40th Season for Glimmerglass Opera
• August 17, 2015

In this town, people are talking about Francesca Zambello.

This town being not Washington, D.C., where Zambello is artistic director of Washington National Opera, but Cooperstown, New York. As you may have heard, this bucolic upstate village is home to the Baseball Hall of Fame, where four new members will
inducted July 24-27.

Soon thousands of visitors, many times the resident population, will be streaming in for the baseball festivities. But the weekend before, quite a few people will be heading out to State Highway 80, also known as Lake Street. Just outside of town on scenic Otsego Lake is the Glimmerglass Festival, which will be in its second week. Glimmerglass, where Zambello has been artistic and general director since 2011, is celebrating its 40th summer season of presenting top-drawer operas.

This year’s festival, which runs through Aug. 23, kicked off with back-to-back Friday and Saturday openings of Mozart’s “Magic Flute” and Guiseppi Verdi’s “Macbeth.” It continues during Hall of Fame weekend with “Macbeth” on Friday, the rarely seen Vivaldi opera “Cato in Utica” on Saturday and the Zambello-directed production of Leonard Bernstein’s musically wondrous take on Voltaire’s “Candide” on Sunday.

“Up here,” one local said, “it’s baseball and Butterfly” (as in “Madama Butterfly”) or, more currently, Mantle and Mozart. The baseball you would expect. But opera, Zambello-style, that’s another matter.

And it’s had an impact. Taking in the highly original and stirring “Magic Flute” opener, a patron — who had travelled from New York City for the occasion — told us that Zambello had made “a huge difference. She’s turned it around.”

The next day, while waiting at a Main Street ATM, we talked with a local man who had moved to what he called “baseball heaven” from the New York City borough of Queens. The self-described baseball fanatic noted Zambello’s effect on the town. “Glimmerglass has a great reputation,” he said. “We’re glad to have her here.”

“She works closely and partners with other local cultural institutions like Hyde Hall,” a Cooperstown tourism professional said. Jonathan Maney, executive director of haunting and historic Hyde Hall, on the other side of the lake, praised Zambello’s spirit of cooperation and partnership.

At both openings last week, Zambello seemed to be everywhere — thanking patrons and contributors, board members, audience members and the town itself, being the evangelist for opera. This is not dissimilar from what she does on Washington Opera opening nights, turning greeter and up-close opera champion.

We spoke with Zambello at the Glimmerglass administrative offices last week, as the company prepared for its big anniversary opening. She was in her full opera-pied-piper persona.

“We want to create work and productions that resonate with audiences,” she said. “I see my job here as expanding the audience, growing it, but also making this a true festival. This is a very specific place, a beautiful place, with a lot to offer, and we want to connect to this community. As a for-instance, Madeline Sayet, our director for “The Magic Flute,” staged it in a way that the forest setting resonates to the history of the area, and the Native American inhabitants. And she herself is a descendant of the Mohicans.

“I want the festival to be an integral part of the town and the surrounding area. We draw mostly from the surrounding New York state area, and 50 percent come from within a two-hour radius of Cooperstown. We also get a lot of people coming up from Washington,” Zambello said.

The company has a 40-year history. It presented its first, abbreviated season in 1975, with four performances of “La bohème” in the Cooperstown High School auditorium. Twelve years later, the company opened the 850-seat Alice Busch Opera Theater at the Lake Otswego site. Ever since then, especially in the last few years, the company has grown in size, repertoire, variety of offerings and reputation.

There’s something heady about finding a company like this in a small town, the historic shrine to America’s Pastime. The Glimmerglass site is at once accessible and elegant with its scenic lake backdrop, stylish theater and sense of youthful energy. Here, it’s not your urban opera night out. You can ritz it up if you want, but informality is encouraged. “Blue jeans, khakis, informal — not that you can’t dress up if you want,” says Zambello.

This year’s season is characteristic of her touch. Since she took the reins as artistic director, she’s planned seasons with very specific goals. “Each year, we present a season that includes an American musical, a baroque opera, a contemporary work and an opera that’s somewhat obscure and rarely done.” In her first year, she brought in celebrated soprano Deborah Voigt to star in “Annie Get Your Gun.”

But wait … there’s more. The gifted rising-star bass-baritone Eric Owens (“The Flying Dutchman” at WNO this year), who gave a powerful, layered performance as “Macbeth,” will sing with tenor Lawrence Brownlee in a concert on Aug. 23. Voigt and mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade will give master classes Aug. 7 and 21, respectively. There’s also “Odyssey,” a world-premiere youth opera featuring the Glimmerglass Youth Chorus and members of its Young Artist Program, presented at the Cooperstown Arts Festival Aug. 11, 13, 18 and 20.

“We are thinking of Glimmerglass in terms of a destination experience,” Zambello said. “It speaks to being part of this place, in connecting and resonating with audiences and offering a number of different experiences. We are telling stories here, that’s the key to opera.”

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Stuart Ward Stars in ‘Once’ at the Kennedy Center
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On the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater’s stage, it’s not that easy to spot Stuart Ward among the crowd of musicians milling around with audience members on a set that very effectively imitates a Dublin pub. He’s in there somewhere among the crowd of fiddle players and violinists, the accordion player, the red-headed woman, the big publican and the assorted audience members who’ve braved it out and come waltzing on stage for the half hour or so prior to the start of “Once,” the Tony-Award winning musical having a road stop here through Aug. 16.

