Government Rating Sinks While the Heat Rises
• May 3, 2012

Somebody once said that just because you’ve hit bottom doesn’t meant there isn’t a basement down below, and a cellar below that.

Now I’m wondering what’s below the cellar.

The Washington Post, in its weekly dubious award of who had the worst week in Washington, handed it to President Barack Obama, an obvious choice. I’ll give you another: we, the people.

I don’t think this political city has ever quite seen anything like the performance put on by the astigmatic, irresolute and way too resolute, panic-and-partisan stricken performance by all parties—the two political parties, the members of both the Senate and the House of Representatives, the administration and the media who read the political and economic tea leaves as if they were written in Chinese.

In short, have you ever witnessed a spectacle like the great 2011 hot-summer-in-the-city crisis over raising the debt ceiling?

The answer—if you discount a southern senator caning a northern senator during events leading up to the civil war—is no.

And boy, were there consequences.

It’s bad enough that this summer produced unprecedented heat waves, crops turning to dust in Texas and elsewhere starvation in Somalia, and rioting in London.

We now officially have a pretty much completely dysfunctional government, according to the financial agency Standard & Poor, which downgraded the U.S. in its list of risk-free borrowers from AAA to AA. If you’re a battery, that’s not so bad. If you’re supposedly the world’s most powerful country, that’s a financial embarrassment and possible disaster.

The S&P announcement, made after the stock market closed on Friday and after a big tumble in the Dow Jones, was made in spite of the fact that in its figures to determine the downgrade, the agency had made a $2 trillion mistake. You could argue that the S&P might have reconsidered, but the agency, like many politicians, lawyers, consultants, preachers and just plain folks, was not deterred by a little thing like facts. They made a political and policy judgment, prompted by the debt ceiling debacle and the behavior of everyone involved and while you can’t disagree with the observation about a “gulf between the political parties” and a lack of confidence in the government and elected officials being able to solve the country’s debt problems, the downgrading itself seemed arrogant and not a little reckless.

The raising of the debt ceiling used to be routine. Not this time. The newly elected Tea Party members of the house and senate made their no-prisoners, no-compromise policies about huge budget cuts in entitlement programs, no tax increases or changes, a part of the resolution of the debt ceiling issue.

President Obama and the Democrats have now continued to blame the GOP and the Tea-ists for the whole mess. You can blame them because they’re all a bunch of little Robespierres, burning the government down and locking the exit doors.

But Obama continued to believe that he could actually negotiate with Boehner, Cantor, McConnell and the gang of Teabags.

He acted like a man who was dealing with a group of outpatients from St. Elizabeth, among them people who believed they were Jesus, Napoleon, Stalin and Charlie Chaplin and says to them “Come to the White House and let us reason together. We’ll have some tea and scones.”

Every meeting, every phone call, or lack thereof, was scrutinized by the media for signs of wonder or resolution. They never came until the very end when both sides, the clock run down next to nothing—cobbled together a deal that everyone swallowed like it was a piece of coal and did not nothing to prevent recurrences or offer true long-range solutions. And don’t you even say the word “taxes,” you just hush now.
When the downgrading, predicted by many economic experts, came, the results were devastating. The New York Times opined that the downgrading “carried few clear financial implications.”

How’s this for a clear financial implication—the Dow Jones dropped 635 points Monday, prompted by the downgrade, but also a continued debt problem in Europe.

Oddly enough, the only stock being bought up was U.S. Treasury bonds, which, even with the downgrade, seemed the safest bet around.

President Obama gave a speech mid-Monday, chiding the S&P, saying “we were still the United States of America,” trying to reassure the American people. Unfortunately, as he spoke, stocks were tanking on a scale not seen since 2008.

Come to think of it, he may yet get the worst title two weeks running.

Faces of the Nation: Politics in Art
•

History surrounds us in Washington, politics is the humidity of our daily lives as much as suffocating temperatures and the news—intimate, immediate, profoundly affecting—sit beside us at breakfast, lunch and dinner.

History, politics and the news are a part of the culture of the city as an atmosphere, and in actuality. All three are still on hand even as the tumult and shouting dies down only in degrees after the narrow avoidance of a U.S. debt default.

The divisions—deeply felt and deeply expressed, stringent and strident—which helped propel the crisis right to edge of a chasm, the politics that dictated the news and the horrific historic moment at hand could be seen quite literally in three different exhibitions which explore the historic, political and news-driven immediacy which is as much a part of our cultural existence as the neighborhoods where we sleep and live.

No one kept track, but it’s fair to think that Ronald Reagan’s name was invoked at least hundreds of times during the noisy debates, the constant press conferences, the news stories and blogs, more often than not by the Tea Party members who had taken his “small government” message to heart. Reagan, perhaps in ways not intended, was a source of inspiration during the debate that drove the debt ceiling crisis.

At the National Portrait Gallery, Ronald Reagan’s remarkable life and continuing legacy is being celebrated in the NPG’s marvelous one-room examination and exhibition “One Life: Ronald Reagan,” offering small clues about a larger-than-life persona.

On the flip side, the faces of the other contending political forces in the great national chasm can be seen up close and artistically, glowing with a certain kind of humanity, in the exhibition “Democratic Principles” at the Women’s National Democratic Club in Dupont Circle, a selection of 22 paintings of progressive political leaders.

The debt ceiling crisis was recorded with stark immediacy not only by the television and news writers but by press photographers, and some of their efforts (maybe the round of golf between POTUS and Boehner) will surely make their way into the next White House News Photographers Association annual “Eyes of History” show. You can see last year’s best of the best—a powerful mesh and mash of national, political and world news photography—at Pepco’s downtown Edison Place Gallery through Aug. 12.

During the debt ceiling battle, you might have thought that Reagan was the founder of the Tea Party, so often was his guiding principle of small government invoked. If you take a look around at the “One Life” exhibition, you’ll find he was much more than that, and not quite that, either. He had qualities, not just conservative principles, to commend him to the American public, a persona that projected strength and optimism that was part movie imagery, part down-to-earth-reality.

The exhibition shows his roots in small-town America in Illinois, his days as a radio sports caster in Des Moines, his years as a Hollywood actor of considerable renown, if not top-drawer star wattage, his days working for General Electric as a speaker and television host and his improbable second life as a master politician who won two terms as governor of California and President of the United States.

The imagery in this exhibition defines the man’s popularity, the way others saw him and to a great degree admired him once he entered the political arena. Look at some of the photographs here—Aaron Shikler’s Time Magazine painting of Reagan in an unbuttoned shirt and a big belt buckle, his hands in back pockets. Or a photo of Reagan doing some budget jawboning with then House Speaker Tip O’Neill, a classic portrait of two Irish-American polls—you see his self-evident charm and strength. Nowhere do you see, in the numerous photographs, paintings and portraits, an ounce of self-doubt.

