Gary Tischler • May 21, 2015

Bluesman B.B. King, a legend in his and many people’s times, a man who personified the music he played, influenced hundreds of black and white singers and guitar players who played the blues, died in his sleep in Las Vegas May 14 at the age of 89.

He died forever famous and died rich, but he did and could and would still play the blues, especially “The Thrill is Gone,” which was the biggest hit of a storied career that probably began when he heard all those sounds swirling around him and his life, beginning in Mississippi. There was gospel, Robert Johnson at the cross roads and all those Delta blues guys, sharecroppers at some point or another, visitations to the road side boogie joints and jukebox joints and front porch guys, soon to be on the road, playing for quarters and dollars in edgy, hazy, sweaty place where the local brew could make you sick or crazy.

Listening to the blues could evoke that whole world and B.B. King evoked better than anybody ever—the blues were about remembered pain, but sometimes they could just make you get up and jump around, like kicking the demons out.

Born Riley B. King, B.B. was Blues Boy, which was pretty apt, although it is hard to think of him, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Woolf, the Reverend Blind Gary Davis or Johnson as boys of any sort.  Nothing much playful in that song, or many of his songs or any of the blues songs—they’re about loving, losing, about back-breaking and heart-breaking stuff and not ever, ever getting over it: “The thrill is gone away/you know you done me wrong baby/and you’ll be sorry someday.”

He was a sharecropper who made less than five dollars a day for a time, and he heard gospel, and blues, and country music and Count Basie, and for a time he played in places on Beale Street in Memphis.   He was married a couple of times, but everybody says the love of his life was Lucille, his guitar.  According to reports, he once ran into a burning hotel to rescue his guitar.

Once King got successful—with a hit called “Three O’Clock Blues”—he toured extensively with stops at the Howard Theatre in Washington, along with the Apollo and the Royal Theater.  He had a star on Hollywood Boulevard and was inducted double duty in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Blues Hall of Fame. He also received a Kennedy Center Honor in 1995 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2006.

He influenced people—especially some of the blues rockers from England in the 1960s, especially Eric Clapton who paid him a online special tribute.  “Thank you for everything, your friendship and your inspiration” says Clapton, looking older, too.

King can be found all over YouTube—including a rendition of “The Thrill is Gone” from 1993—glitzy blue jacket, black bow tie, sweating a little, squeezing the music out of Lucille, you guess, alive as you and me and then some.
           
“You know I’m free, free now baby, free from your spell,” he sings, “and now that’s all over/all I can do is wish you well.”

You, too, Blues Boy.  Wish you well. The thrill is NOT gone. 

Gary Tischler •

The Council of the District of Columbia now stands fulfilled.

That is to say, with the swearing May 14 of its two newest member—newly elected members Brandon Todd, who won easily in Ward 4, the seat formerly held by Mayor Muriel Bowser, and LaRuby May, who squeaked to victory in a tight election in Ward 8—the city council is now at full strength.

It is a council that is full of relatively fresh faces, a council that is made up of seven men and six women — and seven African American members and six white members.

Chaired by Phil Mendelson, this council has a number of new and newer members who were elected in the last several years, including May, Todd, Chair Pro Tempore Kenyan McDuffie of Ward 5, at-large members David Grosso and Elissa Silverman and Brianne Nadeau and Charles Allen of Ward 6.   The more veteran members of the council include Ward 2’s Jack Evans, the longest serving member of the council, Mendelson, at-large members Vincent Orange and Anita Bonds, Mary Cheh of Ward 3 and Yvette Alexander of Ward 7.

The newest members, Todd and May, have clear ties to Mayor Muriel Bowser.  Todd was a former aide to Bowser, and May worked on Bowser’s mayoral campaign. The mayor endorsed both candidates in their council races.

Gary Tischler •

There’s still another chance—Thursday at 7:30 p.m. at the Kennedy Center Opera House—to see “Cinderella,” a revival of Rossini’s classic romantic comedy, and a number of reasons to take the opportunity.

This version of the French fairy tale  spins happily along with any number of audience treats. There’s the blazingly colorful costumes. There’s the lively Rossini music, the thrilling and trilling vocalizing by a top-notch cast. There’s Don Ramiro, an appealing prince, and Angelina (aka, Cinderella, aka La Cenerentola), an appealing heroine, and an outrageous villain (appropriately named Don Magnifico).

