Legendary Rat Pack Comes Alive at Strathmore
• October 1, 2013

It’s tough to get a vibe going on a conference call. You can’t see anybody. It’s usually strictly business, and people are always interrupting or waiting to say something.

Talking with Sandy Hackett and his wife Lisa Dawn Miller, however, you definitely get a vibe of show-business allure and legend, not to mention talk and memories of Las Vegas and L.A. days and nights, the time of the Rat Pack in Vegas—maybe true stories and the sound of the easy slick slide of cards on green tables.

Hackett and Miller are all about songs and dancing. They come with a glittering show-biz pedigree. Hackett’s father was the late Buddy Hackett, one of the country’s premier comics and comedic actors who was connected by long-standing friendship and work with the Frank Sinatra-led legendary Rat Pack. Miller is the daughter of another legend, world-class Motown songwriter Ron Miller, master of hit and classic songs, who wrote hits for Stevie Wonder, among others.

All of this funnels in like cocktail ingredients as to why we’re having this three-corner, pool-shot conversation. “Sandy Hackett’s Rat Pack Show,” which is at the Music Center at Strathmore tomorrow night, Friday, Sept. 27, at 8 pm.

Both Hackett and Miller hasten to say that the Rat Pack Show is not a tribute show. It is a kind of theater piece, a flamboyant recreation of a time in the 1960s, when the so-called Rat Pack centered around Frank Sinatra, featuring Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Joey Bishop and others—and depending on the night and time—graced Las Vegas with its presence and put on memorable entertainments at the Sands Casino.

“There are a lot of tribute shows around, truth be told,” Hackett said. “But we’re doing something different.” Hackett said of the show which ” . . . we’ve been doing about four years or so now. This is a theatrical production which lets folks get a sense of what it might have been like to see the Rat Pack live on stage in 1960.”

Miller and Hackett put together and wrote a show based on their own knowledge and experience. Hackett grew up around members of the pack, including Joey Bishop, who was the last surviving member. “To me, Bishop was Uncle Joey,” Hackett said. “He was the one that wrote most of the material, the comedy material, that gave things some sense.”

Back in 1960, the Rat Pack—there was no official membership—was a kind of Hollywood designation of what was then a group of very cool persons, headed by the very cool Sinatra, whose song stylings sold millions of albums and who was a major and often talked-and-gossipped-about movie star as well as a friend of JFK by way of Peter Lawford. The Pack included the gifted Sammy Davis, Jr., the seemingly always-in-the sauce Dean Martin, Bishop, Lawford and, sometimes, Shirley MacLaine.

“People thought this was a long-standing, yearly thing as far as the Vegas thing goes,” Hackett said. “It wasn’t. It lasted a month in 1960 when they were in town filming ‘Ocean’s 11’ [a hit precursor of the current George Clooney-led series of films with Brad Pitt and Matt Damon]. They stayed a month. And at night, they would do this show in the Sands. That was it. But it was memorable, and they were memorable.”

“The show is not a recreation,” said Hackett, who plays Bishop, who was never in the show, but was in the movie. “We’ve added some Miller songs, and the presence of a woman, the one woman Sinatra never forgot.”

By anybody’s guess, that would be the sultry movie star Ava Gardner, with whom Sinatra had a tempestuous, tumultuous, passionate affair in the 1950s which almost ruined him. “I play the woman that Sinatra never forgot,” Miller said. “I get to sing one of my dad’s songs ‘Wasn’t I a Good Time?’ Mind you, we don’t call her Ava. Some people might think it was his wife Nancy or the children whom he loved so much. We let the audience decide.”

Not that the old Sinatra Rat Pack music is neglected. “I Did It My Way,” “Mack the Knife,” “For Once in My Life” and a host of others are heard, sung and remembered in uncanny renderings by the cast, headed by David DeCosta as Sinatra, Doug Starks as Sammy Davis, Jr., Tony Basile as Dean Martin, Sandy Hackett as Joey Bishop and Miller as Frank’s one love. DeCosta, while he can’t be Sinatra, gives him his due and manages to resurrect more than hints of that great voice of experience and confidence, rue mixed with wry and rye.

“We’re all about respect for the music,” Miller said. “I couldn’t help but learn that from my dad. He knew his way around a song. Some of them are part of the show like ‘For Once in My Life.’ So, this is not a tribute show, but part of it is a tribute to the great songs.”

Hackett is working on a book and a show about his father, whose pre-recorded voice (as God, no less) is heard in the show. He would have been right at home in the banter and humor, Rat-Pack style that is audience-involving, brash and irreverent in that cocked-hat, boozy, don’t-give-a-damn but also personal style that characterized any gathering of that legendary group, be it movie, party or showtime, or after-hours bar-time.
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Two Tales of Two Losses, at Arena and Woolly
• September 25, 2013

I cannot think of two plays that might be more different than “Detroit” by Lisa D’Amour and “The Velocity of Autumn” by Eric Coble, both works by relatively new, but definitely rising and shining, playwrights.

“Detroit,” the season opener at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre (through Oct. 6), and “Autumn”, which is the season opener at  Arena Stage (through Oct. 20), march to the tune of different drummers and rhythms, with different concerns and ambitions. The productions are physically different and treat the audiences to different views and viewpoints, literally.  “Detroit” is, in some ways, a circus in which the elephants and clowns have escaped together, wreaking havoc.  “The Velocity of Autumn” is more of a chamber work, a two-character play in which rueful, sometimes bitter-and bitter-sweet rise to the surface to do battle with here-and-now contemporary anxieties and fears.

