Gary Tischler • November 6, 2012

The voice on the phone didn’t give many clues. I expected to hear Janis Joplin’s growly, smoky voice, but,
after all, I was talking to Mary Bridget Davies. Davies stars in the current run of “One Night With Janis Joplin” at Arena Stage. She takes the stage performing, being, acting the part of Joplin, who for a time in the 1960s was the queen of rock and blues in America before she died of a heroin overdose in 1970.

Davies talks smartly, movingly about Joplin, the person and the music, the blues. She’s had plenty of experience herself singing the blues, and, well, being Janis. If you catch any of the videos on YouTube, the Joplin persona and voice and way of singing rises easily to the surface, and catches you full force.

“One way or another I’ve been singing her songs for a while,” Davies, a thirty-some- thing woman who hails from Lakewood near Cleveland, Ohio, says. “Even when I was little, people tell me I was jumping up and down on the couch singing ‘Piece of My Heart.’ ” That would be Joplin’s signature heartbreak song from her initial hit album “Cheap Thrills” back in 1968, when she bowled the rock world over with her emotional blues style and let-it-all-hang-out persona.

“I’m not her, in that sense,” she said. “But you know, when I get on stage in this show, there are times when I just sort of let her take over, I’m singing a song, and there she is and I just step aside.”

“One Night With Janis Joplin,” staged in partnership with the Cleveland Play House and written and directed by Randy Johnson, is a show on the order of a concert, but also a trip through the sources of Joplin’s particular bluesy style, by way of Sabrina Elayne Carten as the blues singer paying homage to African American blues singers like Etta James, Bessie Smith and Aretha Franklin.

Davies got the role after the original actress backed out, but she was more than ready. She had already performed in “Love, Janis,” had already the affinity for Janis’s music, had parents who were genuine members of the rock and roll, blues and country rock world, played and fronted with Big Brother and the Holding Company, Joplin’s original band, and has her own blues band and record her own albums.

“Yeah, you could say she was a big part of my life all along,” she said. “This is something special. It’s like being her on stage at least, and that’s okay, more than okay. She lived quite a life. She had this unique gift she didn’t even know she had. One day, she sang and she knew she could do it and that was that. The first kind of music she heard was “Summertime”, which she sang herself.” When she got the role, she played it in Cleveland and it was like a homecoming for her. One critic wrote that “While there never has been and never will be another Janis Joplin, Mary Bridget Davies is awfully damn close.”

“I think audiences really get it into it—and you get all kinds of people, people of that gen- eration, people my age, maybe even young, not teens so much unless their folks bring them,” she said. “I think they have the same reaction as people did back then. It’s the raw emotions. The songs are so out front, they get to you.

That was Joplin’s stock in trade—she laid herself out there, just about without any let up through songs like “Piece of My Heart”, “Me and Bobby McGee”, “Cry” and the difficult, wrenching “Ball and Chain”, a regular mountain for singers to climb.

“People said, well, she doesn’t exactly look like Janis, but then they get into it, and it’s some- thing different,” she said. “You have to wonder what she would have been like if she had lived.”

She’d be in her late sixties, or a little more, like her “Big Brother” band mates, and, Davies thinks “could have been like the soul or god- mother of country rock and the blues, because in truth, nobody sings like that anymore.”

Nobody, except maybe Mary Bridget Davies.

Gary Tischler •

Vlad the Impaler, the original real his- torical figure from which sprung Bram Stoker’s fictional , blood-sucking anti- hero and the emergence of ballet as a dance art form are separated by less than a century, give or take.

It seemed to many that Dracula’s story—the one Bram Stoker wrote in the era of Victoria’s buttoned-up, repressed England—and ballet might make for a dreamy narrative match on the stage. That’s exactly what happens in the Washington Ballet production of “Dracula,” choreographer Michael Pink’s gory, heated, very bloody and seductive version of the tale at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater, now through Nov. 4.

Narrative ballet—from “Swan Lake”, to “Don Quixote,” to “Romeo and Julet”—as opposed to more abstract works of modern dance, have always seemed to me like the dream version of a story, it’s dreamt essence lying at the core of the tale, just as opera is fevered version of the same tale, with the emotions riding on the music, and drama and plays carry the narrative with character and words.

