Gary Tischler • February 8, 2012

Rhythm and blues — the musical category sometimes infused with soul, jazz and rock and roll—seems like an oxymoron, as if saying “I’m so sad and depressed I wanna shake it all around with the whole dang mess of it.”

But then, the genre has always been a crossroads for all sorts of feelings and characters. It’s where the heart multitasks its pain and jubilation. It’s where Elvis Presley soaked up Beale Street. It’s where Billie Holiday brought a smoky blues to jazz. It’s where song-writers from everywhere made people get off their behinds and do everything from the glide to the hand jive to sultry, slow dancing.

It’s where the son of Greek immigrants and a woman whose life and music all but embodied a steady saunter on the dark, sad, wild side, which she turned into the most soulful of troubled blues. And somewhere in there, the two crossed paths, one discovering the other.

These two — Johnny Otis, 90, born Johnny Alexander Aliotes and sometimes called the “Godfather of Rhythm and Blues,” and Etta James, 73, who translated her own trouble life of sad romance and loss into powerful blues-filled music — died within three days of each other.

Otis, a multi-tasker in his own right was a bandleader, club owner, musician and, most influentially and importantly, songwriter and talent scout. He embraced African-American musical forms with gusto. He loved jazz, rhythm and blues, the blues themselves and soul music. And he discovered James, by way of his Barrelhouse Club and Revue in the Watts section of Los Angeles when she was a teenagee, as was Esther Phillips, the dynamo jazz singer also discovered by Otis.

The life of Otis criss-crosses genres and was fueled by a strong melting-pot passion, an avid love of African-American culture as muse and part of the great American mosaic. In his times, everybody crossed his path including the great blues singer Big Mama Thornton, who did the original version of “Hound Dog,” a song which later became a part of Elvis’s early success. Last, but not least, Otis was the author of the hugely popular song “Willie and the Hand Jive.”

Etta James was now and forever known for “At Last,” the stirring, heartbreaking (when sung by James) ballad of utter love, loss and triumph, which Beyonce sang to the Obamas at one of their inaugural balls, stirring up some controversial anger on the part of James.

She needn’t have worried. Although, ironically, Beyonce played James in a dramatized account of Chess Records called “Cadillac Records,” “At Last” was her song, every last emotion-packed line and vowel. She was one of those gifted singers and musicians — Charlie Parker and Billie were others — who struggled throughout her life with various well-documented addictions. The troubles — money, drugs, lovers and husbands — draped all over music, she brought, like Billie, the blues to jazz and added her own voice and style.

Born Jamasetta Hawkins, she met Otis as a teen in the 1960s. He guided her career for a number of years and also dubbed her Etta. Back then she wrote “Roll With Me Henry,” a raccous, sensual song, somewhat later, became “Dance With Me Henry,” a sanitized hit for Georgia Gibbs — because “roll” connoted sexual activity.

By all accounts, James was one-of-a-kind on stage: dynamic, dramatic, raunchy, powerful and moving. It’s the kind of concert stuff from which legends are built.

She told one reporter that when she sang the blues, she sang life. Her life, to be sure, but that’s what all the great blues and jazz singers and musicians do: singing life, living songs.

Gary Tischler •

Newt Gingrich talks a lot about being a man of big ideas, how he embraces them, gives birth to them and spouts them morning, noon and night.

He ought to come over to Arena Stage and see “Red,” John Logan’s play about the raging, despairing, non-stop talking abstract expressionist artist Mark Rothko in crisis, as he takes on a critical mural project and a new assistant.

Talk — and there’s a lot of wonderful, powerful talk — about big ideas. It’s enough to make a politician realize just how small his ideas really are.

“Red,” directed by Robert Falls, the gifted artistic director of the Goodman Theater in Chicago, is a two-character play about Rothko, arguably the star member of the generation of American painters whose abstract expressionist breakthroughs put New York at the center of the art world once defined by Paris.

Rothko, with his huge and mysterious paintings of emotional color fields achieved fame, if not understanding, early, became, along with the erratic Jackson Pollock and his action paintings, a rock star of a movement that was already being threatened by yet another next, new thing, the rising work and fame of pop art stars, such as Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg and others.

When we see Rothko, alone in a chair staring at a canvas, he is arguably one of the most famous living artists in the world. Pop art is on the horizon, and Rothko has taken on, for big money at the time, a commission to create a series of murals for the Four Seasons restaurant in the new Seagram Building.

In “Red” — the murals are varations on the color, a kind of combat between dark and light as well — we see Rothko in full with all of his famous imperfections: the grandiosity, the urge not only to talk but to make pronouncements, his famed insecurity and egomania always warring, the contempt for other artists, critics, intellectuals and so on. We see him through him, and through the eyes of a new assistant, a sharply-edged dynamo named Ken, an aspiring artist himself, a fact that Rothko notes and ignores.