Different the two plays are, and that’s as it should be, but they are also bold examples of playwrights dealing with the way we live and connect — or not — now. Not so oddly, the two are also often very funny, even if the laughter gives you pause  and sours the echo of the last giggle.  More importantly, to my mind, both are electric and powerful examples of why—in a world increasingly experienced through the magic filter of a plethora of gadgets and digital toys—we still almost urgently go to the theater, not, God forbid, because it’s good for us, but because it holds up a mirror to life in the hands of gifted artists, playwrights, designers and actors.   What happens and how things happen and move in front of us at performances of these plays are every bit as right now as anything we access through the apps on our devices, on our phones, computers and pads.

In “Detroit,”  playwright Lisa D’Amour, who is part of PearlDamour, an Obie-award winning interdisciplinary performance company with Katie Pearl, is chronicling, in high-dudgeon, low-comedy, angst-ridden and kinetic fashion, the societal crumblings that have occurred in the wake of a still wounded national economy, particularly those affecting the younger middle class, made up of those who once worked but now are  hanging by their fingernails — and of those who completely derailed into drug-filled anarchy.

Which is to say we give you Mary and Ben, who own a house in a slightly decaying suburban development just outside of trembling Detroit, and their new neighbors, the antsy, hyper-ventilating Sharon and Kenny, who moved into a relative’s house next door, after, they say, having met and fallen in love in rehab.   Mary and Ben have invited have invited Sharon and Kenny over for a barbecue, a telling little almost obligatory social gathering.

Ben and Mary are in dire straits: she works in a law office, he’s just lost his job at a bank, but says he’s working day and night building a website offering financial advice.  Sharon and Kenny are something else again—they have no furniture, and apparently subsist on junk food, but they’re rich in flaky, lightning-like energy and give off a kind of stormy anything-can-happen, half-sexy, half-mordant vibe.  They have a kind of freedom—to completely implode, flee, reach out, sing and dance, travel to the forest or to ruin, theirs or anyone else’s.  They’re a kind of naked, made-up mystery.

Director John Vreeke has staged the goings-on like a disjointed parade—things fall apart, nobody gets to where they’re going, the clowns are constantly stepping on nails, hurting themselves and each other. Much of this—the clashes between Ben and Mary’s attempts at normalcy with Sharon and Kenny’s almost rock-and-rollish anarchy—is funny, but it’s done against a background,  where we –the audience—cannot escape the flying debris.  The designers have put two sets of chairs front and back, with the stage—the two back yards and flimsy-appearing homes—in the middle. Every now and then, the houses are flaked and patterned by traveling videos played on their exterior and serenaded by stormy and discordant music.

It’s a comic tragedy in some ways. You can see how the anything-goes, barely contained dance of Sharon and Kenny undoes Ben and Mary, who put up a fight but are drawn to them, nonetheless.  

You’ve got a quartet of terrific actors, especially Gabriela Fernandez-Coffey as Sharon, who combines an appealing, puppy-sexy way with the pain of someone being eaten alive by electronic impulses. Danny Gavigan makes a good mate for her—patient, confused, dazed and jumble, while Tim Getman acts the part of a man fraying before our eyes.  Emily Townley keeps trying to keep her head above water through all this. It’s like she can handle almost anything except that incoming tidal wave that’s forming not so far away. But then, the struggles of the two couples are on display almost every day in our travels, our news and blogs.  Things fall apart in real life. In this play, which seems like a tale told of real life in another country but looks like a familiar street.

Woolly—in its staging, in its environmental lobby works and in all this — continues to be Woolly, amazingly edgy, right here and quite a bit ahead of the game, our forward-looking theater pied piper.

By contrast, “The Velocity of Autumn” seems less problematic. It’s easier to look at the characters, hearts and mind, problems to solve, secrets to reveal.  But the more you stay and the longer you listen, the closer it gets to being a risible, long-lasting memento you’ll carry with you.

It sure sounds a little crazy: Alexandra—an elderly woman whose children want to take her out of her brownstone in Brooklyn and put her into a nursing home—resists by threatening to burn down the house with an impressive array of Molotov cocktails.  All it takes is the flick of a lighter, which she holds firmly in her hand.

We first see Alexandra sitting snugly in an easy chair in a cluttered living room, the door to the stairs barricaded, the cocktails in evidence, a room full of books and old records. There’s a big window where her son, Chris, can be seen clumsily trying to climb the tree and get in, scaring her and him half to death.

And so it goes.  Chris, who’s been absent for years, is on a mission of reasonability, but he doesn’t have a clue what’s really going on.  Old secrets, old wounds, older loves and resentments, losses and memory churn through the air like wounded birds who can speak.  Chris is a failed artist, whereas his mother was an artist who painted abundantly.   

This is material that could quickly and easily turn maudlin and—the critics’ satan sin— sentimental, but it doesn’t.  First, because director Molly Smith lets the play—no intermission, 90 minutes—flow along with ease as well as urgency.  Second, because Coble is a terrific writer, he treats his character with a combination of tough love, affection and halting respect and honesty. 

               Third and, probably most importantly, are Stephen Spinella as Chris and Estelle Parsons as Alexandra.  Spinella makes rueful humor and a spindly awkward clumsiness sources of charm, just an edge away from panic. Parsons is, as most know, a theater treasure, who was most recently in “August: Osage County,” a  terrific gift for actors. She is also remembered for her Oscar-winning role in the film “Bonnie and Clyde.” 

Parsons’s Alexandra, raccous, angry, resentful—“I just want to be left alone. I’m good at it.”—could get on your nerves. She’s not warm and fuzzy, but she has a gift that she hoards and treasures, and that’s what it’s all about.  It’s about art as well as people. It’s the gift that is in danger, the ravages of lost memory.