On those terms, “Dracula” surely feels like a dream, even if that dream resembles more often than not a nightmare. Actually, it begins with a nightmare, one dreamt by the much- put-upon Jonathan Harker. This “Dracula” is remarkably faithful to the Stoker tale, with its bedeviled, haunted Harker, the bug-eating, madhouse resident Renfield, who acts as a kind of portal for Dracula, the beguiling Lucy and her swains, Lord Arthur Godalming and the rifle-toting, buckskin-wearing American Quincy Morris, a very romantic-looking, Byronian Dr. Van Helsing, and Mina, Harker’s fiancé, the real object of Dracula’s sinister affections, as well as assorted couples, female vamps, gendarmes, and peasants, including a horde of infected victims of Dracula.

The production itself lets out all the stops with Lez Brotherson providing a set and costume design that encompasses Dracula hallmarks — the stark sanatorium, the imposing staircases, the castle, the graveyard, beds and cof- fins, all bathed in a score by Phillip Feeney full of bells and whistles and screeches and pounding heartbeats, the ominous sounds of a hungry heart accompanied by an impending feeding frenzy.

This production, (which was originally directed by Christopher Gable) has different casts in different productions, with Jared Nelson cast in the red-caped and ninja-black role of Dracula. This is about Dracula, no question, and his overpowering will to feast. The production – a nerve-wracking and haunting two hours plus event is wrapped, and stacked around the architecture of three seductions in which Dracula overpowers Harkin, visiting his castle on business, the flirtatious, enchanting Lucy at what appears to be a gala brunch of couples moving up and down a staircase, into chairs and out on to a dance floor, and Nina at night, alone in a bed, beckoning her to his bloody, bared chest.

These dances—and that’s what they are, almost classic manifestations of ballet, but also almost Olympic-style athletic feats—show us Dracula’s magnetic, physical powers, as well as his hypnotic powers and for Nelson—and also for the dynamic Jyum-Woong Kim—the require- ments for the parts are a display of emotions, strength and lean-muscled strength so that the effect on the audience is as hypnotic as those of his victims.
These three pa-de near-deaths are interjected like a stiletto into the production, which includes the desperate presence of Renfield, a kind of ritualized, loud, brazen and bloody peasant folk dance which ends with the sacrifice of a wolf.

In England, there’s a ball, and as much flirtatious, happy, stylized, fashionista and high energy style dancing to make you almost forget who’s coming to dinner. In this production, Nicole Haskins, makes for a heartbreaking Lucy, she’s so full of energy, such forgiveable flirtation that her submission to Dracula and her trans- formation into a bloody-tooth, virally hungry otherbeing is a tragedy.

The presence of Dracula—for the audi- ence—even when he’s not in plain sight provides the tension of a violin bow, it speeds up the nar- rative, no matter what’s happening. This way, it becomes an adventure tale which moves to a kind of action climax, one, by the way which is as graphically violent as a stage production can
manage.

Pink’s “Dracula” is like a loud, almost unbearably and frightening dream, the tale remembered at some primal level, becoming real. In this season, that’s not a bad fright night.?

Gary Tischler •

Opening nights in the theater are always fraught with a certain danger, an intensity—and intenseness—of feeling that probably won’t occur later during the normal run of a show or production.

That was especially true in the case of “One Night With Janis Joplin,”, the Arena Stage-Cleveland Playhouse biographical showcase of the life, time and roots of the 1960s blues-rock singer-become-legend who died of an overdose in 1970 at the age of 27.

The opening night performance had an electric feel to it, a wobbly-time-machine feel, and an almost total willingness on the part of the audience to join in, dive in and swim in the pool of rowdy, rock and blues driven music that carried the evening along. There was, even before things got going, an air of anticipation, with people—a good many of them of that baby-boomer generation which embraced Joplin, the girl from Port Arthur, Texas, with gusto in live performances and with record sales.

In fact, Arena is enjoying a kind of festival of rowdy, strong Texas women what with Kathleen Turner as journalist Molly Ivins also in the building. There’s enough attitude here to make the building levitate.

The production was set up as a kind of live concert—as in “Set One” and “Set Two”—with star Mary Bridget Davies delivering an uncannily authentic—in voice, in emotional feeling—performance as Janis Joplin. She did not so much resemble Joplin—she sports an open, lovely face and is a little more full-bodied than Joplin—as become her, in all the mannerism of hair shaking, dress, eye-rasing, and in a true voice both in speaking and singing, and bare-naked emotions, especially when she and some of the more wrenching songs in the show—“Cry Baby,” “Ball and Chain,” “A Woman Left Lonely,” “Piece of My Heart” and “Me and Bobby McGee” among them—meshed and became one.