This is the Reagan people will remember—you won’t find much of the contentiousness, the Iran Gate, the lack of empathy for America’s unfortunates here. This is the star wars, anti-Communist, “tear down the wall” warrior, the mourner in chief after the Challenger crash, the morning-in-America celebrator.

“One Life,” when it comes to most of its subjects, is celebratory in nature, and with Reagan, there’s no exception. It’s the public man on display, his sunny appeal that comes through; including his view that big government was the bane of American political life.

But perhaps the biggest thing—a certain kind of class that transcended politics and ideology—on display here is the handwritten letter to the American public in 1994 announcing that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at age 83. It was full of hope and buoyancy, without an ounce of self-pity, the kind of language and attitude that helped propel him to so much political success and the status of icon. (“One Life: Ronald Reagan” continues through May 28, 2012.)

There are also some icons on display in the “Democratic Principles” exhibition of paintings by Elizabeth McClancy, which focus on progressive leaders known for their support and defense of causes, groups and people in need of political defenders and supporters. Many of them are elected members of the U.S. Senate, one or two are legends, some are no longer with us, and one of them is the President of the United States.

The politics in this case are less interesting than the portraits which seem to define, in one painting, the essence of the subject. It’s a telling exhibition of faces of not only of Barack Obama, but the Lion of the Senate, Ted Kennedy, whom it is difficult not to imagine as a ghost on the Senate floor during the contentious debt debate. It includes former Secretary of State Madelaine Albright and the current Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and her husband, former President of the United States Bill Clinton, as well as current partisan battlers like Kerry, Leahy, Mikulski, Pelosi, Schumer and Boxer.

Given the astonishing amount of natural disasters, big news stories and political conflict and controversy that have taken place more than halfway into 2011, it’s difficult to look at the photographs in the “Eyes of History” exhibition without thinking of them as a piece of history, far removed from last week’s or next week’s turmoil, the next story, the next flood, the next Wall Street free fall.

Except, of course, that they’re not. Look at the series on American soldiers recovering from traumatic wounds and you can hear the mortars, the rapid fire in the mountains of Afghanistan. Look at the triumphant, then wan face of the president and it feels as if you’ve seen it just a moment ago, with more grey hair. Look at the angry and worried faces of people out of work, trying to get by and feed their families and you see not months ago, but now. The dramatic scenes of the Haitian earthquake still leaves footprints and is repeated in other disasters—the faces of the starving children of Somalia will surely be a part of the next “Eyes of History” gathering of photographs. [gallery ids="100266,107025,107022,107019" nav="thumbs"]

Fall Visual Art Preview 2011
•

The visual arts are the quiet arts, the arts of contemplation, the finished art.

When we see a painting in a gallery or a museum, a sculpture in a garden or a vast lawn, an installation wherever it’s installed, the artist is gone, finished and done, dead or alive. The visual arts are about viewing and taking it in, seeing, believing and feeling. We derive meaning from not just the work but from our own lives. In visual arts, the unfinished part of the painting is what we bring to it.
And what we bring to art varies from setting to setting, viewing to viewing, person to person; it’s as if a painting wiggled under the glare of a thousand stares and eyes. This is possibly why people buy art—ownership keeps out the democratic eyes of public spaces, making the work rare.

A Rembrandt on a wall by a staircase in a home is a little like a love song sung to no one in a forest. It is almost invisible, except for the owner and his visitors. A museum opens up the process, finishes it or keeps it going. Contemplation ensues, to be sure, but so does conversation and argument, the murmur of more than one presence.

Nothing proves the case more than a visit to the Louvre in Paris and the room housing the Mona Lisa. Hordes of tourists, sometimes the size of an entire residential block of Beijing, surround the rope that avoids close contact. Something happens to the Mona Lisa in this setting, it becomes both less and more mysterious—it sways with a certain imperiousness, but it also gets cut down to size among these multitudes.

Exhibitions at museums—and individual works at museums—alter the equations of visual arts. Museums in America exist at the pleasure of boards, regents, overseers, budget minders, and the trailing ends of the artistic process, the critics, scholars, historians and cultural observers. But most obviously, they exist for and at the mercy of people who come to museums to see paintings, drawings, sculptures and installations.

Visitors change museums as well as art and how we look at it. You can make yourself feel small at a museum, but you are never alone – unless they’ve locked you in. Your friends and neighbors and fellow citizens from all over the country and the world are here in these galleries, standing right next to the Rembrandt self portrait, sometimes posing, at other times puzzling over Pollock just like you did before you got smart and knowing and saw the Ed Harris movie.

In exhibitions, juxtapositions, like the wall descriptions, are important. It’s when you begin to realize the varieties of great art and how sometimes, some art is not so great when looked at from here and there, from far and close and next to other art. The National Gallery once had a show of two great German artists. One was Kate Kollwitz, the great, powerful maker of art, often in bold strokes and hammerings of chalk and black pencil, which cried out for justice in depictions of starving children, dying soldiers, striking miners and rageful peasants. Her work demanded, screamed for humanity. She lived to a ripe old age and died at the end of the Third Reich, and posters made from her work have often been seen at riots and demonstrations for social justice. She was juxtaposed with a small exhibition of Ludwig Kirchner – big, bold paintings of prostitutes, dancers and cabaret singers, the night life of Berlin. The works were musical, almost, full of gusto and energy and life. But Kirchner was also a German Jew who ended up committing suicide as Hitler’s Reich was picking up speed. Who’s the more life affirming in such a context?

I mention this because of the richness of museums in Washington and the regularities of exhibitions at the museums which freshen up the holdings and permanent collections like sparkling water in an exquisite garden. Exhibitions are the creations not only of the artists but the curators who set them in settings and create new ways of looking at old work. The works of old and new masters and reputations, whether belonging to Degas or Warhol, sometimes are restored, not by restorers, but by fresh eyes and different context so they can come to live again under the gaze of their admirers.

For the first installment of our fall visual arts prevue, we give you a quick look at exhibitions and events coming to a Washington museum.

ANDY (WARHOL) IS STILL DANDY

Nobody, certainly not Warhol himself, ever claimed that Andy Warhol had the gifts of a Picasso, a Da Vinci, a Renoir, or even a Rothko.

But there’s also no question that Warhol was one of the most influential artists of the latter part of the last century and into this one. He may not have been the best draughtsman ever or the most gifted painter, but he had his pale, white finger on the zeitgeist. If Warhol didn’t invent pop culture, he sold and marketed it like no artist before, during and since. Warhol made silk screens of money and Monroe and Jackie and Elvis and soup cans, making Lichtenstein’s pop art comic blowups and “pows” palatable and hot. Warhol hooked up low/high art to commerce, ignited America’s still-flaming worship of celebrity by turning it into an aspiration; Kim Kardsashian and Snookie are his illegitimate cultural children. I recall a fairly comprehensive Warhol exhibition at the Corcoran a number of years ago sponsored by PNC Bank with the CEO speaking in front of blowups of Warhol’s Ben Franklins, saying “I always wanted to stand in front of one of those marking the marriage of marketing, money and Warhol.”

