, but in their adaptation Peterson and O’Hare have made it so much more. It is a huge story, bounding and echoing across lands, borders, time and space. We know without being told that this story has always been about us, about war, about what it does to us, an invention, not of God or gods, but of our own, where men, leaders and spit-upon-privates carrying spears can catch a sense of something god-like and monstrous in the rivers of blood that are spilled.

All that’s there on the stage are the tools of the trade—of story-telling, not war—a trunk, a shaggy coat, a stick, a woman (Rebecca Landell) in a flowing white gown, playing the cello beautifully and serving as a kind of chorus, movie score and subtle carrier of grief to come. There are stage lights that look like masks or discarded armor, but that may be your or my imagination.

Mostly, Parkinson is the teller of tales—sometimes funny, sometimes sage and sagacious, sometimes sarcastic, sometimes like a man carrying old wounds and memories. He tells the tale, but it become something more. It seems to involve everything from the Crusades, to the Persian wars, ancient and modern, to Vietnam, Afghanistan, all those forays by one group of nationals or alliances into the lands of another group of nationals and alliances, to come to grief, to cause great destruction and create new stories over and over again.

That’s the underlying minefield of this tale, the tragedy of mankind, but its surface is full of phosphorus, the hot blood and rage of individuals, their deeds and deeds undone. Parkinson plays all the parts—the ragged poet, but also Hector and Achilles, and Priam and Achilles, the king and the greatest warrior, meeting in the middle of the night after Achilles has killed Priam’s son Hector. The meeting of king and warrior has a calming effect on Achilles after Priam begs for his son’s body. It’s as if the stage suddenly filled up with people in the silence and became dotted with tears.

Parkinson also follows Homer’s telling of the tale. This poet stops before the creation of the Trojan horse, the foretold death of Achilles, the destruction of Troy, the awesome fall of a Bronze-Age Asian civilization, its aftermath of epic journeys and the stuff of Greek tragedies.

When the actor is done you feel like leaving a giant tip, or a wreath to wear, some token of appreciation that you’ve understood every word, even the haunting spackles of ancient Greek.

“An Iliad” runs through Jan. 13.

Gary Tischler •

That Quentin Tarantino. He’s such a cut-up.

After bowdlerizing and generally having a grand old time with the Holocaust in his fantasy-action-god-knows-what-genre movie “Inglourious Basterds,” Tarantino, never a director to cringe from any subject, now matter how low or high, has tackled slavery and race in America to unhinge our sense of history further and to bolster the survival of the mashup genre.

And what a mess this mashup of a movie called “Django Unchained” is. And I say this with all due respect to the hordes of critics and way-cool Tarantino fans who have sung the praises of the movie, while duly noting the director’s gleeful use of blood-spurting violence and the n-word.

I think Tarantino is a brilliant director who bleeds cinema, talks cineaste and has probably seen every bad B movie ever made. Here’s a brilliant guy who, unfortunately, has never made a brilliant movie. He’s made brilliant sequences, scenes, segments and such, but never a movie that amounted to something that you could hang a feeling or a revolution on. If they gave Oscars for parts of movies, why give him one for best performance by an actress, playing a character under the influence of heroin (“Pulp Fiction”), best use of gangster yakety-yak (“Reservoir Dogs”), most suspenseful, tense ten or 15 minutes to open a movie for “Inglourious Basterds,” best performance by a German actor in an 1848 American setting (Christoph Waltz in “Django Unchained”), best dissertation on the origin of the name Brunhilde and how it came to be bestowed on slave woman (“Django Unchained”).

Tarantino has been praised for tackling such a serious subject as slavery—and presenting it realistically and gruesomely—horrible scenes of whippings and Mandingo fighting, for instance. But you know what? The cruelties practiced by slaveowners and overseers are no secret. It seems to me that we’re supposed to be edified by these scenes, and horrified, and educated, but should we also be entertained? I know it’s exhilarating to see those awful guys (and one woman) to be slaughtered by the righteous Django in the film’s climax, but should this be quite so much fun? You can kill Adolf Hitler in a movie, but it’s harder to end slavery. Django said it much better when offered to be a bounty’s hunter’s partner: “Killing white people and getting paid for it? What’s not to like?” That stings, and it’s sharper than the literal-minded slaughter of the guilty at the end, especially the way Django metes out justice the hard way against Samuel Jackson’s embittered, viscous Uncle Tom character. It almost makes you wonder how Django would have handled Mammy, the stubbornly and blindly loyal slave of Scarlett O’Hara.