But director and creator Randy Johnson added something else that turns the show into a kind of celebration of women and the blues by adding the amazing Sabrina Elayne Carten as the “blues singer,” in turns as several African-American female blues singers like Bessie Smith, Etta James, Aretha Franklin and Odetta, to name a few, who turn up as embodiment, influences and pioneers of the kind of blues Joplin herself so fully realized. When the two are together—or apart—they add to each other and the music, and when Carten jumps into the persona of Franklin, in a rousing rendition of “Spirit in the Dark” that ends the first “set,” they do what a member of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band once told me they did with audiences—they gets their feet to tappin’ and their hands to clappin’. Davies and Carten make them downright crazy.

This isn’t a “real” concert piece, nor do much of Joplin’s less appealing excesses of drugs, booze and heartache in terms of her relationships with men get in, although Davies, like Joplin herself, manages to get in every piece of broken, bleeding wounds into her singing. Joplin had her troubles, fears, anxieties and blowups and blowouts, and she pretty much took the pain she felt and put it like bandaids in her music. On stage is where Joplin found love—“There isn’t a man that could make me feel like that,” she says. That being said, the set, ramshackle and rich in detail, could pass for the Fillmore or the Avalon, two San Francisco rock and roll palaces where Joplin performed.

Joplin’s recorded music—and this rendition—lasts because it was emotionally authentic and searing. If Joplin talking about her life on stage—when she says words like “blues” and “lonely,” they carry miles and miles of mileage—leaves out some of the juicier, awful parts, so be it. We know them already.

I cannot pretend to be totally objective in critical terms about this show. It took me back, having seen Joplin at a smaller venue and been moved by her music at the creation in the Bay Area. But I honestly feel something happened that night—what with Joplin’s brother and sister in the audience, some folks dressing hippie-style or Joplin-style, buzz in the lobby, and rocking and rolling almost from the beginning without letup. I heard a young woman behind me scream piercingly, explaining later that she was letting off steam because “they don’t scream at rock concerts in Seattle.” I found myself remembering most of the lyrics to most of the songs, with the exception of the wrenchingly sweet “Little Girl Blue,” a Rodgers and Hart offering.

Davies had you believing that you were watching and listening to Joplin. She gave her specific mannerisms, a kind of child-like, perky smart, knowing intelligence, and saved the desperation for the songs, difficult, exhausting performances with notes in outer space and feelings raw and naked.

Inevitably, the production loses a little steam when you’re getting to the end, which is signaled by the onset of “Bobby McGee,” a song written by others, sung by many, but which she made her own. I heard one woman in the lobby, reading some bio notes on the wall, say almost angrily how her death “was so stupid. She wasted her life.” To which I can only add, that too, is why we’re because she died that way, and young.

This one night stays with you—at least partly because you don’t want it to end and because it reminds you that she’s already gone.

Gary Tischler •

Sometimes, we embrace culture in more forms than music, singing, dancing, the stories of plays and operas.

Sometimes, all we want and need are words, in the form of readings, discussions, debates, readings, debates or conversations.

Talk is becoming more and more a part of our culture scene at many venues. Museums have curator talks, theaters have conversations with directors and actors, and so on. Poetry readings have become popular in all sorts of venues.

The Music Center at Strathmore is beginning a series of talks between or by noted personalities, humorists and poets in advance of the 2012 election, which moves steadily ahead in a whirlwind of debates, twitters and the commentary of experts in every medium available. There will be a trio of discussions, talks and readings in October, taking in politics, culture, satire and poetry.

A State of the Union Conversation: Oct. 19, 8 p.m. Fran Lebowitz and Frank Rich, Lebowitz, outspoken, funny, sly and razor sharp is noted for her books and novels and articles in the New Yorker, her early collection of essays called “Metropolitan Life” and “Social Studies.” In 2010, a documentary on her work and life, directed by Martin Scorcese, aired on HBO. Rich was the chief drama critic of the New York Times for years and has expanded his voice to the arena of national politics and op-ed opinion pieces. Lebowitz and Rich will take a look and opine on the election race and the state of the country.