But there’s more — two more to be precise.  Two young performers who add a major portion of the fuel for the high-dudgeon energy of “Cinderella” are also two good reasons to laud the effectiveness of the Washington National Opera’s Domingo-Cafritz Young Arts Program. That would be American soprano Jacqueline Echols and American Mezzo-soprano Deborah Nansteel, who take on the gaudy parts of Cinderella nemeses, the stepsisters Clorinda and Tisbe, respectively..

Both Echols and Nansteel had already built an impressive list of credentials, including appearances at the Washington National Opera and at the Glimmerglass Opera Festivals in Cooperstown, New York, where WNO Artistic Director Francesca Zambello is also in charge.

“The sisters are just terrific parts,” said Echols, who is a Detroit native. “You really an opportunity to emote, and I’m sure it looks like we’re having a great time, which we are.  But the vocals, the music, the singing in tandem together and with other characters, that’s really difficult music.”

“The sisters are great roles,” Nansteen said. “And those costumes, those wigs, wow.  You have to be able to really work together, and in the sense of this production, we operate like sisters.  We get along really great.”

Even in a telephone interview, you can differentiate their voices, which operate on the thin no-man’s land between soprano and mezzo. Nansteen’s voice a shade lower.  

Both began their careers in the Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist Program. Echols appeared with the WNO  as Musetta in “La Boheme” (a Domingo-Cafritz performance) in the American Opera Initiative, as the Water in “The Little Prince,” covered the role of Pip in “Moby Dick” and was First Lady in “The Magic Flute.”

Nansteen sang the title of “Penny” in WNO’s American Opera Initiative and was Curra in ‘The Force of Destiny” and was Third Lady in “The Magic Flute.”

Watching the two singers and listening to the two, you can imagine them as real sisters, even though each had a different journey to the world of opera.  Thoughts about jazz, listening to chorus music, gospel and the art of acting in opera intermingle in their conversation.   They both agree that acting is important, especially in contemporary opera.  As the sisters, Echols and Nansteen prove their point—they are masters of the singing, and they dive with relish into the more obvious comedy.  But, somewhere, you see the sisters as sisters, and as real people, or as real as opera characters get.

The Washington National Opera’s “Cinderella” runs through May 21 at the Opera House of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
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Gary Tischler •

Anton Chekhov, the great Russian playwright of comedic melancholy, is either spinning in his grave or sporting a modest smile these days.

His mostly 19th-century plays, which chronicled the decline of Russia’s privileged and landed classes, remain a source of fascination for 21st-century playwrights and — more important — 21st-century audiences, especially in Washington.

First, there was “Stupid F—–g Bird,”  a take on “The Seagull,” staged twice at Woolly Mammoth Theatre, followed by “Life Sucks,”  a riff on “Uncle Vanya” at Theater J last season.  Both were written by director-playwright Aaron Posner.

Posner is also directing “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” the Tony-Award winning play by Christopher Durang now at Arena Stage. At the same time, we have “Uncle Vanya” itself, by way of playwright  Annie Baker who’s modernized the language for this production at Round House Theater which features an all-star cast that includes Joy Zinoman (who in her time as founder and artistic director of Studio Theater, staged and directed an award-winning production of “The Three Sisters”).

Round and round it goes. There is even a comedic production—by  way of the New York Three-Day Hangover Theater Company called “Drunkle Vanya” at the Pinch Bar on 14th Street through April 25.

For the play that probably contains more references to—and probably reverence for—the Chekhov canon, you have to go to “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” hereafter referred to as VSMS, in the theater-in-the-round confines of the Fichandler at Arena Stage. 

Christopher Durang remains one of the most scathing, full-of-surprises satirist and comedic playwrights in American theater. In plays like “The Wedding of Betty and Boo,” “Sister Mary Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You” and “Beyond Therapy, ” he displayed a sharp eye on American culture. He poked tough love fun at what passed for modern society and did it with verve and imagination of the kind that made your eyes roll and your migraines start up.  Where else could you see a priest give a sizzling imitation of bacon frying on a griddle in “Betty and Boo”? Consider how Sister Mary Ignatius explained God’s answers to all our prayers: it’s just that “most of the time, the answer is ‘no.’ ”

Something seems to have happened to Durang with “VSMS.” He appears to have mellowed a little. He has afflicted his characters with painful modern crosses to bear and little wherewithal to withstand the pain, but he’s also bathed them in the warm (and sometimes fuzzy) light of hope. This is also good for the audience, which has opportunities to become fully engaged with these often hapless, self-centered, funny, sad (in a thoroughly Chekhovian way), glib, defiant characters.  At a recent matinee performance that I saw, the audience did just that and then some in a surprising and clearly visible and audible show of emotions. 

