Performance

Gary Tischler • March 20, 2014

I was coming home in a cab to get ready to attend the annual Series of Legends concert to benefit the Duke Ellington School of the Arts at the Music Center of Strathmore, featuring rock-pop legends Sting and Paul Simon yesterday.

Guess what was playing on the cab radio?

“Everything Little Thing She Does Is Magic” by you know who. And if you don’t, too bad for you. I thought, what could possibly go wrong? The answer to that question is the tag line to the story about the woman who once come up to the late uber-movie star Cary Grant, known for his eye-candy smooth class, and asked: “Do you know what’s wrong with you?” A quizzical Grant asked, “I don’t know, what?” ‘’Absolutely nothing.”

There was absolutely nothing wrong with the night which was an affirmation for the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, the ongoing parade of gifted young artists—dancers, musicians, singers in groups and as individuals–for its co-founder (with Mike Malone) Peggy Cooper Cafritz, for an exhilarating demonstration of star power when it engages with and for a worthy cause, as Sting and Simon, who are touring together so ably showed.

This was a high-end fundraiser for the District’s pre-eminent arts school, which will help fund the school’s major renovation, with attendees filling the grand foyer of the Music Hall at Strathmore in a VIP reception and the acoustically renowned and beautifully designed hall for a stirring and few songs left unsung. The event raised at least $1.2 million for the high school at 35th and R Streets.

This was the Seventh Annual Performance Series of Legends fundraiser, which began in 2006 with comedian Dave Chappelle –an Ellington alum—headlining. Other stars that followed included another Ellington alumn, opera star Denyce Graves, Earth, Wind & Fire, Smokey Robinson and Patti LaBelle. Stevie Wonder was an early headliner, and he was scheduled to appear with Sting and Simon, but could not appear because of the death of a close relative.

That was just about the only sad note in an evening when donors, well wishers, media, culture mavens and politicians mingled in the grand foyer, the media at one point setting up a kind of Sting watch (can you call it a Sting sting?), until he appeared from the very VIP Comcast Circles Lounge with donors, smiling broadly and walking fast. (See The Georgetowner’s photo.)

In the foyer, politicians and elected officials mingled and schmoozed—Democratic congressman Chris Van Hollen, Montgomery County Executive Ike Leggett, retiring Virginia congressman Jim Moran, and a raspy-voiced D.C. At-large Councilman David Catania, an independent, who had just announced that he would be running for mayor of D.C. in the November general election.

Inside, the night turned into something truly special, on a stage packed with the youthful talent of the Duke Ellington band and chorus, and guitarist Reilly Martin, who played with the verve that could give some of the pros on stage a run for their money.

Duke Ellington School CEO Rory Pullens, beaming with pride, announced, “You know what Sting said? He said those kids blew me away.”

The kids were always there. They’re these tumblers, that guitar player, the hand-clapping choir which achieved gospel tones, all the young girls and boys playing trumpets, oboes, flutes, the French horn, clarinets, drums, violins and such. Among them might be future stings, future song stylists, rappers, tap dancers, classical musicians, opera stars and jazz singers and players, rock and rollers and divas.

“We’re in the presence of the future,” Sting acknowledged, and then began a set, later joined by Simon, that erased any doubt that this might be one of those perfunctory, well-meaning musical efforts that would leave you parched for something better.

It doesn’t get much better than this. With Duke Ellington student dancers, singers and musicians, setting the stage with “Demolition Man” and “Synchronicity.”

Sting—aka Gordon Matthew Thomas Summer—looking lean and clean in dark-wear and precisely little left short hair, showed himself as the ever-growing and versatile stylist that he is, beginning with a crowd-pleasing “Englishman in New York,” one of his first solo efforts after becoming a super-star with the 1980s group, “The Police.” This one was—as is much of his work now—infused with world stylings and sounds, a little bit of Reggae, a little exotic, full of a wistful kind of bounce. He sang the Middle East-infused “Desert Rose” (some of it in Arabic), “Seven Days” and the classic Police song “Every Breath You Take.” At one point, manically and a little maniacally beautiful with his playing, electric fiddle player Peter TIckell wowed the crowd into a standing ovation.

Out came Paul Simon, once of Simon and Garfunkel, the soulful inspiration of imagination for a generation of 60s outsiders—“Hello darkness my old friend” goes one song, “Mrs. Robinson….Jesus loves you more than you can know”—came out, small but casting a huge musical shadow. They sang the Simon and Garfunkel classic, “The Boxer.” Simon then sang Sting’s “Fragile.”

“I suppose you know Paul and I are touring together,” Sting said. (The two will be at the Verizon Center tonight.)

“I remember when we were just starting out, jumping into cars and playing half-empty bars all over America and loving it,” he said and asked Simon to exit the stage. Sting sang Simon and Garfunkel’s “America” and made it his own “… We’ve all come to look for America.” He sang The Police’s “Message in a Bottle” and everyone standing, dancing and singing.

Then, everyone came back on stage. They sang “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” one by one, and then with the Duke Ellington Chorus, and then Sting again taking a lyric, and making the song more robust, stirring, a little more brave.

And then, like you might have wanted, they closed it out with “Every Breath You Take.” And everyone again was standing, dancing and singing.

Departing, I thought of the lyrics: “Everything you do is magic. Every little thing she does turns me on.” The kids, Sting, Simon. Every little thing they did was: Magic.

Gary Tischler • March 14, 2014

The actor Richard Thomas knows a little about icons. He’s pretty close to being one himself.

