Performance

Gary Tischler • December 6, 2013

Pseudolus is back in town at long last, and so is Bruce Dow.

Pseudolus can trace his lineage back to the old Roman farces written by Plautus, and to “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” the 1962 musical with a score by Stephen Sondheim.

The musical had an out-of-town tryout right here in Washington at the National Theatre, and Jerome Robbins lent a hand with the book before the show made it to Broadway and became a memorable musical, Sondheim’s first major effort, although a long
way from the types of musicals that he would become famous for.

Dow is returning to Washington in the sense that he was here playing Bottoms in the Ethan McSweeney-directed version of the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and what a memorable Bottom he was at that, playing the stage-struck leader of the so-called mechanicals who had quite a midsummer night himself, ending up wearing the head of a donkey with Titania, the queen of the fairies.

“That was a wonderful experience, the whole production was just a delight to do here,” said Dow, who calls himself mostly a North American, being born in Seattle and raised in in Vancouver, Canada, living a goodly time in Seattle and now being somewhat between residences. He plays Pseudolus, a part he’s played before, including a memorable production at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, Canada. “So, I’m glad to be doing this here.”

Pseudolus, the slave who schemes mightily and cannily to gain his freedom during the course of “Forum,” cast a long shadow, as does “Forum” itself, especially in its Richard Lester-directed film version, which starred Zero Mostel as Pseudolus, and featured such legendary clowns as Phil Silvers, who turned down the role on Broadway, and even Buster Keaton. Silver would return to head a Broadway revival, while Nathan Lane starred in still another version.

“You don’t ever try to compare yourself to Zero, or to the film,” Dow said. “It’s just not smart. The movie was a movie, it was very strange, zany, and so forth, but it’s not the show, the play, it’s not theater.”

“It has tremendous music in it, this was Sondheim’s first really big show, so to speak,” Dow said. “It’s more than ‘Comedy Tonight.’ It has wonderful ballads, and it has a lot of resonance. This was a show in which many of the main characters are slaves, who want more than anything to be free. You can feel that if you really listen to the song ‘Free.’ ”

“The roots are of course vaudeville, everybody in it originally came from that milieu, with its time-honored farce and physical humor and vulgarity,” Dow said.

“I knew when I was a child that this was what I wanted to do and my parents encouraged me,” Dow said. “I got superb and broad training at the University of British Columbia. I wanted to be an actor, but I had such good professors, and learned about so
many things that I joined their MFA in directing program.”

Luckily, Dow returned to acting and did a lot of it and all kinds of it at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, including two stints in “Forum,” playing the host in “Cabaret,” various clowns and character parts in Shakespeare plays, including a stint as Trimulco in a production of “The Tempest,” which starred Christopher Plummer.

He also went to Broadway in roles in productions of “Jane Eyre,” “The Music Man” and most recently “Jesus Christ, Superstar” in which he played Herod, singing nifty lines like “You’re the Great Jesus Christ, the Great Jesus Christ, walk across my swimming pool.”

Herod was a revelation to many people—this was a full blown, full-bodied, avid character—you can catch Dow singing to Jesus on YouTube, dancing, hoofing, eyebrowed and gowned, draped around a piano.

His training and his track record and that American-Canadian thing, his versatility seems not just something he learned but a quality he has. He can do Japanese-style theater, he can sing (two CDs, cabaret and pop music), he can hoof a little, he’s a clown of the highest and lowest order (there was no end to his Bottom, a truly original personification), he has written two shows. On the phone, you hear the eager clown, but also the guy on a quest.

“I think that line between comedy and tragedy, serious straight plays and musicals and musical comedies is very thin,” he said. “I’d like to do some things, ‘Timons of Athens,’which is rarely done, it’s a great challenge I think. Beckett’s tramps, they’re desperate, but they’re funny too, they’re clowns, after all.

It would not pay to tag Dow as a clown, or any other specific tag. He’s more like Bottom, a mechanical born to be a theatrical, a man of the imagined worlds and people of the theater.

“A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” runs through Jan. 5 at the Harman Center for the Arts; www.ShakespeareTheatre.org.
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Gary Tischler • November 26, 2013

There is perhaps nothing so mysterious in show biz as the sound of tapping feet, or, in one of its many disguises, the (“gimme that”) old soft shoe, or the slide, it makes hardly any sound. What all forms of tap dancing do is to make the audience happy, for reasons that are not that easy to figure out. In performance terms, it is a holy mystery.