Things happen here that happen only in the intimacy of theater. The feelings engendered in our presence make their way into ours, and the words lodge our in memory. In this play, it’s about parents and children, mothers and sons, and some of us remember right then and there.

McLean Drama Company Presents a 10-minute Play Festival in D.C.
• September 23, 2013

Each year, the McLean Drama Company sponsors a 10-Minute Play Contest. The first-, second- and third-place winners have their plays presented by the drama group at a selected venue. This year’s MDC 10-Minute Play Festival features national contest winners’ plays that are being performed in a staged reading at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company Melton Rehearsal Hall, 641 D St., NW. Opening night is 8 p.m., Saturday, Sept. 21. Sunday matinee is at 3 p.m., followed by a “talk-back” with the audience, players and playwrights. Ticket price: pay what you can.

Rachael Bail, founder and president of the McLean Drama Company, is a playwright, producer and journalist. She is a former Voice of America editor and Supreme Court correspondent, who now lives in Washington, D.C., and originally began the drama company in McLean, Va., but has moved the staged readings to Washington. Renana Fox, also of D.C., is the director, and Ely Lamonica is artistic director.

MDC’s mission is to present and inspire dramatic writing and new American plays, by playwrights from Northern Virginia, the Greater Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area and nationwide. In the past, MDC has performed at the Capital Fringe Festival and the 450 seat Alden Theatre in McLean, Va.

This year’s winning plays are: the first prize winner, “The Brazilian Dilemma” by William Fowkes, a comedy about relationships; second prize winner “Peppered Precinct,” the story of sexual harassment in a police department, by Cynthia Morrison and “Nik & Ida,” scientist Nikola Tesla against the world, by Jerome Coopersmith.

This is MDC’s first experiment with “Pay What You Can” admission.

For more information: www.mcleandramacompany.org.

View our photos of the winning plays taken during rehearsal by clicking on the photo icons below. [gallery ids="101440,153762,153765,153756,153752" nav="thumbs"]

Jenny Live in D.C. at WPAS
• September 17, 2013

Just being around Jenny Bilfield,
the new president and CEO of the
Washington Performing Arts Society,
you get the sense she’s the kind of
person that can fill and command a
room, whether it’s a board room, a concert hall
stage, or a small downtown D.C. coffee shop
on this occasion.

Although she’s been around less than a
year, Bilfield, the artistic director of Stanford
Live at Stanford University in California since
2006, she already sounds like a Washington
D.C. booster. That, you suspect, comes out
of her deep appreciation and sense of place. A
New Yorker, she acknowledged that her work
and time at Stanford changed and enriched her,
and that’s exactly where she’s coming from
in her approach to her new job—taking over
the reigns of an organization with a long (48
years) history as a premier world arts presenter
and arts educator. She comes across as accessible,
really smart, unpretentious, and probably
knows more about most things you’d care to
talk about in conversation.

“This is such a terrific, unique place,”
she said. “We [composer husband Joel Philip
Friedman, 12-year-old daughter Hallie, a rescue
dog and a few parrots) live right next to the zoo.
We can walk to the zoo.” This is said with all
the verve of a genuine enthusiast, a woman
who can generate enthusiasm for just about
anything. She is seen as, has a reputation for,
and talks a lot about risk taking. In terms of
classical music, for instance, she’s known for
a passionate commitment to encouraging new
work and compositions, in addition to holding
fast to established artists and work which is the
hallmark of most presenters and their seasons.
“If you look at this year’s Stanford Live
season, some of which I’m responsible for, if
you run across some names that you may not
be familiar with, I’m probably responsible,”
she said.

She seems to have gotten a handle on the
unique qualities of Washington pretty quickly.
“You have a rich and diverse performance art
world, so many venues from the big to the
small, it’s full of opportunities to do many
unique things. You have a city that’s rich in
neighborhoods too, and it’s full of gifted artists
that work and perform right here. You can draw
from that. You have unique opportunities for
arts education. You have the embassies and
the whole international framework to draw on.”
Reginald Van Lee, executive vice president
of Booz Allen Hamilton and chairman of
WPAS’s Board of Directors said that “Jenny is
a visionary with a proven track record of success
who is passionate about the arts and their
role in the community. She is the right person
to lead WPAS’s new strategic plan and build
upon our core strengths: rich, educational and
community engagement programs, the nurturing
of young talent, and presenting the finest
artist of our classical, jazz, dance, and world
music performances.”

Upon the announcement of her appointment
in January, Bilfield said that “WPAS is an
essential, deeply valued anchor of the Capital
region’s cultural scene and has earned a sterling
reputation as a premier American arts presenter,
and an engine of high-impact arts education
programs and alliances. I feel the same rush of
energy and optimism that I experienced when I
joined Stanford University in 2006.”

That rush, that energy is on full display,
when she’s touting the new WPAS season,
tellingly built around the theme of “The City
Is Our Stage,” the neighborhoods in the city,
the diversity, the opportunities for expansion
and new partnerships. “We hope to engage
audiences and artists for the long term, and
get people to participate in the arts, not just by
going but by being a part of the whole,” she
said. “Audience here are very committed, very
smart and intelligent, and receptive, I think, to
new forms and ideas.”

At Stanford, she transformed Stanford Live,
from being a university presenter to a producing
organization along the lines and size of
WPAS, and was also instrumental in bringing
the vision for the Bing Concert Hall to fruition.

