Arts & Society

Georgetowner • April 20, 2016

In his welcome to more than 500 supporters of the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation at the Ritz-Carlton on 22nd Street April 13, Leonard Lauder said that every penny raised goes directly to research as ADDF seeks to accelerate the discovery of drugs to cure Alzheimer’s disease within our lifetimes. Elise Lefkowitz launched the event to honor her mother Estelle Gelman. Fox News Sunday anchor Chris Wallace emceed. Following Neiman Marcus Mazza Gallerie’s presentation of Oscar de la Rentas’s Fall 2016 Collection, the Great Ladies Award was presented to honorees Trish and George Vradenburg, co-founders of UsAgainstAlzheimer’s. [gallery ids="122156,122149,122161,122165" nav="thumbs"]

Georgetowner •

Supporters of the National Museum of Women in the Arts were invited to a reception April 7 to preview “She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers from Iran and the Arab World.” More than 80 photographs and a video presentation probe ideas about personal identity and topical political issues. Museum founder Wilhelmina Holladay hailed the beauty of Muslim artists. Kristen Gersh, who curated the exhibit at the Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, spoke of putting arts and culture before politics and media.

Georgetowner •

Under the patronage of Hungarian Ambassador Réka Szemerkényi, Mary Mochary and Aniko Gaal Schott co-chaired an elegant gala evening April 8 at the embassy, featuring pianist George Li to benefit the nonprofit Young Concert Artists of Washington. For 37 years, the Young Concert Artists Series at the Kennedy Center has presented the Washington debuts of extraordinary young musicians. George Li, in his sophomore year in the Harvard University-New England Conservatory joint program, captured the Silver Medal at the 2015 International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. [gallery ids="102414,122176,122169,122180" nav="thumbs"]

Georgetowner •

“I can’t define what fashion is, but I know when I see it,” said Vice President Joe Biden, after speaking lovingly of his Senate days and Senators George McGovern and Bob Dole. The veep and his son Hunter Biden, board chair of World Food Program USA, presented the McGovern-Dole Leadership Award to designer Michael Kors for his work against hunger and initiatives, such as “Watch Hunger Stop,” at the Organization of American States on 17th Street NW April 12. Raised in Georgetown, actress Olivia Wilde said, “I’m glad to be back in my hometown.” For his part, Kors said he was “awestruck” and “humbled” by the recognition. [gallery ids="102413,122177,122193,122185,122198,122188" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

Filmfest DC, the Washington, DC International Film Festival, may not be as big as it once was, but it’s still pretty big — still capable of generating various kinds of film buzz, still a rich array of special programs and, most important, still full of opportunities to see unusual films from far, far away that you otherwise might not.

Headed by Tony Gittens, founder and director, and Shirin Ghareeb, deputy director, Filmfest is marking its 30th anniversary this year. It opened April 14 with two near-legendary performers — Kate Winslet and Judy Davis — starring in Australian director Jocelyn Moorhouse’s witty drama-comedy “The Dressmaker,” about a once despised resident of a small Aussie town coming home to care for her mother.

The festival closes April 24 at AMC Mazza Gallerie with Philippe Falardeau’s “My Internship in Canada,” a satirical sendup of politics, after which there will be a last-night party.

Along the way, there’s a journey of 75 films from 45 countries over 11 days, with quite a few original and unusual choices remaining. As always, there are categories, prizes, special events and series. This year’s special categories include The Lighter Side, with comedies from all over, including France’s “21 Nights With Pattie”; Denmark’s “Men and Chicken”; another film from Canada, “No Men Beyond This Point”; “How to Tell You’re a Douchebag,” an edgy American entry; and the optimistically titled (all things considered) “Sweet Smell of Spring” from Tunisia.

There’s a series of noir, spy, crime and thriller moves called Trust No One, including “The People vs. Fritz Bauer” from Germany, about the man who prosecuted Adolf Eichmann; “The Last King” from Norway; “A Patch of Fog” from the U.K.; and “600 Miles” from the U.S.

Fittingly, there’s a triad of films called Cine Cuban or Films on Cuba, a Justice Matters series sponsored by the D.C.-based CrossCurrents Foundation. There is a series of films on music, something of a tradition with the festival, called Rhythms On and Off the Screen. And there are awards: the Circle Award, the Filmfest DC Audience Award and the Signis Award.

