Performance

Gary Tischler • January 17, 2014

Even under normal conditions, the opening of the Washington National Opera season qualifies as an event—it’s an occasion highly anticipated by opera aficionados and music lovers. It’s loaded with anticipation for the season as a whole, a major part of the city’s cultural and social scene.

But by any standard, the opening performance of the WNO’s season-opening production of Richard Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde,” Sunday afternoon, directed by Neil Arnfield, with WNO Musical Director Philippe Auguin, conducting the WNO orchestra with impassioned fervor, was almost an uber-event.

Consider that this was artistic director Francesca Zambello’s beginning of a first full season in a world, like many others, where first impressions and efforts count for a lot.

Consider that this was after all Wagner, German and European 19th-century romanticism in high dudgeon in one of the most original—and difficult to stage, sing and perform operas ever composed.

For audience and artists alike, this is a night or day at the opera that requires full commitment. If you arrived at the opening a half an hour before curtain time at 1:30 p.m., taken in three acts and two 20-minute or so intermissions and left right at the end before all the applause and cheers commenced in earnest, you will have taken out pretty much a full afternoon of your life, four-and-a-half hours all told — or the length of close to two Sunday afternoon football games, including another dismal Redskins defeat, an afternoon of brunch and two movies, or a good chunk of season three of HBO’s “Game of Thrones.”

Oh, we almost forgot to mention that just a week before “Tristan and Isolde” was scheduled to open, star soprano Deborah Voigt, after consulting with Zambello, withdrew from the role, generally considering an exhausting, punishing role for body, soul and voice. Swedish soprano Irene Theorin, a Wagnerian veteran who had performed Brunnhilde in “Siegfried” at the WNO in 2009 was brought in to take on the role.

Now, that’s an opera opening that’s — well — downright operatic, creating a stir of expectation, and perhaps not a little dread, such feelings often present at openings for Wagner works. The sheer length and size of the production, the effort in time and attention on the part of the audience was daunting. It was, in the end, also entirely worth it, exceeding any expectations one might have held, and demolishing whatever fears might have existed.

To get the most open-ended part of the evening out of the way, Theorin didn’t just hold her own with the part of Isolde, which is frightingly large and taxing, especially in the first section of the opera, she took ownership of the part. In contemporary parlance, she nailed it, showing her particular gifts which included a powerful voicer that can and needs to hold its own with the orchestra, because this is, after all, Wagner. The opera is more than Wagner, with a score that, as Aguin, a Frenchman adept and expert with Wagner’s methods, suggests, “has the music act as a character.” Theorin seemed physically and dramatically comfortable with Wagner’s idea of a woman consumed by love, in stages. With Theorin, who cuts in an imposing and moving figure. We didn’t just hear Isolde. We felt her anguish, her girlish delights, her discovery of love. That was some potion, that potion.

This production is—in a way—Theorin’s and Aguin’s show. “Tristan and Isolde” is an opera where you really listen to the orchestral music because it cues you, it takes over. Often, it’s an illustration of thought, story and feeling, every bit as the voices and the libretto, the words, written by Wagner himself.

The story comes out of Arthurian tales by way of German writer Gottfried von Strassburg. It is about lovers ill met and then totally entranced, enhanced and immolated by love. Tristan is one of the noblest knights of the Cornish king Marke and has been sent to bring the Irish princess Isolde as the king’s bride after a war in which the Irish were crushed. In that war, Tristan killed Isolde’s bethrothed, a fact of which he is unaware, and Isolde also saved his life with her special healing gifts. The embittered Isolde swears revenge and plans to poison Tristan with a potion, but her loyal maid instead gives her a love potion instead.

Drinking the potion, the two fall instantly, dangerously, totally in love to a point where ideas of love and death almost merge. It is a love as everything, sex, heaven and earth, and, most significantly, night and day, life and death. This is Wagner by way of philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. It dovetails with his ideas about total theater, the opera, in fact, is almost a guileless demonstration of theory as a work of genius-level art. This is the Wagner we know and love, that is, if you do to begin with.

After the lengthy idyll enjoyed by the lovers in the forest, this cannot have good results and portends disaster. Thanks to the treacherous and jealous Melot, they’re discovered by the king. Tristan is severely wounded, and everything goes to hell or somewhere else.

In the end, Tristan lies dying and has to carry the final act, alone with his loyal comrade Kurwenal at his ancestral home, awaiting against hope for Isolde. This is a challenge for tenor Ian Storey as Tristan who has to hold the stage, and be strong enough with his voice to duel with Wagner’s ravishing, challenging music which veers through different styles like a ship battered at sea. Storey does not always succeed. Also at the end, everyone shows up—some to die thankfully like Melot, Isolde too late to heal Tristan, and willing herself to die with him in the famous tear-drawing (lots from many in the audience) “Liebestod” or love death.

There is the certain so-called “Wagnerian” aspect to Wagner’s music—some of loudest, full-orchestra sounds you hear come oddly as no surprise, but the nuanced, quieter parts are delicious and moving in their depth and, surprisingly, in their tenderness.

