Joyce DiDonato at the Kennedy Center
• July 26, 2011

Unless you’re a classical music and opera fanatic, you may not have heard of Joyce DiDonato. But take my word for it—and I’m no expert in this field—Joyce DiDonato is a woman on the verge of a major breakthrough. She is as hot as you can possibly be in the here and now, driving critics to a kind of ecstasy in their descriptions of her.

Try this one: “it is a remarkable package that DiDonato offers: a mezzo cast in milk chocolate, but so smooth and agile that it can reach up to a diamond-bright soprano as well as sink to a rich, chesty alto. And then there is that instinctive charisma: she is always engaging, always sparkling…”

This quote is from the Times of London, probably not prone to comparing a singer’s voice to chocolate very often.

We caught up with DiDonato by phone as she was making her way by car from Houston to Dallas. DiDonato is at the Kennedy Center’s cavernous Concert Hall this Tuesday for a recital of works by Haydn, Chaminade, Hahn, and most notably Rossini, a composer whose music she consistently knocks out of the ballpark.

Even though Texas had been hit by seriously bad weather at the time, DiDonato didn’t seem to mind. “It’s not that long a trip,” she said. “And I love road trips, anyway. You see so much of the country, the real country. It’s not just dropping down in an airplane, get picked up and go to the hotel, go to rehearsals and perform.”

You’re on level-headed ground talking with her; she doesn’t do diva airs, even if she calls her blog Yankee Diva. Yes, she has a blog, which has now been more or less merged with a very attractive, diverse and comprehensive website

“I want to do more than perform, more than sing, more than be on that stage,” she said. “I want to communicate my love of the music, my love for the fans that follow my work, what I learned day to day, and the world I live in.”

She’s pretty savvy about this sort of thing. Check out her website—it’s a regular wonderland of performance, reviews, bios, pictures, thinking out loud and news of what’s next. She is right now the middle of an eight-city recital tour with pianist David Zobel, of which the Kennedy Center appearance is a part.

It’s hard to imagine her by herself on a big stage like the Kennedy Center accompanied only by Zobel. But if anything can fill the stage and the space, it’s probably DiDonato. She has a way of expressing charm, enthusiasm and passion about her work just by talking about it, let alone performing and singing.

“I like doing both,” she says of opera and recitals, “but they’re very different challenges. In an opera, there’s a certain amount of safety net. It’s an enterprise of tons of people. You’re never really alone, and it’s a family kind of thing—a team effort, if you will. In a recital, you’re pretty much alone, no safety net. It’s you, the accompanist, the music and most important of all the audience. And you can’t for a second lose the audience. That’s what makes it challenging, and I love that. It’s risky out there, and I don’t mind it one bit. I’m not the kind of person who believes you have to be perfect if that sort of attitude keeps you from taking risks.”

She already has honors—too many to name, but notably Gramophone’s Artist of the Year. And she recently came out with a new album, “Diva, Divo,” in which she alternates traditional operatic heroine roles with “pants” roles arias. “I love doing them,” she says. “It gives you a lot of insight into everything, and you really have to use all aspects of your voice.”

She is accessible and, at 42, one of those energetically attractive blue-eyed blondes whose rich array of hair begs to be constantly shaken and stirred. Over the phone she sounds a little like what she looks like on performance videos: strong-voice, high-energy, warm—a born storyteller without any fussiness.

“Some people have done this girl-next-door thing with me, as was done with Beverly Sills,” she said. “You know what some people said: she had a wonderful smile, she was sweet, but she had steel when it was required. Well, I can be tough when I need to be, I know what I want musically, how I want to do it. I don’t mean I’m temperamental, there’s just not a lot of time for that sort of thing.”

She performed here with the Washington National Opera right after 9/11 in Mozart’s “Cosi Fan Tutte”, an opera not done here again until last fall. “I can’t say I remember much about that,” she said. “It was such a strange time to be here, to be doing what I’m doing.”

She is by all accounts one of the finest interpreters of Rossini you can find, having done “The Barber of Seville” in many venues, including a performance that is becoming legendary for its above-and-beyond-the-call-of-duty aspect. The production in London was rolling along nicely in the first act at the Royal Opera House, when DiDonato tripped and fractured her fibula. She waved off a doctor, and appeared in Act 2 on a crutch. If that doesn’t get you a standing ovation, nothing will. And it did.

“The show must go on, right?” she said, and laughed almost sheepishly. Recently she was in a production in Houston of the much more modern opera “Dead Man Walking,” about a man on death row and the nun who tries to help him. “To me, an opera like that is an emotionally shattering experience. I am so glad I had the opportunity to do that.”

All this from a girl named Joyce Flaherty, born in a small town with the classic small-town name of Prairie Village, Kansas. “Yup, really small town,” she said as we compared notes on growing up in small town Midwest America. “You weren’t really exposed that much to classical music and opera, although I liked it. At most I had dreams of becoming a pop singer maybe, or teaching music in high school.”

You can almost see her as a schoolmarm, getting kids enthusiastic about Rossini and the like. She is not one of those girls who had voice lessons from age three and worked in the local opera company, or a child prodigy whose gifts were recognized early. “I didn’t know I had a voice, in the senses of having a gift for this,” she said. “It’s still a work in progress, as far as I’m concerned.”

It wasn’t until college at Wichita State University that she became interested, especially after performing in a production of “Die Fledermaus.” She was hooked, like a girl falling in love for the first time. She did graduate work at the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia, and from that point she became serious, and rose fairly quickly to the top.

Not bad for a kid from a family of seven children, Irish through and through (DiDonato was a name acquired from her first husband. She is now married to Italian conductor Leonardo Verdoni). “No kids yet. No pets,” she said. “We lead a pretty hectic life, although we live in Kansas City.”

She’s often quoted as having an aversion to being called a “star.” “That can be such a trap,” she said. “It’s the music, getting better, giving your audience an experience that will enrich them, that they won’t forget. I mean sure it’s nice. And no question, we have a very, very good life, traveling all over the world, performing in a very rarefied atmosphere. But I think my upbringing keeps me grounded.”

