‘What’s Goin’ On’ at the Folklife Festival
• July 26, 2011

Every year for 45 years now, visitors to Washington and the rest of us who live here have had a chance to come down to the National Mall and let the contours of the world—its music, its food, its songs and poetry and smells and clothes and sounds—come in, along with our own memories of what’s what in our souls.

They call it the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, a summer treat and tent and dog and pony and sheep and llama and guitar and memory show that occurs every summer wrapped around the Fourth of July.

This year, it’s more about us than them—the three-section festivals features the arts, music and food of Colombia, a memory train of the history and celebration of the Peace Corps and a lively, deeply rich festival of Rhythm and Blues. It’s “Colombia: The Nature of Culture;” it’s “The Peace Corps: Fifty Years of Promoting World Peace and Friendship;” it’s “Rhythm and Blues: Tell It Like It Is.”

But look what was on the menu in 1967, a veritable smorgasbord with no visible category except crafts and performance: American basket makers, doll makers, needle workers, potters, blacksmiths, spinners and weavers, fife and drum groups, string bands, gospel singers, shouts and spirituals, Puerto Rican music, New Orleans jazz, Cajun music, cowboy songs, the King Island Eskimo dancers, the dancers of Galicia, polkas and ballads, Irish dancers and Chinese New Year’s pantomimes.

Since then, over the years, the smorgasbord has become specific, focusing on states and regions, American style from Texas to Pennsylvania, to countries and continents, to Native Americans from everywhere, to the African Diaspora, to Kentucky, to the cultures of Britain and Yugoslavia to topics like Family Farming in the Heartland, the Music of Struggle, France and North America, Russian Roots, Metro Music, the Bahamas.

On summer days, you could see a Welshman shear a sheep or cook one, hear bluegrass music from the nearby mountains, dance to Reggae or Rap, see artists from Asia, Europe, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Africa, here, there and everywhere, watch the work of the cultural institutions and pioneers of the world.

This time, you can watch what’s often a reunion of Peace Corps Workers, catch all things musically and foodie positive about Colombia, and listen to, watch and dance to the soul music of our souls.

Friday, I stayed for a snippet, walking by the big tent of Motor City to see the Funk Brothers rip through my past in a special way.

I saw a man who danced with his wife.

That’s a supposition. They looked alike, smiled alike, and moved alike. They were thin and looked to be together for quite a while, almost like a twinned couple. She had curly hair, a smile to kill a rainy day, she was thin and sporty looking and moved like silk, and he led her, followed her, gray hair, big just-glad-to-be-here-with-her grin on his face and they twirled and stalked the way couples do.

They were singing to the Funk Brothers and their leader, wearing a white-suit from when guys in white suits could dazzle you, named Bob Babbitt. He was saying something like “Back then, like now, people were worried, what with the economy and wars, and senseless stuff, and Marvin Gay, he was singing what he could be singing now, he was askin’….

Mother, Mother, What’s goin’ on, what’s goin’ on…”

And the couple twirled into dizzy, and a mother was dancing with her little girl, and other couples swayed and some people did the same by themselves to “What’s Goin’ On.”

And earlier they were “Dancing in the Streets” and Kim Weston, who sang with Gaye back in the day on “It Takes Two,” was singing that afternoon and it was like that, the people were singing it, dancing it, and telling it like it was and is.

And you can catch a whole lot of groups still now till Monday at the 45th Annual Folklife Festival, and there’ll be people like the Jewels, the Monitors and Fred Wesley and the New JBs and you can get funky, soulful or happy as you please. Just check the Folklife Festival website and see:

What’s goin’ on.

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Covenant House hosts a Night of Broadway Stars
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For once, it was all good for the often beleaguered Mayor Vincent Gray.

That hasn’t been the case too often for the mayor, who’s been embroiled in controversy almost since he took office. But last week, Gray returned to his roots and was honored for what he accomplished there.

The occasion was “A Night of Broadway Stars” a gala event honoring Covenant House, the international organization which dedicates itself to helping homeless young people find work, homes and hope. It awarded its first “Lizzie” award to Gray, Covenant House Washington’s first executive director from 1995 to 2005.

In the course of Gray’s mayoral campaign, one of the first things you found out about him was how much pride he took in his tenureship of Covenant House. “The importance of Covenant House in my life is hard to overstate,” he said in accepting the award. “I am better for my time at Covenant House… We set out to serve the suffering children of the streets and become a voice on behalf of all young people who are themselves homeless and otherwise at risk.”

It was an occasion for honoring the young people themselves, who recited poetry, sang amid Broadway pros, and were visible evidence of the effect of hope fulfilled.

The event, held at the ARC, a state-of-the-art performance space in the heart of Anacostia and next to Covenant House Washington, was indeed a performance of “A Night of Broadway Stars.” It was a song-filled presentation of musical numbers from enduring Broadway hits like “Phantom of the Opera,” “Les Miserable,” “Chicago” and “Jesus Christ Superstar.”

Broadway composer, lyricist and producer Neil Berg put “A Night of Broadway Stars” together, bringing along performers Robert Dusold, Craig Shulman, Ted Louis Levy, Danny Zolli, as well as Frankie Valli, Roger Cohen, Alan Greene, Natalie Rita Harvey, Capathia Jenkins and others.

The combination of empowering music and empowering setting, along with the presence of young men and women who have been helped by Covenant House provided a bracing dose of optimism, probably and especially for the mayor.

Co-chairs for “A Night of Broadway Stars” were Ms. Linda Mercado Greene, Mrs. Judy Greenberg and Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Miller, and Judith Terra and Mrs. Virginia Williams acted as honorary co-chairs.

Follies Comes to the Kennedy Center
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Believe it. “Follies” is no folly. It’s a big deal.

