Arts & Society

Gary Tischler • April 18, 2013

The Eric Schaeffer-directed production of “Hello, Dolly!,” now at the Ford’s Theatre through May 18 is a kind of disguised version of the mega-hit, legendary Broadway musical which opened on Broadway in 1964.

I don’t mean to suggest that audiences aren’t getting their money’s worth with this production, a coproduction of Ford’s and Signature Theaters or that it’s a knock-down and knock-off version of the original and everything else that followed in revivals and road shows. In fact, you could argue that you’re getting more of two plays in one as opposed to the diva- and spectacle-driven original versions.

This production arrives like the latest, if not last, piece in a string of serendipity. “Hello, Dolly!” is derived from a drama by Thornton Wilder (whose “Our Town” already graced Ford’s Theatre this season), which he derived himself from his flopped play “The Merchant of Yonkers,” which was in turn derived from an 1835 English play, called “A Day Well Spent” by a gentleman named John Oxenford, which was adapted into a farce called “Einen Jux Will Er Sich Machen” by Johann Nestroy, from which Wilder got “The Merchant of Yonkers,” which became “The Matchmaker” (which was presented at Ford’s Theatre several years ago), which became “Hello, Dolly!” So, we can say today, “Hello, Dolly!”

Nonetheless, it’s still the same old story—and song and dance–about the adventures and misadventures and yearnings of a matchmaker-widow who still loves her late husband and can do just about everything except perhaps change a tire, a rich widower merchant in search of a compliant wife, his daughter who is in love with an artist, his two over-worked, under-paid clerks out in the wilds of upscale night life New York in search of adventure and, maybe, love and a dressmaker and shopkeeper with her high-energy assistant.

All these folks—prodded along by the wily machinations of the life-force that is Dolly Levi, once a legendary mover and shaker and connector in New York, where the waiters at the pricey Harmonia Gardens still remember her—bump into each other, do something brave and daring and life-changing. Dolly herself—all the while asking her late husband for forgiveness—is seeking to land the big whale, the merchant Horace Vandergelder by acting as a matchmaker for him.

What’s also there is Jerry Herman, his music, his songs, his lyrics. “Hello, Dolly!” is still there, still an anthem, but somehow, less of a national anthem, more of a local anthem, the locale being home plate disguised as the big heart of Dolly outbeating everyone else’s. We’ve got a polka, Horace’s anthem about the uses of a wife, “It Takes a Woman,” dressmaker Irene Molloy’s song to what she does “Ribbons Down My Back,” and the dancing waiters and a number called “Dancing.” In some ways, this has always been Herman at his warmest—he is the genius of creating music for divas and his biggest hits, “Dolly,” “Mame” and “La Cage Aux Folles” are diva-driven.

“Hello Dolly!” doesn’t come until a bit into the second act, but more characteristic of what Schaeffer is up to is the closing number of Act One, “Before the Parade Passes,” a piquant, clear-eyed song which Nancy Opel delivers with a knowing, straight-to-the-heart openness.

Her delivery, her way of moving in Dolly’s billowing wake seems to me not to echo so much the blot-out-the-sun star turns of the likes of Carol Channing (three times) or la Streisand who did not leave much room for anybody else in the film version. Rather, she echos Wilder’s original play which starred a younger Ruth Gordon. “The Matchmaker” didn’t need an exclamation point and neither does Opel. This is the chief virtue of this production—you get the expected goodies—even if scaled down—while the play opens up the give us a closer look at the other folks.

Which leaves Ed Gero with half-hearted bluster as Vandergelder, succumbing almost as if he knew he would, the sudden daring of clerk Cornelius played nimbly and in spirited fashion by Craig Meheu, the attractive solidity of Tracy Lynn Olivera as Irene Molloy.

Dolly lives in a world, a full and rich one richly staged here—and she knows every inch of it. Her deliverance unto and into the world of Vandergelder will no doubt transform it. Opel, in her way as Dolly, lets you see that this is still Wilder’s play as much as it is Herman’s show.

