Performance

Gary Tischler • May 9, 2014

“Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezín” is never just a concert, a performance, a presentation of a masterpiece. The multimedia concert-drama, which has been presented many times, most recently at the Music Center at Strathmore on May 1, has always been something more, larger and larger still.

But it is also something as troubling and always evocable and intimate as the remembrance of the heart and mind of a people straining with music to be free in the midst of constant death.

The concert, as well as a documentary film of the same name, has been performed all over the world, and will continue to be performed. It is at heart the resurrection of what was an obscure but heart-rending and powerful story from the annals of the Holocaust, which hardly lacks for unique and powerful stories.

For Murry Sidlin, the founder and creator of “Defiant Requiem,” the Baltimore-born conductor and music educator at Catholic University in Washington, the story, the music, the concert has become a life’s mission. This mission has resulted in the creation of the D.C.-based Defiant Requiem Foundation and the telling and retelling and resurrection of a story of great courage and the indomitable spirit of one man.

For Sildin, it began on a sunny day in the late 1990s, when he was a faculty member of the University of Minnesota’s school of music. He ran across a used bookstore, the kind that you always saw in cities and universities in America. “There was a bin, a cart outside,” he said. “I stuck my hand in and pulled out a book, an old book.”

The book was “Music in Terezín”, by Joza Karas, a Czech writer and composer who had collected the music of Jews imprisoned at Terezín, a Nazi camp in Czechoslavakia, where thousands were killed and from which thousands more were sent to Auschwitz.

“I had picked the book out of sheer luck,” Sidlin said. “I opened it up and there was a chapter on a man called Rafael Schächter.”

“He was a composer, he was an opera coach,” Sidlin said. A Czech Jew, he had been rounded up and sent to Terezín carrying a lone, shopworn copy of the music of Verdi’s Requiem inside his coat.

Terezín in popular accounts is known as the camp which the Nazis tried to pass off as a model camp, to show Red Cross members and other inspectors that Jews were being treated well.

“That’s not exactly right,” Sidlin said. “They did that once, when the Red Cross came and it was then that Schächter, with 200 members of the camp, put on a recital of the Requiem in front of the Red Cross and the Nazis.”

“For those in the chorus – they were accompanied by a three-legged piano – it was an act of defiance, an act of courage. Schächter had them rehearse after every day of hard labor and impossible conditions in the basements of the camp,” Sidlin said.

“But the camp already had a lively culture – here were writers, singers, artists, professors, directors, composers, musicians from all over Europe, and there were lectures, cabaret music and singing, plays, operas, put on after the day was done. And Schächter was at the heart of it. He held 14 performances with 150 singers at the camp for the other prisoners.”

“The book and the story moved me in ways that I can’t begin to describe,” he said. “I wanted that story to be told and sung, and to be remembered. That’s what I’m doing, that’s what everybody that’s involved is doing.”

The result, in the end, was a foundation, the Defiant Requiem Foundation, with Sidlin as its president and Stuart E. Eizenstat as its current chairman. In turn, the foundation sponsors the Rafael Schächter Institute for Arts & Humanities. Next month, for the first time, the Institute will be held in the U.S., at American University’s Katzen Arts Center.
At Strathmore, 50 survivors of the Holocaust attended, including Edgar Krasa and Marianka May, who were members of Schächter’s Terezín chorus. Soloists including Arianna Zukerman (the daughter of Pinchas Zukerman), mezzo-soprano Ann McMahon Quintero, tenor Issachah Savage and bass Nathan Stark. D.C.-area theater star Rick Foucheux appeared as Schächter, with Rheda Becker, who often performs speaking roles with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, as the Lecturer.

Interspersed there were clips from the “Defiant Requiem” film, as well as clips from a Nazi propaganda film.

Schächter himself was sent to Auschwitz, where he survived until the remaining prisoners were sent on a death march, in which he perished.
The Strathmore concert was performed in memory of Fran Eizenstat and Amy Antonelli.

There will be a screening of the “Defiant Requiem” documentary as part of the Schächter Institute, June 8 to 12 at the Katzen Arts Center, with a book signing by Richard Breitman for his book “FDR and the Jews,” Phillip and Noreen Silver performing works by Terezín composers on piano and cello, a one-woman show “The Tin Ring” and a panel discussion led by Eizenstat on “Anti-Semitism in Europe Today.”

Gary Tischler • May 5, 2014

Randy Johnson, the director-playwright and three-ring-circus master of theater, knows his way around icons—iconic performers, singers and musicians, iconic music, iconic people, iconic times and events.

With Johnson, who directed and wrote “A Night With Janis Joplin,” which received no less than two successful runs at Arena Stage plus a Broadway run, everything is always different. If there is a trademark for Johnson productions, it’s that they’re going to be nothing that you might expect.

He’s back at Arena, directing “Smokey Joe’s Café, the Songs of Leiber and Stoller,” a 40 hit-song paean to the music of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who, Johnson says, “all but invented rock and roll.”

“This is a little different for me,” said Johnson, who is not to be confused with Randy Johnson, the famed and tall major league baseball pitcher. “This will be one of the few times that I haven’t also written what I’m directing.”

Johnson staged a flamboyant, nostalgically and emotionally exhausting “Janis” by turning the show about the late 1960s and 1970s rock and blues singer who succumbed to a heroin overdose into a partial rock-ous concert, which also included contributions from female black blues and rhythm-and-blues legends like Bessie Smith and Aretha Franklin, the sources of inspiration for Joplin.