He’s still with us, pale and glowing even in death. The National Gallery of Art is hosting the first exhibition examining Warhol’s works centered around news headlines appropriately entitled “Warhol: Headlines” (Sept. 25 though Jan. 2). The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is also touching base with Warhol with an exhibition of 102 silkscreened and hand-painted canvases of distorted images of shadows created in his studio (Sept. 25 through Jan. 15).

“Shadows” will be unique and big—the works are edge-to-edge and will extend 450 feet around the curved Hirschhorn galleries. The “Headlines” show is no small thing either—some 80 paintings and drawings, photographs, prints, film and video works all based on Enquirer-like headlines. The pieces are dovetailed with Warhol’s obsession with the sensational or trivial-made-sensational side of news running from news of Princess Margaret’s baby, to Eddie Fisher’s breakdown to plane crashes, all grist for Warhol’s star-grinding mill. It was Warhol who said that everyone would be famous for 15 minutes during their lives—which means the Kardashians are way overdue to crash into obscurity.

The two exhibitions follow a successful run of the musical “Pop” at the Studio Theater located brashly in Warhol’s factory where outrageous things happened, including the near-assassination of Warhol.

DEGAS AND MARIONI AT THE PHILLIPS COLLECTION

You may not be able to make a direct connection between the legendary French impressionist painter Edgar Degas and modernist Joseph Marioni except that Duncan Phillips, the founder of the Philips Collection, liked them both, and in its 90th anniversary year, the gallery is doing both proud.
The Phillips has Degas’ famed “Dancers at the Barre,” highlighting the painters obsession with ballet to the gratitude of the art world, and has built an exhibition around that obsession with “Dancers at the Barre: Point and Counterpoint” (Oct. 1 through Jan. 8).

The exhibition features drawings, studies and related work and was sparked by a careful attempt at correcting time-caused aging in the “Barre” painting. The result is an exhibition that renews interest in the Degas-Phillips connection and Degas’ great and shining works—paintings sculptures and drawings—on the theme of ballet the first major exhibition in 25 years on the subject.

Acclaimed modernist Joseph Marioni will have 15 recent, glowing, monochrome paintings on display at the Phillips (Oct. 20 through Jan. 29), alongside the artist’s existing 30 works from the museum collection.

30 AMERICANS AT THE CORCORAN

In a kind of artistic echo of the completion and opening of the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial, the Corcoran Gallery of Art is featuring several exhibitions on the theme of race and ethnicity. Chief among them is “30 Americans” (Oct. 1 through Feb. 12), a major survey of works by a number of the most important, established and young African-American contemporary artists of the last three decades.

The exhibition includes works by Nina Chanel Abney, Leonardo Drew, Renee Green, Nick Cave, Kalup Linzy, Jeff Sonhouse and Purvis Young among a large group of artists. Sarah Newman, the curator of Contemporary Art at the Corcoran said that the exhibition explores “how each artist reckons with the notion of identity in America, navigating such concerns as the struggle for civil rights , sexuality, popular culture and media imagery.”

Also on tap are “Strange Fruit,” an exhibition of some 15 new photographs and video works by Hank Willis Thomas, exploring how spectacle and display relate to African American identity (Oct. 1 through Jan. 16); and “Gordon Parks: Photographs from the Collection,” an exhibition of photo essays on civil rights from the Corcoran Collection (Oct. 1 through Jan. 16).

MORE AT THE NGA

Some of the finest Gothic-era tapestries in the world will be on display at the National Gallery of Art.
“The Invention of Glory: Afonso V and the Pastrana Tapestries” will feature four recently restored monumental tapestries which commemorate the conquest of four cities in Morocco by Afonso V of Portugal. (Sept. 18 through Jan. 8).

On a very different note separated by a number of centuries will be “Harry Callahan at 100,” an exhibition of some 100 photographs on the noted photographer’s centenary of his birth. (Oct. 2 through March 4).

The show will reach across Callahan’s innovative, elegant photographic career from his days in Detroit, Chicago and Atlanta.

WPA’S OPTIONS 2011

The Washington Project for the Arts will present “Options 2011,” the 14th installment of its biennial exhibition of works by emerging and unrepresented artists from Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia (Sept. 15 through Oct. 19 at 629 New York Ave., 2nd floor).
[gallery ids="100268,107024,107026" nav="thumbs"]

Fall Performance Art Preview 2011
•

When Arena Stage brought back its hugely successful season and theater opening production of the very-much-a-staple Rodger Hammerstein musical “Oklahoma” for a late summer run, the theater community stood up and took notice.

Theater folks noticed too that Woolly Mammoth had also done a similar thing bringing back its production of Bruce Norris’s Pulitzer-Prize winning “Clybourne Park” to record-breaking (for Woolly) box office success. Both productions brought back original casts and energized productions. People saw a trend.

In truth, while innovative and smart marketing and scheduling strategies may have been at work, what happened wasn’t really new. Arena Stage, in fact, had been doing a similar thing with productions of “Crowns,” the popular musical about the importance of hats in the lives of African American women.

In theater, in fact, the adage that “everything old is new again” is the life blood, the bread and butter, the staple of theater world. What Arena and Woolly did was to bring back almost identical versions of the plays they had already done, thinking correctly that a larger audience as well as a repeat audience remained for the two plays. They were right. But theater exists on reviving, re-doing, and returning to a repertoire of plays and musicals that make up the core of what theater does on Broadway, in regional companies, in dinner theaters, amateur companies, high school and college. Road companies of big hit Broadway musicals are hugely profitable, same-version, different casts of eagerly awaited shows.

The staple of classic and therefore “old” theater literature are revisited time and time again over the centuries and decades—that’s why we have theater companies whose repertoire is rooted in Shakespeare, Shaw, the Greeks and American classics by O’Neill, Miller and others.

The reliance on the old and familiar—along with revisits that cast fresh light on the old plays—make new plays all the more thrilling because we don’t know how the story ends, what the characters will say or do, and we haven’t heard the songs by new composers and lyricists sung and played. This mix and mash of old and new is the heart of theater—we find surprises in the way an actor might play Hamlet—in fact hope for it—and are surprised how familiar and close to our lives the work of a new playwright is.

Every theater season begins with those anticipations of the familiar, the hope for surprise and connection and, of course, all of it accompanied by the possibility of awe and wonder, of moments in the dark that will lie in our memories like special dreams, the come-and-go moments for which, as I’ve noted elsewhere, there is no app.

The season kicks off with a hefty mix of old and new. Here, with some things to look forward and backward to.

SILENT SHAKESPEARE AT SYNETIC

Synetic Theatre, headed by the dynamic husband-wife team of Paata and Irina Tsikurishvili from the Republic of Georgia, has become and always was just about the most innovative, beyond-category theater company in the Washington area.