Jeff Malet • April 15, 2013

Bowen McCauley Dance played to a packed house at the Terrace Theater at the Kennedy Center April 5 and 6 with a program that included choreographer Lucy Bowen McCauley’s version of “Le Sacre du Printemps” (The Rite of Spring) on the ballet’s 100th anniversary. The dance is a dramatic portrayal of ritualistic human sacrifice, set to the music Russian composer Igor Stravinsky.
The program also included two premieres, “Fire and Air,” based on the moment Cleopatra poisons herself and joins lover Mark Antony in the afterlife, and “Tableaux de Provence.” The fourth piece, “Before the Fall,” based on the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme, was capably performed by the Maryland Youth Ballet.

The company will reprise “Le Sacre du Printemps” in a special performance with the Alexandria Symphony at the National Gallery of Art, East Building Atrium on Fourth and Constitution Ave., NW, at 6:30 PM on May 19.

View our photos of Bowen McCauley Dance at the Kennedy Center by clicking on the photo icons below. [gallery ids="101238,145670,145663,145657,145651,145645,145637,145631,145624,145677,145683,145736,145729,145723,145716,145710,145703,145697,145691,145617,145611,145537,145749,145531,145754,145523,145760,145517,145766,145545,145551,145605,145597,145589,145583,145577,145570,145563,145557,145743" nav="thumbs"]

Mary Bird • April 10, 2013

On March 11, Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center brought several hundred D.C. top business women together for a cancer briefing followed by Women & Wine, a cocktail reception and silent auction at the Four Seasons Hotel. Proceeds will support breast cancer research at Georgetown University Hospital’s Lombardi Cancer Center. Baker Tilly and Brandywine Realty Trust were presenting sponsors with Greta Kreuz of ABC 7 News as honorary chair. Georgetown Lombardi is the only comprehensive cancer center in the D.C. area, designated by the National Cancer Institute. [gallery ids="101218,145061,145050,145056" nav="thumbs"]

Mary Bird •

Chef Nathan Bates of the Embassy of New Zealand is the first chef to win in all three categories: Challenge Hungary, a preliminary “Top Chef”-like competition; The Judge’s choice and People’s Choice awards. Bates served his garnished roast lamb cutlet to more than 450 guests, including “Top Chef All-Star” chef Carla Hill at Cultural Tourism’s Fifth Annual Embassy Chef Challenge at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center on March 14. The event promotes diplomacy and celebrates arts, culture and heritage by supporting the organization’s free programs and events. Benefit chair Shahin Mafi introduced a video honoring the event’s first gala chair, the late elegant Pat Skantze, and introducing the Pat Skantze Lifetime Achievement Award.
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Gary Tischler •

The Studio Theatre production of “4000 Miles,” the play by gifted and buzzed-about playwright Amy Herzog opens suddenly, like a revelation in the middle of the night.

We see Vera, the 91-year-old, card-carrying Communist and self-described lefty Vera open the door to her Greenwich Village apartment to encounter her grandson Leo, holding his bike, almost buried in packs of all sorts. “Hi, grandma,” he says, and she holds her hand over her mouth, mumbles incoherently, then rushes into the bathroom to put in her false teeth.

The moment is startling, sudden, discomfiting, funny, revealing, and most of all, immersive. We are in the play as quickly as a fish thrown into water, and we are in for it. Director Joy Zinoman, the founder of the Studio Theatre in her first directorial stint here since retiring in 2010, keeps things moving and punchy, but also often patient in scene after scene, bringing to light the play’s situation and secrets almost organically and without an ounce of sentiment. You laugh often—because often the play is very funny—but you never come close to that instant gratification of a budding lump in the throat. Here’s the thing, though: you won’t forget Vera and Leo, not for a long time.

“4000 Miles” could have been a lot of things—a battle-of-the-not-understanding generations or a comedy built around the same thing, a painful pastoral about growing and being old, a wise and touching play about basic, truthful communication in the age of instant communication. It’s all of these, to some extent, but also something entirely different.

The situation—and it is a situation that comes to a head but not an explosion—is fairly straightforward: Leo has arrived at his aging grandma’s place in New York after bicycling across the country from Portland, Oregon, a journey marked by a tragedy that eventually reveals itself. He is of an age—and as Grant Harrison plays him—a young “hippie sort” with tousled black hair and charm and charisma which he throws around almost carelessly but also as a potent defense mechanism. He’s plunked himself and his worldly belongings on grandma’s floor and ends up staying awhile. Vera a widower, lives by herself, insistently independent in her ways, but also aware that she’s losing her powers. She is forgetful and says, “There’s this trouble with words, I can’t find them.” She’s also gruff, unsentimental, hurtfully direct, a widow who knows how to hold a grudge in reserve. She has a friend across the hall with whom she rotates “check-to-see-you-haven’t died” phone calls but never sees.

