Gary Tischler • September 22, 2011

There are at least three good reasons to see the Washington National Opera Company’s production of “Tosca” at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House.

They are Patricia Racette, Alan Held and Frank Paretta, the principals in this hugely popular and classically melodramatic opera. The fourth is Giacamo Puccini once again displaying all the reasons why he’s up there with Wagner, Verdi and even Mozart as composers of enduring operas.

“Tosca”— one of Pucinni’s three great operas that includes “La Boeheme” and “Madame Butterfly”—is probably the least familiar among his works, maybe because of its less comfortable setting (Rome in the time of the Naoleonic forays into Italy in the early 19th century) and because it isn’t stuffed with long arias or overly crowded with secondary characters. It’s Tosca, her boyfriend and her nemesis, and the rest are window dressings with lesser functions.
But Tosca, an almost feverishly passionate and direct woman, volatile as a volcano, is the main show.

She is an artist, a renowned singer (from whence we get the word diva, apparently), who’s in love with another artist, the appealing painter Cavaradossi, who sings like an angel on top of everything else. But then there’s Count Scarpia (a villain by any other name, but especially this one), the chief of the secret police, relentless, cruel, completely amoral, who’ll torture and kill anyone who gets in the way of what he wants. In this case, he wants Tosca and he’s got Cavaradossi, who’s hiding a rebel in his estate.

Scarpia puts Tosca in an impossible situation—he promises to let Cavaradossi go—staging a “fake” execution” if she succumbs to his advances, although he’s already come closing to raping her. But Scarpia has underestimated his prey even as she’s appearing to agree to the devil’s bargain.

And so it goes—love, murder, passion, betrayal and it all ends very badly, about as badly for all concerned as you get. “Tosca” puts the T into operatic tragedy to say the least. But this is what we want in tragedy—the fun and the kind of feeling and music can you get out of a happily-ever-after. Imagine if Romeo and Juliet had lived and gotten married. Not so much.

Puccini is every the innovator here: the arias—including the famous duet in the last act—are nothing less that focused, concise and powerful, not leaving room for anything less than powerful emotions. “Tosca,” like the upcoming “Lucia di Lammermoor,” is of course in the grand tradition of high dudgeon melodrama, full of improbabilities not the least of which was someone charging on stage announcing that “we’ve lost the battle.” “What battle?” you might ask, but never mind. A little thing like that never stopped lust, lost love and mayhem.

And Racette—who’s known far and wide for her “Tosca”—justifies the acclaim with her beautiful soprano voice, singing strongly and clearly, with very little, if any, showboating and a consistent acting performance that makes Tosca a full-bodied, full-blooded character.

Held, a bass—baritone who’s building a solid resume with Wagnerian performances, makes an imposing Scarpia, a man with giant appetites and a fierce, dangerous quality. He’s bigger than life and casts a huge presence. He’s answerable to no one, and you get a good idea of that when he sings of his plans and desires for Tosca wile a “Te Deum” can be heard in the background.

Tenor Frank Paretta, mainly through his gorgeous singing and his chin-out stances of bravery makes Cavaradocci a heroic, romantic figure.

You can also get a glimpse of opera legend Placido Domingo, no longer the man in charge at the WNO, but conducting for this production.

“Tosca” is the first WNO production in its new affiliation with the Kennedy Center and it’s a popular choice and a focused execution that delivers the considerable virtues of the work, it roars with melodrama, and affecting singing and performances.

Gary Tischler • September 19, 2011

If asking yourself what’s there to do this weekend, we’ve got an answer for you:

PLENTY! A LOT! SO MUCH THAT IT MAKES YOU CRAZY!

Why, there’s an arts festival, a big neighborhood festival, 9/11 memorial events, the start of the NFL Football Season and the start of the Washington National Opera Season, plus the beginning of the season for a number of theater companies and probably a few other things we just plain forgot about.

Check it out: The Penn Quarter Arts on Foot Festival for 2011 is a neighborhood and city institution that this year has expanded to two days in the buzz-filled, hyper-energized downtown area which encompasses a multitude of restaurants, the Verizon Center, theaters and museums on a daily basis.