Durang makes sure we know we are in Chekhov land.  Vanya and Sonia are both from “Vanya,” and Masha is one of the “Three Sisters”, but could pass for the monstrous mother of “Seagull.” There is also Nina, a budding young actress beauty who embraces and worries over an assignment to play an molecule with all the nervous seriousness of a Broadway ingénue.  Spike is entirely with it in the here- and-now. He’s an actor wanna-be (he just missed landing a spot on “Entourage”) and Masha’s boy toy.

We’re not in a Russian dacha, but a big old house in Bucks County, Pa., where brother and sister Vanya and Sonia, in old bathrobes, start their caretaker day and get into a fight about coffee—or wait for their favorite birds to show up at the pond.  There’s also a housekeeper named Cassandra, tangled in braids, omens and warnings, from another world entirely, the old Greeks or voodoo New Orleans.

In marches Masha, a movie star in some decline but still acting acting the star and queen and a barely clothed Spike in tow. Things happen: there’s preparations for a costume party down the street. Masha wants to sell the house, which would evict the aimless Vanya and Sonia.

All of this is typical Chekhov material,  but we don’t need to know Chekhov plays to get this. In fact, a funny thing happens.  Somewhere along the way as things started to fall apart, all of the audience—which at this matinee was made up of mostly baby boomers, and two or three busloads of high schoolers—got involved.   When Sonia, (played with a startling range of emotions by Signature Theater star Sherri L. Edelen) bereft of love all her life, suddenly gets a call from a would-be-suitor, you could see many audience members were leaning over in their seats to see what she’d do, thoroughly engaged. 

Then, there was the attentive silence when Vanya (played with irascible spirit and warmth by Eric Hisson), having written a play which did include molecules, global warming and other matters, explodes into a roaring, raging riff after catching Spike texting. “We wrote letters back then. Yes, we licked stamps then,” he yelled, making it sound like Nora Desmond’s anthem, “We had faces then.” He launched into a dirge about all things lost to the Internet age, including coonskin caps, “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet,” and the habit of snail mail.  Nobody snickered, and everyone applauded.

Sometimes, things happen in the theater:  chief and often among them, the notion that we—the audience—are all in this together.  I suspect that happens often in “VSMS,” no matter what the makeup of the audience.  To be sure, it’s full of laughs, great writing, startlingly original performances—the worried star quality of Grace Gonglowski as Masha, Rachel Esther Tate’s warm Nina and Jessica Frances Dukes as Cassandra.

But mostly, it sparkles with communal acts of recognition, from a century ago and from right now.

“Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike” is at Arena Stage through May 3.
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Gary Tischler •

There is a lot more to Steven Knapp, 16th president of the George Washington University, than meets the eye.
Standing up and speaking at the George Town Club recently, the last of the spring speakers in Georgetown Media Group’s Cultural Leadership Breakfast Series, is one sort of person, an affable, impressive man talking about a range of subjects, but focused on the university’s rise to its own cultural leadership role in Washington.

But this is the same man who – when he became president of the university in 2007 after a stint as provost at Johns Hopkins – focused on building the stature of the university as an “intellectual contributor to the solution of national and global problems,” presided over the building of a new Science and Engineering Hall and hired a neurobiologist as president of research.

Talking with him later in a corner of the George Town Club, and reading about the man on paper, you get a sense of how it all fits together.

“You can no longer focus on one thing in terms of leadership, in terms of the kind of university we are,” he said. This, to him, is about being an urban institution of learning in Washington, “the most unique city in the country.”

What’s happened is also a reflection of the man who wanted to be a percussionist and still plays, who thinks that Dostoevsky is relaxing reading and who bonded with students who were initially skeptical of him by participating (at some risk) in a snowball fight.

His memberships and leadership in any number of organizations reflect a drive toward cross-pollination, not only of disciplines but of institutions and of intellectual and artistic taste. He has seen the future – for quite a while now – and finds it rife with opportunities for collaboration.

“Our world,” he has said, “has reached a level of complexity at which problems can no longer be solved by relying on the contributions of any single discipline.”

You have to think a little about his specialty: Romanticism, literary theory and the relation of literature to philosophy and religion. A longtime teacher of English literature at the University of California, Berkeley, Knapp is used to dealing with intersections in thinking and creating; he knows how poetry can become infused – in the case of a Blake or a Coleridge – with matters near-holy.

The arts were a place rife with opportunity. GW was a major player, along with Arena Stage and, later, other universities and theater companies, in the National Civil War Project conceived by choreographer Liz Lerman, a GW alumna. “It was something important, and it was a chance to work with other institutions for me and for us. It was a great experience.”