This could be cute, even cloying, but it never gets close to that. Leo may be a charmer but you can see his painful self absorption, and for lack of a better word, careless cruelty at times. Tana Hicken’s portrait of Vera is hardly sweet—it’s sweet and sour, and that mixture makes her difficult, fascinating, and most important, sometimes brutally honest. “You stink,” she says to Leo when first appears. Then, with great affection folds his clothes that she’s washed for him while he’s asleep. They shares an affinity for Karl Marx and leftist dogma—her apartment is a veritable used bookstore in full flower, and you recognize a thick biography of “MAO” on one of the shelves.

Hicken shows off Vera’s frailty as if she were not afraid to be naked. It leaves her uncertain about what’s happening. Did she lock the top lock? Did she lose her checkbook or hearing aid? She still has her intellectual smarts, her ability to observe, and give love—grudgingly at times, but you know there’s more where that came from. Vera is another full-bodied portrait of vivid older women that include Miss Helen in Athol Fugard’s “Road to Mecca” (at Studio with Zimmerman directing) and grandma in “Lost in Yonkers” at Theater J.

Herzog as a playwright shares some qualities with another current “hot” playwright (and Studio favorite) Annie Baker. Her approach to characters and story-telling and narrative is often deflective, like a game of pong: secrets will out but they often do it by way of a side trip to the alley and a back-door entrance. So we learn Leo’s secrets: he’s not close to his mother, too close to his adopted sister and on the cross-country trip his best friend Mica was killed in a horrific accident. But the secrets come out in accidental silence.

The small cast—it includes Heather Haney in an insistently honest portrayal of Leo’s girlfriend Bec and Annie Chang as Amanda, on a disastrous pickup date interrupted by guess who—is altogether excellent, made more vivid by the lived-in, book-rich set and intimate theater setting. In the end, we and Leo and Vera, are left, not with the overused commodity of hope, but with a soothing appraisal of sad laughter.
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Nico Dodd •

Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell have enough fans between them to support their own tours, but the two singers brought their pipes and picking to Strathmore Music Center last Friday, March 29. The theater was filled by the drugstore cowboys of yesteryear. After the two stars traded a few songs, they settled into their collaborative album, “Old Yellow Sun,” released this February. The Georgetowner last caught up with Harris before her performance at Wolf Trap in August.

Harris’s roots in the area lead to an inexplicable amount of remembrances. “Remember country music?” “Cassette tapes? Remember those?” “I remember the 80s…” She was all about remembering things.

Being that the performance was on Good Friday, there seemed to be an added note of somberness to the performance. One of Harris’s guitar straps had the image of the Virgin Mary on it. “Spanish Dancer” and “Back When We Were Beautiful” were excellent but heart-wrenching. More upbeat songs like “Hanging Up My Heart” and “Black Caffeine” did not manage to level the mood. I guess that’s what they call the blues.

The contrast between the two singers was interesting: Harris being more timid, Crowell more seasoned towards country music. Crowell aptly described Harris as having the “soul of a poet, the voice of an angel and the heart of a cowgirl.”

For this reviewer, the highlight of their performance was Jedd Hughes, their lead guitarist. I admit it: I’m a sucker for guitar. Hughes knocked my socks off as he played on telecasters most of the night and switched to an acoustic for “Spanish Dancer.” Richard Thompson joined the group for one number.

Richard Thompson Electric Trio

Opening the evening was the Richard Thompson Electric Trio, which brought down the house as an opening act. Richard Thompson, one of the original members of the British rock group Fairport Convention, is touring for his newest album, “Electric,” which was released this February.

As with most virtuosic guitarists who are also vocalists, Thompson’s vocals and lyrics fill the space just fine, but the musicianship was the backbone of the group’s performance. The dense sound it produced as a trio is a tribute to the musicians’ ability and uncynical approach to it. Nearly every song received a standing ovation from the audience.