It’s a big deal for the Kennedy Center, where a ground-up, full-blown revival of the groundbreaking Stephen Sondheim musical is now on stage at the Opera House through June 19. It is the culmination of four years of planning, effort and work.

It’s a big deal for director Eric Schaeffer, the artistic director of the Signature Theater, who is practically a Stephen Sondheim godson when it comes to all things music and staging of the reigning monarch and legend of the American musical.

It’s a big deal because “Follies” was a big deal for Sondheim; he took a giant step forward in his creative control for this show, not only writing the lyrics, but composing the music. The net result was a string of musicals that have made Sondheim a giant and innovator of the American musical theater.

It’s a big deal because the content-and-concept laden “Follies,” first staged by Harold Prince in 1971, was a uniquely Sondheim kind of musical, with its story of members of a former Zigfield-type follies reuniting on the eve of a theater demolition, past theater glory, and what happens to divas and stars when the spotlights shut down. It is a musical driven as much by the characters as the music. The original featured song and dance man Gene Nelson, movie star Alexis Smith and Dorothy Collins. The musical received seven Tony Awards, including Sondheim’s first for best original score.

Ron Raines stars as Benjamin Stone, and longtime Washington favorites Terrence Currier and Frederick Strother grace the stage in this production.

It’s also a big deal for Lora Lee Gayer who plays Young Sally and Christian Delcroix who plays Young Buddy.

Everybody’s heard and read about the ladies of “Follies,” mainly Bernadette Peters, Janis Paige and Jan Maxwell.

You may not have heard of Gayer and Delcroix, but they’re also critical elements of the show, a connection to the past for the main characters, alter egos that drift in and out of the show, sometimes sharing the stage with them.

For Delcroix, the process was probably filled with less angst than facing Gayer. “Danny and I had already worked together in ‘South Pacific’ at the Lincoln Center, so we knew each other, had been on the stage together before,” said Delcroix, who grew up in Pittsburgh and lives in New York. “So we could talk about the parts, who they were, what a young Buddy might be like. We had a pretty good rapport right off the bat. That’s an advantage.”

Delcroix acknowledged that playing the small part of the professor at Lincoln Center in the original cast of the smash hit revival (a touring company played the Kennedy Center’s Opera House this winter), was a big break. “That was a wonderful experience and chance for me. Now I’m in this terrific musical by Stephen Sondheim. You can’t get much luckier than that.”

For Gayer, who plays young Sally, the challenge was a little different. “Bernadette Peters is a legend. She’s one of the biggest stars in Broadway history. So yes, I didn’t know what to expect initially,” she said. “I was a little intimidated, sure. But she is really wonderful to work with. She’d make suggestions about the character, about what she might have been like. She is the expert when it comes to Sondheim”

Gayer graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh with a BFA in Musical Theater. “I did Rapunzel in ‘Into the Woods,’ so that helped in dealing with Sondheim’s music, which is very difficult and challenging to sing,” she said. Gayer has played Roxie in “Chicago” and Mrs. Gottlieb in Sara Ruhl’s “Dead Man’s Cellphone.”

For the Kennedy Center, Michael Kaiser and Schaeffer, “Follies” marks a return to the works of Sondheim, by whom they’ve done very well. “Follies” was one of the few missing entries in the hugely successful Sondheim festival several summers ago, which included “Sweeney Todd,” “Company” and “A Little Night Music.”

Schaeffer put himself and the Virginia-based Signature Theater on the map with a smash production of “Sweeney Todd” years ago, and he and the theater never looked back, gaining a national and international reputation as interpreters of the Sondheim songbook and playbook, while forging a permanent presence with productions of edgy, sharp, contemporary musicals, including the works of Kander and Ebb as well as new shows like “Glory Days.”

“Follies” not only features legends in the flesh as characters, but in some ways it’s a bittersweet tribute to the musical stage. The irony is—as is sometimes the case with Sondheim—the original production had a relatively modest run of 522 productions. But this show, with songs like “Broadway Baby,” “I’m Still Here,” and “Too Many Mornings,” acquired—as is often the case with Sondheim—a sure footed afterlife with concerts and successful revivals, including a 1985 Lincoln Center Concert version, a 1987 West End production, a 2001 Broadway revival, another West End revival and a New York City Center Concert in 2007. The Lincoln Center concert starred Barbara Cook as Sally, George Hearn, Mandy Patinkin, and Lee Remick, and also included Carol Burnett, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Liliane Montevecchi, Elaine Stritch and Phyllis Newman—one of those wish-you-could-have-been-there casts.

“Follies” runs at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House through June 19.

Prodding the Masses: Mike Daisey at Woolly Mammoth
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It’s hard to pin Mike Daisey down. You’d kind of like to know what he is – is he an actor, a monologist, a comedian, a one-man show, a writer, husband, radical, political and social critic? Is he a guy who sweats a lot on stage, a provocateur, a really interesting guy to interview or shoot the breeze with?

All true, but you’d still be missing a few things. He’s not lacking for fans—the New York Times has called him nothing less than “one of the finest solo performers of his generation.” But on the other hand, a Christian group walked out on one of his performances earlier in his career (though that may be taken as a compliment).

On his website, which he calls “His Secret Fortress on the Web,” he calls himself, “actor, author, commentator, playwright and general layabout.” I suspect most of that is true too, although you may have to talk to this wife to verify the latter.

And he’s back in town, back at the nearest thing to an ideal home he might have in Washington, the Woolly Mammoth Theater. And he brings with him his latest one-man production, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” a title that resonates on so many levels that it’s almost not funny. As always, the piece is about a Mike Daisey obsession. This is not so unusual; Daisey admits that he tends to obsess about things.