“The arts are the source of innovation, a constant search for innovation, and we have to do everything in our power to become involved, to innovate and lead, in the arts,” he said.

His belief and focus on enhancing partnerships with neighboring institutions couldn’t be better illustrated than by the moves GW and Knapp have made over the last two years.

In 2014, GW joined with the National Gallery of Art to assume responsibility for the Corcoran, saving the venerable museum and its art school, which was merged into GW’s Columbian College of Arts and Science. According to Knapp, there will continue to be art on display in the landmark 17th Street building – the National Gallery, which has control of the collection, is planning to mount “Corcoran Contemporary” exhibitions and to show works representative of the Corcoran legacy – free of charge. The college is now called the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, the plural suggesting that studies in the non-visual arts will be added.

The university also took under its wing the Textile Museum, a small, almost unassuming institution of the kind often described as a hidden treasure. Hidden no longer, the Textile Museum moved from its former location on S Street to its current one on the GW campus at 21st Street. Its new building, connected to historic Woodhull House, now home to the Albert H. Small Washingtoniana Collection, is part of the complex called the George Washington University Museum and the Textile Museum.

In the May 6 issue of The Georgetowner, Ari Post called the Textile Museum’s “Unraveling Identity” exhibition “a well-earned retrospective of the museum’s historic collection of textiles, spanning centuries and almost every continent.”

In addition, the university has a high functioning, high profile performing arts center at the Lisner Auditorium, where Executive Director Maryann Lombardi oversees a program laden with global performers and artists.
It’s all of a piece for Knapp: science and pragmatics, the Economics Council as well as the NSO board, drums and snowballs, art singular and the arts plural, textiles and Washingtoniana, being part of the city and a citizen of the world. His wide embrace suits a university whose mission – from its namesake – was and is to “educate future leaders, not only for the nation, but for the world.”

Gary Tischler • May 11, 2015

One of the obituaries that almost immediately hit the Internet after the death, at 87, of Gunter Grass, the Nobel Prize-winning German novelist,  focused strongly on his admission in the autobiographical work, “Peeling the Onion,” that he had been a draftee in the Waffen-SS, the Nazi Party’s soldiers—a fact that he had not exactly kept hidden but had not dealt with in his voluminous writings of novels, fiction, stories, autobiography and poems.

The revelation, which came seven years after he had won the Nobel Prize, caused a bit of an uproar among the literati, and Grass himself tried to explain away the omission as an outcrop of his sense of shame.

But in truth, he didn’t need to do even that. For all of his writing life, the subject was always German literary, cultural, societal and moral loss of memory or re-arranging of the same, which afflicted many adult Germans who survived the war. 

In that gigantic genius of an imaginative work, “The Tin Drum,” his main character was a boy who willed himself not to grow physically, who had a gift with playing hypnotically on a tin drum and a scream that broke glass and eardrums. The boy, Oskar Matzerath, grew up in the much fought-over city of Danzig and grew to emotional maturity throughout the war, watching betrayals, bombings, serving in the army, and generally becoming a devout cynic,  a survivor who saw the devastating, ruinous, morally decrepitude and slaughter of the war: Germans winning, then waning and Russians invading.

All of his books—“Cat and Mouse” and “Dog Years,” which, with “The Tin Drum”—formed his Danzig trilogy, as well as later books, were about the effects of the rise of the Nazi state, the scalding devastation and punishment of the war, and the post-war years.  It was a German—and a Catholic at that—dealing with the moral effects of memory, of forgetting willfully or pragmatically things that should be impossible to forget.  German survivors were not crippled by the war, they were, in a way, invigorated and energized to affect a phenomenal rebuilding of the state and country. Today, Germany, pacified and pacificist, and re-unified  is the master of Europe, economically.

In one way or another, Grass, whose works in translation managed to preserve the lyricism, the wicked, metaphor-rich styles of writing,  dealt vividly with what is remembered, and what the memories mean—his characters are not about atrocities, but about moral betrayals and outrages, about sexual excess and sexual betrayal as well, and they are paradoxically rich in humor, especially books like “The Tin Drum,” the surreal “Dog Years,” which is about Hitler’s dog, and “The Flounder,” a hefty almost whimsical work of magical realism and folk tall tale.

Grass was more than a writer. He was the novelist as conscience, questioner, left-wing politician.  He was, as one person described him, a citizen-writer.  Grass said once that writers should always “keep their mouths open.” Only Heinrich Boll matched his gift for unapologetic scrutiny.