Arch Campbell, the city’s longest-running writer, critic and commentator on film, heads “An Evening with Arch Campbell and Friends,” April 21 at Landmark’s E Street Cinema, with fellow critics Jane Horwitz of the Washington Post, Travis Hopson of WETA Around Town and Jason Fraley of WTOP Radio.

Here are some highlights of the remainder of the festival, many of them speaking to the collaborative power of contemporary filmmakers.

“21 Nights With Pattie” is a French film, directed by Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu, about a woman who travels to her hometown for her mother’s funeral. Unfortunately, the corpse is missing (April 22, AMC Mazza Gallerie).

“3000 Nights,” which has the participation of film makers from France, Palestine, Qatar, Jordan, the UAE and Lebanon, is a fictional film by documentarian Mai Masri on the subject of the condition of Palestinian women in Israeli prisons (April 21, Landmark’s E Street Cinema, and April 23, AMC Mazza Gallerie).

“The Brand New Testament,” from France, Belgium and Luxembourg, posits the question: “What if God were one of us?” (April 21 and 22, AMC Mazza Gallerie).

“Dough,” directed by John Goldschmidt, is a U.K. entry with character actor and star Jonathan Pryce as a Grinchy Jewish baker trying to keep his family business together (April 20, AMC Mazza Gallerie).

“The Last King” is a Norwegian movie set in medieval times (1204) about men trying to keep the heir to the throne safe from powerful bishops (April 21 and 22, Landmark’s E Street Cinema).

“Nina” is a movie biography about the highly dramatic, emotional and brilliant American vocalist Nina Simone (April 20, Landmark’s E Street Cinema).

“Notfilm/Film” is a U.S./U.K. film about the making of “Film,” the silent movie clown Buster Keaton’s film based on a screenplay by the famously elliptical playwright Samuel Beckett (April 24, National Gallery of Art).

“Belgian Rhapsody” is a musical from — you guessed it — Belgium about rival jazz bands (April 23, Landmark’s E Street Cinema).

For cinemaniacs, there’s “Rebel Citizen,” a documentary about famed cinematographer Haskell Wexler directed by Pamela Yates (April 22 and 23, Landmark’s E Street Cinema).

The complete schedule, summaries and ticket information are available here.
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Gary Tischler • April 18, 2016

A number of years ago, I saw a play in which the author declared in the program that what we were about to see was not really a play, but a poem.

He was right. It was not a play, but a poem, which — while affecting — didn’t work as a piece of theater.

Something similar is at work at Theater J in the admirable, affecting and sometimes powerful production of “Falling Out of Time” by celebrated Israeli writer David Grossman, famous both for short stories and works of nonfiction. An exploration of human grief, “Falling Out of Time” feels and looks and is played and performed like a ritual. At times recalling the chorus in Greek tragedies, it could be a dramatic or cathartic church service, a memory of a dream or even a long poem. It resembles a recessional and processional with speaking parts.

I don’t mean to suggest that the production isn’t moving; it almost always is, once we get the hang of the people involved and what they are attempting to do. The people and their plight are the saving graces of “Falling out of Time,” because grief is the burden of being human. We will all suffer losses, along with the prospect of our own disappearance from time.

“Falling Out of Time” concerns itself with the acutely painful and terrible loss of children, as suffered by those left behind. It’s a personal issue for Grossman: his son, an Israeli soldier, was killed in the Lebanon War at a young age, and his loss is, if not the centerpiece, the jumping-off point for the work.

“I want to go there,” says the character identified as the man to his wife, meaning (as we learn through the course of this no-intermission work) he wants to fall out of time to be in proximity to his son — not dead, but not living in this time either. It’s not the simple desire to see the lost loved one, but the deeper need to have contact with the world in which he exists, to find meaning and relief from the fact of death, by entering its world.

There are others here — all of whom have suffered a similar loss, the death of a child, a death from an illness, an accident, a drowning, all of them sons and daughters now gone, the space they occupied in the lives of fathers and mothers hugely empty and full of unassuaged pain. There is a centaur, his body rooted below the surface, a chronicler of life in a village and his wife, a cobbler and his wife, a teacher, a count, a midwife.

As the man embarks on his journey, explaining the need to go, the others, one by one, tell their stories. And one by one they embark on the same journey, conducted by walking up the stairs and across a lane midway through the audience, down to the stage and back and around again. One by one, they “fall out of time” and join what sometimes resembles that dance of death from Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal.” They are joined together, holding hands, sometimes apart, until they come to the place, the “there” of there, to commune with what is left of their children in the other place and time, imitating death.

