Arts & Society

Gary Tischler • April 27, 2016

“Jersey Boys” on tour seems almost like a recurring, regular thing — like the seasons¸ you might say — and here they are again, through April 24, at the National Theatre, part of Broadway at the National.

And yet, this award-winning (Grammy, Tony, Olivier) musical, which has been around since 2005, never drops in like a lazy old uncle, telling — or singing — the same old stories in the same old way. This particular showbiz musical still has the buzz of something that somebody put together for the first time. It’s gritty, fresh and packs a punch.

The fact that this show — about the life and times and career and superstardom of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, a uniquely American rock-and-roll group that vied at one time for attention, fame and record sales with the Beatles and the Beach Boys — also works like a greatest-hits album in the flesh doesn’t hurt, of course.

“Sherry,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “Walk Like a Man,” “Dawn,” “My Eyes Adored You,” “Big Man In Town,” ”Let’s Hang On,” “Rag Doll” and the inimitable “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” … these songs stir memories and seem new all at once.

There’s a reason for that, and a reason why Frankie Valli is at the center of the sound. It was his way with a falsetto range that made the songs (penned by the gifted Bob Gaudio, the creative core of the group) unique, giving them a style, almost a genre, all of their own.

Ever since “Jersey Boys” debuted on Broadway in 2005, there have been many performers who wore the mantles of Gaudio, Tommy DeVito and Nick Massi, as well as many Frankie Vallis. Every Valli should, in theory, be the same, but that’s not the case. Every Valli seems to make the man, the voice and the songs his own, but not in a way that you’d ever forget Valli.

That’s the case for Aaron De Jesus, a veteran Broadway musical performer (he’s toured or performed in the monster hit “Wicked,” in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” and in the more traditional “Guys and Dolls”), who says that while he’s done Valli for a while now, it wasn’t always easy. “The hardest thing is the falsetto,” he said. “It’s what makes the lines and the song, but it’s not all of it. I’m a natural tenor, so that was difficult for me at first. You tend to concentrate on that at first.

“I’m familiar now, I’ve been doing this [in the Las Vegas production and on tour] for some time now,” he said. “And you know what’s interesting? It never, ever gets old. What’s surprising is how much depth there is to this show. It’s not just a musical, it’s a piece of theater, a play. It has more than its share of dark moments, and everybody in the group gets their say. Every time out, you find stuff, you dive in.

“In this show, you get to use your acting skills, you have to. Because these guys, those four guys, they were something. Frankie Valli came by several times, at different times. He really cares about the show, he offered tips, he was very accessible.”

Every Valli is different, of course, even Valli himself. What De Jesus brings to the part is a stubborn humanity, a self-awareness, a decency and a keen appreciation of friendship and family, even when Frankie fails, often, as a father and a husband. He sings clearly and with great honest emotion, and doesn’t use the high notes as a kind of trick.

What’s interesting about the show, and what makes “Jersey Boys” still seem raw and real, is the milieu. These are real Jersey boys, from the mean streets, the neighborhoods, those once dominated by the godfathers, where young boys growing up wanted to be cops or firemen, but often ended up in jail for breaking and entering or petty theft. They listened to street-corner groups and doo-wop music.

The Four Seasons started out as the Lovers, and ran through names by the score until Gaudio showed up to give them a sound, and songs perfect for the high-pitched, emotionally rich voice of Valli.

This is a show about fame and its ill and great effects, about life on the road, about things that happen, love and marriage and the death of a child. Even as you swim in the songs — love those songs — you still get moved by the life on stage. You laugh, often, sigh a little and just sort of surrender.

It should be noted that Clint Eastwood (of all people) made a pretty original movie out of this material. And the beat does go on, Valli is still touring with a new set of Four Seasons. Hang on, hang on, to what you’ve got, indeed.