“Smokey Joe’s Café” originally opened on Broadway in 1995 and proved to be a hit. “This will be different,” Johnson promised. “For one thing, we’re doing this in the Fichandler, which means theater in the round, which means you have to be acutely aware of the audience in so many different ways.

“For another, I’ve had the good fortune to be friends with Mike Stoller (Leiber died in 2011), which has given me some unique insights into the songs and music they created together,” he added.

Leiber and Stoller were a regular hit factory for any number of early rock and roll legends, including Elvis Presley, the Coasters, Ben E. King and the Drifters.

“You could make a very good argument that Leiber and Stoller created rock-and-roll,” Johnson said. “Certainly, rock-and-roll would not be the same without them.”

The 40 songs in the songs in the show—performed by a cast that included Levi Kreis (Jerry Lee Lewis in Broadway’s “Million Dollar Quartet”), the incomparable E. Faye Butler and Nova Y. Payton and Jay Adriel, Austin Colby, Ashley Blair Fitzgerald, Michael J. Mainwaring, Stephawn P. Stephens and Kara-Tameika Watkins—are rock-and-roll and rhythm-and-blues classics.

“I don’t think there is such a thing as one American songbook,” Johnson said. “Yes, of course, we have Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Gershwin, Lerner and Loewe and Stephen Sondheim from Broadway. It’s generational for certain singers. But the works of Leiber and Stoller constitute a songbook of a different sort, the songbook of rock and roll for another generation.”

Those songs—Carole King and Burt Bachrach would provide later pop samples—are memorable because they had lyrics that stuck in your head just about forever, and, as Dick Clark might have said, “You could dance to them.”

It’s hard to think of Elvis, for instance, without “Jailhouse Rock” or “Hound Dog.”

“It’s great to be back in Washington and to be working with Molly [Arena Artistic Director Molly Smith] again,” Johnson said. “She has done spectacular work here.”

It’s a mutual admiration society. “Randy Johnson is a true theater artist,” Smith said of Johnson. “What sets him apart from others is that he is that rare breed of visionary director writer truly in a league all his own. I have rarely met anyone like him—he has the ability to move between theater, the broad culture, the concert world and everything in between…”

Johnson certainly doesn’t lack for ambition or vision, or social conscience. In the strictest sense of the word, he isn’t a theater director—that might be too much of a constricted space for him, although he’s certainly done well there.

Much of his work is flavored and driven by music—all kinds of music. Think of “Elvis, the Concert,” Michael Bolton’s World Tour with “Bolton Swings Sinatra,” in England “Songs My Mother Taught Me,” a tribute to Judy Garland or shows about Patsy Cline, (“Always Patsy Cline,” which re-opened at the original home of the Grand Ole Opry.) and Conway Twitty.

Johnson directed and co-wrote the world premiere of “Mike Tyson, the Undisputed Truth,” starring Tyson himself at the MGM Grand, and staged and directed Pope Benedict’s appearance in New York—giving us two men not usually mentioned in the same sentence. He also wrote and directed “The Wildest—The Music of Louis Prima and Keely Smith,” Smith being one of the most under-rated American pop singers ever. “Isn’t she though?” Johnson asked. “She’s also my godmother and just a truly remarkable singer. Period.”

“The people, the projects, the music I’m interested in are all a part of my life, a background to it and people of my generation,” he said. “This is what we grew up with, and these songs by Leiber and Stoller, are the songs we grew up with.”

Gary Tischler • May 2, 2014

Here’s a hot tip: “The Magic Flute” is coming.

Mozart’s last opera was a big hit at its 1791 premiere at the Freihaus-Theater auf der Wieden in Vienna, where it ran for an unheard-of 100 performances, though Mozart himself did not live to see that milestone.

It’s been a hugely popular opera ever since, with the whole-family appeal of its stirring fairy-tale story: a brave prince named Tamino, with the help of the Queen of the Night, attempts to rescue her daughter, Pamina, from the evil sorcerer Sarastro. Magic stuff indeed. It’s cliff-hanging adventure, fantasy, comedy and romance tonight, with the musical gifts of Mozart on display in full force.

So the news that Washington National Opera will be staging “The Magic Flute” would perhaps not be big news ordinarily. But the WNO production of “The Magic Flute,” which runs May 3-18, is no ordinary project or production.

Perhaps most importantly, this production of “The Magic Flute” will be sung in English, in line with Artistic Director Francesca Zambello’s initiative to broaden the WNO’s audience base. It’s a boon for fresh audiences and a challenge for singers, and it adds a new dimension to the opera, usually sung in German.

That especially concerns bass Soloman Howard, the Washington-born-and-raised bass who sings the part of Sarastro.

“It’s a part I’ve always wanted to do,” he said. “Singing in English is a challenge, and it’s the kind I like to face, but having the opera done in English, well, it’s a step that should bring in people who don’t normally go to the opera, or find it too intimidating. It makes things accessible, and this opera as a story, and a look and design, is already something everyone can embrace. Kelley Rourke, our dramaturg, did this new version in English, and she works with all of us singers. You have to find how to stretch or not different vowels, how low or high you can go with a word, a feeling in English, as opposed to German.”

Soloman is in his third and last year in the WNO’s Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist Program. In June, he will appear in the world premiere of “An American Soldier,” composed by Huang Ruo with a libretto by playwright David Henry Hwang, the season-ending American Opera Initiative production.

The biggest news is that he has signed a contract with the Metropolitan Opera Company to sing the part of The King in their fall production of “Aida.”