He was a teenager when he was in the Waffen-SS and died an old man, spanning war, defeat, resurgence, re-unification, deflecting controversy and creating it.   Writers like Grass are rare these days, when the Great American Novel is a little like a dream few American writers pursue.  You can find his ilk in the great Latin American writers like Marques, Allende and Fuentes, whose writing were part magic, part hidden politics and full-blooded dreams.

I read “The Tin Drum,” when I was college-age and without fully understanding the multi-ethnic—Slav, German, Polish—aspects of it, or being familiar with Danzig. I responded strongly to the book.  The book was oddly perverse and entertaining, full of violence and the kind of Grimm fairy tale—adult version—aspects that were familiar to me.

Grass’s subject—the slippery status of memory in Germany—hit home to me: I was a decade and a half behind Grass in his experience, born in Munich, with a first memory of American tanks driving over the rubble of Munich in 1945, tossing out candy bars, for which, like any hungry kid, I fought. I emigrated to the U.S. in 1952 at age 10, and that’s when I first discovered what happened in Germany, in a book about Nazi war crimes, the Holocaust, Hitler and everything else with pictures.

It’s hard to take in then, and now, still, and Grass met that subject of memory elusively, including his own. My relatives essentially claimed a kind of not-remembering.  I had three uncles which almost sum up the war—an infantry soldier killed in Russia, another an SS major and the third, an intellectual member of the German underground. That, at least, were the stories, I was told. They died so long ago.

We all do these things to move into a different life.  Somewhere, I stopped using my real name of Gerhard and went to Gary, instead. People sometimes get tired of being different, far from home. Grass gave a lot of thought to who he was and when he was:  the result are pages and pages of forever memories and their meaning.

Gary Tischler •

It’s been 35 years since Woolly Mammoth Theatre began its Washington theatrical adventure and journey.  Looking at this season’s offerings, and especially the current production of playwright Chad Beckim’s “Lights Rise on Grace,”  it seems like yesterday.

The play—poetic,  crude, raw and wholly imaginative—is what audiences might call a “Woolly” play, even though it had its beginning as a New York Fringe Festival entry.   It seems carved out of the time of now, it’s unlike anything you’re quite likely to see here (no disrespect to other companies meant), it’s beautifully acted and totally engaging.   The faces—three remarkably gifted actors—are new, and so is the spirit of the play and its structure, which seem beyond category. 

It’s not that we don’t see new plays in Washington these days, staged by familiar companies and groups as well as new ones with attitude and style.  It’s that new plays, new writers,   new artists, has been a Woolly trademark under Artistic Director Howard Shalwitz for all these years that a play like “Lights Rise on Grace” is part of an ongoing and singular achievement—even though it’s now in permanent downtown digs, Woolly continues to dance on the sharp edge of edgy with every offering.

“Lights Rise on Grace” is a particularly daunting, and moving example of that tradition.   It concerns a kind of unusual love triangle that plays itself out in a tough and layered urban environment of neighborhood and school, not to mention prison.   It sees Grace, a shy, but eager-for-experience daughter of strict Chinese immigrants meeting an affable, charismatic, “can’t help loving him” African American boy in school, who greets her with by saying, “I want to know you”, clearly meaning both senses of the phrase.  His name is Large—named for his size at birth, not for anything else—and the two fall deeply, it seems, and passionately, and very physically in love, in spite of disapprovals from their peers and families.

And then, Large disappears for a long time—into prison, as it turns out, for an assault.  Grace doesn’t know why, she just known that young man who filled up her live and soul is gone without reason.   In prison, Large meets and eventually is protected by and gets intimate with a white prisoner named Riece. Eventually, Large gets out of prison and is reunited with Grace, who has left her home, made a life for herself, and is both astonished and in total turmoil of the return of her one and only love, if not lover.

Riece soon follows, and the three begin a sort of awkward, confusing, tense relationship, pushing toward a kind of family.  But Large is not the same—prison has changed  and damaged his natural optimism and charm, and his assurance about his place in the world and who he is.  Grace, too, is confused by the new Large whom she’s longed for. Adding to the confusion, but also providing a kind of solid steadiness, is the presence of Riece, especially after Grace becomes pregnant.

Things don’t tidy up—they become more confusing for the audience and characters as well as they try to do the right things for themselves and each other, faced with difficult decisions.

They occupy a space for themselves in a rich and rough environment, physical, cultural and emotional.   This is an urban and changing world of neighborhoods—much like that world is changing in the city, in this case where generations maul each other pitilessly, where violence is abundant and, economically and identity-wise, life is a grind where love, and a paying job are difficult to achieve.