Or as grounded as a self-described “Yankee Diva” can get.
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“The Carpetbagger’s Children” at Ford’s Theatre
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When Kimberly Schraf, Holly Twyford and Nancy Robinette come back onto the set to take their final bows for their work in Horton Foote’s “The Carpetbagger’s Children” at Ford’s Theatre, you expect a whole bunch of people to follow them on out—Texas townspeople, family members, momma and poppa, brother and brother-in-law, swindlers and Confederates, best friends, children, sharecroppers, and lost loves and friends.

Nobody shows up of course, but they’ve been there through the whole hour and a half of this intimate, epic play, rich in stories, rich in language, rich in real people and ghosts.

That’s what happens when you marry a trio of gifted actresses—and these women are among Washington’s finest—to gorgeous writing, and a playwright’s ability to evoke a sense of place through memory and spoken stories.

Foote, who died last year, was among the top tier of American playwrights, not just by his output, which was large, but by his particular gift, which was to revisit the Texas places in which he grew up, delve into his own life and memories and, with writing tinged with hard-scrabbled poetry, bring to life characters that were universally American.

He didn’t always play by the rules, and he didn’t always play to the expectations of audiences. What fame he had seemed to come mostly from his screenplay writing and movies made of his plays. He wrote the screenplay for “To Kill a Mockingbird.” His play “The Trip to Bountiful” got a best actress Oscar for the late Geraldine Page.

Some critics have had trouble with the way Foote tells the story of the three sisters (and a fourth who’s never seen, but often brought up). The suggestion is that “The Carpetbagger’s Daughters” isn’t really a play, but a series of monologues. While that’s technically true, the work moves like a play, walks like a play and talks like a play. And it has the emotional impact of a play and story, so by my definition it is a play, and a fine, beautiful one at that.

So yes, the three sisters: Cornelia, the practical one, played with exasperation and a certain and affecting lonely reserve by Kimberly Schraf; Grace Anne, the one that got married, played with challenging rue by Nancy Robinette; and Sissie, the baby, played with utterly engaging charm by Holly Twyford. They all take turns pushing the story forward (and sometimes backward) by way of monologues. They are on stage against a dusty, open canvas background, together all of the time, but also apart. They rarely connect through dialogue exchange, but they do react subtly to what is being said and remembered.

The three are the daughters of a Union soldier who returned to the Texas town of Harrison as a carpetbagger after the Civil War’s end, taking on the critical position of tax collector, which allowed him to accumulate property cheaply, and to become an important figure in the cotton-land town over the years.

The monologues are a series of memories about getting from here to there. We never see momma and poppa, but we hear their voices, especially Momma who has by now passed through the gates of dementia.

The timeline takes us—through story and memory—from Reconstruction all the way through World War II, and along the way the usual tribulations occur. Right off the bat, Cornelia recalls the death of another sister, taken home from New Orleans after coming down with a mysterious and eventually fatal illness. Cornelia recalls how the townspeople gathered up straw and laid it down in the streets to prevent the wagon, which carried the sick sister, from jarring.

The story, told matter of factly and with a sad precision, sets the tone. Things never stop happening: Grace Ann, against her father’s wishes, marries a man without sharpness or ambitio. Cornelia takes over the running of the estate. Poppa dies. Sissie marries and becomes a mother. Love is not requited. Children grow up and move away. And Momma cannot figure out whose dead and who’s alive.

The town changes, fortunes are made and lost, and secrets eventually come out. The sisters—through a nod here, a raised eyebrow or head—do indeed communicate. When Twyford takes the stage for the first time as Sissie, the mood becomes light, sunny and sweet. She spreads warmth around through her personality on a family that sometimes badly needs it.

People get older—there are more funerals than weddings—and the land itself is eventually changed. Cornelia recalls telling the sharecroppers that she was giving in to technology and forcing them off the land they had worked for decades.

It seems like a small play because of the structure, perhaps, because of the way the women speak, intimately plowing memory like a farmer plows the land. They are personal stories, broken up by momma’s need to hear Sissie sing “The Clanging Bells of Time” so frequently.

This is the first time that these three actresses have shared a change, which is at once unbelievable and momentous. They live up to the expectations, using the monologues as a connection to each other. There is always “Lear” or “The Three Sisters” to offer a chance to reprise the occasion in a different way.

The Women of Washington Theater
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We interviewed Holly Twyford, Nancy Robinette and Kimberly Schraf, the stars of Horton Foote’s “The Carpetbagger’s Daughters,” now completing its run at Ford’s Theater a few days before it opened.

The three women were going to go back to rehearsal again and they were a little frustrated.

“We are so eager for an audience,” Holly Twyford said, sitting with fellow actresses Nancy Robinette and Kimberly Schraf. “We don’t really know how we are doing in relation to an audience. There’s just us.”

“We invited some people to a dress rehearsal,” said Shraf, “just so we can get an idea.”

“In this play you can’t really work off of each other,” Robinette said. “The structure of the play, time is critical. It’s about what people remember and how those memories can be different.”

Sitting at a table at the Ford’s Theater with these three, you’re a little awe-struck. Together and apart, these three women are part of the life and lore of Washington’s theater history, key figures in the rise of theaters like the Studio Theater, the Shakespeare Company, Woolly Mammoth, Round House, Arena, and Signature. Name a theater, functioning or not, and chances are one of them at least has performed there.

When we talked to them, they were only a few days away from the opening of Horton Foote’s “The Carpetbaggers’ Children,” a three-character play in which they play sisters who remember their youth and their father, who had moved west to take over a plantation in Texas after the Civil War. That the characters are sisters talking about their father leaves dry-dust flavorings of “King Lear” and “The Three Sisters,” Texas style.

The three know each other very well and they know of each other. You can sense a tremendous respect and affection that they have for each other, something that seems to spring naturally out of the experience of preparing a play for which they are the key ingredients.

They’re a little shy about giving away what makes this play such a challenge and why a real audience is to be so desired. “It’s the memory thing,” Robinette said. “They don’t really talk to each other in the play. Rather, we all have longish monologues, talking about our father, about how he died, the funeral.”

