Gary Tischler • August 7, 2014

“Carrie: The Musical,” now at the Studio Theater’s 2nd Stage, carries a lot of baggage.

Everyone remembers the source material. “Carrie” was one of horror novelist’s Stephen King’s first big successes in 1974, with its story of a high school girl who is an outcast, lives with a scary ultra-religious mother and has tele-kinetic powers. The 1976 movie version, directed by Brian de Palma and starring Cissy Spacek in the title role with Amy Irving and Piper Laurie, became a huge hit, resonant with teens and adults alike, and scary as all get out. There’s also a fairly recent but not so successful movie remake.

On top of that, there’s “Carrie: The Musical,” legendary in a not so good way, a production staged on Broadway in 1988 to the tune of around seven to eight million dollars in production costs, with a three-day run after some scathing reviews, making it the one of Broadway’s biggest flops ever.

But wait: Things aren’t so bad on 14th Street in D.C. after all. “Carrie: The Musical” isn’t “Carrie,” the movie, by any means, but it’s hardly flop-worthy in its Studio incarnation, directed by Keith Alan Baker and Jacob Janssen, and featuring a big-voiced, moving star turn by newcomer Emily Zickler as Carrie White.

The musical—described often somewhat mistakenly as a rock musical—remains the work of composer Michael Gore with lyrics by Dean Pitchford and a book by Lawrence D. Cohen, which hews fairly closely to the book, with some differences.

As a musical, “Carrie” is more of a pop-rock opera: there are 25 musical numbers performed by a fierce, high-energy cast, a mix of soaring, sometimes searing and soft ballads, jump up and down guitar-driven power numbers. The songs and the music aren’t necessarily memorable—there’s no “Wicked”-like “Gravity” number, for instance, but taken as a whole, they make their impression, carry the story along with energy and fit the material emotionally.

And it’s the whole that counts here, not so much individual incidents, although individual cast members Zickler, Barbara Walsh as her crazed, God-sick mom, Maria Rizzo as Sue, a sympathetic class mate, Robert Mueller as Tommy Ross, the likeable star jock who wants to be a writer, and Eben K. Loan as the hating, hateful high school mean queen Chris do stand out.

It’s still the same old story—Carrie, a 17-year-old misfit in high school and ignorant of sex and the world, discovers the onset of menstruation in a shower with her classmates, for which she is mercilessly bullied. She lives with her mother, who keeps her away from boys by locking her up in a closet and forces her to pray constantly.

Sue Snell, the school nice girl who’s dating Tommy, the star jock, takes pity on Carrie, and makes her try to fit in by making Tommy ask her to the prom. The result is all too familiar to most of us, even if the original novel is 40 years old.

It is the staging as much as anything that pulls you in here. It’s the intimate setting of the smallish fourth floor theater at the Studio, with the results that you’re always fairly close to the actions and the actors, who emote, dance group and re-group, and sing their hearts out within sometimes inches, and feet of the audience. And the directors and designer make do mostly with imagination—this is not a million-dollar set, but a door opening here, closing there, lights shifting the scenes and acting as a kind of malleable, moving set. There’s nothing fancy here, except the choreography of shifting the groups around the stage, until all of them become familiar. What’s special isn’t the blood and guts but the young characters on stage.

There are some effective, kinetic (no pun intended) moments here—“A Night We’ll Never Forget,” which opens the second act, is resonant of the cast preparing for the dance in “West Side Story,” Zickler displaying vocal and emotional range in Carrie’s plaintive “Why Not Me?,” the lovely “Unsuspecting Hearts” and “Once You See,” Walsh singing powerfully her own youthful memories in “I Remember How Those Boys Are.”

Because Zickler has made Carrie so appealing with her uncertainty, her yearning to be normal, her painfully shy stance with Billy, the story moving at a train-wreck speed, makes you afraid for her, it fills you with dread, but also expectations. How will they stage her ragingly destructive power, how will the ultimate bad trick of the bucket of blood work out?

Well, it’s not the movie, but it still has the power to shock. Wisely, I think, the production lays off high-tech spectacle. Carrie’s power may be horrific and weird, but it’s the deed that counts.

The musical-opera has a lot of punch, surprisingly so, given the reputation of the original production. There’s a lot of talent on display here, fresh, volatile. It’s a full-throttle reminder that life can still be like high school. It’s not rock and roll, but I like it.

Gary Tischler •

That’s some bird, that stupid f—–g bird.

That would be “Stupid F——g Bird,” the play by director-playwright Aaron Posner, now getting resurrected in zingy, audience-pleasing style for a late-summer run at the Woolly Mammoth Theater. It will be directed by Woolly’s stalwart ‘s artistic director and founder Howard Shalwitz.

You might remember that “SFB,” Posner’s deft, irreverent riff on Anton Chekov’s “The Seagull” in a very contemporary and near-interactive mode debuted last summer as a play commissioned by Woolly as part of its “Free the Beast” program, an ambitious ten-year project that supports new plays (some 25 new works) through workshops, commissioning and research.

And look what happened.

It’s not every day that a regional theater gives birth to a play that is so defiantly theatrical that it succeeds beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. The play won two Helen Hayes awards for Best New Play and Best Resident Play for the 2013-2014 season. Not only that the play moved on to very successful- productions in Boston and Los Angeles.