Georgetowner •

On Saturday, April 23, from 1 to 5 p.m., the Georgetown Garden Club will host a book-signing party for “Gardens of Georgetown: Exploring Urban Treasures,” published by the club in 2015. The event, at the Lou Lou boutique at 1304 Wisconsin Ave. NW, will include “sips and sweets.”

The 95-page hardcover book, with text by Edith Nalle Schafer, features glossy color photographs by Jenny Gorman. Together, words and images offer an inside look at some of the most beautiful private green spaces in Georgetown, where “the gardens expand the living areas of the houses for six months of the year.”

Proceeds from the sale will benefit Georgetown’s parks and public spaces. Tickets for the club’s May 9 Garden Tour will also be available for purchase. For details, visit georgetowngardenclubdc.org.

Gary Tischler •

The current struggles of the 2016 presidential campaigns — even now, as they steamroll toward the summer conventions unresolved as to who the Democratic and Republican nominees are likely to be — have taken on an apocalyptic tone, as if Trumping and trampling the outsider battles and insider strategies.

Go see “All the Way,” the Broadway hit about Lyndon Baines Johnson and his epic struggle to pass a landmark civil rights bill and get re-elected in 1964 — at Arena Stage through May 8 — and you’ll see that, by comparison, maybe the current contretemps, much of it centered around the candidacy of Donald Trump, aren’t so huge, let alone historic, after all.

And when it comes to vulgarity, the Donald is doing child’s play, or at least middle-school work (something often noted by present-day observers), when compared to the titanic outbursts and style of the Texan LBJ. His references to squeezing the privates of rivals and opponents who stand in his way are numerous and witheringly pungent.

Jack Willis originated the part of LBJ at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and Brian Cranston starred in the role on Broadway to much acclaim, but it’s Willis who embodies Johnson, who’s become president after the assassination of John F. Kennedy the year before. Willis doesn’t exactly try to imitate the mannerisms or even the speaking style of LBJ; he does something better: he makes him outsized, not so much physically, but by his sheer, sweaty, loud, hyperventilating and tenacious presence. This LBJ can exhaust the audience, almost as much as he wears down his rivals and friends alike.

Playwright Robert Schenkkan has written and made an epic. It’s nearly three hours long and peopled with just about every notable political and Washington figure alive at the time. It’s the White House that makes LBJ the king of Washington. All the comings and goings — except for those of Martin Luther King Jr., who’s trying to push LBJ while trying to tamp down the more impatient urgings of his close advisors and followers — funnel to and from the White House, interwoven with telephone calls and television clips.

Today’s politicians and presidential wannabes might complain that LBJ was exactly the kind of Washington insider who controlled the game and policy of the times, and it’s true. Historically and on this stage, LBJ is a wheeler-dealer, an arm-twister who made people yelp, a crude, super-smart and physically electric leader. Willis’s Johnson insults his wife, browbeats his vice-president-in-waiting Hubert Humphrey, handles the dangerous and Machiavellian J. Edgar Hoover, manipulates the Southern senators and tries to wrangle the civil rights bill through Congress like a rodeo rider, never giving up, often hanging on for dear life. He compromises, he digs up arcane senate and committee rules, he controls the process. He’s a master psychologist who could use a shrink himself.

The problem with a lengthy play like this is that there’s an amazing amount of historical stuff going on here, and Schenkkan tries to get it all in. That includes the stirrings of the mess and muck of Vietnam, the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi, the attempted blackmail by Hoover of just about everybody — but especially King, who’s won the Nobel Peace Prize and is vulnerable in his personal life. We see the beginnings of the South, once securely Democratic, heading towards the GOP.

The second problem is that this could very well be a one-man show (which has been done before) because of the sheer bluster and size, the humanity of Johnson. Nobody quite manages to break through to take over the stage, except Bowman Wright as King when he is arguing with his own group, including his wife, the passionate Stokely Carmichael and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy. This is a reserved, thoughtful, even quiet King, not the famed orator and impassioned leader.