“I’ve been very fortunate, and it’s a great honor to get something like that,” he said. “But I’ve grown here, being able to perform here, getting out into the community, working with children in the area where I grew up. I’m going to miss it – the company, the director, all the people you work with. It’s like a family.”

Soloman, who has a phenomenal lower range that appears to come straight out of the ocean floor, has made big impressions and big strides here. He got to sing “Old Man River” in Zambello’s production of “Showboat,” he was a stirring and moving Muhammad Ali in the powerful “Approaching Ali” produced for the WNO’s new commissioning program for contemporary opera and he was a roaring lion in the wonderful WNO children’s production, “The Lion, the Unicorn and Me.”

“To me, seeing kids and going to the schools here is a way to make a difference. They see me, and they maybe recognize there’s all sorts of avenues out there,” he said. When we talked with him about Ali, he recalled his own growing up going to high school in Suitland, Md. “People wondered about why I was doing classical music. They’d say, Why aren’t you doing pop, or gospel or blues? Well, I can do that, I suppose. But the challenge is what’s important.”

Solomon is joined in the youthful “Magic Flute” cast by newcomers to the WNO Maureen McKay and Eri Nakamura as Pamina, Kathryn Lewek and Anna Siminska as the Queen of the Night, Joseph Kaiser and Paul Appleby as Tamino, Joshua Hopkins and David Pershall as Papageno, Jordan Bisch as Sarastro, John Easterlin as Monostatos and Ashley Emerson as Papagena.

WNO Music Director Philippe Auguin will direct the WNO orchestra and Harry Silverstein, who directed a popular “Marriage of Figaro” here, is directing the production.

Of particular interest are the costumes and sets designed by the brilliant Japanese-American set and costume designer Jun Kaneko, who has created a unique, high-tech look and environment that includes the use of projections. There will also be a special exhibition of his artwork in the Hall of Nations through May 19.

Opening night of “The Magic Flute” on May 3 will be part of the WNO’s popular and popularizing “Opera in the Outfield” program, in which the opera is broadcast live to the high-definition NatsHD scoreboard at Nationals Park beginning at 7 p.m. Admission is free and the gates open at 5 p.m.

As part of the ballpark program, there will be pre-game entertainment in the form of Taiko drumming, a meet-and-greet with Ms. Brown (“Chief Chocolate Officer” of M&Ms), photo ops with the living statue of Babe Ruth, cutouts of characters from “The Magic Flute” and a costume trunk.

On May 5, there will be a free preview performance of musical highlights from “The Magic Flute” at the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage, performed by members of the Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist Program and other artists from the production.

In addition, there will be pre-performance education events called Opera Insights prior to every performance in the Opera House.

Performances for “The Magic Flute” are May 3 and 5 at 6 p.m., May 7 at 6:30 p.m., May 8 at 6:15 p.m., May 10 at 6 p.m., May 11 at 1 p.m., May 15 at 6:30 p.m, May 16 at 6:30 p.m., May 17 at 6 p.m. and May 18 at 1 p.m.

Gary Tischler •

No matter how much you change things, core things remain the same.

That was the case with the 30th annual presentation of the Helen Hayes Awards, held last Monday. The changes were big-time, sometimes startling, even confusing. But in the end, it was still the same old story – not a fight for love and glory but a celebration of the Washington-area theater community.

It’s a community that sometimes seems to be bursting at the seams, reflecting the almost boomtown growth of the city. But it’s also a community that seems to be coming more and more together in collaborative and identifiable ways. Here’s a change: the folks at Theatre Washington decided to hold the awards ceremonies at the National Building Museum. It’s a great space for what used to be called the biggest cast party ever, but not so much a theater space.

The proceedings – more often than not held at the Warner Theatre or the National Theatre, followed by a trip to a hotel ballroom for the big shindig – were altered in a way that proved in the long run to be more efficient. The whole thing was over by 10 p.m. (although the partying went on).

The set-up was three sessions of award-giving, with two very strict 20-minute intermissions. It began with food and drink, lots of both, and continued that way through the intermission. The effect was sometimes as if you were at a show on a cruise ship, which resulted in a lot of jostling, intermittent dancing and non-stop schmoozing.

And the business at hand, the handing out of awards got done almost – but not quite – at a fast and furious pace, with merry singers shuffling recipients off the stage if they got too long-winded. During the intermissions, an ominous gong that sounded almost like a cannon called folks back from partying.

As for the awards themselves, there were a few real surprises and a shock or two in the mix, but they seemed mostly about spreading the wealth, as opposed to honoring juggernauts.

What you saw was a parade of talented, gifted, high-spirited, often funny actors, performers, directors, leaders, costume and sound and set designers get their just rewards in the spirit of being honored by their peers and being part of a greater whole.

Having been to most of these affairs over the years – 30 years is a long time – this is the heart and soul of the awards. It’s what sets the Helen Hayes Awards apart from the Tonys or the Oscars, for instance. A play, after all, is always a collaborative effort, and so is a happening and celebration like this.

Victor Shargai, the longtime chairman of the Helen Hayes Awards and Theatre Washington, received the Helen Hayes Tribute for nurturing and helping to build and expand the group into one of the city’s major cultural forces. It is hoped that Shargai’s award is at least as much for his singular and original spirit and character, which was always on display, as for his achievements.

The Aaron Posner-penned play “Stupid Fing Bird,” a modernist take on Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” received numerous nominations, allowing every host on the stage to gleefully drop the F-bomb on a gathered multitude of close to a couple thousand people. E. Faye Butler, the not-ever-demure performer who really should be a Washington treasure even though she lives elsewhere, gave the title a full-throated bluesy note when she tackled it.