It seems to me that Tarantino can’t help showing off, being wickedly funny or showing how smart he is. That doesn’t make “Django Unchained” profound, it makes it at bottom a little silly, which undermines the seriousness the subject deserves. I don’t mean Steven Spielberg serious—although Spielberg, a frequent target of the cool, hip critical world, gets to the heart of the matter in “Lincoln”—but serious in the manner of respecting the audience’s intelligence instead of indulging your own smartness

It should be added that all the actors—Jamie Foxx as the hero, Waltz as his German partner, Jackson, Leonardo DiCaprio in a relishing turn as the corrupt, effete owner of the plantation named Candiland, and Kerry Washington as the heroine, are pitch-perfect, and the writing as always, is sharp. What “Django Unchained” lacks, and what most if not all of of Tarantino’s movies lack, is size, which is to say greatness. Nobody—except smart-ass critics—loves a smart ass.

Gary Tischler • January 3, 2013

If you want to get an idea of the diversity enshrined in what is loosely called “The Musical,” past, present and who knows what the future holds, all you have to do is take a gander at “White Christmas”, the holiday red musical rife with nostalgia and the best works of the grand old man of the American songbook at the Kennedy Center, and down Pennsylvania Avenue to the National Theatre, where you can find “Les Miserables,” techno-upgraded but now in its second year of touring its 25th anniversary production of the big, spectacular, dramatic musical based on Victor Hugo’s 19th-ccentury novel.

“White Christmas” is based on a 1954 Paramount Studios movie musical, starring the great crooner Bing Crosby and mister-do-everything Danny Kaye as his sidekick, with Rosemary Clooney and Vera Ellen as their love interests. “Les Miserables” is producer Cameron Mackintosh’s national touring version of the gift that keeps on giving ever since it debuted in London more than 25 years ago—so much so that it’s become a highly anticipated, Oscar-buzzed movie with Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe and Anne Hathaway in the starring roles. There you have it: a stage musical, based on a movie musical, and a movie musical, based on a stage musical.

For all that connective material, the two shows couldn’t be more different. “White Christmas,” performed with the kind of spirit that recalls Mickey Rooney, Gene Kelly and Judy Garland, is redolent of the kind of musical that once were the main staple and fare of both Broadway and major Hollywood studios. The music, the material and the style are so comfortably old-fashioned that they almost seem fresh.

“Les Miserables” is a juggernaut, a powerhouse of a certain kind of musical—call the music rock-pop with oversized operatic style—that began to originate overseas, primarily in England, featuring productions almost entirely sung, usually in a manner that required voices that could reach places and hold notes few people could. “Les Miserables,” created by a French song-and-music team and produced by Mackintosh, was probably the most successful in a long line of shows that included “Jesus Christ Superstar,” “Cats,” “Evita,” “Miss Saigon” and “Phantom of the Opera” as well as “Sunset Boulevard.” Andrew Lloyd Webber was the superstar among such creators, along with Tim Rice and MacIntosh.

There was a time when most—if not all—of these shows dominated Broadway and the musical theater. That situation has waned, giving way to the force known as Disney. Mixed in are occasional new, sometimes rock-and-roll themed works (see “Million Dollar Quartet”) and revivals of prominent and reliable staples from the great works of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Cole Porter, Gershwin and Lerner and Loewe, and for the intellectually stimulated, Stephen Sondheim. The next thing as far as we can tell really hasn’t arrived yet, noting of course “Spiderman,” which is a Titanic that, having struck an iceberg in its early voyage, refuses to sink.

With “White Christmas,” it pays to have patience and a passion fo Irving Berlin’s music and old musicals, if you must. As musicals went, “White Christmas” was no “Singing in the Rain” but relied primarily on its star powered quartet, and Berlin’s music, which was quite enough to make it a hit. The star power isn’t in this production, although all the performers more than hold their own, and that includes James Clow and David Elder (a terrific Kelly-kind of dancer), and Stefanie Morse and Mara Davi.