“But Foote is such a wonderful writer, he had such a sense of place, those places in Texas that he wrote about all of his life,” Schraf said. “So the words are wonderful. They’re so evocative.”

“With Foote, and with the monologues, one of the most important things you can do, you HAVE to do, is listen,” Twyford said. “We barely interact. We listen to what the others say, and that’s a different kind of acting.”

When it comes to different kinds of acting, all three have had considerable experience. Among Washington theatergoers, Twyford and Robinette are vivid and fairly constant presences, working furiously from one play to the next. This is proof enough of the growing strength of Washington’s professional theater scene, in which a growing number of actors are booked a year, sometimes two years in advance.

Twyford and Robinette and Schraf are, regardless of whatever else they might have done, Washington theater people. Sitting across from Twyford and Robinette, I get an odd sense of familiarity, as if we’re long-time friends. If you write about the theater, of course, this is a natural feeling. With them, you feel as if you’ve spent a lot of time together.

Twyford’s voice and looks are distinctive. Her voice is a little raspy and husky, at turns funny, empathic and beguiling. Robinette emanates cautious warmth, but that impression may be because you tend to remember the characters she’s played—women who make an impression, who are like nobody else, especially when embodied by her.

Schraf is perhaps less familiar, but at Ford’s she has worked quite a bit, with major parts in “Member of the Wedding” and the recent, sharply successful “Sabrina Fair.” “Actually, when I was approached for this, I suggested them,” she said. “It’s just so great to work together.”

Surprisingly, what with all the history and exposure, Twyford and Robinette have never worked together before, and Twyford has never been seen on the Ford stage. Everybody, of course, goes to the Helen Hayes Awards, where Robinette and Twyford make frequent trips to the stage to receive acting awards on a regular basis. Schraf has had two recent nominations.

What they represent, though, is the cream of the crop among Washington actors, all very distinct and unique, but nonetheless, characterized by a strong pride in what they do and the community they work in. Schraf has the distinction of having worked in two productions of the play “The Women,” one at Arena and one at Studio. Twyford played Beatrice, Juliet and one of four Hamlets at the Folger…and yes, a tap-dancing pig at Adventure Theater. Robinette is known for eccentric, off-kilter women who leave a mark on the memory, particularly her performance as Florence Foster Jenkins, the society matron who wanted to sing in “Souvenirs”.

“You saw that?” she asked. “Well, you missed something. I fell off coming off the stage on one of my exits.” That would have been memorable, but her performance was more than sufficient to stay in my mind.

“I’m the baby,” Twyford says of her part in “The Carpetbaggers Children”

“That means she gets away with saying things,” Robinette says.

“Kimberly is the most empathic, the most articulate among us,” Twyford says. “She says things straight and on the mark.”

All of them, at one time or another, have done other things, tried out here and there, been in films or television or done audio book reading. Most folks in the Washington theater scene have. They are not movie stars, but they’re the stars of every play they’re in.

You think, remembering the play(s) you’ve seen them in, they can do pretty much anything. And that is probably true. They’re grounded now in family, in relationships, in parenthood.

On stage they can become Birdie of “The Little Foxes,” tough, strong women of “The Women,” Russian molls, femme fatales, dotty ladies or fierce mothers. Whatever they do, it will be in that singular manner that defines them and makes them memorable to us.

Robinette and Twyford will both move on after this to other plays, Twyford doing her first role at the Shakespeare Company. “Nothing so far,” says Schraf, shrugging. “I’m available, as they say.”

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A Not-So-Holiday Theater Roundup
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Just because it’s the Christmas season, not everyone wants to be entertained by all things Christmas.

That’s true for theatergoers, who have more than enough Scrooges, Nutcrackers, Santa Clauses and elves than they probably need.

But take heart and beware of what you wish for. There’s plenty of theater fare that isn’t in the spirit of the holiday season, and which sheds a light on how we live today or how we used to live. Here’s a sampling.

The Studio Theater has a play by Traci Letts, the Pulitzer Prize-winning super-charged new writer who gave us the generational and family drama “August: Osage County.” The scale is smaller this time but no less human and acerbically funny. In the wonderfully titled “Superior Donuts,” Letts focuses on the fortunes and friendship between a grouchy, cantankerous white shop owner and a very ambitious black teenager in a changing Chicago neighborhood. The new friends bond over literature, of all things, and American economic values. And there are secrets. Aren’t there always.

This show has already been extended through January 2.

Also at the Studio, in its Stage 4 space, is “Mojo,” by Jez Butterworth. It’s all about London criminals, underground rock and roll and, of course, music and revenge in 1958. It runs through December 26.

“A Wrinkle in Time” is at once a fantasy of wish fulfillment and a quest that goes as far as it can possibly go (another planet). This whimsical theatrical adaptation by John Glare comes to life at the Round House Theater.

And if you’re really not in the mood for Joyous Noel at all, you can welcome back Cherry Red Productions, once Washington’s most outrageous theater group which returns after a number of years with “Wife Swappers,” by Justin Tanner of “Coyote Woman” fame. Despite its subject and some (all right, plenty of) nudity, this comic play about the doings of conservative types trying to get some sexual variety, is surprisingly operatic (think soap) and even sympathetic to its self-justifying characters who talk dirty, but see themselves as otherwise clean.

It’s nice (or dangerous) to have Cherry Red, Ian Allen, Chris Griffin and the gang back. After all, they gave us such plays as “Dingleberries” and “Zombie Attack,” to name a few. In the very intimate space of the DC Arts Center on 18th Street in Adams Morgan, through December 18.

There’s more than “Oklahoma” at Arena Stage and the Mead Center for American Theater. Now through January 8, in the smaller Kogod Cradle Space—meant to nurture new American playwrights—there’s “Every Tongue Confesses,” in which writer Marcus Gardley mixes jukebox blues with church gospel blues and television news to tell a blazing story.

And speaking of news, opening in January at the Kreeger is “Let Me Down Easy,” which marks the return of one-woman dynamo Anna Deavere Smith. Smith wrote and will perform the play in which she lets varied voices speak out and “explores the power of the body, the price of health and the resilience of the spirit.” Beginning December 31 and running through February 13. At the Kreeger in the Mead Center.