Most people, either by reading the program information or just by more than a passing interest in modern art will know that Rothko’s story ends badly — a suicide in his late 60s in 1970, adding the last dose of tragedy and drama to the story of the expressionists. There’s a sense of urgency to the proceedings, especially when he’s talking about Pollock’s possibly suicidal death in a car crash, and in a scene that seems almost horrifically prophetic, paint being mistaken for blood.

What you get here is theater — about art and an artist and the artistic impulse. It’s pretty inventive stuff, high theater and drama as well as high-mindedness, all of it executed at a level of kinetic, intimate physicality.

Looking at these two artists — Ken is a young man who’s embraced the new art, he has a back story of murdered parents — you see a father-son rivalry as Ken, with thin, tensile strength like tough wire, challenges Rothko right where he lives, in his most cherished views of himself as an art-philosopher, a serious beyond serious man. That’s Rothko’s gripe about the pop artists who have achieved fame without being serious, a notion that Warhol for one would find ironically hilarious.

Ken’s continuous challenges seem at first fresh, an affront to a god, but he earns the right by sweating with Rothko, doing everything he wants, sharing his passions. There is no better scene about art in a play than the occasion when the two, like sweaty street rats, set about priming a huge canvas with paint — it’s a choreographed dance, it’s heated, almost desperate and beautiful, it’s almost a mating exercise, not with each other but with the canvas and the paint. It’s a shared moment, an intimate contact with paint which leaves both men splattered, they look like a shaman and his assistant in the dark arts.

Ken’s main and biting attack on Rothko is his betrayal of his own art by taking on a $30,000 commission. Rothko thinks he’s creating a cathedral for his works, an idea at which Ken scoffs. Rothko wants the diners to sit in awe of his work, having lost their appetite for everything else. In the end, Rothko, historically and in this play, gives back the money and won’t have his work in the Four Seasons.

Edward Gero, the long-working Washington actor who seems to be saving his best work for the latter part of his career, gives a bullish, bravura performance, the intellectual as hard-nosed verbal street fighter, defending Nietzche, discussing Apollo, drinking hard, working harder, hardly ever at rest. It’s a great performance matched sharply by Patrick Andrew as Ken. He’s prickly. His skepticism is like a coat of porcupine needles.

The set by designer by Todd Rosenthal is a lived-in, worked-in cathedral, informed and haloed by Rothko’s art and by the sweaty reality of the workaday artist’s studio.

“What do you see?” Rothko asks more than once. “I see red,” Ken says. In the play, we see a lot more. Going to places like the National Gallery of Art or the Phillips Collection in Washington, where you can find Rothko’s haunting work, you might ask yourself a different question: “What do you feel?”

“Red” will be performed in the Kreeger Theater at Arena Stage through March 11.
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Gary Tischler • January 23, 2012

When the folks at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington decided to add to its celebration of the company’s 25th anniversary by including a series of conversations between its artistic director Michael Kahn and celebrated (and classically trained) actors, they may not have guessed what a rich gift they’ve presented to Washington theater buffs.

But a gift the series is — and for free, no less — and has so far included dense, entertaining, enlightening theater talk between Kahn and a Starfleet captain, the star of “A Fish Called Wanda,” and, most recently, one of the Bingo Long Traveling All Stars.

Okay, truth be told, Patrick Stewart, Kevin Kline and James Earl Jones managed to come up with memorable theatrical performances before (and after) they ever appeared in a motion picture, including notable roles in the plays of William Shakespeare.
If the series—we hope it will be permanent—was intended to be grounded in discussions about the craft, education and performance of classical theater, they quickly became much more than that, because of Kahn, with his own long history as a director in the theater, with his puckish, sly sense of humor and gift for story-telling and sharing.

While there was always talk about the how of acting and theater, about process and methodology, it’s never sounded like that. Rather, it sounded like two theater friends, talking about stuff over a glass of water in front of a few hundred people, as it were, as if in a play, or many plays. Kahn and the three actors so far—all of them stage actors who had found almost pop culture fame in movies and/or television—were swapping fascinating, almost insider stories around a campfire, but they were also familiar tales, familiar to us because we had encountered their art, their gifts somewhere, in a theater like this, in a movie theater or at home on television. If we were here in attendance, then these men had been, at some time or another, a part of our lives, sometimes a large part.

Certainly, that’s true of James Earl Jones, a large man with large gifts, who made his way to the stage slowly, but in very cool fashion. Jones is just over 80 years of age, but going strong, working the stage a lot now—back to Big Daddy, to “Driving Miss Daisy” and prepping for a new production of Gore Vidal’s vital-still American politics play, “The Best Man.”

We know Jones, of course, from “The Great White Hope,” which first found life in this area at Arena Stage back in the 1960s, a revolutionary, long, dynamic and outsized play about the controversial fighter Jack Johnson who became the first African-American boxer to win the heavyweight title, incensing the predominantly white boxing world, and then, taking it one step further by having a white wife. Jones owned that passionate, taxing part lock stock and barrel and also starred in the film version with Jane Alexander.