The show is practically a recreation of the 1950s movie in terms of the plot, which includes the heroes, Broadway impresarios and stars, trying to save the fortunes of their old World War II commander, now running a Vermont resort into the ground. They make the rescue just in time for—you guessed it—a “White Christmas.” You kind of have to go with this because it’s part of the season, and, um, well, just because, because you’ll feel better. There are tons of 1950s references to old television shows, gossip columnists and such, which can make you feel very old or very confused.

Here’s what you do: kick your feet back and watch what happens after a somewhat slow and longish first act. Because right off the top comes a little Berlin number, called “I Love a Piano,” which exists solely to make you happy—beginning small, ratcheting up to a riveting, rhythmic and spectacular dancing, much of it in the key of tap. To me, the sound of 30 or two feet hitting the floors loudly or softly and syncopated has always been good for what ails you.

So are songs like “Let Me Sing and I’m Happy,” “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm” and “Blue Skies”—not to mention, of course, “White Christmas” and the torchy duo of “Love You Didn’t Do Right By Me” and “How Deep Is the Ocean.”

You’ll probably have the various themes and tunes of “Les Miserables” running around your head once again, but the residual feeling, as always, is of a pleasant and satisfying sadness, giving all the melodrama, triumphant and tragic that is so much a part of Hugo’s novel and of the musical, even more so. The presence of both the show and the movie are serendipitous, but should probably not be compared. The stage is the stage, and a movie is a movie. To be sure, the movie will be louder, and in your face. But, then again, serious weight loss and other physical changes are not a requirement for having a role in the stage production.

This staged version—instead of a turn-tabled barricade—achieves cinematic effects through back projection along with dramatic effects by way of soaring voices and affecting acting. As always the case with touring companies, or new groups, some will rise; others will stand out more. For my money, Andrew Varela as the driven, relentless Inspector Javert and Peter Lockyer as the almost saintly Jean Valjean are the standouts. This is a good thing—their mortal rivalry is the key to the show, the book and a number of songs—“Bring Him Home” knocked out of the park by Lockyer and “Stars,” sung with great revealing power by Varela. But Genevieve Leclerc makes “I Dreamed a Dream” her own song, at least until the movie comes out, as Fantine. Jason Forbach as heroic Enjolras, the leader of a student revolution, is a super-hero in this production.

As for who likes what: you say “Les Miserables,” and I say “White Christmas.” You can do both. In this season of high drama and tragedy, and the need to feel good about something, both shows have something to offer.

Gary Tischler •

(This is the fifth in a series of articles about Washington performers, singers and actors who are playing iconic roles during the holiday season at various venues).

Per his professional biography, the American tenor Corey Evan Rotz has sung more than 400 performances with the Washington National Opera since making his 1995 debut in “Der Rosenkavalier.” So, he’s used to Washington audiences. Friday, he may have a different experience.

“I expect to hear some boos,” Rotz said. “There will be children there who may not like me or what I do in this part.”

That part is the role of the witch in the WNO’s production of Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Hansel and Gretel.” Rotz, in a bit of unusual casting, will be playing the menacing gingerbread witch—one of the classic villains not only of opera but of fairy tales and fictions.

“I’ve done all sorts of roles over the years,” said Rotz, 40, a Pennsylvania native who has settled in Washington. “But this is very different from anything I’ve ever done. It’s funny, when it was suggested that I play the witch, I thought, ‘Huh. But why not?’ I jumped at the chance. I think it’s a real challenge—you really have to be an actor as well as a singer. You have to be convincing.”

“Hansel and Gretel”—which comes from one of the Grimm Brothers’ more famous fairy tales—is a bona-fide, full-length opera which will be performed at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater Dec. 21 through 23. Humperdinck was one of the great composers of the 19th century and got the idea at the urging of his sister who had written some German folk songs on the theme of the Grimms’ fairy tale. Humperdinck apparently liked that idea and termed the result a “fairy tale opera.” It proved to be a winner and is a staple of opera companies throughout the world. It was also something of an event in its various debuts, among them in Weimar in 1893, conducted by Richard Strauss—and in Hamburg by Gustav Mahler.