Whether performing at its original Church Street locale, at the Kennedy Center, in Shirlington or its new digs in Crystal City, the company has propelled a mix of mime, choreographed movement and spectacle to create its own kind of (classical, but silent) theater, borrowing its subjects from sources that include classic Russian literature, Dante, Cervantes and Shakespeare.

Its productions have reaped dozens of Helen Hayes Awards and almost instantaneous and consistent critical acclaim. Synetic’s form of theater is new, but its base subject is classical theater, minus the words. This brings new meaning to Hamlet’s “The Rest is Silence,” a play Synetic did ALL in silence.
The company is kicking of its 2011-2012 season with three best-of productions under the banner of “Speak No More,” three of its most popular versions of Silent Shakespeare, its 2008 production of “Macbeth” (Sept. 14 through Oct. 2); its 2010 production of “Othello” (Oct. 19 through Nov. 6) and its 2008 production of “Romeo and Juliet” (Nov. 25 through Dec. 23).

Synetic covers the criteria—everything really old is really new again and again—and again.

FRIENDS, WASHINGTONIANS AND COUNTRYMEN : IT’S FREE!

Michael Kahn’s Washington Shakespeare Company is presenting its 21st Annual Free for All. This time “Julius Caesar” is doing the honors and also kicking off the company’s 25th anniversary season.
This Julius is a revival of the critically acclaimed 2007-2008 production and will be performed at Sidney Harman Hall through Sept. 4. The Bard’s best play about politics and ambition echoes mightily, featuring as it does among its main characters honorable Republican senators whose fears of centralized government leads them astray. But that’s just one man’s opinion David Paul directs with a cast led by Aubrey Deeker, Tom Hammond and Tyrone Henderson.

ON THE ROAD AGAIN WITH LES MISERABLES AND THE JERSEY BOYS OR UP THE BARRICADES AND WALK LIKE A MAN

It’s a 25th anniversary for the Cameron McIntosh juggernaut “Les Miserables” and for the occasion there’s a brand new fully-staged production of the legendary Boubil & Schonberg operatic musical which set records in London, on Broadway and in dozens of road companies. The tale of the escaped convict (serving time for stealing a loaf of bread) Jean Valjean and his nemesis the relentless Inspector Javert is epic in scale with soaring songs a plot to fill several books by Victor Hugo and spectacle that stirs the heart and mind, and songs and music that make you want to run to the barricades (or from them, depending). Set in 19th Century France during yet another revolutionary time, the songs include “On My Own,” the stirring “Bring Him Home” and last but not least, “Can You Hear the People Sing.” If you can’t, you need a hearing aid.

It all happens at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House (Sept. 28 through Oct. 30).

If Victor Hugo isn’t your cup of tea, how about them boys from Jersey, as in “The Jersey Boys,” the earthy, hit-rich musical that traces the success, pitfalls, rags-and-juvie-to-riches story of Franki Valli and the Four Seasons, arguably one of America’s biggest rock-pop bands ever, not excluding their peers The Beach Boys.

The hugely popular show returns to the National Theater for quite a long stint and why not. (Nov. 10 through Jan. 7). Walk like a man, my friend.

HOLLY TWYFORD DIRECTS

Holly Twyford is one of the most gifted, eclectic actresses on the Washington theater scene who’s done just about everything except have her own reality show; from Shakespeare to an outrageous Woolly play to a gig as a dancing pig at Adventure Theater, she has plenty to round out her resume. What she hasn’t done is direct, and she’s taking care of that with her directorial debut at No Rules Theater Company, named Outstanding Emerging Theatre Company.

That would appear to be a nice fit for Twyford, who’s always been a little edgy and is now directing Diana Son’s “Stop Kiss,” a play about two women, a scattered New York City traffic reporter and a St. Louis school teacher, who meet and fall in love. “The play chose me,” Twyford said. She had appeared in the play ten years ago. “The play had been special to me when I was in it and to be able to help shape the entire telling of this beautiful story as much as a director can was a chance I couldn’t pass up,” (Sept. 7 through Oct. 2).

HISTORY IN THE MAKING AT SIGNATURE (AGAIN)

Signature, no slouch in the ambition department, will be by all accounts the first theater to present two original world premiere musicals in repertory by presenting “The Hollow,” and “The Boy Detective Fails,” now in prevues.

“The Hollow,” with a book by Hunter Foster and music and lyrics by Matt Conner, is based on the Washington Irving Sleepy Hollow story and features a headless horseman but not Johnny Depp (through Oct. 16, directed by Eric Schaeffer).

“The Boy Detective Fails,” with a book by Joe Meno and Music and Lyrics by Adam Gwon, is about self-styled boy detective Billy Argo, who must face the shocking death of his partner-in-crime-solving and sister. Ten years later, he’s on the case (through Oct. 16, directed by Joe Calarco).

BERNIE MADOFF AT THEATER J

One of the more anticipated plays of the season is coming to Theater J where Bernie Madoff in his new home, a jail cell, will make an appearance in Deb Margolin’s “Imagining Madoff,” a play which posits Madoff setting the record straight and telling the story of an interview with Holocaust survivor, poet and investment client Solomon Galkin.

Bernie Madoff defrauded clients for hundreds of millions of dollars in a vast Ponzi scheme and he didn’t’ quibble, destroying friends, family, charities and celebrities with quiet gusto. Rick Foucheux stars as Madoff, artist-in-residence and Washington favorite Jennifer Mendenhall plays Madoff’s secretary, and Alexandra Aron directs. (Aug. 31 through Sept. 25)

BOOKS BURN AT ROUND HOUSE

Ray Bradbury, now in his 90s and still writing, has often been pigeonholed as a writer of science fiction novels and short stories through his long career (“The Martian Chronicles” “Something Wicked This Way Comes”). But in truth, he’s been much more than that; celebrator of literary favorites, teller of Irish tall tales, and prophet might be good, for starters.

Long ago, he wrote a slim novel imagining a world in which firemen occupied themselves with burning books by state directive because, well, you know, books are dangerous things. (Bradbury did not, however, envision Kindle as far as we know). The book became a haunting, if imperfect, film directed by Francois Trufautt and starring Oscar Werner and Julie Christie. The writing in the book and the images from the film are haunting.

Now Round House Theater in Bethesda is staging Bradbury’s own theatrical adaptation of the novel, a multi-media production incorporating cutting edge video, projection and a sound design created by the Savannah College of Art and Design.

Sharon Ott directs with a cast that includes Katie Atkinson and John Lescault, among others (Sept. 7 through Oct. 9)

A “PARADE” OF A DIFFERENT SORT AT FORD’S THEATRE

The trial and lynching of Leo Frank in early 20th-century Atlanta seems an unlikely subject for a Broadway musical, but the show, with music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown and with Harold Prince as co-conceiver, won a Tony award for musical drama and is now getting a Washington premiere as a co-production with Theater J.

Frank was a Jewish factory manager who was accused of murdering a teenage girl on the day of the Confederate Memorial Day Parade.

