Gary Tischler • November 6, 2012

Washington Ballet: A Vampire Arrives for Halloween
Septime Webre, artistic director of the Washington Ballet, decided to call the company’s 37th season “Seduction,” meaning that he hopes this season’s rich material and lengthened offerings in terms of time and number will seduce more patrons into attending TWB productions.

But in another way, it could very definitely be a major characteristic of the season’s first production, the noted choreographer Michael Pink’s production of “Dracula”, which will be done by the Washington Ballet company under the direction of Pink, who now heads the Milwaukee Ballet Company.

“It’s a very seductive production, it’s romantic and spectacular all at the same time,” Webre said in a phone interview. “We’re living in a time when vampires and all the attendant markers and history are very much a major part of our popular culture—there’s “True Blood” on HBO, there’s the “Twilight” book and film series, and all the publicity surrounding the stars, and, of course, there’s all the films, and the original novel by Bram Stoker, which comes straight out of the 19th-century romantic period, in terms of music, dance and to a degree literature.”

The production dates back to the 1990s and Webre says “I’ve wanted to have this done by the company for at least 10 years now. Finally, it’s the right time.”

“Dracula” will be the opener for what promises to be an exceptionally interesting season for the Washington Ballet, and just in time for Halloween. “Well, that certainly helps, don’t you think,” Webre said. “I just think it’s perfect material for a ballet, and it will be true to the source, as Pink emphasized. It’s not a ballet to merely showcase dancer, it’s meant to tell the story clearly and with dramatic effect. It’s very physical material, seductive, romantic, the look of it will be important ,too, and it has a powerful, dazzling pas de deux with Dracula and Jonathan Harker in the opening act.”
Webre calls the season provocative and engaging, one which will include an extended two-week run for “Dracula” at the Kennedy Center, beginning Oct. 24. This year will also bring the annual production of “The Nutcracker.” Next year includes a ballet version of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” part of a new initiative called “The American Experience,” arising “out of my love of both dance and literature,” according to Webre, and makes official what began with “The Great Gatsby.”

THE 4th ANNUAL VELOCITYDC DANCE FESTIVAL
What started out as a popular showcasing of Washington area dance companies and artists that featured world class artists and groups has now become an institution. The fourth VelocityDC Dance Festival is back running at break-neck speed at the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Sidney Harman Hall on Oct.18, 19, 20 and 21 after three years of sold-out performances.

Numerous companies and individuals will perform at the festival, which was organized by a consortium of local dance-supportive arts entities which includes presenters Washington Performing Arts Society, the Shakespesare Theatre Company and Dance/MetroDC, the region’s service organization for dance. The festival is being presented in a fast-paced gala format of movement and music, hip-hop and spoken words and through its revolutionary, cutting edge styles and artist, has made Washington DC a leader as a top dance destination nation wide.

Also returning is the Ramp!-to-Velocity series, put on 90 minutes before each evening performances, with excerpts from the work of up and coming young dancers and choreographers. Performances of the Ramp! Series will be held in the Forum, an intimate space on the lower level of the Harman.
Individual artists and group performers for the three day festival include Dissonance Dance Theater, CityDance Conservatory, Word Dance Theater, the Uprooted Dance Theater, Gesel Mason, El Teatro de Danza Contemporanea de El Salvador, The Suzanne Farrell Ballet, VTDance, Urban Artistry, Flamenco Aparicio and Pastora Flamenco, The Washington Ballet Studio Company, Asanga Domask, Christopher K. Morgan and Artists, Farafina Kan, slight dance theater, the American University Dance Company, the Youth Dance Ensemble, Step Afrika!, Jane Franklin Dance, Edgeworks Dance Theater, Xuejuan Feng, Sidney Skybetter, Footworks Percussive Dance Ensemble, Company/E, The Washington Ballet, Farafina Kan, Rebollar Dance, Just Tap and Janaki Rangajaranm.
Inquire about tickets at the Shakespeare Theatre COpany at (202) 547-1122 or at www.ShakespeareTheatre.org

OUT OF AFRICA, FROM RUSSIA
Two at the Kennedy Center—Tradition meets contemporary edge in two diverse fall dance offerings at the Kennedy Center.

First, it’s “Voices of Strength: Two Programs of Contemporary Dance and Theater byWomenfrom Africa” from a collection of female African choreographers who mix “humor, irony, poignancy and power in their work. In two Terrace Theater programs, it’s “Correspondances” and “Quartiers Libres” on Oct. 4 and then “Sombra (Shadow)” and “Madame Plaza” on Oct. 5.