You’ll recognize him soon enough—he’s the guy, playing the “guy” part in this sweet, big-hearted but oddly un-sentimental show about a guy named just “guy,” love-lorn and locked up with his music, and a girl named “girl”, a spritely, blonde, optimistic Czech émigré and single mother who has inspiration written all over her, and how they connect through music surrounded by an endearing group of eccentrics and regular folks blissfully playing and making music through the course of things.

The minute Ward, with that rugged-sensitive two-day beard handsome-but-shy look, picks up a guitar, you, and the rest of the people in the play notice him. That guitar is “guy’s” connection to the world and his own heart and that of the audience’s, and, as in the course of things, the “girl’s” heart, too.

And from then on, you’re in their world, and the fact that half of the characters somewhat disconcertingly are from Prague seems perfectly natural, and that the “guy” and the “girl” should start to have feelings toward each other. That’s as natural as having a Guinness in a bar with similar, fizzy-feel-good results.

And that Ward should be at home with a guitar is pretty natural too. “I’ve been playing guitar since I was six,” Ward says in a telephone interview with The Georgetowner. “I’ve been doing that since seems like most my life.” On stage, the Englishman drifts easily into an Irish accent, and a little bit of a lilt remains over the phone.

Ward, who plays guitar for English rock legend Sir Cliff Richard, tried out for “Once”—formerly a cult independent small film turned into a West End musical-cum-Broadway musical—and was an understudy. “I got to go on a few times, but mostly I watched and waited and learned, and it was such a phenomenal show, so new and different.” When the national show was starting up, he was asked to take over the lead “boy” part in a show that won a ton of Tonys.

“It’s something very special that happens here,” he says. “There are actually a few shows like that in England, with that kind of music and process, musicians playing parts, they’re organic. Ask me, I think it’s the coming thing—there’s so much more room for the audience to react and even participate, this thing of being able to go up on the stage before and during intermission.”

“I love the music in this show, playing the tunes, singing the parts,” Ward said. He feels connected to the part of “guy.” Ward says, “He’s a little locked up and expresses himself with the music, that’s how he shows his emotions, and I guess I’m a little, a lot like that myself.” He says his co-star, Dani De Waal is “a gift,” adding, “She’s such a natural, it’s just so easy to work with her.”

This seems to true of almost all of the characters—there isn’t a one that doesn’t grab an instrument at one time or another, even the banker from Cork, who works up a pretty mean cello.

“The music’s a lot of things—there’s traditional—and non-traditional Irish music, folk music, thumping rock music, ballads, and somewhere in the audience, there’s something for someone.”

He loves touring. “I feel like I’m really seeing America,” he said. “It’s a lovely country, so varied, so generous.”

A natural actor, he becomes something else when he sings. “I have a musical career, so that’s a thing I’m passionate about.” He has a CD out called “Pictures.”

To watch him—and De Waal—perform the Oscar-winning song “Falling Slowly” is to see Ward take hold of himself. It’s like something pure coming out of his heart, a heart slowly filling up and sprouting wings musically.

If you check him out on YouTube, you can see that he takes to American roots naturally, by way of the tribe of Celts and Liverpool.

There’s a black and white video with Ward in the famous Sun Studios, picking up a guitar, surrounded by portraits of Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis, reaching all the pain and sorrow, the high notes, the heart of Roy Orbison’s “dreams.” He seems in the midst of rock and roll, the South’s Blues, all at home. As he is on stage, and not just “Once” in “Once”.

Trump Factor: Presidential Egotism Exposed
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Let’s talk about Donald Trump.

I know. I know. Let’s not.

Enough, too much, had already been said about Trump. It’s like some giant blather-a-thon that just won’t stop, and it’s all threatening to make a mockery of the endless political process of polls, primaries, candidate announcements, insults and counter-insults, and debates leading up to the 2016 elections.

It’s hard to resist the mockery of a process that has become like an out-of-control fat person trying to put ON weight. After all, just last week, the 100th Republican — or is it 20 or 75? — declared that he would be a candidate for president. Former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore, who announced that he didn’t want to be someone, he wanted to do something. On the scale of slogans, it’s nicely niched in the sandwich made by “If you see something, say something.” Gilmore apparently saw a light that formed into a hologram of President James Gilmore, and so he said something.

But Trump is a special case — yet not because he’s a candidate for the Republican nomination. Given Trump’s long life in the same light of ambition, a Trump run for the Republican nomination, an idea with which he has teased or tortured us, lo, these many years, was not improbable. Fur would fly, we thought. Things better left unspoken would be spoken, and loudly. The banners unfurled — no apologies, no mercy, no sense might have made a good slogan for his campaign.

We should have known. He treated his announcement like the season-opening episode of “The Apprentice,” dragging in paying customers from the streets to attend, become immigration-basher in chief with outrageous comments about Mexico sending us criminals and rapists. People — especially those who make up the much-desired Latino vote — were upset, angry and beside themselves. There were consequences: NBC threw out “The Apprentice,” but not “American Ninja,” and two chefs in Washington cancelled their bid for restaurants in the Trump Hotel that is being constructing in the Old Post Office on Pennsylvania Avenue. These were the sorts of things that might cost Trump, who also shared with us the fact that he was really, really rich.

How can you top that? You attack Senator John McCain, claim he’s not a hero, and then backtrack on that one, and add, “He was captured. I don’t like people who are captured.”