The other mystery besides its giddy, happiness-inducing quality—who knows, if Napoleon had seen a tap dance before making up his mind to go to Moscow, he might never have went—is that to the eye of the beholder, the whole thing looks as easy as selling chocolate.

Except that it isn’t.

“Nothing about it is easy,” said Maurice Hines, the celebrated Broadway performer, dancer, singer and legend of tap, in a recent interview. “It’s supposed to look easy. That’s part of the trick, but it sure isn’t easy, I can tell you that. It’s not work, in the sense that you gotta love tapping if you’re going to be a tap dancer, but it’s hard work in the practice, the doing it right, and just about everything it can do to body, muscle and bones, when those taps hit the floor, you feel it practically all the way to your teeth.”
If anybody ought to know about tap, it’s Hines who’s spent his life in show biz and tap. So, now he’s at Arena Stage, back in Washington, a town he loves, doing “Maurice Hines is Tappin Thru Life,” now through Dec. 29 at the Kreeger Theater.

Here’s a tip about tap: be prepared to warm up with warm feelings, maybe an itch to want do a little tapping underneath your chair yourself. Guaranteed is that for a while you will absolutely not think about Obamacare or the Redskins.

“Yeah, I think for a while there, it was something of a lost art, in terms of people studying how to do it, people teaching it, or tap numbers not being part of big Broadway musicals so much,” Hines said. But Hines, who has taught master classes in tap to folks and is always on the look out for the next generation of tap dancers doesn’t just dance—he teaches. In his case, those that teach, teach because they do it and have done for all of their lives.

The show, directed by Jeff Calhoun, is also a tribute to his kid brother Gregory, his charismatic partner in dance, star singer and actor who died of cancer ten years ago. “My little brother,” he said. “When we were little kids in growing up in Harlem, there was a story about us already, and we didn’t even know how to dance. Mom would take us out, and people would stare at us. And somebody would ask, what are they doing. And somebody else would say, “Look at them walk.”

“It’s about my life in tap, about Gregory, about our musical influences, the people whose music I listened to all my life, like Ella—Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Lena Horne, Nat ‘King’ Cole and Judy Garland. These are the folks who were an inspiration to me. Watching them on stage, in a theater, in a club, you got the sense of how great it is to be a performer. They did everything with class.

That’s a sense you get about Hines, too, if you saw him in the Arena Stage as Nathan Detroit a number of years ago (Sinatra did the movie version), if you saw his work in “Sophisticated Ladies,” the Duke Ellington show which was an Arena production at the Lincoln Theater a few years back, you get a good sense of him. You notice not only how light he is on his feet, you notice how he gets from here to there, still and all, just like a kid, although with style and elegance and something unforgettable, like a millionaire’s after shave lingering in the room. And if you saw him with his brother in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Cotton Club”—they played tap dancing brothers—you got a sense of them together.

“Tap’s been not just a part of my life, it’s a part of the country’s life,” he said. “You go back to Mister Bojangles, to the Nicholas Brothers, that’s a part of our history.”

Hines is joined by the Manzari brothers, John and Leo, a pair of gifted dancers he discovered while casting “Sophisticated Ladies,” along with the Heimowitz Brothers, Sam and Max, students at Knock on Wood Tap Studio, who started dancing about the time that Gregory and Maurice did.

“Like everything else, tap changes, life changes,” Hines said. “Savion Glover just got people all excited all over again with his form of more contemporary tap dancing.” Other things have kept the mystery real—the young people’s film “Happy Feet,” and 1989’s “Tap,” which starred Gregory Hines.

“Tap” is a tapestry, whose ingredients are words and moves, song and dance, the kind that re-arranged our dreams and parts of the American lexicon, the naming of the moves is like a long poem’s roster of moves and ways of moving around a stage or a living room, down the street, in a tux, or jeans, on a street corner. Listen to the music, watch the move: the pullback, flap heel, running flap, wings, the shim sham shimmy, the paddle roll, the paradiddle, stomp, brushes, scuffs, spanks, riffs, the single and double toe punch, hell click, hot steps, over-the-tops, New Yorkers, Shiggy Bops, chugs, and cramp roll turns. The hard tappers see themselves as musicians, making music.