There’s something else Wagnerian here, too. Opera isn’t known for its “book,” the quality of its librettos as literature. In this case, Wagner also wrote the libretto: after a while, the words, like the chords start to fall down like a sometimes salving, sometimes burning rain. Even in English translation, it’s a very German kind of rain—words and sentences as proclamations, spitting out whole all-embracing ideas, love, death light and darkness, otherness, the sadness of the day. Tristran and Isolde often don’t sing in sentences. It’s all nouns and adjectives: it’s the music that act as verbs, as action, as the heart in total abandon and flight.

Wagner, performed, played, acted and staged this originally. He’s a bully who will not be ignored, chastened, or cut by a minute. And at journey’s end with Tristan and Isolde, even if their boat takes its own sweet time arriving at the shore, it is more than worth it. You don’t have to love opera or like Wagner to be swept up in the waves.
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Gary Tischler • January 15, 2014

I’m betting that “If/Then,” the new talent-laden musical in a rare pre-Broadway tryout run at the National Theatre through Dec. 8, will be a hit by the time it opens on Broadway in the spring of 2014.

Which is not to say it’s ready for Broadway yet, or that it’s a perfect show, or that it couldn’t stand some heavy cuts here and there or that it sometimes tries too hard to be clever and cutting-edge cool for its own good.

Still, here’s why I think it will attract a big audience: it’s very much a show about the times in which we live. It’s got a great score. It may be the first big Millennial Generation musical to hit the boards, although its characters run to Gen X age-wise. It is thus is in tune with the changing, renovating, liveable urban scene all over the country, including Washington, D.C., but definitely New York City, where it’s headed and for which it’s a kind of visual and musical love song.

Here are other virtues for this head-spinning show: it has Broadway pedigree written all over it. With this much talent involved in the show, whatever fixes are needed ought to be completed by the time it really matters. You can make your way along a path that runs from “Rent” and “Wicked” through the much acclaimed “Next to Normal” and find most of the people involved on stage and backstage in “If/Then.”

Tom Kitt, who wrote the music, and Brian Yorkey, who wrote the books and lyrics, and Michael Greif, who directed, all worked together on “Next to Normal,” as did producer David Stone. Stone also produced the hugely successful “Wicked,” which made a big Broadway star out of Idina Menzel when she played the role of the green-skinned witch Elphaba. Greif also directed the other big smash “Rent,” which got Menzel her first Tony nomination for her portrayal of Maureen. (Menzel won a Tony for “Wicked.”) Co-star Anthony Rapp was also in “Rent” with Menzel. This may account for a certain comfort zone among the performers and the scene on stage, although that connection needs to be established more with the audience as well.

Menzel is another big asset for “If/Then.” She is a genuine Broadway diva star in the best sense of the word. She’s got acting chops—and a voice that ranges all over the planet and is liqueur smooth, powerful as a train which knows where it’s going, emotionally on target. Without Menzel, you haven’t got much of anything. She convinces the audience that all of this is important and makes perfect sense with every musical note and facial expression. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that she’s enormously appealing and beautiful, green witch aside. She plays a character who has the serious romantic attentions of at least three men in the cast—her boss, an old college sweetheart who’s also gay, and a two-deployment veteran (and a doctor, no less) who drops his duffel bag and falls in love the first time he sees her.

This may be the first musical in recorded history that has an urban planner as its heroine. How cool can that be? This is a show about choices, if you haven’t guessed from the title. Elizabeth in her late thirties has come to New York and is fresh from a broken marriage, trying to start over. She has made an instant friend in kindergarten teacher Kate (the high-flying, terrific LaChanze from “The Color Purple”) and re-united with college flame Lucas, a squatter and housing activist. She meets Josh, the returning vet in uniform who stirs her heart. But Beth is a bit of a data nerd, as well as an idealist. So, her choices are: take the hot, urban planning job from potential (but married) mentor Stephen (Jerry Dixon), take up with best friend Lucas, or take a teaching job and marry the stone-cold tender hunk Josh from Nebraska.

Life, Kate tells her, is all about chance meetings and events that come from them—decisions to do this or do that.

What’s a girl to do? Well, the book has her do it all—she slides in and out of two lives, often awkwardly, so that we get to see and hear the results of both choices, an often clumsy process where you don’t always know who’s there. Clarity is not yet a part of the menu here, and that goes for the songs which aren’t always clearly identifiable. When Menzel sings “Here I Go,” you get in one not the exact, long length of the journey. This structure, though—Liz and Beth, in and out—hasn’t been fully worked out to avoid puzzlement by the audience.

I’m not a prude, but it seems to be almost an established sign of cool to work the f-word into any contemporary theatrical proceedings, in titles and dialogue, but now in songs, too. Mamet could do this well. Here, it’s just a kind of cheap laugh which I hope doesn’t make the song an anthem. I understand the sentiment but not the need for its expression musically.