After all, he became something of an icon in the 1970s, when he played John-Boy Walton, Jr., on “The Waltons.”

The hugely popular television series – about a big family growing up during the Depression and World War II in Walton’s Mountain, Va. – ran for nine seasons. It’s still remembered for its closing good-nights among family members, as in “Good night, John-Boy.”

To this day, he remains John-Boy to thou- sands of fans, even if he’s in his early sixties now. He’s not bothered by that. “I call it the gold- en pain,” Thomas said in a telephone interview.

John-Boy may have become an iconic fictional figure. However, playing a living former president of the United States, that’s something else again.

Thomas will be playing President Jimmy Carter in the world-premiere production of “Camp David” by Lawrence Wright, directed by Arena Stage Artistic Director Molly Smith. “Camp David” will run Mar. 21 through May 4 in Arena’s Kreeger Theater.

Thomas will be joined by veteran stage and screen actor Ron Rifkin as Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Egyptian actor Khaled Nabawy as Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Tony Award nominee Hallie Foote as first lady Rosalynn Carter.

Named for the presidential country retreat near Thurmont, Md., “Camp David” centers on the events and difficult negotiations surround- ing the talks held there in September 1978. The resulting Camp David Accords, the ground-breaking peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, are still in place 35 years later.

The historic peace treaty remains the singular, uncontestable achievement of the Carter Administration. While it was not enough to help Carter earn a second term, it was the kind of accomplishment that gave him a prominent role as a former president. It echoes throughout Washington, where many players from the Carter Administration, and the administrations before and after, are still active.
We reached Thomas in a break between rehearsals. His voice still sounds as youthful as it did during a 1987 Georgetowner interview, when he was in town to play another historic figure in “Citizen Tom Paine.” “Gosh, that was a long time ago. Wasn’t it?” he said. “A lot of years.”

“Playing a living president, that’s quite a challenge,” Thomas said. “I read the script and found it impressive. It was an engaging script, a theater piece about real events, solidly grounded. And here I am, and here we are.”

“People forget what happened, and most people don’t know the details,” Thomas said. “It was a very human process among three men who had ideas and ideals, a big sense of themselves, and it was extremely difficult. It was dramatic.”

President Carter is a public figure about whom people have strong feelings, one way or another. Here in Washington, Carter’s involvement in the talks was one of those occasions when news of historic proportions became local news, too.

“You have to avoid certain things,” Thomas said. “You’ve got to watch the accent, the things you’re overly familiar with. You can’t put him on a pedestal or you’ll be playing a statue. You can’t slip into stereotypical things or try to do an impersonation. It’s a little nerve-wracking, initially. In the end…I try to think of him, not as president of the United States, but as a character in a play, because that’s what I do.”

It is expected that the Carters will be in attendance at the official red carpet premiere on Apr. 3. “Well, that could be a little extra pressure, I guess,” he said. “That awareness will no doubt add a little to the night.”

“Camp David” is produced by Gerald Rafshoon, White House communications director in the Carter administration, who brings intimate knowledge along with access to tapes made by the president during the negotiations.

Playwright and screenwriter Wright is also the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.”

Thomas was excited to be back in Washington. “It’s such an unusual town, and I love working here,” he said. “It’s a great theater town.” He worked with legendary director Peter Sellars at the Kennedy Center in “The Count of Monte Cristo” and a trio of plays by Samuel Beckett. Thomas also played the title role in “Richard II” at the Washington Shakespeare Company.

Thomas and his wife, Georgiana Bischoff, have a large family with seven children, including triplet daughters from his first marriage. “They’re all grown up now,” he said. “That’s one of the biggest roles you can have, being a father and a parent.”

Ralph Waite, who played Thomas’s father on “The Waltons,” passed away Feb. 13. “It was a huge loss,” Thomas said. “He was like a second father to me. I lost my father last year.”

“Camp David” will run March 21 through May 4 in Arena Stage’s Kreeger Theater.

Gary Tischler • March 13, 2014

You read about him, you talk to him, you see his life and resume, and you think life probably couldn’t get much thicker and fuller for Washington Concert Opera Artistic Director and Conductor Antony Walker.

Here we were, on a long distance call from Australia, where he was raised, and where he would return to conduct a production of “Carmen” at the Sidney Opera House, directed by Francesca Zambello, the artistic director of the Washington National Opera, thinking out loud about home, hearth and the WCO’s next production, Giuseppe Verdi’s “Il Corsaro,” on March 9 at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium.

“I understand you’re having a bit of snow,” he said. “It’s not too bad here. But being so far away, even though I love it here, you miss Georgetown.” Walker lives in Georgetown with his partner Lauren, their daughter, Genevieve, who is not yet one-year-old, and their 10-year-old border collie mix named Sadie.

“I love Georgetown,” he said, “I love the sense of history here.”

Walker is also a rising presence in the world of opera and classical music. In his early forties, he got high marks from the Sidney critics on “Carmen.” They wrote: “It’s a joy to be carried along by his [Walker’s] zesty reading of a score that in lesser hands can sound over-familiar or routine.”

“ ’Carmen,’ in a way, is the exact opposite of what we do at Washington Concert Opera,” Walker said. “It’s the most familiar of operas, even to people who don’t often go. And it’s a full-scale dramatic piece, the whole of opera, sets, and costumes galore.”