Mind you, you could get very involved in all this, and with the litany of sorrows and stories expressed by people onstage. They’re very individualized in terms of how they look, their clothes, their manner of moving, their voices, so that we feel for them. But they are not in the end either characters or people; they are, well, walking, touching, echoing poems of their own sufferings.

Because of this, the play is not really theater, it is literature. That’s very difficult for actors to play. There are some very fine actors doing their best with what they have, including Edward Christian as the ranting, raving centaur, the imposing John Lescault as the Duke, Michael Russotto as the ragged chronicler and the always impressive Nanna Ingvarsson as the chronicler’s wife, with Erika Rose giving the wife of the grieving man a down-to-earth freshness that the play badly needs.

Adapted and directed by Derek Goldman, “Falling into Time” is beautifully written, and it has the same power that some poems do, which is to make certain moments unforgettable. But it needs to be a play to truly complete the circle that it’s created.

Gary Tischler •

We are coming up on April, and April is the month of William Shakespeare — who was born on an April day in 1564 and died on an April day 52 years later, 400 years ago. (We know he died on April 23, which may or may not have been his birthday.)

Inevitably, we will talk about words, words, words. And, inevitably, we will talk about “The Tragedy of Hamlet,” Shakespeare’s most famous play, a play voluminously full of words.

Yet, right now, we have a “Hamlet” without words, and it’s not at Synetic Theater. It is instead the “Hamlet” of choreographer and Ballet Austin Artistic Director Stephen Mills. This “Hamlet” is an intense, under-two-hours ballet fueled by the driving, insistent music of Philip Glass and performed in grand, classic and very physical and emotional style by the Washington Ballet at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater. It runs through April 3.

Watching the production — beautifully and starkly danced in a modernistic set — is to get to the heart of the story, without necessarily getting the full effect of the layered, dense meaning within the play. Stripped of words, danced by a high-energy cast and jet-fueled by the music of Glass, the play becomes something of a staged action movie.

Dressed up in high contrast — peopled by not just one ghost, but apparitions that dance in visually effective unison with Hamlet — Mills’s version sets key moments in “Hamlet”: the celebration of the new king and queen, the play-within-a-play, an achingly beautiful duet by Hamlet and Ophelia, the confrontation between Gertrude and Hamlet, the killing of Polonius, the descent into madness, death and funeral of Ophelia and the climactic duels and deaths of, well, just about everyone.

This is dance as effective, affecting storytelling, highlighted by color: Hamlet is in red and most everyone else is in black and grey. In ensembles and solos, the dancers manage to convey the tensions — both toxic and intoxicating — of the court. It’s a speeded-up process that starts out with the sheen of outward beauty, but soon exposes the underlying struggle between guilt and anger, love and hate. The tools are not words, but muscle and bone, pointe and flight, wings and knuckles and leaps.

In this “Hamlet,” there is a certain amount of clarity about what’s what: very little of the what-to-do-what-to-do? grappling by Hamlet finds its way into the language of movement; everything is directed toward a resolution that builds and builds with a kind of inevitability. The music by Glass is nervous, string-filled, pushy, almost whip-like in its effect.

Nothing illustrates the power of this approach more than the role of Ophelia, danced in this production by the remarkable newcomer Venus Villa. Slight of build, she seems on the verge often of breaking into two. She’s vulnerable but also crazy-strong, well matched with Brooklyn Mack’s high-flying Hamlet. Her growing madness and her loss is devastating, in ways that few theatrical or cinematic versions have approached.

You lose some things in “Hamlet” as a dance, but the way that Mills recasts “Hamlet” as pure story is breathtaking in its own way. It’s remarkable how much can be said without words and how much can be done when words are whittled away cleanly in the play’s climax. You end up watching carefully, trying not to miss when Claudius puts poison in the chalice and when Gertrude drinks the wine, even as Hamlet and Laertes make the whole world a duel.

It reminded me of the time, a long time ago, when I was convinced to don tights and become an extra (Osric 2) in a local production of Tom Stoppard’s frantic “15-Minute Hamlet,” and how quickly the time passed. A three-hour play compressed itself into bodies and stories. The late British film director Lindsay Anderson once staged a version of the play that began with all the dead bodies on the stage and commenced the story from that point.