“We thought it would be great to look at it again, from the audience standpoint and from the artist’s—the actors, myself, Aaron and the designers,” Shalwitz said. “And you know, this whole thing has just been amazing. It’s a kind of phenomena, yeah, sure. I mean, you remember the thing where Con asks the audience to give him advice on how to win back Nina’s affections, right? Well, the preview audiences were ready for it. This time, I think we saw a lot of repeat attendees from last year’s productions.”

“I just think Aaron came up with something new, but it was a trick thing, you know,” Shalwitz said. “I think he (and the whole production team) accomplished something very difficult to bring off. You can read this and not necessarily get the whole sense of it. It wasn’t a rip-off of Chekhov, or some sendup that totally disrespected the original, because that play was full of pathos, but was also, in its own quieter way, funny and nearly tragic. We always know what play we’re in. And so do the actors. We’re here now, so to speak.”

Which is why an actor comes on the stage and says, “Start the f—–g” play.

The “SFB” in question is a seagull who, in both the original and Posner’s version meets an unhappy end by the hand of Con, the angst-ridden, mother-issues semi-hero of this saga, a would-be-poet-artist-playwright who wants to discover new forms, a new kind of art and new life in the utmost serious way. He’s also in love—grandly, operatically, hopelessly, and close to suicide —with Nina, a feverish, beautiful young would-be actress with whom he’s staging a new-form play for the benefit of his mother Emma, who is a famous star of stage, screen and everything else, as well as for her new lover, a famous writer.

We’re in familiar territory here. These are Americans who could be found in People Magazine, theatricals of the celebrity world. Here’s Posner, making it here and now as in “here we are,” the oft-repeated phrase that Nina uses in Con’s little play.

“Aaron found new forms, too, for contemporary theater,” Shalwitz said. “The actors talk to the audience. They’re self-aware of being in a play. They want involvement. They don’t want to be alone with their problems, and so it is a new form. That pathos in the original is here, too. I think it’s changed a little from where we started. With that, audience connections, it changes a little every time out. “

The language—pungent (life sucks, or the f-word like a loud intruder at a party) also manages to be poetic, a delicate balancing act for actors. There are times when the play seems almost too smart and hip by half, too inside-theaterish. But when you have a cast like this one—the same one that appeared in the original—such a complaint can be reduced to a quibble.

“It’s been some time for the actors and the designers, too, so they don’t have the habit of doing the roles for some time,” Shalwitz said. “They’ve done other parts, and will move on to other parts—Kimberly Gilbert, who plays Masha, is going to play the lead in ‘Marie Antoinette,’ our season opener.”

Gilbert, a Washington treasure, in fact, is one of the acting standouts in this production, playing Mash, the cryptic, depressed young woman, who’s smitten with Conrad—Con to us—but settles for Dev, a practical guy who thinks he has little to recommend him, but ends up with Mash. Mash is a jewel, albeit with some ash on her—she introduces the acts playing the ukulele, dressed in punk black and singing sad songs (“Life is disappointing”) in a kind of bright-eyed, knowing way that contradict the content. Gilbert has a gift for understated emoting and emotion, which is perfect for Mash.

While Kate Eastwood Norris, in the part of Emma, the slightly aging diva actress, Cody Nickell as the facile super-writer Doyle, Darius Pierce as Dev, and Brad Koed as Con and Katie Debuys as Nina are all fine in inventive ways. It’s Rick Foucheux who grounds the play and straddles the line between Chekhov and Posner, then and now, nuanced and way cool, with aplomb as Sorn, the good doctor. He’s the observer, and he’s us in a way—astounded at the keen and keening emotions of the various lovers and would-be lovers. He’s like an audience to a feast, bemused, and moved, and by being his own expansive self, he explains it all to us.

What Shalwitz, Posner and company have accomplished is indeed to present something new. A new form, it respects and then invites the audience and knows that it’s always a complicit partner in a play being performed. As I’ve said more than once, there’s no app for that.

*”Stupid Fuc—g Bird” runs at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre through Aug. 17.*

Gary Tischler • August 4, 2014

In troubled times, the precious daily dealings we do demand to be noticed, as if they might lose themselves in the morning headlines and the nightly news.

Of late, we have lived a summer of ongoing sorrow as well as one in which the weather has contrived to bring us rain and heat and the tribulations of storms during the week, and often picture-perfect weekends which we embrace with urgency.

In Washington, D.C, where the world news is local news and politics are like soot in the air, these patterns are especially poignant. We saw recently flowers grow like gardens at the Malaysian Embassy and the Embassy of the Netherlands, where mourners signed condolence books and President Barack Obama visited. It was the Dutch who suffered the most deaths in the shocking, horrific shoot down of a Malaysian over battle-contested territory in Ukraine. Nearly 300 deaths came from that act, suspected to be committed by pro-Russian separatists armed with sophisticated missiles, obtained from Russia, in eastern Ukraine. Bodies of passengers and uniformed crew members and children and toys, laptops, scarves and shoes and notebooks fell from the sky and scattered across the war-torn steppe.