Walker has been artistic director and conductor of the Washington Concert Opera since 2002 and also serves as music director of the Pittsburgh Opera and artistic director of the Pinchgut Opera in Sydney. Since his professional debut in Sydney in 1991, he has conducted more than 200 operas, large and smaller scale choral and orchestral works as well as symphonic and chamber works with companies all over the world. On the opera stage, he has led performances by the Metropolitan Opera and numerous major opera companies.

He is big and getting bigger and is very much in demand, but you also suspect that the work he does with the WCO is close to heart. “We have a slogan,” he said. “It’s all about the music. It’s not an either-or thing. It’s a different way of seeing, experience and hearing opera, for that matter. It’s the stage, the singers, the orchestra, the conductor, performing a full opera, no sets no costumes. In a way, you ‘see’ a different sort of opera. It’s much more intimate. And, as a conductor, you’re very much exposed. You’re a part of everything in a way that everyone can see.”

“We’ve also specialized in doing operas that are rarely performed, works by composers everyone knows, but works that aren’t done often,” Walker said. “It’s not because they’re obscure or because they’re not good. I think ‘Il Corsaro’ is a masterpiece or very near to it.”

“It’s very characteristic Verdi,” he added. “This was a time of revolutionary passion in Europe and Italy. It was Byron’s time, too, and you can hear and feel that in this opera.”

Tenor Michael Fabiano takes on the title role of the pirate and corsair Corrado, with the noted lyric soprano Nicole Cabell, starring as Corrado’s great love, with Tamara Wilson, named Washington’s singer of year in 2011, as Gulnara, in the the Washington Concert Opera production of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Il Corsaro,” March 9 at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium.

Gary Tischler •

After the young actor Andreu Honeycutt has staggered downstage and out, apparently wailing, after they’ve put away the large lynching rope, after the explosion of n-words in the last minutes of the play and the telling of horrible racist jokes, after all that and the two hours preceding all that, there’s an awkward silence that descends over the audience at “We are Proud to Present…” at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre.

The audience, squared off across the stage in different sections, eventually claps, but the six actors in the play do not return for a bow. In some ways it seems awkward to clap, like cheering at a funeral or the site of a bloody traffic accident. Nobody’s helping us out. So, we wander out kind of dutifully, and there are the actors, handing out programs and smiling expectantly.

Even for Woolly Mammoth Theatre, with its long history and reputation of presenting new, edgy theater nobody else does, in ways that are driven by daring, sometimes discomfiting, staging, “We Are Proud to Present…” is unusual, like a daring and beautiful woman going out for a date dressed as a menacing clown.

This isn’t really a play in the usual sense. Worked out in detailed, rehearsed ways, it nevertheless resembles a provocation, an improvisation, a little like a street performance with lots of grounded details, not to mention the tail end of a day. And, in what amounts to a recent trend with Woolly productions, its immersive, inside-and-out activities surround the performance — chores to do if you choose — along with information provided to excite debate and talk. Add in the re-arrangement of the furniture of the theater, so to speak. Also, there are echoes and contexts from other plays, books, history to chew on and a zig-zag course from out-and-out-laughter to discomfiture to silence that you can actually hear.

We should afford you the full title, which may or may not spark recognition from audience members: “We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, formerly Known as Southwest Africa, From The German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915.”

The play—actually a play within a play—is about six actors trying to put together a play about Kaiser Wilhelm-era imperial Germany’s occupation of said Sudwestafrika (now Namibia) as a way of getting into the colonial games of great power nations, chief among them Victorian Great Britain. During the course of that occupation of an area populated by several different tribes, chief among them the Herero people, the Germans tried the usual imperial gambits of pitting tribes against each other. In the end, they took the course of attempting a mostly successful genocide of the Herero people because the Herero had resisted and fought back. Orders were given to kill the males and force women and children into the desert. When it was all over, some 100,000 Hereros had died. In 2004, 100 years later, Germany apologized for what happened.

Six actors — three black, three white; two women, four men — have gathered to create a play that deals with that history, but their only source material are letters written by German soldiers to their families, none of them referencing what happened or offering descriptions of the tribal population. They are full of Victorian romantic and sentimental cliches about hearth, home, love and children, missing the fireside and the wifely presence.

Initially, led by the director (in a spirited, decisive performance by the compelling Dawn Ursula), the cast members struggle, they are actors after all, of various degrees of commitment, all of them with enough ego to spare. This cast is made up of actors playing actors in search of a part and understanding of the material. The world they’ve entered suggests, at least, Pirandello’s mystifying “Six Characters in Search of An Author.”

The squabbling among them is initially about the roles: there’s the angry young black actor, the aforementioned Andreu Honeycutt, who has no interest in playing Germans and reading German letters, an older black man played by the commanding Michael Anthony Williams, and two white men—the arrogant one, played with odd confusion by Joe Isenberg, and the older guy, played with contained force by Peter Howard. There is also the generic white woman, who gets to have a name—Sarah—played with aplomb and sometimes quaint, silly goofiness, by Holly Twyford, who, asked to feel sad about the death of a cat, guts out a cat wail.

Much of this is initially very funny—actors after all often offer a ridiculous face to the world—but as they continue to fail to come to grips with the subject—the murder of the Hereros—racial concerns rise to the fore.

“We haven’t dealt with what happened,” says the angry young man, and he tries to get them into that area. There’s talk of appropriating suffering, appropriating roles, until prodded by their director, they come face to face with the monster in the historic woodshed.