“As far as I’m concerned, my brother was the greatest tap dancer that ever lived,” Maurice Hines said.
“I miss him, and I think of him every day,” Hines said. “I used to call him up wherever we might happen to be. I still find myself starting to do it at times. So, this is my tribute to him. To all the tap dancers, but to my kid brother, especially.”
At the Kreeger, there will be songs and rhythm, the sound of feet hitting the floor, the almost-sound of a slide and glide, the old soft shoe, maybe a shaggy bop, a paradiddle.

Guaranteed to make you happy.

Gary Tischler • November 25, 2013

Singing in America is once again a really big deal. From voice competitions on network television ranging across vocal genres, to the critical importance of singers in opera, to “Glee” on television and Broadway musicals where big, rangy voices, which are the hallmarks of shows like “Wicked,” are in demand.

It’s entirely fitting then that the Kennedy Center is presenting an unprecedented three-day (Friday, Saturday and Sunday) festival of voices and singing, called “American Voices.” It’s equally appropriate that soprano Renee Fleming, one of the premiere American and world-class singers will be moderating, curating and leading the festival.

“Everywhere in our country’s popular culture—from ‘Glee’ and ‘106 &Park’ to ‘American Idol,’ ‘The Voice’ and ‘Nashville,’ at sporting events and national ceremonies—the art of singing is suddenly center stage. This festival will explore, across a range of genres, the artistry, business, technology, pedagogy and community of American singing,” Fleming said.

The festival will also feature some of the top vocalists and singers in the country, holding master sessions and performing in the centerpiece “American Voices” concert, 8 p.m., Saturday, Nov. 23, at the Kennedy Center. In addition, there will be several symposiums on a variety of subjects, concerning music and singing in America today.

Fleming will also be a part of the “American Voices” concert, featuring Sara Bareilles, Kim Burrell, Kurt Elling, Ben Folds, Sutton Foster, Josh Groban, Alison Krauss, Norm Lewis, Eric Owens and Dianne Reeves with the National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Steven Reineke.

Heading master sessions will be Eric Owens on classical music at 2 p.m., Friday, Nov. 22; Dianne Reeves on jazz at 8 p.m., Friday, Nov. 22; Alison Krauss on country music at 10 a.m., Saturday, Nov. 23; Ben Folds on pop music at 3:30 p.m., Saturday, Nov. 23; Sutton Foster on musical theater at 11 a.m., Sunday, Nov. 24; Kim Burrell on Gospel at 3 p.m., Sunday, Nov. 24. Fleming will head a Sunday wrap-up session. All master sessions will be held in the Terrace Theater and will be moderated by Fleming.

There will also be symposiums in the Atrium: “Vocal Health and Illness: Insights into the Past, Present and Future,” 4:30 p.m, Friday, Nov. 22; “The Business of Technology of Popular Singing Today”, 1:30 p.m., Saturday, Nov. 23; “Voice Training Today” 1:30 p.m., Sunday, Nov. 24.

There will also be free performances at the center’s Millennium Stage by the jazz vocal group Afro Blue and Washington National Opera’s Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist’s Program Friday, 6 p.m., Friday, Nov. 22; Gospel singer Vanessa WIlliams and the country band Mama Tried, 6 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 23, and musical theater performer Erin Driscoll and multi-instrumentalist Jon Carroll, 6 p.m., Saturday, Nov. 24.

Gary Tischler • November 18, 2013

With “Love in Afghanistan,” playwright Charles Randolph Wright has written a play that covers a lot of bases and touchstone. It’s contemporary, while dealing with centuries-old customs. It’s got the familiar “Romeo and Juliet” and “Madame Butterfly” elements in it. It’s a play about the differences between men and women, Americans and Afghans, love and commitment or love versus commitment.

On the surface or at first glance, “Love in Afghanistan”—at the Cradle at Arena Stage—also appears to have powerful, original characters: Roya, a young Afghan woman, committed to working for her countrywomen, and Sayeed, her sophisticated, urbane and cosmopolitan father, both of them living among the Americans, working as interpreters. Then, there’s Duke, a swaggering, super-charming pop, rap and hip-hop star, here to entertain the troops, and his mother Desiree, a high-power business woman, living in Dubai.

At first, it’s a tale of boy-meets-girl, boy-wants-girl, girl is charmed but resists the American pop star with a keen sense of entitlement. He pushes, she yields, a little, until she finally agrees, pretending to lead him to a man that would act as his guide in a trip to Kabul, which is out of bounds for the visiting super star. The guide is actually Roya, resorting to her habit as a child of dressing up as a boy to get work and help her family, a centuries-old practice called bacha posh.