Everyone else is somewhat in the shadows, and perhaps sometimes unfairly portrayed, as is the case for Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic Party’s “Happy Warrior” from Minnesota who, as played by Richard Clodfelter, seems hardly the party’s most optimistic battler for justice as LBJ dangles the vice presidency before him.

Willis gives us a full and rich LBJ, often unpleasant, often, a little like Nixon, insecure and paranoid, but a man who meant to change the nation by sheer force of will, with the help of a memory that knew where the bodies where buried. His belief in bringing justice to African Americans and fairness to the poor came from his own mean beginnings as a Texas schoolteacher, and he embraced this belief with strong arms and tight knuckles. He may have lacked elegance, but he had more than enough heart and vision.

Juliana Zovak •

FilmFest DC, the largest international film festival in the District, is back, running from April 14 through April 24.

The festival first came to the district in 1987. This year it celebrates its 30th anniversary. Opening night is tonight, April 14, at AMC Mazza Gallerie, with a showing of “The Dressmaker,” an Australian movie starring Kate Winslet that was nominated for five Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts awards.

Over 11 days, the festival will screen 75 movies, including foreign films, dramas, comedies and international shorts. Cine Cubano is showing three different Cuban films that feature life in contemporary Cuba.

In addition to the film screenings, the festival will host panels, workshops and Q&As with people in the business, from actors to directors to producers.

Landmark’s E Street Cinema and AMC Mazza Gallerie are the primary venues. Other events will take place at the Embassy of France and the National Gallery of Art.

A full schedule of events can be found here.

Gary Tischler •

The time is approaching. The Gods will awaken, rise and fall. Battles will be fought. There will be fire and dragons and Rhine maidens, heroes, giants and dwarves, magic rings and spears and swords, forbidden love, chaos and destruction, nature itself threatened.

Sorry, it’s not the upcoming Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

It’s the Ring Cycle, Richard Wagner’s epic total-theater quartet of operas. This is Washington National Opera’s first complete “Ring” production, directed by Artistic Director Francesca Zambello and rooted in her 2011 production in San Francisco.

There will be three sets of cycles of the work Zambello calls “the pinnacle of opera,” beginning with the first opera in the first cycle, a performance of “The Rhinegold” on Saturday, April 30. “The Valkyrie” follows on May 2, “Siegfried” on May 4 and “Twilight of the Gods” on May 6. The three cycles will be presented through May 22.

“It’s based on the San Francisco production, but, remember, a lot of time has passed since then, and I think the entire work is pertinent to our own lives. And I also think it resonates in the popular culture,” Zambello said. “We’re in the age of ‘Lord of the Rings,’ ‘Star Wars’ and fantasy and superhero culture with male and female heroes. ‘The Ring’ is a heroic epic, it’s full of gods and demigods, but also about man and his relationship with nature, and the destruction of the environment, all of which echoes today. I think the themes can be found in contemporary culture, politics and policies, in our society and the things that concern and haunt us today.”

While the Ring has often been controversial to some people in terms of its Teutonic mythologies and themes, Wagner was trying to achieve universal themes with the richly ambitious music, the dramatic diversity of the score and the concept of theater itself.

“He was beyond 19th-century romantic opera and music, he was after something revolutionary,” explained Zambello.

Wagner always dreamed of a kind of “total theater,” in which music, dance, librettos, scores, drama, setting and story blended into a gigantic whole. You can stage each opera separately, but the totality is beyond category, in fact daunting as a complete work. With the Ring, Wagner came as close as any artist to achieving that goal.

Zambello not only believes in the contemporary quality of the Ring, but has set the operas in stage environments that seem contemporary, modern, industrial, sharp and edgy, even apocalyptical and post-apocalyptical; this is a Ring for the 21st century. She sees the Ring as a way of staging an American epic: “The timeless themes of the Ring — the destruction of nature, the quest for power, the plight of powerless — are beyond the Nordic realms of long ago. They’re also in America’s own stories, myths, visions and iconographic images in the post-9/11 world.”