When the young white actor has to shoot a defenseless Herero, he at first can’t do it. “I’m not like that,” he says. “I can’t do this.” But, of course, he can, and now we are in the thick of it: songs of loss and home and massive suffering. In a kind of not surprising, but nevertheless shocking, segue, we appear to be in the American south. The white actors are talking “Cracker Southern,” and the rope is raised. It becomes hard to swallow, because there is a temptation to say stop.

The play by young playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury walks into the muddy waters of comparative crime, of the unsettled cloud of race American style, not to mention the Holocaust, also perpetrated by Germany, and other genocides of all kinds. The segue into our times, or the times just preceding, is not smooth. It happens all of a sudden and here we are, and suddenly everyone gets quiet.

Does it add up that way? A question that’s raised, but only individuals can answer it. As it is, the proceedings lets you look not only at yourselves, but across the way at other members of the audience who sit silent, crossing legs, scrunched up, or a couple that hold hands strongly, after appearing to argue, the faces changing every bit of the way. It’s uncomfortable to look at people like that because surely they’re looking at you.

“We Are Proud to Present” is all of a piece in recent theatrical offerings by Woolly Mammoth—last year’s almost stately “The Convert,” which dealt with Christian missionaries in Africa, “Detroit,” which was configured somewhat similarly physically, and “Appropriate”, a wildly feverish play about buried secrets among members of a white Southern family written by an African American playwright.

However worked out this play was, and it was done with care, it had the look of stuff that happens every day to most of us: life and death, cab rides in which a driver offers up the notion that there may be such a thing as a coming apocalypse, the hurly burly of demographic change in this city.

“We are Proud to Present … “ runs at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre through March 9.

Gary Tischler •

If you can imagine the Washington National Opera as a Nantucket whaling company, then you can congratulate it for finally landing the great white whale of contemporary opera: composer Jake Heggie’s and librettist Gene Scheer’s “Moby-Dick,” now at the Kennedy Center through March 8.

Unlike mad and fiery Captain Ahab’s doomed, mad expedition to destroy the white whale, the opera, making its long-awaited East Coast debut, doesn’t end in disaster. It is an invigorating, emotionally powerful, poetic and visually astonishing triumph. The production is fueled emotionally by Heggie’s accessible and richly varied music and Scheer’s poetic libretto, which echoes the novel’s style and 19th-century American poetics.

While an entirely operatic opera with all the elements in the operatic toolbox, “Moby-Dick” is also a very American opera. It’s almost a spiritual and emotional anthem to the era’s literary strivings. This isn’t just a question of language—the opera is written and sung in English—but one of style and themes. Throughout the nearly three-hour course of the opera, you hear (and see) the strains of what Walt Whitman heard, you hear American voices, transcendental strivings and New England religious and biblical tones, the salty, dangerous and lonely lives of whalers alone on the ocean.

The opera doesn’t arrive newly minted. It was first commissioned for the Dallas Opera—jointly with the San Francisco Opera, the San Diego Opera, the State Opera of South Australia and Calgary Opera—and had its world premiere at the Dallas Opera in 2010. The San Francisco Opera production was staged in 2012. For Washingtonians who had not seen the production, it existed as a kind of much-talked-about and much-written-about rumor.

To begin with, all the stories about the physical and technical aspects of the production are true: on stage, “Moby-Dick” is a spectacle of projection, lighting and a physical apparition which is both highly complicated and affecting. It’s sailors on ropes, decks and shadows, in whaling boats seemingly bobbing in fierce storms on high seas, sets that sometime dwarf the characters like the shadow of a giant white whale. The wizards who helped re-recreate the physical presence of the whaling ship Pequod include Robert Brill (set design), Jane Greenwood (costumes), Gavan Smith (lights) and Elaine J. McCarthy (projection design). It’s McCarthy we presume who’s responsible for the magical projection that hooks stars and ship together in the opening sequence.

But, as somebody once quipped, you shouldn’t come out humming the sets or the lights, however impressive. Opera is about music, words and music, singers and singing and, in many cases, fevered drama. As literature, “Moby-Dick” is nothing, if not operatic, dealing with obsession, man’s place in the cosmos, and relationship to the almighty, not to mention being a tragic adventure fully muscled with the brawn of an emerging America.

After all, this is about Captain Ahab, the one-legged leader of the Pequod, and his pursuit of the white whale Moby-Dick, who stole his leg from him. It’s about Starbuck, the reasonable and moral first mate, Queegqueg, the island harpooner, the cabin boy Pip and the sailors like Flask and Stubb, and the newcomer and sometime narrator of the tale dubbed the “greenhorn,” otherwise known as Ishmael, alone on the vast ocean, far from Nantucket.

This production is an intimate marriage of music and libretto. It brings out, if perhaps not all the essential details of Melville’s massive masterpiece, the key elements of the heart of the book. Heggie has become something of a master of the contemporary opera musical narrative form. He is the composer of “Dead Man Walking,” which has become a staple and received 40 productions as well as “Out of Darkness”, a trio of Holocaust stories. The music is remarkably varied. It’s a kind of ship of treasures itself, often wandering into pure songs, intimate duets between “greenhorn” and Queegeg, and Abab and Starbuck or arias (notably Ahab’s and the “greenhorn”). With echoing sea shanties or bursting like a wave, there’s no sameness in this music. This is a little remarkable given that all the action takes place on a single ship.

Just as critical is Gene Scheer’s libretto. Noted American playwright Terence McNally, who had the initial impulse to make an opera out of “Moby-Dick,” was originally slated to do the libretto but bowed out because of illness. Scheer, who has worked with Heggie on other projects, instead took over and produced a libretto that more than complements the music. It’s a marriage. Scheer finds the style and words of the characters and the time and the book, you can, as Whitman did, hear America singing, along with the Puritans and bible thumpers as well as strong-armed, brave and rum-loving sailors.