An Evening With David Sedaris: Oct., 8 p.m. Sedaris is considered by many of his avid readers one of America’s pre-eminent humor writers with such best-sellers as “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” “Naked,” “When You Were Engulfed in Flames” and others and he’s also a regular contributor to the New Yorker and National Public Radio. He’ll be reading from selections of his works, divulging personal recollections and answering questions from the audience.

Collins and Oliver: Oct. 28, 3 p.m. Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate of the United States and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver will share personal favorites, highlight writers from award-winning collections and celebrate Oliver’s new book, “A Thousand Mornings.”

But wait, there’s more.

Speaking of poetry, Natasha Tretheway, the current and 19th U.S. Poet Laureate will give her inaugural reading at the Library of Congress, Sept. 13, 7 p.m., in the Coolidge Auditorium of the Thomas Jefferson Building.

The reading opens the Library’s 2012-2013 literary season and will kick of the 75th anniversary of the Poetry and Literature Center. Tretheway is the author of four poetry collections, including “Thrall,” her latest, and “Native Guard,” winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

At Lisner Auditorium on Sept. 20, Jeffrey Brown and Scott Simon share and debate thoughts on “Searching For Civil Dialogue in a Divided America.” On Oct. 8, Salman Rushdie, the noted novelist will share the story of how he was forced underground for more than nine years after becoming the target of a fatwah issued by Ayatollah Khomeini for his novel, “The Satanic Verses.”

And, as part of the Folger Institute’s literary Pen/Faulkner series, acclaimed novelist Jeffrey Eugenides will be in a conversation with Washington Post book critic Ron Charles on Sept. 24, 7:30 p.m.

Eugenides is the author of critically acclaimed novels like ‘The Virgin Suicides” and “Middlesex.” [gallery ids="100965,130812" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

The great American soprano Sondra Radvanovsky admits she likes a challenge.

She’s taking one on now as she prepares to help open the Washington National Opera’s 2012-2013 season in the title role of Donizetti’s “Anna Bolena,” a role described by critics as variously punishing and daunting.

“That’s a part I’ve always wanted to do, partly because it is a real challenge, but also because I like the character, the drama that’s at work,” Radvanovsky said in a phone interview last week. “And it is a mountain, let me tell you.”

At three hours plus, the classic bell canto opera is a long night out. “I’m on stage almost all of the time, and that can be really exhausting,” Radvanovsky said. “So, you have to be able to keep yourself fresh, you have to pace yourself, and you can’t let down.”

“Anna Bolena” takes itself up with the latter part of the troubled Queen of England’s life, when she is in disgrace, headed for the block, rejected and dropped by King Henry VIII as he consorts with another woman, Jane Seymour.

“It helps that audiences will be familiar with the characters, because there’s so much history there,” Radvanovsky said. She was an avid follower of the Showtime television series, “The Tudors,” and has done her research.

“It’s a true dramatic part,” she said. “I care very much about the acting, performance part of a role, as well as the music and singing. Maria Callas is my idol in that department. It’s not always just about technique, about the perfect notes, but about singing and acting a part.”

“Anna Bolena” is famous for a first-act duet which is unusual in that it’s a scene between the two rivals, Anna and Henry’s new bride-to-be. Plus, as there was in Donizetti’s “Lucia Di Lammermoor,” there is a mad scene.

Radvanovsky works almost all of the time and travels overseas for roles, taking her from Italy to Austria and Germany, not to mention in American opera houses all over the country. “I know that it sounds romantic to some people, all this jetting around and eating bon bons in hotel rooms,” she said. “It’s not like that. Truth is, it can wear you out.”

Some of the pressure of that kind of life is eased by the presence of her husband Duncan Lear, who is also her business manager and who travels with her. “Oh, my God, I could not do any of this without him,” Radvanovsky said. “But you know, you miss being at home, sleeping in bed, seeing our friends and neighbors, just being at home.” She is a Chicago native, who grew up in the Midwest, although she and her husband reside in Toronto.