And the winner for best resident play?

You guessed it. “Stupid Fing Bird.”

Probably a bit surprising were the wins for ensemble cast and best resident musical by “Hello Dolly!” This joint production by Ford’s Theatre and Signature Theatre, staged at Ford’s, signals the rise of such projects. We saw it before in Arena Stage’s cooperative efforts with other companies in its O’Neill Festival and the citywide Shakespeare Festival a number of years ago. Kudos to Paul Tetreault at Ford’s and Eric Schaefer at Signature.

We saw familiar faces march up there or mingle: Ted van Griethuysen for a supporting actor award for Studio’s “The Apple Family” and Rick Foucheux, best actor for Round House Theatre’s “Glengarry Glen Ross.”

And we saw new faces in the crowd and on stage. The affair is always listed as black-tie, but from the beginning this has been an affair for young theater people, people who dress in bright colors, do outrageous dos, wear bowties that sparkle and shoes that have polka dots, and just generally dazzle with their high spirits. And they dance, they yell, they scream.

This year, they had a longer time and a bigger playpen. Break a leg indeed.

THE RECIPIENTS OF
THE 30th ANNUAL
HELEN HAYES AWARDS

OUTSTANDING DIRECTOR,
RESIDENT MUSICAL
Alan Paul, “A Funny Thing Happened on
the Way to the Forum,” Shakespeare
Theatre Company

OUTSTANDING DIRECTOR,
RESIDENT PLAY
Mitchell Hebert, “Glengarry Glen Ross,” Round House Theatre

OUSTANDING CHOREOGRAPHY,
RESIDENT MUSICAL
Karma Camp, “Hello Dolly!,” Ford’s
Theatre and Signature Theatre

OUTSTANDING MOVEMENT,
RESIDENT PLAY
Irina Tsikurishvili and Ben Cunis,
“The Three Musketeers,” Synetic Theater

OUTSTANDING MUSIC DIRECTION, RESIDENT PRODUCTION
Jon Kalbfleisch, “Gypsy,” Signature Theatre

OUTSTANDING SET DESIGN,
RESIDENT PRODUCTION
Clint Ramos, “Appropriate,” Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

OUTSTANDING LIGHTING DESIGN, RESIDENT PRODUCTION
Andrew F. Griffin, “Henry V,” Folger Theatre

OUTSTANDING COSTUME DESIGN, RESIDENT PRODUCTION
Merrily Murray-Walsh, “Mary T & Lizzy K,” Arena Stage

OUTSTANDING SOUND DESIGN,
RESIDENT PRODUCTION
Eric Shimelonis, “Never The Sinner,” 1st Stage

OUTSTANDING SUPPORTING
PERFORMER, VISITING PRODUCTION
Samantha Marie Ware, “The Book of Mormon,” The Kennedy Center

OUTSTANDING LEAD ACTRESS,
VISITING PRODUCTION
Rachel York, “Anything Goes,” The Kennedy Center

OUTSTANDING LEAD ACTOR,
VISITING PRODUCTION
Christopher John O’Neill, “The Book of
Mormon,” The Kennedy Center

OUTSTANDING SUPPORTING ACTRESS, RESIDENT MUSICAL
Erin Weaver, “Company,” Signature Theatre

OUTSTANDING SUPPORTING ACTOR, RESIDENT MUSICAL
Bobby Smith, “Spin,” Signature Theatre

OUTSTANDING LEAD ACTRESS
RESIDENT MUSICAL
Diana Huey, “Miss Saigon,” Signature Theatre;

Jessica Vancaro, “A Chorus Line,” Olney Theatre Center

OUTSTANDING LEAD ACTOR
RESIDENT MUSICAL
James Gardiner, “The Last Five Years,”
Signature Theatre

OUTSTANDING SUPPORTING ACTRESS RESIDENT PLAY
Dawn Ursula, “The Convert,” Woolly
Mammoth Theatre Company

THE JAMES MACARTHUR AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING SUPPORTING ACTOR, RESIDENT PLAY
Ted van Griethuysen, “The Apple Family Plays,” The Studio Theatre

THE ROBERT PROSKY AWARD FOR
OUTSTANDING LEAD ACTOR,
RESIDENT PLAY
Rick Foucheux, “Glengarry Glen Ross,” Round House Theatre

OUTSTANDING ENSEMBLE, RESIDENT MUSICAL
“Hello, Dolly!,” Ford’s Theatre and
Signature Theatre

OUTSTANDING ENSEMBLE,
RESIDENT PLAY’
“Glengarry Glen Ross,” Round House Theatre

THE CHARLES MACARTHUR
AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING NEW
PLAY OR MUSICAL
“Stupid Fing Bird” by Aaron Posner, Woolly Mammoth Theatre

OUTSTANDING VISITING PRODUCTION
“The Book of Mormon,” The Kennedy Center

OUTSTANDING PRODUCTION,
THEATER FOR YOUNG AUDIENCES
“Anime Momotaro,” Imagination Stage

OUTSTANDING RESIDENT MUSICAL
“Hello Dolly!,” Ford’s Theatre and Signature Theatre; “A Chorus Line,” Olney Theatre Centre

OUTSTANDING RESIDENT PLAY
“Stupid Fing Bird,” Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

Gary Tischler • April 17, 2014

When the touring company of “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” a good-natured musical about the dreams and perils of young spelling bee contestants, first came to town a number of years ago at the National Theater, I remembered thinking that we might be in for a sugary evening.