Sen. Lindsay Graham, who’s so far back in the polls that people have forgotten to spell Benghazi, criticized Trump, and the Donald promptly gave out his (Graham’s) cell phone number during a speech.

It’s easy to mock Trump, to make fun of his hair, and to dismiss him.

You’d think with all that — plus insulting many of the people in the GOP race — that there would be some blowback. There has: Trump is up 26 percent in some polls.

Pundits will tell you it’s because he’s touched a nerve among some Americans, the ones who stand up and salute when somebody gives the government, not a thumbs up, but the finger. He’s touched a nativist, anti-immigration nerve, going as far back as the Know Nothing Party of long ago, which was hostile to Irish immigrants. He’s a strong man in a country of weak politicians. He says what he means and is mean in what he says.

There is probably some truth in that. McCain called his supporters “crazies,” to which Trump took offense. Call them what you will, they comprise a large enough portion of the GOP hardliners to make people like Rubio, Bush the younger and others nervous. The truth is that the path to the GOP nomination for any moderate-sounding, or rational-sounding, or reasonable-sounding Republican is through that block of voters. The only Republican running for president actually to attack Trump on immigration was Texas governor Rick Perry, a man not shy about saying outrageous things, who said Trump was a “cancer on conservatism.”

Trump hasn’t even asked for President Obama’s birth, or that of anyone else. He is, in the end, an egotist of the most extreme sort. It would be easy to ignore him, except you can’t — and shouldn’t. Can you take him seriously?

Somebody should. The Republicans are getting extremely nervous about Trump’s posturing and his rise in the polls. The word is that the Koch brothers have cut him off from access to their political database. Trump says he’s refused to take their money.

Every Trump supporter — an Ethiopian cab driver here, an Iraq vet there, an out-of-work man here, people troubled by the Iran deal, the trade deal, or the rise of Putin and ISIS, the folks getting killed here, not out there — use one word to describe Trump: strength. He stands up to politicians, to Washington, to Obama, to — I don’t know — the IRS, to regulations, to immigrants from Mexico.

They see Trump in populist terms, almost as if his were a rags-to-riches story instead of a riches-to-riches story. Here is a man who stands up there and tells people, “You know, I’m rich. Very rich.” Can he put America or his money to work? Well, he has promised Sarah Palin a job in his administration. One down, millions of jobs to go.

We’ll see soon enough. The first debate, with its first and second tiers, is about to start — with the Washington Redskins’ first preseason game coming seven days later.

Magic of ‘The Magic Flute’ and Madness of Verdi’s ‘Macbeth’ at Glimmerglass
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The Glimmerglass Festival at Cooperstown—in its 40th anniversary at Cooperstown in upstate New York this year—has a very Washington vibe to it, and not just because festival director Francesca Zambello is also the artistic director of the Washington National Opera.

The first two  of this season’s four productions included a powerful and stirring performance by bass-baritone Simon Owens in the title role of Verdi’s “Macbeth” and noteworthy appearances by bass Solomon Howard in “The Magic Flute” as the magician Sarastro and as the ill-fated Banquo in “Macbeth.” Owens came from a triumphant starring role in this spring’s WNO production of  Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman” and Howard, a member of the WNO’s Domingo-Cafritz Young Artists Program, starred as Muhammad Ali in the new opera “Approaching Ali” two seasons ago at the Washington Opera, as well as appearing as Sarastro in the WNO’s production of “The Magic Flute.”  

In addition, Tazewell Thompson, who directs Vivaldi’s “Cato at Utica” here, is well-remembered as a veteran director at Arena Stage here, and Zambello directed “Candide” for the festival.

In the gorgeous lakeside setting at the Alice Busch Opera Theater, we saw the festival-opening productions of “The Magic Flute” and “Macbeth.” On the surface, you couldn’t imagine two operas that were as different in tone and story as these works by Mozart and Verdi.  Yet, in key ways, they had some distinct qualities in common. Most notably, the two productions shared unique and imaginative approaches to design and concept, and outstanding singing among the lead roles.

Director Madeline Sayet, working with sometimes startling sets by Troy Hourie and costumes by Kaye Voyce, gave us a version of the familiar and often done “Magic Flute” that seemed fresh in the re-telling and singing.  Conceptually, the production mixed and matched a nature-driven and magical set, resonant of a Native American look (which in turn echoed in the local Cooperstown history, where James Fenimore Cooper is a major figure).   It’s still the same but slightly newer story in which a bewildered hero named Tamino wanders in search of himself into a strange forest where, with the inept assistance of a local lad named Pagageno, he must go an a quest, win a princess, thwart the Queen of the Night and face the wizard Sarastro.

We’ve seen it a lot—at the WNO or in a movie version by Ingmar Bergman, no less.  But this production has a fluid speed, a winning hero in Sean Panikkar who has both charisma and singing ability to spare, and is matched by soprano as the Jacqueline Echols as the heroine Pamina.  Soprano So Young Park did not quite have the acting chops for the role of the Queen of the Night, but, vocally, she jumped at the opportunities in the role with rousing and bravura singing.

“Macbeth,” Verdi’s first encounter with Shakespeare, hasn’t often been seen in Washington, but this production, directed by Anne Bogart with an eye for the main dramatic chance as well as an eye for detail, shows you why composers often turn to Shakespeare for their source material and inspiration.  So do singers as well evidence in the spectacular performance by Owens in the title role, and he was well matched by soprano Melody Moore as Lady Macbeth.