The show has another plus: Mark Wendland’s crisp, sparkling, almost breezy set design, allowing for the instant incarnation of bedrooms, boardrooms, trains and such, as well as a paradise-type park, aided and abetted by a big floating wall-to-wall mirror used inventively.

A pre-Broadway tryout is a rarity in D.C. these days, and you can tell there’s a lot riding on this. There’s been plenty of talk and buzz on Facebook, and in early peek-a-boo mentions, most of which are excitable and favorable, but not all.

A good gauge were comments I heard from two youngish, 30-something women: “We thought it was a little long and ought to be cut, but I think it spoke to our demographics.”

It didn’t speak to my demographics (baby boomer). Nevertheless, I have to admit that the show moved me, almost in spite of myself and itself. That, I think, is due to the really splendid cast—and, for sure, the voice and heart of Idina Menzel, a true Broadway star, still defying gravity.
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Gary Tischler • January 6, 2014

Even back in 1967,  “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” a hit movie and social comedy about white liberal parents facing their principles as their beloved daughter comes home with an African-American doctor she plans to marry, seemed a  little retro, out of touch and tune with the turbulent times where anything seemed possible.
              

While entertaining, the movie tackled the subject of race in America with so many layers of kid gloves that you’d think it was morally snowing. Who could get mad at or even want to stand up to Spencer Tracy, entertaining serious doubts about such a marriage? What mother would not want her daughter to marry a black doctor with a United Nations portfolio, especially when he came into the house in the spitting image of Sidney Poitier? Certainly not the mother played by Katharine Hepburn, who after an initial attack of dizziness supported her daughter  As a topical dose of medicine about race and interracial marriage, the movie went down pretty easy and was, in fact, a highly entertaining hit, the kind of movie Hollywood liberals like to pat themselves on the back for (see “In The Heat of the Night”) come Oscar night.

              
Well, it’s almost 2014, and “miscegenation” is a word nobody utters any more at least not in public, nor can interracial couples be prevented from marriage. Himself a product of an interracial marriage, today’s President of the United States is an African-American man, named Barrack Obama, a startling shock to the political culture which has not been fully absorbed, but which the characters in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” could hardly imagine.  “A secretary of state, maybe,” one of them says in Arena Stage’s deft, powerful, funny and affecting production of Todd Kreidler’s stage version of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.”

You’d think this play—hewing tightly to the plot line and talk and setting and time of the original film—would be a little old-fashioned, a little uncomfortably creaky around the edges, a period piece that has little to say to us, except perhaps we’ve come a long way, folks. 

Actually, the production is a total winner. Better still, it seems, in terms of the periodic grand debate about race, almost fresh and authentic, in ways that our increasingly economically and culturally separating society rarely manages today. For many reasons, it seems to speak to just about every part of the audience, at least in the performance I saw, which, as somebody pointed out, was a Washington audience. I went to a weekday matinee and sat in the middle of an audience which was full, responsive, diverse,  loud and as much a part of the play as the actors on stage, which is one of those rare and self-evident moments in the theater that you can cherish.  There are fairly obvious reasons for this: this was an audience full of groups of people who  had arrived by bus, many of them older, baby-boomer generation members, black and white, as part of groups, including a group of Washington members of a teachers union. There was also pumped-up high school kids who dove into the material with apparent relish.

There were several occasions—when the doctor’s mother scolded him and men in general and when you could tell exactly who was laughing— you just knew all the black moms in the audiences were laughing while their husbands and/or sons squirmed.  

There was a tremendous amount of energy at this matinee performance. Part of it had a lot to do with the fact that the play—despite the presence of a sackful of cliché moments and characters—struck a chord because the characters were indeed talking about race, haltingly, uncomfortably and at last straight-forwardly,  Today, such discourse only happens, when sensational events rouse the torpid, sometimes angry differences in our society.   Often, it seems to us—in the here and now and who were there back in the day—that we’ve come a long way and brought all our keepsakes and baggage with us.

So, in this case, the audience is a critical part of the production, but the cast and the pacing by director David Esbjornson should get huge dollops of credit.  The situation is rife with cliches, of course: the maid, as a character but not in the timing-perfect performance Lynda Gravatt  is one; the brogue-touched, whiskey-drinking Irish priest and family is another; one of those well-bred social bigots who manages to thrive even in 1967 San Francisco is still another.  But the humanity of all the characters shines through, because—at least partly—they’re not being played by the likes of Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn or Sidney Poitier.

In its mechanics, the play is as old fashioned as a Shaw play, in which George Bernard managed to touch on political, cultural and societal issues, while not forgetting to douse his plots with family secret and surprises. There are several family tragedies and two big surprises:the first when Joanna or the beloved Joey, daughter of the well-off Matt and Christina Drayton, arrives unexpectedly with the man she announces she’ll marry, the highly respectable, gifted, quite a bit older and obviously black Doctor John Prentice.  At first, daddy Matt, a prominent liberal editor, doesn’t get it. “What’s wrong with my daughter, doctor?” he asks, the first of many mistakes he makes.  Mom, played beautifully with great, silky grace by Tess Malis Kincaid, swoons a bit, but adjusts rapidly—love is, after all, the domain of mother and daughter.

