Gary Tischler • 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"]

Gary Tischler •

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"]

Gary Tischler •

The Chamber Dance Project, the innovative dance company founded by celebrated choreographer Diane Coburn Bruning, made a spectacular debut and became a D.C. resident with its inaugural season here last year at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater.

The company is in the midst of a second flurry of programs in year two through June 28 at the Lansburgh Theatre, where it’s in-residence, with a program oriented towards imaginative innovation of the kind you’re not likely to see anywhere else.

The program is a heady brew sparked by the presence of a roster of solo dancers from companies in Cincinnati, Atlanta, Milwaukee and Washington performing world premiere works with contemporary ballets and dances by four choreographers, complete with a live string quartet. The works are classic in echo and resonance and contemporary in style with athleticism, sensuality, and “arresting emotional shifts.”

The Chamber Dance Project will be performing two programs, including a world premiere of choreographer Darrell Grand Moultrie’s “Wild Swans,” founder Diane Coburn Bruning’s “Arranged,” and D.C. premieres of Ann Carlson’s “Four Men in Suits” and Bruning’s “Journey.” In addition, they will be putting on Bruning’s powerful “Exit Wounds” and “Time Has Come” as well as Jorge Amarante’s tango-flavored “Sur.”

Every performance includes CDP’s popular “structured improv”, in which the troupe builds a dance from audience suggestions.

There will also be house concert’s with the string quartet, open rehearsals, and preview performance As part of the group’s outreach organization, the CDP is donating 300 tickets to area youth and veterans

Dancers include Francesca Dugarte, Morgann Rose and Luis R. Torres from the Washington Ballet, Jacob Bush from the Atlanta Ballet, Chris Lingner from the Cincinnati Ballet, and Davit Hovhannisyan and Luz San Miguel from the Milwaukee Ballet.

Program A—“Wild Swans”, Arranged”, “Four Men in Suits” and “Timer Has Come” will be performed Friday at 7:30 p.m., and Sunday at 7:30 p.m. at the Lansburgh Theatre.

Program B—“Journey”, “Wild Swans”, “Exit Wounds” and “Sur” will be performed tonight at 7:30 p.m., and Saturday at 1 p.m. (Family Matinee Program) and 7:30 p.m. [gallery ids="102125,133742" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

It’s 10th anniversary time for the Capital Fringe Festival, the annual summer performing arts festival that keeps on moving and keeps on staying.

Ever since the Capital Fringe Festival—which runs from July 9 to August 2 — appeared in and around Washington ten years ago as one of the many offsprings of the Edinburgh, Scotland, Fringe Festival, it has made yearly strides to become something more than a fringe thing.   It has become, by now, an imbedded, always fresh, always surprising enterprise, part of the Washington performing arts community, and was so rewarded with a Helen Hayes Award not so long ago.

Every year, sometimes by the skin of its teeth, the Fringe presents its gaudy package of theater and performing arts baubles, the work of a large, eclectic group of theater and performing arts artists and groups from Washington and all over the country.  Here are the classics reworked, new one-man and one-woman shows about everything under the sun, bawdy comedy,  clowns, new plays with new views done in new styles, music, dance, burlesque and vaudeville. 

Surprise is always the key element, but there is a certain spirit involved, too—an almost breath-taking inviting tolerance of the different, the new, the never-heard-of before.  In the past, the venues have spread all over the place, downtown, in Southwest, in bars, churches, art spaces, adding another eclectic layer to the proceedings.  

Under the leadership of co-founder  and president and chief executive officer Julianne Brienza, the festival has moved to at first survive, then branch out, preserve, and moves forward, and the festival has managed to do so with aplomb.  This year, it seems almost permanent after the festival purchased a former gallery space as its headquarters in Northeast Washington at 1358 Florida Ave., NE, which serves as the Logan Fringe Art Space, and one of the venues (actually two, since there are two theaters in the space) for the festival.