As always, the Festival includes an art market, live performances on stages at the festival and a showcase of the work of some 25 area theaters in the elegant Harman Hall, home to the Shakespeare Theatre Company. There will be artist studio showcases, food and wine to buy and food and wine to appreciate by way of demonstrations by top D.C. Chefs and sampling. The weekend will also offer 9/11 commemorative events. Things start at 11 a.m. and run through 7 p.m. on Saturday and from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sunday.

A festival of another sort, but with equally strong traditions, is the annual Adams Morgan Day Festival from noon to 7 p.m. on Sunday, in which D.C.’s most diverse and eclectic and ethnic neighborhood showcases its music, its food, its customs and its people from a stretch of 18th Street at Columbia Road to Florida Avenue. Here’s where the streets famous restaurants and clubs like Madam’s Organ and Columbia Station become a part of the scenery. You can smell its heavily spiced foods even before you get there. There’s also a dance plaza, art shows, kid fair and lots of cultural demonstration and no doubt an elected official or two. Listen to the sounds of the rumba, salsa, blues and rock and roll and rap, yo.

On Saturday, the Washington National Opera opens its season—now affiliated with the Kennedy Center—with “Tosca” in the old style: suits, ties, some tuxedos and gowns and grand Puccini music at the KC Opera House.

If Sunday weren’t busy enough, there’s the 5th annual Unity Walk, an inter-faith, cross-cultural commemoration of Sept. 11 with an eye toward peace and understanding. The bulk of the march takes place on Massachusetts Avenue, with stops at synagogues, the National Cathedral and the mosque. Speakers include the Rev. Mpho Tutu and Arum Gandhi.

The National Cathedral will also be holding special events, concerts and services on the occasion of memorializing the 9/11 attacks.

That’s just a taste. Don’t stay in indoors. It’s bound to stop raining sometimes. But if must stay indoors or in a sports bar, the college and NFL football season kicks off officially this weekend, plus there’s the U.S. Open Tennis Tournament and major league baseball, including Nationals, soon may they win.

Check out photos by Jeff Malet from Arts on Foot Festival!

Enjoy!

Gary Tischler • September 9, 2011

I didn’t know there was so much to know about the ukulele , or how many people were crazy about it.

What I learned about the ukelele came later, on Wikipedia, where else. I learned that it had come from Hawaii, which I sort of knew, that it originated in the 19th century as a Hawaiian interpretation of the cavaquuinho or braguinha and the rajao, which meant nothing to me, but they were both small guitar-like instruments which came to Hawaii by way of Portuguese immigrants and that the name “ukulele” translates out to something like “jumping flea”. Queen Lili’uokalani, the last Hawaiian monarch said it meant “the gift that here.” Either way is fine by me.

I’ve never touched a ukulele in my life until last week when I went to the last concert in the annual free outdoor summer concert series held on the lawn by a gazebo at the Strathmore Mansion, adjacent to the Music Center at Strathmore, and now, it appears, a new and classy housing development down the way a bit.

This was Strathmore’s Third Annual UkeFest, and all I can say is, who knew? There were, by an admittedly very rough guesstimate on my part a couple of thousand people spread out on the Strathmore rolling law, near a thousand of them carrying ukes of all sizes and designs with them. Like I said, who knew?

Strathmore’s Shelley Brown handed me this little itty bitty thing that looked like a toy. “It’s easy, try it,” she said. “Play the C note.” I played the C note. The earth did not move—that was the day before. But I was pleased, in a silly, stupid sort of way, as if I had done something really cool.

A fellow by the named of Michael Al Rosson understood perfectly. He had a mighty beard and looked and overalls and looked exactly like a uke player to me, those that don’t appear to be Samoans. “I work in the mail room at a research center,” he said. “I took it up about six years ago, and I got the fever, the uke fever. Never stopped. It’s easy to play. You can play just about anything. It’s fun. It has history. You can entertain people including yourself. And it’s really great to be here.”
Now he bills himself as a singer/songwriter/charactervoice perfsormer and Ukulele Enthusiast.

Just about the spiffiest cool looking ukulele dude there was ChristyLez Bacon, a self-described progressive hip-hop artist, but also a ukulele player. He had a cool hat, suspenders, his clothes looked ready-made from London by way of some dude shop in LA. He was as thin as a reed, with energy to burn.