“I am, and always have been obsessed with Apple, everything about Apple, about Jobs, about the things we use every day, about iPad, and the iPhone. I grew up with everything we use today, like a natural progression,” he said.

Beware of what he says. I don’t mean to suggest that Daisey is not truthful, because he is painfully so. It’s just that most things he does, says, writes about and performs about on stage are so layered and crosswired as to defy any sort of coherent and sane description. The ability to connect and pull together, not always in a perfect fit, is a special gift of Daisey’s.

On stage—and I’ve only had the discomfiting pleasure once—he roils you up and carries you along with him like a runaway horse. He gets in your face and reconstructs your thinking a little. He makes you think, and it feels sometimes like he’s writing a novel right in front of you. At least that was my experience upon seeing “The Last Cargo Cult,” his last presentation at the Woolly.

On the phone, Daisey is pretty casual once you get going; he comes across as a very serious guy who can talk about big things in an off-handed way, as if just considering the implications of what he’s saying.

He is not, per se, an actor, although he was trained and educated in the academics of theater and performance. Nor is he a stand-up comic—he’s sitting down, sweating on stage—although almost casually he can be very funny

“The Agony and the Ecstasy” involves a portrait of Jobs, who with Bill Gates comprise the dynamic duo—opposites of sorts—who changed our whole way of living through technology. The two are to blame, can take the praise for and generally be damned and worshipped for all the little buzz-buzz things in our lives—the phone we carry, the computer we marry, the operating systems that run us, the apps we gotta have, all those things we plug into and flip open that are like breathing to us now.

And Daisey loved it—the Apple version—but then he embarked, as he often does with his projects, on a journey (this time to China) where he discovered that most of what Apple creates and manufactures comes at the cost of deplorable labor conditions. And it didn’t take long for him to see a terrible light, which became a monologue, which was workshopped, changed, troubled over and agonized over for over a year. And here we are now. I won’t say more because I haven’t seen it yet.

But here’s this up front. I Loved “Cargo Cult” as did a lot of people and critics in Washington. It was practically unanimous. It was a riff on a journey to the Pacific where he found islanders still worshipping and celebrating American “stuff,” crates of stuff left behind that symbolized the great American God of commerce. And from that he extrapolated a scathing explanation and description of America’s financial collapse from which we still reel. Not bad for a general layabout.

“I like to connect things,” he said. “It’s work, really hard work, exciting work. See, I don’t think we see how we live, what affects us, how things are connected. I want to challenge the public, the audience out there. I’m not out to really entertain, I’m not out to sweet-talk people. I don’t’ want to make people feel good. ”

On stage, Daisey is a hard charger and a water-drinker. He looks a little like the local actor Michael Willis, and others have compared him to Sam Kinniston, the blaringly loud stand-up comedian and social critic who died young. “I’m a big fan of his,” he said. “But no, that’s not me. I understand the anger though.”

A list of titles might give you a glimpse of where he’s coming from: “21 Dog Years,” his jump into notoriety and fame; “Tongues Will Wag”; “The Envoy’s Dilemna,” about a visit to Tajikistan; “Barring the Unforeseen”; “If You See Something Say Something,” the secret history of the Department of Homeland Security; “All Stories are Fiction”; and the very controversial “How Theater Failed America,” in which he contends that the regional theater powers that be have failed its workers, its actors and its audiences by focusing on subscriptions and building bigger and bigger stages, themes that resonated not always with agreement here and elsewhere.

“Well, it’s true,” he said. “I think as a result we’re shrinking audiences. We don’t take care of actors, for instance. We bring in people from the outside, there’s very little left of repertoire theater. People, truly gifted people, can’t afford to stay in the business.”

Daisey works with his wife Jean-Michele Gregory, who has been his director for the last decade, as well as editor and dramaturg. But it’s Daisey who’s the out-front guy, not she. I asked him if that ever creates tensions.

“Yeah, I suppose. Yeah, I think so,” he said. “I suppose it does. But you know, this relationship, I can’t think of anybody that has anything like this. The work slips over into the marriage, and the marriage slips into the work. It’s really, really intense. And I think and believe that this helps make our marriage strong and makes the work better. It’s an intimate process, you know. I mean we do everything together, we eat and sleep together, and we work together.”

Daisey, who is a lone provocateur on stage and in print, seems at times like a jilted lover. Two of the things he loves the most in his world—tech and theater—he has now taken on in tree shaking, thought provoking pieces that make you look differently at them.

If critics see him as a rebel, audiences are often stunned by his work. He is in an odd sort of limbo: his work is cutting edge, designed to provoke, make the powers that be tremble a little, and yet he’s a bit of a celebrity too, often written about, talked about and talked with. It’s a dangerous artistic world in some ways, like being the brazen filmmaker Michael Moore, to whom he’s sometimes compared.

If the New York Times rhapsodizes about him, lesser known folks like the Bugwalk blogger, upon seeing “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” said, “I left the theater in tears vowing to buy no electronic device that I don’t’ truly need, though there is no such thing as living a life that does not include increasing the misery of a thirteen-year-old Chinese girl. It cannot be done.”

Daisey probably cares about what others thing. He likely appreciates praise and worries about criticism. Or maybe not. None of the hoopla—which he seems to enjoy—will deter him. Take, for instance, his next little project.

It’s a monologue called “All the Hours in the Day.” And you guessed it: it’s a 24-hour performance that “charts the epic story of America’s essential character as a weaving together of Puritanism and anarchism.”

Shy he is not.

“All the Hours in the Day” will be performed at the Time Based Art Festival in Portland and the Under the Radar Festival in New York. “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” runs through April 10, and has already been extended through April 17.