Stopping for coffee, they almost become the victims of a terrorist bombing, which, since it involved Duke, makes unwanted headlines.

The halting, push-and-pull courtship of Roya, who is dedicated to the cause of Afghan women’s rights has its charms, as does Duke. However, Duke is more about what he wants, than who he wants, going to great lengths to help Roya and her father, including a trip to Dubai where some things that you might expect to happen don’t, and some that you don’t expect do.

In a play that features a pop star and a cultured father in the leads, it’s ironic that the women are the most memorable, appealing characters. They understand each other and protect each other. The men, when push comes to shove, revert to being men. The results of the play’s dramatics tend to diminish the male characters, and there’s a failure to communicate here that doesn’t quite seem believable.

Khris Davis as Duke is all way cool swagger, high energy, a kind of irresistible force that is very resistible when it comes to Roya. She’s obviously a little smitten, and she, in a nod to the irresistible force that is American hip hop and video, is familiar with the young man’s work. Duke, having been raised in the Gold Coast neighborhood of Washington, D.C., is having a hard time with his second album generating street cred. He sees Roya as a kind of object of his determined affection—at best, someone in need of his generosity and help. Oddly, the father concurs in the end.

Old prejudices and habits die hard here and makes the play a kind of halting affair. But not altogether—and that’s thanks to the remarkable actress Melis Aker, who makes Roya an unforgettable character, a strong young woman, aware of the risks, even fearful of them, busy committed to who she is. That kind of commitment may not be apparent to Duke, but Aker makes it real for the audience.

Robert Devaney •

It isn’t easy being Ta’Rea Campbell these days, but it sure sounds like a lot of fun.

Campbell—who has had so far an impressive career in Broadway-style musical theater that might take some folks the better part of a lifetime to achieve—is starring in the national tour of “Sister Act,” the hit Broadway musical take on the popular 1992 Whoopi Goldberg comedy. Campbell plays, and Whoopi played a diva on the lam from the mob who enters a San Francisco convent and makes it a hideout. Laughter then—and laughter and music now—ensued.

The show is now at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House through Nov. 10 as part of an extended tour that’s a hectic pace for Campbell, who’s starred in “The Lion King,” “The Book of Mormon” and “Aida” among other hit shows.

“I have to admit this so far in my career has been the most challenging thing I’ve ever done,” the Philadelphia native said. “It’s hard work, but it’s fun because the role is so much fun. And when we were doing rehearsals, I met Whoopi who was looking in. She was the most fun, the nicest, most helpful person, just couldn’t be better. I admire her a whole lot, but you can’t just imitate her. You have to find your own way in it, how it relates to you. Seeing her in ‘The Color Purple’ and the movie itself inspired me to want to become an actress.”

“You know what it is,” she said. “This is it. This is me. There’s a lot of responsibility there, you expend a lot of energy. In “The Lion King,” I was only on stage for less than an hour. Here, I’m on stage pretty much all of the time. That’s work.”

But Campbell sounds like the optimist, glass-half-full or probably mostly full type, and she’s been wowing them all across the country. The biggest wow probably occurred in April in Philadelphia, where the show played there for a short run. “That’s my hometown,” Campbell said. “That’s where I grew up. Everybody I knew came, my family, everybody. Here’s the thing: because the show’s setting has been changed from Las Vegas to Philadelphia, the first line of the show is naturally ‘Hello, Philadelphia.’ That was kind of a big line for me.”

Campbell started out wanting to be a dramatic actress. “I still want to do that, but you know, in this business, things happen,” she said. “You can’t envision the future. Everybody’s got dreams. Mine were a little different. I studied acting, but ended up in musical theater, which has been an amazing experience.”

“What’s great about this show for me is that I can do everything in it—sing (disco, gospel). I can clown it. I can act. So, it’s kind of perfect.”

“I’ve been blessed,” Campbell said. “My boyfriend, who’s a musician, he’s a violinist, and I got engaged. He’s working in New York where I live. I get to take Stevie, my beautiful Chihuahua-Beagle mix with me. Stevie is great company.”

“Sister Act” features a score by Alan Menke and is directed by Broadway veteran Jerry Zaks.

Gary Tischler • November 11, 2013

Everyone knows about three of the most famous ballets in the world—“The Nutcracker,” “Swan Lake” and “Sleeping Beauty,” all of which are set to the gorgeous, astonishing music of Pyotr Tchaikovsky and are 19th-century dance and music creations of surpassing magic.