“The challenges here are not the same,” she
said. “WPAS exists in a unique place and is
a unique organization, with unique opportunities.”
She provided a hint of how she might
approach her new tasks, in a kind of farewell
interview with the San Jose Mercury News.
“Ultimately,” she said then, “specificity and
sense of place are central for me. My litmus test
is that our vision, mission and programs need to
reflect the unique DNA of the organization and
its community. …Washington Performing Arts
Society has had a significant impact upon the
cultural life of Washington D.C., from nurturing
new talent to substantive arts education,
and serving as a destination for outstanding
performers at venues around the city.”

It’s obvious that she’s already gotten the
vibe of the city’s cultural DNA. It would
appear that it matches hers.

Jane Austen Film Festival at Dumbarton House, Sept. 18
• September 16, 2013

Dumbarton House will host the Jane Austen Film Festival on the lawn of its North Garden on Wednesday, Sept. 18. This free showing of “Pride and Prejudice,” starring Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen, puts action to Jane Austen’s most famous novel. It is about a headstrong young woman, Elizabeth Bennet (Knightley), entering womanhood with four sisters, a crazy mother and no men that seem worthy of her time. Elizabeth is thrown when she meets Fitzwilliam Darcy (Macfayden), a rich and seemingly pompous man. She puts all her energy into hating and avoiding him, until she finds his hidden side.

The show will start around sunset or approximately 8 p.m. The lawn will open at 7 p.m, 2715 Q Street entrance only. Tradewinds Specialty Imports, Dean & Deluca, and Café Bonaparte will be selling food and drink. No pets or smoking allowed. Please bring blankets. You can thank Long & Foster and Christie’s International Real Estate for sponsoring this event.

The museum will be closed during the event but is open Tuesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Visit the Dumbarton House, the Headquarters of the National Society of The Colonial Dames of America, during that time to experience its rich history — DumbartonHouse.org.

‘Anything Goes’: Broadway Babe Rachel York Runs the Show
• September 12, 2013

There are probably some very hip, very cool theater customers with their thumbs on text and their minds on Twitter and the next thing going viral who might find the national tour of the Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes” bewilderingly old fashioned, as in an old fashioned with all the right ingredients.

In the annals of musical theater history, “Anything Goes,” now getting a jazzy, spiffy run at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House, is practically ancient history, a show so old that, for god’s sake, it made a star out of Ethel Merman and featured such old plot devices—as least as old as “Twelfth Night” –as people pretending to be other people, jokes that shake with burlesque dust, chorus girls and tap dance numbers and a faux dog, stuff that you could find on a vaudeville production roster.

Man, it’s so old that the usual admonition to turn off your phone was accompanied by the information that in the time of “Anything Goes,” iPhones and iPads had not been invented yet. That’s how old this show is.

Tell it to that great genial genius composer and song writer Cole Porter, who, in 1934, managed to sneak in a reference to cocaine (in “I Get a Kick Out of You”). Porter could rhyme on a dime. When it was decided to title the show “Anything Goes,” he went home and wrote the song overnight, or so the story goes, which is to say anything goes.

Tell that to the chorus boys and girls and who ever invented tap dancing, a thing so simple and complicated that it can induce a warm glow for the duration—you get a kick from all the kicking and tapping.

Tell that especially to Merman and Mitzi Gaynor and, more recently, Sutton Foster, who wowed in the Broadway version of this production. Now and forever, tell it to Rachel York who’s taking on the role of the wise-cracking, dazzling, leggy, high-stepping Reno Sweeney and making it her own. Not only is York the best reason to see the show, she’s practically a swaggering, swanky, swell, walking, dancing, tapping check list of what I call Broadway babies, the indispensable stars who can do anything, anytime, on stage. Can she act? Check. Dance? Check. Wise-crack Check. Tap? Check. Deliver punch lines? Check. Be sexy and mesmerizing? Check.

York is a seasoned trouper and star of the stage—and television where she played Lucille Ball in “Lucy” and several movies as well. She knows her way around Cole Porter, that’s for sure, having played Reno twice before and the lead in the Cole Porter backstage musical about feuding Shakespearean stars, “Kiss Me Kate.”

In fact, “Anything Goes” resembles “Kate” in its show bizzy busy tropes, its vaudeville ticks and its absolutely fabulous songs, music and dancing. Bobby Van, Bob Fosse and Ann Miller were in the MGM movie version of “Kate” as were old pros James Whitmore and Keenan Wynn, urging the audience to “Brush Up Your Shakespeare.” Bing Crosby, Mitzi Gaynor and Donald O’Connor starred in the movie version of “Anything Goes.”

It’s York who’s the real show in the production at the Kennedy Center. She puts every tough, gold-hearted, sassy dame you ever saw and won’t see again into her performance: a shoulder-whisper of Bacall, a breathy Monroe, a brassy dare-you-to-take-me-on Mae West. The big voice, the dynamo energy, the sexy head-of-the-parade walk, the knowing way with words, that’s probably all York.

You think this is easy: watch how she sort of glides almost casually into the “Anything Goes” number at the end of the second act, a number that’s like winning the lotto for those of us who get dizzy in the presence of tap. It builds and builds and multiplies and brings the curtain down like an unexpected kiss. Act two starts about ten minutes later and it’s “Blow Gabriel, Blow,” another powerhouse number featuring York/Sweeney, who’s a sort of slightly shady, glitzy gospel-preaching gold entrepreneur, in which Sweeney comes clean parading from church-wear to dazzling, slit shirt gown.

The two numbers stacked like that are the broadway version of a marathon, and York breaks through in style.