The musical kicks off Ford’s 2011-2012 season and is also the first selection for Ford’s five-year “The Lincoln Legacy Project,” which aims to create a dialogue around the issues of tolerance, equality and acceptance (Sept. 23 through Oct. 30).

MICHAEL KAHN DIRECTS WORLD PREMIERE OF “THE HEIR APPARENT”

It’s not Shakespeare, it’s not even British, but it is old and funny. That would be “The Heir Apparent,” a variation of Jean-Francois Regnard’s 1708 comedy adapted by David Ives. It’s a play with a familiar plot—young swain wants to marry young girl, but needs an inheritance from his uncle who wants to, guess what, marry the young lady herself. Moliere made do with less and more, as did Shakespeare.
Michael Kahn, Washington Shakespeare Company’s Artistic Director for the past 25 years, will direct a cast that will include long-time D.C. favorites Floyd King and Nancy Robinette (Sept. 6 through Oct. 23 at the Lansburgh).

TED, DAVID AND ALLAN AT THE STUDIO THEATER

That would be actor Ted van Griethuysen, just hitting his stride, Studio Theater Artist Director David Muse, hitting his stride in his second year at Studio, and Playwright Alan Bennett, always in stride, whose “The History Boys” received a standout production here several years ago.

Muse is coming off a hugely successful production of “Venus in Fur” for Studio, and seems perfectly suited for Bennett’s brainiac, culture-buff comedy “The Habit of Art,” which includes as characters the British composer Benjamin Britten and poet-as-legend W.H. Auden (opens Sept. 7).

HOWARD SHALWITZ INVITES YOU TO THE WOOLLY APOCOLYPSE

That’s Howard Shalwitz talking about the 2011-2012 season, Woolly’s 32rd on planet Washington. “Join us as we mine our collective visions of apocalypse—and all the drama, jokes, and dreams they inspire.” First episode is “A Bright New Boise” by Samuel D. Hunter, directed by John Vreeke, where someone is summoning the rapture, right in the middle of a parking lot of a mega craft store in Boise, Idaho.

Gotta be there for that (Oct. 10 through Nov. 6).

HERE, THERE AND EVERYWHERE

Caryl Churchill of “Top Girls” fame kicks off the new season for Forum Theatre, now company in residence at the Round House Theatre’s Silver Spring location. Michael Dove directs Churchill’s “Mad Forest” while Rose McConnell, Alexander Strain, Heather Haney and Dana Levanovsky star (Sept. 22 through Oct. 15).

More at the Shakespeare Theatre Company: the musical “Fela!” returns to the United States, telling its tale of the legendary Nigerian musician Fela Kuti. It’s directed and choreographed by Bill T. Jones, kicking off a national tour at Sidney Harman Hall (Sept. 13 through Oct. 9).

“Ay Carmela!,” a U.S. premiere of a play by Spanish playwright Jose Sanchis Sinisterra, will kick off the Gala Hispanic Theatre’s season. It’s a play about the adventures—comic and romantic and dark all at once—about a pair of vaudevillians who find themselves in the midst of the bloody Spanish Civil War (Sept. 15 through Oct. 9).

The National Theater of China will present a production of “Two Dogs’ Opinions on Life,” an improvisational comedy that will be part of the Kennedy Center’s celebration of “China, the Art of a Nation” in September and October. “Two Dogs” will be performed at the Terrace Theater (Sept. 20 and 21 at 7:30 p.m. ). A second theater company, the Beijing People’s Art Theatre will perform “Top Restaurant” about the history of a Peking Roast Duck restaurant over half a century (Sept. 30 and Oct. 1 at 7:30 p.m., October 2 at 1:30 p.m.).
[gallery ids="100269,107035,107031,107029" nav="thumbs"]

Till Fellner: Past, Present and Future of Classical Music
•

There are certain images that come to mind when you think of classical music, and pianist Till Fellner, a rising star in the world of classical music performers, embodies quite a few of those if you’ve ever seen him perform.

The last time Washington saw Fellner, who is being presented by the Washington Performing Arts Society at the Kennedy Center Oct. 1, he played at the Austrian Embassy as part of Jerome Barry’s Embassy Series Season, which was also the concluding program in Fellner’s ambitious project to perform the complete 32-part cycle of Beethoven sonatas.

Played on a Sunday afternoon before a sold-out but intimate audience, the Embassy Series program was a coming together of artist, music and audience, and a rather romantic display of the culture of classical music. It came with all the practiced history and rituals one would hope for, from the hollering of “Bravo!” to the flying of tailcoats.

An occasion like this has its roots in the 18th and 19th centuries, when music was played in front of kings and members of the courts. It was played by candlelight and under chandeliers, in churches and the drawing rooms of aristocracy. The audiences are no longer quite so elite or powerful, but certain manners, mannerisms and behavioral traditions still persist. Just like the tradition remains that important cast members take curtain calls in between acts at an opera, so there are certain expectations at a concert or recital. After all, the music of the classical Forefathers—in this case Beethoven—is being played.

Fellner is Viennese and European to the core, but he is also a citizen of the world by dint of the global explosion of interest and competition in classical music. He understands and appreciates the seriousness of what he does. “The music is all that matters,” he said in a brief international telephone conversation, where he was taking in the evening tide in the old city of Vienna. “You are in service to the music, it’s the most important thing there is. And on such occasions, there are certain ways of doing things. There’s a respect that is due to the music, from myself playing it to the best of my abilities and understanding, and from the audience in terms of listening.”

You don’t get grand gestures from Fellner, no thumping on the keys with over emphasized drama, no hair or headshaking that one might get from musicians who play the keys to elicit applause. Fellner, although tall and almost boyishly handsome at age 38, will not try to seduce an audience with body language. Rather, he tries to ford the defenses of the heart with perfect performances and worship the music with his playing.

The airy embassy spaces, sunlit and bright, were an ideal setting. Fellner walked up to the shiny black piano with a quick and friendly nod, resplendent in tuxedo and tails, sat at the piano—arranging the tails just so—and began to play to the kind of communal silence that sometimes catches you off guard.

“I believe,” he said, in precise and fluent English, “that there are certain traditions to be followed, and that it is a part of the music, the occasion. There’s a certain formality and I like that, but it doesn’t interfere with feelings and emotions.”

Fellner carries with him the life of a concert pianist, and with it a mountain of ever-growing challenges. He lives in a world that seems to be at a contradictory phase—there are more and more classical musicians being trained all over the world, especially in Asia, while at the same time interest in classical music, while not in any sort of dramatic decline, still seems pointed to a closed world made up of the affording class.

But bridges are being built in the music industry, often with real artists on the forefront, who fuse their talents with giants from the world of pop music. But Fellner isn’t one of them—at least not yet. “I like some popular music,” he said. “Some of the artists are very good. But on the whole, I’m not that interested in rock music and things like that, nor do I have any desire to play it. There are plenty of challenges in playing the music that already exists—every pianist, violinist and so on takes on projects that are difficult and challenging. And the Sonatas was one of mine.”