But Malcolm-Jamal Warner, who is easily remembered as the son, Theo Huxtable, in “The Cosby Show” gives Prentice down-to-earth rough edges that Poitier never even tried for. He is strong, ardent, patient, a man who knows his worth, and what he wants and intends to get it, and is perfectly aware of what he and Joey are in for.  But he’s also imposed an artificial, even theatrical condition—the parents—hers—must approve, or there’s  no marriage.

Meanwhile, Joey—the delightful Bethany Ann Lind—does whatever she will for her cause, which is her love for John Prentice, to the point where she’s invited his parents for dinner without telling him. “I want it to be a surprise,” she said, surprising everyone.  The parents—a furious, pent-up Eugene Lee as John Prentice, Sr., and a stoic, frustrated Andrea Frye as Mary Prentice—are excellently played so much so that we begin to realize this play isn’t just about race but also about gender and memory.  This cast—because the audience can see themselves in them in ways that you just couldn’t do with, say, Spence,  Sidney and Kate—is so good that you can forgive Matt Drayton’s obtuse panic which challenges his own principles and his love. He can only turn his lips down when his wife reminds him: “We raised her to be exactly what she is.” You forgive because Tom Key is so recognizable as any father, and as any liberal hoisted on his own petard because he knows he’s been hoisted, he knows he’s torn and in pain.

This is a great evening—or better, yet, afternoon—at the theater.  “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”—quite a few people already have.  It’s playing at Arena Stage’s Mead Center for American Theater’s on the Fichandler Stage through Jan. 5.

Gary Tischler •

Who says kids won’t sit still for an afternoon or evening at the theater?

Well, maybe not entirely still, but “kids”—from adolescents, to pre-teens, to just-out-of-the-stroller-but-some-years-before-kindergarten are getting a couple of great choices at the Kennedy Center this holiday season with an opera and a play geared toward them. “The Lion, the Unicorn and Me,” is a new piece, commissioned by the Washington National Opera. Directed by WNO Artistic Director Francesca Zambello, “The Lion, the Unicorn and Me,” will be on stage this weekend at the Terrace Theater. Performances are Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m.
At the Kennedy Center’s Family Theater, “Elephant & Piggie’s We Are in a Play!,” based on the popular “Elephant and Piggie” children’s books by Mo Williams, will have its world premiere. The musical production stars young actors tackling the challenge of being, well, elephant and piggie. Performances run through December 23.

“The Lion, the Unicorn, and Me” (and children’s opera in general) is a specific project and passion for Zambello, who has promised to bring a holiday production for the entire family each holiday season. “Hansel and Gretel” was presented last year.
“The Lion, the Unicorn and Me,” as Zambello noted on opening night, is the first opera composed by a woman—the Tony-Award-nominated Jeanine Tesori—to be presented by the Washington National Opera. Based on the book of the same name by Jeanette Winterson, the story posits the entirely plausible notion that on the eve of the Nativity, Jospeh and Mary were looking for a ride to Bethlehem. A boy angel was in charge of the search committee and all sorts of creatures applied, including a snake slithering down the aisle and a flamingo and a hippo. But it all came down to the lion, the unicorn and me, me being a donkey who was sturdily and patiently perfect for the job. All of which did not prevent the lion—the yeoman of WNO bass Simon Howard—from roaring musically and impressively and the unicorn—who looked a little like a mysterious disco diva, both alluring and fey, as portrayed by Jacqueline Echols—from being dazzling.

All of this, the contest, the journey and the Nativity, was remarkably touching and enjoyable because it reminded me that my inner child was still here. The stage was full of children and young people, including members of the WNO’s Domingo-Cafraitz Young Artists Program and the WNO’s children’s chorus.

The music was perhaps not entirely classically operatic, but it was accessible and varied in voice, tempo and feeling. Tesori is after all a Broadway veteran with “Shrek: The Musical” and “Thoroughly Modern Millie” as well as the score for “Caroline, or Change” to her credit.

Imagination, heart and seeing the world through the eyes of children while playing members of the animal kingdom in a musical is also at work in “Elephant & Piggie’s We Are in a Play!” at the Family Theatre. Veteran theater pros are at work on this musical version of the popular books by six-time Emmy Award winner Mo Willems. It is recommended for ages four and up, but don’t let that stop you.

Willems is adept at finding themes and stories that children are drawn to. He’s worked on the Cartoon Network and Sesame Street. He also wrote “Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Musical,” also commissioned by the Kennedy Center. The adventures of “Elephant and Piggy” asks such kid-friendly questions as, “Should you share your ice cream cone?” and “How can two friends share a single toy?”