The enterprise has generated a number of astonishing pieces of data. Each cycle consists of 17 hours, including intermissions. There are 2,650 title slides. Indicative of its industrial strength, the production uses 13,000 feet of chain, 130 overhead chain motors, 950 pounds of propane, 2 elevators and 500 lighting instruments, plus 920 liters of liquid nitrogen.

The human total: 370 people on stage, backstage and in the pit, with 94 orchestra members, 74 choristers, 63 crew members, 56 supernumeraries, 39 principal singers, 33 members of the production staff, 210 members of music staff and one conductor (that would be NSO conductor Philippe Auguin).

There will have been 230 rehearsals of about three hours each leading up to the opening.

We had the opportunity to drop by the Opera House on a weekday afternoon recently for a rehearsal of “The Valkyrie,” the second of the four operas, in which Wotan, the king of the Gods, is forced to tragically confront a challenging son, Siegmund, who falls in love with Sieglinde, who happens to be his twin sister (which spells trouble), as well the fabled female warrior and daughter of Wotan, Brünnhilde.

Two things become clear during the course of the rehearsal. We are in a tempest on stage, what with a ring of fire, the warrior Valkyries parachuting from the skies and Wotan and Brünnhilde in a tragic battle on the limits of loyalty and love. It’s also clear that, like the one-of-a-kind “Tristan and Isolde,” the world of the Ring is expansive, all embracing, all-out and both fulfilling and exhaustive. For those visiting that world, it might be wise to write a will: you never know what could happen on such a journey.

Gary Tischler •

Whatever your level of digital competency, I’m sure you’ve stopped and wondered exactly what kind of superhighway we’re collectively traveling on, and where the latest app is taking us on the never-ending treadmill known as the internet.

How private is our private life? Who’s communicating with us in the disembodied replies to our queries? Who’s watching and recording our every peck on a keyboard, click on a mouse, touch on a screen?

“The Nether,” a remarkable play by Jennifer Haley — and an amazing piece of stagecraft that’s at once gripping, really smart, imaginative, dramatically disturbing, even poetic and, yes, more than a little creepy — tackles just about any question you might have about our rapidly changing technological capacities, which allow us to confront and evade reality at an alarmingly accelerating rate.

Directed by Shana Cooper with a gifted cast headed by Washington veteran Edward Gero, “The Nether” is getting a dazzling production at Woolly Mammoth through May 1. The play can work as a detective thriller about unraveling identity, asking what is a crime in our brave new world, or as a dystopian sci-fi story. It could even be mistaken for an extended and lavishly decorated episode of Special Victims Unit, the long-running NBC cop show that specializes in sex crimes.

The play imagines a world — it could be decades away, or a month — in which the internet, where people already spend an inordinate amount of their professional, personal, imaginative and breathing time — has expanded to become the Nether, a digital space where virtual reality is as common as waking up and going to sleep.

In this world, a man named Sims is under investigation by Nether police for creating a difficult-to-hack sub-world called the Hideaway — subscription-only, apparently — where customers can spend time in a detailed recreation of a Victorian environment, geared toward an aesthetic of finely honed visual and intellectual beauty. This historical-artistic setting is a way of glossing over its real purpose: to enable users to spend time with, have sex with and do horrific violence to an avatar of a little girl. It is, in other words, as one observer commented, a daydream for pedophiles.

That notion is always there, underlying (and sometimes undermining) the plot, debates and twists and turns of the play. Sims, the creator and virtual ringmaster of the Hideaway, played with insistent evasiveness by Gero, is being interrogated by a police officer, bluntly portrayed by Gabriela Fernandez-Coffey. He does intellectual battle with his tormentor, rationalizing, using the privacy defense, above all trying to evade responsibility.