“I supposed it could be a little bit scary for children, but I think it has a very triumphant ending,” Rotz said. “I know these are troubling time for little kids.” The opera is deemed appropriate for ages nine and above; there will be small children in the audience.

It’s a bit of a jump for Rotz, who’s been a mainstay for WNO audiences in a variety of roles, many of them with German themes or by German composers. He has performed roles in “The Magic Flute,” “The Queen of Spades,” “Salome,” Arturo in “Lucia di Lammermoor” and Bacchus in “Ariadne of Naxos.” He made his Los Angeles Opera debut as Abace in “Idomeneo” and his Carnegie Hall debut as Raymond in Tchaikovsky’s “The Maid of Orleans.” He also appeared in the WNO production of “Othello,” which toured in Japan with Placido Domingo.

“ ‘Hansel and Gretel’ isn’t just a children’s opera per se,” Rotz said. “It’s a major work by a major composer. ‘The Magic Flute’ is also considered something of a family opera, but it’s very much Mozart.”

The cast also includes Sarah Mesko and Julia Mintzer as Hansel; Emily Albrink and Shantelle Przybylo as Gretel; Norman Garrett as the father; Maria Eugenia Antunez as the mother—with Jessica Stecklein, playing dual roles as the Dew Fairy and the Sandman.

“Hansel and Gretel” is being presented as the WNO’s new commitment to family programming during the holiday season and is expected to be a regular part of the WNO seasonal programming in the future.

Although he performs in other venues, the Washington National Opera is essentially the beacon, the mainstay, the home of Rotz’s career. “It’s home,” he said. “Every time I perform here, it’s like going home. I know the stagehands, everybody that works here, from top to bottom. So, it’s always a great experience for me. That’s why I’ve decided to live here.

“I would say that the witch is probably the most challenging part of I’ve done, simply because the role is so different,” Rotz said.

It is a very audience-involving opera. Hence, the boos.

“I think there will be some,” Rotz said. “But I don’t think—given the news and what happened in Connecticut—that the witch and the opera is too frightening for children. And it ends on a triumphant note. There’s a quote at the end: ‘When we cannot bear our grief, God the lord will send relief.’ ”
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Gary Tischler •

Unlike the death being impersonated by both Frederich March and Brad Pitt in the movies “Death Takes a Holiday” and “Meet Joe Black,” death does not go on vacation, wondering why folks fear him.

His work is continuous and non-stop. In the results, we hear music, loss, grief and full lives. And in those stopped abruptly, shockingly, we hear and think of thousands of words, and note achievements and those left behind and the legacies of lives lived. Searching through the paper snowdrifts of the names of the dead in the historical record for 2012 (newspapers, Wikipedia, video vaults) is an endless task best not taken. It makes you yearn for the sound of voices you’ve never heard, faces you’ve never seen, stories not yet told except in some small spot on earth.

On one such search, we found Paddy Pecker Dunne, died in his 80th year Dec. 19, in Killimer, County Clare in Ireland, where he lived with his wife and four children. Before you smile at the noticeable whimsy in the name, you might also notice that he was generally acknowledged to be one of the finest banjo players in all of Ireland and was adept with the fiddle, the melodeon and guitar, not to mention the owner of a voice that stirred anger and broke hearts, it is said. Dunne played everywhere. He was often singing in the streets for causes and melodies, otherwise known as buskering, a term we heard once from a woman who’s now a noted jazz singer. He appeared with the Dubliners and was in a movie with Richard Harris called “Trojan Eddie.” He once met Woody Guthrie.

In the Belfast Telegraph obituary, a gentleman by the name of Kieran Hanrahan, artistic director of the Tradfestival, said that “The Pecker mastered the art and craft of many an instrument, the mandolin, the fiddle and the banjo… He was distinctively known for his most precious of gifts, his voice, and what that voice could deliver. It was the envy off some of the world’s renowned rock, pop, folk and traditional singers.”