Bogart offered up several thematic conceits that may have been unsettling to classicists. She split the witches into three groups of “apparitions,” operating in a setting that appeared to be 1930s or pre-or-post war England. The extras that we see often seem to be typical Londoners, in suits, with briefcases and baggage, coming from the market. They’re the ordinary folk that are used to unsettling effect in a second-act set piece which, shows the true suffering of the denizens of Macbeth’s tyrannical kingdom.

While Moore has her musically difficult and powerful moments, it is Owens who bears watching and listening to throughout. Decked out at first as a triumphant but brusque general heavy with medals, he has some uncertainty in his bearing at the beginning, it’s a slow process whereby Owens, with his acting and singing, gradually and frighteningly becomes Macbeth in full, no more so than in the famous Banquo’s ghost scene at a banquet where he repeatedly jumps on a table to joust with the ghost and victim of Macbeth, an apparition no one else can see.

Verdi—with music that offers the full range of emotion and style—does Shakespeare justice with a big assist from conductor Joseph Colaneri.  The libretto often stays strictly true to the Bard’s most famous speeches from “Macbeth.” If you’ve never heard Shakespeare truly sung, this is your chance.

All four operas, plus other offerings, will be performed through most of August.  For Washington opera lovers, it’s worth a trip to see what’s going on at Glimmerglass. “The Magic Flute” will be performed Aug. 7, 10, 14 and 23. “Macbeth” runs Aug. 8, 13, 15 17 and 22.  “Cato in Utica” will be performed Aug. 9, 16, 20 and 22, and “Candide” runs Aug. 6, 8, 11, 15 and 21.
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‘Dear Evan Hansen’: The Next Big Thing?
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In a Broadway theater world where the search for the next big thing is always on, “Dear Evan Hansen,” the new musical having a world-premiere run at Arena Stage through Aug. 15, has a lot going for it.

In many ways, it’s a thoroughly modern musical, with contemporary music, themes and central characters, and with rising theater artists at the helm. The show — about a young man who pretends to have been a close friend of a troubled high school student who’s committed suicide — is the work of a group of artists who’ve already made names for themselves on Broadway. And the cast is both an exciting and calming mixture of young and older pros.

Directed by Michael Greif, whose credits include “Grey Gardens,” “Next to Normal” (which was rebooted for Broadway at Arena Stage) and “If/Then,” starring Idina Menzel, which had its pre-Broadway run at the National Theater two seasons ago, “Dear Evan Hansen” has a book by Steven Levenson, who penned “The Unavoidable Disappearance of Tom Durnin” (staged at Roundabout Theatre), as well as scripting and co-producing the hit Showtime series “Masters of Sex.”

The music and lyrics are by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, noted for the hit “A Christmas Story: The Musical” and “Dogfight,” produced Off Broadway at Second Stage Theatre (and, coincidentally, being staged at the Keegan Theatre in Dupont beginning Aug. 22).

Ben Platt is headlining “Evan Hansen” as Evan Hansen, bringing some major movie mojo to the project after being the male lead in the hugely successful “Pitch Perfect” movies (1 and 2) and appearing with Meryl Streep in “Ricki and the Flash,” now playing at a Cineplex near you. He made his Broadway debut as Elder Cunningham in “The Book of Mormon.”

For Michael Park, playing alongside another Broadway veteran, Jennifer Laura Thompson, as the shaken parents of Connor, the teen lost to suicide, “Dear Evan Hansen” has been a unique experience. “Being in a show like this from the beginning, an original American musical with all that phrase implies, is exciting. It’s really being part of the process from the beginning, from inception, all the readings, the workshops, the rehearsal. And it’s still changing. This project remains electric and alive even now, because this is the first time it’s gone in front of a paying audience.”

The hope, of course, is that the show will eventually wind up on Broadway. Like some of the other shows involving the creative team of Greif, Levenson, Pasek and Paul, it’s part of an ongoing attempt, on Broadway and in the theater in general, to find the kind of musical that taps into the temper of the times and pushes the genre forward.

Park may be best known for playing Jack Snyder on the hugely popular daytime soap opera “As The World Turns,” for which he received two consecutive Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama.

His theater credits are varied and rich. He was in the original cast of “Smokey Joe’s Café” and played Billy in “Carousel,” the difficult part of Gooper in a recent production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and Mr. Bratt in “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” Off-Broadway, he was in “The Threepenny Opera” at A.C.T., “Hello Again” at Lincoln Center and “Violet” and “The Burnt Part Boys” at Playwrights Horizons.

He was also in the live television productions of “Peter Pan” and “The Sound of Music” on NBC. “That can be scary,” he said. “It’s sort of like theater in the sense that it’s live, but there’s no audience. But then again there’s an audience of millions.

“This is a very touching, moving show,” he said. “Playing a parent, well, I know about that, and it touches you deeply and easily. I’ve been very lucky to do the things I’ve done. I have a good and real life, and that keeps you grounded. I’ve been married for 20 years to my wife Laurie Nowak, who’s a music therapist, and we have three children, daughters Annabelle Jayne and Kathleen Rose and son Christopher Michael.” He understands all sorts of audiences, including the somewhat insular, fanzine world of soap operas. “Fame, celebrity, all of that is nice if it comes, but I’m an actor who loves the work, and loves my life.