With that move, the festival—game and big as ever with 129 productions spread out across three areas plus additional venues—has became a part of the locus of where a good chunk of D.C. change is taking place, which might seem perfect for the possible audience of the festival, a younger-skewing audience in search of the irreverent, the informal, the brand new, the amusing and serious, which might speak to the times we lives in and the upcoming weeks as well.

Essentially, the Fringe Festival will be centered around three neighborhoods—Trinidad, Brookland and H Street NE or the H Street Corridor. These are all burgeoning, rapidly changing and culture and restaurant-bustling neighborhoods, in fairly close proximity to each other.  Trinidad will haves the Fringe Festival headquarters, including Trinidad Theatre. Other venues include the Tree House Lounge at 1006 Florida Ave., NE, Jenks & Son at 910 Bladensburg Road NE, the Gilbert C. Eastman Studio Theatre at Gallaudet University, 800 Florida Ave. NE and the Playground also at Gallaudet University.

Brookland venues will include the Morris & Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation Theater at the Dance Place, at 3225 8th St. NE, the Hyman M. Perlo Studio at Dance Place, the Brookland Artspace Lofts Studio at 3305 8th St NE, banished? ARTillery (that’s how it is written), at 716 Monroe St. NE and Ward Hall at Catholic University.

H Street NE, where the trolley car is still not operating in a hot neighborhood, Fringe Festival are centered around the Atlas Performing Arts Center at 1333 H St. NE, sites of many Fringe performances last year, and at the Argonaut at 1433 H St. NE and Gallery O on H, at 1354 H St. NE.

Other venues around the District include the D.C. Columbia Arts Center in Adams Morgan, the Mead Theatre Lab downtown at Flashpoint, the Japanese American Memorial at New Jersey Avenue, Louisiana Ave and D St. NW, the Anacostia Arts Center at 1231 Good Hope Road SE and the Pinch at 3548 14th St. NW.

According to the festival website, there are 129 performing arts group schedule to do their thing, many of them are from Washington, D.C., Virginia and Maryland, but not exclusively. Surprise is probably the order of the day, but the name of the groups and some of their offerings might give you a hint of things to come—plus there are musical offerings at Fringe with late night cabaret and a music in the library program.

Here’s a dash of what’s up thoroughly at random:

“Belle and the Beasties” from the Actors Repertory Theatre; “Vanek Unleashed,” Alliance for New Theatre.org; “Sonata: The Naked Project” from Annexus; “Augustus the Sissy” from Dana Galloway; “It’s a Circus Out There,” the Federal Theatre Project;  “District of Cara” from Local Yogurt Productions; “Neighborhood 3:  Requisition of Doom” from the new Molotov Theatre Company; a Shakespeare sendup called “To Err is Falstaff” from Falstaff production and “The Winter’s Tale” from We Happy Few Productions; “The Second Coming of Joan of Arc” from Theatre Prometheus; “The Giant Turnip” from Beech Tree Puppets; “From Seven Layers to a Bikini Top in Less Than Five Hours” from Andrea Schell from California; “Bond, An Unauthorized Parody” from Tasty Monster Productions; “Dancing Ophelia” from Trajectory Dance Project; “Wombat Drool” from Uncle Funsy Productions; “The Last Burlesque” from Pinky Swear Productions of Virginia;  “The Life of King John: The Reprisal” from the Rude Mechanicals of Virginia. 

That’s just a few from a list of 129.  The rest you should be able to find by visiting the Capital Fringe Festival, along with ticket prices—reasonable, more than, times, locations, information about the shows, principals, and so on. And on.
[gallery ids="102135,133242,133248" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler • July 2, 2015

Robert Kellett van Leer, most recently managing director of the heralded European arts consulting firm Wonderbird, will fill the newly created position of senior vice president of artistic planning at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Following other recent hirings, van Leer, who has dual American and Dutch citizenship, will complete Kennedy Center President Deborah F. Rutter’s senior management team. He begins work July 6.

“Robert brings a wealth of multidisciplinary arts experience and creative leadership to the table, and I am excited to partner with him and our creative curatorial team of administrators and artistic leaders to shape the artistic vision for the center in the years to come,” said Rutter. “His commitment and innovative approach to the artistic endeavor will build and expand on our mission to provide innovative programming that reflects the core of John F. Kennedy’s legacy.”