Dunne lives on on the Internet—there are dozens of videos of him playing, singing—at home, surrounded by family, on the fiddle in a room where a couple is dancing, surrounded by a wall full of old photos and instruments, or on the street, his face prophet like, white beard of winter, sweeping voice, singing “Whiskey in the Jar.”

I didn’t know Mr. Dunne, but my running across him makes me miss him, illustrating the true fact that grief and loss and remaining memories are worldwide conditions, both universal and strangely particular.

December was a cruel month for many, and we all lost persons we did know. In our neighborhood in Adams Morgan, for instance, we lost Jacques Morgan, the one-of-a-kind, book-smitten, opinionated, sometimes querulous owner of the Idle Time Book Shop, which he ran with his wife Val Morgan. Morgan, according to friends, was the kind of proprietor who did not suffer fools or sports fans gladly, even and especially when encountered among the used books and periodicals and knick-knacks of the store, which is an Adams Morgan treasure.

Morgan, 62, died of colon cancer. The book store, as far as it is known, remains. It is the kind of store which reflects Morgan’s eclectic tastes, abundant in books hard to find, but even more surprising to discover—that includes Three Stooges fan magazines found in New Zealand. In a current atmosphere where bookstores (and real books) are on a perpetually alarmist endangered species list, it is also a kind of safes house for book lovers and mavens. “Maven” is, of course, not a word you would have called Morgan to his face.

We also lost Larry L. King—not to be confused with the former CNN talk show host—who was most famous for writing the book for “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,” an enduring Broadway musical constantly revived, trailed fecklessly by the movie version, starring Dolly Parton and Burt Reynolds.

“Whorehouse,” a word which really shouldn’t appear too often in a man’s obituary, but King probably wouldn’t have minded. It came from an article about a real such place in Texas, where patrons included politicians but was run out of business by local moralizers. It was probably King’s most rewarding work, but not his best—books about his good friend, the writer Willie Morris, were much better, as were plays like “The Night Hank Williams Died” and “The Golden Shadows Old West Museum.”

We met King, a thin, talkative, friendly guy with a beard, on the occasion of a production of “Golden Shadows” locally. He was naturally garrulous, a story-teller with a run of wistfulness in him, and tall tales about his drinking days, which by that time had ceased. I remember that I liked him a lot, instantly—I have no idea why Texans cast such an easy shadow but are, according to legend, hard to live with but also fun around a jukebox and a pool table.

King’s death came after Signature Theater once again took out the formidably likeable and appealing “Whorehouse” to much success. I remember seeing “Whorehouse” (there it goes again) in its road show re-incarnation, starring Ann Margaret at the National Theater. We ran into him at a cast party, surrounded by young cast members. He raised a glass—presumably non-alcoholic. I remember his warm voice now, telling stories.

Charles Durning, considered by many to be our best character actor on stage and in film passed away, too at the age of 89—he happened to be in the movie version of “Whorehouse.” Being a “character actor” is a role in which you are not the star, but you can feel free to steal the movie or the stage from the nominal star. It was a kind of theft Durning, portly, funny, who could turn a waddle into a menacing move on a dime, committed often. I saw Durning at Zenith—comporting on the stage with Julie Harris in “The Gin Game,” two great stars of the stage dancing around each other in the mine-layered territory of old age.

Here are more noteable passings.

Chuck Brown died in the spring, and his death completed a truth not always noticed throughout our whole city: that this man’s music, jaunty, driving, endlessly delirious and rhythmic was a Washington, D.C., treasure that could be shared by all of its citizen, and his passing was a real loss. Old-school D.C. politicians, such as Marion Barry and Mayor Vincent Gray, felt the loss keenly at his funeral. I remember when I saw—felt him—for the first time at an outdoor, free concert at Strathmore, go-go and funk on the stately lawns of greater Bethesda, the then 70-year-old playing like a truck driver high on the road.

Outer space got fuller with the permanent arrival of Sally Ride, America’s first female astronaut, and Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first human on the moon.

I miss Gore Vidal for the simple fact that he won’t write another book. I love his essays, his historical novels, “Burr,” “Lincoln” and “Washington, D.C.”—and his unrepentant, pugilist paganism and not always justified sense of superiority.