I also remembered being surprised at how much I actually enjoyed myself. The darned kids had a way of making you care about them, charming you with little guile and a lot of enthusiasm. Amid the snappy and high-energy musical numbers, there were more than a few gentle jabs at completion and the meaning of success American-style.

Now that “Spelling Bee” is a ground-up spring production at Ford’s Theatre, I got surprised again, along similar lines. This show—with music and lyrics by William Finn and a book by Rachel Sheinkin, once again takes us to small-town America, where Putnam County is putting on a highly competitive spelling bee, the winner of which will go to the national contest. The usual mixed bag of characters—a kid with two dads, an over-hyper, over-achieving girl who can also do gymnastics and doesn’t get much sleep, a girl who has nobody in the audience (except this audience) rooting for her, a boy scout just beginning to feel the physical pangs of noticing girls, an endearing and gentle kid with the unlikely name of Leaf Coneybear and a fellow by the name of William Barfee, a high-achieving speller with a magical foot, whose name is always mispronounced.

Nightly, there are also an additional four members chosen from the audience to participate, which I suspect, works with various levels of success and in any case, all of them will be eliminated because that’s the way the show is written.

The cast is ethnically and racially mixed, although there appears to be no significance to that—like spelling, the philosophy here is that acting is about talent, not skin color. The production is directed with verve by Peter Flynn, working in the big shoes of original director James Lapine. A welcome addition is choreography by Adventure Theater Artistic Director Michael Bobbitt.

The show is, at turns, very funny and on the money, with some updated references, as slowly but surely the words come that cause eliminations. Guiding the proceedings are Carolyn Agan as Olive Ostrovsky, a former queen bee, or spelling bee champ, and the taciturn and slightly disturbed vice principal Douglas Panch, played with clipped humor by Matthew Anderson.

But it’s the kids—they’re supposed to be younger than they are—who are the stars of this show, at turns anxious, wise and silly, lonely, smart, goofy, dressed in kid styles that come out of the fashion world of America without a red carpet.

With audience members in the cast, it’s “Putnam County” is conducive to rooting and reaction. Everybody’s got a fan in the audience. When competitors misspell a word, it’s often a sad, and sometimes oddly triumphant occasion.

Part of the reason the show works so well—almost in spite of its subject—is its beguiling small-town attitudes and the cast, of course. Every time, for instance, Panch mispronounces Barfee’s name (it’s pronounced Barfay), played with barely contained patience by Vishal Vaidya, you tend to flinch a little, too. Then, there’s Kristin Garaffo, playing the anxious Logainne Schwartzandgrubenniere (Shouldn’t that be a word to spell in the bee?), who plays the worried girl with halting efficiency and determination. Felicia Curry is explosive, confident without a life outside the bee, and Nickolas Vaughan plays Leaf Coneybear with affecting wistfulness, even though his family thinks him stupid. Rachel Zampelli is a true Broadway-type trouper as Rona Lisa Peretti, who waits in vain to hear from her parents, including a mother gone away to an ashram.

“The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” runs until May 17—still with the power to surprise and seduce.

Gary Tischler • April 11, 2014

Only in Washington. You go to see a play, and you’re in the middle of a historic moment about history itself. History in the flesh.

That’s about the only way you can describe what happened when Arena Stage hosted the April 3 “red carpet” world premiere of “Camp David.” The play, by Pulitzer Prize-winner Lawrence Wright, is a two-hour dramatization of the 13 days in September 1978 that gave painful birth to the first and only peace treaty between an Arab state and Israel. Unexpected, unprecedented, the treaty was probably the signal achievement of the administration of President Jimmy Carter.

It’s hard to look at the production – which began haltingly, then kicked into gear with humor and power – as a critic. It had already been in previews leading up to this premiere, and it will continue through May 4. However, there will be no staging that resembles this one.

This night, with the audience in the Kreeger Theater on its feet clapping, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, who had been the centerpiece of what amounted to a theatrical state dinner, settled into their seats, and the staging of the play became something beyond itself.

Here we all were, watching a play in which actors were assembled on a Camp David set, knitting together the nights and days of difficult negotiations that would end in the words “Habemus Pacem” (“We have peace”): Richard Thomas, once John-Boy on “The Waltons,” but now a seasoned 55-year-old portraying Carter; veteran actor Ron Rifkin, inhabiting the part of Israel’s Prime Minister Menachem Begin like a rumpled suit; Tony Award-nominee Hallie Foote bringing sharp and gentle humor as Rosalynn Carter; Egyptian actor and activist Khaled Nabawy, matching the charisma that was part of the soul of Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat.

Even as the play heads for a climax that is preordained, there were times as events unfolded, and the arguments between Sadat and Begin reached the point of animus and rancor, when you could almost entertain doubts that the peace treaty would be signed.

The guiding force behind the production was Gerald Rafshoon, a television and film producer who was director of White House communications in the Carter Administration. It took him decades to bring it to the stage. Arena Stage Artistic Director Molly Smith directed.

Much of the material in the play is new, a good chunk of it coming from diaries kept by the Carters. Other material was garnered from interviews with participants in the negotiations. What you are seeing sounds as fresh as a batch of secrets spilled unexpectedly at a White House press conference.

The emotion that accumulated during the course of the drama on stage achieved its peak when the Carters – Jimmy Carter, now 90 years old, and Rosalynn Carter, 85 – slowly came up to the stage to meet the actors during the curtain call, to the applause of audience and cast. They were joined by Jehan Sadat, 80, the widow of Anwar Sadat, who was assassinated in 1981. “That was a moment,” someone remarked.