“I think Broadway — especially the world of Broadway musicals — is always trying to find a new voice, a new way of creating work that touches an audience, for its music, for its drama, or style and theme. I’ve been around it a lot and it’s a crowded field. Those songs by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller were wonderful. I’ve done Rodgers and Hammerstein and ‘Business’ as well.

“I think this is a pretty special creation. It’s original, down to earth, it is romantic and moving at the same time. I love being a part of it, of getting to work with everybody here. It’s very much a part of our times, and in that sense it’s very alive, and I think it will attract that elusive new audience that’s out there.”

Keegan Theatre Comes Full (Dupont) Circle
• August 7, 2015

Barring unforeseen circumstances, by the time anyone reads this, the folks at the Keegan Theatre — which is to say, founders Mark A. Rhea and Susan Marie Rhea — will have come full circle.

Keegan will have settled into its newly and finally renovated theater on Church Street just off Dupont Circle, giving both a climax and new beginning to a story that had its start in the 1990s, when Keegan was a fledgling, nomadic enterprise with a not-always-certain future.

Their 2015-2016 season will have opened with a production of Tennessee Williams’s classic play “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” which resonates in American theater history, but also in a highly personal way both for the Rheas, who are co-directing, and the company.

“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” is famous on a larger stage as one of the great playwright’s bigger Broadway hits, and as a gaudy 1958 MGM film starring Elizabeth Taylor at her zenith, as Maggie the Cat in a negligee; Paul Newman as Brick, her boozing, haunted husband; and Burl Ives as the formidable (and dying) Big Daddy. The play won a Pulitzer Prize for Williams. The original 1955 production was directed by Elia Kazan and starred Barbara Bel Geddes as Maggie and Ben Gazzara as Brick; a 1974 revival, directed by Shakespeare Theatre Company Artistic Director Michael Kahn, starred Elizabeth Ashley as Maggie and Keir Dullea as Brick, with Fred “Munster” Gwynne as Big Daddy.

“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” was the first play Keegan staged, in 1997-1998. Not only that, but the last time the company took on the play, during its 2001-2002 season, Mark was Brick to Susan Marie’s Maggie the Cat.

“Oh, God, yes,” Susan Marie said. “This production, with all that’s going on, is so special to us. We’re opening the season with a play that began our history. We’re directing actors in roles that we played. All of this while the finishing touches to the renovations are still being done. And, of course, it means something very special on a personal level.”

We’re talking as the smell of fresh wood, long planks of wood on the side of the lobby, still lingers in the new theater.

“We had known each other, and worked together before [in the “The Taming of the Shrew”], but something happened during the course of the ‘Cat’ production,” she said.
“Our relationship deepened,” Mark said. “I mean, this play asks so much of you, you have to really dig deep and expose some parts of yourselves which under normal conditions people might never get to see. We fell in love, deeply.”

“He proposed and, I think perhaps a year later, we were married. We’ve been together ever since,” said Susan Marie.

So part of the story of Keegan — actors falling in love while acting in a searing, emotionally draining play — is a love story. A love story that includes the building of a company, regular tours in Ireland (Galway, County Killarney, Cork), staging plays and making theater in a certain way, with each bringing particular gifts to the process.
Mark, whose background is Irish, has a deep passion for Irish theater, plays and playwrights. “They’re dark and funny, and character driven,” he says.

“We’ve almost always done the Irish tour,” says Susan Marie. “We take American classics — Tennessee Williams, Miller, Mamet, Albee — and bring them to Ireland. In Europe, and for sure in Ireland, that’s what people really want to see and experience — that is, our classic plays — and, of course, many people have seen the ‘filums,’ as they say it.”

In the Washington area, “We’ve been everywhere,” she says. “Arlington, Northern Virginia, in churches and schools. It was something of a vagabond existence, but we built an audience over the years, and we have an audience now.”

The theater on bucolic Church Street, which used to be a private school, has attracted an eclectic set of companies over the years: outliers from the suburbs like the award-rich Synetic Theatre, theaters without homes, and New Playwrights. Keegan had been there off and on until, a year or so ago, in the midst of a full and successful season, the opportunity arose to buy the theater for over $2 million, accomplished with a special fund drive.

Renovation proceeded apace, though not necessarily with ease. Even as the opening approached, there were still things to be done, permits to finalize and agonizing details to finish off. But the new theater, with more open air and glass-enclosed views of the leafy setting — not to mention enough bathrooms for everyone — is a big improvement on the past, without losing the most important thing Keegan offered as a theater environment: intimacy.

“Cat” will run through July 25. Other shows in the 10-play season include a new musical, “Dogfight,” in August; “The Dealer of Ballynafeigh”; “An Irish Carol”; and Green Day’s “American Idiot.”

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At the New Keegan: an Intimate ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’
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One thing you can say about the folks at the Keegan Theatre: they don’t shy from a challenge.

To inaugurate its new and permanent digs at the Keegan on Church Street in Dupont Circle, co-directors Mark and Susan Marie Rhea chose to open with Tennessee Williams’s  still startling and ferocious 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” in all its three-hours-plus fury, a play that on scale of one to ten in terms of tasking and testing actors and directors as well as the patience and will of the audience is around an 11.

If that wasn’t enough, the official opening performance July 30 heightened the difficulty level with the cancellation of two preview performances due to weather difficulties that occurred during the last finishing touches to the renovation.