From the beginning imagery, the production moves from spectacle to wonder, to intimate scenes, buoyed by strong singing and believable, often touching acting. Two of the performers—the young American tenor Stephen Costello as the “greenhorn” (aka Ishmael), and American soprano Talise Trevine in the pants part of Pip were in the Dallas and San Francisco productions. They anchor the production: Costello with a clear, rangy, heart-touching voice, commanding without being pushy, especially in the aria “Human Madness,” accompanied only by an oboe. The greenhorn’s relationship with the Pacific whaler Queegeg is touching, as they cement their friendship and the greenhorn sings about learning the other’s language.

This is one of the strengths of the production—the surge from spectacle to intimacy. There are times when the overpowering sets tend to diminish the characters on stage. It’s a fine line to walk. That whole idea of man in the face of impossibly large forces is a thematic content after all. I would have like to see a little more charisma and force from tenor Carl Tanner’s Ahab when he’s singing out of a crowd, but he’s very affecting in his scenes with the stoic, pragmatic Starbuck (baritone Matthew Worth).

On the whole, guided with imagination by director Leonard Foglia and conducted with energy by Evan Rogister, “Moby-Dick” is an engaging American opera. It is something we’ve seen rarely here, an epic American experience, and a lodestone of inventiveness in almost all of its aspects. It ends—as it should—with the right words, the right tone, the right image, just so.

“Moby-Dick” is playing at the Kennedy Center’s opera house through March 8.
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Gary Tischler • February 28, 2014

As Arena Stage Artistic Director Molly Smith reminds us, the play now at the Fichandler at Arena is called “Mother Courage and Her Children”—not just “Mother Courage,” as it sometimes is—implying that the character played in gruff operatic style by the great Kathleen Turner is motivated primarily by her maternal instincts.

That may be true, but there’s no solace for the audience or for Mother Courage in Bertolt Brecht’s astonishing epic, which the author of “The Three Penny Opera” and a host of almost tribal theatrical jeremiads against war, greed, militarism, big business and corporate interests began writing in 1938, on the eve of World War II, and only two decades after World War I, when “the war to end all wars” ended.

The play—hugely theatrical, casting a wide net—almost always has a way of looking both specific and humanly abstract. Certainly, that’s where Smith is going. She means to connect Mother Courage, her three children, a camp follower, a minister, a chef and sundry scoundrels, brutal soldiers, camp followers, and civilians from the Thirty Years’ War to the present and our own times and country with the presence of soldiers in present-day uniforms.

The suggestion that we’re always in some sort of Thirty Years War isn’t wrong, but given that we’ve conducted our winding-down and current war and most recent war in a way that our populations are disconnected from them in a way that the protagonists of this play are not, the idea is not as searing as it should be. The mix of present-day clothing and weaponry, not to mention contemporary colloquial profanity, does bring us closer to the characters that populate the Fichandler in-the-round stage, which looks like a bombed out-pit of debris from wars coming and going.

The problem with the ironically nick-named Mother Courage is that she tries to balance what she thinks is her astute business acumen with her love of her children. That acumen is mostly greed, driven by fear. She is fiercely neutral, without ideology, with a burning passion to save her children and her cart of goods, a kind of moving canteen that she and her children carry across the battlefields of central and western Europe. They skate just barely by, never sure, never safe, in a particularly savage war which ruined what was then Germany for decades.

Turner’s Mother Courage has a kind of gruff passion. She has verbal size and distinction. She knows the values of goods and her own shrewd self. She has the survivalist courage to take on whatever’s coming down the pike, which is always unexpected , unfair, unsavory, and unpleasant. She and her children—a big, tough strapping boy Eilife, played with a strong presence and even stronger voice by Nicholas Rodriguez, the vulnerable but numbers-wise boy she calls Swiss Cheese, played with pathos by Nehal Joshi, and Katatrin, solemn, quickly moving and silent, played with astonishingly loud silence by Erin Weaver—stagger across the muddy fields, cratered and shell-serenaded landscape like watchful wayfarers.

Mother Courage is a part that can be done with scurvy, sexy humor—or it can plain done in, without humor. Turner is, at turns, funny and calls on her gift for sexuality when it is appropriate but with ease, and the love for her kids—a really tough love—is nevertheless self evident. It seems to blind her when it’s hitched to her greed. She’s like a con man who thinks war is just another mark she can outwit.

As an experience, this production, which features gloriously thrift-shop costume designs by Joseph Salasovich and a spectacularly beat-up war set by Todd Rosenthal, is almost overwhelming. It’s like being parachuted into a place you’ve avoided all your life. It’s a dangerous place. It has the unkempt odor of religious passions which can turn murderous in a second. It’s full of loss and constant change—one day you’re a camp follower, the next day, you’re a colonel’s mistress, which is what happens to a Grisabella-like Yvette played with loud charm by Meg Gillentine.

The production also has the gifts of David Hare’s tough translation, which knows the different between honest colloquial grief and polemics, and new music composed by James Sugg. Turner sings in the key of knock-you-over, when she’s doing “Mother Courage’s Song” and straight from the torn heart with “Lullaby.” Rick Foucheux displays a fine, touching voice in “The God Who Was a Man” as well as putting on a display of complexity in his role as the chaplain. The music is presented like there’s a circus band of gypsies and jazz men following the proceedings.