At Wonderbird, based in London, van Leer did strategic cultural consulting with preeminent performing-arts and visual-arts organizations and philanthropic corporate clients. Previously, he was managing director of Nederlands Dans Theater, one of the world’s leading dance companies, where he increased revenues threefold, managed a budget of $15 million and supervised a staff of 110.

Earlier, he was head of music at London’s Barbican Centre, transforming its concert hall into a creative center for the commission, curation and presentation of global music in a multi-arts context. He also held positions with Wigmore Hall in London and Lincoln Center in New York.

“To work with the extraordinary artists and experienced, talented programming professionals at the Center across such a wide spectrum of the performing arts is a particular delight for me,” said van Leer. “Working together alongside our colleagues in education, as well as partners old and new, will provide the creative opportunities to manifest the voice of the Center for a new era while respecting the original vision.”

Gary Tischler • July 1, 2015

The singer-songwriter-memoirist-performer-author-rocker Storm Large is a sort of gaudy cruise ship that has sailed exotic, dangerous and, naturally, stormy musical (and probably personal) waters for a number of years. Large — her given name is Susan Storm Large — is a star to anybody who’s encountered her, and a legend in places like San Francisco and Portland,
Oregon, where she lives and performs.

But Storm Large and Frank Sinatra? The combination hardly seems likely for someone who quite successfully fronted a rockish-punkish-and-beyond band called The Balls (as well as other bands including “Storm and Her Dirty Mouth”), who was a contestant on “Rock Star Supernova,” who blogs on her website in blunt and honest terms and has written and performed her harrowing, affecting memoir “Crazy Enough.” She is an American original.

But then, so was Sinatra. Large will be part of “Let’s Be Frank: The Songs of Frank Sinatra,” organized by NSO Pops director Steve Reineke. The tribute will feature Reineke and piano man Tony DeSare conducting — and what Reineke terms his own “rat pack” of swell singers, including Ryan Silverman and Frankie Moreno, in addition to Large. The show will be presented in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall June 5 and 6 at 8 p.m.

“I always liked the whole idea of the Rat Pack and Frank Sinatra, all those kinds of very cool atmospherics,” Large said in a telephone interview. “I have an enormous amount of respect for him as a singer. I think he was the kind of guy who was always prepared. He trusted the lyrics, he made sure that he got the emotional truth of the songs. That way, his approach was blue-collar, which is where he came from.”

It’s not the first time Large has been at the Kennedy Center, a huge venue when compared to places like the popular Joe’s Pub in New York and clubs in Portland and San Francisco. She was here in 2012 with the eclectic pop group Pink Martini and the NSO Pops, performing to sold-out audiences.

“She was remarkable on that occasion, and she’s a remarkably talented singer,” Reineke said of Large. “Back then, she had to appear, on very short notice, for the group’s lead singer China Forbes who was ill.”

“She’s a fantastically gifted singer, and she’s grown so much—from rock to jazz to cabaret,” Reineke added. “She’s brave and tough and very sweet.”

She’ll be singing duets, songs like “Come Rain or Come Shine,” as well as solo numbers, notably “My Way” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”

“I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” by Cole Porter song is about obsessive love. “I don’t do it like most people. It’s usually upbeat, confident, buoyant. Mine is a little different — it’s more like you have this big love that you can’t get rid of. It’s like you can’t stop thinking about it. It’s like a woman who sits in her car in the rain watching her lover. She’s a little like a stalker.”

“I’ve Got You Under My Skin” is also part of “Le Bonheur,” a remarkable album which she produced last year with Robert Taylor and musicians James Beaton, Scott Weddle, Greg Eklund and Matt Brown. It’s almost a natural flow from her rocker days to Pink Martini to this album, which astonishes with its selection of songs, from Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart tunes to “Unchained Melody,” a longing song which the Righteous Brothers turned into a megahit, “Saving All My Love for You” by the iconoclastic Tom Waits and the charming, puffy-go-lightly “Satellite of Love” by Lou Reed.