For more information visit WoollyMammoth.net

“An Ideal Husband” makes good on the work; flaws may be in Wilde himself
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The Shakespeare Theatre Company’s production of Oscar Wilde’s “An Ideal Husband” has a lot going for it. It is stylishly staged, practically overpowering you with its visual gorgeousness both in sets and apparel. It’s also wonderfully acted by a cast of fresh young actors among the principal performers, buoyed by the presence of a trio of locals who perform fuss-budgets, grouchy fathers and man-servants better than just about anybody.

But in the end, ‘An Ideal Husband” is not…well, ideal. It’s missing something. It’s like a big vat of champagne that’s gone flat. Maybe the fault is not in the stars, but in Wilde himself. “An Ideal Husband”—which hit the public eye on the heels of the “The Importance of Being Earnest,” and just around the time when Wilde was about to take a scandalous and disastrous tumble—is full of Wildean social comedy that doesn’t pop nearly enough and too much high-minded tussles with moral issues and continuous retracing of exposition and plot.

But here’s what this production does do, in addition to dazzling the eye. In Washington, where scandal and matters of morality and probity are much talked about but not so much observed in practice, the main plot line and the main character are familiar as the last firing of a chief of staff, the last bit of cash flushed town a toilet, the last thunderous call to end ear-marks.

But it isn’t funny enough. Wilde usually dealt with hypocrisy, Victorian society’s self-infatuation and obsessions with titles, money and lineage. He played on his culture’s gigantic addiction to living life on the surface around Hyde Park with knowing, devastating, slashing metaphors and ready-to-go aphorisms. It still rains epigrams in “An Ideal Husband,” but they’re more like snowflakes than stinging rain.

Sir Robert Children is the play’s ideal husband in question, a rising figure in the British Empire’s foreign office. He is handsome, wealthy, and with a beautiful wife of such moral probity as to make Caesar’s wife look like a strumpet. Together they are the perfect Victorian power couple, childless but with reputations unstained by as much as a whisper of scandal, a late bill, a flirtation or a hair out of place.

In their firmament, beautifully displayed in a grand staircase with a circular mirror, there is a social order where everyone knows their place, including husbands and wives, gossip is rife, and small talk is so small you need a magnifying class to muddle through it.

One fine evening dinner at the Children estate, as butlers announce arrivals, up comes one Mrs. Cheverley, and you know she’s trouble because she arches her eyebrows with cynical disdain and is wearing a fetching, eye catching purple dress while everyone else seems to be attending a black-and-white (and very gray) ball.

Mrs. Cheverley is here to derail Sir Robert’s unblemished reputation because she knows that his fortune is built on a bit of insider trading on information he was privy to as a foreign service official. Such news of course would devastate his wife, who thinks he is, well, an ideal husband, not to mention his career and future. Whatever will he do?

Well, he has help in the character of Lord Goring, the seemingly fitful, lazy, lay-about son of the Earl of Chaversham (David Sabin, wonderfully harrumphing his way through a series of disapproving fits). Goring, played with playful elan by Cameron Folmar, is a kind of Scarlet Pimpernel of the social set. He is frivolous as a feather on the outside, while kind, faithful, brave and loyal on the inside. He’s had some dealings with Mrs. Cheverley and means to prevent her plot from succeeding.

But the fizz isn’t quite there—with some exceptionally fussy acting by Nancy Robinette as Lady Markby, and Floyd King’s amazingly varied ways of saying “Yes, My Lord.” There’s a gloomy atmosphere here in Gregory Woodell’s portrayal of Children, mortified that his secret is out, wrestling with shame, gloom and doom. He gives you a clear picture of a tortured man caught up in something like that, revealing him to be what he thinks is a fake. In Washington, a play like this echoes loudly.

And then there’s Mrs. Cheverley; Emily Raymond plays her haughty, alluringly even, but not with a sense of purpose other than to be without mercy. Or is she? Women like her usually have a secret that they keep for some time, and the consternation they cause arises from confusion about sex and virtue, not so much the less interesting follow-the-money theme.

That sexy stuff is missing here, because it isn’t there to begin with. This is a comedy about morals and probity, stuffed evening gowns and overwrought virtues. Director Keith Baxter tweaks the material wonderfully, to include a murky ending of sorts, but you miss the rolls of knowing laughter ever after.

Elizabeth Taylor’s Washingtonian Legacy
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Ah Hollywood…Ah Washington. How the denizens of these two cities yearn for each other.

The recent death of Elizabeth Taylor, pre-pixel Hollywood’s last great star, and its coverage around Washington highlighted the nurture-torture nature of this relationship, like an electric wire was connecting the cities. People remember her here; just ask the senator, the gossip writers, theatergoers and the folks at the Whitman Walker Clinic.

She was, heart and soul, a child of Hollywood, since her violet eyes and pitch black hair made their first impact on screen as one of MGM’s child stars in “National Velvet,” when she was just twelve years old. She was a movie star long before she ever aspired to become an excellent actress.

People, of course, still have trouble taking a really beautiful woman seriously, and Elizabeth Taylor was astonishingly beautiful in her youth. As such, it’s much easier to give the wrong kind of credit than to credit the right things. People focus on her numerous marriages, the drama and the diamonds. They focus on her adulteries that broke up first the marriage of Debbie Reynolds, America’s sweetheart, and then her own and those of husband Richard Burton’s.

The local obituary seemed to me curiously snarky and petulant, going out of its way to offer quotes disparaging her acting abilities. The front-page photo showed her in her famous white swimsuit from a scene in Tennessee Williams’ “Suddenly Last Summer,” in which she shared top billing with Katharine Hepburn and Montgomery Clift, two of the finest screen actors of the time. “Despite Oscar nods,” the caption read, “she was not always taken seriously an actress.”