The protagonists in that tragedy are still sifting through the physical and emotional wreckage that came from—there were funeral marches, candlelit vigils, full churches and anguish both spoken and held in the quiet of the night. In the meantime, the quasi-civil war continued in the Ukraine, apace, some of it fought near the site of the crash.

In the Middle East, there was nothing but death and fire everywhere, most dramatically in the Gaza strip, that embattled, compact land in which Palestinians live in stark contrast to many of their neighbors. A series of events—the murder of three Israeli teenagers, a retaliatory killing of a Palestinian teenager and the launching of rockets by the militant group Hamas into Israel—led to eventually an Israeli invasion of Gaza in search of deadly tunnels and launching sites. Gaza has become a killing ground with half-hearted truces quickly broken. A thousand Palestinians have died, many of them civilians, many children among them. There have been significantly more Israeli military casualties than in previous such clashes.

There seems to be no end in sight—thousands dying in Syria in the civil war there, hundreds more in Iraq where a preternaturally violent terrorist group is still within sight of Baghdad, killing with terrible efficiency.

These are the daily news of our lives—they often obliterate other news, as well as the politics of our divided times, including the big national questions of what to do with the flow of Central American youngsters to the American borders in Texas.

This is the stuff of coffee house talk, morning headaches, anguish and sorrow for many Washingtonians, this most international of cities, who have friends and relatives in the areas of conflict and killing.

In times like these, in this city, we cherish the joys we can manage, almost with a kind of guilt, the news always out there like a reproach. Still, the sun reflecting on carefully stacked tomatoes, bright and shiny, from the Eastern Shore, is a welcome, almost energizing sight: the colors seem perfect, even blessed. At the Dupont Circle Sunday market, musicians—a black, wiry man playing jazz with his violin, a smallish man in blue jeans putting a folk and country wail into a song about love gone dry in the long ago.

We wander through the market, where ready-made food is an increasing presence, buy our Sunday crab cakes because we must, take home West Virginia potato salad and a scrumptious peach and strawberry pie.

At Eastern Market on Capitol Hill, we mingle with the many who have come to enjoy the sun and its bearable temperatures and blue sky. We buy a stack of chocolate chip cookies from a woman who says, “Money back guaranteed, the best cookies on the street.” We go to the bookstore stacked with so many used books over two or three floors that the building seems to list. “Been here over two decades, sitting right here behind the counter,” the proprietor says. “You need to get out more,” somebody tells him. Children run, fathers lift their baby boys, dogs abound and jewelry from South Africa sparkles like a gift to come.

These days, you notice these things in what appears to be a sad, dangerous summer, filled with bright skies and omens.

In 1914, 100 years ago, on July 28, World War I began — after a month before there was another impossible blue-sky day like that in Sarajevo, when Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb, shot the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, setting off a series of events that would lead to the deaths of millions and change the world.

Gary Tischler •

The folks at Strathmore in North Bethesda are always forging ahead, doing new things.

First, it was free outdoor music concerts on the lawn. Then, it was tribute concerts, celebrating rock and pop legends. Then came the now annual ukulele festival.

Now, it’s all about food.

“Appetite—a Gastronomic Experience,” a two-day celebration of all things food on Friday and Saturday will mark Strathmore’s first culinary and epicurean arts festival, with world-class chefs, live music, trendy food trucks, demonstrations with local chefs and food purveyors, tasting, a craft beer garden, wine pairings, spread out over the Strathmore grounds, the Music Center and the Mansion.

Headlining the food festival will be top chefs Giada De Laurentiis and Andrew Zimmern.

De Laurentiis, the Emmy-award-winning Food Network star, will give a presentation during happy hour events, beginning 5 p.m. De Laurentiis will appear at 7 p.m.

On Saturday, it’s food-food-food everywhere, beginning at 11 a.m., with live music and demonstrations by restaurant chefs from all over the regions.

At 7:30 p.m., Saturday, it’s time for Zimmern, a noted bizarre food aficionado and star of the Travel Channel with food demonstrations and stories about his globetrotting adventures.

Throughout the day there will be wine and food samplings and pairings with a huge array of chefs and restaurants participating. Just to name a few, the dozens and dozens of participants include Rocklands Farm Winery, Robert Wiedemaier of Mussel Bar & Grille, Todd Gray and Ellen Kassoff of Equinox, Morton’s Steakhouse, Scott Drewno of the Source, Jane Morris of J. Chocolatier, Tastes from Jaleo by Jose Andres, Ridegewells Catering, Swing’s Coffee, Ed Hardy of Quench, Colci Gelati, Pub Dog, Magnet Earth Gourmet, Reyka Vodka, Susan and Alan James of Stonyman Gourmet, and many more.

Live music will originate from the Strathmore Backyard Theater stage by such groups as the 19th Street Band, Chopteeth Afrofunk Big Band, Howlin’ at the Moon with Jay Summerour, Israel and Morris and Victoria Vox.

For information on tickets and ticket package, call 301-581-5100 or go to www.strathmore.org/appetite.

Gary Tischler • July 21, 2014

People die every day. We note the passing of people of note, and in doing so, we also remember. They are not our loved ones, our relatives, our children or parents, but still we mourn, because we live in the time of knowing many people without ever having said hello.

Obituaries are the way we remember the passing of people whom we know from books, screens, stage, those venues that show or record excellences and achievement.