After a while, the ballet takes on a curious aspect: it is a ghost of itself, a skeleton of every “Hamlet” you’ve ever seen on stage or screen. All the Hamlets seem to flicker in the back of your head, filling in what you’re watching, captivated.

Gary Tischler •

“American Idiot,” the Green Day/Billie Joe Armstrong rock musical about a kinetic, confused and lost group of post-9/11 suburban small-town youths has already been extended through April 16 at the Keegan Theatre in Dupont. As semi-contemporary musicals go, it’s a current Washington must-see. It could probably run longer.

We’re talking not so much about my generation, but someone’s generation. And the show echoes forward and backward to them all, with rippling guitar riffs, painful ballads and an energy you won’t find on too many stages.

“American Idiot” actually was birthed and perhaps spawned in 2004. It became a super-album by the group Green Day and Armstrong, its charismatic leader, he of the zombie-like heavy eyeliner and lean, mean and boyish stage persona. With punkish as well as Who-ish “Tommy”-like roots, it became a surprise 2009 Broadway show and hit (although minus Green Day and Armstrong).

What’s affecting about the production at the Keegan — directed by founders Mark and Susan Marie Rhea — is the energy, the way it seems like a prolonged, authentic outburst of feeling and confusion, and the way it pays respect to the music. For artists sort of bagged in the punk-garage milieu, the music is surprisingly varied, mixing jump-off-the-stage guitar-god numbers with those plaintive ballads. A uniformly terrific cast aids and abets the proceedings with a full investment of physicality and emotion; the mix seems painfully wrought by tears, lighter fluid and dynamite sticks.

It seems to me, too, to be a generational musical from a period during which the sureties of youth were punked. There was no sure-thing after graduation, little time for adventure and a bag full of doubts about the end of the rainbow for many young people of the time, who are perhaps the same group that’s come to angry maturity now.

In “American Idiot,” they’re already angry. “Welcome to a new kind of tension/all across the nation,” the cast sings in the title song … don’t want to be an American Idiot/one nation controlled by the media.” It’s a far different notion than in the 1960s, when they were singing in the Bay Area “all across the nation/there’s a new vibration … people in motion.”

These kids, headed more or less by the “Jesus of Suburbia,” are eager to get out of suburbia into the open-armed “city,” only to find chaos, desire and nothing much to embrace. There’s Johnny, feverishly played, often like a zombie-clown, by Harrison Smith, in Billie Joe Armstrong apparition form; Heather, by Holly Janiga; the soaring-voiced Eben Logan as Whatshername, Johnny’s love, forever but not quite; and Christian Montgomery as the creepy-appealing St. Jimmy, the drug dealer who brings a box of bliss and sorrow and needles.

The music is terrific. Songs like “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” “Favorite Son,” “Give Me Novocaine,” “She’s a Rebel,” “Extraordinary Girl” and “Know Your Enemy” define the times and the young people.

You don’t have to a member of any particular generation to get this. The music and the musical echo like low-lying roadside bombs, or broken limbs and broken hearts. It reminded me of “Hair,” one of the first generational rock musicals, which Keegan, incidentally, did proud with an expansive production some years back. It appears from one visit that everyone has poured their hearts into this production; it sways and rocks and sometimes cracks in the smallish space here. And the audience, on this visit, rocked back.

If Baby Boomers can respond to this and see some other one of their own selves in it, then “American Idiot” may be more than just grounded in its own time and place. Maybe soon or sometime later we’ll have a definitive Millennial musical. In the meantime, we’ve got this production of “American Idiot.” Go see it. You’d be an idiot not to.

Gary Tischler •

Bruce Levingston — pianist, composer, founder and artistic director of the music foundation Premiere Commission — looks in his photographs like the essence of the concert pianist. He has the dramatic and handsome look of the artist as public figure: sensitive, serious, intellectual.

He’s been called one of “today’s most adventurous musicians” by the New York Times and “a poetic pianist with a gift for inventive and glamorous programming” by the New Yorker. The Times listed his album “Heavy Sleep” as one of the Best Classical Recordings of 2015.

But he’s also a man who understands and believes in the transformative power of music. And to that end this native of Mississippi has confronted issues surrounding the intersections of art, race and politics, premiering new compositions that echo those issues in America.

Levingston has been busy this week, with the premiere of new work at Carnegie Hall tonight (April 4) and, on Wednesday (April 6), an appearance at Georgetown University with President John DeGioia, premiering Nolan Gasser’s “An American Citizen.”