For a worldwide opera star, especially at the Metropolitan Opera, who is known for being one of the outstanding interpreter of Verdi’s heroines, especially Leonora in “Il Trovatore,” Radvanovsky seems to have an affinity for Donizetti’s work. She has performed his so-called three queens—“Anna Bolena,” “Maria Stuarda” and Queen Elizabeth in “Roberto Deveareux,” not to mention “Tosca” to great effect. Donizetti and bell canto opera preceded Verdi and Wagner, but for Radvanosky, there’s not that much difference. “It’s a challenge for the voice, and I like to take on that kind of challenge, you can aim higher, always,” she said. “And the music is purely beautiful, you’ll see, it’s a joy to sing and to act the parts.”

Placido Domingo, the former WNO director and a huge opera star in his own right, was an early fan of her work. “We are great friends, he was a mentor in many ways,” Radvanovsky said. You can catch a YouTube clip of the two in concert, singing various arias and other compositions, including a turn at “Some Enchanted Evening” by Domingo.

She has heard the word diva on occasion about herself. “I take it for what it is, in a good way,” she says. “To me, it’s about the work and doing it right. I don’t see myself as a grand personality or anything like that. But I play and perform them, which is wonderful to be able to do.”

Gary Tischler •

Washington is a town of monuments. It is also a town of museums.

We have museums of art, history, modern art, science and natural history, a Holocaust museum, the National Museum of the American Indian and the soon-to-be Museum of African American History and Culture.

Yet, there is still no museum that honors the achievements of American women or role of women in American history.

That cause for women came a little closer to reality recently when Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., introduced a bill to create a federal commission to determine the feasibility of constructing a National Women’s History Museum in Washington. Senator Susan Collins, R-Maine, is introducing a companion bill in the Senate.

For the National Women’s History Museum organization and its president and CEO Joan Wages, the news brings them one step closer to making the dream of a National Women’s History Museum a reality. “We are thrilled to have this legislation introduced by such distinguished national leaders as Sen. Collins, Rep. Maloney and Del. Norton and ten prominent senators as co-sponsors,” Wages said. “The establishment of a commission would be a giant step forward to help obtain an all-important site for the National Women’s History Museum on or close to the National Mall—the place where our nation shows what it honors.”

Aside from the Women In Military Service For America Memorial at Arlington Cemetery, there is no institution in the capital region which is solely dedicated to honoring women’s role in American history.

Bills to create a National Women’s History Museum have been passed in the Senate and in the House in various versions, but no bill has ever established a commission.

The other co-sponsors of the Senate bill include Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., Sen Mary Landrieu, D-La., Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., Sen. Amy Klobucher, D-Minn., and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska.

Gary Tischler •

“Invisible Man,” Oren Jacoby’s adaptation of Ralph Ellison’s iconic and National Book Award-winning novel of a nameless black man’s experience in and of America, is a wonder to behold.

In the novel’s incarnation as a play, now at the Studio Theatre, directed by Christopher McElroen, co-founder of the Classical Theatre of Harlem, in a co-production with the Huntington Theatre Company, you find yourself thinking and feeling on any number of levels—and wondering about the rest of the audience.

Gifted young actor Teagle F. Bougere says, “I am an invisible man,” intoning the opening words of the novel which remains a classic of American and African-American literature. It is a stylistic landmark, a powerful experience in reading. And, with some critical caveats, it’s an equally powerful but also very different, theatrical experience.

Bougere plays a young black man in the 1920s or early 1930s, not yet graduated from a so-called Negro college, who comes to live in Harlem in search of work and identity. “Invisible Man” as a novel is high-style, almost surreal and certainly poetic. It’s not really a naturalistic work; it’s episodic, a novel of experience. The experience, the biblical and harsh lessons that come from it, is the essence of what it was, and sometimes still is, to be black in America. In the invisible man’s world, grandfathers are freed slaves, the poor live in squalor, and education, as preached by the gospel of Booker T. Washington, is a vehicle for advancement, if not equality.

What’s remarkable about the play is adaptor Oren Jacoby has managed to create a play functioning with the words of the novel. Given the high intensity, rolling, often eloquent and thundering, poetic and even abstract nature of Ellison’s writing style, that’s no small feat. There’s little that seems naturalistic about the way the characters—with all the actors, except Bougere, playing several parts—speak. A certain formality, a poetic distance characterizes how characters—black and white—speak, there’s precious little slang or colloquialism here. It’s always, by way of example, “perhaps” not “maybe.”