In the end, of course, everything Mother Courage does puts her children in danger, and they fall or disappear one by one, as she nevertheless hangs on to her cart. Those last images remind you of any war, of Lear, of great, imagined losses. And when the production does that, why that’s a kind of courage in and of itself.

Gary Tischler • February 27, 2014

Anoushka Shankar, the world renowned and world-class sitar player and interpreter of classical Indian music was talking about her latest album, “Traces of You,” in a phone conversation last week.

Listening to her and to some of the songs on the album like the single, “The Sun Won’t Set,” and the title track, you get a sense of the personal nature of her music and its universal appeal. It’s about what art—be it performed, recorded, written, painted or sculpted—reaches for a particularism that goes straight to the personal heart and imagination of the viewer and listener and then becomes magically universal.

This is what usually happens in the best and most successful creative endeavors. Whether receptively popular or consciously artistic, the results often seem mysterious—a “don’t know how” kind of happening that arrives with inscrutable blessings.

This is, it seemed to me, especially true for Shankar, the daughter of a legend in the world but more so in her roots, the wife of a film director who has taken risky approaches to cherished classical material in his work, and the half sister of a singer whose broad popularity nevertheless has it own mysteries.

“Traces of You” is often talked about as a highly personal work, in the sense that many see it as a tribute and musical ode to her father, Ravi Shankar, the legendary sitar player who popularized classical Indian music to the world. He became a prominent figure in the annals of rock and roll after rock musicians, especially Beatle George Harrison, took up the music. Shankar died at the age of 92 in December 2012. “It was a time of tremendous change for me,” Shankar said. “My father died while we were in the midst of recording “Traces of You,” and, of course, it was a tremendous loss for me and, I think, for all the people who loved his music.”

Everything about the album seems on the surface, and in its descriptions and particular sound, a way of turning loss into watchful celebration and memory. Anoushka invited Norah Jones, her half sister and Ravi Shankar’s daughter by a different mother, with whom she had worked before, to sing several of the pieces on the album, including “Traces of You” and “The Sun Won’t Set” and “Unsaid.” “It turned out to be a good experience, having her there, working with her. Instinctively, Norah understood what we were doing together.” They had both lost their father, and that is always a loss freighted with meaning and memory for everyone.

For Anoushka, the music is very much about and full of her father, with whom she toured, the man who trained her and gave her first sitar, the towering influence in her life. It is very personal and connected to family. There is the presence of Jones, the music of her father, and there is the fact that Joe Wright, her husband with whom she has a two-year old son, Zubin, directed the video of “Traces of You.” Another song, “Monsoon,” had its roots in 2009, when, she said, “I was just in the process of falling in love with my husband-to-be.” Wright himself shares an affinity for making original creations out of classical sources in such films as “Pride and Prejudice” and his recent astonishing version of “Anna Karenina.”

She is noted for her mastery of the sitar, for her beauty and for her fight for causes—especially about sexual violence against women, an issue that has been in the news in India. She is also noted for expanding the reaches of Indian classical music into jazz, American classical music and tango, sending it out until it returns somewhat changed, not so much fused as slightly altered and richer for the flight. “I love expanding the music while being faithful to it,” she said. “It has always been universal at its heart, Indian, but more.”

That’s why the album seems in many ways very specific and personal, but also uncommonly generous and kind in many of its aspects, an acceptance of life in all of its forms. “The music is very specific, but it has been drawn in and accepted by the world,” she said. “I know what I’ve done with my music, who I am, but things always change. I can’t predict what I will be doing musically in the future.”

“Look what has happened, this has been an enormous time in my life in the sense that I have grown with the music, I met my husband and fell in love, I’ve become a wife and mother, I’ve lost my father, all in a relatively short time,” she said. “All of this affects the music, the composing. I am not who I was several years ago, or when I was a child or an adolescent in California.”

She is, in some ways, the embodiment of the idea of the personal and universal being played out in art and life all the time. Looking at her—and for that matter remembering her father and his pioneering influence—you often see this beautiful woman, deft, not dramatic but a presence, sitar and sari. The image and the accompanying music seem exotic, different from, say Iowa or California, where she was a prom queen. At the same time, it familiar, the atmosphere speaks musically to common experience. The instrument itself seems difficult and ungainly, but yet, she elicits and plays music as clear and complicated as a proverb, and as easy as rhythm from it.

Describing how the album for Deutsche Grammophone evolved, she said “A lot of it happened unconsciously. Life took a journey of its own, and the music followed that form. The sitar leads the listener through the album like a narrator.”

Anoushka Shankar is presented by the Washington Performing Arts Society at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium, 8 p.m., Nov. 15.

Gary Tischler •

These are heady days for the venerable
National Theater. The oldest theater in
town is looking better than it has in a long
time, and it’s full of energy. Sporting a physical
makeover done this summer, the National
is the site for something that hasn’t happened
there in years, a pre-Broadway tryout run of
a new musical, “If/Then,” a show with some
giants talents involved, on stage and off.
Not only that, but the National is having its
first season subscription series in many years, a
full slate of shows going well into next year. In
fact, a run (Dec. 25-29) of “Gershwin’s Porgy
and Bess” will follow “If/Then” during the
Christmas season.

All of this makes it an exciting time for
Steve Traxler, co-founder of Jam Theatricals,
based in Chicago, which, along with SMG of
Philadelphia is the National Theater Group’s
new programming team.