That probably accounted for a certain under-rehearsed quality to parts the production, but it also ratcheted up the raw emotional qualities of some of the longer scenes, and the Keegan’s gift and history for intimate directness. What you got was a true, authentic version of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,”  which in terms of its history is a play full of the ghosts of legendary past productions and a brilliant, if entirely muddled all-star movie version to haunt actors and directors. 

The renovation includes new entrance and a glossy and glassy outdoor sheen, plus the addition of several new rest rooms throughout the theater, an addition that was entirely welcome for a play lasting three hours plus, three acts with two intermission.  

It’s a taxing proposition for an audience, but this is the reward: the realization in the end of just what a forceful masterpiece of American theater this Tennessee Williams play is, what a gift for language, mixing crudeness with poetic imagery, he had, how he managed to peel the onioned layers of lies the characters hold savagely close, and how this more than 60-year-old play resonates so sharply today.

The Keegan stage has remained the same—it makes any production an exercise in intimacy. With the characters in “Cat,” this is a proximity that can sear.  

Here we are again in the brilliantly white bedroom, occupied by the self-described Maggie the Cat in the most alluring slip in stage history, holding forth, pacing more like a lioness than a mere cat, laying out the Southern situation, gathered here in this thousands of acres-estates for the birthday of Big Daddy, her husband’s overbearing father. 

Big Daddy may be dying, but he thinks he’s dodged a cancer bullet.   At stake is love and hatred and Big Daddy’s estate.  Maggie wants it for herself and her husband Brick, haunted by the death of his best friend Skipper,  refusing to have relations with his wife, guzzling booze by the shot glass at an alarming rate until he hears the  click that stops his pain.  His lawyer brother Gooper and his snooping, snooty wife Mae have produced a passel of what Maggie calls “no-neck monsters,” five kids with another on the way.  Big Mama, strident, emotional frets over Big Daddy’s health.

Williams, a gay man and Catholic son of the South, takes his time with the characters—in a long first act, Maggie, played with  the intensity of a striving but unsatisfied woman, using her Southern accent like a musical story-telling instrument by company member Brianna Letourneau, dominates the stage, alternatively haranguing and trying to seduce her husband Brick, trying to prod and provoke him into life. 

When Big Daddy arrives, he comes on with strength, bolstered by news of an apparent escape from the Big C judgement, and he revels and reeks of the life force that he carries with him—he’s an inhaler, a dominate storm force. It’s a kinetic performance by Kevin Adams.  It’s not in the big, bigger-than-life bigness of a Burl Ives or even James Earl Jones. It’s mainly real and layered.  Adams makes an aria out of storming into the room and yelling, “What’s that smell? I smell . . . mendacity.” He lingers over the little-used word, as if it were a bomb that was stealthily building to explosion.

This “Cat” is directed and laid out to the point where every word counts. You strain to listen and hear it right, accompanied by the atmospherics of that family house, veranda, walkways, voices heard from outside, a storm exploding, servants walking in and out singing fragments of gospel songs, peeking in, passing by. 

In this scene—once occupied by the likes of blue-eyed Paul Newman in the movie version—Kevin Hasser is a great deflector as Brick. He pushes aside accusations, the allure of Maggie, Big Daddy’s attempts to push him into action.  That understated quality to this Brick is as haunting as every drinks he pours and downs.

The production isn’t perfect. It’s rough around the edges, but never at the core. Sometimes, the sheer length of it can bludgeon the audience member, who’s bearing witness.  

You watch this, and you see that has the quality of a classic play. It has the ability to drag you in and make you hear the music of our times. 

The movie version muddled the issue of the true nature of Brick’s relationship with Skipper, which appeared to be homosexual, even though Brick denies it.  “No,” he says. “Not that. People hate that. It wasn’t that. People think it’s disgusting.”  That phrase just a few days after gay marriage became the law of the land resonates mightly.  So does the plantation mentality and atmosphere in which Big Daddy strides so confidently, given recent events.

Mostly, much of this production is a gift, not only to the audience, but to Tennessee Williams.

“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” runs July 7 through July 25 at the Keegan Theater at 1724 Church St. NW. 
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Doctorow, Bikel: ‘Larger Than Life’ Luminaries Who Enlightened Us
• August 6, 2015

Thinking of the novelist E.L. Doctorow and the actor and musical performer Theodore Bikel, who passed away this week at the ages of 84 and 91, respectively, the phrase “larger-than-life” comes to mind, for different reasons.

Doctorow built a prize-winning literary career that was both critically acclaimed and popularly embraced, with novels that often emerged transformed as films and theater works.  Bronx, N.Y.-born Doctorow lived a literary life—he wrote 12 novels,  several books of short stories and a book of  essays on literature.

He was a teacher or a “writer-editor-professor,” as one bio summed up. His was a life attached and garnished with honors—the National Book Critics Circle Award for his novels “Ragtime,” “Billy Bathgate” and “The March” and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Fiction.

This kind of literary life is the fodder for the work of critics, academics and literati, but it did not stop there. His novels not only made best books lists but also bestseller lists—and were embraced by the public, either in and of themselves or as popular works on stage and screen.  His output and works were a more than modest achievement, they would put him reputation-wise in the ranks of great American novelists when that  phrase was still resonant of a desired achievement among writers, although it may be less so today. 

With Doctorow, there’s a feeling of a man who worked stubbornly, often inspirationally at his craft in a way that did not require celebrity or fame. But his works—the novels—were something else again. They had heft, an epic feel to them, without being of great length in terms of words and pages and even actual, physical weight.  You could carry all of them in a grocery bag without risking a stroke.  But their effect and result was a kind of intricately familiar waltz conducted by his creations—some of them historical figures—with the factual tropes of historical eras and actual events. 