Therefore, we note the passing of a famed conductor who left a lasting legacy by founding the Castleton Festival and program; a Pulitzer Prize-winning political historian; a Nobel Prize winning novelist and activist; an albino white-haired Texas blues player; and a show business legend on Broadway and television.

We note the passing of Lorin Varencove Maazel, James McGregor Burns, Nadine Gordimer, Johnny Winter and Elaine Stritch.

LORIN VARENCOVE MAAZEL, 84

Not surprisingly, Maazel was a prodigy. Born to Jewish-American parents with a Russian background in Neully-sur-Seine France, he had a father who was a singer, a voice and piano teacher and an actor, and a mother who founded the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony Orchestra—plus his grandfather was a violinist in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.

So, it may not be a surprise that Maazel made his conducting debut at the age of eight. He conducted the NBC Symphony Orchestra at the age of 11. The list from that point goes on and on: he toured as conductor of the Gershwin Concert Orchestra in the 1950s, and in the 1970s, he was music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, then became music director of the Orchestre National de France in Paris, followed by a stint as Vienna State Opera general manager and conductor, was music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra , director of the New York Philharmonic and so on.

Maazel and his wife Dietlinde Turban Maazel founded the Castleton Festival in 2009 on his 600-acre estate Castleton Farms in Castleton, Va., between Sperryville and Warrenton. He also did something more than make and create great music: he left a living legacy of performance that encouraged young musicians in all phases, and he worked tirelessly on that project. The Castleton Festival—replete with live performances and seminars — now wrapping up another season has becoming increasingly respected and noteworthy in the classical music world after five seasons, and it’s hoped that it will continue to provide the kind of musical event and training that is priceless for both audiences and musicians. Maazel was 84. He died from complications from pneumonia.

JAMES MACGREGOR BURNS, 95

Burns, who wrote a two-volume biography of Franklin Roosevelt, “The Lion and the Fox” and “The Soldier of Freedom” (Pulitzer Prize, 1970), was a leader in the study of leadership. In Roosevelt, he found a leader that he saw pragmatically and clearly, a strong leader who could inspire while work the politics of issues to his advantage.

He wrote—among 20 books—a three-volume political history of the United States, “The American Experiment,” and was co-author of “Government by the People” as well as a 1963 book called “The Deadlock of Democracy,” which predicted precisely the kind of partisan deadlock which is gripping Washington today.

All of this writing, and research, resulted in the end a whole new field of academic and intellectual study of leadership, including the University of Maryland’s Burns Academy of Leadership.

NADINE GORDIMER, 90

Nadine Gordimer wrote novels and was the recipient of the 1991 Nobel prize for literature. But she was a lot more than just a writer of fiction.

A South African, Gordimer was raised in Gauteng , a mining town near Johanessburg. Spurred by her Jewish parents’ experience of oppression in Czarist Russia, she took a critical interest in Apartheid in South Africa and spoke out against it, especially after the Sharpsville massacre of 1960. It was also a time when she came into her own as a novelist and short story writer, publishing in the New Yorker. Her novels—which were insightful and critical of the South African government—were often banned or censored in South Africa. She did not stop with just writing, however. She joined the banned political party, the African National Congress, and in later years was an AIDS activist.

Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991.

JOHNNY WINTER, 70

Johnny Winter was an albino, he had white hair like his brother Edgar, and came out of Beaumont, Texas, and at age ten, he played on a local children’s show on the ukulele, and sang Everly Brothers songs.

He ended up becoming one of the pre-eminent blues guitarist — and singers. He was ranked 63rd among blues guitarists by Rolling Stone Magazine in a field dominated and inspired by Delta Blues African American musicians like Muddy Waters, B.B. King and Bobby Bland. Winter idolized Muddy Waters, as did a number of British blues players like Eric Clapton. To them, the blues were the source of everything in rock-and-roll.

His big first success was being recognized by Columbia Records by way of Mike Bloomfield and Al Cooper, ending up jamming with them at Fillmore East, where he played B.B. King’s “It’s My Own Fault.” His first album remains a classic—“The Progressive Blues Experiment”, in 1969, with Tommy Shannon on bass, drummer Uncle John Turner, Edgar Winter on keyboards and sax, blues giant Willie Dixon and Big Walter Horton, where he played and sang the remarkable version of “Be Careful with a Fool.”

Winter was for a short time in a relationship with Janis Joplin. All the great blues players, singers, boys and girls, black and white, live online for us to view today. If you love the blues and listen to the jam session of a Muddy Waters tribute, you’ll just about feel like you’ve died and gone to heaven. Which is about what Winter, who died in Geneva, Switzerland, may have done—or at least gone off to wherever they perpetually play the blues.

ELAINE STRITCH, 89

Elaine Strich was something else. She was raised as a strict Catholic girl in Connecticut, but she always seemed, with her raspy voice, her attitude, her sheer presence, to be something much less than demure.

She lit up Broadway a number of times. She made her debut there in a comedy called “Loco” in 1946, was in the original production of William Inge’s “Bust Stop,” performed gloriously in Noel Coward’s 1961 show, “Sail Away,” and spectacularly stopped the show with her number “Ladies Who Lunch” in Stephen Sondheim’s “Company.”