There are also two songs written by Large herself, “Stand Up For Me,” a straight-up inspirational anthem, and the moving “A Woman’s Heart,” somewhere between a love song and a rueful lament.

Songwriting is yet another aspect of this queen of creative multitasking. She’s a great storyteller, intelligent and cogent in her opinions, awfully funny and often profane.

Large comes from Southborough, Massachusetts, attended a famous private school, where her father Henry was a history teacher and football coach, and went to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. “I think sometimes my parents weren’t sure when I went out the door where I was going — to school or running away with the circus.”

You can track her career and persona erratically on the Internet. On YouTube, watch her in a club in Mill Valley doing not just the song but the lead-up to “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” a 1983 super-hit which shows off Large’s playful, rocker side, as she tells the story of a song written on a napkin. She’s a natural-born clown; she loves making faces. And she’s hard to ignore as a presence, a dazzling, six-foot, hard-striding blond woman whose voice is as big as her shadow.

“I think you grow up a little as you go along, the things you can do, what you want to explore,” she said. “You go deeper into the music. You live your life more. I’m 46 now. You can’t do 300 shows a year all of the time.”

Listening to her talk, reading hair-raising parts of her memoir, seeing her on YouTube and listening to that voice, you get how she relates to and is at home in the deepest part of Frank Sinatra’s songs.

Her voice — like her walk and talk — is rangy, and in its push to put emotional truth out there is marked by her persona, her experience of the sex, drugs and rock-and-roll life, as well as the highs and lows of vocalizing. Her voice really gets up there, but it’s hard to say whether it can break a wine glass. For sure, when Susan Storm Large sings, she can break your heart.

Gary Tischler • June 25, 2015

In our daily lives, news cycles never end—something (awful, strange, crazy, violent, awesome) happens and the news goes viral one night, dominates the next day, is analyzed and commented on ad infinitum and slithers away, replaced by the next story, the next piece of oddness, the next disaster, the next next.    

Hello Bruce, Good grief, it’s Caitlin,  goodbye to both, hello Donald—you know I’m really rich-Trump, (was that Jeb Bush announcing his presidential run?), hello Miss Dolezal, we hardly knew you, but it’s hardly a black or white issue, and you say it is, goodbye Rachel—did you see that no-hitter at Nationals Park?

But sometimes, a story—an event, really—stops everything and a kind of murmuring, shocked stillness ensues in its wake, starting slowly, gaining force, and then, as hours and days pass, and the aftermath itself becomes the event,  all the other things—we’ve seen fire and we’ve seen rain—seem to melt away, leaving us at a watershed in time.

That’s what happened last Wednesday, when the news trickled out slowly, out of Charleston, South Carolina, that there had been a shooting at a historically black church that evening, and it evolved to a full blown, shock and ghost-inducing headline: “Nine Dead in Shooting at Black Church in Charleston, S.C.”  A similar headline greeting morning coffee drinkers in Charleston itself, its two papers carrying the news, which was unfortunately and horribly and  ironically, partially hidden by a sticky ad for a gun shop and shooting range.

The alleged shooter turned out to be a  21-year-old, white high school drop-out named Dylann Roof of Eastover, South Carolina, who was apprehended by local police on Thursday, at least partly due to being identified by relatives.  The victims were parishioners at members of a bible study group at Emmanuel AME Church, the South’s oldest African American Church. 

Roof, as it turned out, held strong white supremacist views and apparently wrote a manifesto about his beliefs which warned against the country being taken over by blacks and minorities, including Hispanics and Jewish people.  

The very deed brought up ghosts that had always haunted this country, where slavery was considered its original sin.  They were ghost from slavery days, Jim Crow days, routine lynching in segregation days and nights, the shocking violence done during the high water marks of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s including a bombing that killed little girls in an Alabama church. It made false the claims that racist times were a thing of the past with the coming of America’s first black president, a notion that had already begun to re-take hold in the wake of a series of fatal police shootings of black men and demonstrations in the wake of incidents that ran from Missouri to New York City to Baltimore, which was struck by anger and fiery demonstrations and looting.