Still, Fellner understands that the classical repertoire—Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Brahms and Wagner, to name a few—needs to be replenished and added to, and he’s not stuck in the past in that sense.
“There’s actually a lot of new composers and new classical music being written, and I also like playing the works of the 20th century composers. There is a different sort of challenge in the new.”

Fellner’s program at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater on Oct. 1 is a kind of indicator of direction: the richness of the past and the potential for the future. There are Haydn, Schumann, and Liszt, and there is also 19-year-old classical music sensation Kit Armstrong.

“Kit is a prodigy. As a performer, as a composer, he’s just amazing,” Fellner said. “I’m playing ‘Half of One, Six Dozens of the Other,’ which he wrote for me in 2010.”

Fellner has been praised all over world and received raves like this from the London Observer: “Fellner confirmed his standing among the foremost keyboard virtuosi of the day; exact, limpid and feather-fingered, he exquisitely conveyed the sense of yearning haunting the andante and cruised effortlessly through the teasing syncopations of the closing allegro of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 18.”
He will treat Armstrong’s music like he treats a Beethoven sonata, as if in the interpretive position of high priest.

Till Fellner will be performing at the Kennedy Center on Oct. 1, presented by the Washington Performing Arts Society. For more information visit Kennedy-Center.org

A Life of Achievement and Service
•

When you think of the life of Roger Kennedy, the former director of the National Park Service who passed away at the age of 85 last week, you think almost immediately of the old adage that “they don’t make ‘em like they used to.”

Kennedy defined the idea of a Renaissance man, a concept which today merely means multi-tasking, which is not the same thing.

Kennedy lived a life of service and only became the NPS director relatively late in his life when President Bill Clinton appointed him to the position in 1993. By that time, he had already become a noted attorney, historian, television news correspondent, radio journalist and author of 12 books on American history, architectural history and public affairs. His last book, in fact, was published in 2009, a work called “When Art Worked: The New Deal and Democracy.”

He had served the nation and six presidents in various capacities, including Special Assistant to the U.S. Attorney General, the U.S. Secretary of Health, and Welfare and the U.S. Secretary of Labor.
The current NPS director, Jonathan B. Jarvis said that “Roger made it possible for everyone to have a stake in the national parks.”

Eight parks were added to the national park system during his tenure and you can tell the eclectic nature of his interests and passions from the list, among them the Tall grass Prairie National Preserve in Kansas, the New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park in Massachusetts, the Cane River Creole National Historical Park and the New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park.

During his tenure, he implemented a major restructuring of the Service while defending the Park Service against changes that would have undermined the system’s mission. He insisted that the park system tell multiple and diverse sides of the American historical story, a stance that often came under fire. He was a futurist in the sense that he anticipated the emergence of the Internet as a major communication tool to tell the American historical story to a huge audience.

He resisted government cutbacks that would weaken the ability to tell an inclusive story of the history of America. In 2002, he warned that “The impulse to prune back the budgets and get rid of the newer parks was all code for ‘let’s stop paying attention to blacks, Hispanics, women.’”

Kennedy could always be seen during the time of his tenure wearing the familiar uniform of the NPS, something that critics saw as grandstanding, but something he did with a great deal of pride.
Look at his life and writings; he had a lot to be proud of.

‘Parade’ Shows Our Past and Present Dark Sides
•

“Parade” (now at Ford’s Theatre through Oct. 30) sounds like a musical, it pretends to be a musical, it has fast numbers, soft numbers, ballads and rousing numbers that make you want to tap your feet.
As musicals go, “Parade,” with a book by Alfred Uhry and music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown, is kind of subversive, so much so that an audience can get tricked into clapping after a rousing song sung by a gifted singer and then almost instantly feel weird for do so.

The number in question is “That’s What He Said,” sung by Kevin McAllister as Jim Conley, an African-American janitor at a pencil factory in Atlanta in 1913. What Conley is singing is his testimony at a trial in which Leo Frank, the northern Jewish factory manager, is being tried on charges that he murdered 13-year-old Mary Phagan, a factory worker and dumped her body in the basement. Conley is singing a song, a bald-faced lie of a story in which he says he was witnessed to the aftermath of the murder and helped Frank dispose of the body. He sings “That’s What He Said” in friendly, furious fashion, it’s almost a vaudeville tune that gets people going, makes you want to dance, in fact.

Of course, that’s not what you should want to do. You should be appalled, shocked, torn and bewildered by your own feelings, the natural inclination to clap for a show-stopping number at war with the horrible lie being told that will help railroad Frank to the end of a rope.

More important, this is a true thing, a horrible event in post-Civil War southern history that was already replete with regular lynching and murders of blacks during Jim Crow days. Frank, a northerner from Brooklyn, had married a southern Jewish woman named Lucille and moved down South to manage the factory. Mary Phagan was killed on Confederate Memorial Day in Atlanta, which included parades and picnics, a holiday memorial celebrating Confederate valor and the loss of the old South.

“Parade,” which had a run on Broadway under the auspices of producer Harold Prince no less, won a couple of Tonys but not much acclaim. It should get some here, where the story and theme resonate mightily. It’s also been deemed the centerpiece of the programming for the Lincoln Legacy Project and is a co-production with Theater J.

It’s also an often powerful, gut-wrenching hybrid theatrical evening. Unsettling and disjointed, a sharp, thoughtful and creatively staged and performed piece that has some of the aspirations of both a serious opera and the kind of conscience-hitting plays that came from Arthur Miller. But it’s also not exactly what it seems to be, which is a musical. You sometimes think that Uhry and Brown are using the genre to get audiences to interact with the material in unaccustomed ways, the better to make an impact.

History tells us—and it’s no secret to tell the results—that in the end, Frank was convicted on almost totally fabricated, suborned lies and testimony by the victim’s friends, by the janitor and the Franks’ maid, among others, to satisfy the still bitter devotion to the Glorious Cause, a lasting hatred of northerners and blacks by the local Ku Klux Klan, supported by the establishment including a rabid newspaper publisher and author whose next book was going to offer up reasons why Jesus was not a Jew.

The approach doesn’t always work. The casual use of non-traditional casting in having African-American actors be members of crowds celebrating the Confederacy seems somehow altogether wrong, for instance. The music is often stirring, or, in quieter pieces with Frank and his wife, lovely and touching. Then again, songs pop up like period pieces from the times, and then again, you get a piece like “A Rumblin and a Rollin’,” which opens the second act, sung by black servants at a party with almost teeth-bared bitterness, a song that nicely is a bookend to a young Civil War-era soldier singing “The Old Red Hills of Home” setting off for war.