Only a few more days left to see Synetic Theater’s dynamic, loud silent style at work in Washington, where a theater piece on the Russian classic “The Master and Margarita” is being performed through December 12 at the Lansburgh Theater.

If you like musicals, but still aren’t interested in the holidays, there’s “Candide,” the Leonard Bernstein cerebral, but very entertaining musical, directed by the magical Mary Zimmerman, based on a novel by Voltaire, with some of the words by Lillian Hellman, and some of the lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and poet Richard Wilbur. With Lauren Molina and Geoff Packard in the leads. At the Shakespeare Theatre Companyn through January 9.

If “Oklahoma” at Arena doesn’t satisfy your Rodgers and Hammerstein jones, there’s the road company of “South Pacific” at the Kennedy Center, which will run December 14 through January 16.

A well-received production of “Annie”, the most optimistic little redheaded girl in the world, with her friend Daddy Warbucks and her dog Sandy, has already been extended to January 7. At the Olney Theater in Maryland. Be prepared to have faith in “Tomorrow.”

A Theater Note

Actor James MacArthur, son of legendary American actress Helen Hayes and playwright Charles MacArthur, passed away recently at the age of 72.

Best known for his series role on the original “Hawaii Five O”, MacArthur is fondly remembered in Washington for carrying on the role played by his late mother, annually presiding over the Helen Hayes Theater Awards, named after her. [gallery ids="99577,104880,104876,104872,104868,104864" nav="thumbs"]

Edward Albee & Tennessee Williams
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In the annals of 20th-Century American theater history, there are few playwrights more influential, more continually fascinating to theatergoers and theater makers, than Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee.

If there is a hierarchy of American playwrights, then Williams and Albee belong in the highest tier, along with Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller, for their strong, echoing and expansive bodies of work, an output that rarely dates in reading or performing, and continues to draw the attention of generations of theater artists.

Both playwrights are getting their full due in two ambitious, wide-reaching, far-flung local festivals. Arena stage will be hosting a two-month long Edward Albee festival. And “The Glass Menagerie Project” at Georgetown University, which runs through March 27 and picks up again in the summer, is part of a nationwide Tennessee Williams Centennial Festival.

There’s a vital, live-wire connection between the two festivals—“The Glass Menagerie Project” is part of an Arena Stage/Georgetown partnership and will be picked up again in June at the Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater. And both festivals will be graced with the in-person presence of Albee.

The Arena Stage Edward Albee Festival kicks off with a visit from the Steppenwolf Theatre Company of Chicago and its electrifying production of Albee’s most produced and famous play, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Starring Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tracy Letts as George and Amy Morton as Martha, it will be running in the Kreeger Theater February 25 – April 10.

Meanwhile and simultaneously, Arena Stage itself is mounting “At Home at the Zoo,” which will be performed in the Arlene and Robert Komodo Cradle February 25 — April 24.

That double bill would normally count as a mini-festival and ambitious project in itself. But wait, there’s more. Beginning in March and running through the end of April, 16 theater companies will present staged readings of Albee’s works. The readings, by such companies as the Shakespeare Theatre Company, Theater J, Taffety Punk, Round House Theatre, American Century Theater and Forum Theatre, with directors like Irene Lewis, Howard Shalwitz, Wendy C Goldberg and Amy Freed, are free, but reservations are required.

The readings will include “Lolita,” “Fragments,” “The Lady from Dubuque,” “Marriage Play,” “The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?” “The American Dream,” “Tiny Alice,” “The Play About the Baby,” “Three Tall Women,” “A Delicate Balance,” “Seascape,” and Albee’s version of Carson McCuller’s “The Ballad of the Sad Café.”

In addition, Albee will be honored with the presentation of the American Artist Award on March 14, in “An Evening with Edward Albee.”

Albee will also be present at Georgetown, appearing at Gaston Hall in a conversation with Susan Stamberg, a special correspondent for National Public Radio, talking about his perspectives on the work and influence of Tennessee Williams. The conversation will include performances from leading actors, curated by Albee himself. (March 24)

“The Glass Menagerie Project,” presented by the Georgetown Theater and Performance Studies Program, is a re-envisioning of what is generally considered Williams’ most autobiographical work, a work often called a “memory play.” The project—really a Williams festival—will include performances, discussions and events intended to illuminate Williams’ most familiar and perhaps least controversial play.

The project, of course, will feature a production of “The Glass Menagerie,” starring Georgetown theater professor and one of Washington’s most luminous, gifted actresses, Sarah Marshall as Amanda Wingfield. The show will be directed by Professor Derek Goldman and runs February 24 – March 27 at GU’s Davis Performing Arts Center’s Gonda Theater.

Other special productions and events include appearances by playwright Christopher Durang (who wrote “For Whom the Southern Bell Tolls,” a takeoff on “Menagerie”), and a performance of “Camino Real,” Williams’ most gaudy and mysterious play March 26. There will be readings, discussion, and plays throughout the festivals.

Among a trio of readings on March 26 is “Mister Paradise” directed by Joy Zinoman and featuring Ted Van Griethuysen.

Albee’s presence at both festivals should be electric, illuminating and haunting. Williams died in 1983, seemingly played out, but his plays continued to be performed everywhere, including as part of a notable Tennessee Williams festival at the Kennedy Center.

Albee and Williams both concerned themselves with aspects of that big theater theme, love—sexual, romantic and any otherwise. As such, many of their plays were considered controversial at the time of their debuts. “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” with its plum, rich and profane language and sexual themes, had to be cleaned up a little for the movie version. Years later, “The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?” still had walkouts at its performance at Arena Stage because it was about…well, a man who loved a goat.

Williams’ later plays, like the classic “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “Sweet Bird of Youth” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” with its overt references to gay themes and violent incidents, were also controversial, while featuring grand roles for women, a Williams trademark.