They could have said it the other way around: “Despite not always being taken seriously as an actress, she won two Oscars—for “Butterfield 8” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” (Mike Nichols’ film adaptation of the Edward Albee play, now enjoying a satisfying production at Arena Stage), opposite then husband Richard Burton.”

It’s fair to say that she was often used for her looks—one of those cases of “don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.” But those looks could be used to heartbreaking effect: Check out that scene when Montgomery Clift (again) first sees her in “A Place in the Sun.” You could see ambition rise in him like a sour soaring, and you could see him hold his breath. The film is one of George Stevens’ finest works, part of what he saw as an American trilogy that included “Shane” and “Giant,” the latter also starring Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean, who completed filming and promptly was killed in a high-speed sports car crash.

For someone not highly regarded, she apparently had the regard of directors like Stevens and Nichols, two very serious-minded men who made classic and serious films. I would expect that even Meryl Streep, our most serious and darling film actress, might have liked to have films like “A Place in the Sun,” “Giant,” “Suddenly, Last Summer,” “Reflections in a Golden Eye” and “Cat On a Hot Roof.” Even “Cleopatra,” in spite of its excess and on-set drama, which almost ruined 20th Century Fox and boss Daryl Zanukc, ended up making money.

She was legendary, larger than life, and lived in the public eye. No need to go into details too much. Like the Kennedys, a political institution, she experienced more than anybody’s share of triumph and tragedy, heaven on earth and hell on wheels all at the same time.

One thing everybody knew: she made friends, and kept them beyond death. She nurtured the troubled and gifted Clift through car wrecks, addictions and emotional troubles. She stood up for Hudson and still loves Burton. If she was at times over the top and with a certain carnal vulgarity, especially in the two bouts of marriage with Burton, well…she was entitled. That doesn’t make her the godmother of Charlie Sheen or Lindsay Lohan.

Her stays in Washington were memorable: she married Senator John Warner of Virginia, the kind of marriage that should probably never happen. Imagine the fights in front of the mirror. But Warner remembers her with affection.

She appeared twice on stage in Washington, both times at the Kennedy Center, to mixed success and reviews. The first was as Regina in Lillian Hellman’s “The Little Foxes,” which underwhelmed local critics, as I recall.

Then there was the time when then Kennedy Center President Roger Stevens thought that movie stars might pack ‘em in for theater. This brought us Liz and Dick in “Private Lives,” something this writer won’t ever forget. This is Noel Coward’s sophisticated play about a divorced married couple on honeymoons with new partners who run into each other at the hotel where they’re staying. Sparks fly in familiar ways. But in the middle of the play, Taylor’s Amanda says off-handedly: “You know, I’ve always been afraid of marriage.” This line brought the house down with laughter in a way that had everything to do with Taylor, not the show. Old pro Burton rode out the laughter wisely, and then ignited it again with a drawn out “Yes.”

That’s show biz. That’s legend.

She became, in a very real and practical way, the patron saint in the fight against AIDS, in the public’s recognition of what a dangerous disease it was, and the people it affected. She spoke up for Rock Hudson and everyone else who suffered from it, and she lent her name to the Whitman Walker Clinic. By contrast, the silence in Washington AND Hollywood in the early, devastating years of the disease was deafening. The Reagan, whose roots were in the Hollywood community which was being hit hard by AIDS, offered grief and condolences over the death of Hudson, while not mentioning AIDS at all, as if he had died of some peculiar strain of the common cold?

She opened minds and changed them, and her presence rose above that of the fundamentalists who called the disease the punishment of God at Gay Pride parades. She never wavered in this, and she did it out of life, not boredom or publicity seeking.

God bless her for that, and have no doubt that he and she will.

FIlmfest DC turns 25
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Filmfest DC Director Tony Gittens, sipping a coffee at Tryst, the local Adams Morgan coffee house, could look around him and know how much had changed since the first festival.

This is the 25th anniversary for Filmfest DC, which opened April 7 and closes April 17 at locations and venues throughout the city, and it’s also the same for Gittens, the festival’s first and only director over the years.

At Tryst, there are smartphones, laptops and iPads open everywhere, all of them potential venues for international films of all kinds.

“There wasn’t any of that back then. No downloading anything from or to your phone, no computer libraries of films, no Netflix,” he said. “Basically, there were theaters, and Cannes, and repertoire theaters which showed old movies, new and smaller films that weren’t made in Hollywood [they weren’t called independent films back then], and theaters specializing in festival fare, like the Circle Theaters, the Avalon, the Biograph and the Key Theater.”

“Actually, there were no festivals here,” Gittens said. “We were the first.”

He looked around at the laptops and the people glued to their screens, probably wondering if anybody was watching a movie.

“We didn’t have all these new delivery systems and ways of looking at films,” he said. “There was no digital film, no Internet, no Youtube, nothing like that. Sundance didn’t exist as a major marketplace for independent films.”

The DC International Film Festival was a pathfinder and trailblazer for other festivals to come, a booming DC festival atmosphere that’s now taken for granted. We’ve got the Environmental Film Festival, the Independent Film Festival, the Documentary Film Festival, the Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, festivals for short films, children’s film, the Jewish Film Festivals and all kinds of niche festivals.

The tech explosion has affected the film industry in no uncertain terms, dictating a Hollywood aversion to serious films and a drift toward big-budget items for adolescent boys—the so-called youth market. That’s why you have so many movies based on comic book characters like Batman, Spiderman and the Fantastic Four. That’s also why you haves a surge in cartoons and a resurgence of high-tech 3-D movies.