The two leads are in good hands with Evan Casey who plays Elephant Gerald and Lauren Williams who plays Piggie. Both are veterans of children’s theater and performed together in “Snow White, Rose Red (and Fred)” at the Kennedy Center. Williams has been in “The Phantom Tollbooth” and “For the Love of Goldfish.” Casey has performed in “Tales of Custard the Dragon.” Both are regulars on the D.C. theater scene.

Casey, 31, says he, “tends to emulate Rex Harrison” in terms of his singing, while Williams, 30, says she has “a very young voice” for Piggie. “It’s a musical,” Casey says. “But it’s not just about singing. I also think right now, with what the Kennedy Center is doing, with Imagination Stage and Adventure Theater with Michael Bobbitt, children’s or young people’s theater has become a very big thing in the Washington theatre.”

Williams says the two characters are true to size—the elephant is really big, Piggie is small, yet they’re friends. “You tend to make big gestures if you’re playing an elephant,” Casey said, “although my wife saw me in rehearsal and she said I was acting like our dog.”

“Children’s theater is always a challenge, for acting, but you can also let yourself go, be dramatic, emphatic, so that children will understand what you’re doing,” Williams said.

After all, Elephant and Piggie are in a play!

Gary Tischler • December 30, 2013

Right now, on different stages at the Olney Theatre Center, you can see two of the most iconic stage roles ever. They are roles forever embedded in the hearts and minds of theater-goers for decades—and centuries, in one case.

That’s the challenge for Paolo Montalban, who plays the King of Siam in Olney’s spectacular and hugely entertaining production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The King and I” (through January 5), and Paul Morella, the actor who plays not only Scrooge but all the parts in Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol: A Ghost Story of Christmas” (through Dec. 29).

For Montalban, the precursor, the ghost of “The King and I” past is, of course, the late Yul Brynner, the bald-domed, charismatic actor who made the part his own on stage (to his last, dying performing days) and on film, so much so that for a few years after his death, you didn’t see too many productions of “The King and I.”

For Morella, the problem is a little different: literally thousands of actors and actresses have played the part of Ebenezer Scrooge, the miserly businessman who bah-humbugs Christmas and mankind in general, before being visited by a set of ghosts on Christmas eve. It’s not one actor who shadows any production of “A Christmas Carol,” but a horde that includes Alastair Sim, star of the 1951 black-and-white film, but also George C Scott, Albert Finney, Patrick Stewart, and locally, Ed Gero who stars in the yearly production at Ford’s Theater. We also have to mention Mr. Magoo and Susan Lucci, not to mention Charles Dickens himself.

“I saw Yul Brynner when I was a kid doing the part,” said Montalban, a Filipino-American. “It’s not something you forget. But you can’t be him, even if you wanted to try, and I don’t want to do that. You respect the man, the memory, and then you do what you do, and hope you’ve created a character that’s believable and memorable.”

This King of Siam has a head of dark hair, is handsome, just 40-years-old, sometimes funny, and very much carries a full load of charisma of his own. He’s not so much a stage-stomper as an actor who commands the stage, while letting out a certain amount of warmth and humor, especially when sparring with Eileen Ward as Anna.

“I’ve done the part and the show before,” he said. “I’ve been in the ensemble. I’ve played the young lover and the king. So, it’s not entirely unfamiliar to me, but I could go back to it again and again. This venue is especially challenging and rewarding. It’s not a huge theater. So, you can feel and hear the audience.”

Montalban achieved some early success as Prince Charming in the ABC production of “Cinderella” back in the 1990s, opposite the pop singer Brandy. No less a star than Whitney Houston, who was executive producer of the show, picked him. In a People Magazine story of the time, Houston was quoted as saying, “Everyone knew he was the one the moment he entered the room.”

He’s still the one when he first enters the stage in “The King and I.” It’s not that you forget Yul Brynner; it’s that you remember Montalban (who is not related to Ricardo Montalban).

Morella knows that Scrooge is a familiar part—and motif—especially at this time of the year. “I know that many, many actors have played the part,” he says. “But that’s not the thing. If there’s a ghost in the machine, here it’s Dickens himself.”

Dickens, in fact, did tour with “A Christmas Carol,” reading or playing all the parts. “I try to imagine what that must have been like, but that’s the idea behind this. Dickens intended for one person to do the show.”

Morella has been seen at most of the theater venues in and aroundWashington, but he’s used to the spotlight because it’s something of a family tradition—he’s the eldest child of the former Maryland Republican congresswoman Connie Morella.

“A Christmas Carol” is, in some ways, a Paul Morella re-invention and re-habitation of Dickens himself. “This is my fifth year with this, and it keeps getting deeper and richer for me, and the audience, I hope,” he said. “It’s a one-person show in the sense that I play 47 parts—exactly so—including Scrooge, the ghosts, the nephew, Tiny Tim and his father (that was hard), but it’s more than that. It’s story telling, not reading. It’s the way Dickens, I think, did it back in Victorian times. So, you recreate a style of a certain time in history. It wasn’t unlike our own—it’s easy to dismiss Scrooge as a heartless man, but he’s lost his bearings, not his intelligence. ‘My business is business,’ he says. He’s pragmatic.”