“People always say that nobody could really play that part but you,” Kahn said. “Well, that’s not true, but I know I’m associated with it, that it’s mine. But Yaphet Katto (who also shared “Fences” with him), and Brock Peters did great with that part. But it changed my life, it gave me a certain amount of fame and standing, that’s for sure.”

Kahn asked him, as it is with many actors who have done film and stage work, the difference between the two. “Well, different aspects of your craft are emphasized and required,” he said. “But it’s different for everyone. I was told by the film director of “Great White Hope” not to overact the part, that things would be done in the editing room. I didn’t yet know what I was doing and I can’t say I did a perfect job. I think Jane (Alexander) struck the right balance.”

Jones’s fame and familiarity are historical—with his size he opened big doors and other African-American actors walked right through it. “Of course, you’re aware of who you are, the social aspects, the injustices, the disparities, your own history. But you cannot be bitter, you cannot just blame, or you will never succeed. I tell young black actors everything they will encounter, what’s unfair, the parts they won’t get. But you know, it’s a hard profession, period. It’s hard for young white actors, too.”

Jones was a stutterer, a fact about him that isn’t always commonly talked about. “I had help and good advice. I find that on the stage I don’t stutter, because the language, the spoken word is so strong, so musical, almost, it’s like singing, when you’re passionate, you can speak clearly.”

When it comes to films, he had a nice little start: his first movie role was as the bomber who couldn’t get the bomb loose in Stanley Kubrick’s “Doctor Strangelove.” “What a great film, I was lucky with that. So, Slim Pickens had to ride the bomb down to Moscow.” This was in the 1960s when his peers where people like George C. Scott, Richard Harris and Richard Burton among others.

Jones had the part the common soldier who gets into an argument with King Henry in “Henry V,” about how war is different for the king and the soldiers, not knowing he’s talking to the king, in a Joseph Papp-directed version of the play. “This was the ’60s, you remember, and everyone thought he was somehow making an anti-war statement by casting me,” Jones said. “He wasn’t, as far as I know. I was a spear carrier.”

He became much more than that. Especially when he encountered “Othello.” “My god, I have played Othello seven times,” he said. “I still don’t think I got it right. I don’t know. Different Iagos, different Desdemonas. I sometimes I think when I played it with Christopher Plummer, I sometimes think I should have grabbed Iago and stuck his head and near-drowned him in a fountain when I said, ‘Prove my wife a whore,’ to add emphasis.”

He was asked if he thought Iago, the man who plotted against him and made him believe his wife had betrayed him, was a racist.

Jones took his time answering. “On balance, I do think so,” he said. “It’s not good enough, as some people suggest just to say he’s naturally evil, like Richard III. He mesmerizes people, including Othello. But he has an advantage. He talks to the audience. Othello doesn’t.” This led to discussions about Shakespeare’s intentions and feelings vis-a-vis race and prejudice, a controversy that also simmers every time out over “The Merchant of Venice,” and its central character of the Jewish moneylender Shylock.

It’s something we all forget sometimes. In the life of these men, they have played many parts, and we remember their bearing, their voices—especially the resonant, powerful voice of Jones. They are in our minds and dreams and the way we remember them mostly is: Stewart making the U.S.S. Enterprise go to warp, the voice of Darth Vader, in movie images. The tales of the stage are just that: memories.

I happened to see Jones and Plummer in “Othello,” which happened to include an over-the-top performance by a pre-“Frazier, “pre-“Boss” Kelsey Grammer. And you realize then that while those of us lucky enough to be able to see many plays, nevertheless, see them really only once. To Jones, there must be a thousand Othellos in his head, the voice modulated a little here, a line slipped there, the hand on Desdemona’s throat softer or stronger each night.

But, we remember too and being with them like this makes us think and remember. Later, going home from the talk in a cab, the Ethiopian cab driver talked heatedly about Othello, although he has only seen a film version, while I remembered Plummer and other Iagos, saying “I hate the Moor.”

These classical conversations have been classics. Bravo.

Gary Tischler • January 13, 2012

At last.

Our long national nightmare is finally over.

No, we’re not talking about Watergate or the Redskins’ football season.

We’re talking about the endless debates, rise and falls, and media obsession with the political events leading up to the Republican race to “win” the Iowa caucuses, the first actual voting event in the grinding road to the presidential nomination.

It’s over.

Mitt Romney, the other Mormon candidate, squeaked out an eight-vote win over Rick Santorum, the surging ex-Pennsylvania senator and darling of the Christian right.

And now, it’s on to New Hampshire, where Romney, who has yet to get more than 25 percent in preference polls or this last vote-count in Iowa, is expected to get a little more than an eight-point margin of victory.

Still, let’s face it. This race so far has been a farce, a joke, a circus, a media obsession, and anyone who still thinks anyone can actually beat Romney—loved or unloved—is smoking something funny.

With the climax of the Iowa caucuses — aren’t you glad we don’t have to revisit that state anymore? — it’s time to say that Romney has won the nomination, and just give up on the idea that somewhere out there, there will come a man, or even Sarah Palin, who will ignite the fury of the Tea Party and smite down the bland, Gore-like Mitt, whose only known stand so far is the opinion that he is opposed to President Barack Obama.