None of those things are part of film festivals, which, because of their diversity for every niche and special interest, become a kind of clearing house, the places and occasions that form a kind of venue all by itself. Festivals are the venues where you can see movies from France, Afghanistan, Iran, Japan and India. A festival is where you can see the results of the restive imaginations of young American and international directors. A festival (and the occasional E-Street Cinema) is where you can see documentaries with a political and social edge. They won’t be at the mall where transformers, pirates and superheroes rule.

Gittens put it this way, writing about his festival: “Filmfest DC has always been willing to bring films not only from Western Europe but from Eastern Europe, Latina America, Africa and Asia with little concern for a film’s long-term commercial prospects. The only criteria in place were that the film be intelligent, thought provoking, well made and entertaining. Without Filmfest DC, the thousands of films the festival has brought to our city would never have been seen.”

Although sometimes criticized in the media, the festival has in fact been innovative in its approach to films, with focuses on international music, documentaries, special regions of the world, celebrations of directors and film movements. These have included “Justice Matters,” a unique section of films focusing on social justice issues, and “Global Rhythms.”

The international focus in this year’s festival is on Scandinavia with “Nordic Lights: The Old and the New” and New South Korean Cinema.

As always, the venues are varied and spread out all over the city. This year, they include AMC Mazza Gallerie, the Avalon Theatre, the Goethe-Institute of Washington, Landmark’s E Street Cinema, Regal Cinemas Gallery Place, Busboys and Poets, the Embassy of France, the Lincoln Theatre and the National Gallery of Art’s East Building.

In the distant past (the 1950s-1960), when people talked about film festivals they meant Cannes and maybe Venice and Berlin. But not the United States. That’s certainly changed with Sundance and, yes, the DC International Film Festival.

We talked a lot about foreign films, when you could still see foreign films in the United States at the small theaters that carried them. Today, festivals are the scene and venues for foreign films. And in a way this festival pays a little homage to the past by opening at the Lincoln Theater with the French film “Potiche,” the work of a relatively young director, François Ozon, and starring bonafide French and international movie stars Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Diperdieu. Ozon is known to specialize in what might be called screwball comedies, French style, with a more sophisticated twist than possible in the age of Carole Lombard.

The festival will close with “Sound of Noise,” a decidedly modern comedy cum police procedural, cum drama and music, a combined Swedish, French and Danish effort from Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjarne Nilsson at the Regal Cinemas at Gallery Place April 17.

In between are over 70 premieres from all over the world, with visits by artists, directors and producers: director Vibeke Lokkeber and producer Terje Kristiansen of “Tears of Gaza”; Director Jean-Charles Deniau, director of the documentary “Scientology: The Truth About a Lie”; director Matias Bize of “The Life of Fish”; director Ali Samadai Ahadi of the documentary “The Green Wave,” and others.

Some other highlights include films like “Flamenco, Flamenco” from Spain’s Carlos Saura; “Queen to Play” with Kevin Kline (in French, no less!); “Juan,” a riff on “Don Giovanni”; “Circumstance” from the director of “Run, Lola, Run”; “Young Goethe in Love”; Argentinian Director Eliseo Subiela’s “Hostage of Illusion: Korkoro,” a French film about a gypsy family in Nazi Occupied France; and “The Traveler,” an Egyptian film (pre-revolution, we’d guess) starring Omar Sharif.

What’s always striking about the film festival is the eclectic spirit it carries with it and the memories it arouses, because so many international films—which you won’t see anywhere else—bring with them the electricity of recent and current events and upheavals. We remember once talking with a noted Czech director who arrived in the aftermath of the fall of the Iron Curtain which saw a playwright raised to the Czech presidency. We remember documentaries about World War II and the Holocaust and romances from Canada and the first movies coming out of North Vietnam.

This year’s festival promises to be the same, and for this, Gittens, and Deputy Director Shirin Gareeb can take a lot of the credit.

Shakespeare Turns 447 at The Folger Library
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“April hath put a spirit of youth in everything.”

William Shakespeare said that. Well, he wrote it. Maybe.

I think he did, no maybe about it. Otherwise why were we celebrating William Shakespeare’s 447th birthday instead of, say, Oxford’s?

He put “To be or not to be. That is the question” into Hamlet’s mouth, and he spoke them and took three hours answering the question before expiring from a poisoned sword tip. Every young girl from his time forward imagines herself as Juliet, helping Romeo up the balcony, because Romeo described her thusly: “But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.”

He wrote:

“April hath put a spirit of youth in everything.”

And he was right.

The evidence was on display at the Folger Library’s annual Free Family Party in celebration of William Shakespeare’s Birthday on Capitol Hill. Spring was there. The spirit of youth was in everything. And there were children, lots of them, who I am sure knew his poems.

To many Washingtonians—those who loved the Bard and bards, peonies and poems, madrigals and sword fights, and faint and fair maidens—this great celebration is the first official sign and stamp of spring.

No question, it was spring on Capitol Hill after all that harrumphing about closing down the government and the tea party that has neither tea nor does it party. At this gathering, a rhyme trumps a riot. and children and dogs are princes, princesses and canine royalty.

Hundreds turned out and did things they rarely do every other Sunday. Little boys picked up wooden swords and watched a demonstration of sword-and-broad-sword and other weapons fighting, with two or three members of the gentler sex bashing each other with fury that hell hath not, under the supervision of Brad Weller, who trains and designs medieval combat scenes from Shakespeare’s more warlike plays.

Children –and gleeful adults—stood in a small room and yelled Shakespearean insults at each other.

There was maypole dancing and actors on the Elizabethan stage doing excerpts from “Richard III,” doing their best to explain that he wasn’t such a bad guy. Rosalind appeared on stage from “As You Like It,” the most formidable female character ever put on stage. There was courtly dancing to be sure and much lording it over and bowing and beautiful feathered hats from folks who appear at Renaissance Fairs and look splendidly fair and handsome.