Now, “Sleeping Beauty” is at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House Nov. 12 through 17, but it is not just Tchaikovsky’s “Sleeping Beauty.”

It is now squarely “Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty,” which is to say that it is the work of the renowned, very cool and very different British choreographer and his New Adventures company, which returns with memories of his 2007 visit with his dance version of “Edward Scissorhands” still fresh in the minds and imaginations of those who saw it.

Bourne, a former dancer, set out on his own to create and re-create different, stranger and all the while more accessible versions of classics—his “Swan Lake” featured all-male swans and his “Nutcracker!” with the exclamation point promised renewed energy. Bourne’s “Sleeping Beauty” is right on time in the age where our interest in all matters romantic and gothic, including the undead and vampires, seems never quite to peak, what with a new “Dracula” a hit on network television.

“Sleeping Beauty”, with its fairy tale of the princess who, along with her kingdom, is put under a spell that puts everything to sleep for years and years, only to be awakened by the kiss of a prince, seems in the telling, an old children’s tale, romantic but also, well, a little sleepy. But Bourne, never shy about changing things, has set his version—still with the great music—in the fin-de-siecle turn of the 19th into the 20th century, when interests in fairies and vampires, and gothic horror tales were the passion of high-style Europeans, to begin with. Bourne’s version moves through time, from fin-de-siecle, through the Edwardian age until Princess Aurora wakes up more or less in our present day.

Gary Tischler • November 7, 2013

Lou Reed—who, it was said in an American Masters PBS special, brought rock and roll to the avant garde or is it the other way around—died just a few days before Halloween. Means nothing, but I hope somebody at some party puts on his lean, gaunt, hollow-eyed mask of a face, grabs a guitar and plays more than a few riffs of “Baby Jane,” or like a pied piper heads out into the night and the wild side, doo do doo, doo do doo, doo do doo.”

Reed, the Brooklyn native and world citizen of the wild side—as in “Take a Walk on the Wild Side”—and the Velvet Underground are in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. There are a thousand reasons, because his name and music bounces around like a pinball wizard in all the tell-tale hearts of rockers and rockers as somewhat mad poets and rockers as intellectuals. He’s a legend in his own time, mind and New York, if not Graceland. He—and the Velvet Underground, the strange rock-out but dark, and darker group he led with violinist John Cale—wasn’t your typical rock and roll god, he was more like Loki than Thor.

According to the Rolling Stone obituary, Reed once said that his entire career, taken together amounts to a kind great American novel. Don’t know about that—”Moby Dick” is the big fish for me—but maybe it’s the Reed life and work that should be the subject of a great American novel, or e-book at least. So, get to it, somebody, before things get waylaid, misquoted and forgotten.

The Washington Post obit dubbed him “The Velvet Underground Visionary.” While that is true, I think he was more than that. Everywhere you look in the nooks and crannies of rock and roll, the New York art scene, in the generals of the defiant punkers, the glams (hello, David Bowie), you find a piece of Reed, and another stroll on the wild side. But it’s true—the Velvet Underground, discordant and full of not just musical discord, was rich in talent, vision, rock lyrics that went where no one had dared to go, but could also scare the beejesus out of you while breaking your heart, or in “Baby Jane’s” case, make you dance until you died.

Everybody—outside of Dylan—owed something to Reed: David Byrne, David Bowie, the alt rockers, garage rockers, the big boys in the arena, the little ones in every aspiring 9:30 club joint, the New York too cool kids out all night, and not a few real poets.

What Reed was was a writer of songs, and singing them, he seemed to be a sleep walker, creating in a dream. Go online now and roll through his fugues and songs, and his “Perfect Day” and “Heroin,” the latter approached with caution. Small wonder, his college English professor at Syracuse University was Delmore Schwartz, who was neither easy nor happy-go-lucky, but lyrical as an unpredictable cloud, and in the end, died too young.

He met if not his equal certainly somebody simpatico in Andy Warhol, the two of them could pass for brothers, a different shade of pale. Velvet Underground, which was preceded by pitch-black groups called the Warlocks and the Primitives, rehearsed rehearsed at Warhold’s factory and recorded sometimes with Warholish singer Nico, all strange and blank.

“Baby Jane” and “Rock and Roll” marked a turn: these songs, if you listen to them, reveal rock-and-roll.

Reed’s second wife was Laurie Anderson, herself a sharp rebel and pioneer of new music. Not surprisingly, perhaps, in 2002, he recorded an album centered around the works of Edgar Allan Poe. He also collaborated with Metallica.