I know—there’s dozens of primaries left all over the country stretching into the next few months—but there’s no chance that Romney can blow this nomination. He has too much money, too many good-looking children, and a blasé, murky, fuzzy, spin-like-topsy approach to issues that add up to a winner.

Maybe not a popular winner, maybe not an inspirational winner, but a winner nonetheless. Just ask Newt Gingrich, who was erased by a Romney SuperPAC attack in the blink of the time between two polls.

But seriously, folks, let’s take a look at this so-called race for the GOP lineup for the race to the presidential nomination.

All those pictures of the stalwarts lined up next to one another on a stage in debate after debate—truthfully, didn’t you just feel like giggling a little bit?

Except for Romney, who’s been there before, and who in the very least looks presidential, and can out debate anybody, that bunch looked more like a future “Dancing With the Stars” or “Celebrity Apprentice” cast than a group running for President of the United States. And don’t think that Michelle Bachman, now at last out of the race, might not show up and kick butt on one of those shows, not to mention Herman Cain, the pizza king, dial 9-9-9?

Romney was Mr. Steadfast in these proceedings, never really ahead of the pack but always the front runner, hovering around 25 percent in the polls. Every week, it seemed that there was a new leader: Bachman herself was the briefest of leaders in the polls after winning the Iowa straw poll which is something less than a caucus but something more than drawing straws for designated driver.

Along came the mighty Rick Perry, who figured if Bachman could win one thing, why he could probably win the whole thing just by showing up and throwing a Texas hat in the ring. He soared in the polls, running past Romney like a sprinter. So well-heeled and financed was Perry, so successful a politician in Texas (he could at no risk not return calls to Karl Rove) that there was a lot of boot-quaking going on, at least in the media.

Except that he showed up for the debates, where he proved to be as adept as Elmer Fudd, and even worse than the previous governor of Texas. Perry proved to have trouble with complete sentences, ideas and memory.

That was probably better than having trouble with women. Just ask Bill Clinton, I mean Herman Cain, the African-American former Pizza company executive with the 9-9-9 plan, who, for no discernible reason, rose in the polls and became the darling of the Tea Party, which by now had adopted a stance of anybody-but-Mitt. There came a time when Cain started behaving like he was in a national primary campaign and not a book tour, and further, he thought he could win. Right up until those pesky women showed up with their sexual harassment talk, including the last one who said she had a lengthy affair with him. Soon enough and inevitably, Cain folded up his campaign tent, went home to sleep on the couch and, as far as we know, has not been heard from since.

Enter Newt Gingrich the former Speaker of the House who caused Bill Clinton no ends of trouble, often married, author, intellectual, smart guy and, well, loose cannon. Still compared to the rest of the bunch, he looked like Einstein, although a portly Einstein. Romney, in fact, acted as if he were worried because chances were good that Gingrich could hold his own in a debate and had a blonde wife.

No worries. The Romney Superpac blasted Gingrich out of the water and into fourth place in the Iowa caucuses which he had led in the polls only 15 minutes ago, causing him to call Romney someone who didn’t tell the truth. Nobody dared call Romney a liar, but the word disingenuous came up quite a lot, which nobody paid attention to.

Enter — after lurking in the campaign and debates like a stalker — , who talked values, had little money and only recently said he would annul all gay marriages when he became president and that he would attack Iran’s nuclear reactor if he became president.
Nobody paid attention. Santorum was surging, and urging, and that was all that mattered. Give it another two weeks, and that will be the end of that.

The media — especially all the lads and gals with their iPads at the ready, their pie-charts and projections and their thumbs on the pulse of regular folks — can take a lot of the blame for this Iowa obsession. Media folks love the race itself, and ponder every vote and percentage point like high priests at a ceremony blessing the new consul in ancient Rome, pulling out hearts of chickens and rabbits feet to make their predictions. They love the process — so much so that they hang on every word a Perry, a Santorum, a Gingrich, a Cain has to say as if they meant something.

Did any of them seriously think that any of that bunch beside Romney was a serious presidential candidate?

And, oh, I’m sorry I forgot to say anything about Ron Paul, mainly because finishing third is like kissing your sister. And I’m sorry I forgot to mention Jon Huntsman, the other Mormon in the race because … well … I forgot.

Gary Tischler •

All last year, it seemed, different parts of the District of Columbia government were hanging under a cloud of suspicion, as Mayor Vincent Gray, Chairman Kwame Brown and Ward Five council member Harry Thomas, Jr., await the outcome of federal investigations.

The city, in short, was waiting for one of the three shoes to drop.

This week, one of them did, and it fell on Thomas, who resigned Thursday night after rumors and reports had swirled all week on local television news, websites and newspapers that he had reached an agreement or deal with the U.S. District Attorney’s Office that he would resign and that he would probably be facing jail time.