Yet, the shootings—which have been detailed elsewhere and dramatically on television, blotted out the sun and the sum of all other things, including a enormously influential papal encyclical on the environment and income disparity—stopped time itself for a time and left everyone—black and white, everyone with the remarkable effect of seeking solace with each other, not apart, but together.

What else to do in times like that, with the losses so familiar for the victims and their relatives looked and behaved like the kinds of people whose lives we could aspire to, no matter what our skin color?

They embodied decency, generosity of spirit, forgiving natures, they were all about love and family and so it seemed that in South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag—at least, for now—is still allowed to fly freely at the State Capitol, whites, ordinary people and the governor and the senator, and all, flocked to the same church to console each other and be the people which belied the alleged killer’s bigoted and racist claims and embodied the exact opposite.

We think now of that moment in time that this nothing-much person could be welcomed by this group of people, old and young, pastor and retired folks, parents and grandparents and all, look at them for an hour, listen to what they had to say, and commence to shoot because he says he had to. 

He could not in the course of an hour, see them at all, for kind hearts, for civil words, for lives they had and lived.

Not at all.  He could not image them, let alone see them.

He just commenced to shoot and kill, as if he were just the most important soul under the sun.

He is not.  

The nine people whose lives were taken became a loss for everyone who streamed to the church, became a loss for all of us, a huge loss which may yet transform our lives and sense of who we are together and apart.

Gary Tischler • June 24, 2015

Christopher Lee, who passed away in London June 7 at the age of 93 of heart and respiratory problems — will always be known for playing Dracula— but, oh, there was so much more.

His was a life in full—and sometimes, he surprised us after a period of absence by his re-appearance, better and bigger than ever.   In this way, he was something like the movie, “Dracula.” He would always come back in yet another film, another sequel, another apparition for that matter.

Lee, who began life as a member of an aristocratic English military family, wanted to fly but an eye problem prevented it. He worked for British intelligence for a time.  And then, he decided to become an actor. After stage stints and a small part in the Laurence Olivier’s black-and-white version of “Hamlet,” he emerged from the British horror movie works, Hammer Films, to play not only Dracula time and time again but also the creature in the Frankenstein epics which Hammer also made.

The Hammer style in the 1950s and 1960s was color—blood red, dripping from teeth, necks and Victorian low-cut bodices. They hardly resembled the Universal black-and-white films of Bela Lugosi’s time.  But Lee, with a tony aristocratic and recognizable voice, added class to these films, along with Peter Cushing, who played Dr. Frankenstein and Dracula’s nemesis in many films.

Lee’s Dracula was singular—not quite like the stilted living ghost of Lugosi, not as sexy as Frank Langella and not as weird as Gary Oldman. Lee was lean, scary and totally hypnotic and authoritative.

Those were qualities he brought to his later, resurrection-mode films as the deeply compromised evil wizard Saruman in “The Lord of the Rings” films and another villain, Count Dooku in the prequel “Star Wars” movies.

He appeared in 250 films—including as a villain and nemesis for Roger Moore’s James Bond in “The Man With the Golden Arm.”

But wait, there’s more: Lee was by all accounts a swell singer, singing “Name Your Poison” in a film called “The Return of Captain Invincible,” and he merged operas with heavy metal in recordings he made on which he also sang. He appeared in “Sweeney Todd” and “Corpse Bride” from director Tim Burton, king of the intellectually weird in cinema.

He played Sherlock Holmes and Rasputin the mad monk.

He hosted Saturday Night Live in 1978 and played a character called Doctor Death.

He was knighted by Prince Charles. So, that’s Sir Dracula to you.

He was married for 54 years to the Danish painter and former model Birgit Gitte Kroncke.

The world learned of his death today. I would — out of respect — check that, just to be sure.

Gary Tischler •

When directors and designers come face to face with the daunting task of staging a piece of classical theatre—a “Hamlet,” or a “Lear,” the world of Falstaff or the Spanish classics, or a Moliere—the temptation, even the urge to contemporize, to make relevant a work from the past is often irresistible.