These relatively slim volumes embraced and riffed on the execution of the Rosenbergs, (“The Book of Daniel”),  America’s coming of age during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt (the amazingly thick and elliptical “Ragtime”), the depression-era New York World’s Fair as a quasi-boy-coming-of-age piece (“World’s Fair”),  a boy’s dangerous infatuation with gangster Dutch Schultz (“Billy Gathgate”) and Sherman’s ruinous (for the South) to the sea (“The March”), among others.

In those novels, fictional characters mixed it up with historical characters,  in ways that seemed plausible, but were often fictionalized and in so doing, managed to capture the spirit of an age, a decade, a time in ways that seemed richly packed with everything the times contained.  They played on what the reader knew and what he didn’t know. These novels were a form of enticement, the work of the carny barker with a spiel of bright shiny promises and elusive meanings.  There was music in those novels.

“Ragtime” was the most emblematic, characteristic of Doctorow’s works. It fairly sang with a changing, robust, dramatic times without being overly dramatic or operatic.  Here was the striving American family, dreaming big dreams, but unsettled by the changing times. Here were the beginnings of the movie industry. Here was Houdini, the injustices of child labor, immigrants coming ashore full of energy. Here was anarchism, a black man running afoul of already settled Irish immigrants, busting with steam and bigotry.  The book seemed to contain almost every rising wave of the times covered in a style that was sharp-edged. It had the feel and emotional impact of a flowing thread made up of a series of short poems and songs.   Carl Foreman turned “Ragtime” into a masterful film (with Norman Mailer in a bit part, James Cagney in his last role as a New York City Police Commissioner, Donald O’Connor as a song-and-dance man, among the large cast).  “Ragtime” would later become a Broadway musical—twice—including a ground-up production from the Kennedy Center.

Theodore Bikel—who appeared frequently in Washington, D.C.—in road companies of “Fiddler on the Roof” and in plays at Theater J—may not have a “Ragtime” equivalent in his career (although “Fiddler,” even though it was originated by Zero Mostel, would certainly qualify), but his entire life and career was bigger than life. 

Born in Vienna, Bikel made his first appearance as Tevye the Milkman (non-musical) in Tel Aviv. His first film was “The African Queen” (Bogart-Hepburn) in 1951, and he had an Oscar-nominated role in Stanley Kramer’s “The Defiant Ones.” He spoke nine languages and could perform in 24 languages with an accent in hundreds more. He often played Germans and Russians.  He performed Tevye more than 2,000 times, probably a record for the part.  He was married four times. 

He created the role of Captain von Trapp in the original Broadway music production of “The Sound of Music” opposite Mary Martin. He appeared in 2005 in a highly praised production of “The Disputation” at Theater J in downtown D.C. 

He described himself as a liberal Jewish activist. He appeared in the Frank Zappa film, “200 Motels.” On television, he was in “The Twilight Zone,” “Gunsmoke,” “Law and Order,” Mickey Spillane’s “Mike Hammer,” “All in the Family,”, “Columbo” and “Charlie’s Angels” and numerous versions of “Star Trek.”

Saying all that—Bikel’s CV includes a memorable role in “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming,” and training at the Royal Academy in London, a small part in “A Streetcar Named Desire” directed by Laurence Olivier.

There was another whole career: Theodore Bikel was also a folk singer, playing the guitar, singing Jewish folk from Russia and songs and protest songs. He was co-founder of the Newport Folk Festival (with Pete Seeger, Oscar Brand, George Wein and Harold Leventhal) and took the stage in 1963 with Seeger, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary and the 21-year-old Bob Dylan.

He was a long-time civil rights activist. One could go on and on. 

The life, the music, the parts, the sum of it all, the passion, the liberality of feeling and the largeness of soul made Theodore Bikel: bigger than life its own self. Ditto for Doctorow. 

GALA Pushes the Envelope with New Musical, ‘Las Polacas’
• July 16, 2015

Over the 40-some years of its existence, GALA Hispanic Theatre, under the leadership of founders Hugo and Rebecca Medrano, has proven to be an eclectic institution that, while culling Spanish-speaking culture for iconic works, has also pushed the envelope with productions of new ones.

Still, in all of its history of bringing receptive Washington audiences classic plays by Spanish authors — from Lope De Vega to Lorca — as well as newer works from Latin America, and a treasure trove of musical and family presentations, it’s likely that the Medranos and company haven’t tackled something quite as challenging and unusual as the show now playing at the GALA stage in the renovated Tivoli in Columbia Heights.

That would be “Las Polacas — The Jewish Girls of Buenos Aires,” an edgy, salsa- and tango-tempered musical about … sex trafficking. The “Polacas” are young Jewish girls from Poland who were lured to Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital city, by false promises of marriage or work in the 1920s.

Like GALA’s website, the production is bilingual, Spanish and English — GALA, incidentally, stands for Grupo de Artistas Latinoamericanos — with projected English subtitles. Performances continue through June 28.

Written by Argentinian playwright Patricia Suárez-Cohen, with music by Mariano Vales, the show is a commissioned production, which is to say that it’s a ground-up work by GALA, a fact that, alone, should make the project daunting for all concerned.