The rest is fizz, pure entertainment that Porter with his magic way with words and music turns into art. The stage at some time or another is filled with sailors, a crook on the lam named Moonfaced Martin, a Chinese convert with a yen for poker, the Angels, Sweeney dancers, Purity, Charity, Chastity and Virtue, who managed to embody the opposite qualities, a near-sighted rich tycoon, a young ingénue engaged to a twitty, slightly off British lord, named Evelyn Oakleigh, and Billy Crockett, a handsome but slightly pennyless Wall Streeter in love with the sweet ingénue Hope who’s more of an angel than the angels.

Chaos, disorganized, silly, naughty and nice ensues, if you’re interested in plot matters. Astaire-Rogers type dancing ensues. Pratfalls ensues. Song satisfaction ensues. Entertainment ensues.

If this is old fashioned, it has the peculiar of something just gone viral on YouTube. Thank York for that and Cole Porter, but also Josh Franklin for his insistent wooing as Billy Crocker, the graceful Alex Finke as the ingénue, Fred Applegate for having so much fun with Moonfaced Martin and Edward Staudenmeyer for having even more fun with Evelyn, oh lord, Oakleigh.

That’s entertainment.

“Anything Goes” runs through July 7 at at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House.
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‘Knave of Hearts’ from the Mind and Life of John Carter
•

Almost every biographical reference you can find on John Carter—the ones that don’t lead to the fellow who spent time on Mars—tend to lead off with a colorful, intriguing picture, as does the one in the program for his new play “I, Jack, am the Knave of Hearts,” which begins: “John Carter (playwright) is also a poet as well as a former merchant seaman, railroad man and wordsmith for hire who has ceased his wanderings and now lives out of sight with his wife and dogs.”

Somehow, the merchant seaman, railroad man and wordsmith are the grabbers. It’s resonant of the kind of creative types who live fully, breath smoke and traveling air, have seen and done things most of the rest of us mortals haven’t. All of this and the rest of the biography you may read is true and important. Yet it’s more like the beginning sentence of a novel, or better still, a play.

The dog part is true, and more importantly, the playwright and poet part are gloriously true. Carter is also an actor who’s played cops in films and on stage and has performed his poetry on stage in Washington in “various dives with the rock groups Eros and Luna and solo in more polite venues, including the Library of Congress.”

I met Carter in my D.C. neighborhood of Lanier Heights some time ago when we were walking our dogs. Carter looks a little like his biography—smallish, lean, blue jean jacket, a trademark wind-bitten Aussie hat. We met through Ruby, his brown, energetic poodle and my bichon Bailey, who has since passed away. Once our dogs were properly introduced, we discovered mutual interests and common experiences which we shared over coffee and over time. One of those interests was theater.

At the time, Carter was involved in staging an earlier play he had done (there have been four altogether), called “Lou,” a one-man play about Lou Salome, a dazzling woman, contrarian intellectual, muse, companion and sometimes lover to the likes of Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. “Lou” was staged in New York and at the Fringe Festival there. It was performed by Elena McGhee.

In many ways, “Lou” is a remarkable play because of the way it appears to get at the heart and soul of a remarkable woman—a daunting task for any male writer. “I tried to imagine everything that happened to her, everything she talked about from the standpoint of a woman,” Carter said, as if that’s the most natural thing for a male writer to do.

While Carter has written all of his life and been a poet for many years, playwriting is new to him. He is, after all, in his early eighties—82 years old, to be exact. For him, there is still a lot to do in this arena. From “Lou,” Carter tackled something a little different, which eventually became “I, Jack, am the Knave of Hearts.”

“ ‘Lou’ took a long time,” he said. “ ‘Jack’ practically came to me in a rush. It’s a work of the muse. I can’t explain it in any other way.”

Jack is Don Juan, or Don Giovanni, or perhaps all the great philanderers, womanizers of history rolled in one. He is time specific as played by D. Stanley, who is the artistic director of Theatre Du Jour and who also directs. All over Adams Morgan, these past few weeks, we’ve seen cards and posters, at bookstores or galleries or even a shoe repair shop for “Jack,” seen as a darkly-dressed, time-driven swaggering mystery man with a sword, whom you can see at the District of Columbia Arts Center on 18th Street.

The play closes this Saturday, April 6, and has been marked by a roller coaster ride that is a a lot about the life of Carter, the play itself, writers, and Adams Morgan. It’s also about the special qualities of the DCAC, which doubles as an art gallery and has seen the presence of many of Washington’s troubadour theater groups like Scena, Venus, the Landless Theatre Company, and the outrageous and lamented Cherry Red Productions, as well as appearances by burlesque and vaudeville performers.

“We’ve been reviewed twice,” Carter said. “Once negatively, which isn’t much fun, and once positively, which is gratifying. We’ve had good houses, and not so good houses—there was one time when the only people there were three kind of scruffy old guys, which made it difficult for Stanley, because the reaction of women in the house is important.”

“Jack” is a one-character play which sees Don Juan escaping from hell, in a bravado-like confusion, and trying to make sense of the life he led that landed him in hell, and the particular qualities of hell. He wears an open white gallant’s shirt, black boots of the striding kind and carries a spectacular sword and arrives with an attitude.

I saw the play on a night when Carter’s wife Julie Bondanza, a Jungian analyst, was there, seeing it performed “for the first time,” along with his daughter, assorted relatives, a member of the Playwright’s Forum to which Carter belongs, neighbors and walk-ins. The presence of a number of women in the audience seemed to invigorate Stanley, whose Jack was a man in search of his own identity, energetically striding the stage like an adventurer, looking over the fleshly highlights of his life, the death of his mother at the stake, the seduction of a woman and the murder of her father. On the simple, brightly lit, dark-background stage, the search seems to be the one we all march on, in our dreams, in those moments. “I begin to know myself,” Jack says and at another point, notes that “Hell is the end of hope.”