Both of them continue to be influential writers and playwrights with their body of work, much of which will be celebrated in the two festivals. Go to ArenaStage.org for details on the Albee festivals and PerformingArts.Georgetown.edu for more on Williams.
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‘Circle Mirror’ Shows Promise for Direction of Studio Theatre
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-David Muse makes his official debut as the new artistic director of the Studio Theater (he succeeds founder and long-time A-D Joy Zinoman) by directing “Circle Mirror Transformation.”

This is not a debut accompanied by trumpets blaring, and neither is Annie Baker’s muted but ingratiating play about a group of people who are part of an acting class in a small community in Vermont. But the play and the production send out several promising signals about the future,
each in their own way.

“Circle Mirror Transformation” signals a new voice, for one thing, in playwright Annie Baker, who’s made it a point to transform the often inarticulate way we speak and communicate today into a kind of music and poetry — a revelatory method that leads, like acting, to a kind of truth.

It’s an understated play with a little bit of this and a little of bit that. It has soap opera elements, theater stuff, acting stuff, and it’s both contemporary and naturalistic in its look and sound and old-fashioned in its dramatic elements. Baker seems to suggest that acting arrives at difficult truths by way of artful, hard-learned artifice, much in the same way that literature arrives at the same destination by way of fiction.

While the production often seems loosey-goosey and unformed, Muse’s direction and Baker’s writing keep things directionally focused: “We and the folks at the acting class are going somewhere here, and the road and destination seem uncomfortably familiar.”

In the program, Baker says that “the way human beings speak is so heartbreaking to me—we never sound the way we want to sound. Speaking is a kind of misery.”

You can see that observation in action in “Circle Mirror Transformation.” This is especially true for the three students: Schultz, a yearning, confused, recently divorced man full of inarticulate, shiny wounds; Theresa, the bright-eyed, sexy former actress and especially Lauren, the quiet, painfully shy teenager who wears her hoodie like a turtle wears its shell.

The school is run by the insistent, work-it, risk-taking Marty and her husband James, who’s middle-aged, phlegmatic, and a walking disappointment.

We see all of them right at the beginning, lying in a circle at the studio, which is lightly cluttered with a mirror. They’re doing an exercise, an acting exercise, in which they try to count to ten one at a time without anyone counting at the same time, interrupting, or jumping in. In other words, it’s a clean, nearly-impossible exercise in team-work and empathy.

Throughout the play, which is preformed without interruption for nearly two hours, you get exercises which resemble a kind of group therapy, as opposed to anything to do with the theater. The group takes turns “being” each other, hence the initially startling appearance of Jim talking about “my husband.” They try telling stories along a string that is taking a story word by word from one place to another. Interspersed are moments of reality, where the characters interact and relate, and those interactions reverberate in the exercises and vice versa.

That’s especially true of Theresa, played with almost anything-goes, playful energy by Kathleen McElfresh. She’s bounding, bouncy, mobile, and uses every part of herself — the flouncy hair, the long legs, arms, fingers, body — to become a kind of focus point, a magnet for the two men and wary distance for the other two females.

Things happen that probably shouldn’t, but the process itself is what counts. There’s a five-point build-up to the play as we do what they do: at first we keep following Theresa around, then Schultz’s plaintiff voice makes itself heard, and then we note the tensions and old hurts that are part of James and Marty’s marriage. We barely register Lauren’s goth-ish, quiet ten and her voice, barely audible at first. She’s closed in.

But it’s with the final two exercises — a risky write a secret on a piece of paper, then pick out of a hat and read it, and an imagination of what happens after – that we realize that it’s Lauren who’s been paying attention the most, not the least of which was an earlier comment asking, “when do we start acting?”

If MacKenzie Meehan, who plays Lauren with thorough, skinny-teen authenticity and stops-and-starts, is a stellar surprise, Jennifer Mendenhall as Marty is the play’s elastic but tough glue — it’s center and heart and soul. She holds everyone together, even when she comes close to falling apart. We’ve known and seen Mendenhall a long time, especially at the Studio and the Woolly Mammoth, and we’re always struck by her particular brand of guileless, sexy and open-faced naturalness. She doesn’t hide much and can therefore wound you at the oddest moments.

For Muse, it’s a solid start — a bid for a long relationship with the audience worth building. (“Circle Mirror Transformation” runs at the Studio Theater through October 17.)

Ken Ludwig Returns the Love
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-The eminently successful playwright Ken Ludwig insists that no one has ever called him a dinosaur.

“My kids maybe sometimes,” he said. “But as far as I remember, no one has said that to my face or in print.”

Well, there’s always a first time. Ken Ludwig is something of a dinosaur. And I mean that entirely
as a compliment.

In the theater world, Ludwig is like one of these environmentalists that runs all over the world trying to save species of animals from extinction.

In Ludwig’s case, he’s almost single-handedly kept alive such genres as the pre-Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, stage adaptations of young people’s literature, plays that can be called farce, star-studded (or not) comedies about theater, movie and show business folk, and the oft-remembered but rarely sighted “well-made play.”

I don’t mean to suggest now that he’s re-staged, produced or mounted new productions of old plays—otherwise known as revivals—no sir. He has written well over a dozen plays that are basically examples of all of these genres, as authored not by George Kaufman, Mark Twain, P.G. Wodehouse,
or anybody else you can name now tap dancing in show biz heaven, but by himself.

“I’m not a dinosaur,” he said. “I don’t see myself that way, let’s put it that way. I write and create plays that are in the form or genre of plays that I’ve loved, or forms of entertainment that I love. Most of them are comedies, which are, as you know, are serious business.”

Example one, and the latest: the world premiere of “A Fox on the Fairway,” now at the Signature Theater in Shirlington through November 14. It’s a comedy—farcical, no doubt—about golf.

“Specifically, it’s about two American country clubs and some of its members competing for an annual trophy,” Ludwig said. “From there, you can just imagine.”

Now think for a moment, who made a literary sideline of writing wry comedic books and stories
about golf, besides American sportswriter Dan Jenkins?

It’s none other than the great comedic British stylist P.G. Wodehouse, the man who gave the world “Jeeves,” the impeccable, perfect literary butler.