Sims — also known as Poppa in the Hideaway — puts forward an old argument: wouldn’t it be better for people to be allowed to commit virtual or fantasy crimes in the Hideaway than act out in the real world?

In the Hideaway, visitors adopt other identities. The star object of desire — for Poppa, for a youngish swain, for customers — is Iris, a virtual little girl who is at once precocious, intelligent, smart, funny and appealing, deftly played by 18-year-old Maya Brettell.

It should be noted that the entire enterprise seems virtual. The more odious implications of the Hideaway are handled with discretion and imagination. There are no graphic depictions of sexuality or violence. What’s haunting is the talk about the future of the virtual world and the internet and how we live in it, outside of it or even deeply lost in it — as one character appears to be, to the point of becoming a permanent resident or “shadow.” It’s talk, sharply written and argued, that’s already being bantered around coffee tables and chat rooms, sometimes erupting from dreams.

One of the ideas embedded in the play is that the world has denuded itself of reality. The steadily eroding environment, the disappearing plants and animals, the machines that do everything that brains and muscles should do, have made it difficult — in this world — to keep it real. This has created a niche for places like the Nether, places where anything that can be imagined, dreamed or desired can be fulfilled, made real or achieved.

“The Nether” — which in its staging seems feverishly detailed — may be in the end neither here nor there, but some of it (perhaps most if it) is coming up, straight ahead.

Click.

Robert Devaney • April 22, 2016

“This is groovy,” said Rev. Kevin Gillespie, S.J., pastor of Holy Trinity Catholic Church, at his blessing of the temporary discotheque at Holy Trinity School on 36th Street. At Studio 36 (not 54), the April 9 disco inferno of more than 200 parents — many dressed a la 1970s and ’80s — raised more than $100,000 for the school, with help from auctioneer Martin Gammon. Edward Reno won best male costume; Kerry Myers, best female costume. Thanks to event chairs Teresa Dolan, Melissa Giuffrida and Jennifer Touchette, it was the first major fundraiser on school property in years. [gallery ids="102416,122125,122131,122137,122158,122147,122113,122143,122153,122119" nav="thumbs"]

Robert Devaney •

Concerts in the Park supporters found their way through Gypsy Sally’s to the Vinyl Lounge down at the Georgetown waterfront April 14 to chill with classic tunes, bar food, beer and the music of singer-guitarist Steve Siekkinen. “More cowbell,“ announced the T-shirt of John Rentzepis, the public safety chair of the Citizens Association of Georgetown. Concerts in the Park is a CAG program — with these summer dates: May 22, June 19 (Fathers’ Day) and July 10. [gallery ids="102415,122163,122172,122168" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

Knowledgeable political sages and strategists keep trying to tell you that a developer and reality-show host who lives in a penthouse in New York City somehow had his fingers on the heartbeat of working class folks in America, especially the kind that lived in towns in the Midwest, Southwest, central California and everywhere else where the factory closed, the dime store is charging a dollar and the honky-tonk bar and the white wood church stare at each other from across the street.

Don’t you believe it. If you want to know who had his fingers, and an aching heart on the heartbeat of regular folks, listen to some of the songs of Merle Haggard, the poet of hard times, too many beer bottles in the garbage bag, hopes beat on by betrayal, hard-won mistakes and love lost and regained to last and endure.

Haggard — whose face often resembled his name in later years — died at the age of 79, and the whole world of country music that could remember back more than past the birth of “American Idol” mourned and felt the loss: from Dolly Parton to Travis Tritt and any old singer who can still put a hitch and twang in his voice and make it sound like forget-me-not cards from a high school sweetheart, or the train fading over the horizon.