“What’s really the best thing in some ways is the audience,” Morella says. “We make it a total experience. I greet people at the door as Dickens in costume. It’s part of the season.

As for the Olney, Morella said: “I’ve done a good share of my work here over the years, and everyone involved in this space, this place, has grown it, built it. It’s a very special place, and more and more people are seeing that now.”

“A Christmas Carol: A Ghost Story of Christmas” is Paul Morella’s story as well as Dickens. “It’s like a tale told around a Christmas fire,” he said.

Gary Tischler •

Larry Cahn is on the road again, and he likes it.

Right now, he’s playing Walter Hobbs, the apparently cold, money-oriented businessman who’s landed on Santa’s naughty list in the touring company of the hit Broadway musical “Elf,” which was a hit comedy for Will Ferrell playing an oversized Santa’s helper and finding a dad in James Caan, who co-starred as Hobbs.

It’s all at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House through Jan. 5, with Will Bloom as the “Elf” in question. “I got the part of Walter Hobbs the old-fashioned way,” said the veteran actor and performer Cahn, no six degrees of separation from Caan. “I auditioned for the part.”

In a cast that includes a lot of wide-eyed, high-energy young performers, especially Bloom, Cahn is the kind of been-there, all-purpose professional that every road company needs and usually has. “You do this long enough, and you realize you’ve done a lot over time,” Cahn said. “Sometimes, there are dry spells. But this is fun. We did it in Chicago where I have a lot of friends and memories, being a Northwestern guy, and I have to tell you, what they call a snow storm around here is nothing.”

“This is just a really great family show,” Cahn said. “It keeps you busy. It’s aimed straight at the heart. We were working on it in October, in Kentucky, and we did a rehearsal in a school as a performance, you know, making sure we were getting right, an open rehearsal, and it was amazing to me, anyway. That was a great audience.”

If you see pictures of Cahn you think you recognize him. Even over the phone the voice sounds accessible and familiar. “I can do everything, that’s for sure, always have,” Cahn said. “A little bit of this, a little bit of that. I can carry a tune. I can dance a little. I’ve done television and movies, witnesses and parts on ‘Law and Order’—and that one, used to be the life blood of New York actors.”

Back in the 1980s, when a periodic revival of “Anything Goes” was produced, Cahn had numerous roles in the production: he was Reporter No. 2, he was in the Chanty Quartet and a member of the Lady Fair Quartet, he understudied both Billy Crocker and Lord Evelyn Oakleigh.

Cahn understudied eight different roles in the company of “The Graduate” in 2002. That was the play which starred Kathleen Turner in the iconic role of Mrs. Robinson. “There is an actress, a star, that you would do anything for,” Cahn said. “She insisted that we were all part of a family, we were all in it together, down to earth, blunt, honest, with a big heart.”

“Touring the country like this is hard, sure, but it’s invigorating,” Cahn said. “When you’re in a tour, you get to see the country, all sorts of different audiences. I wasn’t worried about the movie. The movie was the movie, you know. James Caan—well, you don’t try to imitate him or sound like him. It was a fun movie. This is, to my mind, a great entertainment.”

Cahn is a New Yorker, but he also spends time in Los Angeles with two dogs. “I’ve got to get a dog for my apartment in New York,” he said. “But it’s tough on them, when you’re on the road.”

Washington isn’t exactly unfamiliar to Cahn. He was in a production of Ken Ludwig’s “Lend Me a Tenor” at the Kennedy Center, a touring production of “The Pirates of Penzance” at the National Theater, and a musical called “Is There Life After High School?” “You remember that?” he said. “Wow. It’s good to be back. The town has changed a lot since then.”

Gary Tischler • December 12, 2013

Broadway may be rocking. It might have Spiderman and Cindy Lauper and “Wicked” and “If/Then”, the next perhaps big thing by spring. For sheer entertainment value, however, you cannot beat the comfort zone of a spectacularly well-done production of a golden oldie or what we still think of as the Broadway musical.

Two examples are on display now and worth the bucks and a visit. At the Olney Theatre in Maryland, there’s director Mark Waldrop’s faithful, quite spectacular version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The King and I,” driven by a warm, royal performance by Paolo Montalban. At the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Harman Hall, there’s Bruce Dow headlining in show-hogging but also show-sharing fashion a rollicking, hells-a-popping production of 1962’s “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” which is actually a whole bunch of funny things. Both productions feature Broadway musical composers and writers at the top of the form for the genre with with R&H for “The King and I,” and Stephen Sondheim providing the music (including the wowser opener, “Comedy Tonight”) for “Forum.”