“Exactly,” Ludwig said. “I love comedy, and Wodehouse is an example of a certain kind of style of writing comedy. Writing comedy in book form is terrifically hard. So is writing comedy for the stage. To my mind, it’s the most difficult art form in literature because, first and foremost you have to make people laugh—out loud, preferably—chuckle, smile. In the theater, you don’t want silence during a comedy. It’s a kind of homage to Wodehouse, yes, but it’s very American also.

“I loved Wodehouse. I loved his golf stories. I loved Jeeves. I love J.B. Priestley, whose writing
has a little more edge. They’re both great stylists.”

So ‘A Fox on the Fairway,’ you can be sure, is going to be funny. “We heard good things during performances for preview audiences,” Ludwig said.

There are other things Ludwig loves—besides his family. He loves old movies, you guess. He loves show tunes and the great composers of the American songbook like George Gershwin and Cole Porter. He loves comedy. He loves classic and popular literature and stories, like those by Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson. He loves show biz people, of which clan he is now a certifiable and certified member.

He says what he tries to do with his plays is to look at them in a fresh way, to make them come alive for contemporary audiences. That’s probably true, but there is a greater force at work here. Put simply: it is love.

Ludwig brings a first-love quality to his work, the boyhood crush you never get over, the grateful
love for whomever gave you that first kiss that was really stupefying, the first movie you ever saw that made an indelible impression, the love you still feel for all the lyrics you can’t get out of your head like “Summertime,” “Porgy” or any Gershwin and Porter tune, the love you feel for the great clowns and their pratfalls and that moment during a comedy when there are three people hiding in closets and three people coming through the door.

All of this stuff sounds old fashioned—dinosaur-like if you will—except for one thing: it works for him and for us. He doesn’t do revivals, but his own plays are continually being revived and performed on Broadway (“Lend Me a Tenor” most recently) and in just about every regional and local theater in the country and around the world.

Consider that his very first produced play, the aforementioned “Lend Me a Tenor,” is a side-splitting comedy about the world of opera and was produced by none other than Andrew Lloyd Webber, a gentleman with a fairly decent show biz track record who once wrote a musical called “Jeeves.” Or consider “Crazy for You”, the 1990s musical that he wrote in the mode of Gershwin’s original musical which won a Tony for him (He also pulled off a similar epic with a production of Gershwin’s “An American in Paris”). Consider the stage versions of “Treasure Island” and “Tom Sawyer” and “The Three Musketeers,” geared toward young audiences and the family trade. Consider one of my personal favorites, that of “Shakespeare in Hollywood,” a grand, affectionate comedy about the making of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at Warner Brothers Studio in 1930s Hollywood. Consider “Moon over Buffalo,” already revived and an adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s “The Beaux’ Stratagem” or “Leading Ladies.”

Now take a look at Ludwig’s website and check out where Ludwig plays are, or have been playing. Why, they are just about everywhere: Aurora, Ohio, Broadway, the Crested Butte Mountain Theater, The Minstrel Players, the Villainous University Theater, the Scarborough Theater in Ontario, Canada, “Moon Over Buffalo” in Moldova, The Three Musketeers, in London, “Crazy for You” in Melbourne.

High-minded critics haven’t always been crazy for Ludwig. But theatergoers have. Those plays live on, in much the same way that the forms, writers and shows that Ludwig loves so much live on in his mind. In a way, he’s returning a favor of happiness found, happiness returned.

“As somebody said: tragedy is easy, comedy is hard,” Ludwig said. Actors like Barry Nelson, Hal Holbrook, Carol Burnett, Joan Collins and the late Dixie Carter have shown that.

Not bad for a guy who’s also a certified lawyer and graduate of Harvard Law School, family man, husband to wife Adrienne (also a lawyer), and father of Olivia and Jack, resident not of Hollywood or New York, but of Northwest Washington. And he just keeps on rolling because, well, the game’s afoot. Oh wait, that’s the title of his next play (subtitled “Holmes for the Holiday”) about William Gillette, the great actor who made a career of playing Sherlock Holmes on stage.

‘Elvis at 21’ at the National Portrait Gallery
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When you’re with Elvis, you start to feel like a rock star.

When the “Elvis at 21, Photography by Alfred Wertheimer” traveling exhibition—an unusual collaboration among the Smithsonian Institution’s Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES), the National Portrait Gallery and Georgetown’s Govinda Gallery—opened at the NPG a while back, people involved in the show started putting off R&R vibes.

That seemed pretty true of Wertheimer himself. It’s been 54 years since he spent time with a budding national phenomenon named Elvis Presley, Elvis the pelvis, going to New York for an appearance on the Steve Allen show, to Richmond, Virginia, on a train ride to Memphis and Elvis’ pre-Graceland home.

If there was a star in addition to Elvis on the wall that day, it was probably Wertheimer himself, standing in the spotlight in a pretty cool gray suit, salt and pepper beard and hair, full of stories about what happened in 1956.

Right behind him stood Chris Murray, the founder of the Govinda Gallery, the man who had rediscovered Wertheimer’s cache of 1956 photos and shown them first in a small exhibition at Govinda a number of years ago, then added an expanded show eight years ago. Murray, who always looks like something of a rocker, is probably the king of rock and roll photography exhibitions in the area.

Even museum folks like NPG director Martin Sullivan and the exhibition co-curators Amy Henderson and Warren Perry, an Elvis buff who walked to school in Memphis on Elvis Presley Boulevard, had that Elvis buzz, along with folks with SITES, and the first visitors to the show.

Elvis had a way about him, and a little matter like his early death wouldn’t change that.

“I was lucky,” Wertheimer tells everybody about how he came to take the pictures that caught, in the most natural, raw manner, a down-home former truck driver just about ready to shoot out into the super-firmament, straddling home, the past, family, friends and old girlfriends, the fire already lit under him to propel him away from all that into legend. In these 40-some enlarged photographs, Elvis is caught smelling the jet fuel that was burning in him, and savoring the first taste of what it all might bring, while simultaneously loosening his grip on the ties that bind. He was changing right before their eyes, and in the process he was changing the whole damn country, (and scaring it a little).