The trio showcased its abilities on Fender instruments. Thompson is a fan of Fender Stratocasters, and bassist Taras Prodaniuk played on a Precision Bass and used Fender amplifiers. Along with Strathmore’s exceptional micing, it made for a crispy sound which wouldn’t sound out of place in a Guitar Center.

Thompson’s Britishness came across with his subdued, cheeky humor and hints of New Wave. An audience commenting on Thompson’s Converse sneakers got a reply of, “You realize we’re in the middle of a concert?” “Good Things Happen To Bad People,”, a track from the “Electric” album, has rootsy, three-part harmonies. Hints of folk ballads are everywhere. Prodaniuk pulling out a fretless bass underlined a proggy, druidic feeling that turned Strathmore into Stonehenge.

The tour will be making its next stop today in Atlanta at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre.

Gary Tischler •

Joy Zinoman, looking very cool in various shades of black and gray, was sitting on a couch on the second floor of the Studio Theater recently near a window that overlooked a bustling flow of traffic on 14th Street, a bank, numerous shops that hadn’t been there back in the day, all the signs of neighborhood transformation that she and the Studio Theatre had helped shape.

She didn’t dwell on it. She just took it in. Zinoman, who founded of the Studio Theatre in 1978 and was its artistic director until she announced her retirement in 2010, was back. She never really left, of course, since she still teaches here in the Studio Acting Conservatory, but now she is back to direct.

In an interview with the Metro Weekly after her retirement, she was asked if she would direct in the future at the Studio. “If the play is right, and they offer me enough money,” she said.

It looks as if the play is right. “4000 Miles”, by rising young playwright Amy Herzog, who was the subject of a feature profile in Time Magazine’s Culture section recently, is the thing, for sure. “David [artistic director David Muse] asked me if I wanted to direct this play, so I read it, and I was just drawn to it. It’s perfect for me and the Studio. It’s powerful, intimate, and completely unsentimental. It’s a generational play because the main characters are a young man who visits, then stays with his 91-year-old grandmother in Greenwich Village. Amy drew the character from her own grandmother. Then there’s Tana, getting a chance to work with Tana Hicken.”

Hicken, of course, is one of Washington theater’s most consummate, unfailingly excellent actresses, a company member at Arena Stage when it sported arguably the country’s outstanding repertoire company, as well as gracing Washington stages in major and memorable parts for decades.

Zinoman and Hicken last worked together when Zinoman and Studio mounted Athol Fugard’s moving “The Road to Mecca” with Holly Twyford. In the intimate spaces of the Mead Theatre, that production measured up to and perhaps surpassed the original production seen at the Eisenhower Theater many years ago with Fugard himself and Kathy Bates.

“Tana is a joy to work with, it’s like coming home,” Zinoman said. Indeed, talking with Zinoman and watching her as Muse came by to say hello, as well as a costume designer and members of the staff here, there was an air of homecoming. Zinoman had been rehearsing for days already, so it was not like a “look who’s here” kind of thing. Rather, there was a feeling of professional and personal pride that a founder might have, that the place was solid and on sure footing.

“It’s not like you stop in theater. You don’t just retreat,” Zinoman said. “When I announced my retirement, it was with the idea of not so much leaving, but retiring when you’re still doing your best. And I didn’t want to hang around—there’s a great temptation there, you know, to do that, and I didn’t want to do that. So we traveled, a lot. We lived in Italy for a while, and that was getting away from it. You couldn’t accidentally stop by.” She has, of course, a rich family life—she travels with her husband Murray, a retired state department official, they have three grown children with lives of their own, and careers of their own, and she is a very proud grandmother of four grandchildren.

“You cannot imagine how wonderful that is, being a grandmother, I love it,” she said. Mind you, she’s not being gushy here, although she’s entitled, she’s just stating a fact not so matter-of-factly.

“Herzog is phenomenal, it’s a great play for me to be doing,” she said. “I also love teaching here, there’s a continuity to all that.”
Plus, she did “Sounding Beckett”, an unusual production of three short plays by Samuel Beckett with musical composition and performance by the Cygnus Ensemble at the Classic Stage Company in New York. “It was a terrific experience, it was a challenge, and we had Ted, Philip and Holly.” That would be Ted van Griethuysen, Philip Goodwin and Holly Twyford and Zinoman’s informality speaks to her reputation as an actor’s director—and perhaps also a designer’s and theater people’s director.