Speaking of books—all hail to the prophet of a future he anticipated and did not like when it came—Ray Bradbury of “Fahrenheit” fame also penned “The Martian Chronicles” and brawling tales of brawling Irishmen and small town wonders. He wrote the screenplay for John Huston’s “Moby Dick” and titled a book “Something Wicked This Way Comes.” A giant.

We lost Arlen Specter, the sometimes quixotic, often confrontational, but always, in his own way, true to the stature of his standing, which was being the senator from Pennsylvania, until the rise of the Tea Party—and then, Sen. Daniel Inouye, a true larger-than-life ennobler of his home state, Hawai’i, and his institution, the United States Senate.

Speaking of quixotic, another senator, George McGovern, best known for his devastating, muddled presidential loss to Richard Nixon, proved a prophet in many ways—about opening the Democratic party, about Watergate. Asked at a press conference on presidential politics about what it was like to get over losing a presidential race, McGovern replied, “I’ll let you know when it happens.”

The stars we lost and the curious spectacle of celebrity deaths all came together in the passing of flamingly incandescent—once—Whitney Houston who died under questionable conditions in a hotel room on the eve of the Grammy Awards, making the awards seem weird, and the loss even more difficult, she singing her note-holding anthem “I will Always Love You” seemingly everywhere on television on the net, in our memories.

Other pop music losses: Ravi Shankar—who, with the help of Beatle George Harrison, brought the sitar within sight and sound of the world; Donna Summer, the unchallenged queen of disco; “Daydream Believer” and Monkee star Davy Jones; rock-and-roll pied piper Dick Clark and his African-American counterpart on “Soul Train,” Don Cornelius.

We also mourn writer Paul Fussell and his histories of modern war; critic Robert Hughes, who entangled and finagled us into an appreciation of the big themes in art; Mike Wallace, who really was “60 Minutes.”

Last but certainly not least—and always—those we lost Dec. 14 in Newtown, Conn.:

Charlotte Bacon, 6

Daniel Barden, 7

Rachel Davino, 29

Olivia Engel, 6

Josephine Gay, 7

Ana M. Marquez-Greene, 6

Dawn Hochsprung, 47

Dylan Hockley, 6

Madeleine F. Hsu, 6

Catherine V. Hubbard, 6

Chase Kowalski ,7

Jesse Lewis, 6

James Mattioli, 6

Grace McDonnell, 7

Anne Marie Murphy, 52

Emilie Parker, 6

Jack Pinto, 6

Noah Pozner, 6

Caroline Previdi, 6

Jessica Rekos, 6

Aveille Richman, 6

Lauren Rousseau, 30

Mary Sherlach, 56

Victoria Soto, 27

Benjamin Wheeler, 6

Allison N. Wyatt, 6

Gary Tischler • January 2, 2013

This is another in a series of profiles and stories about actors who are performing iconic roles in and around Washington during Christmastime. In terms of Shakespeare, there are few characters more iconic than Puck, the henchperson to Oberon, king of the fairies, fly-by-night, magical creature, master of dreamscapes in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” now being performed at the Shakespeare Theater Company’s digs at Harman Hall and directed by Ethan McSweeny. We talked to actor Adam Green about Puck, the Shakespeare Theatre Company, working with Zelda Fichandler, being married to an actress, and a few other things in the Patron’s Lounge at Harman Hall recently.

As Kermit the Frog once noted, it’s not easy being green. And for actor Adam Green, it’s not easy being Puck.
He’s practically become the logo for the Shakespeare Theater production of “Midsummer.” His face is on the downtown Shakespeare banners. Like a beguiling master of the revels, he’s in TV commercials and the cover of the “Midsummer.” Hair slightly askew, surrounded by sparkling stars, lit by a bulb of moonlight, he’s Puck to the world.

Well met by moonlight, you’d spot Green as a Puck in a crowd, partly because Puck, who could be Robin, could be a spirit of the night, elfish, puckish, could be and always is an actor, the audience’s connection to the land of illusion. Mostly, Puck is an actor, more of this world than that of the world of the fairies.

In this production, the fairies and Puck often appear as if by magic, often bolted out of an area underneath the sea by jumping on a trampoline. Being everywhere and being able to circumvent the world in seconds takes it out of you.