“To be honest, I didn’t know who he was,” Wertheimer said. “But I got an inkling, that’s for sure. That was a special time.

It was 1956, almost right in the middle of the fabled fifties of normalcy, Beaver, the Hit Parade, fallout shelters, cars with big fish fins, Davy Crockett, sexual ignorance. We all loved Ike, even if we were Democrats. And Elvis was singing “Hound Dog” and shaking his tail like a demon. He was singing “Shake, Rattle and Roll”, and “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Blue Suede Shoes.” In February of that year, he had a Number One pop hit which nobody remembers now, the catchy “I Forgot to Remember to Forget.”

He scared people, mostly parents, television censors and people like Steve Allen, who got him to sing with a hound dog on his show.

What Wertheimer catches in these photographs is the beginning of a transformation—a boy singing roots music, still sometimes from a flatbed truck, changing into a star who could move his hips, show a pouty lip, hit the high notes and the low, and make girls scream en masse.

He was completely natural then, a little full of himself, sure of his way with girls, cool with the guys, relaxed. “I had access,” Wertheimer said. “The old fly on the wall thing.”

He must have been the most invisible little fly with a big camera when he caught Elvis with a pretty, blushed but cautious girl in a hallway prior to going on stage to sing. “He was trying to kiss her, you know, and she was doing what girls do, a little yes, a little no,” he said. “I had to shoot from up a little or behind and it was like I wasn’t there.”

It was kind of a seduction, a full-speed courtship, a kinetic moment, forever in the annals now.

Wertheimer had an eye for the periphery, a gift that actually allowed him to catch what was important. There are two shots of a girl who has just gotten an autograph from Elvis in New York; a sweet young girl who looks like she’s just about to faint, explode or burst into tears, or all three at once.

He caught Elvis on the piano in a hall, practicing, working a tune, and it was the kind of casual shot that might not look like anything, but it explains musicians, the secrets they keep. It became the cover for Peter Guarelnik’s classic biography “Last Train from Memphis.”

He also captured the country: Elvis at lunch counters in the south, where segregation ruled. Yet it was Elvis—by being the white kid who could sing so-called race music, mixing it with pop and gospel and country—who made it possible for people like Fats Domino and Chuck Berry to rise further into the daylight, escape the prison of category and burst into rock and roll. If there had been no Elvis, no Chuck and Fats and Little Richard, does anyone really think Bill Haley could have sustained the genre?

“I just followed him around,” Wertheimer said. “I don’t think I knew myself how important he would be. It was a freelance gig for a record company.”

Elvis was on the verge. In the last series of photos, which Wertheimer shot from the train going home to Memphis, Elvis dropped off, running home to his old neighborhood, parents, new swimming pool, running into the fields with only a piece of luggage, waving at the folks in the train.

Looking back, you might be tempted to think he was waving goodbye to his old life. If he was, we didn’t know and he probably didn’t either. [gallery ids="99582,104901,104899" nav="thumbs"]

Till Fellner at the Embassy Series: A Resounding Climax
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-Most worthwhile efforts have small beginnings, and this is also true for the Embassy Series, the unique musical events put together every year by its director, Jerome Barry, now in its 17th season.

Barry began his series of concerts/receptions at Washington embassies, ambassador’s residences and occasionally cultural centers with a core spirit. Many early offerings were held at European embassies like the Embassy of Austria and the Federal Republic of Germany.

The cultural core of the early concerts was the music of what may be Europe’s greatest cultural contribution to the world—a kind of library of great 18th and 19th century composers from Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, Brahms, the Strausses, Haydn and others whose compositions amount to the great and lasting saving grace of the German-speaking nations and peoples of the continent.

With them came the pianists, the violinist, the quartets and ensembles and trios, the flautists and cello players, the young as well as the world-renowned to play the works of European geniuses in settings and atmospheres unique to the music. Recitals, solo performances, sonatas, the E-minors and B majors, and all the technical bravura and skills are all important here. They are the missals for the body of European music’s masses and scriptures.

Over time, the Embassy series concerts have expanded into the wide and wider reaches of the world, embracing the rest of Europe, Russia, the Slavic countries, Latin America and the Middle East. With its acceptance came a wider scope of music with different sounds, emphases and instruments, which sprung from the fountain of different cultures and traditions.

But the Series always returns to the great composers, the great wellspring of European music, and even now such concerts are unique in and of themselves.

In that sense, the recent appearance of Till Fellner, the rising-star pianist, at the Embassy of Austria was so illustrative of the performance of classical music that is really classical beyond the music.

Fellner came to Washington to conclude his project of playing the complete cycle of Beethoven Sonatas—all 32 of them—on a journey that included New York, Washington, Tokyo, London, Paris and, appropriately, Vienna, where Fellner was born and which is home to a gilded, triumphant musical reputation and aura.

On the Sunday afternoon of his performance before a sold-out audience, Fellner completed the cycle by playing Sonata 30 E major, op. 109, Sonata 31 a flat major, op. 110 and Sonata 32, C minor, op. 111. The numbers, of course, tell you absolutely nothing unless you are an aficionado of Beethoven’s sonatas, or know your way around the little manifestos that describe how a piece will be played as in (for No. 32): Maestoso—Allegro con brio ed appassianata Arrietta: Adagio molto semplice e cantabile.

This is not meant to be even remotely a critical piece, which, in any case, this writer isn’t qualified to do. But I’m pretty good on history, setting, atmosphere, feeling and response. And I know a super-star when I hear one—here I mean Beethoven—and a budding super star when I see one. The Sonatas Fellner played are works from 1820-1822, and music history suggests that they were meant to be of a piece.

Fellner performs, behaves, and plays like a man dealing with a masterpiece. This is not just a question of technique, but a kind of presence, where the artists become a priest –my fingers to God—who is inspired and inspiring to listen to. All great pieces of art, and perhaps most especially of music, have a religious quality to them even if composed, written and created by agnostics or atheists. They are offerings meant to penetrate the great void and give it density, nuance, glory, suppleness, a kind of knowing. They are like sacrificial smoke rising up in swirls. The Sonatas do that like King Lear’s lament, Rembrandt’s touch of light.