In the Elizabethan garden, open for the first time, you saw a sight to prove Shakespeare right: nearly a baker’s dozen of five or six year old girls, ensconced as if bewitched, watching and listening to the Larksong Renaissance Singers singer Renaissance music, medieval music, madrigals, in Italian, German, French and English, blessed by the presence of mothers and children as much as the music itself.

Everywhere, everyone wore bright garlands and danced. This is the occasion when the Folger airs out its venerable reading room with its century-old books and the scent and dandruff of scholars and the lights and youths come sparkling in to pose with Shakespeare.

I met a dog—a Maltese, miniature poodle mix—named Rosa Luxembourg, the 1920s revolutionary in Germany. Someone played, with dancing delight, an accordion.

Queen Elizabeth (the first) showed up to wave, her hair blazing. They handed out cakes, but not cupcakes, those not having been invented in Georgetown yet.

Spring reigned on Capitol Hill, where in a courtyard at a used bookstore down the street, a woman sang boogie-woogie music, a guy played rickety piano, someone strummed a guitar, and purple blossoms embraced a branch like benign boas.

“Now, every field is clothed with grass, and every tree with leaves; now the woods put forth their blossoms, and the year assumes its gay attire.”

Say happy 447 thbirthday, Master Shakespeare. It was a day in April when “the spirit of youth was in everything.”

Liberty Smith at Ford’s Theater
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You’d think that a new musical set during the Revolutionary War featuring a hero that’s somewhere between Forrest Gump and Zelig might be something of a risky undertaking for the Ford’s Theatre company.

Ford’s executive artistic director Paul Tetreault doesn’t think so. Not even a little. “I think it’s a terrific show. I love the whole idea, and I think it’s perfect for us,” said Tetreault, who took over in 2004 after the death of founder Frankie Hewitt.

When Tetreault, who came to Ford’s from the famed Alley Theater in Houston, talks, you tend to listen. So chances are that “Liberty Smith,” maybe Ford’s biggest musical undertaking ever, may just be the audience-pleaser that Tetreault thinks it will be. He’s been right before.

The Revolutionary War as source for theater entertainment is historically a mixed bag. The pinnacle of the genre is surely “1776,” a musical about the haggling founding fathers as they try to come up with the Declaration of Independence, which proved to be a mighty Broadway hit, and continues to be a hit in revivals all over the country (including one at the Ford’s earlier this decade).

“Liberty Smith,” a kind of tongue-in-cheek, young-hero retelling of some major events of the revolution, has a few things going on for it. It has a top-notch, experienced creative team with a book by Marc Madnick and Eric Cohen, music by Michael Weiner, and lyrics by Adam Abraham. Weiner is a veteran of Disney musicals and films and wrote the music for “Second Hand Lions,” which is slated for a New York opening at the end of the year.

“We think this is going to be great entertainment,” Tetreault said. “With the involvement of people like Marc, Eric, Michael and Adam, we have a big, Broadway-style musical here, which will appeal to the whole family.”

“Liberty Smith” features a cast of 20, including a number of musical comedy veterans like Donna Migliaccio as Betsy Ross. Using local stars has been a Tetreault trademark—witness this year’s production of Horton Foote’s “The Carpetbagger’s Children,” which starred Holly Twyford, Nancy Robinette and Kimberly Shraf. But the main attraction and the key to the production will be Geoff Packard, the critically acclaimed and appealing star of the recent production of “Candide” (under director Mary Zimmerman) at the Shakespeare Theatre Company.

Smith appears to be the kind of characteristically American tall-tale character that somehow did not get mentioned alongside Davy Crockett, Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill and Johnny Appleseed. Yet there he is, boyhood friend of “George” (Washington), apprentice to Benjamin Franklin, trying to get Thomas Jefferson to quit fiddling and write. He helps out Paul Revere on a horse and steers Betsy Ross with her knitting while courting her niece, the pretty lass who’s mad that she can’t do what the founding fathers do because she’s a woman.

“We’ve been working on this for a couple of years now,” Tetreault says. “We’ve taken great care to get it right because I think it’s a very special project.”

Tetreault stepped into the shoes of several legends when he arrived at Ford’s. There was Hewitt, who founded the renewed theater as a functioning performing entity and faced the same challenges that Tetreault did: the theater is a historic structure, and a gloomy one at that. It is where another legend, Abraham Lincoln, was murdered while attending a comedy. And there’s no getting around that. This is theater as museum, a tricky kind of thing to provide programming for.

Lest you forget, there’s always the flag-draped presidential box to remind you.

Hewitt trod a careful line—musicals were always a strong fare, many of them exceptional (think of the originally produced “Elmer Gantry”), most of them entertaining for the tourist trade. And that’s the economic trick, of course—the Ford’s is as close to a historic national theater as we have, which both guarantees tourist audiences, and makes original programming and theatrical respectability difficult to get.

Tetreault realizes, as did Hewitt, that you probably can’t do “Streamers” here, or Mamet or “Sylvia,” and so critics tend to often arrive in the early years with a built-in, genetic sneer, which was often patently unfair.

Hewitt presented classic, historical fare, but also many African American plays and musicals by and about African Americans, something that local audience were starved for.

Tetreault has often surprised people with his choices, but more often than by the critical and popular success of those choices. Sometimes, when you look at a Ford’s season schedule, the nose can turns up by itself, which just goes to show you that you can’t trust your nose any more—at least not in the theater.