On Friday, Jan. 6, Thomas stood up in U.S. District Judge and pleaded guilty to two federal felonies, admitting that he had embezzled $350,00 in government money meant to go to a youth athletic program and that he had falsified federal income tax reports.

According to a report in the Washington Post, he answered U.S. Judge John D. Bates with “Guilty as charged, your honor.”

The resignation was historic. Thomas, who occupied the Ward 5 seat once held by his father as well as current at-large council member Vincent Orange, became the first sitting member of the D.C. Council since the beginning of home rule to resign his office under a cloud. That’s a dubious distinction for a once promising political career.

Suspicions about the fraud, theft or embezzlings have been long-standing, first raised by a Republican opponent after his 2010 re-election campaign, although vigorously denied by Thomas. The money was apparently funneled through a non-profit called Team Thomas, created by Thomas as a source of funds for youth athletics, funds which Thomas allegedly used for luxury cars and vacations among other things.

Recently, indicating the seriousness of the federal investigation, teams of FBI and IRS agents launched a raid on the Thomas residence, seizing a number of items and an SUV. Thomas had also agreed to pay back the some $300,000, although he did not admit he had done anything wrong.

Things came to a head this week with reports from television reporters citing individuals close to Thomas that he would be resigning.

The result leaves Ward 5 without a council representative at least until May, when a special election could be held. In addition, there are also early races for the Democratic and Republican nominations for several council seats.

Several council members had already called for Thomas’s resignation, as did Mayor Vincent Gray recently. Chairman Brown was not among them.

“I think it’s time to move on and heal and and work as hard as we can to gain the trust of Washingtonians,” Brown said in a television interview. He also indicated he felt “confident” about the outcome of the investigation into his 2008 campaign practices.

Thomas’s resignation comes amid newly created ethics reform legislation which the council is now attempting to give a final approval.

There is no small irony that the ethics package, praised by many, but criticized by others for not going far enough, is on its way to becoming a fact of life in the District, with key members of the government still under investigation.

Gary Tischler • January 4, 2012

‘Ann’: An Original Played by an Original

I thought I knew Holland Taylor.

She was a lawyer, a judge, a WASP, somebody who drank martinis and complained if they weren’t done right, an East Coaster, main liner, bossy, Charlie Sheen’s mother in his unreal life, the kind of upper crusty, attractive woman around whom you tried to hide your minuscule repertoire of good manners. She had been all those things in acting roles on Broadway, in movies and big and little hit television series.
Talking to Taylor on the phone, I allowed that I had read her resume and felt like I should be a little scared. She laughed. “Maybe you should,” she said.

Actually, what really impressed me was what she was doing now, the reason we were talking at all. Ann Richards.

If you should ever be in awe of or be intimidated by a woman you’d never met, it would have been Ann Richards, the late and former governor of Texas before it turned into a puddle of Bushes and Perrys. Ann Richards, a liberal icon who once taunted Bush senior for having been born with a “silver foot in his mouth,” a woman with an elongated white hairdo who thrived as a Texan politician, who was famous for her straight talk, compassion, and the kind of sense of humor which let her play with the big boys sometimes with one hand tied behind her back. People I admired — the creators of the “Tuna” plays, the acerbic Texas political writer, the late Molly Ivins, who would always refer to Bush II as “shrub” loved Ann Richards unto death.

And here was Holland Taylor, as far removed from shrubs and bushes, and Amarillo and Armadillos as you can be, starring in “Ann,” in which she was not only the star but the author. “It is very, very different from anything that I’ve ever attempted,” Taylor said. “And it’s strange, you know, I met her exactly once, over lunch in New York, and she was the kind of woman, the kind of person, who haunts you, she’s so impressive.

In 2006, Richards was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and died that same year and that was probably when Taylor first started thinking about a work about Richards. “She was an original, she affected so many people, she was funny, she helped others, and there was nobody, nobody like here,” Taylor said. “So, I spent a lot of time researching, I spent some time in Austin and Texas, and, eventually, it and we came to life and here we are.”

For my money, it takes an original to play an original. Taylor was always a fine actress, especially on stage but also in soaps, television series and films, always, it seemed, playing strong-minded women of one sort or another but never in the same way. When she finally won an Emmy for playing “a rapacious judge” on David Kelley’s hit series “The Practice,” she gave an unforgettable speech in which she thanked Kelley for “giving me a chariot to ride up here on: A woman who puts a flag on the moon for women over 40 — who can think, who can work, who are successes and who can COOK!”

We don’t know about the cooking part, but that could be Ann Richards. That could be Holland Taylor.
“Ann,” written and performed by Holland Taylor, will be performed at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater, Dec. 17 through Jan. 15.

. . . And the Music of ‘Billy Elliott’

There’s more than Ann and Holland at the Kennedy Center. There’s a kid named Billy Elliott.

“Billy Elliott the Musical” isn’t about Christmas but may warm up some hearts anyway, and it’s bound to please. This Broadway smash — 10 Tonys — is based on a critically acclaimed film in which one Billy Elliott, a would-be-kid boxer, stumbles into a ballet class and changes his life and that of everyone around him.
The show features music by Elton John, book and lyrics by Lee Hall, choreography by Peter Darling and direction by Stephen Daldry.