Carter didn’t attend rehearsals. “I like to be surprised,” he said. But he was sitting in the back listening and watching intently, laughing at the laugh lines as if discovering it again, like a true audience member, for the first time.

At play’s end, you walk into the gallery, where a reception for artist Joanne Kent’s amorphous works on the wall is in full swing and swagger. The crowds don’t part, they mix and talk and merge, art not so much imitating life as joining it.

The Knave of Hearts is surrounded by people. John Carter is surrounded by friends and family. The words still seem to be a part of the night, the cool air, hanging there… “A man back from the other side of hell, a man you hide your daughters from, a man with bloody hands. Am I that man?”

That night, he sure—as hell—was.

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Paquito D’Rivera’s ‘Sax Life’ Perfect for Jazz
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When we think about the 2013 D.C. Jazz Festival, we can think about a lot of things—the essence and variety of jazz, the boundless talents of the performers, the vision of festival founder Charles Fishman, the way the festival has grown in size and venues.

All of that is well and good, but there’s been another constant through the history of this festival which is critical, and that’s the presence of Paquito D’Rivera in his role as co-artistic director, idea man, iconic figure of Latin jazz and performer.

In some form or another, he’s always there: we remember him from the New Orleans-themed festival several years ago in which he headlined a concert but managed to appear to be in several places at once. On a Sunday, with the bluesy, jazzy uniquely New Orleans sound being generated by Buckwheat Zydeco, there was D’Rivera in a shirt of many colors wailing with Zydeco and his group on the sax, blending and adding.

On the phone, he sounds a little bit like he plays—hard-driving, direct, untethered and not a little unfiltered, boisterous, funny, adventuresome. You think of him immediately as a man who’s comfortable with ideas and appetites, all sorts of people and all sorts of music. He is the pied piper and exemplar in some ways of the marriage of forms and genres. He’s an embracer. He’s speaking from New York, but it feels as if he’s in the room with you.

This year the Cuban-born D’Rivera and his PanAmericana Ensemble headline another special feature of the festival in “Jazz Meets the Latin Classics,” which comes after last year’s Jazz Meets the Classics I in a concert at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater June 14.

“It continues the theme of jazz and classical music, only this time the emphasis is on Latin classical music,” d’Rivera said. “The music will be tackling compositions and works by people like Piazzolla, Lecuona, Rodrigo, Villa Lobos and some of my work.” On hand will be soprano Brenda Feliciano and guitarist Berta Rojas in arrangements and improvisations, along with Alex Brown, Oscar Stagnaro, Yotam Silberstein, Edmar Castañeda, Hector del Curto, Diego Urcola, Michael Philip Mossman, Mark Walker and Pernell Saturnino. Brenda Feliciano is D’Rivera’s wife.

“We explored the classics with jazz musicians and jazz style last year,” D’Rivera said.

“This is a continuation along the same lines but in a Latin vein. I think we’re seeing bridges trying to be built that bring musical forms together, lead to new innovation and the like. A lot of it is coming from the classical end, trying to expand the horizons and audiences. I think on the whole that’s a good thing, the idea of fusion. But, just like in fusion cuisine, you’ve got to be careful of how you go about doing it, otherwise you end up with something like putting together black beans and sushi, which tastes awful.”
“I have to tell you,” he said. “Charlie got this festival done. This is a great city, a city with a jazz history. It’s supposed to be the capital of jazz. It should have a major jazz festival. If not here, where, you know. And Charlie got that done. He’s been a great friend, and so was Dizzy Gillespie, which is how I got here to begin with. But my job here—I think it’s to keep Charlie calm. Seriously, I am so proud of being a part of the festival as much as I have.”

D’Rivera is a multi-tasker, a multi-excellent talent and leader, an innovator. You can see the strains of where his music often goes in his compositions and by the people he plays with and collaborates with, building bridges. He has the stellar, huge reputation that allows him to make major inroads into cross-pollination of musical genres and styles—he has won six Latin Grammy Awards and four Grammy Awards and plays the saxophone, clarinet and soprano sax and flute. He’s won a Gramny for classical music. That may be an influence from his father Tito Rivera, who was a noted classical saxophonist and conductor in Cuba. In a way, D’Rivera’s presence, his association with jazz giants, his own major star status adds to the festival’s luster.

No question, he is also Cuban, through and through. In his colorful autobiography “My Sax Life,” that comes through in anecdotes and pictures and a vibrant, pungent story-telling gift. But you can also tell he’s a serious man, who can improvise with the best of them—he’s a Charlie Parker fan—but insists upon the notion that musicians ought to be able to read music.The book itself is a jazz history of sorts—meeting with men he admired and respected, and probably loved, Gillespie among them. I mentioned that Gillespie used to go to Harold’s Deli in Georgetown for coffee back when he played in town frequently. “Maybe we can have coffee there,” he said. Sadly, Harold’s is no longer around.

He left Cuba in the 1980s and has never returned not even to visit, citing the visa and passport restrictions and a serious lack of love for the Castro regime. “Some people make a hero out of Che Guevera,” D’Rivera said. “Not me.”

He is a jazz man but much more than that. Not by any means is he an elder statesman—he’s in his mid-sixties—but he carries the earned weight of honors, a string of multi-faceted recordings that are mountain-sized. “I’m not crazy about rock and roll,” he said. “The noise, it’s loud. But then you look at the Beatles, those guys they expanded the form.”

That’s what Paquito D’Rivera does with jazz and, one suspects, with life its own self. He expands the form.