One of his first successes was the staging, with the National Theater for the Deaf, of “Big River,” a redo of the musical version of Huckleberry Finn driven by Roger Miller’s easy-going music. This production, while delivering the entertainment goods, discovered surprising depths to the show in the performance.

“I think I have a lot of leeway in what we do,” Tetreault says. “You can find originality, emotional depth, and theatrical excitement in American theater stories. I believe in partnering, because that’s the future of theater. It’s the here and now.”

By partnering with the African Continuum Theatre, Tetreault steered a highly praised (and unlikely) production of “Jitney” to Ford’s stage, which resonated mightily. A partnership with Signature, under director Eric Schaeffer, resulted in one of the best musicals ever produced ground-up in Washington, the exciting “Meet John Doe,” based on Frank Capra’s stirring populist movies.

After exciting remodeling—which took out two full seasons—Ford’s re-opened looking much better, but still very much a part of the greater Lincoln atmosphere getting built in the surrounding area. The theater opened without missing a beat, coming up with four straight hits: “The Heavens Are Hung in Black,” a new commissioned play about Lincoln’s time in Washington, “The Rivalry,” about the Lincoln-Douglas battles, “The Civil War,” and (just for fun, I suppose) “The Little Shop of Horrors.”

But who would have thought that the 2010-2011 season debut “Sabrina Fair,” a 1950s romantic comedy about a chauffeur’s daughter who has to choose between two wealthy brothers, would look so fresh with new faces and a different, youthful outlook?

Paul Tetreault did.

So “Liberty Smith” may be a gamble, but it’s probably a good bet.
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‘Telling Stories’
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Poor Norman Rockwell. The guy can’t get a break.

Every time there’s a big exhibition of his works — as there is now at the Smithsonian American Art Museum — you can bet your mortgage that someone, somewhere in the art world is going to scream bloody murder.

As in: he’s not a real artist, he’s kitschy, his paintings — most of them originally seen as magazine covers — are too corny, too rosy in their vision of America to be true.

You can debate all of these points to a fare-thee-well and inevitably, the debate starts to betray political views right alongside critical views.

Worst of all for his critics, perhaps, is that Rockwell, in his time, and right up to this moment, continues to remain popular.

Check it out: at almost any time during the week, the exhibition “Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg” is thick with people — young, old, parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren, older, for the most part, and white, for the most part. Tourists, for the most part.

There’s a thin line between populist and popular art, of course, and the geography of that line has so many footprints on it as to make it unidentifiable. Rockwell’s work is and always was squarely aimed at the great American working and middle class. It was meant to reflect an American landscape and people-scape that was easily recognizable.

What galls a lot of critics — even as far back as the 1920s — is that Rockwell’s work, excellent though it may be in brush strokes, draftsmanship and technique, straddles the thin line between illustration and art, per se. In the age of abstraction, Rockwell’s work sins again in that it doesn’t push forward, it cuts no edge, there’s nothing revolutionary in his work in terms of boundaries. And in the age of a rapidly changing America so diverse as to be almost unrecognizable, Rockwell’s people and imagery seem almost like a dream instead of having connection to reality.

And yet, here are the people in those rooms, trying to find themselves and a story. Rockwell lingers, like a hanger-on at a party for which he’s improperly dressed, just beyond the buzz, an elderly uncle with a bow tie.

To some critics, Rockwell’s work suggests an absence, a kind of intolerance that characterizes small towns steeped in sentiment, which, to critics of almost any kind of artistic work, is like garlic for a vampire. That kind of criticism, of course, is rife with intolerance itself.

“Norman Rockwell is an artist and a storyteller who captured universal truths about America that tell us a lot about who we are as a people,” said Elizabeth Broun, the Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. That’s probably not entirely accurate — or, at least, it’s a little more complicated than that. Through his illustrations for Look Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post and, much later, his work that embraced the Civil Rights movement, Rockwell engages an ideal wish Americans have for themselves, the wish of the virtuous and bucolic nation where small things are big. Think for a moment about his great Thanksgiving painting — it’s almost THE holiday experience, which no doubt has inspired numerous movies about the holidays from hell as a counterweight. Yet it’s Rockwell’s painting we dream about if we dream.

This exhibition is about Rockwell’s story-telling gifts, and indeed, he had fantasized about wanting to become a director. His story-telling paintings are about what happened before and what happens after: here’s Gary Cooper being made up for a cowboy scene, here’s a sophisticated mom peering into a mirror, her daughter watching her; here’s truck drivers eyeing a blonde with manly admiration; here’s a bulky cop on a soda fountain with counter with a small boy; here’s a little girl on top of the stairs watching a Christmas party; here’s a woman being cajoled and yelled at by her fellow jury members; here’s a baseball rookie arriving at camp.

Here’s a boss, his red-haired secretary, a window-washer. At the exhibition, a mom explained the story to her daughter “He likes her, she likes him, she’s looking at him,” she said. “She’s not paying attention to her work. Maybe she’ll get fired. Maybe she’ll see the window washer outside. Maybe they’ll fall in love, go on a date. Maybe.”

This is what Rockwell does best: invite people into the stories in his paintings, backtrack, fast forward, wonder and speculate. It’s the stuff of the material that Lucas and Spielberg, both movie directors who themselves try not to visit too much the dark side where Darth Vader and post-modernism live.

His covers, illustrations, paintings and works of art may not be everybody’s cup of tea, and the America he portrayed may not include or be everybody’s America. It would indeed be a sad world if it were Rockwell’s world alone. But you can’t help but feel sometimes that we remember the works as real, even if they weren’t. If art is at least in part something that has the power to pull at you and not let go, then that’s art. It cuts through the edge where the heart and memory lies. [gallery ids="99175,103200,103174,103196,103192,103179,103188,103184" nav="thumbs"]