Great musicians, always in their own ways, behave accordingly. There is a ritual involved, and a pact with audience and player. Unlike music and performances from other areas of the world, which have aspects of naked emotion and celebration in them, a kind of intense sociability, concerts like this one require, and always have, a certain embrace of stillness. The object is not to clap your hands, but to sit on them, or to stroke your mustache or listen intently with your eyes and heart. A performance such as this calls to action that part of the brain that can hear a lapse in technique, a missed key, or the buzz of a fly two blocks away.

In a sense, concerts like these are indeed like being in church. It’s smoke and incense and faith and appreciation; apt enough since much of European composition begins with church and ended up there too.

Felnner has the requisites of a star player. He knows it’s not enough to wear a black tuxedo to the chair. You have to spread out the tails in a certain way. You must every now and then, with a shake of the head and a wave of the fingers coming up from the keys, add human drama to the notes. At 39, he maintains those boyish good looks that seem to be built into the genes of future pianists, so that when he bows, it is a polite but not quite humble act.

No need for humility, in any case. Playing the last three sonatas seemed not just a climax to a personal musical journey, but a journey in and of itself where movements soar, tremble, and achieve a grand serenity in the end.

Tammy Grimes: Some Kind of Genius
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-Even if she hadn’t announced herself, the voice on the phone, a little whispery, a little dramatic, not as strong as in some other years, was still instantly recognizable. “Hello,” the voice says. “This is Tammy Grimes.”

Of course it was. Tammy Grimes, the legend.

She came to Washington for a concert as part of Barbara Cook’s “In the Spotlight Series” on cabaret singers; a category which seems almost whimsically focused to define Grimes. Cabaret singers are by and large original in such a way that they can be compared to no one else.

As she was in the 1980s when we talked to her in the midst of a concert gig at the now defunct Charley’s, a tony, jazzy, New Yorkish night club on K Street in Georgetown, Grimes is in the Duke Ellington mold: beyond category.

And probably by now, so thickly is she held in the affections of New Yorkers and by people who care more than they should about Broadway lore and stories, she’s also probably beyond criticism. She continues, in her mid-seventies, to fiddle around the edges of her creation, that is, her story and herself.

“Well, I’ll be singing songs by Tom Waits, Jimmy Buffett…” she said almost blithely, as if they might be the standard repertoire for a woman who rose to become a Broadway star for decidedly un-Buffett, un-Waits-like material.

But then again, maybe not. If Grimes repeats anything a lot, it is a simple thing. “I like songs that tell stories,” she says to me on the phone, and again to us in the audience of the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater. The story she tells, of course, is her story, and so a concert like this, and others written about New York, are about her. They are familiar stories, and the songs are pertinent to them; about two ex-husbands, two Tonys (“The Unsinkable Molly Brown” and “Private Lives”), about Cole Porter, Noel Coward and Truman Capote, about loss and love, family and children, theater openings, parts made her own and parts she never got.

Hence, “Moon River.” She tells me the story over the phone, and it’s like we’re just talking. There was the time that, ”Truman Capote–we were friends–said that he’d written “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” with me in mind. He saw me as Holly Golightly, and he promised that he would get me the part in the film. And of course, Audrey Hepburn got it.” And on the phone it’s a matter of fact telling, a good story, with no hard feelings or regret in it, because those things happen and Truman is Truman and that sort of thing not said, but implied. On stage, she tells the same story, but here it becomes a no-regrets bridge, a way to launch into her anthem, “I Ain’t Down Yet” from “The Unsinkable Molly Brown,” the Meredith Wilson musical about a particularly defiant survivor of the sinking of the Titanic.

For sure, Grimes is a legend, but it’s hard to say exactly what kind of legend. Noel Coward discovered her after her hearing her sing. he had dinner once with the shy Cole Porter, whose “The Oyster Song” she makes a hugely enjoyable enterprise in performance. “We were both shy, I think,” she said. “We spent the whole dinner not saying a word.”

Imagine that. She has plenty to say, of course, and more to sing. She talks about her ex-husband Christopher Plummer, the grand actor, “a beautiful man.” “He still is and now we get along just fine,” she said. “And we had our beautiful daughter, Amanda. Honey, if you’re listening anywhere, please call home.”

The higher registers of her voice are something of a tremulous adventure now, but the lower range is alive with danger, feeling and unpredictable adventure. She sits most of the time now during her concerts, although she will walk to the mike and grab it forcefully. And she sings “The Pirate Song” from Kurt Weill’s “Three Penny Opera” and kills it. The song has all the vengeful menace that it offers up.

Sometimes you suspect people haven’t always known what to do with Tammy Grimes. She’s made a number of mostly forgettable films and done all sorts of unruly television work including her own brief show.

But it’s Broadway and New York that are the stars in her crown, where the cheering still goes on as it does with the Terrace Theater audience, as well as at the Metropolitan Room. Walter Kerr, a legendary drama critic, flat out said, after seeing her as Molly Brown, “She is a genius.” The question is: what kind of genius?

Listening to her sing-tell Waits’ “Martha,” or Buffett’s “He Went to Paris,” or “You Better Love Me While You May,” you pick up on her strength more than the fragility, and the tremendous loss the death of her husband, the composer/arranger Richard Bell must have been. She doesn’t hide it. She merely swings into “You Gotta Ring Them Bells” or something similarly fist-clenched and forward-moving.

For me, and I suspect for New Yorkers who have heard and seen her at the Metropolitan Room, she’s an urban unicorn, a legend for whom, when they appear, the slate is always clean and the stories always rich.

Grimes is the kind of performer who is a reminder that you don’t go to the theater or the cabaret to forget.
You go to remember. And Tammy Grimes, while she may forget a lyric here or there, has a rich store of memories and music.

She came back with everyone standing up clapping for an encore: “I’m going to sing ‘The Rose.’” I heard her sing that song on a wintry night in Charley’s, snow on the ground. Bad news in the news like today. She pushed up the rose and made you remember.