It was a Washington moment. The Carters did not stay for the post-play reception. Rafshoon, Smith, Wright and the actors mingled with audience members, including longtime Washington media stars such as Chris Matthews, Bob Schieffer and Andrea Mitchell. “I was a White House correspondent then,” Schieffer said. “This is what it was like. It felt exactly right and true.”

The play seems hardly dated, though time has worked its way with everyone alive in 1978, 35 years ago.

Begin died in 1992. The peace treaty, in which Egypt recognized Israel as a state and Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt, remains in place. In 1993, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel and Yasser Arafat, the head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, signed an agreement of principles, the Oslo Accords, under President Bill Clinton. Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by an Israeli ultranationalist.

The four actors all inhabited their parts with the passions and quirks of real persons. Who knew, for instance, that Carter frequently prayed to and even railed against God? Thomas lets us see the whole man, insistent and unwilling to give up. Nabawy and Rifkin shine the most when, as Sadat and Begin, they are trying hardest to find common ground, especially when they share their experiences of time spent in prison. All three men were infused with their religious beliefs: Carter raised Southern Baptist, Begin haunted by the Holocaust, Sadat daring much in the Yom Kippur War and in going to Jerusalem and then to Camp David.

We saw it all up close, thanks to full, warm performances by Thomas, Foote, Rifkin and Nabawy. That’s all to the credit of the actors, directors, writer and producer. On this night, we got to see and feel a lot more than that. That’s theater, but that’s also Washington.

We woke up to read a story about the difficulties encountered by Secretary of State John Kerry in the Middle East: “With peace talks at impasse, Kerry’s image may be at risk.”

The last words of “Camp David,” like a pungent reproach, still echo from the night before: “We have peace.”
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Gary Tischler •

The pianist Simone Dinnerstein, the late-blooming star of the classical musical world, is—to put it in Willie Nelson’s terms—”on the road again,” and she’s not traveling light.

It’s not that Willie Nelson has anything to do with the occasion, but you wouldn’t now be surprised to find out that he did.

In 2007, Dinnerstein soared into the musical stratosphere with her recording of Johann Sebastian Bach’s “The Goldberg Variations,” a kind of daunting test that pianists worth their salt or fingers seem compelled to play or record, and not just because it’s an intrinsically difficult piece, but because others have climbed that particular mountain, most notably Glenn Gould.

Dinnerstein soared with the “ Variations” and her self-financed recording on Telarc Records in 2007, scoring the number one classical recording that year, and tackling the challenge at a time when she was pregnant. Last year, she went on tour with a program of “The Goldberg Variations,” stopping at the Music Center at Strathmore. Not only that, but she came out with the album “Night,” collaborating with singer-songwriter Tift Merritt, an eclectic program of new works and classical music.

Now, she’s coming back, this time on Sunday, Feb. 9, in a 3 p.m. recital at the Kennedy Center’s Concert Hall, presented by the Washington Performing Arts Society. She’s once again with her old boon companion and lifetime passion, Johann Sebastian Bach, performing his 15 two-part Inventions, which headlines an eclectic program that includes Beethoven’s Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op 111 and two very different contemporary composers, Nico Muhly and George Crumb.

In addition, her most recent recording on Sony, “J.S. Bach: Inventions and Sinfonias,” debuted in the top spot on the Billboard Classical Chart in its first week of sales.

“The first time I ever encountered the ‘Inventions,’ I was nine years old,” she said. “I thought then I could never play them, that they were wholly beyond my abilities. Bach meant the ‘Inventions’ to be educational tools for musicians, a guide for teachers and musicians. But they are much more than that, they taught me about duality, about two voices. I’d always thought until then that music was melody and accompaniment. When you listen—and musical training is as much about listening as it is about playing—you hear two continuous and independent voices.”

“I like the presence of the works by Crumb and Muhly. Crumb is fearless with his compositons, in terms of what he tackles. Muhly is still young—he’s in his thirties, he’s written the opera, “Two Boys,” and he’s working with old, traditional English Virginal music while at the same time being something of a minimalist.” The connection to Bach’s two voices becomes obvious when you listen to her talk about the music.

She will be playing Crumb’s “Eine Kleine Mitternacht Musik,” which is a nine-movement suite for amplified piano, based on Theolonius Monk’s 1940’s jazz standard “Around Midnight.” On its face, it seems like an illustration of resonant point counterpoint.

Muhly has composed works for ensembles, soloists and organizations, he did the score for the film, “The Reader,” for which Kate Winslet won an Oscar. Muhly’s work, he has said, was designed “to be navigation challenge for Simone Dinnerstein, who, aside from her technical prowess, has an emotional and interpretive virtuosity I was very interested in exploring.”

She will be playing Muhly’s “You Can’t Get There From Here,” commissioned by the Terez Music Foundation, which was named after a World War II concentration camp.

“I love this program,” WPAs President Jenny Bilfield said. “And I love that this program focuses the lens on the tandem of talents of composer-pianists spanning several centuries.”

Dinnerstein has brought something else with her: her cherished “Bachpack” initiative, complete with a digital piano by Yamaha, bringing the piano, and herself and her unique gifts and some of Bach’s Inventions to District schools over a period three days, working with children and using the Yamaha Remote Lesson technology found in the Disklavier reproducing piano. Dinnerstein began the Bach packing initiative, in 10 New York-area schools in January. She has also founded Neighborhood Classics, which was launched at P.S. 311, where her son attends school and her husband teaches.