So did this kid about five years old, who handled his little ukulele like it was a Rick James rock and roll and funk guitar. His sister looked at him skeptically, but he struck the pose and vogued his little self and played: something.

It was one of those things in a week of earthquakes and hurricanes and the usual slew of politics that could make you forget your cares and woes and play “Bye Bye Blackbird”. You can on the uke. Rudy Vallee, when he wasn’t holding a megaphone, played the uke in the Roaring Twenties when it was mysteriously popular in the United States.

That ended with the Depression, but the uke has resurfaced in a big way in the aftermath when Hawaiian musician Israel Kamakawiwo’ole made it popular all again with uke renditions of “Over The Rainbow” and “What a Wonderful World”, which went viral on the Internet in a good way, making people laugh and cry at the same time.

At Strathmore, they were trying to break the Guinness Book of World Record uke record for the largest Ukulele Ensemble ever, which stood at 851. The gathered thousand or more easily swept by that with well over 900, all of which raised high in the air, as if the night was the ukulele Agincourt, which it probably was.

That record lasted a little because news on the Guinness website said that some Swedes had set a new mark well over a thousand.

Silly Swedes

Such news, in the uke world, don’t mean a thing, because it don’t have that swing. Because the instrument produces sounds, plays songs, and music that make you in the dark of the night pretty happy or at least not lonesome.

It showed in the family-like sun-setting fervor of the Uke Setting, where the Riders, amateur musicians from the Riderwood Retirement Community showed up and played in Hawaiian shirts, and youngsters fromn the Piney Branch Kids Ukulele Ensemble layed as Gerald Ross, blending humor jazz and blues, the terrific ladies duo of The Sweater Set, and hosts Marcy Marxer and Cathy Fink led the crowd in a rendition of “This Land is Made for You and Me”, as the smell of fried chicken wafted in the air.

That magnificent C Note. If only we all had one. [gallery ids="100280,107237" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler • September 6, 2011

Down at the Music Center at Strathmore in Bethesda, they’re saying it’s time to put up your ukes.

That would be the center’s annual UkeFest, a celebration of the ukele, ukele-playing and even an attempt to try to beat the Guinness Book of World Records’ world record for Largest Ukulele Ensemble ever assembled.

The current record was set in London in 2009 when 851 uke players performed at the London Uke Festival. That may give you an idea how many ukers will be at the Strathmore grounds, where its annual series of free outdoor concerts is drawing to a close on August 24 at 7 p.m.

Local two-time Grammy winners Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer will emcee UkeFest 2011, which will also feature the Riders, amateur musicians from the Riderwood Retirement Community, the Piney Branch Kids Ukulele Ensemble, and the Washington Ukulele Orchestra, as well as the pop folk duo The Sweaters. There’s also an appearance by Baltimore uke singer Victoria Vox.

Gary Tischler •

The Kid’s Farm, a recreation of a touch-and-see interactive farm that remains one of the most popular family attractions at the National Zoo, is off the endangered list.

The Zoo had announced earlier that there were plans to close the Kids’ Farm due to budget cuts but
after an outburst of support for Kid’s Farm by local FONZ members and families all over the city, the Zoo found a sponsor that saved the date.

A major $1.4 million gift from State Farm Insurance will keep the family friendly attraction with its barn, grazing area, sheep, goats, chickens, cows and a mule open for visitors.

Gary Tischler • August 24, 2011

You’re not likely to hear The Three Stooges and Anton Chekhov mentioned in the same conversation. Yet I found myself thinking of Curly and Moe, and Laurel and Hardy, for that matter, and maybe even Lucille Ball at odd moments during the Sidney Theatre Company’s electric, very energetic, and yes, very funny, production of “Uncle Vanya” at the Kennedy Center.

Chekhov, the Russian master of the short story and theater, reportedly insisted that his plays were comedies of a kind. Director Tamas Ascher and his Sidney Theater ensemble cast certainly found a lot of rough and tumble, physical and sly comedy in “Uncle Vanya”, without diluting what is basically a comic tragedy. You laugh, you cry, you watch the twilight preceding the night.