By the time the young man makes his way to New York, he’s already lost a few illusions—he receives a college scholarship from the white aristos in his southern community, but not before having been forced to be part of a smoker in which blindfolded black men strike out at each other for the entertainment of the white swells. After he accidentally introduced a kind, wealthy trustee to the more sordid examples of black poverty, he’s expelled from school by the wheeling and dealing school president and sent to New York with a bogus letter of introduction.

In Harlem, he gets a job at a paint factory which specializes in a whiter-than-white paint. “You mean white is right, right?” he asks a co-painter. He’s injured in a factory explosion after a fight with his foreman. He’s helped by a kind woman who puts him up in her modest home. Then, after witnessing an eviction of a black family by an Irish cop, he spontaneously discovers a gift for oratory, stirring up a crowd, talking about “the dispossessed.” That feat attracts the attention of a leftist group of organizers called the brotherhood, strongly resembling the active Communist Party of the time, which many Americans, including Ellison and his fellow novelist Richard “Black Boy” Wright found, for a brief time, attractive.

But the experience ends in disaster—for his friends, for the black community of Harlem and for whatever visibility the man might have thought he still had.

The production is haunting, even beautiful. Bougere is passionate—at turns distant and feverish—as the nameless, invisible man. The staging is stunning. When we meet him the hero lives in a small basement apartment, illuminated by hundreds of light bulbs, making it seem like a consecrated carnival booth. The set by Troy Hourie is remarkable: it doesn’t just shine with lights but is a constantly moving back drop of historical black and white imagery.

The rest of the cast—the intense, lean Brian D. Coats, who plays the grandfather and other parts, the sly coquettish Julia Watt as an enticing white woman, Edward James Hyland as both the well-meaning trustee and a short-tempered Irish cop, and Johnny Lee Davenport in his turn as the idealistic Tod Clifton—leave indelible impressions.

The play—as a drama, not a novel—comes in a way to a halt, and we’re left with the thought, as he insists, that “who knows, on a lower frequency, I speak for you.”

You’re also left with some other thoughts—what this play and that novel mean today in the age of a black president, how it might resonate, say, in the Chicago teacher’s strike; what it has to tell us in this borderline, hateful campaign, what it and its resonating language might sound to young black kids. Given the audience, a full house, was generously 90 percent white, you hope Ellison does indeed speak to and for all of us. Because in this city and in this America, there is a growing divide, and there are still invisible people.
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Gary Tischler •

The performing arts—all of them-are all about music, movements and moments that add up to magic.
In our second fall prevue, we offer selective looks at the offerings on our varied stages, and venues in the realm of opera, dance, music of all sorts, as well as a rich series of spoken word events, discussions, talks, readings in prose and poetry.

Sondra Radvanovsky, the great American soprano, talks about her title role in Donizetti’s “Anna Bolena”, which opens the Washington Opera season, followed by Mozart’s “Don Giovanni”.

Washington Ballet Artistic Director Septime Webre talks about the company’s season opener, just in time for Halloween, of “Dracula”. We’ll look at the annual Dance Velocity events, and upcoming offerings from the Washington Peforming Arts Society, and we’ll have a sampling of Washington’s musical offerings, from the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center, to the Embassy Series, to the star-studded concert celebrating America’s legendary folk and people’s music man Woody Guthrie. We’ll talk about the various voices on stage, including David Sedaris and Fran Lebowitz and Frank Rich and Billy Collins at the Music Center at Strathmore, and U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Threthewey at the Library of Congress, giving her inaugural reading.

The picture, we think, ends up being a mosaic of the richness of Washington’s cultural offerings in the performance arts, and in the visual arts.

Click here for the following article on performance: Radvanovsky Takes on the Star-crossed ‘Anna Bolena’

Click here for the following article on performance: A Diva and a Don Start Things Off in a Rich Washington Opera Season

Click here for the following article on performance:Dance, Dance, Dance

Click here for the following article on performance: Music, Music, Music and More Music

Click here for the following article on performance: Readings and Conversations, from Strathmore to Folger
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Gary Tischler •

Well, we’ll be doing the songs I’ve done over the years, from the beginning until now. We’ll mix it up a little, but they’ll be songs people know, “ Emmylou Harris said in a phone interview about her upcoming August 15 concert at Wolf Trap in a matched set with singer-song writer John Prine, another enduring voice.