Reed had a self-admitted major problem with alcohol, which may or may not have been punctuated by waltzes with heroin. He had had a liver transplant. He was 71 when he died Oct. 27.

In “Sweet Jane,” he sings, “Standing on the corner,/suitcase in my hand/Jack is in his corset, and Jane is hervets/and me/I’m in a rock’n’roll band/Hah!”

“Hah!” Indeed, Mr. Reed.

Gary Tischler •

R&J are here to stay—for a while—“Romeo
and Juliet,” under the inventive direction of
Aaron Posner with his spouse Erin Weaver as
Juliet and Michael Goldsmith as Romoe remain
at the Folger Shakespeare Theatre through
Dec. 1.

Two to catch at Signature—Christine Lahti,
who first gained attention by stealing the movie
“Swing Shift” right out from under star Goldie
Hawn back in the day, is starring in the world
premiere production of “Pride in the Falls of
Autrey Mill”, a drama about suburban secrets
by hot new playwright Paul Downs Colaizzo
of “Really, Really” fame at Signature Theater
through December. Just to know you’re in
good hands, Michael Kahn, the Shakespere
Theatre Company Artistic Director, is directing.
Also at Signature through November 24 is
the first of three world premiere musicals. In
“Crossings”, a train station platform becomes
a meeting place across time and space. Music
and lyrics by Matt Conner and book by Grace
Barnes, directed by Signature artistic director
Eric Schaeffer.

It’s “Appropriate” at Woolly Mammoth
Theatre —Woolly Mammoth Theatre , the
city’s always cool, never-too-old cutting edge
theatre is presenting the East DCoast premiere
of “Appropriate”, a comic drama by
Washingtonian Branden Jacobs-Jekiins, directed
by Liesl Tommy. It’s a sharp-eyed, sharptongued
look at what lies beneath a Souther
families’ secrets. Through Dec. 1.

Star-Crossed Lovers—“Love in Afghanistan”,
playwright Charles Randolph Wright’s new
play about what happens when a hip hop star
entertaining troops in Afghanistan, meets a
young AFghanistani enterpreter committed to
the fraught-with-danger cause of helping her
country’s women. Through Nov. 17.

An Argument—“The Argument”, a newly commissioned
2013 edition of Alexandra Gersten Vassilaro’s relationship drama is now at [Theater
J]9http://washingtondcjcc.org/center-for-arts/theater-j/) through Nov. 24. [gallery ids="118705,118699,118694,118679,118687" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler • October 31, 2013

Donovan Leitch was in the wind, halted for a day and night in Georgetown.

Like all poets, minstrels, the self-professed Hurdy Gurdy Man was on the move, like a stitch of moon on the rise.

He had done a concert at the Robert E. Parilla Performing Arts Center in Rockville, Md., the night before, appearing surely a little like an unexpected apparition and legend there. Next day, he was on his way for a visit to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, the scene of a signal triumph only the year before. That’s when he was inducted into the R&R Hall of Fame, an event many of his admirers, of the torch holders with giddy lyrics of 1960s hits like “Sunshine Superman,” “Mellow Yellow,” “Wear Your Love Like Heaven” running through their heads was way overdue.

And he was singing and talking about “Shadows of Blue,” a resurrection album of sorts, perhaps also long overdue, which he recorded in Nashville this year, the place where much of the music began for him. It was full of songs he’d put aside, like notes for a novel or a poem, and they sat in his life waiting patiently along with some new works.

We caught up with him then in the lobby of the Georgetown Inn. He wasn’t difficult to spot: in the flesh, as in the music, there is no one that looks or sounds like Donovan Leitch. We’d run into him before, at the Govinda Gallery, where some years ago he had an exhibition of his “Sapphographs,” at the Kennedy Center with movie director David Lynch of “Blue Velvet” fame where on a Transcendental Meditation event, and most recently and again at the Kennedy Center where he was a part of a star-studded tribute to Woody Guthrie, a man whose life and music haunts him and inspired him.

There’s a singular look to him, and now that look, which had the air of a Celtic Rimbaud, an affable, seductive boy-poet about it, is still there, weathered a bit, deepened, but still, in his sixties, having already lived a few lives, youthfully buoyant and full of eager curiosity. He is one of those singers whose singing voice sounds like his speaking voice. It’s not exactly musical, but it has the singer’s loop of valleys and ridges and side roads.