In a large cast, some of whom double and triple up, Euan Morton and Jenny Fellner stand out as Leo and Lucille Frank, who, singing and acting, manage to give a full portrait of a married couple. Often at a distance from each other in the early going they reveal their boundless love for each other in crisis. Will Gartshore is downright scary as an extremist politician and newspaper owner, steely and merciless. Stephen Schmidt as governor, John Slaton and Hugh Dorsey as a solicitor general with political ambitions, effectively define men dealing with their consciences: Slaton finds his; Dorsey misplaces it.

In the end, Slaton, after reviewing trial transcripts, commuted Frank’s death sentence to life, costing him his political future. A mob of KKK types broke into jail and hauled Frank out and lynched him. Frank’s murderers were not brought to justice and Mary Phagan’s killer was never found. Frank was granted a posthumous pardon in 1986, showing again, as if we didn’t know, that the wheels of justice grind exceedingly slow.

“Parade” is, I think, a complicated, nuanced work, and the production does it justice and honor. It is not a history lesson, or even a heavy-handed dose of moral lesson. It’s a powerful hybrid that uses the musical theater form as a way of reminding us in disturbing, moving, complicated ways, of how we live today, how far we’ve come, and how issues of tolerance, race, ethnicity, and just plain expressions of out-and-out irrational hatred remain with us. [gallery ids="99240,104014,104018" nav="thumbs"]

D.C. Theater Gears up for the Holidays
•

It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

No kidding, folks. Looking ahead just a little bit, you might want to brace yourself for Scrooges and Nutcrackers, coming up sooner than you think. We give thanks, and god bless us everyone.

Just to start you off, “A Christmas Carol” returns like clockwork to the Ford’s Theatre, beginning Nov. 18 and running through Dec. 31. This is the production adapted by Michael Wilson and starring acclaimed Washington actor Edward Gero, who can go from Shakespeare to Mamet to Scrooge in a heartbeat. Michael Baron directs. Click here for more information

At the Olney Theater, Dickens and Scrooge will also be on hand with “A Christmas Carol: A Ghost Story of Christmas,” performed by Paul Morella and adapted from Dickens’ original novella and reading tour. Dec. 13 through Jan. 1. Click here for more information and to buy tickets

Meanwhile, among many Nutcrackers for the season, you can count on the Washington Ballet and Septime Webre’s version to return to the Warner Theater for a nearly month-long run, Dec. 1 through 24, while the Kennedy Center will have the American Ballet Theatre’s version Dec. 8 through 11.

A Couple of Guys Named Othello and Othello and Iago and Iago

These days, we’re seeing two versions of Shakespeare’s classic tragedy about Othello, the great Moor general in Renaissance Venice, the passion of his life Desdemona, and Iago, perhaps the most despised villain in Shakespeare outside of Richard III. You can see what you can do with style and silence at the Synetic Theatre’s production now in the midst of a three-way run at its Crystal City space, or take in a more classic, wordier, sound-and-fury version at the Folger Theatre, directed by Robert Richmond, which has already been extended through Dec. 4.

Seriously, Folks

There’s serious drama afoot all over the region, beginning with a production of Arthur Miller’s “After the Fall,”his most revealing, autobiographical play about a playwright named Quentin and his tragic, glamorous wife Maggie (hello Miss Monroe). Jose Carrasquillo directs this rarely performed play, Mitchell Hebert stars as Quentin, and Gabriella Fernandez-Coffey is Maggie through Nov. 27.

At Arena Stage, history plays a big part in both Amy Freed’s “You, Nero” and Bill Cain’s “Equvicocation.” The latter concerns Shakespeare, the infamous Gunpowder Plot and the relationship between artists and kings. It comes from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Cain’s play will run Nov. 18 through Jan. 1 with the cast of the original Oregon Shakespeare Festival production.

“You, Nero” is part of Arena’s American Voices New Play Institute, with Freed continuing to work on a play which first opened at South Coast Rep and Berkeley Rep in 2009. It makes its D.C. debut Nov. 25 and runs through Jan. 1. Danny Scheie stars as Nero, an emperor who may have been the first emperor-as-public-celebrity.

For one night only, you’ll have a chance to see one of the landmark plays of the 1980s and the tragedy of AIDs when Forum Theatre will stage a benefit performance of “The Normal Heart” by Larry Kramer, with an all-star cast of area actors including Holly Twyford, Mitchell Hebert, Will Gartshore, J. Fred Schiffman, Rick Hammerly, Michael Tolaydo and others at the Round House Theatre’s Silver Spring stage, where Forum is in residence on Nov. 7 at 7:30 p.m.

Kevin Converses with Michael and Broadway Does Shakespeare

Star of the stage and screen Kevin Kline (“Sophie’s Choice”) will join Shakespeare Theatre Company Artistic Director Michael Kahn for the second installment in the Classic Conversations series at Sidney Harman Hall Nov. 28.

Speaking of the Shakespeare Theatre Company, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary, the run will be short but the occasion sounds terrific, with a concert-style staging of “The Boys from Syracuse” with a book by David Ives (“The Heir Apparent”) hooked up to Rodgers and Hart’s classic score. “The Boys” is of course a Broadway musical version of “The Comedy of Errors” which features two sets of twins unaware of each other, the kids from Ephesus. Nov. 4 through 6.

Who Wrote Shakespeare?
•

There’s a class war going on.

It’s not being waged where you might think it is—in presidential primary debates, or on the streets of Occupied America.

It’s being waged in movie theaters where the nearly century-old debate about who wrote Shakespeare’s plays is being engaged anew in trash-epic director Roland Emmerich’s “Anonymous,” whose subject and hero is one Edward De Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, who’s being presented as the aristocratic author of the plays most, if not all of us, believe to have been written by William Shakespeare, the Bard of Avon.

Shakespeare, in the movie, is a buffoonish, ambitious, drunken actor who declares himself to be the author of the plays. There’s also a lot of historical political intrigue centered around royal succession, Queen Elizabeth and the like.

I’m not here to argue the merits of the film, or the status of Mr. Emmerich as a director. He apparently sincerely believes that Oxford was indeed the author of the plays.

Good for him. He’s not the first person to think so. The authorship debate around Shakespeare’s plays has been debated for centuries, and the Oxford candidacy has attracted Supreme Court judges, learned scholars and not-so-learned scholars.

That’s where class comes in. The basic contention is that Shakespeare—with a minor education – was a would-be-actor from a small town who could not possibly have written the plays he did. He would be required to have an immense amount of knowledge, a superior education, an understanding of the ways of courts and geography.

That he probably didn’t—as is often pointed out he made big mistakes in geography and history. Here’s what Shakespeare did have a major understanding of—the human heart and mind, the psychology of being human. Just about all the plots are borrowed from other sources, including other plays, or ancient Roman texts, the bible, English history books. Shakespeare’s genius—that’s what it was—lies in his understanding of human nature, and his poetic abilities, his invention of free verse, his knowledge about how to put a play together.