Haggard hard a hard-knock life and sang like a writer. His songs weren’t much full of hard-to-decipher metaphors, or veiled, hidden meanings. He was, after all, inspired to become a songwriter and singer when hearing Johnny Cash as a prisoner in a prison. He was a scion of all the families that moved out west during the Depression, the self-proclaimed Oakies, leaving lost farms and jobs behind in the dust bowl that was then Oklahoma. They settled in central California, principally Bakersfield, the flattest area in California, right between the mountains and greenery of Northern California and the goofy Hollywood skyscapes of L.A.

Haggard got famous for a time for maybe the wrong reason. He penned a song that seemed to express the silent majority of the days in the 1960s who scowled at hippies, druggies and liberals. It was called “Okie from Muskogee,” a midsized town in Oklahoma, and derided such things as burning draft cards and smoking weed, as in “we don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee,” which, for Haggard, apparently was a little white lie, given that he admitted to smoking the very same stuff before or after concerts.

He was a nitty-gritty, authentic country singer who could play and write, and his music always sounded like the real stuff in real life. He was up there and around Willie Nelson, who was famous for smoking marijuana and also looked as if he left half a beard on, and another type of country man, Buck Owens, who wore glittery jackets and had a wavy hairdo and a voice that oozed twang (not to mention a national television show).

As a writer and singer, Haggard was right up there with Hank Williams, minus the flashy, rock-star personality, the charisma and the early death. Look at pictures of his young-man version and you could see how he could get in trouble with women. He had that pitch-black-hair handsome stuff going for him like Cash and Elvis, but he was also, up close and personal, a lot more raggedly real.

His songs were about marriage and how hard it was, money and how not having enough put a worry and a scowl on your face, survival, the thing with booze and what too much of it did to you and how it made a train wreck of families.

In his love songs — which were often frisky as well as sorrowful — he echoed George Jones in his rueful delivery and regret-filled lyrics.

You don’t have to quote Merle. You can find all that you need to know in his songs, just the titles alone, from the great ones: “Will We Make it Through December,” “If We’re Not Back in Love by Monday,” “I’m going to Break Every Heart That I Can.” The titles are like a book of life, a life he lived: “I’m Always on the Mountain When I Fall,” “A Drunk Can’t Be a Man,” “A Working Man Can’t Get Nowhere Today,” “After I Sing All My Songs,” “Ain’t Your Memory Got No Pride At All,” “Are the Good Times Really Over,” “Beer Can Hill,” “Better Off When I Was Hungry,” “Bottle Let Me Down,” “Amber Waves,” “Cocaine Blues,” “Daddy Won’t Be Home Again For Christmas,” “Don’t Seem Like We’ve Been Together All Our Lives,” “From Now On, My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers,” “For the Good Times,” “Fightin’ Side of Me,” “Ham Boogie,” “I’ll Leave the Bottle on the Bar,” “From Graceland to the Promised Land.”

The titles — hundreds of them — read like a book of plainspoken notes and poetry from a guy writing things down at the end of the bar, waiting to catch the bus to work or the train out of town, missing what he’s missing, savoring what he got, pride in country and country music, regret at the mess we make of things.

Haggard, if you listen to him, has a familiar hitch, distinctive as a particular memory that comes rushing at you out of nowhere, in his voice. It’s a little tremulous something, a kind of lingering over a note without stretching it to the breaking point. Loretta Lynn does it in her new (yes, new) album “Full Circle,” and there are versions of it in most of the great country singers.

The songs sounded good on the radio, but they look and sound good on YouTube, too, like a revelation sitting next to you for inspection and comfort.

Georgetowner • April 20, 2016

Gayela Bynum, chair of the non-profit “We Will Survive Cancer,” was honored at Peacock Café on April 5 by Copa Style Magazine, a digital lifestyle publication. Copa Style publisher Rodney Branche spoke of Bynum,’s support during his mother’s bout with cancer before toasting the honoree. Emcee Renee Starlynn Allen called Bynum a role model. Greg Davis saluted Bynum as “the woman of the 21st century.” [gallery ids="102417,122105" nav="thumbs"]