“Correspondances” is a duet that’s part dance, part theater and part story telling by choreographers Ketty Noel from Hait/Mali and Nelisiwe Xaba from South Africa. “Quartiers LIbres” is a solo work by Nadia Beugre from Cote d’Ivoire. In “Sombra,” Mozambique choreographer Helena Pinto explores the role of women in modern society, while “Madame Plaza” is the work of Bouchra Ouizguen from Morocco.

In a more traditional vein, the wondrous Mariinsky Ballet returns to the Kennedy Center’s Opera House Oct. 16 to 21 with a production of “Cinderella,” choreographed and staged by Alexei Ratmansky, one of ballet’s prolific and hottest choreographers. [gallery ids="100963,130774,130772" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

THE KENNEDY CENTER

THE NATIONAL SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
The season starts officially in grand style for the 82nd year with the Season Opening Ball, as the charismatic NSO and Kennedy Center music director Christoph Eschenbach conducts and world-class star violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter performs Felix Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, headlining a varied program on Sept. 30 in the Concert Hall.

The initial non-gala event for the NSO will come Oct. 4 to 6, when Eschenbach conducts mezzo-soprano Kelley O’Connor singing Lieberson’s “Neruda Songs” as part of a romantic program that includes works by Wagner and Tchaikovsky.

NSO Pops
Hometown lady Roberta Flack is back in her home town with the NSO Pops Orchestra in “Roberta’s Back in Town” featuring many of her famous songs as well as songs from her new Beatles-keyed album, Oct. 25 to 27. Steven Reineke conducts the NSO Pops Orchestra with Flack, who’s famous for such hits as “Killing Me Softly” and “The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face.”

Kennedy Center’s Own Jazz Club
With the passing of the legendary Billy Taylor, the KC Jazz Club now has a new artistic advisor in Jason Moran, a young innovator who will add a new spirit to the expanding KC jazz scene. The center also has a new performance space in the center’s atrium, the Supersized Jazz Club.

Performance-wise, vocalist Kurt Elling comes to the Terrace Theater on Oct. 27, while at the KC Jazz Club, now in its second decade, Mulgrew Miller and his trio, who opened the club in 2002, returns Oct. 5. Pianist and organist Dr. Lonnie Smith appears Oct. 6, and the vibrant Israeli clarinetist Anat Cohen comes to the center Oct. 19. The legendary Heath Brothers Jimmy and Albert “Tootie” appear Oct. 20. Moran and his group, The Bandwagon, appear Oct. 26.

History Comes Calling
Two very special concerts which showcase how music can bear witness and drive and interact with social change will be hosted by the Kennedy Center. On Oct. 14, there’s “This Land Is Your Land,” an all-star concert that pays tribute to the folk singer and troubadour Woodie Guthrie, who celebrated and sang of about working people, drifters and a nation in the midst of the Great Depression. In the process, he influenced and continues to influence generations of folk and blues singers, including Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan and his own son Arlo Guthrie. Gathering together for this “Woody Guthrie Centennial Celebration” include such top musicians as John Cougar Mellenkamp, Arlo Guthrie, the Old Crow Medicine Show, Tom Morello, Rosanne Cash, Judy Collins, Ry Cooder, Jackson Browne, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and others.

Coming Oct. 17 to 20, “Songs of Migration” is a musical salute to the great songs of migrants of the African continent created by trumpeter and composer Hugh Masekela, singer Sibongile Khumato and James Ngcobo.

The Barbara Cook Spotlight cabaret season opens Oct. 12 at the Terrace Theater with Maureen McGovern, who transformed herself from a pop singer to a great Broadway and cabaret performer.
And let’s not forget who’s getting the Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain Award for American Humor: Here’s Ellen, that is, Ellen DeGeneres, will get the prize Oct. 22 in the Concert Hall.

WASHINGTON PERFORMING ARTS SOCIETY
The Washington Performing Arts Society has been the top presenter of performing arts talent, both established and rising for over 40 years, connecting with venues large and small, from the Kennedy Center to the Music Center at Strathmore to the Harman Center to the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue.
Highlights for the next month or so include:

Israeli-born pianist Inon Barnatan kicks off the Hayes Piano Series, named after WPAS founder Patrick Hayes and his wife and with a mission to feature rising piano stars. Barnatan will be performing works by Debussy, Ades, RaVel, Britten and Schubert at the Terrace Theater Oct. 13.
Also on the immediate schedule are pianist Richard Goode (Terrace Theater, Oct. 11); Rob Kaplow’s series “What Makes it Good?” with pianist Brian Ganz focusing on Chopin (Oct. 14 at Baird Auditorium); violinist Paul Huang (Terrace Theater, Oct. 25); pianist Andras Schiff (Strathmore, Oct. 30) and superstar violinist Joshua Bell (Strathmore, Nov. 1).