Jazz Festival’s Roll Call of Heavy Hitters

With its many venues—especially with the offerings all over town in the Jazz in the ‘Hoods series as well as more high profile venues such as the Jazz at the Hamilton Live series—the 2013 D.C. Jazz Festival, running June 5 through 16, represents a treasure trove of talent on Washington stage.

To paraphrase what people say about theater—with the jazz festival the players are the thing and so we’re presenting a few of the names, the music, the players who are the stars of the festival, including Paquito D’Rivera, the Latin Jazz king who’s also the co-artistic director of the festival.

Player drum roll:

The Roots—If any group exemplifies just how big a shadow jazz casts and how many kinds of music and musicians perform under its big tent, it’s probably the Roots, the Grammy Award-winning hip hop and soul band founded by Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter and Abmir “Questlove” Thompson in 1987 in Philadelphia. Their music is jazzy, and eclectic, and with its wide reach, man
ages to maintain a broad audience, with no small thanks to its role as the house band for the perpetually hip and cool Jimmy Fallon Show.

Although ranked among the top hip hop bands ever, the group with 10 albums under its belt, two EPs and collaborations with many artists. It’s the festival’s signature event, a concert at Kastles Stadium at the Wharf June 15, with doors opening at 3 pm.

Arturo O’Farrill, is a pianist and the son of Latin jazz musician Chico O’Farill who’s performing with his own band, the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, in a concert at the Sixth and I Street Synagogue June 9 , being billed as “From Bagels to Bongos.”

Pharoah Sanders—The legendary saxophonist came out of the John Coltrane bands and made himself known for his “overblowing, harmonic, and multiphonic techniques” which were totally new. At the Bohemian Caverns, June 14.

John McLaughlin—The South Yorkshire, England, native who is called Mahavishnu John McLaughlin is a guitarist, bandleader and composer who mixes jazz with rock and Indian music. No less an authority than rock guitarist Jeff Beck has called him “the best guitarist alive.” At the Howard Theater June 16.

Terri Lyne Carrington—Carrington is a multi-talented force as a jazz drummer, composer, producer and entrepreneur who has played with Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry and Herbie Hancock. She’s performing her “Money Jungle: Provocative in Blue” at the Hamilton Live June 8.

The Brubeck Brothers Quartet—The quartet, made of Dave Brubeck sons Chris on bass and trombone and Dan on drums as well as Mike DeMicco on Guitar and Chuck Lamb on piano are presenting a Tribute to Dave Brubeck June 14, also at the Hamilton.

Hilary Kole—Only in her twenties, she heads and sings with the Hilary Kole quartet which has played at Birdland. She’ll be at the Embassy of Turkey June 10.

Ron Carter—Carter—owner of a lifetime DCJF award, is a living legend, a double-bassist who has also played the cello and has appeared on more than 2,500 albums and played in Miles Davis’s second quintet in the early 1960s, a group that included Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and Tony Williams. Carter and his Golden Striker Quartet will be the Hamilton June 13. [gallery ids="99246,104157" nav="thumbs"]

‘Desert Cities’ Is Right at Home at Arena
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For Kyle Donnelly, directing playwright Jon Robin Baitz’s scathing, smart and intense family drama, “Other Desert Cities,” at Arena Stage in the in-the-round Fichandler must seem a little and a lot like a homecoming.

She was last at Arena directing another family play, “Ah Wilderness,” a distinctly and surprisingly sunny and warm play from Eugene O’Neill, that master of theatrical and autobiographical dark family dysfunction (see “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”).

“That was a little different, to be sure,” said Donnelly in a phone interview. She has said that “Wilderness”, an example of theater as a wish, was a kind of fiction that acted as a counterpoint to the personal realism of O’Neill’s other plays about family, the one he experienced painfully in life as well.

Family is a good point to consider when it comes to Donnelly and Arena Stage—this is the place where she served as associate artistic director at Arena from 1992 to 1998 and where over 30 years she has directed 22 plays.

“It is like a home,” said Donnelly, who lives in California. “I’ve spend a major part of my professional life here, working with wonderful actors and design professionals. There was a group of wonderful actors to work with back then—Richard Bauer, Stanley Anderson, Robert Prosky, Tana Hicken, Randy Danson. “

Donnelly is considered by many something of an actor’s director. “It’s a collaborative art, this putting on of plays, but the actors are front and center, and that’s especially true in this play. Doing this play in the round makes for a different challenge for the actors. It changes the focus, where people are on stage, who’s hearing and seeing them in what way. So in some sense, it becomes a little bit of a different play. But what you really want to and have an opportunity to do is to create a sense of immediacy and intimacy with the audience, as if they were right there in the family living room with all this ‘drama’ going on.”

“In Washington, this play really resonates,” she said. “For one thing, the parents in the play haves been written as friends of the Reagans, among a group of politically savvy people in Southern California. And there’s the role of the media—it involves high-profile people dealing publicly with tragedy and scandal.”

If you’ve been going to Arena and plays in Washington for any length of time, Donnelly’s name resonates, it’s a resume full of remarkable and memorable theater moments. She had astonishing success with stagings of “The Women,” “The Miser,” “Misalliance,” “Polk County,” Tennessee Williams’s “Summer and Smoke,” “Shakespeare in Hollywood” and perhaps most notably, a perfect production of Brian Friel’s “Dancing at Lughnasa”, which received a Helen Hayes Award for Best Resident production.

Her first play at Arena was Moliere’s “School for Wives.” She has said that watching Friel’s “Lughnasa” on stage “broke my heart.” Hers was not the only heart that broke.