“Bill Elliott the Musical” runs Jan.15 at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House.

Romeo, I Can’t Hear You

And of course, there’s the eternal Shakespeare play of “star-crossed lovers,” Romeo and Juliet. “Romeo, Romeo Wherefore Art Thou?”

At the Synetic Theater in Crystal City, Romeo’s not saying. Synetic, as we all know, is the great beyond-category theater company where words — even and especially Shakespearean words — are secondary. In Synetic’s unique acting style —combining movement, dance and mime— it’s not the rest that’s silence but everything. Synetic is in the midst of its Silent Shakespeare Festival, “Speak No More,” and its production of “Romeo and Juliet” had six Helen Hayes nominations and two Helen Hayes awards for outstanding director and ensemble.

This production runs through Dec. 23.

History Being Made and Acted at Arena Stage

At Arena Stage, history plays a big part in both Amy Freed’s “You, Nero” and Bill Cain’s “Equivocation.” 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 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. Making its D.C. debut, it runs through Jan. 1. Danny Scheie stars as Nero, an emperor who may have been the first emperor-as-public-celebrity.

Off the Beaten Track at the Studio

If you’re in the mood for something in a completely non-holiday spirit and different, head over to the Studio Theater where there’s still time to see Lauren Weedman, a correspondent on the Daily Show who brings “Bust” her acidic, tough and funny autobiographical one-woman show about her experience as a volunteer advocate in a Southern California prison for women to Studio’s Stage 4 through Dec. 18.

Spoiler Alert: Second City is Back

For something perhaps a little more fun but still dark, there’s the wonderfully titled “Spoiler Alert: Everybody Dies,” whereby Chicago’s famed comedy troupe Second City returns to Woolly Mammoth Theater in a collaboration with D.C. artists, including actors Jessica Frances Dukes, and Aaron Bliden and designer Colin K. Bills. Here’s the way the press release describes the proceedings: “the most gleeful anti-holiday celebration of doom ever”.

God bless us every one.

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Gary Tischler • December 30, 2011

“Billy Elliot the Musical” started out as a movie, a smallish, critically well received and quite popular English movie about a working class kid who wanted to become a ballet dancer. The movie became a popular hit and received some award nominations. Then, as small movies often do, it disappeared, apparently indelibly embedded in the minds of people who saw it.

If you go to the Kennedy Center’s Opera House—and you should—to see “Billy Elliot the Musical,”, you might be amazed to think that this was ever anything you could call small. The touring version is big—a really big show—big in physical size, in production qualities, and most importantly, big in ambition and heart, while rarely mushing or stooping to out-and-out sentimentality.

Oh, it’s still the same old story, one boy’s fight for leaps of glory, but it manages to be fresh, original, it manages to be about big subjects—the importance of art in lives that rarely come in contact with it, the mystery of talent, and as always, the equally mysterious natures of families. At three hours, the musical should be a bit of a slog, but it’s worth every minute, a worthy payoff of time and money and a critical success at that.

We’re in Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, where the national mining union has just gone on strike, and the Iron Lady is out to bust the workers in villages across the country, which may explain her natural affinity for Ronald Reagan. In one such village, Billy Elliot, an adolescent boy who’s lost his mother and lives with his belligerent father, tough brother and slightly daft grandmother, is taking boxing lessons when he accidentally wanders into a ballet class. He’s intrigued, watching the energy of the dancers under the guidance of the tough-talking, colorful Mrs. Wilkinson, but he’s also put off, because in the mining culture ballet is part of the upper class world, not to mention unmanly.

Still, he comes back, and finds something in himself—a gift for movement, flight, he’s a natural—and Mrs. Wilkinson gives him private lessons.

When pops and brother find out, they cut his budding efforts to get into the National School of Ballet short. But as the miners battle cops and scabs and run out of money, it occurs to Billy’s family and the extended family of miners that maybe Billy ought to get a chance to live his dream — and theirs — with him. And so, off they—Billy and pops—go to an audition in London, an enterprise that is often funny in a clash-of-cultures way, but also results in Billy’s audition number “Electricity” where Billy, in a bout of spectacular dancing expresses what dance means to him—its electricity, its hope, its dreams and freedom.

The show—with music by Elton John, a book by Lee Hall, choreography by Peter Darling and direction by Stephen Daldry—ended up winning 10 Tonys when it first hit Broadway. The road company requires a cast of five different Billys, and just watching, somewhat awestruck, two of the big numbers Billy is featured in, you can understand the need for a break.

Lex Ishimoto was the Billy I saw, lithe, unpretentious, a kid until he started to fly and leap. Billy talks like a normal working class kid, there’s nothing treacly here, no Oliver Twist, no David Copperfield or Tiny Tim. This is an often lonely kid who misses his mother tremendously, whose best friend is an exhibitionist gay teen who likes to wear dresses, who feels adrift in the often violent, macho world of the miners.