This production—with a stellar cast headed by but not dominated by Oscar-winning movie actress Cate Blanchett, who runs the company with husband Andrew Upton, noted for his adaptation of “The Cherry Orchard”—is an electric, combustible staging, always entertaining to watch for its physicality, for its portrait of a group of people in frustrated mourning for the missed opportunities of their lives.

If there is a slight tic in this production, it’s probably the setting. Ascher has decided to put Chekhov’s 19th-century Russians-on-the-country-estate into Soviet times, a move that’s not particularly comfortable if you pay too much attention to it. These people—so enmeshed in their beat of their personal but also universal soul—wouldn’t have lasted a weekend under Stalin, the wrecker of the individual soul on a grand scale. You hear a car horn hiccupping, the sound of a motor, and some of the clothing could be modern, if threadbare, especially Yelenda’s two little clingy somethings, basic hunger-inducing outfits in white and red, ruled over by teased white-blond curls.

Basically, you know where you are: Chekhov country, which is to say the denizens and residents of a floundering estate losing their grip on the property and land, barely getting by, yearning for the past and love and success never found. In short, there’s a quasi-intellectual (a pompous professor in theis case), a hopeful young person, a frustrated middle-aged romantic, a cynic of sorts, and a glamorous, diva-like woman around whom the twilight sun of the setting and every one in it moves, plus the odd relative, hanger-on, old man who remembers back in the day.

In Chekhov’s plays—which are really about people’s inability to adjust to social and economic changes like the end of serfdom, the rise of the middle class and the struggle to keep up old habits and appearances—the emphasis shifts and moves around like a game of sad tag. The craziest, most tortured, and erratic spokesman of the frustrations of change and a sudden clarity of vision is Vanya, who for years has kept up the estate for the absentee landlord—the puffed up clueless Serebyakov, a man whom he admired only to find him an empty suit.

The professor has arrived at the shabby estate with his stunning, much younger wife Yelena (Blanchett), who manages to disturb the numbing routine of the estate. Like a witch high on speed, she wreaks havoc among the residents: Vanya realizes he’ll never have her, the good Doctor develops an almost uncontrollable lust/love for her, and even the practical Sonya finds a new BFF in the jittery diva that’s been placed in their midst. On top of that the professor has plans for the estate, which he can’t afford to hang on to.

Money, feverish promise of sex, romance and love, the impending loss of status and property, shifting relationships and a terrible longing for the past—these are all familiar Chekhov tropes. Usually, they’re played out an atmosphere of waiting, a kind of poetic languor interrupted by bursts of high drama, the revelation of secrets and even a gunshot (“The Seagull).

There’s a gunshot in “Uncle Vanya” too, but it’s one of the more splasticky moments in the play when Vanya attempts to shoot the professor because he has Yelena, because “he’s added nothing to nothing,” intellectually. Like Oliver Hardy, he misses in three tries. Richard Roxburgh as Vanya is a study in epic frustration, exasperation, he flounders like a fish, his arms and hands are prayers, they’re moving around in electric supplication.

In the midst of all this Yelena is like a moth, who recognizes that every one wants to touch her, it’s essentially all she’s got to offer. She even touches herself as if to guard against some imagined winter storm. She fends off the doctor, she puts off Vanya and doles out her affections in small bursts, so as not to excite a fever. When her husband demands a kiss, she swoops in like a mother bird feeding her chick a worm.

It’s a feverish performance, all tangled up in her thin, elongated body which is never still, its as if she were constantly eying the rooms of the estate for escape hatches.

Haley McElhinney as Sonya sports a broad Aussie accent, but somehow it doesn’t matter—her performance is so natural, so true and strong, that she could speak in another language altogether and still be understood.

In the end, people leave, people stay, as if the soul of the once-great estate had evaporated.