On television, she won three Emmys for a guest role on “Law & Order,” a documentary of her one-woman Broadway show, “Elaine Stritch at Liberty,” and most notably for playing Alec Baldwin’s mother Colleen on “30 Rock.”

There was always something about her, no matter what she did—movies like “Autumn in New York” or “Monster-in-Law” or television series or Broadway shows in a crowd of others, that made you want to look and listen. She was a show stopper and defined that term—she could one-up Ethel Merman or the most brazen performer or even herself. This isn’t about charm—it’s about talent and having the gift of being unforgettable.

Gary Tischler • July 17, 2014

One of the great joys of the Capital Fringe Festival is that a theatergoer—avid, serious or just tasting—is sure to encounter an experience of the kind that they won’t get anywhere else. Given the volume of theater groups, shows and performers, this is not a guarantee or promise of quality or excellence, which is something that reveals itself in the performance, but it is a promise of things different and new.

Something similar has always been at work in any production put out there by Scena Theater for over two decades under its artistic director and founder Robert McNamara at venues throughout the D.C. area, operating as a kind of one-theater, mini-fringe outfit over time. Eastern European plays, the classics back to Greece, explorations of dada, Fassbinder, modern Irish playwrights, short plays by the avant garde giants like Beckett, Genet and Ionesco, there was always something that was new and refreshing, and often never seen before on Washington stages.

I cannot be entirely sure about this, but one thing you rarely saw in any of McNamara’s and Scena’s productions was McNamara himself, even though he is a veteran and experience actor. By way of the Fringe Festival, now we get a chance to see McNamara the actor in a production that seems to be the very essence of what McNamara and Scena, and by extension, the Fringe is all about.

In “Report to the Academy,” McNamara portrays Red Peter, an ape who has seemingly buried his ape self in order to survive in the human world, and who’s now reporting on his life as a quasi-human to an audience of academics, and ourselves. It’s based on a story by Franz Kafka—the great novelist and short story writer from Prague who write terrifying stories in German about issues of identity in modern society. Gabriele Jakobi, who directed Brecht’s “Mother Courage and her Children” at Scena,” directs “Report to the Academy,” which is being performed at the edgy Caos on F gallery.

Red Peter may be an ape, but don’t confuse “Report to the Academy” with the serendipitous arrival of “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” in your local cineplexes. Red Peter is no Caesar. He’s a being trapped between two worlds, trying to understand himself and the world he lives in. McNamara arrives on stage almost in a limping dance, carrying a tightly-wound cane, he looks on first sight like a slightly tipsy, shaggy vaudeville trouper, or perhaps one of the tramps in “Waiting for Godot,” canvassing the audience with eyes that appear at turns curious, sly, contemplative, challenging.

What follows isn’t so much a report as a story, a contemplation of a journey, of becoming—almost—human, the process of transformation with losses and gains, gains and losses.

It’s a bravura performance by McNamara on a stage that has nothing but a table and a chair, a little lighting and a little day music. Red Peter isn’t bitter. He has obviously thought long and hard about his predicament, about human beings, himself as an ape, himself as a human. He recounts his capture and being shot: “I was hit twice, grazed on the cheek for which I bear a scar, and in the body, a more serious injury.” His dilemma became simple to him—he was being held in a cage, in which he could not sit, stand or lie down. “I had to find a way out , there was no way out, you could only squat,” he says, in dreamy words that seem part lecture, part a discussion of pain.

In order to be free, he understood that he had to abandon his apeness. “They plied with me liquor, “ he says. But he also got to interact with his captors, simple, sometimes brutal sailors by acting like them—drinking, shaking hands, and all that act entailed. “Humans seek freedom, total freedom, which is not natural, as experienced in nature,” he said. Whimsically, he recalls seeing trapeze artist flying true and through the air, being caught, flinging themselves into air. “It was an illusion of freedom.”

The ape, in the end, learns to speak—and in a very nuanced way, like a pedagogue who is also a poet. He launches on a career on the vaudeville stage, a successful one at that. In the process, he gives himself up, a kind of imposed cruelty. “It was either the stage or the zoo,” he explains.

As he tells his stories, you see a kind of self-awareness that is shockingly sad as well as funny. He cannot recall himself in the mirror. And McNamara gives himself little bits, like an actor, a vaudevillian, a song and dance man. His limp often changes, his gait has a foot dangling at times, at other times dancing, he slouches, stands tall, and occasionally, spurts of ape yips and laughter, desire and joy come out of him, as if escaping by memorized accident.

Many writers and observers see the story as a fable and parable about assimilation, which could certainly be true, given Kafka’s own issues about his identity (see also “Metamorphosis”). These days, with a heightened societal awareness of cruelty towards animals, that issue also pops up per force.

McNamara—in his studied, layered ways, his ticks and tricks, his intensity and his unstill ways—makes Red Peter someone, somebody, neither ape nor a man, but a living, thinking, speculative being with a searing soul.

“Report to an Academy” is at Caos on F July 15, 19, 25 and 27. Go to the Fringe Festival website for details at capitalfringe.org

Gary Tischler •

If you were alive and young in the 1950s and early 1960s, Elvis may have been king of rock and roll, but the Everly Brothers—Don and Phil—and their music and songs went straight to the top of the charts right along with him.