The stark, prison-like set is a kind of metaphor not just for incarceration but for life itself — or at least their particular lives, which echo strongly here.

The actors are (relatively) new to Washington, although Ryan Barry (Riece), has workshopped  the play in New York, where it was directed by Robert O’Hara, who is directing Woolly’s next production, “America  Zombie.”   “Grace” is directed here by Michael John Garces, who is the artistic director of Cornerstone Theater Company in Los Angeles and is a company member of Woolly where he directed three powerful and difficult plays, “We Are Proud to Present…” by Jackie Sibblies Drury,” “The Convert” by Danai Gurina and “Oedipus el Rey” by Luis Alfar.  If “Lights Rise on Grace”  resembles any of the three, it is “Oedipus,” which also had a stark, crackling urban air to it in taking the Greek classic to the barrio.

“Grace” is almost elliptic in the way it tells the story, which is always open-ended—characters turn to the audience to tell the story, their point of view, an effective and intimate approach, especially when Jeena Yi, as Grace, opens the play with an almost verbally naked telling of how she met and loved Large, lost him,  and then embarked on a series of almost brutal sexual encounters in the aftermath.

Yi, the hugely appealing DeLance Minefee as Large, and a quietly effective Ryan Barry as Riece, seem the best kind of actors: they’re naturals, inhabiting their characters fully, while also playing the parts of Chinese parents and relatives, Large’s street and school peers, inmates and prison folk.

In these days of instant communication and entertainment gratification, I haven’t seen a play in a very long time that so stilled the audience into silent attention.   I think there are acts of recognition here—these are characters that live in a changing world, where attitudes about sex, gender, race and multi-ethnicity are shifting rapidly.   

Beckim, who describes himself as growing up as a white kid with a preference for African American culture, is a gifted writer. Even in the realistic attitudes on stage, he finds a way to make poetic observations and gives his characters a generosity they both deserve and need.

“Lights Rising on Grace” runs through April 26 at Woolly Mammoth.

Gary Tischler •

It’s hard to categorize actor Julian Sands except for one thing: if you see him in anything—movies, television, what all—you can’t quite get his image out of your head.

He’s in Washington this Saturday at the Lansburgh Theatre to do “A Celebration of Harold Pinter,” presented by Washington Performing Arts. It is a one-man performance-production directed by the actor John Malkovitch, a theater piece that concentrates on the late Nobel Prize-winning playwright’s poetry, which is rarely heard, but probably much read, given the giant shadow cast by Pinter and his plays.

This project has become something of a legacy for Sands, who works regularly, on stages, television and in movies, but was approached by Pinter himself as far back as 2005.

Sands called out of the blue, and for some reason, beside the fact that his name popped up on Caller ID, I recognized his voice. I remember him distinctly from one of his best films and roles, the 1991 “Impromptu”, about the lives and loves of great artists, composers, and writers in which he played the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, Bernardette Peters played his wife, Hugh Grant was Chopin, Judy Davis played George Sand and Mandy Patinkin played a French painter whose name escapes.

“That was a wonderful experience,” he said, remembering. “Working with so many terrific actors, and the subject, well, that was a rare thing.”

Pinter, of course was the master of the oblique, the unsaid, discerning and dissecting the lives of contemporary relationships in such plays as “No Man’s Land,” “Old Times,” “The Homecoming” and “Betrayal”.

“This all began in 2005,” he said. “I knew him of course, and he approached me about doing a one man piece focusing on his poetry. He wrote quite a lot of it, even long before he started writing plays. The thing was, he wanted me to do a master class with him, basically with him overseeing every inch of material. It was a very strenuous, even difficult task, to make something of this, me working with him. But it was a tremendously rewarding. We became friends during the course of things. The poetry is very different from his plays. More personal. You get a real sense of the person, the man. He was also a very funny man.”

The finished product premiered at the 2011 Edinburgh Fringe Festival to considerable acclaim and he has toured with it ever since, off and on. Sands had worked with Malkovitch on “The Killing Fields.” Malkovitch is an American actor who has had a similar career filled with oddities, highs and lows, independent small films, then villains in big budget Hollywood action movies—memorably “In The Line of Fire”.

“What we’ve ended up with it in not just a poetry reading,” he said. “I’ve added anecdotes from working together with Harold on this, stories about his plays, the poems, certainly, and his life,” he said. “It’s a celebration, but you know, when the lights go up, you feel like a soloist, you’re alone with the audience in a way that most playwright surely ever do.”

“Personally, I think he was the most influential playwright of our times,” he said.