I expect that none of the Billys are particularly grand singers—both dance and voice are exacting disciplines that require training, and, as far as I know, there is no Rudolf Nuryev’s greatest hits album.

Darling and Daldry have done something remarkable here, they’ve put dance and music in the service of the story, instead of the other way around. In depicting the battles between cops and strikers, they’ve included the ballet dancers in seamless fashion.

“Billy Elliot” is in fact, very moving, in a tug-tug way, it delves into the fulfillment and pursuit of aspirations, it creates the world of the miners with not only drama but dance and song, some of which occasionally swerves into Les Mis territory.

And it should be said that while its hero is a kid, “Billy Elliot, the Musical” is no Disney effort. It’s gritty, with the occasional blunt, four-letter gruff language of working class types, something that we can applaud, but also approach with caution, if you’re a parent.

Gary Tischler •

I’ve been reading stories about and obituaries of Christopher Hitchens these past few days.

I was amazed how much I laughed—out loud.

I mean no disrespect toward the noted writer, literary critic, verbal bomb-thrower, bane of organized religion, outrageous and
iconoclastic savager of the whole band-width of ideology and political rhetoric, who was, above all, a very serious man. His opinions and pronouncements were principled, well thought-out to the point of almost being irrefutable and passionately held.

But by God — okay, perhaps not by God — he could be and was funny in his writing, on the air, in debates and interviews and probably in his sleep. And I mean funny as in deadly serious funny. He died last week at the young age of 62 of pneumonia, and the effects of cancer of the esophagus. Put another way, he probably died of the way he lived, or rather the effects of his mammoth indulgent drinking and smoking.

He probably would have abided by that judgement, but not the one in which some mean-spirited religious types insisted he was being punished by you know who. He was towards his last days astonished by the amount of communications offering him prayers, but also urging him to repent and recognize God.

Hitchens suggested if that should somehow happen it would be from the effects of his illness, not a recantation.

He talked (and wrote) about the subject of his dying days on talk shows and his recent autobiography boldly titled “Hitch 22”. “I could not imagine seeing a good religionist on his death bed and screaming in ear that there was no afterlife, no nothing. That would be unethical,” he said.

Among the many entries in the comment sections of stories about his death there was this: “Just this once, I will admit I am not great.” God.

Hitchens became known a little late in his life as an atheist, with arguments aplenty to prove that he was right, including a book called “God is Not Great”. But he backed his arguments with his keen wit and intelligence, and it would always seem that in religious arguments, faith might trump reason, but reason holds the info cards.

What Hitchens despised was the intolerance, the violence against other religions that was practiced by fanatical religious adherents and fundamentalists, especially the most radical of Islamic believers who committed acts of terror and murdered in the name of their religion. He also attacked Mother Theresa. He loudly and bravely blasted the fatwa issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini against Iranian author Salman Rushdie for his novel, “The Satanic Verses.” He was in all his opinions and writings, an equal-opportunity critic, offending friends and enemies on the left and right. And I think he was a brave man—he reported for the Nation and later Vanity Fair from war zones and once underwent waterboarding personally to be able to write about it first hand. “If this is not torture,” he wrote, “then there is no torture.”

He was a brilliant and elegant, if sometimes brutish, essayist, a keen literary critic, and by all-accounts, non-stop talker, sober or not.

As somebody noted that if you’re a famous and respected writer, you’re bound to get good notices when you die. He got good notices from really good people all of his life. On the publication of “Hitch 22,” the great English novelist Ian McEwan wrote that “If Hitchens didn’t exist, we wouldn’t be able to invent him.” Richard Dawkins wrote “If you are invited
to debate … with Christopher Hitchens, decline. His witty repartee, his ready-access store of historical quotations, his bookish eloquence, his effortless flow of well formed words … would threaten your arguments even if you had good ones to deploy.”

I saw Hitchens once at a faux debate at the Shakespeare Theatre in Harman Hall, where, I believe a Supreme Court justice, several media pundits, historians and Arianna Huffington as well as Hitch debated the issue of whether Henry V’s invasion of France which resulted in the battle of Agincourt was a war crime or legal. I don’t remember the outcome, but I do remember Hitchens, apropos of nothing except that Shakespeare’s ghost was in the house, gave a perfectly vivid description of Edward II’s horrific murder (from a play by Marlowe), which left even Huffington silent for a second or two.

This is the kind of thing Hitchens could be counted on to do: whatever came out of his mouth, would come out in perfectly formed sentences, it would often be risible and offensive, and dead-on in the
facts.

He was on Bill Maher’s show at least once, because Maher, you suspect, saw him as a kindred spirit because Maher flayed against people of faith religiously on his show, in the manner of a petulant boy whose favorite insult is “redneck,” a peevish boy who had obviously been hit on the knuckles with a rule by a nun in his childhood. On that occasion, Maher might have been forced to believe that there was a higher being, because he was sitting next to one.