“The Carniegie Hall event features the remarkable bass-baritone Justin Hopkins performing Gasser’s ‘Repast,’ which honors the Civil Rights era leader Booker Wright,” Levingston said in a phone interview. “The Georgetown premiere is also by Gasser. It’s about a former slave, John Wesley Washington, and the portrait that was done of him by Southern artist Marie Hull.”

“Of course, my upbringing figured strongly in all this,” Levingston said. “Those issues evolve, but they’re also a part of who everyone is. These are strong parts of the lives of Southerners. There’s a reason that so many artists come from there — writers, musicians, composers, artists.”

Levingston also wrote a book about Hull, “Bright Fields: The Mastery of Marie Hull.” Along with performing “An American Citizen,” he will join in a discussion about the painting and its subject, which inspired the piece. It’s all part of a program called “Creating ‘An American Citizen,’” at 5 p.m. in Gaston Hall.

“I feel there’s a strong connection between visual art and music,” Levingston said. “Notes are like words, they contain emotions, they contain visual elements and imagery. We’ve had records of all these instances of movements and individuals — Picasso, Debussy and Matisse — the art inspiring music, the music inspiring art.”

“I think composers, and musicians are storytellers as well, and so are visual artists,” he said.

Gary Tischler •

Septime Webre — casual, blue jeans, pullover and checkered shirt and hair flying — was in his element. He was saying goodbye, sort of, to his last 17 years as artistic director of the Washington Ballet, but also hello “to my next 17 years, by which time I’ll be 70.”

Webre was his own star as the first spring headliner in Georgetown Media Group’s Cultural Leadership Breakfast Series, now at the Cappella hotel. An almost preternatural storyteller, he covered his progress through his years at the Washington Ballet, nurtured for many years by founder Mary Day, and the last days of his tenure (he steps down at the end of June).

“This sort of feels like a victory tour, like the baseball players do,” he said. “It’s so good to see so many supporters here, including my former chairman of our board Kay Kendall and others, and it’s wonderful to talk about the company. I’m really, really proud of what we’ve done here in this city, which, when I got here, didn’t have what you could call a diverse arts community. The city was still a little quiet then, and truth to tell, the food wasn’t much either.”

What he encountered was a company that did traditional programming, notably the yearly “Nutcracker” (which Webre expanded, and made expansive to the point that it included hundreds of young dancers). “I think, initially, we were thinking about new choreographers, new dancers, a new group of more diverse people, young dancers like Brooklyn Mack who grew into their persona and into being able to use all their gifts.”

“I loved Mary Day, she was the founder, she was our visionary person,” he said. “She was elegant in everything she did, she was something else.”

Webre arrived from Cuba with his family, the seventh son in a pretty creative bunch. “On a beach in the Bahamas, two of my brothers and I created an entire Versailles complex on the beach with sand.”

He recounted the phases in his time leading and choreographing for the company. “You start out with Balanchine. And, at that time, all the serious people were like art people: everything abstract, no narrative. But I discovered something about myself. I liked being a storyteller, I like doing the big ballets, new ones.”

To that end, he revolutionized things. He started a series of full-length narrative works that included “The Sun Also Rises,” “The Great Gatsby,” “Alice in Wonderland,” “Sleepy Hollow” — pretty big productions. And, by the way, “The Sun Also Rises” was “basically a great ballet about erectile dysfunction,” he noted.

“To me,” he said, “it was about building a company, young dancers, the school, THEARC [in Anacostia] and so on. And we discovered our niche. The Kennedy Center was bringing in all the great ballet companies, doing the big ballet pieces, and that was fine, but we could do something that identified us as a Washington company. It was a niche for a different kind of creativity. Sure we did some of the classics, but that was never all we did.” He referred to bringing choreographers such as Twyla Tharp and Mark Morris to Washington.

“And I believe in diversity of programming, of artists and dancers,” he said. “I recognize that when people come to a program that they want to be able to see themselves up there.”

As for the future? “I’m ready for the next thing. I want to concentrate on my work as a choreographer, a creator, and move on to work with other people — here, to be sure, but in Australia, in Istanbul, in Europe and other places. I’m looking forward to the next thing. I’m not moving, although my partner and I will be having a place in New York.”

He’s still a Washington guy, and something of treasure here: unique in his style, his outlook, that fizz and energy he brings to every encounter. “No question, I’m a workaholic, that’s where it all comes from.”

He’s Septime Webre, going out in style.
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