This week, she brought the program to Lafayette Elementary School, Watkins Elementary School, Savoy and Patterson elementary schools, the Washington Latin Public Charter School and Ballou High School as well as Duke Ellington High School for the Arts in Georgetown, participating with Ballou through the Disklavier piano technology this Friday.

She’s also hosted a master class with adult amateur pianists at the Washington Conservatory of Music in Bethesda.

Gary Tischler • March 31, 2014

Gaetano Donizetti often takes you to the dark side in operas like “Anna Bolena” and “Lucia Di’Lammermoor,” but with “The Elixir of Love” (L’elisir d’amore) he comes on a little like a Hollywood toastmaster, arms spread wide, singing “Let Me Entertain You.”

Donizetti and the opera, entertain you mightily, as does the Washington National Opera production, directed by Stephen Lawless, at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House now through March 29. The opera may provide all kinds of difficult, even exhausting opportunities for the leads singing the roles of its often mismatched young lovers, Nemorino and Adina, but its plot has sawdust in it, coming not from the sunlit barn where it’s set, but from ancient comedy tonight strains, to vaudeville and burlesque bits and the kind of bits and pieces that strain a fair amount of incredulity.

You can nit-pick this kind of thing as old-fashioned (when did you last see an eye-patch switched for laughs?), but I think it may be best to think of this “Elixir” as a glass of high-grade champagne, and not the cheap wine that the canny salesman and rogue Doctor Dulamara is selling as an all-purpose love potion.

You can quibble here and there: individuals sometimes get lost in the crowd here, especially Italian bass baritone Simone Alberghini as the quasi-villain of the piece, Sergeant Belcore, the blustering enlisted man who thinks he’s a general with an army, and vies for the love of the heroine with an overblown sense of his own prowess.

Here’s the thing, though. Donizetti’s score is gorgeous, smooth, romantic and soaring. It has a little bit of everything in it. It goes down easy and leaves the young American tenor Stephen Costello and, in the production I saw, soprano Sarah Coburn to shine as Nemorino and Adina, the young lovers. (Coburn shares the part with Soprano Ailyn Perez, who happens to be Costello’s real-life wife. Perez will sing the part March 26 and 29, and Coburn will be singing March 25 and 28)

Costello is hitting Washington in grand style—his rangy, clear tenor voice was one of the individual highlights in the WNO’s powerful production of “Moby Dick,” and he makes for an appealing Nemorino, the hopeless and sometime hapless hero yearning for the love of Adina. This becomes heart-breakingly and movingly clear in the great aria, “Una Furtive Lagrima”, in which his love—both hopeful and hopeless—shine through. Both Costello and Coburn proved smooth and flawless in finessing bell canto thrills and trills, Coburn handling the aria “Prendi, per Me Sei Libero” with great warmth.

Along comes the good Doctor Dulcamara, a bit of a scoundrel, who convinces Nemorino that a shot of love potion (poured from a handy bottle of cheap wine) is just the thing to win him the fair, but sometimes fickle, Adina, who has promised to marry the oily sergeant.

The snake oil of a plot that’s part of the opera like sawdust in a Dodge City bar is harmless because there’s a lot of musical good wine and champagne to drink in. The giant barn that constitutes the set is the kind of place where you can have a wedding, a sing-along, a feast or a hoedown. The sun is always shining. Just outside are golden fields of sun-touched wheat for bread or pasta.

This production of “The Elixir of Love” is just the sort of opera that is for people who don’t normally go to the opera. It’s a painless , but rousing, introduction, or, as one friend of mine put it, a “perfect American production of an Italian opera.”

As love potions go, this “Elixir” might not be quite a “Number 9,” but it gets the job done as a number eight.

The Washington National Opera production of “Elxir of Love” runs through March 29 at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House.
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Gary Tischler • March 26, 2014

Listening to Hal Holbrook in a phone interview, it’s easy to think that Mark Twain might still be alive, even if you’ve never talked to Twain in person.

We’re having the conversation because the accomplished American actor is bringing “Mark Twain Tonight” back to Washington. The show will be at the National Theatre April 4 to 5, perhaps in the nick of time, and with the star, once again, burning with a passion for the part.

In rumpled whitish hair and a white suit, Holbrook has been doing his one-man show for years, going back to 1954, when the Cleveland, Ohio, native first performed the role at Lock Haven State Teachers College in Pennsylvania.

Ed Sullivan put Holbrook-Twain on his show in 1956, and Holbrook made it to Off-Broadway in 1959. He performed the role again in a production at the New York World’s Fair in 1964 and 1965. In 1966, “Mark Twain Tonight” went to Broadway for the first (but not the last), and the following year it was presented on CBS. Holbrook won an Emmy. He would return to Broadway and continue to tour with the show.

Holbrook said he has performed as Mark Twain more than 2,000 times over 60 years of his life. There is a very good chance that he never performed it the same way twice, so rich is the material, so endless is Holbrook’s love for the man and the part.
He is 88 years old now, and you have to ask: Why do you do it?

“Why do I do it?” Hobrook said. “Why, because it keeps me alive, man. It keeps me alive. It makes my blood run. It makes my heart beat faster every time I do it. It keeps you young and interested and curious and passionate. It’s hard sometimes. I do all my own research, I change the material a lot. Sometimes, you never know where it exactly goes. He did the same thing you know. That’s what he became, Mark Twain on the road, on tours, talking about America, God, politics, greed, the big business guys. Nothing has changed.”