That’s certainly almost an imperative at work in the production of “Tartuffe,” Moliere’s most famous, and perhaps most difficult, play now at the Shakespeare Theater Company.

Ostensibly in the lists as a comedy—as are all of the 17th century playwrights works—“Tartuffe,” more than most has its dark sides, it’s frustrating, “good” people behaving idiotically. And it’s “bad” people behaving far worse than you might image. If Tartuffe, the most nearly savage of Moliere’s villains in his avarice, his heartless manipulations and will to power, is a monster, then Orgon, the good and disturbingly pious man is almost his equal as Tartuffe’s enabler. He’s a monster of thick-headedness pinned to his own sense of wisdom and authority that is tyrannical to a fault.

“Tartuffe” has been done often at the regional theater level, but never by the Washington Shakespeare company, and strictly speaking this is a co-production with South Coast Repertory and the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, directed and designed by Dominique Serrand, who is co-artistic director of “The Moving Company.”

This production has already been staged elsewhere in California at Berkeley Rep, for one, where it received a lot of critical acclaim. Contemporary relevance is the goal here, but what often happens in high concept productions of the classics is a kind of tug-of-war between style over substance. This “Tartuffe,” it seems to me, is a kind of a draw, wherein the style of the play, a barrage of contradictory intentions, is trying to become the substance of the play.

“Tartuffe” is about a lecherous, primal and almost gifted grafter, who sets his sights on the wealthy Orgon, the very proud and pious head of a family that includes servants, a marriageable daughter, his younger (and smarter) and beautiful wife, a brother, and sundry others. Tartuffe pretends to be the most pious of pious men, even more than Orgon himself, pretending to want nothing while trying to take everything. Orgon, smitten hopelessly with Tartuffe, promises him his daughter, his money, his house, all except his wife Elmire, whom Tartuffe pursues relentless and with oily passion.

Proceedings proceed to the brink of disaster as Orgon is on the verge of losing his daughter, his house and his wealth.

Serrand has approached this material as a kind of horror story, focusing on religious fanaticism, social tyranny and hypocrisy, where people are always on the move, posing or re-arranging themselves or disappearing upstairs or downstage. There is a lot to like in his approach—the slapstick set pieces in the first act are loud little mini-silent movies in their comedic effects.

But often, this production seems to trying to have its cake and save it for a rainy day. It starts out in rhyming intonations, then drops into more modern speech with occasional bouts of rhyming. There seems to be no particularly good reason to do this.

It’s difficult to escape Moliere’s world of 1643, except of course for the fact that Moliere deals in archetypes—his plays are about and satirize quack doctors, misers, meddling heads of families, misanthropes, frauds, tyrants and religious zealots. They are with us always, and are quite easily recognized. Moliere’s particular gift was one of dexterity in the absolutist world of Louis XIV—he could attack religious zealotry, but not the church, he could satirize social tyranny, but not the king.

Steven Epp as Tartuffe is a self-assured rat—he’s sexy, confident and sly—trying to seduce Ermine, he flips open a breast plate to bare his chest, much like an eager knight of old popping a cod piece. He’s the kind of religious tyrant who talks about blasphemy even while being casually blasphemous. In one of the more chilling lines, he says to Elmire while trying to straddle her: “I can consecrate any evil I do.” Sofias Jean Gomez, who was the sprite Ariel in “The Tempest” at STC last year, makes a temptation out of Elmire for almost any man, even in her deception, she never stoops to pretending to be stupid.

The Orgon house is a curious affair—bright and full of light, it resembles the abode of a Calvinist trying to be stylish.

Tartuffe always has at his side, or in corners or passageways two assistants, oily, creepy men who catch small birds and snuff them out just to show that they can. There is in this house always a threat, of spying, of being caught, of any horrible thing at all. This may echo our own age of no privacy whatsoever.