This “Uncle Vanya”completes the set for this writer, in the sense that I can now say I’ve seen the Chekhov plays in versions that are immensely satisfying. If Upton’s and Ascher’s version is a stylistic departure in terms of physicality, energy and the spice of comedy, it brings a freshness to Chekhov, a new, or rather additional way of experiencing the plays. The production can stand beside my particular favorites: The Studio Theater’s and Joy Zinoman’s elegiac version of “The Three Sisters”, along with Zelda Fichandler’s classic production of the same play; Zinoman again with the rarely seen “Ivanov”, which opened the Studio’s new space; the David Mamet translation of “The Cherry Orchard” at Round House Theater and last, but not least, the iconoclastic director Peter Sellars’ just-about-perfect version of “A Seagull”, which was the late Colleen Dewhurst’s shining moment as the fading actress Irina Arkadina, and featured Kevin Spacey, Kelly McGillis and Paul Winfield in an outstanding cast at the time when the Kennedy Center was attempting to create a national theater.

Gary Tischler • August 17, 2011

Some time ago, when Woolly Mammoth Theatre first staged a production of “Clybourne Park” by Bruce Norris, it was doing something very much in the Woolly tradition. That is, a Washington premiere, a topical, ice-pick witty and emotionally pulling play by a gifted young writer which seemed to echo especially in D.C., as real as a stopped Metro escalator, even though it was set in Chicago.

Now “Clybourne Park” is back, complete with its original D.C. cast under the direction of Woolly artistic honcho Howard Shalwitz, after a successful stint in New York, and more than that, after winning a Pulitzer Prize for Norris

If you didn’t see “Clybourne” the first time around, please, please go see it—you’re in for a terrific play that encompasses ideas about how we lived yesterday, and today, in race-haunted America. Here in Washington, once known as “Chocolate City” for its long-standing African American majority population now drifting ever more towards vanilla, the themes of “Clybourne Park” resonate loudly.

Norris took his jumping point from Lorraine Hansberry’s classic 1959 play “A Raisin in the Sun” and it’s set in the same house occupied by the African American family of that play.

In “Clybourne Park” we see a white couple packing up—knick knacks, boxes, dishes and the like while the black cleaning lady looks on in the early 1950s. Soon, there’s another couple in the house, headed by a weasely, high-energy and bursting with rationalizations Rotarian named Carl and his deaf and pregnant wife. Turns out that Russ and Bev, the soon-to-be-moving couple, have sold their house to a black family and that’s got the Rotarian and the local minister fit to be tied.

This is the 1950s and Russ and Bev aren’t trying to be enlightened liberals—their real estate agent is more to blame here, and besides, the couple are more focused on their own sorrows than what might happen if black people move in, and move in, it appears, they will. Carl, the minister and Russ start to bicker, to argue, and all of the latent fears of the white neighborhood start to come to the surface like muck after a rainstorm. Carl—played with sharp and sly energy by Cody Nickell—is like a sharp-edged mouser on the hunt. He keeps coming back, talking about cultural differences, real estate values, all the racial clichés of the 1950s couched in euphemisms—“Do you ski?” he asks the housekeeper’s husband, as if that made all the difference in the world.

The second part of the play skips to the present time, same place, same house, and a reverse situation which sees a prosperous, adamantly liberal white couple about to buy the house which is part of a predominantly black neighborhood now. If that’s not a Washington story, it sure could be. The white couple are played with a kind of eager hipness, full of PC values held dearly but with a back-breaking fuzziness, by Nickell and Kimberly Gilbert, who were the couple opposing the sale in the first half.

Kevin and Lena, a black couple played Jefferson A. Russell and Dawn Ursula with great depth and edge are flying the flag of neighborhood history and tradition, which is to say black history and tradition. The issues—actually one issue—are the same: race in America and why can’t we just get along and live together or at least side by side. Because, Norris suggests, we don’t know how to talk about race, not only in our own homes, but in our day to day dealings with each other

Everyone, no matter how they dress or how cool and tolerant they are in the 21st century, walks with open wounds. If euphemism and personal tragedy carry the day in the first act, not-so-well-hidden cultural historic values and resentment emerges like grenades, in the form of jokes that are more than jokes, they’re weapons of choice.

Norris – who also wrote the Woolly Mammoth staged “The Unmentionables,” a play about how Westerners are still the elephant in the china shop in modern Africa – uses comedy to open up in slashing style old wounds and lets them bleed out.