“By God, it’s good to be here,” he said. “I love Georgetown. So many good memories and good friends and people.”

In his hotel room, a weathered guitar lies on the bed, a green and color-hued guitar, it looks well-used, no spit and polish there. “It’s seen some days,” he said. “But I like it that way.” Whereupon, he launched into a story about Jimmy Paige of Led Zeppelin and his cache of electric guitars, their own, shiny, cleaned and tuned every day, and never played. “He showed them to me once,” he said. “Can you imagine, all of that, finely tuned, no sound?”

“These songs in this album, they were waiting, for a long time,” he said. “It’s like poetry, the time has to be ripe and right. It was right now.”

We can and do, of course, wander over the course of his life, in which an idea or two figure so strongly, come together. If you remember the 1960s at all, smoked some stuff, danced with hippie girls, you were seduced and driven by the music. The music started out in protest and folk music and moved into a rich and deep musical labyrinth which was full of colorful and amazing wizardly characters. In that time, what you did more than anything was move to the music that had lyrics you never forgot. It’s easy to lose track of Donovan in all those names—the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Stones, the Animals, Zeppelin, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Santana, Joplin and Slick, not to mention Otis and Hendrix, and Motown in the background.

But there was also only one Donovan Leitch, a Scottish lad who had his days of street singing sticking his hat out with his pal Gypsy Dave vagabonding and busking but who would become a singer-songwriter and star in that cauldron of folk and funk and rock and roll, with his first hit “Catch the Wind.” “That’s when things went into the stratosphere,” he said. In the collection album, “The Essential Donovan,” you can catch that rising wind. He was a part of it all, with a singular do, and a singular voice, and the do is still there, a little wilder, gray streaked, and the pure eyes and just that voice, with etchings of rock and roll and balladry in it.

No question that he was a star. He has an id and an ego, and lots of his sentences begin with the letter I, but then he has a lot to say and talk about, and when he says “I think”, you tend to listen. But in a conversation like this, a lot of that doesn’t matter—you begin to realize after all these years, how much of an original he is, and how original all of them were. In that hall of fame and the roster of rockers and singers and balladeers and players, there is no other “Donovan,” not even a sixth cousin, although many have said that he was a lot like Dylan. “You can say it if you want,” he said. “I learned a lot and sure there is influence from everybody. Mine included me dad, and Dylan, sure, and Rambling Jack Elliott, who was a friend.”

There is, once you think about it, a touch of the ancient about him—ancient Greece, medieval rover-abouting, the spoken word becoming the sung truth. He was born in Maryhill, Glasgow, and he talks about his dad a lot—one Donald Leitch, a Rolls Royce factory employee, but a man whom Donovan sees as having the touch of the poet.

And that’s it too—that lyric, minstrel thing—his autobiography is “Donovan, the Hurdy Gurdy Man,” which in America is a step removed from Mr. Bo Jangles and the like. The whole book is full of poetics, and lyrics and lines both straight, and crooked. Look at the chapter headings and you can sum him up pretty well: “Rebel,” “Vagabond,” “Windcatcher” and “Folksinger” early on, “Fairytale,” “The World Is Beautiful,” “Sunshine Supergirl,” “Magician” and so on.

You end up talking snatches of memory, lines from poem, and you end up in the end really appreciating his gifts. You look him up, hear the poem he said for acceptance, listen to him sing “Season of the Witch” with John Cougar Mellencamp, how he presents himself as a gift of the muse that is music.

I sat down and wrote this article, while listening to his music. You realize, though the two albums are years apart—that it’s a long time from “Electric Banana” to “Blue Jean Angel”– the early work still seems brand new, while the later songs and music feel sometimes like an echo finally freed as well as finely ground. Those bookends make the old music new, the new music old. They come together in a kind of dance.

Donovan’s been nominated for the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame. Rolling Stone raved about “Shadows of Blue.” He’ll be in Ireland singing. It’s like, just like the song, he’s still “Catching the Wind,” not a second wind, but something as fresh as the first wind.

Gary Tischler • October 21, 2013

People who know about Sutton Foster talk about Broadway, the whole story line around her career and that’s as it should be. Broadway is where Foster made her mark, an indelible mark rewarded with two Tony awards, Drama Desk Awards and Outer Circle Awards, especially for her landmark starring roles in “Thoroughly Modern Millie” and “Anything Goes.”