“We’re just glad have “If/Then” here. We’re
really excited about it, because there’s so many
really terrific, talented people involved in it,
it’s a brand new show, headed for Broadway,”
said Traxler, a veteran producer of Broadway
shows, both musicals and dramas.
“David Stone—he did such a great job with
guiding ‘Next to Normal’—is the producer and
he was looking to be in Washington, and so
we are honored and lucky to have the show.
Is there risk in doing something new? Sure,
there’s always risk when you get involved in
any show, on Broadway, in music, anything.
But you can’t do anything that’s really excellent
without taking a risk. That’s what I believe.”
In addition to producer David Stone, famous
for guiding the off-beat contemporary musical
“Next to Normal” (“If/Then” also has a contemporary
setting) through a process that led
through Arena Stage and eventual Broadway
success, was also one of the producers of
“Wicked,” a mega-hit which is still running on
Broadway and on the road. Not coincidentally,
there are a lot of people involved in “If/When”
that know each other, including composer
Tom Kitt and lyricist Brian Yorkey, as well as
director Michael Greif (Signature’s “Angels in
America”) who were the creative masters of
“Next To Normal”.

The star is Idina Menzel, the woman with
the incredible beautiful and rangy voice who
starred as Elphaba, the green witch of “Wicked,”
a role which got her a Tony. Menzel plays a
woman making choices in her life, looking for
a second chance. She’s reunited with Anthony
Rapp, with whom she appeared in “Rent.” “If/
Then” also features LaChanze, who won a Tony
Award for Celie in “The Color Purple.”

Pre-Broadway runs were once a staple
at the National Theatre. “The National just
has this amazing history, which is so appealing
to me, personally,” Traxler said. “It’s
Washington’s oldest theater, and, programming
wise, certainly, we aim to restore it to its old
standing as a place for new works, great shows
and plays and performances, as well as special
events.”

The first subscription season includes
Green Day’s “American Idiot” in February,
a return of “West Side Story”, as well as
“Stomp”, “Mamma Mia”, Hal Holbrook still
doing “Mark Twain Tonight”, and “Blue Man
Group.”

Talking with Traxler, you realize he loves
theater, shows, the stuff on stage, the people
that do it, write it, sing it, act it. He’s what
you might call a careful enthusiast, somewhat
like his mother, a movie buff. He and his Jam
Theatricals got into theater in the 1990s, and in
2002, he turned to producing.. Before that he
had worked with an aging Frank Sinatra to put
on his last performance in Chicago. “That was
an experience I’ll never forget,” he said. “The
man was a true professional.”

Jam Theatricals and its principals have won
six Tonys: for “Spamalot,” “Glengarry Glen
Ross,” “The History Boys,” “August: Osage
County,” “Hair” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia
Woolf.”

Traxler was also one of four producers
on “August: Osage County,” the harrowing,
hit family play. The film version—for which
he’s also listed as a producer with Harvey
Weinstein—opens this Christmas. “Weird, I
mean it’s not exactly holiday stuff, but it’s
Oscar time, you know,” he said. It just might
do pretty well, given a cast that includes Meryl
Streep and Julia Roberts.

And now: “I just got into town,” he said.
“We’re really excited about this being here at
the National.”

(“If/Then” will run at the Naitonal Theatre
through Dec. 8 and is scheduled to have its
Broadway opening at the Richard Rodgers
Theatre in the spring of 2014 on March 27.)

Gary Tischler • February 3, 2014

There was a time—during the 1970s,
the 1980s and a little beyond—when
Georgetown and its surrounding areas
vibrated with the sound of music coming
from all sorts of venues, up and down M
Street, on Wisconsin Avenue and on K
Street by the waterfront.

Almost all of that is gone, surviving only
as legend. Neil Young recently issued an album
based on his appearance at the Cellar Door, and
there was a movie documentary shown on PBS
about the golden age of the Bayou. Only Blues
Alley, still presenting top-tier jazz in a classy
(and one-of-a-kind setting) remains, just off
Wisconsin Avenue in Blues Alley, NW.

But wait. There’s a new kid on the block,
or rather there are new kids on the block.
That would be David and Karen Ensor, who
remember the Georgetown music scene well and
hope to begin to revive that scene with Gypsy
Sally’s, a new music club which opened last fall
under the Whitehurst Freeway at 3401 K Street,
also known as Water Street that far west in town.

The club—more of a total environment than
just a music venue—specializes in the elastic
genre of Americana music, which goes back
as far as folk legends Woody Guthrie and Pete
Seeger (who died yesterday) and runs through
Appalachian-rooted banjo music, the kings and
queens of singer-songwriters (Emmy Lou Harris
and Bob Dylan) come to mind. It’s got its own
Grammy category (Harris and Rodney Crowell
won the best album honors). It’s roots music
steeped in tradition, but it is also as new as
tomorrow, when the next legend, packing a
guitar on his or her back, comes in and sets up
on the main stage at Gypsy Sally’s.
We stopped by Gypsy Sally’s on a quiet,
icicle-cold mid-week afternoon to talk with
Karen and Dave Ensor, the couple who are
fulfilling a long-held dream and hope to jump
start a Georgetown music renaissance.

“We remember that time when if you were
talking about D.C. music, you were talking pretty
much about what was going on in Georgetown,”
Karen said. “But right now, as far as Georgetown
is concerned, what was left was Blues Alley and
that was pretty much it. I think we complement
Blues Alley, right down the street from us, and
maybe we can start something going again.”