Donnelly founded Actors’ Center in Chicago, an acting studio, in the 1980s which may account for her reputation as doing well with actors. Certainly that aspect shows up in “Desert Cities,” where the likes of Helen Carey, who’s also worked many times at Arena, Martha Hackett, Larry Bryggman, Emily Donahoe and Scott Drumond give searing and intense performances.

“I’m going to be slowing down a little,” she said. “I’m a mother of a teenaged daughter, and I’d like to be there for her more, lending some guidance through high school. I won’t be going on the road as much.”

“Other Desert Cities” runs through May 26.

‘Other Desert Cities’: Family Secrets in Palm Springs
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If you go to Arena Stage to see the compelling production of Jon Robin Baltz’s Tony Award-nominated play “Other Desert Cities”—and you really should, despite its occasional frustrations—check out some of your fellow audience members to see how and what they’re doing.

I went to a matinee performance recently and the house was filled with student groups—from high schools from around the area—as well as long-time patrons and season ticket holders and members in good standing of that generation which the stridently wounded and angry Brooke Wyeth rails against in a battle with her Southern California affluent parents, especially her mother Polly, close friend of Nancy Reagan’s back in the day.

“Other Desert Cities”—the reference is a dry, melancholy riff on California road signs directing you southward once you get past Palm Springs—is something of a familiar staple of a play. It’s a generational war pay in which the liberal novelist daughter Brooke, visiting her parents during Christmas in 2004 when the Iraq war was at its height, squares off against her parents with news that she’s written a memoir which focuses on the suicide of her beloved (by her) older brother, who was part of a group of left-wing radicals who ended up bombing a recruiting center which resulted in the death of a homeless janitor in the 1970s.

This kind of situation is a classic one in the theater—the revealing of family secrets long hidden or forgotten or still festering like an odious cancer with all the attendant grudges, resentments and unspoken feelings that come along for a catastrophic ride. Almost all family dramas from Ibsen to Miller, and especially O’Neill burn with secrets—just try to walk away from “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” or “The Iceman Cometh,” for that matter (a family play and a bar play), unscathed.

This comparison is not to suggest that Baltz is in that league yet. “Other Desert Cities” is more like a long weekend in the Palm Springs desert hideaway home of Polly and Lyman Wyeth who are hosting Brooke, a one-book novelist who spiraled into depression and now brings her memoir as a kind of brick of coal for Santa’s stocking, her surviving young brother Trip and aunt Silda Grauman, Polly’s sister and former screen-writing partner in house for another bout of staying off the sauce.

These are not by any means your typical American family. Polly—something of a socialite—and Lyman were shining figures in the Reagan GOP circles of Southern California, and Lyman was once a well known movie actor who played cops and cowboys, before being named an ambassador to somewhere by Reagan. Brother Trip is a television producer, his latest being one of those daytime judge shows in which amateurs decided the fate of cases. Brooke talks like a GOP-dreaded East Coast lefty and literati and lives in a cottage on the New England coast, her older British husband having left her.

The early rounds of this battle—and it is a battle set in a house featuring one of those white plastic Christmas trees, with a trip to the country club for dinner on the agenda—are frequently funny, smart and very cool and on the money, with most of the jabbing going on between mom and daughter along political and cultural lines while brother and dad act as referees. Lyman, famous for his death scenes as an actor, plays ones out for the family, and Larry Bryggman, a veteran theater and big and little screen character, turns the effort into a barrel of laughs.

These early goings are abetted triumphantly by a strong cast, ably and unobtrusively directed by Kyle Donnelly who has worked with most of the actors before. There are—blessedly—no heroes and heroines here, just deeply troubled souls having the usual amount of agonizing difficulty showing their love for each other, which nevertheless is very evident as are the resentments, those never-healed wounds.

Bryggman and Helen Carey—who starred in “Long Day’s Journey” at Arena—are the crown jewels in a pretty heady cast.

Bryggman is one of those actors we know by face instantly—we’ve seen him on this show or in this move and on daytime soap opera, but here he is a lion, a giant of a character, he’s so full of the burden of the pains he’s carried around for decades that he finally burst with pieces of heart and soul, like the blood spatter in one of those CSI shows.

Carey, who looks small and thinly elegant but is steely and regal, is one of the area’s acting treasures, not credited as much as she should have been. Until the free-for-all explosion of “the truth,” she dominates every scene she’s in just like her character. There’s love for Polly there, but, boy, it’s true tough love. In this atmosphere of two really great performances, Martha Hackett as sister Silda survives with perfectly placed irony and sarcasm, Scott Drummond as Trip with a long-suffering warmth, while Emily Donahoe has the thankless task of humanizing Brooke, who threatens to become a merciless true believer and whiner. She is the apparent victim here, but she’s also the accuser.

In this two-hour play, there’s one more cat to come out of the bag. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve been hearing soft meows all along. It’s a manipulative kind of plotting—smart by way too much, and it could have derailed the play. But by that time, Bryggman, Carey, Donahoe, Drummond and Hackett have given you too many reasons to give a damn about the people on stage.

Baltz saves things with a kind of epilogue, a nine-years-later summation that remains resolutely ambiguous.

“I wanted more,” a woman told me as we left. In this, Baltz took the side of reality. Life just isn’t that tidy, or, as Sister Mary Ignatius once said in another play, “Of course, God answers all your prayers. It’s just that most of the time the answer is no.”

“Other Desert Cities” runs through May 26 in the Fichandler at Arena Stage, 1101 Sixth St., SW — ArenaStage.org. [gallery ids="101287,149571" nav="thumbs"]