Both shows also have stars (Dow and Montalban) who have to overcome the giant shadows cast by the original creators, made larger by movie versions: Zero Mostel, who starred as the Roman slave Pseudolus in both the stage and movie version, and Yul Brynner, who’s gleaming, bald head and charismatic stage presence became almost indelible in the stage version (including a reprisal while he was dying of cancer) and the movie version with Deborah Kerr.

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM

“A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” which comes to us by way of ancient Rome, reminds you mostly of a circus. No, wait, a carnival. Wait, no, it reminds you of a vaudeville show. Better still, a burlesque show. Sometimes, it even seems like an old television variety show, or maybe the tail end of a house party in ancient Rome (or a campus toga party), after Bacchus has been served much too well.

Director Alan Paul is the great, inventive ring master, the barker, the backstage organizer who put this show together, but it’s Bruce Day who does the heavy juggling of its many disparate and, often, desperate parts. “Forum” would not work without Dow as Pseudolus, the slave longing to be free and a citizen of Rome, who goes the extra league and then some to achieve that end. But it would also be impossible to imagine “Forum” without each and every member of the cast , so knit together tightly are the bits, and the fast pace of the laugh-a-second, eye-candy, bawdy, zany show.

Everybody—every character—in “Forum” at one time is somebody else—even the three houses which dominate the set of a block on a street in Rome—are mistaken for the other houses. The only thing you can trust on stages is that something funny and unexpected is about to happen, not always on purpose.

You may or may not have noticed that vaudeville and burlesque haves re-appeared as forms for entertainment around town—here and there in a club, a small theater, a bar—as people seem to have a sudden longing for bad old jokes, performers who can juggle and dance at the same time, singers of the old school and strippers who don’t take everything off.

You can get all of this in “Forum”—the show’s roots are firmly planted on warp-speed comedic lines, some of them nonetheless first heard in Nero’s day, timing cued to slamming doors, panic, and deft, but straight faces that might burst into screaming at any second. It’s like a three-card monte game, a “where’s the pea under the cup” street game, a hustle and a bustle—lots of bustles. In fact everything comes in threes—three houses, three versions of almost every character, and the fact that the courtesan-heroine-ingenue (three again) cannot count past three.

We have not the space or inclination to reprise all the intricacies of plot here—perhaps over drinks some other time. Suffice it to say that slave Pseudolus can gain his freedom from Hero, the clueless scion of his house who has been bowled over Phylia, the winsome, dim, blonde resident at the brothel-house of Lyceus next door. Pseudolus needs to get Phylia for Hero. Trouble is, she’s already been sold to the thunder-thighed Miles Gloriosus, a Roman commander of overweaning self-delight. From this stems every disguise, misstep, lie, double-and-triple crossing, love and death potion and antic in the show. It leaves you kind of breathless.

So does Dow. He has the task of making you feel you’re part of the plot, you’re in the joke, you’re having so much fun that you don’t care if one of the doll babies gets dropped, or a joke falls as flat as a courtesan’s bust, although you can’t tell by the courtesans. Dow is endearing, frisky, seductive, flat out funny, while making Pseudolus a yearning human being, even when he’s out of breath. But he’s not alone: take Hysterium, the aptly named named head slave of the house of Senex and Domin, which sounds like a sex game. Tom Story turns him into a screaming, whiplashed skinny mound of jello trying to keep up with Pseudolus’s plots and also portray a corpse near the climax of the show.

Philia—a virgin who knows how not to seem like one—is an absolute love potion, as portrayed by Lora Lee Gayer. She is deadpan, deft at malapropism and possesses a sleepy, dangerously short but agreeable attention span and a killer voice. She is a gem in a very large ocean of performers.

Let’s not forget the courtesans, announced complete with specialties, reminiscent of the “Gotta Have a Gimmick” strippers in “Gypsy” (now at the Signature), and the wonderful Proteans, who scramble to be soldiers, servants, slaves, cohorts while running and prat-falling and marching. And everyone can sing—best of all Dow with a show-opening that’s a show-stopper—the remarkable “Comedy Tonight.”

You can you top that? How about the lady that opens the second act conducting the orchestra and ends up twirling tassles and not like a cheerleader? Comedy tonight? Hell, yes.

THE KING AND I

“The King and I” has its comedic moments, most of them, oddly, provided by Montalban as the King of Siam, a ruler with a sly, imperious sense of humor as well as sense of entitlement, which he has trouble hanging on to.

If “Forum” predicts Sondheim’s fast-paced runs of music and tunes, if not his seriousness and sophistication of purpose, then “The King and I” epitomizes Rodgers and Hammerstein’s dramatic and purpose-driven theatrical sensibilities, while re-defining and even inventing musicals.

“The King and I” premiered in 1951, while Americans were fighting a war in Korea, still owning bloody memories of its war with Japan, and only less than a decade ahead of entering the fray in Viet Nam, all of them clashes of cultures, among other things. The King of Siam, long in a line of such kings, is fending off western incursions in the 1860s, including cultural ones that challenge notions of kingship, power and slavery. The West is in his palace in the person of Anna, and her son, hired to tutor the many royal children, including the king’s heir. To the king—challenges to his power over his many wives, learning western ways while upholding tradition—it is “a puzzlement,” none less than Anna herself, with whom he struggles, interacts, and has a relationship which ripens into friendship if not romance.