THE MUSIC CENTER AT STRATHMORE
The Music Center at Strathmore, now in its seventh season, continues to supply performance seasons characterized by eclecticism and diversity, mixing the offerings of partners like WPAS, the National Philharmonic and the Baltimore Symphony with its own programming.

The center kicks off the season with Virginia’s own and America’s own rock-out pop star Pat McGee, as in the Pat McGee band which will feature a lineup that includes members of McGee’s very own high school band (Sept. 28).

Meanwhile, the torchy, iconic and always one-of-a-kind Patti LuPone continues the center’s American songbook series with “Matters of the Heart” (Oct. 5 and 6) in a concert of love songs featuring the works of a wide range of composers from Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim to Randy Newman, Jimmy Webb, Brian Wilson, Judy Collins, Dan Fogelberg, Joni Mitchell and Cyndi Lauper.

On Oct. 20, the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, described as “anarchic” and mind-bogglingly versatile brings the great, re-discovered ukulele to bear on music by the likes of the Who, Beethoven and Isaac Hayes.

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Marin Alsop, brings a season prevue performance to Strathmore, with excerpts from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, “West Side Story” and Christopher Rouse’s Ku-Ka-Ilimoku” among others, with Alsop presiding and offering commentary Sept. 13.
The National Philharmonic Orchestra will opens its season at the center with “Beethoven: The Power of Three” with Orli Shaham on piano and NPO director Piotr Gajewski conducting.

THE EMBASSY SERIES
Since 1994, Embassy Series founder Jerome Barry has been practicing his own form of cultural and musical diplomacy, and in the course of things, managing to create a unique and lasting Washington cultural institution. By doing what he and the Embassy Series did—a series of concerts by established and rising American and international musicians and artists performed in many of this city’s well-situated embassies, international cultural centers and residences of ambassadors—they managed to introduce an accumulatively large audience over time to the international community in our midst and vice versa.

In the process, he also built bridges by producing concerts in such places as the Iraqi Cultural Center, the Cuban Interest Section and the Middle Eastern community reflecting their music and culture as well as receiving strong support from the European community and its traditionally Western classical music and performers.

This year’s season begins at the Embassy of Latvia with the popular violinist Lorenzo Gatto, with Robert Giordano on piano on Oct. 4, followed by an Oct. 10 concert at the Embassy of Hungary, with mezzo-soprano Veronika Dobi-Kiss and George Peachey on Piano. On Oct. 19, the Fairfax Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Christopher Zimmerman and with Edvinas Minkstimas on piano will perform at the Embassy of Austria. And on Oct. 31, Andre Goricare, the silent film pianist, will perform at the Embassy of Slovenia.

THE FOLGER CONSORT
The Folger Consort adds another aspect of Londonmania to our all-London summer consciousness with a return to its roots and opening its season with “London: Music from the City of Shakespeare,” Sept. 28 to 30 at the Folger Elizabethan Theatre.

THE CHORAL ARTS SOCIETY
Choral Arts opens its season Oct. 21 with “La Musica Latina,” a program of Latin American music from ballads to swinging salsa and rumba music, under the baton of new director Joseph Holt, with the Choral Arts Chamber Choir at Lisner Auditorium.

THE WASHINGTON BACH CONCERT
Washington Bach Concert celebrates its 35th season with a six-concert season, beginning with “Kings and Commoners,” a selection of music commissioned for state occasions, including works by Handel and Bach on Sept. 23 at the National Presbyterian Church.

THE IN SERIES
The beyond-category institution begins its 30th anniversary season “Prelude: Songs We Love” on Sept. 29 and Oct. 1 with a program of opera, cabaret, dance and zarzuela, no less.

DUMBARTON CONCERTS
Dumbarton begins with the Vida Guitar Quartet, comprised of some of England’s finest guitarists: Bizet’s “Carmen Suite,” Turina’s “Prayer of the Bullfighter” and de Falla’s “Love, the Magician” at the Dumbarton Methodist Church in Georgetown Oct. 20.
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Gary Tischler •

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 •

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.