A lot of the debate about authorship—the Queen herself, Francis Bacon, rival playwright Ben Johnson, have been held up as candidates—centers around a kind of intellectual snobbishness, an unwillingness to accept the idea that Shakespeare—a commoner, or son of the lower middle class at best, could be the greatest author who ever lived. If Oxford was the author, he hid it well. Trouble is that Shakespeare, too, hid himself, in some ways. Little, or not enough, is known about his life, although what we do know suggests that he was a man of the theater, a professional who kept books, ran a company, managed to know enough about the upper classes to become a favorite playwright of the queen.

Someone recently suggested to me that I can’t stand the idea that Shakespeare’s works might have been written by an aristocrat, by a member of the ruling class of England. I can stand the idea. What I can’t stand is the idea that the plays and the sonnets and the characters MUST have been written and created by an aristocrat.

The very definition of artistic genius is its mystery—it does not zero in on class, societal standing, education per se, or any other MUST factor other than it exists and it flowers in a particular person. Shrinks no doubt have had their say on this matter.

The plays of course contain many royal, aristocratic types—generals, kings and queens, lords and dukes and duchesses, even a few small business men and Shakespeare gave them speech that was understood by everyone. But he also created, to name one, Falstaff, a full-bodied man both vile and lecherous, outsized and full of bombast, a man who was more of a father to a prince than the king himself. He was the salt, and mud, and beer of the earth. It’s doubtful that Oxford would have imagined such a man, let alone hung out in bars with him. Aristocrats may have gone to the theater, but they did not admit going to the dogs.

I’m going to see the movie. Emmerich, if nothing else, makes movies that aren’t usually boring except when it’s “Godzilla” filmed entirely in grey rain, or so it seemed. His movies—“Independence Day”, “The Day After Tomorrow” and “The Patriot” among them are not exercises in nuance, and I don’t expect “Anonymous” to be that either.

The Nomination Conflagration
•

The weekly scramble that is the Republican Party’s race to the presidential candidate nomination is as muddled as ever, with yet another new face leading in at least one poll.

That would be Herman Cain, the African American pizza company executive, who leads the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll with a nifty 27 percent of Republican voters favoring his candidacy. Mitt Romney, steady as a shy but relentless suitor, was at 23 percent, although he led in another poll.
What all this means is anybody’s guess, so I’ll take one: even though the first primary (Florida, can you believe it?) isn’t until Jan. 31, and the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire primary, the traditional bellwethers of any presidential political season, are even further off, is it possible to think that the race is already over?

Mind you, there’s only been a few debates, a handful of round-table discussions, a couple of straw votes and likely some undisclosed arguments in an Iowa cornfield. But much has happened, most of it not pretty. Some people never showed up, others dropped out, some jumped in and got toasted and others, like Newt Gingrich, plugged on, unmindful that nobody was talking about them, let alone casting them any sort of vote.

This GOP presidential nomination race isn’t so much a competition as it is a circus or reality show, resembling the old Abbott and Costello routine “Who’s On First?”

Well, who is on first this week? Cain and his 9-9-9 plan for reinventing the tax code appear to have caught fire in certain quarters, but is he really on first, and can he round the bases as the first semi-serious national African American Republican candidate of any sort? 

So who’s on first? Well, for just a little while it was good old Rick Perry, who had never lost at anything in his political life, being a three-term governor of Texas. He was largely credited for the miracle in Texas, which, it is often asserted, sailed through the Great Recession almost unscathed thanks to conservative economic policies. He also OK’d a record number of executions. Perry, seeing Michele Bachmann win the Iowa straw poll followed by Ron Paul, and thinking he was at least as smart as his predecessor, probably figured he could take the whole enchilada, being a big, strapping fellow from Texas who looked like a guy that could lead a country, by God—and a prayer meeting too.

On his way to mortal combat with Mitt Romney, Perry tripped on a rock that hadn’t been quite painted over enough to hide the “N” word it sported on a piece of his property. Perry got caught in a messy routine of having to perpetually explain whatever he said the night before, like a sailor coming back from shore leave.

So now Perry is a fading, a distant third, and his taillights are fading from view.

So, who’s on first? Well, how about Sarah Palin? Palin understands that first base is a lonely place, an exposed area where people will take pot shots at you.  Better to wait for the next season of “Dancing with the Stars,” or pontificate at Tea Party rallies, or have nasty books written about you. Or write one yourself and sing a few rounds of “Money, Money, Money.”

How about Chris Christie, a tea party favorite and the governor of New Jersey, rich in charisma and a few extra pounds. You wish. People in the media practically cried when he finally said a final and resounding “No,” even after GOP stalwarts effectively got on their knees and begged him to run. Christie said it was not his time. But it just might be time for him to be a vice-president—and therefore president in waiting—given his grand and gushing endorsement of Romney.

How about Mr. Pawlenty, the early dropout. Now I imagine he wishes he hadn’t.

There are, of course, others: Ron Paul, who actually says more outrageous things than Rick Perry, but nobody complains because, truthfully, nobody cares. There is also Rick Santorum, a social and every-other-kind-of conservative who somehow comes across as a whiner.

There’s Bachmann and her zealots and her straw poll win in Iowa, which lasted for all the time it took Perry to make up his mind to run. There is John Huntsman, the second Mormon in the race and former governor of Utah. But then he said that he might be happy to take the VP spot on a Bachmann ticket. That’s not going to happen. I mean the Bachmann ticket.

What’s most notable about this race is who decided not to run: the budget whiz kid Paul Ryan; the aforementioned Chris Christie; Mike Huckabee, the very Christian right former governor of Arkansas who ran nobly in the last competition; Bobby Jindal, a GOP star for one shining moment until he gave a rebuttal address to a State of the Union speech by Obama; Palin, of course.

There is also Virginia’s rising star governor Bob McDowell; the hot, hot, tea party senator from Florida, Marco Rubio; and, lest we forget, Donald Trump, who Trumped himself before voters had the chance.

To end the baseball analogy: game over. Romney has been there before and appears to have won the race simply because nobody has really been able to knock him off his steady-as-he-goes performances in the debates. He’s a terrific debater, mildly humorous, not too mean but mean enough, good with the Obama knocks, a business man who knows something about economics, (so much that Perry practically conceded his smarts). He’s a guy who looks presidential—whatever that means—unruffled and unperturbed. He was governor of Massachusetts, and how many Republicans can say that, or even want to? He passed a version of a health care bill that much resembles Obama’s, the one that’s headed straight for the Supreme Court. When a Christian Evangelist preacher called Mormonism a cult, it gained sympathy for Romney.

Tea Party stalwarts don’t like Romney, which may yet be a problem. The Tea Party is a little like the Georgetowner slogan, “It’s influence far exceeds its size,” but not in a good way.

In any poll, Romney is by far the only GOP candidate who looks like he could win the general election and beat Obama. He’s close enough—two percentage points—to take a swipe at the president.

The questions remains: why not get rid of the primaries altogether this year and have the election early. The suspense is killing us.