VACLAV HAVEL

Hitchens, unlike writers like Jimmy Breslin or Norman Mailer in America, never aspired to public office, high or low, because the tradeoff is inevitably a piece of your soul.

In other countries, especially in the latter part of the 20th century, during the time of the Cold War and the relatively imminent breakup
of the Soviet Union and its Eastern Europe, things sometimes were different.

The dissident, writer and playwright Vaclav Havel , who died at 75 on Dec. 17, would become president of what was then Czechoslovakia and later became president of the Czech Republic when the country split in two with Slovakia becoming a separate country.

In all cases, Havel was first and foremost an eloquent dissident and provocateur in a country where creativity and dreams of freedom burned
strongly even in the darkest hours when the Soviet Union crushed the Prague Spring in 1968 with an invasion of tanks into Prague.

Havel was a prolific playwright and prolific and open dissident which caused his writings to be banned, which caused him to be arrested and land in prison. He was a hero throughout the world for his defiant stance, and his plays were performed often in the United States and frequently by Scena Theater under its director Robert McNamara in Washington, D.C.

His letters to his wife published under the title of “Letters to Olga” were widely praised for their moral resonance and example.

Writers or artists, of course, don’t always make good presidents. The presidency in the Czech Republic, as it is in other European countries,
is large ceremonial and symbolic, but as a symbol to his country Havel filled the job. As a president per se, Havel was a very good playwright.

A noted filmmaker was visiting in Washington during the D.C. Film Festival at the time of Havel’s ascendancy to the presidency and passed on this story to me. “Someone told Havel that people were already making jokes about him,” he said. “And Havel said ‘Jokes? About me? But I’m the
president.’ ” “Yes,” he was told, “That’s the joke.”

Havel reportedly found that joke funny. But then, he would, because he was a serious man.
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Gary Tischler • December 19, 2011

Near the end of his “Classic Conversations” visit with Shakespeare Theatre Company Artistic Director Michael Kahn, actor and sometime movie star Kevin Kline noted that he loved the big parts, the scary parts.

“Why are we here if not to do the hard parts?” he asked.

Why indeed. Kline, who is a gifted Shakespearean actor and a fair-sized movie star, has done his share of the hard parts, done them more than well and risen more often than not to the challenge of being Cyrano, Falstaff, Hamlet, Richard II and Richard III, Henry V and, in his first movie role no less, the quicksilver, charismatic and doomed Nathan opposite Meryl Streep in “Sophie’s Choice” among other roles.

His old Juilliard compatriot introduced him as the actor who has been called “the American Olivier,” high praise in indeed, once issued by New York Times Drama Critic Frank Rich.

“Well, I don’t know about that,” he said. “I mean, Olivier, good God.”

“And remember, when I was a kid, I hated Shakespeare,” he said.

But then, when he was a kid in a Catholic private school which included corporal punishment, he didn’t like a lot of the things he grew to love. “Actually, I wanted to study music. I had a rock band, if you can believe that.”

He probably didn’t imagine himself to be a movie star, either, or traveling the country with the Acting Company, the creation of John (“We make money the old fashioned way. We earn it”) Houseman, a stern original from film and theater times past. “That was the best experience you could possibly have, doing the different plays in different places, small towns one night, big city the next, a college campus, and so forth. I loved that. And you learn from that.”

Kline has always returned to the stage—it’s his main love, it’s where the biggest tasks, those Moby Dick-size challenges await him.

Kahn and Kline are obvious old friends. “Remember, next year you’re going into, I don’t know what decade in theater and acting. Maybe you could do something special. Maybe we’ll give you another Will Award.”

“It has been a long time,” Kline noted. “I like always going back to the stage. But the movie industry—I have to say I don’t understand it. I don’t understand the audience. It’s teenage boys. I mean I have a reputation as being very, very careful in the roles I choose. I have a nickname to uphold. They call me Kevin Decline. Or Doctor No. I’m known for turning down roles. I even turned down Nathan at first, not to mention Dave.”

“Dave” was one of his more popular movie roles, in which he played a man who is forced to impersonate a president. He worked with director Lawrence Kasdan on “Grand Canyon” and something he thoroughly enjoyed, the star studded improbable western “Silverado” and the iconic “The Big Chill.”

That’s when he was bonafide catnip for the ladies, a movie star as well as a grounded, gifted, talented actor. “I was scared to death on “Sophie’s Choice,” he said. “But Meryl was so generous. She said don’t be intimidated. Improve. Don’t be scared to throw me around.”

Kline got an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for the cultish “A Fish Called Wanda.”

Kline these days seems to lead the most normal of lives, married to actress Phoebe Cates for over 20 years with a grown son, Owen Joseph Kline, who had a major role in “The Squid and the Whale.” “Time Magazine called it one the best performances of the year and he was a teenager. But he said he didn’t care to become an actor. Can you believe it?”

He always comes back to Shakespeare, to the parts that are big and scary, including his embrace of Cyrano, which is French, but still big and scary.

When Kline, still boyishly and elegantly handsome, walked into the room, a woman in front of me whispered: “His hair is white.”