While some of us may be overly familiar with the material, its power has not lost its effectiveness. At Olney, some of that comes from the (as usual) parade of the king’s children, a set that’s entirely Asian, but also pragmatically effective, along with beautiful costume design by Kendra Reign.

While Eileen Ward makes a formidable challenge to the king, she’s also an actress who can bring off classic R&H songs, such as “I Whistle a Happy Tune” and “Hello, Young Lovers.” The highly anticipated “Shall We Dance” number is brought off with swirling charm and energy by Montalban and Ward.

Neither Ward nor Montalban haves the best voice in the cast—that easily belongs to Yoonjeong Seong who can hold a note with passion and then go a little higher than it was written in “We Kiss In a Shadow.”

It’s impossible to compete with the memory of Brynner—and Montalban doesn’t try. He makes the part his own with those touches of humor, a different look to be sure, but a warmth, sometimes displaced by anguish and confusion. He is a very human, often struggling, king—but a king, nonetheless.

Both “Forum” and “King” are classics, which seem—50 and 60 years after their debuts—to be fresh as anything on Broadway stages today.
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Georgetowner • December 10, 2013

I kept thinking, as I watched Mikhail Baryshnikov navigate the stage of the Lansburgh Theatre in “Man in a Case,” a theater piece from the Washington Shakespeare Theatre Company by way of the Hartford Stage in Connecticut, what this might be like without him.

Watching him move, gesture, do no more than a 30-second series of moves to the blues, a little skip-and-glide, watching him collapse on a bed, or put something yearning and languid in a tentative gesture of unfulfilled love, you remember who he is. At the same time, you see him as the men on stage, you get a little lost in the Chekhov stories he inhabits along with a wonderfully eclectic and eccentric cast of performers.

It’s all a little puzzling, this echo of other lives and identities.   A young woman, kind of Chekhovian in a loose scarf, confessed that she was a little confused, as she walked out of the theater with her companion.  “Don’t worry, sweetheart,” he said. “It’s just Chekhov.”

That it is, but it’s also a little more than that.  This is the work of Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar of Big Dance Theater, who combine dance, theatre and video and achieve an effect that makes audience members feel more like casual witnesses.  It’s an odd effect. When you walk in, you see folks at a long wooden table, there’s pop music—Petula Clark?—the people are hunters, who begin to talk about the efficacy of wild turkey calls.

Videos end up on screens, on tables, they’re tools to broaden the story, make faces and feelings bigger, but like the later Carly Simon song, seem to be not so much tools as toys after a while. They’re —lookee here—echoes of ourselves, because, you think, surely these characters don’t know the music.

The piece—and it is more piece than outright, formal play—is a riff on Chekhov’s riffs on love in two of his short stories: “Man in A Cage” about a professor of Greek  in a school in a small obviously Russian village and “About Love” about a man with a married woman. In the end, well, it is just Chekhov.

Baryshnikov plays the headmaster who is most at home within the strictures of rules, habit, the strait jacket of allowed behavior as well the poetry of government circulars. He narrates this tale of a love affair that only Chekhov could write properly and brings another dimension to things. The dimension that Baryshnikov brings—he is a small, but always charismatic, presence—is the Russian echo to the two stories. He came to the West from a repressive system and a world where a break in the order of things was ominous. Now, the ballet prince and king is a majordomo.

The Greek master professor is an object of both derision and fear. It’s as if everyone knows he’s taking notes on changes in the emotional and intellectual, the behavioral atmosphere, this figure in a dark coat, awkward and clumsy, at one point clumsily being pushed to dance.  Imagine that: a clumsy, awkward Baryshnikov.

It’s what makes him scary in the end, until, inevitably, he meets a girl whom he’s expected to marry. She undoes him bit by bit with laughter, a kind of fleshy silliness. She’s a disturbance in the field who causes him an ultimate kind of embarrassment until he’s still. That again is hard to think about: him still unto death.

In “About Love” is carried by his languid narrative voice. It’s a tale of circumstance that is so peculiarly Russian, evoking not the Soviet system, as the first might have, but Pushkin, Chekhov, even mad Tchaikovsky. In the telling, sometimes taken up by others, the man describes his growing love, unrequited, and what it does to the woman in question.

Taken together, the man in the case, wrapping his heart into cold confusion with pamphlets and routine and the man and the woman and the love they lost are both like a dance, choreographed between here and now and where they came from.  Something about it all is highly affecting, beguiling, sad and human—not the least of which is the presence of Mikhail Baryshnikov.  And that’s not just Chekhov.

“Man in a Case” runs through Dec. 22 in the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Lansburgh Theatre at 450 7th St., NW. [gallery ids="101573,148325" nav="thumbs"]

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.