“It’s very, very physical,” Green says. “It’s a wonderful part, but it’s really, really hard work. With a week’s work, counting the matinees, you can feel it.”

“I work out all the time a lot,” he says. “It helps, and you have got to do it,” he says.

Green walks in with back pack, street clothes, and while he isn’t back lit, you see the Puck in him right away. He’s slight, looks lots younger than he is (36-years-old) with a thin beard, trailing curiosity, as opposed to fairy dust.

“You try not to think about other people who’ve done the part,” Green says. “It’s iconic, but there’s lots of ways to do it. I saw that old Mickey Rooney movie from the 1930s. That’s really strange. Sure, there’s a lot of history in the part, in the play. It’s done so often. This is the play that young people, kids, even children, seem to love. You think of him as first, this Robin Goodfellow, who’s sent on this mission, which he messes up. Of course, given that he’s the king of mischief, that may be on purpose. He’s the chaotic element in the play. He goes back to the olden days. He can be Cupid; he can be Eros.

In this production, Green plays the parts of both Puck and Philostrate, the king’s butler. “He represents order and structure, he knows the rules, the exact words in the play the mechanicals do, he’s the exact opposite of Puck who is the prince of disorder.”
“I think audiences really get into this,” he says. “Some performances you can really feel it. They get what’s going on, the little jokes, the asides, the way it’s being done, and sure, a lot of it is about theater itself.”

You can say the same for Green. All actors set out to be a success but that means—everything from being a movie star which sometimes, but not often, rarely happens, to doing defining roles, to matching contemporary plays with classical theater—any number of things.

For Green, it’s the stage. It’s Shakespeare. It’s new plays which open up new challenges and old plays that open up new challenges.

A New Yorker through and through, he’s familiar to Washington audiences going back a little. Most recently, he managed to snag a Helen Hayes award nomination for supporting acting in David Ives’s version of “The Liar.” He was seen in “All’s Well That Ends Well” and “Two Gentleman of Verona,” all at the Shakespeare Theatre.

In New York, the plays get edgier and modern: “None of the Above” at Lion’s Theatre, “Bone Portraits” at Soho Rep; regionally in “Peter and the Starcatchers” at La Jolla Playhouse and “My Name Is Asher Lev” at Barrington Stage Company.

“I guess you could say I’m sort of a gun for hire,” Green says.

Theater is history—present and future. In 2005, Green had a part in Clifford Odets’s “Awake and Sing,” directed by Zelda Fichandler, the Arena Stage founder, and also featuring the late Robert Prosky. “That was quite an experience for me,” he says. “To work with Zelda and Prosky.”

By the way, a young actress named Miriam Silverman was also in it. Green and Silverman, who is also something of a fixture at the Shakespeare Theatre company, began dating and soon thereafter married in a ceremony at Circa 1799 Barn, a farmhouse and event venue in Ancramdale, New York.

Silverman, a luminous, gifted actress, is well remembered here for a finely crafted performance in the difficult role of Helena in “All’s Well That Ends Well,” managing the considerable accomplishment that the smart, gifted, funny and courageous heroine is in pursuit of a dolt.

“We were in that play together and in “The Liar”,” Green recalls. “Somehow, we weren’t on the stage at the same time. That’s a trick that Puck could have probably pulled off.”

Gary Tischler • December 21, 2012

The trouble with playwright Cheryl L. West’s “Pullman Porter Blues,” a world-premiere, Arena Stage co-production with the Seattle Repertory Theatre where the play with music opened, is not with the stars or any of the performers, who are almost uniformly terrific.

The trouble is neither with the fluid set, meant to convey a 1930s, depression-era train ride from Chicago to the deep South nor with the costumes. It sure is not with the music, a batch of terrific blues numbers of varying tempos performed and played with verve, gusto and honest and gut-wrenching and heart-breaking honesty by the performers.

The trouble is with West’s play, and its overambitious contents, stuffed so full with often clashing tendencies and goals that it feels both overdone and under-realized in the end. On the one hand, you have a kind of family saga, a story of three generations of Sykes men, all working as Pullman porters on a train heading south from Chicago on a day when Joe Louis fought Jim Braddock for the heavyweight boxing title of the world.