Pinter was famous for the pauses—written into the script—that characterized his characters, often while taking puffs on cigarettes. “There are pauses, yes,” Sands said.

“I think it’s done very well, and so here we are, all roads lead to Washington, right”. Actually, Pinter’s plays have been performed regularly on Washington stages—at Arena, Studio, and Scena Theatre among others.

“He was all about language,” Sands said. “The utterances, the sentences are precise and revealing.”

Sands, in his 50s now and still retaininh the matinee blonde good looks of his early career, which included quality films like “The Killing Fields,” “Room With a View,” “Impromptu,” as well as distinctly offbeat fare like “Gothic,” a Ken Russell take on the Victorian poets like the Shelley and Byron, not to mention “Boxing Helena,” and “Leaving Las Vegas.” On the BBC he played Laurence Olivier in a film about the enfant terrible of theater, Kenneth Tynan.

He’s always had a penchant for offbeat horror films—the title role in “Warlock” and its sequels, the non-musical film version of “The Phantom of the Opera.” “I’ve just finished a part in ‘Gotham’”, he noted by way of his television career, which included a memorable turn as the terrorist Vladimir Bierko in “24.”

He’s married to his second wife, the writer Evgenia Citkowitz, author of “Ether,” a critically acclaimed book of short fiction. They have two daughters, Natalya and Imogen.

As for Sands, “I am an actor, I go where the work takes me,” he said. He had just completed a film in Turkey, and would be going to Mexico soon after the performance here. “I get on a train, and it takes me to the work. That makes it sometimes difficult for my family, I know,” he remarked.

An actor’s career can seem like a careening kind of thing, from one role to the next. “I’ve had stellar heights, and some projects that were perhaps less so.. But I make it a business to have no regrets. This is what I do.”

About the Pinter celebration, he feels “responsibility to do him justice. But there’s the audience. Myself and Pinter and the audience. I respect that, it’s an intimate kind of thing.”

“A Celebration of Harold Pinter” plays at the Lansburgh Theatre this Saturday at 8 p.m.

Gary Tischler •

Hey, guys and gals, looking for something new, something to do, maybe hang out in a bar you’ve never been in before?

Check out “Murder Ballad,”  the new show at Studio Theatre’s Stage 4, described as an “immersive rock musical experience,” which has been extended to May 16.   

“Immersive” experiences aren’t exactly new, although they’re primed to be part of the ideas percolating as theaters look for ways to bring in new audiences.  This one is a kind of rock opera or rock melodrama, mostly sung to music played by a stage-bound, sort-of, looks-like-feels-like rock band. It is surely immersive and thick with ambiance.  The audience gets to order drinks and sit at tables, munch on popcorn while bartenders fix drinks, wield a bat, and all sorts of faded scribblings, graffiti and posters reel you in. The place, with a bright green pool table at the center where the characters in the play often come together or circle each other in a contemporary take on love gone bad, love recovered, love gone bad again with a bad outcome for somebody.  It is, after all, called “Murder Ballad.”

I liked being there, truly—a beer, popcorn, urban audience and couples, young, younger and old and older, too, recalling the bad old days when 14th Street was a mess and not the restaurant-teeming, busy thoroughfare that it is today. Being at this show is a great opportunity for people watching, and the characters often stomp off angrily, and reappear elsewhere, from behind the bars, or off to the side or through the entrance.

Summing up quickly, “Murder Ballad,” set in New York,  has as its center the fortunes and misfortunes of a slightly lost, appealing young girl named Sara, who strikes tough poses to avoid being hurt.  She hooks up with a charismatic bartender  and  someday bar owner, named Tom,  a guy who’s always been catnip for the girls, especially wounded sparrow types like Sara.  They meet, and they hook up, passionately, until Tom, sensing that the word, “love,” might come out of his mouth by accident any day now, dumps her.

Horribly wounded, Sara is at sea, feeling hopeless, until along comes the appealing, caring Michael, a guy who really cares and has a real job, to boot.  They meet, they love, they marry and they have a child. Soon, however, a restless Sara starts to pine for and remember Tom.  “He made me weep,” she sings, as if this were a good thing.   Predictably, Sara and Tom meet, they hook up, she feels horribly guilty. Michael feels betrayed. Tom suddenly thinks Sara is the one that got away, the love of his life, and sings, ominously “You Belong to Me”.

The story is told almost entirely through music, driving, often soaring songs like “Answer,” “You Belong to Me,” “I’ll Be There,” “Built For Longing,” “Sara” and others.   The story’s driven by a kind of narrator played by the big-voiced Anastacia McCleskey,  who is always there.