The duo had hits like “Wake Up Little Suzy,” “Cathy’s Clown,” “All I Have To Is Dream,” “Bye Bye, Love,” “Bird Dog” and a host of others which every teenager worth his name memorized. They had a look—part country, part rock and roll and part pop, two young guys from the south, a little pre-Conway Twitty, pompadoured hair, guitars, the whole package.

And they’re back, in a fashion, on June 28 in Georgetown.

Newmyer Tribute Productions will present a Tribute to the Everly Brothers at Gypsy Sally’s on K Street in Georgetown Saturday with doors opening at 5 p.m. It’s a tribute, featuring some of the area’s top award-winning groups and musicians, including David and Ginger Kitchen, Jelly Roll Mortals, Dede Wyland and Bill Williams, Ruthie Logsdon, Greg Hardin and Bill Starks (of Ruthie and the Wranglers), Buck Stone and Michelle Murray, Willie Barry, the Hummingbirds, Louie Newmyer, Andy Rutherford, Jimi Lethbridge, Amy Sullivan, Bill Baker, Derek Brock and the Lofgren Brothers (Tom, Mike and Mark).

Ron Newmyer, the producer from BandHouse Gigs, is known for producing an array of tribute concerts over the years at a variety of venues, including Strathmore, the Hamilton, the Fillmore and the Barns at Wolf Trap, including tributes to the music of Woodstock, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Simon and Garfunkel and the English Invasion.

“The Everly Brothers had an enormous influence on other groups that followed,” Newmyer said. “The Beatles, for one, really were impressed by their harmonies, and that’s what the Everly Brothers were about. They weren’t exactly rockers. They were part rock, part country and pop. They had enormous success with their songs, and that’s saying something since they recorded when Elvis was king.”

“It’s especially fitting now that we had a tribute to them, since Phil Everly died in January,” Newmyer said. “People are going to get a chance to hear all the popular songs like ‘Suzy’ and ‘Dream,’ but they’re also going to hear songs that they’ve probably never heard before.”

One of the top performers in the tribute concert will be Ruthie Logsdon along with her fellow players from Ruthie and the Wranglers, Greg Hardin and Bill Starks. If you haven’t heard or seen Logsdon at some point during the last 25 years, you don’t’ get out much. “We’ve played everywhere we can play,” she said. “Festivals, county fairs, clubs, and all kinds of venues in the area.” It’s paid off, too—Ruth and her fellow musicians—who now write most of their own songs, have won dozens of Wammies—from the Washington Area Music Association, and are considered by many to be one of the top examples of fast-paced, rock-a-billy, twangy, infectious music makers.

“We don’t do too many slow sings,” Logdon said. “We’re naturally upbeat.”

“I used to be the girl that hung out with musicians, and I’d say, yeah, I’d like to sing, sure, hey, guys, I can sing, kind of thing, I was kind of shy,” she said. But she’s gone far beyond that. Listen to the Wranglers, her natural way with both a twangy, slow ballad, or upbeat, authentic countrified hillbilly music, you can see why the group makes for a popular show.

“When we play, all of us, there’s just such joy and energy in doing it,” she said. “It never gets old. We’re always writing. We’re always playing. It takes a lot of work. You’re always touring. You’re going from radio station to radio station.”

While Logdon is also a graphic artist, most of her friends are musicians. “That’s the world I live in,” she said.

“The thing about the Everly Brothers is that it’s the harmonies,” she said. “They’re just unforgettable. They’re so beautiful.” For the tribute Saturday, Lodson said, “We’re going to do some songs people may not be familiar with, duets and the like. We’ll be doing ‘Gone, Gone Gone,’ ‘Long Time Gone’ and ‘Over So Many Years.’ ”

Ruthie and the Wranglers celebrated 25 years of Wrangler Twang a week before at Gypsy Sally’s.

Gary Tischler • July 16, 2014

When audience members arrive at the Wolf Trap Filene Center for the July 25 Wolf Trap Opera Company’s production of Bizet’s quintessential “Carmen,” they’ll be settling in for something special that’s at the core of opera, and at the core of the WTOC, an experience that’s both expansive and essential. This production, sung in French with English supertitles, features custom video projection design, providing attendees a multi-media opera experience.

Kim Pensinger Witman, the senior director of the WTOC, says that “’Carmen’ is the kind of opera where you draw a lot of people who normally might not go to the opera, or it’s on a list of something they might want to do, or it’s a reason for coming out here.” In short, like a few other standards of the opera repertoire (think “La Boheme” or “Madame Butterfly”), it’s an opera for people who may not even like opera, but want to see ‘Carmen.’ “Somewhere in people’s lives they’ve heard strands of music or arias from the opera, it’s comfortable and familiar in a way.”

“But it wasn’t always like that,” she added. “When it debuted, it created a bit of a firestorm, because it was very non-traditional. Plus there was controversy about the plot because it involved a heroine who was a gypsy as opposed to an aristocrat or royalty. In addition, the opera was an example of the new form “opera comique,” which used spoken dialogue along with the music, which wasn’t like classical opera.”