Recently, we talked to founder Hugo Medrano, as well as Samantha Dockser and Martín Ruíz, two critical members of the cast of “Las Polacas,” at the theater.

“We recognized that this could be a major challenge for us,” said Medrano, who seems to thrive on challenges. “The subject is not the most likely for a musical, for one thing, but it has a historic importance, in that this actually occurred, long before people talked about such things and gave it a name. We wanted to make a musical to give it a flavor, a theme, a setting — which is Argentina and Poland in the 1920s. It’s the kind of thing that needs to find its audience, not just among Jewish people, but a universal one.”

It probably helps that Medrano is a native of Argentina, as is Ruíz, the striking actor who plays Schlomo, the seductive protagonist who helps lure young girls to Argentina, where a life of prostitution awaits.

“The most important thing was that we had to find the right young actress to play the part of Rachela. She had to be the right person, believable right off the bat. She had to embody that part,” Medrano said.

And that’s how they chose Samantha Dockser, a 20-year-old senior BFA acting major at the University of Miami, in Coral Gables. Dockser, who is from McLean, Virginia, is performing her first professional role — the lead role in the production.

With dark long hair and fine features, Dockser has the kind of unassuming loveliness that a girl like Rachela requires. “I saw the notice for the audition and I thought, maybe I could do this, and it didn’t hurt to try.” She got the part.

“She’s a young girl, an innocent, and she is vulnerable to a man like Schlomo, who’s charming and handsome and all of that — and she has no idea what is going to happen to her,” Dockser said. “But she’s also strong and defiant. I can relate to her age, but in terms of the reality of the situation, that’s empathy and imagination.”

“It’s difficult material,” she said. “Ruíz’s character hits me at one point, and I was worried that my dad would get upset watching that. But he understood what was going on.”

For his part, Ruíz is glad to be reunited with GALA (where he appeared in “Momia en el Closet: The Return of Eva Peron” in 2011). “It is a wonderful place to work. The projects are unusual. The people are like a family,” he said through a translator. “I think, you know, that Schlomo presents himself as a kind of romantic revolutionary or anarchist, you know, changing society. And that can be appealing to a girl like Rachela. But it’s her mother who essentially sells her to him.”

On stage you can see a kind of mountain of mementos of the girls’ former life in the villages of Poland: luggage, a toy ocean liner, clothing and books, and the like.

Being here, in this theater, you become mindful of Medrano’s and GALA’s long history and how the Tivoli venue has changed and solidified GALA. The company — which has also presented music, including salsa, flamenco and tango — has occupied many spaces, but it only obtained a permanent home, in 2005, after it won a bid to become part of the renovated Tivoli.

In earlier years, Medrano often acted in the plays, winning a Helen Hayes Awards for best actor in a resident play, for his star turn in “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”

Staging “Las Polacas” may seem like a challenge and something of a brave choice, but it’s also emblematic of how Medrano and the people who have supported GALA — audiences, artists, fundraisers and trustees — have gotten this far, enriching the city with a unique tapestry of Hispanic performing arts. [gallery ids="102112,133813,133811" nav="thumbs"]

Big Names, Emotional Speeches Mark N Street Village Luncheon
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At times, the annual N Street Village Empowerment Luncheon June 18 at the Mayflower Hotel felt like a buzzing, high-energy convention of a major national sorority. There were women everywhere, all kinds of women, united in a mission of making people’s lives better.

There were retired nurses, retired psychologists and retired history professors, and there were volunteers and board members and donors, and there was Mayor Muriel Bowser, promising with force to end homelessness and lauding the rising reputation of the city over which she presides. There was singer Jennifer Holliday, the original “Dreamgirl” girl, belting out her signature song “And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going.”

There were speeches by Pepco exec Debbi Jarvis, and Schroeder Stribling, the ebullient and impassioned Executive Director of N Street Village.

And there were direct, honest, and dramatic talks by Cheryl Barnes and Gisele Clark, both of them alumnae of N Street Village, two women of many who are the reason N Street Village exists. Barnes described how she was homeless and addicted to drugs and alcohol for some 30 years of her life. “I stand before you 24 years recovered and it is a miracle that I stand here. I sit at a table of hope and vision as a former homeless representative.” “You,” she said, indicating the audience members of volunteers, contributors, directors, workers and supporters, “ are giving life and hope to all the women who come to N Street Villages for hope, sustenance and help.”

Clark, likewise an alumnae, talked about addiction and relapse, detailing her journey through N Street Village whuch ultimately led to permanent housing and fall classes at UDC.

N Street Village is a long-standing organization which empowers homeless and low-income women to “claim their highest quality of life by offering a broad spectrum of services and advocacy in an atmosphere of dignity and respect.”

Here is what N Street Village does:

– It is the largest provider of women-only services for D.C.’s homeless population, serving more than 60 percent of the city’s adult female homeless population.

– It provides a self-contained continuum of supportive services and housing in order to help women achieve stability and improved quality of life.

– It focuses on creating a safe and welcoming community where women are empowered to make positive changes in their lives.

The women who come to N Street Village, often in the beginning for respite, rest, and peace, suffer from mental illness, addition, have physical, sexual, and trauma histories. Some are living with HIV, most have chronic health problems and half are over 50 years old and one in three have no source of income.

N Street Village provides basic needs, including food, clothing, crisis support, integrated health services , housing, and a path to employment. [gallery ids="102123,133751,133747,133753,133756" nav="thumbs"]