“I think in terms of the actors, that’s true but I’ve worked with so many really gifted actors—and that’s why working with Tana is so important to me in this production,” she said. This is about the time that a conversation with Zinoman turns into a memory play, a parade of actors, designers, partners in time like Russell Metheny, playwrights and plays because, barring kinescope and videos, that’s what we have of plays, their remembered affects and effects. When “The Slab Boy Trilogy”, a set of three plays rich with British working class characters which she brought to Studio a number of years ago came up in our talk, she smiled. “Oh, Slab Boys, they were wonderful plays,” she said, sounding then like someone remembering the brilliant and fully-formed antics of a favored child.

Actors have a special place here—you can practically recite the parade from memory—Jon Tindle, van Griethuysen, Goodwin, Twyford, Nancy Robinette, Sarah Marshall, June Hansen, Floyd King, just to name a few, and, of course, Tana Hicken.

Hicken sounds surprised at being considered a star in the firmament of Washington actors, although she understands it. “My husband Donald and I have lived in Baltimore for years, and that’s what we consider home.” He heads the Baltimore School for the Arts and is a prominent director and directed his wife in the one-person play “The Belle of Amherst” about Emily Dickinson.
Yet, it’s also true that Washingtonians have been blessed with an accumulated avalance of fine performances from Hicken, working at Arena as part of the repertoire company until it was disbanded, at the Shakespeare Theatre Company, at Theater J, at Everyman Theatre, and at Studio.

“It’s always rewarding to be working with Joy,” she said. “And what I love about this play, is that, well, it’s really very funny. I don’t mean to say it’s a comedy, it has serious themes, beautiful writing, but it is also very funny, in spite of its seriousness. I just did a prevue and luckily the audience seems to get it, they laugh. But I’m surrounded by young actors, which makes the play resonate strongly.”

If your mind contained vivid memories of performances in the Washington theater, you’d be surprised to find how often Hicken pops up—in Shakespeare, in Chekhov, as the flinty grandmother (again with Twyford in “Lost in Yonkers”, in a searing, lost performance in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and one recalls for some reason, as the person who sums up and ties together all the improbable, frayed loose threads at the end of The Shakespeare Theatre Company’s production of “The Comedy of Errors”. Very funny indeed.

“4000 Miles” is currently playing at the Studio’s Mead Theatre.

Mary Bird •

An invitation only guest list previewed Dupont Circle’s newest sports bar, The Gryphon, on Mar. 19. Owners Tony Hudgins, David Karim and Rich Vasey were on-hand to introduce the venue, which boasts the social dining atmosphere of a restaurant, the heart of a pub and the view of a stadium. Executive Chef Joseph Evans served up towering plates of bite-sized menu highlights. The pub-meets-posh venue opens its doors just in time for March Madness 2013. The Gryphon’s fully-integrated media system, including 31 televisions, ensures that college basketball fans catch every air ball and alley-oop. [gallery ids="99233,103692,103689" nav="thumbs"]

Kelley Hudak •

Cherries were on every menu at the fifth annual Pink Tie Party at the Mayflower Hotel, March 23. As part of the National Cherry Blossom Festival, the over-the-top tastings and drinks from more than 20 restaurants filled the promenade and ballroom and benefitted the Red Cross’s Japan Earthquake and Tsunami Relief Fund. [gallery ids="99632,105189,105196,105193" nav="thumbs"]

Mary Bird •

The embassy’s Deputy Chief of Mission welcomed guests to an evening of arts and culture on Apr. 4. Ambassador and Mrs. Tan were in Turkey with Secretary of State Kerry, who he said had decided to make the country “his second home” on diplomatic missions to the Middle East. The fundraising event for Anatolian Artisans, a non-profit organization assisting low-income craftsmen of Turkey, featured historian, architect and author Gül Irepo?lu who discussed her latest book which highlights jewelry as the most sophisticated indication of social history. Following the program, guests enjoyed a buffet dinner and display of jewelry created by select Turkish designers. [gallery ids="101228,145340,145316,145335,145323,145331" nav="thumbs"]