Also on board are Sister Juba and her four-man band to sing a heavy dose of blues, upbeat, downbeat, slow and dirty, wailing and loud and stuff you gotta dance to and bust a move. Add an out-and-out truly evil white conductor—the conductor being God on the Panama Limited or any other train—off-stage passengers, and a cast-off white girl teenager stowaway with the improbable name of Lutie Duggernut who has been deserted by her dad and who can play a mean harmonica.

Mind you, that’s just the setting not the plot. Faced with an opportunity to provide some meaningful drama and commentary about an ugly, but richly relevant time in America’s history in Jim Crow, segregated times, West has chosen to stoke this train ride with melodrama. It is important to remember that melodrama has its own rules that you can’t really break and its own bucket of improbabilities and coincidences and secrets.

The melodrama gets in the way of what we’re seeing and hearing: the blues, for sure, but also a picture of what it was like to live in America as an African-American, particularly an African-American man trying not just to get by like everyone else, but to get to within hollering distance of that elusive American dream — without being beaten, lynched, unjustly jailed or just ending up in a ditch. When we see that part of the play, we’re appalled, but amazed by the fortitude, the dogged courage and the inventiveness displayed by the characters and by the echoes we hear to our times: that what happens in our lives today comes from those days as surely as anywhere else.

And just when you’re ready to embrace the play at this level, along comes the melodrama and melodramatics, those long-kept secrets going back to slavery, the hopes and dreams, the ambitions and sacrifices and shameful failures.

That’s mostly about grandpa Monroe Sykes, who has made a life out of being a porter, saving money, absorbing the daily insults, giving himself respect for his efforts, followed by his son Sylvester, also a porter, who is working on getting to the future by working to create a union for the porters, a brotherhood of porters (and one of the first group organized to work for civil rights), but whose hopes are all focused on his son Cephas, whom he has managed to send to medical school. Cephas, eager, idealistic, full of life, is on this trip courtesy of grandpa Monroe, who lets him see for himself what a porter’s life is. This sets father and son and grandpa and father at odds: Sylvester is a hothead looking for trouble, Cephas is rebellious about his future, and grandpa tries to keep it all together.

Then, there’s the conductor, porter making their lives miserable, as they head south to Mississippi, played with drunken menace by Richard Ziman. There’s the band and Sister Juba who has issues and a past with Sylvester that we don’t know about. And money’s being bet on the fight, and the porters and the band are jubilant when Louis knocks out the white champion (subject of the Russell Crowe movie, “Cinderella Man”).

So what do we end up with? Performances subtle and jubilant (by Larry Marshall as Monroe), tense and fiery (Cleavant Derricks) as Sylvester, eager and appealing (Warner Miller) as Cephas and downright layered, trumpeting and triumphant (the incomporable E. Faye Butler) as Sister Julia. If “Pullman Porter Blues” were strictly a blues show, it would be just about perfect, thanks to numbers like the pounding “This Train.” the delightfully danced “Hop Scop Blues,” the somber “Trouble In Mind” and butler/sister Julia belting out “Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues.”

But there’s more to it, and here the melodrama kicks in with some potentially tragic and dangerous events that could spell serious consequences for the Sykes clan. Having found love and forgiveness together, they face the serious trouble at the end of the line in Mississippi united and together.

Here’s the problem: melodrama all but insists that the issues ahead are resolved, tragically or triumphantly, logically or emotionally. We want to know — to see what happens. The subject matter almost demands a certain ambiguity, a triumph over reality, suggesting the hope in the future.

West settles—abruptly—for ambiguity, something larger than the melodrama which we’ve been watching, a setting where danger and triumph seem to operate side by side. It’s true that you shouldn’t complain that a writer hasn’t written the play you wanted her to write. Nevertheless, you can wish in this case that West hadn’t quite so overloaded her bag of gifts with every which thing.

In the end, you’re likely to wind up fully engaged despite the play’s problems. That was certainly the case for the audience I saw at a matinee performance. It was a somewhat older audience, many of whom surely heard echoes of their own history in the music and the characters.

“Pullman Porter Blues,” will be at Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater through January 6, 2013.
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