Everyone in the play doubles up on parts, but in the first act, Jennifer Mendenhall and Mitch Hebert own not only the house but the audience, both dealing with loss and change. Mendenhall especially reminds us that she is one of Washington’s finest actresses as Bev, exasperated, bleeding inside, barely holding together with habits masquerading as normal. Hebert is like a lean, tense, electric cord of a man unable to shake off the past, thoughtless about the future.

Best to watch yourself and your fellow audience members during the course of the play, you might be thinking though and looking around—which joke should you laugh out and how loudly?

What’s so good about the actors, about Norris, about the production, is that you’re never seeing anybody as less than an authentic human being. And that’s why you look around, and that’s why “Clybourne Park” stays with you. (“Clybourne Park” will run through August 14)

Gary Tischler • August 10, 2011

August may be the dog days of summer, but it also has every year now for the past seven years been the occasion to look forward to one of the top musical events of the year.

That would be when the Music Center at Strathmore, with Bandhouse Gigs, hosts its annual tribute concert honoring iconic figures, events and themes from rock and pop music history featuring the very best of an array of local musicians, singers and performers.

Originated in 2004 by Bandhouse Gigs—a not-for-profit volunteer group founded by Ronnie Newmyer, Chuck Sulllivan, David Sless and Danny Schwartz—the concert began as an outdoor venue at Strathmore but soon moved indoors into the concert hall. The first tribute concert honored legendary solo and group (E Street Band) rocker Neal Lofgren. Others followed: Neil Young, an almost archetype California rocker and the “Heart of Gold,” member of Crosby, Still, Nash and Young, the band considered by some the best rock band ever; Bob Dylan; folk-and-jazz queen and pure singer Joni Mitchell; Woodstock as the music and watershed 1960s event; and The British invasion.

This year’s Bandhouse Gig is the Tribute to Simon and Garnfunkel and Paul Simon on August 25 at 7:30 p.m. at the Music Center at Strathmore’s Concert Hall.

“How could you not?” Ronnie Newmyer said in an interview. “Simon, with Garfunkel, and as a solo performer and composer, has probably had more hits than anybody alive and has influenced more musicians than you can count. Think about it, they had their first hit in high school.”

As a duo, beginning in 1965, Simon (Paul) and Garfunkle (Art), the short one and the afro-blonde one, came up with songs that defined a generation of young people from the early 1960s on, kids that weren’t necessarily born rock and rollers, kids as sensitive, slightly alienated outsiders who could appreciate a song that begins with “Hello, darkness my old friend” (“The Sound of Silence”). The guys weren’t jocks but were fans, they weren’t popular but they were cool and smart and they carried certain angst around with them with a sweet flair. Some of them wore leather jackets instead of letter jackets.

“That was the first stage, all those wonderful songs and harmonies, “The Boxer,” “Scarborough Fair,” “Mrs. Robinson.” “They were poems, quiet anthems,” Newmyer said. “And they were hugely popular.”

“What we were trying to do here is not just make it Simon and Garfunkel, but also Paul Simon, who’s still going strong,” Newmyer said. “I’d say the program is split half and half between S&G and Simon solo. And let me tell you it was tough picking the songs, hard to make the cuts and then to match them with performers.”

So for S&G purists and Simon fans, be prepared to have your feelings hurt. There are some notable absences, including “My Little Town,” the touchstone song Simon and Garfunkel recorded after they broke up, “I am a Rock….I am an Island,” and “Slip Sliding Away.”

“That was hard,” Newmyer, who has his own band called “Soul Cracker,” said. “But hell, you could make a tribute concert out of the “Bridge over Troubled Water” album alone, that’s how good they were and are.”
It would be a mistake to think of these concerts as if they were one of those public television or Time Life golden oldies occasions, although no questions, old songs return like transformed angels.

The most revolutionary and exciting aspect of these concert is the mash of a very familiar song-list—for the most part—with performances drawn from a rich array of Washington performers, some nationally known, others young and new and gifted, some of them graduates of Strathmore’s artist in residence programs, like the youthful rock/pop dynamo Margot MacDonald, who will be on hand again this year.

“That’s the really rich part of this, because the performances transform the songs, make them seem fresh and contemporary,” Newmyer said. “Plus, I think it’s a true showcase of Washington area performers who play everywhere in local venues like the Birchmere or the 9:30 Club. This isn’t a sing along, it’s about as an exciting a concert as you can imagine.”