You can see just how carefully Moliere had to tread by the way he ends things. Orgon and his family are saved by the king, or his agent, who recognizes Tartuffe for what he is. I saw one production—years ago at Arena Stage— in which the king arrived by helicopter in all his Sun King glory to save.

Serrand adds his own touch by having Tartuffe marched off whipped and carrying a cross, perhaps smiling. Could it be that Tartuffe has been Tartuffed?

The play, in fact, ends in a confusion of panic. Too much has happened for the day (if not the play) to be saved.

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Gary Tischler • June 22, 2015

The annual meeting of the Citizens Association of Georgetown presided over for the last time by President Pamla Moore at Sea Catch Restaurant this week was many things for many people—a way to catch up with old acquaintances, the passing of leadership batons, and appearances by Mayor Muriel Bowser and Ward 2 Councilman Jack Evans, both feeling chipper after the District Council approved an $13 billion spending plan without too much blood on the floor, after weeks of sometimes heated arguments and disagreements.

It was an evening to honor Georgetowners who contributed to maintaining the health, the practical get-things-done spirit and the citizen values of Georgetown.

Evans showed up to for several reasons himself.  He gave a reprise of the budget—which includes lots of money for affordable housing , little in the way of tax raising , help for transit and schools.  “And,” he said, “I’m happy to report that there will be money—three million—to repair and renovate and get up and running again the C&O Canal in Georgetown, so that we’ll have the boat again in operation.”

That drew cheers from a large gathering, as it should, since the canal boat and the canal itself are physical and traditional  manifestations of Georgetown, not to mention a tourist attraction.

Mayor Bowser was also pleased with the passing of the budget, and lauded Evans for “as you know being my best friend on the council.  We went up to New York to present our financial status, and we came back with our bond rating being upped.  And I’ve put a lot of pressure on Jack by tasking him to be the council’s representative on the Metro board.”

“I think after six months in office I can say we can be proud in making progress,” Bowser said. “We have great people doing important jobs. In education, we’re trying to find the proper balance between our public schools and charter schools. We have the best police chief in the country, as far as I’m concerned. We’re getting the basics done and going beyond that toward our goal of becoming not only the best national city but a world-class city.”

Evans was awarded the Charles Atherton Award “for Exceptional Service by a Dedicated Public-Sector Professional Public-Sector Professional for Outstanding Work Preserving and Protecting Historic Georgetown.”

Barbara Downs  who seems to have quietly served on an impressive number of  organizational boards in Georgetown for years, including several CAG boards (she is a former CAG president) and committees, the Friends of the Waterfront Park, the Jackson Art Center, and as a volunteer for numerous village projects.  She has done this with grace and class, in a style and manner that befits the definition of Georgetown citizenship.  Downs was awarded the Peter Belin Award for Distinguished Service to the Georgetown Community, presented to her by Harry Belin, Peter Belin’s grandson.

The William A. Cochran Community Service Award (named after the late architect, CAG president and preservation leader) was given to Dr. Sachiko Kuno, President and CEO of the S&R Foundation, which has in short order become a prominent intellectual, cultural and educational presence in Georgetown with the  purchase of two iconic Georgetown properties, Halcyon House and Evermay.

The Martin-Davidson Award for an  Outstanding Business Serving the Community and Enhancing the Historic Character of Georgetown was given to the law firm of  Foley and Lardner LLP.

Special Appreciation Awards were given to Lauralyn Beattie Lee, who was Associate Vice President of Community Engagement and Strategic Initiatives at Georgetown University for the past 13 years; Diane Colasanto who was on the CAG Board of Directors for seven years and effectively co-chaired CAG’s public safety program, and Cory Peterson, who is Director of Neighborhood Life at Georgetown University.

The meeting was also an occasion for the passing of leadership batons, with the membership unanimously voting to elect a new leadership slate consisting of Bob vom Eigen, President, Jennifer Altemus, Vice President, Barbara Downs, Secretary, Bob Laycock, Treasurer, and directors Karen Cruse, Hazel Denton, Hannah Isles and John Rentzepis.

“My favorite kind of election,” Evans quipped, “where there’s only one candidate.”
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