“We love Georgetown, we live here, we’re
raising my two teenaged daughters here,” she
said. “Almost ever since we knew each other, we
wanted to open a club. That was what we wanted
to do. We looked all over the city at first, but
then a friend of ours told us about the space here.
He said, ‘You’ve got to check this out,’ and we
did. We thought the space was perfect for what
we had in mind.”

“It’s more than just a rock club or something
like that,” said Dave Ensor, who knows a thing
or two about rock clubs. “We’re trying to give
folks an experience, so that they have options
about how they want to experience things here,
or what they want to experience.”

David, a local from Northern Virginia, spent
some time in Los Angeles, wanting to be an actor
at first, then working with bands, including his
own. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think you really
have to want to be an actor. It’s really hard. I
think music suited me better. I did everything—
singing, playing, the roadie thing, the process,
you know. But I got to know a lot about how the
business operated, what it took, touring, getting
gigs, booking, the mechanics of setting up bands
in venues.” He calls himself a big fan of Bob
Dylan and Cat Stevens.

The Ensors make a circular kind of couple in
the sense that they round each other out, opposite
on the surface with a passionately held dream
that they’re working on together.

She was raised in the South, went to
Vanderbilt, has a law degree from the University
of Maryland, is a registered nurse and
businesswoman. She’s an admitted Dead Head,
i.e., super-fan of the Grateful Dead, but also
of the kind of rock-and-roll—a rite of passage
in the South—personified by the sound of the
Allman Brothers. She’s high-energy. He’s more
reserved and cautious, except when he’s talking
about music. He still has the kind of quiet
charisma of a guy who would be comfortable in
front of a camera or raising the roof on a rockand-
roll stage. He came back from L.A. in
1990 and had an album in 2009, called “Building
a Life,” and he still teaches guitar. He acquired a
nickname—“Silky Dave”—which seems exactly
right in a good way.

Gypsy Sally’s—the name apparently comes
from an old Townes Van Zandt song called
“Tecumseh Valley”—displays an eclectic
personality.

When you get the tour—minus the music,
but with lots of atmospherics—you get the
seating arrangement, a tiered experience for a
capacity of 300 with both seating and standing
(and if you’re inclined) dancing room.

“We love it that you can do that if you
want,” Karen said. You also have a dining
option, with a menu that’s ripped from the
pages of some of today’s healthier and funkier
cookbooks: hello hempseed fudge brownies, as
well as hempseed hummus, Lake Caesar Salad
and voodoo potato chips. “We wanted above all
for people who come here to find their comfort
zone, to be comfortable,” she said. “We know
we have great venues in the area—the Birchmere
or the 9:30 Club. But in one place you can’t
stand, in the other you can’t sit. Here, you can
do both. That’s for starters.”

“This isn’t just about nostalgia,” Karen
continued. “It’s about contemporary music, a
particular kind of music. It’s the Americana
genre, roots music, singer-songwriters, with
bands and groups that tour and record nationally,
but also new musicians, local musicians, we
hope it will be a place for that kind of thing, too.
We’re not hip hop or Euro-pop or anything like
that, there’s plenty of other places in town that
do that.”

You can get a sense of the music just
by the sound of the band names who are
either coming there soon or have already played
there—the incomparable Kelly Willis, for
instance, or “Covered With Jam” with Ron
Holloway, Lindsay Lou and the Flatbellys, the
Walkaways, Yarn, Steel Wheels, the Railers,
Rico America and the Midnight Train. It’s a
flavor, tinged with banjo and guitars, railroad
cars and diners and songs written by young men
and women waking up feverish with a line that
sticks in their minds, a beat and a rhythm you just
have to fashion a song out of. Upcomers include
a Johnny birthday celebration on Feb. 26, John
Hammond on Feb. 19 and the Flashband Project.

Physically, Gypsy Sally’s comes at you
in sections. It’s on the second floor of a
building that fronts K Street with the restaurant
Malmaison.

When you walk in you’re in the Microbus
Gallery, which features an old “hippie bus,”
designed to give you a feeling for the rustic days
of touring cross-country or hanging out with Ken
Kesey and his merry pranksters.

Exhibitions are a regular thing here, too.
The William Adair construction, “The Golden
Doors to Infinity,” which honors the late and
legendary musician Gram Parsons, and “Martyrs
of Rock,” portraits of lost rock musicians—Jerry
Garcia, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Sid Vicious
and others—by Walter Egan will be seen here,
beginning Feb. 4.

There’s also the Vinyl Lounge, with its own
entrance, a shiny bar, and a small stage—for
open-mike nights—and a collection of vinyl
records, singles and albums, which are making
something of a comeback these days. On the
stand, you can see a collection of old albums,
including the blue hues of a Dylan greatest hits
album. You can bring your own—records, that
is—and play them.

“We care about each and every artist—
roadie or lead singer, or drummer or bass man
who comes in here,” Karen said. “That’s what
we’re about on the whole. It’s the music and
musicians and the audience.”

To meet that goal, Karen and Dave split the
stuff that keeps Gypsy Sally’s going.

“Dave knows everything about the music
business and being a musician—the setting up,
the mechanics, the burnt out fuse, the decibel
level, all the music and creative stuff,” she
said. “Everything on paper, that’s me—the
books, the money, the dates, the business end.”

Together, they’ve got Gypsy Sally’s
humming to a point where people might hear an
echo all over the city up on Wisconsin Avenue
and M Street, the way it used to be. [gallery ids="118495,118491,118486" nav="thumbs"]