Now, it’s one of those operas that expands the audience because of its familiarity. But that’s not all that’s expanding the audience at Wolf Trap, where opera has been performed since 1971. The WTOC is one of the most highly regarded residency programs in the world.

It’s tiered into two groups–the Filene Young Artists and the Studio Artists. The Filene Young Artist singers (some 15-20) are drawn from candidates who already have completed advanced degrees and performed in apprenticeships. The Studio Artists (some 12-16) are drawn from candidates who have undergraduate degrees, but are still undecided on a career path for opera.

“One of the things that’s unique about the program is that we basically select and choose the operas we perform based on the roster of singers that we have, their particular talents and voices,” Witman says. “I don’t think anybody else does that.”

“Carmen” is not the beginning and end of what the Wolf Trap Opera Company has to offer during the summer’s season. There has been a consistently adventuresome aspect to the WTOC offerings, enriched by guest artists, top-notch conductors and designers. They also offer special programs, recitals and pre-performance talks. It’s a full-service season presented by a full-service company.

The company’s first offering of the season was a rarely performed production of Handel’s “Giulio Cesare,” conducted by Antony Walker. The popular “Aria Jukebox,” which features Filene Young Artists singing arias selected by the audience, performed its annual show earlier this month. This year’s concert featured Artist in Residence Eric Owens and Director Witman at the piano.

“I started out as a pianist,” Witman said. “When I came here, I continued to play but took on other tasks, and now I’m senior director. Basically, I do the hiring. I’m involved in much of the production work. I coordinate all things classical music at Wolf Trap, which includes working with the National Symphony Orchestra partnership, which has their own Wolf Trap program and season.”

“We’re all trying to widen our audiences, all the venues big and small, and find ways to get the audience to come but to be a part of something—the talks, the recitals and of course the setting all lead up to the idea of opera at Wolf Trap being an experience. It’s a unique place, a unique company.”

For “Carmen,” Grant Gershon will conduct the National Symphony Orchestra. Mezzo-soprano Maya Lahyani stars as Carmen, with tenor Kevin Ray as Don Juan. Directing is Tara Faircloth. [gallery ids="101810,139907,139905" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

“Hill & Dale has air conditioning, a couch and Willie Nelson on the LP Wall.”

That’s what an Instagram on the relatively new Georgetown shop’s Facebook page offers, which is, if not a summation of what the store is, then a pretty good hint of some of the pleasures therein.

Oh, and Hill & Dale sells new vinyl records, many of them remastered rock and roll, blues and jazz masters, but also brand new things you can call actual albums by contemporary artists.

Hill & Dale is owner Rob Norton’s gamble on the belief that people will want to buy, touch, hold, play and listen to vinyl records again, not just for nostalgia’s sake, but for all the reasons that making really listening to music a one-of-a-kind experience in the iTunes and digital age. There are other stores around which do vinyl—old vinyl albums played on old turntables as well as new vinyl works—but Norton decided that he’d go all in on new vinyl.

“It’s a risk, I suppose,” he said. “But lots of artists and musicians do that now. It’s almost a hedge but also another way of marketing, selling, your music, a process that’s gotten very complicated, business-wise.”

Norton isn’t just a music-rock-jazz-o-phile with an obsession. In the store at 1054 31st St., NW, in what used be the Parrish Gallery, he’s created a kind of walk-in experience.

“One of the reasons I loved albums, always have, is the art work, the covers going back at least to the 1960s. That’s art to me, it’s very much a part of the store,” he said. That’s probably why the shop—with its clean, cool rows of albums categorized alphabetically—still retains the flavor of a gallery, with decorative concert and album posters. The LP Wall, with its changing offerings of current albums, is enough to make you swoon with delight. Another wall provides space for exhibitions and a sampling of the rock photography of Peter Simon, which includes the cover photo for Joni Mitchell’s classic “Blue” album. Another room houses East Coast Rock and Roll photography in a collaborate show with Govinda Gallery and Chris Murray.

If places like the Black Cat and the 9:30 Club are sweaty incarnations of the spirit of live performance music, Hill & Dale is more like a quiet church, where you can commune at the altar of album covers and talk with the owner. It’s a clean, quiet place for people who share an affinity for the power of all sorts of music.

“I think vinyl is coming back strong,” said Norton, who used to be a marketer for the pharmaceutical industry. I’m betting there are a lot of people like me out there who like to really listen to music. I happen to like Jazz a lot, but I like new music. I like Rush, Jack White Bruce, all sorts of thing and I really like Miles Davis.”

With Norton, there’s really two or three things going on in the store. It’s about intense listening—all those hours sitting with “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” from beginning to end, or Mitchell’s “Blue” or the Woodstock album.

“It’s a way of listening,” he said. “You can’t flit around on an album, you have to go from start to finish, you can’t do what you do on the Internet, buy single copies, or just run around YouTube from song to song, artist to artist. It’s a totally different way of listening, a different experience.” He says the big record stores of the past almost prevented customers from getting the full repertoire of music they had on hand. “I never got out of the rock section,” he said, before he finally managed to realize his passion for jazz.

Looking at the LP wall, you see and practically feel the restless scope of 20th-century pop, rock, blues and jazz music—a remastered Hank Williams collection, a collection of an Iranian rock star’s work, the burning Hindenberg album cover by Led Zeppellin, Aretha, Bruce, the list is endless.