“We’ve got Julia Nixon, who is such a gifted singer and who’ll be doing ‘Bridge over Troubled Water,’” he said. “There’s this new, young singer, Victoria Vox, who’ll sing ‘Mother and Child Reunion.’”

“We’ll have a lot of younger performers this year, which should be interesting,” he added.
Other performers on tap include Deanna Bogart, Eric Brace, Chopteeth, Lea, Deep River, Ellen Cherry, The Sweater Set, Cal Everett, Deeme Katson, Ed O’Connell, David Kitchen, Ted Garber, Esther Haynes, Ronnie Newmyer and Owen Danoff, among others.

Just goes to show you, all pop/rock music history is a circle. Danoff is the son of Bill Danoff, one of the founders of Starland Vocal Band, which produced the 1980s hit “Afternoon Delight.” Danoff and co-Starland member Jon Carroll, a regular tribute participant, performed at the Joni Mitchell tribute two years ago.
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Gary Tischler •

“Pop”, a bold and very new musical about Andy Warhol and his factory boys and girls now at the Studio Theatre has a lot going for it: it’s smart and sharp, its witty and biting, it has something to say and sing about art, it’s designed with a pop,, if you will, creating and re-creating an atmosphere of what it might have been like to move around the pale and distant sun of Warhol’s world.

And yet, something doesn’t push it over the top, and after a while, you realize that what this show, for all of its intelligence and seriousness needs is the kind of pop that made Andy Warhol pop, a fizz of vulgar fun.

Somewhere in there, after climbing three or four flights of stairs, after watching Warhol pop images fly on the walls or stick like a fly, after seeing Warhol define the essence of a paper bag, of seeing a crew of attractive (none more than Matthew DeLorenzo as superstar Candy Darling) needy famous wannabes, artists, actors and models cavorting on a striking factory set, you feel like you should be invited to up there and frug, or that you have to restrain yourself from jumping on the stage.

In the intimate upstairs space of the Studio’s 2nd Stage, which has seen Jack Kerouac in his natural surroundings, the cast of “Hair” splayed against windows, and “Reefer Madness” goes crazy mad, you’d think this over-the-top urge would be on tap. It’s not quite there. Maybe because Maggie-Kate Coleman and Anna K Jacobs’ show is just a tad too smart, too serious about art. That’s not a necessarily a bad thing, and if you’re Stephen Sondheim it’s a very good thing.

The smart stuff—the song about the paper bag for instance, which contains nothing, which contains the world and the essence if Warhol-speak, and the dance and song by the trio of expressionist super-stars, for instance—are very smart indeed.

And Tom Story—pale of face, dark of leather jacket—gets Warhol’s utter weirdness, his stand-offish presence, the guy so very prescient (about fame, vulgarity, stardom, the commerce of art) but not quite present. He’s surrounded by people who want his light to shine on them, to make them right here and now famous and not just for fifteen minutes.

That includes the likes of the already noted Candy Darling, Viva the Superstar who went to the Sorbonne before doing porn, the little rich girl Edie Sedgewick, an odd and sad turn of little girl blonde flightiness that’s also wingless.

The sets are just real and riff and raff enough to make you bathe in the ambiance of a kind of art that’s art because somebody, usually Andy, says it is.

The focus of the show is the near-assassination of Warhol in 1968, a shooting that certainly shocked Warhol, if not the world. But that’s the 2nd problem: we already know who did it, historically speaking, but that doesn’t stop you from really appreciating the performance of Rachel Zampelli as Valerie Solanas, the head of the super aggressive SCUM (Society for Cutting up Men), who thinks Warhol will stage her play. (He dumps it probably where it belongs, a toilet which doubles as an art work).

Warhol showed us that anything can be art, anyone can write, and anyone can be a star or be famous for the usual amount of time, thus anticipating reality shows, the breach and reach of the internet, the eventual meaninglessness of too many words, and the worship of celebrity.
Lacking the fun factor that ought to be all over the stage, what’s left is still entertaining, fascinating and junk food for thought. But don’t dance, they won’t ask you. (Through August 7)