The songs—could be the matchless “Boulder to Birmingham,” “To Know Him Is to Love Him” or songs from her last and perhaps most intimate album, “Hard Bargains,” for which Harris wrote almost all of the songs. Could be something like “Pancho and Lefty” or the achingly familiar “One of These Days.” Lots to choose from in a 40-year-career.

Her voice over the phone is matter-of-fact elusive, due to a weak connection, but the accumulated stuff is pretty clear—it’s hard to imagine Emmylou Harris being anything else than the singer she is, or at least that’s the way she sees it. “I’m not sure I could have done anything else,” she says. “This is what I do, who I am. It’s complicated, sometimes, but I’ve been doing this all my life and will be doing it all my life.”

When you hear her sing—in a concert at venues as different as the Music Center at Strathmore or Wolf Trap— the presence and voice is clear as undiluted spring water, flowing. You can hear her life in the songs, the changes, the losses, the adding on of different kinds of music so that whatever she does, there’s always surprises, or things that have never gone away.

“I try to keep things simple when I write,” she says, and it sounds both true and a little too modest. Singing her own songs, or that of others, you hear the spirit of something grainy, pure dirt and wood American, a little cowboy, a lot of unrefined, raw country, the purity of folk with touches of rock and rockabilly, bluegrass and—when she’s of a mind—corner-piano, Broadway, break-your-heart brassy ballads. You can catch the looks, changing, over the years from her album covers, the pitch-black long hair, now turned white, the cheekbones. Now at 65, thrice-married with grandchildren, she looks as magnetic as ever. She looks like a good witch, in some ways. The voice is a little changed, according to her.

“Well, I don’t think I can quite hold the high as long as I used to,” she says. “You lose some things, gain some things. It’s what it is. You adjust, you find new ways, new music, and sometimes you can be more direct.” It’s something you could honestly disagree with her about—life has added some rich, tremulous and heart-probing stuff to her voice, upon listening.

“You know, you always reflect, think of who you were and what’s happened, it informs what you do,” she says. “I can look back when I started out, I was a product of the ‘60s, you know, folk singers and rock, and that stuff. You’d hear country music and sort of treat it with contempt. We didn’t get it, you know.”

With her parents living in the Washington suburbs, Harris famously sang at the Childe Harold in Dupont Circle, now defunct and re-arranged into a different place. “It was a different time,” she said. “I lived a few blocks from the place.”

Her attitude, and quite a few other things, changed when she met Gram Parsons in D.C. He was the legendary and charismatic leader of the Flying Burrito Brothers who was starting a solo act and looking for a girl singer, and that would be Emmylou Harris. The Parsons-Harris relationship is the stuff of musical legend in some ways—people talk about not in the rumor sort of way, but in the sense that Parsons—as close friend, mentor and inspiration helped her emerge with all her gifts firing. “He had a huge impact on me, he inspired me, he educated me about country music, its roots and what it could be, in its basic unadorned ways.”

Parsons died of an accidental drug overdose in 1973, and the shock of that, the hole in her heart, you suspect, is still there. “Sure, he’s with me, he changed my life, and it was a hard, hard loss,” Harris says. He’s in the early “Boulder to Birmingham” and in the song she wrote for “Hard Bargains,” “The Road” as in : “I can still remember every song you played/long ago when we were younger and we rocked the night away.”
“Hard Bargains” also features a song called “Big Black Dog,” which is an outcrop of another passion of hers: the love of dogs, rescuing dogs, being with dogs. Harris runs Bonaparte’s Retreat, a non-profit rescue operation which she runs out of her home Nashville. The “Big Black Dog” in question and music is one Bella, a mix “of just about every breed you can a think of,” who travels with her when she tours in her bus.”

“I can’t believe I never did that before,” she says about traveling with a dog. “It is, I don’t know, such a gift, the companionship of a dog. It’s soothing, full of love.”

She seems to have a gift for easy and long friendships, a natural affinity for musical collaboration. Look her up, and you’ll find almost everybody that’s ever picked up a guitar and banjo, pounded on drums or sung songs for a living in Nashville listed in the “worked with” category.

Harris—while her life has surely been dramatic—isn’t the type of person that get’s talked or whispered, or yacked about a lot about as a star, or god-forgive-them, super-star. She’s the kind of singer-songwriter-performer you remember just a little after the last note is gone as well as years later.

John Prine and Emmylou Harris, Aug. 15, Wolf Trap, Filene Center, Vienna, Va. — www.WolfTrap.org.