“The thing about vinyl is it’s tactile, you have to have patience,” he said. “The turntable, you set the record in the groove, it’s not background music when you listen to an album like that. It’s important.”

Gary Tischler • July 14, 2014

When Rita Moreno talks, there’s always a contextual echo. “I’m an actress,” she’ll say, excusing in advance a rich bag of memories and stories that she’ll tell with exuberance and without much prompting.

“You’ll be lucky if you get to say anything,” she kidded with National Portrait Gallery curator of Latino art and history Taina Carago, who was interviewing her.

Moreno had a lot to say in the July 9 Living Self Portrait event, featuring Moreno who is part of the NPG’s “Dancing The Dream” exhibition which ends July 13. She was also here for a post-interview book signing, “Rita Moreno: A Memoir.”

“I came to this country when I was five years old, “ the 82-year-old actress said. “I came from Puerto Rico. My parents were divorced—my father had a problem with womanizing, I think—and my mother came and brought me to New York to Spanish Harlem. She was a single mother, which was kind of scandalous in those days for a Hispanic woman, but she raised me. She worked and was a wonderful seamstress, among other things. She made sure not just that I survived, but that I got to go to dance classes, to learn, to nurture whatever talents I had. I am always amazed by her. She was so strong.”

She recalled when she was coming into New York Harbor and saw the Statue of Liberty. “In Puerto Rico, you see statues of men, generals, the achievers, statesmen, that of kind thing. When I saw that great green statue of a lady—I thought, my goodness, a lady runs this country.”

“When we came on the boat, there was a storm, and I was frightened. Puerto Ricans don’t swim, you know. And I wondered why my mother brought me to this place, where it was cold and took me from my tropical paradise.”

Moreno recalled that, while she went to classes and to school, there were no role models of any sort, no mentors. “It wasn’t like today. There wasn’t this large population of Hispanics when I was a child. And you get the usual things—people calling you a ‘Spic.’ One thing I realized, if I was going to realize any sort of dream, I was going to have to learn the language, to speak the language, and not just speak ghetto Spanish. To learn to speak like the people around you, or you would not get anywhere. You would never feel at home, otherwise.”

Listening to her talk about her childhood—“It’s all in the book,” she said—you can’t help but be caught up a little in one of the biggest issues of our day. You’ve heard the stories on the nightly news—the logjam of children from Central America, trying to make their way into the United States, the combative, divisive debate over immigration and the current crisis on the Texas border. The stories from the news form a kind of background noise for the stories of Rita Moreno, who led a different immigrant’s life that over the years led to an accumulative triumph, but also times of frustrations and emotional turmoil.

The story is that Moreno has made a home here, more than that, a life which still moves with energy. “I am a working actress, a performer,” she said. “I still work all of the time, because that’s who I am.”

Who she is and was is a woman who is one of only eight living performers and the only Latino to have achieved the Oscar, the Emmy, the Tony and the Grammy. She won two Emmys for “The Muppet Show” and “The Rockford Files,” a Grammy for her 1972 performance on the “Electric Company” album, and a Tony for her performance as Googie Gomez in “The Ritz”.

Her Oscar came for her performance as Anita in the 1962 riveting, spectacularly successful film version of “West Side Story”—the mind’s eye can still remember her flaring her brightly colored skirt singing and dancing in “America,” as in “Everything is free in America. We like to be in America.” She played the girlfriend of the leader of a Puerto Rican gang, battling with white gangs framed around a Romeo-and-Juliet type love story, featuring Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood.

Her whole Hollywood career which commenced when she was very young—she had been taught dancing by Rita Hayworth’s uncle—centered around a string of roles playing ethnic girls. “You name it, Indians, and Indians, Polynesians, Arabians, Latin Americans, girls of easy morals, sexy and spicy and the movies often weren’t very good.” They ranged from big studio efforts like “Garden of Evil” (Mexican spitfire) to “The Yellow Tomahawk” (sexy Indian maid) and so on. One excellent role was the doomed young girl in “The King and I.” “When I first started I was taken to see Louis B Mayer, the head of MGM studios,” Moreno said. “He looked at me and he said, ‘She looks like a Mexican Elizabeth Taylor.’ ”

“Oh, my God, I hated it,” she said. “I couldn’t get away from it. It took a long time, and it seemed like you had to fight for everything. It was exciting at first, but then it was one dusky maiden after another. They didn’t see me.”

She had to relearn dancing to get the part of Anita. “I heard on Oscar night that there was this huge audience watching their television sets in Spanish Harlem and that they went nuts when I won.”

By that time, people did see her in all her glory—the dancer, the actress (“Carnal Knowledge” in a small but powerful role as a prostitute), the singer, the out-and-out-full-steam-ahead performer. And wife, and doting mom of jewelry designer Fernanda Louisa Gordon.

“You have to keep going,” she said. “I am what I am, and you work hard to keep yourself sharp and smart. You test yourself.”

“Sometimes,” she said. “I remember that little girl who was a little afraid in this country. “

She doesn’t sound one bit afraid. She remains: that woman, so smart and so funny, storyteller and actress, Rita Moreno, star of stage and screen and memories.