“I can’t wait to get to Washington, let me tell you,” he said. “I can’t wait. I don’t have to change a thing. I don’t have to update him. He’s as current as all get-out. We’ve got the same things going on, the gap between rich and poor, the intolerance of the zealots.”
“He speaks to me, you know,” Holbrook said. The voice was garrulous, rich in timbre. “I don’t mean literally, I mean in terms of what he says. He speaks to all of us. Because he does what other people don’t do: He tells the truth. That’s what always separated him from everybody else, it’s why he was funny. Because he’s not just a comedian. He tells the truth and the truth is always funny, to begin with, because you hardly ever hear it. So people laugh, but they also listen.”

“When I first starting doing him, I was trying to figure out how to survive on stage by myself,” he said. “That seemed to be the hardest part. I wanted to get the laughs then. Now, well, I need to do it, because it’s worthwhile. Plus, there aren’t that many good parts for a guy my age any more.”

Maybe. But he seems to find them or, anyway, they find him. He had an Oscar nomination for supporting actor in 2008 for “Into the Wild.” He was in Spielberg’s “Lincoln” and the well-received “Promised Land” last year. He works. You guess he needs to work for the sake of it.

Twain did the same thing. He did it to make money, for sure, and he had created this Mark Twain character. Moreover, he was both a great American novelist – “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is still being banned after all these years – and a great and mordant observer of American mores. “Shaw called him the American Voltaire,” Holbrook offered.

Holbrook, of course, is in the pantheon of fine American actors, with an ability to play memorable roles on stage, in films and on television. He was a villainous foil to Clint Eastwood’s “Dirty Harry,” playing a law-and-order zealot. He was the wise broker to Charlie Sheen’s hustler in “Wall Street.” He portrayed an assistant secretary of state on “The West Wing,” appeared on the popular sitcom “Evening Shade” and played Dixie Carter’s swain on “Designing Women.”

That was a part he played in real life, also. She was the enduring love of his life. They married in 1984. Both he and Carter appeared at the Shakespeare Theatre Company, Holbrook as Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice,” Carter giving remarkable performances in two plays by Oscar Wilde.

“She was an original, and I loved her dearly,” he said. “She had courage, intelligence, talent, humor and grace and a remarkable capacity for forgiveness, for which I was grateful.”

Carter passed away in 2010.

Twain saved some of his sharpest jibes for politicians, as in the famous: “Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress . . . but I repeat myself.”

“I can’t wait to unleash Twain on Washington,” Holbrook said. For sure, we could use a dose of Twain, and the presence of Hal Holbrook, too.

Gary Tischler •

On the heels of “World Stages: International Theater Festival 2014,” an eclectic festival of new theater, new styles and new ideas that took up most of March, the Kennedy Center – in collaboration with Hi-ARTS, producers of the Hip-Hop Theater Festival – launched “One Mic: Hip-Hop Culture Worldwide” on March 25. It runs through April 13.

Going beyond the music, “One Mic” essentially explores hip-hop as a uniquely American art form and culture that has spread from its multi-ethnic roots in the U.S. to become a worldwide phenomenon. The festival highlights MCing, DJing, b-boying and graffiti writing, hip-hop’s four cornerstones.

Entering territory not often explored at the Kennedy Center, on March 28-29, actor, rapper, and multi-platinum recording artist Nas joins up with the NSO Pops to reimagine his debut album “Illmatic.”

On April 4-5, March Bahmuthi Joseph’s “red, black and GREEN: a blues (rbGb),” produced by MAPP International Productions, interweaves several art forms to bring “the stories and voices of Black America into the center of a timely conversation about race, class, culture and the environment.”
The Revive Big Band, led by trumpeter Igmar Thomas, shares its hybrid sound of hip-hop, R&B and jazz with fans of the three genres at a performance at the Kennedy Center Jazz Club on April 4.

Dance gets its turn April 6, when Jonzi D, hip-hop artist, educator and director of “Breakin’ Convention” in England, leads a showcase of hip-hop dance at the Eisenhower Theatre. Project Soul Collective from South Korea, Sébastien Ramirez and Honji Wang from France and Companhia Urbana de Dance from Brazil will perform.

Catch up with the latest hip-hip styles – krumping, beatboxing and the role of b-girls – when “Fresh Noise: A Mashup of Youth Voices” is staged for young audiences, directed by Monica Williams, in the Family Theatre, April 12-13.
There’ll also be lots of free performances on the Millennium Stage.

For all the information on performances and tickets, visit the Kennedy Center website: kennedy-center.org/onemic.
Something New at Studio Theatre’s 2nd Stage

Playwright Declan Greene’s provocative new play about anime-obsessed high school students, “Moth,” gets a production at Studio Theatre’s 2nd Stage, with D.C. actor and longtime Studio collaborator Tom Storey directing. 2nd Stage Artistic Director Keith Alan Baker calls “Moth” a “character-based play, focused on these two young people recreating a terrible shared moment.” The show runs April 9 to May 4.

The Two Henrys, Falstaff and Prince Hal

Familiar faces and folks are back at the Shakespeare Theatre Company, where Artistic Director Michael Kahn joins veteran actor Stacy Keach as Falstaff in productions of “Henry IV, Part 1” and “Henry IV, Part 2.” The two plays, which will run in repertory through June 8, are about power and parenting, fathers and sons, war and peace and the education of a prince. High-water marks for Shakespeare, they are at turns gripping and funny, as well as tragic. Keach, who was seen last here in the title role of “King Lear” (he’s also done “Richard III” and “Macbeth” at STC), is the boisterous, cynical, hard-drinking knight who acts as one kind of father figure for Prince Hal (Matthew Amendt), heir to the throne occupied by his distant father Henry IV (Edward Gero).