But truth be told, it’s Christine Dwyer who carries the show, musically, dramatically, as Sara. It’s Sara’s story after all, and Dwyer, slight of build, often guilt-driven, makes her presence  felt. She can belt a ballad and carry a musical load, but it’s more than that.   She’s one of these young female performers who’s got chops and charisma, a deceptive, and ultimately beguiling kind of charisma that touches heart and soul

Tammar Wilson, who’s the nice guy Michael, does gentle and angry equally well.

The show—conceived by and with book and lyrics by Julia Jordan and music by Julian Nash and directed with verve by Studio Theatre’s artistic director David Muse—is appealing enough.  You even care about the people, and the ambiance alone is worth the price of the ticket.

This is not exactly new—the 1960s were full of shows that almost demanded that you be a part of the show, or occasions where body contact with the cast occurred, as it did with “Hair,” where cast members clambered over seats and ran through the aisles   Studio in the past has used its new spaces the same way. There was a terrific show a number of years ago about Jack Kerouac and the beats,  played out in a bar.

I’d like to have seen—not just immersion—but a little more direct contact from the cast with the audience.  I don’t mean physical contact, but playing to the audience.   If you’re this close to the action,  things ought to be a little more personal or reactive.  Opportunities sweep by, untaken. 

But there is room for surprises.  My lips are now sealed.
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Gary Tischler •

This year’s Washington Performing Arts Gala & Auction—Saturday, May 2, at the Marriott Marquis—will have an international theme as Washington Performing Arts focuses on the 40th anniversary  of its Embassy Adoption Program and its planned expansion.
           
The Embassy Adoption Program is a partnership between Washington Performing Arts and the District of Columbia Public Schools, which pairs 50 embassies with 50 fifth and sixth grade classes for a year’s worth of cross-cultural learning, projects, and enrichment activities.

“There is no city, no place in the country which has a program like this,” said Jenny Bilfield, Washington Performing Arts President and CEO. “We are fortunate to have this and be able to do this.”
           
This year, DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson will receive Washington Performing Art’s first Leadership in Arts Education Award at the gala. Henderson is receiving the award as the representative of DCPS, which is partnering on the Embassy Adoption Program, along with taking part in  and collaborating with Washington Performing Arts on a host of programs, including Concerts in  Schools, Capital Dance, Capital Jazz, Capital Strings and Capital Voices.  
           
According to Washington Performing Arts, the award has no fixed timing: it will be given based on arts-education merit alone, and not time-elapsed criteria.
           
“The Embassy Adoption Program has benefited thousands of students over the years,” Bilfield said. “Our students in this city live in a world that’s not always recognized by others—they are surrounded by a hotbed of international culture.  To be able to connect in such a programmatic way with the international community here is one of our proudest achievements.”
           
The focus of gala comes on a day which also kicks off the annual Passport D.C. festivities, a month-long  explosion of international culture in which the city’s embassies open their doors to the public for a variety of activities, exhibitions, and events.
           
This year’s gala is chaired by Reginald Van Lee. The Embassy Adoption Program is chaired by Jake Jones, Daimler.  EAP committee co-chairs are David Marventano, Fluor; Rachel Pearson, Pearson & Associates; Ambassador Arturo Sarukhan, former Mexican Ambassador to the United States and Veronica Valencia-Sarukhan. 
           
The gala kicks off at 6 p.m. with a Kentucky Derby Watch Party.  Cocktails and Silent auction begin at 6:30 p.m. with dinner and program at 8 p.m.
           
Performers will include the Washington Performing Arts Children of the Gospel Choir and the New York-based hot jazz ensemble, The Hot Sardines, who are—did we say?—hot.
           
The Embassy Adoption Program is described as an arts-integrated  academic program in which fifth and sixth grade teachers apply to participate.  Each class is paired with a single embassy, and together they embark on a school year-long journey, exploring the adopted country’s history, culture, government, arts, food and geography. 
           
Some 50,000 students have been able to participate in the program over the years, from all eight wards of the city, partnering with some 100 embassies.
           
The program culminates in a presentation about the countries which the classes have partnered with and a mini-United Nations event in May.
           
The gala comes at a time when Bilfield is completing her second year at the helm of Washington Performing Arts and her first season which bears her programming mark, including new programs, such as “The Art of the Orchestra,” “Mapping Our Silk Road: Creative Intersections” and “Wynton Marsalis x 3: a 30-year Friendship Deepens.”
           
The gala also comes days after Washington Performing Arts’ 2015-2016 season announcement, the first of two seasons in anticipation of 2016’s 50th anniversary  celebrating.