But the Sutton Foster that will be in concert at the Music Center at Strathmore, 8 p.m., Saturday, Oct. 12, will not just be the Broadway star, she’ll be a star in the firmament of cabaret signers, which, as a tribe, are hallmarked for their originality. She’ll be singing Broadway songs, unexpected pop classics, songs from her album “Wish” and, oh, just wait and see . . .

“It will be a lot more intimate, a lot more of who I am, and I hope eclectic and different,” Sutton said in a phone interview. “It’s a challenge, but I’ve been doing it now for a while—all over the country, as well as at the Café Carlyle, which is really a wonderful, small place for singers.”

Sutton is one of those performers who isn’t everything she’s capable of at first glance. She’s one of those people who can do it all—a quickly disappearing type on the stage and in film and television. She can act—see her work on the much acclaimed but sadly cancelled “Bunhead”, and on Off-Broadway in “Trust”. She can sing, she can play the ingénue, the sexy, brassy powerhouse, she can be both winsome and Ethel Mermanish, she can, for sure, dance and strike a pose, and she can tap. She’s funny, physically and otherwise, the humor and optimism shine through.

“There’s a body of work, and I’m proud of all of that,” she said. “This is new, it’s a little like showing some parts of yourself, you’re not playing a part. It’s very liberating, after the Broadway work. And of course, I’m working with Michael Rafter, my arranger and pianist, who is just amazing. When we did the Carlyle, it was the most intimate place, and I think at first it was scary. It’s like a living room with 90 people in it and yet, as setting like that, it let’s you be vulnerable and I like that.” You can find one part of it on You Tube, Foster, goofy, bold, making faces, singing in high dudgeon on “I Don’t Wanna Show Off” from “The Drowsy Chaperone,” a surprise hit in which she starred.”

“You want to challenge yourself,you always want to grow in this business, you can’t be looking back and trying to repeat yourself. Things move fast.

“That’s why when I was offered “Bunheads”, which aired on ABC, I jumped at it,” she said. “It meant moving to Los Angeles, and I was very much a part of New York. But the part was wonderful.”

She played a Las Vegas showgirl, teaching dance, and it was, by all accounts a unique work. “It was so amazing an experience, so different from anything I’d done.

And it got cancelled. “That was a shock, but I’d do that again in a heartbeat. We just didn’t see it coming.”

She has grown a lot since she first made her mark on Broadway when in classic Broadway lore style, she was plucked from the ensemble (she’d already been in “Annie”, “Les Miz” among others) to replace Erin Daily, the star of “Thoroughly Modern Millie” during rehearsals in San Diego in 2002. The result was the kind of impact and “star-is-born” buzz, enough to win a Tony and other awards.

Although she went on to other hit shows as “Little Women”, The Drowsy Chaperone”, “Young Frankenstein”, and “Shrek”, she had to wait until 2011, when she got the coveted part of the spectacular Reno Sweeney in the remounting of “Anything Goes” (a big smash, hit in New York and on the road) and she absolutely killed it. It’s a bravura part and she put the kind of zing on it that made it hers for the duration of her run. She wore hot costumes, red-hot, she tapped, she danced, she dazzled everybody and your momma, her voice belting out the big numbers.

You see the pictures of her, the interviews, the videos and you see all sorts of people, because of her many gifts. She’s a swan who can actually play the part of duck, if she had to, she could probably still play Cinderella, or a woman growing into herself, serious as the blues.

There’s another online video, a long session made from an “Anything Goes” rehearsal, the title song number at the end of the first act, one of the most happiness-inducing numbers (thank you, Cole Porter) ever created. In it, just about the whole cast is involved, and most are in street clothes, and there’s no glamorous, glittery costume for Foster, just a wispy pull on blouse slacks and tap heels, casual lady in ponytail.

If you watch her closely, surprising you with the gutsy range of her voice, with those languid hand gestures, light, and precise with her moves and taps, she makes everything look almost as casual as breathing in and out. This young woman (she’s 38 now and still looks a little like an ingénue, all eyes, long legs and arms, gangly and lovely) seems hardly to be working up a sweat through the number, which is fast, furious and insinuating. And here’s the thing: at the end, and throughout you see someone totally at home in her world, she’s confident, happy, there’s this rush going on around her that seems like a force of nature.

It will be a little quieter at Strathmore, although it’s hardly an intimate room, what with nearly 2,000 seats and perfect acoustics.

She’s probably going to show off, make you feel some things you didn’t expect to feel, don’t know how, don’t know when, but she will.