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Panel on Earliest Opera by a Black American, Jan. 16
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Weekend Roundup, January 9-12
Arts & Society
The 82nd Annual Golden Globes: A Recap
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Ricky Skaggs at the Birchmere
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Onstage Georgetown, January/February 2025
Sutton Foster: All-Broadway, Yet Intimate, Too, at the Strathmore
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.
‘La Forza del Destino’: Overwrought, But Worth the Wild Ride
•
From everything we know, Francesca Zambello—in her first full season as Washington National Opera’s artistic director—likes a challenge. From everything we know about composer Guiseppe Verdi, he can certainly present a challenge, especially with “La Forza del Destino” (“The Force of Destiny”), a rarely performed—for any number of sensible reasons—minefield of an opera, which presents directors, conductors and singers with an array of pitfalls.
If this relatively—it’s three hours plus but could be longer, depending on what’s in and what’s out—short production wavers and falters here and there, and sometimes threatens to crash into chaos and confusion, everyone on hand can take a little responsibility. But the principal fault is the opera’s construction, its raison d’etre. The music, as with all things Verdi, is awesome, while the libretto, based on the play “Don Alvaro” by Angel de Saavedra, Duke of Rivas, written in 1835, is not so much.
Yet the production, set more or less in vague, contemporary times in Spain and Italy, also manages to be compelling, its very overwrought craziness almost works for it. For that, Zambello can take a lot of credit—just for daring not to play it safe on Verdi’s centenary with a Verdi crowd pleaser, and for moving everything along at a feverish pace, overcoming the opera’s improbabilities, and outcomes, which are just plain too, well, operatic.
Give some credit, too, to young American soprano Adina Aaron, who has already had some notable triumphs, including “Aida” at Glimmerglass, directed by Zambello. She took the lead role of the tragic Donna Leonora, who is driven to a life of solitude and isolation after her beloved Don Alvaro accidentally was responsible for killing Leonora’s father, the Marquis of Calatrava as the couple were about to elope against the father’s wishes. Aaron sings movingly and with emotional and vocal range—especially in the quieter scenes, as she anguished her loyalties for love and family and pleads to be allowed into sanctuary and solitude. Vocally, she tugged at the audience with her voice and her ability to perform as a tragic heroine.
Verdi doesn’t help matters, of course, by literally disappearing her for most of the lengthy second act, which leaves the narrative and the singing in the hands of the Chilean tenor Giancarlo Monsalve, who sings Don Alvaro and American tenor Mark Delavan, who plays the implacable Don Carlo, Leonora’s brother on the hunt for vengeance for the stain on the family honor who has vowed to avenge the murder of his father and the dishonoring of his sister. The best way to do that—kill both of them. But after Leonora has made her way to solitude, Don Alvaro and Don Carlo, each searching for Leonora, each living under false names, get caught up in a vaguely modern war where the sides are not quite identifiable as gunmen, armed with AK-47s, hunt each other amid a scarred, charred city landscape, both saving each other’s lives in turn.
The trouble here isn’t just that the story gets a little silly. There’s only so much coincidence you can blame on destiny. The concern is that a certain sameness sets in: the two men sing about their plans, their cries for vengeance or despair—the vengeance for Carlo, the despair for Alvaro, who more than several times lets out that he only hopes for death. For a time, each is unaware of the other’s identity and have become sort of frenemies, buddies in risks, danger and courage. But alas, Carlo soon finds who Alvaro is, and the chase is on again after a bitter but inconclusive fight. Oddly enough, Alvaro winds up as taking up the cloth in the very same monastery where Leonora is hidden— ah, destiny. And soon enough, the three are reunited, with tragic results.
Mansalve hits his mark and notes and cuts a dashing figure, and Carlos is a menacing, large figure who you can certainly hear, but neither makes an emotional impact—and for those two, it’s a long time to carry the production before Leonora reappears. Musically, Chinese-American conductor Zian Zhang leads with energy and force, almost to a fault. The war is presented by Zambello and designer Peter J. Davison with verve, smarts and high, stark drama, the combat zone starts out as a kind of red light district, where the impassioned Preziosilla, a kind of hot-stuff seer and kinky prophetess, holds forth with bold passion as played by Georgian mezzo-soprano Ketevan Kemoklidze, turns into ruins and doubles at times as a portable MASH unit.
The scenes at the monastery are striking, touching and quite powerful, and sometimes—when the whiny priest Melitone (Columbian bass-baritone Valeriano Lanchas) is on hand—even funny.
Zambello chose to put the noted overture at the start of the proceedings with the performers miming actions. It seemed a muted way to begin, especially with the opening scene exploding into startling drama and great beauty, when Leonara sings how she is torn between her great love and loyalty to her father, whom she loves. Everything seems to happen at once: “Shots fired,” confusion, escape, abandonment in the space of minute. And we and they are all off in pursuit of: glory, peace, love, adventure, danger, requitement and forgiveness, vengeance and all the usual stuff.
What Zambello has done is to bring all this to preposterous and often thrilling live action—the landscapes, and settings brim with the energies and schemes, the sorrows not just of heroes, villains and heroines, but priests, the starving, the wounded, the holy and unholy all around them.
That’s what makes this particular “La Forza del Destino”, a force, if not of destiny, at least high drama and stirring (by Aaron and the orchestra) music.
At the Kennedy Center: “La Forza del Destino” will be performed Oct. 16, 20, 24 and 26, while Amber Wagner, Rafael Davila and Luca Salsi will take on the three principals Donna Leonora, Don Alvaro and Don Carlo on Oct. 18 and 22.
Jeremy Denk: Taking on the Musical Life and ‘Goldberg’
October 14, 2013
•To tell the truth, when it came time to pick
up the phone and call pianist Jeremy
Denk, whom the Washington Post had
called “a quintessential 21st-century performer,”
and “an omnivorous musician, who scales the
Everests of the solo literature” on his cellphone,
I felt a little intimidated, a little tenuous. I had
made the mistake of looking him up on the net,
never having actually heard him in concert.
Denk is coming to the Kennedy Center’s Terrace
Theater Saturday, Oct. 12 for a 2 p.m. performance
of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” itself
a famously challenging Mt. Everest of a composition
worthy of the greatness label, as the first
pianist in the Washington Performing Arts Society’s
2013/14 Piano Masters seasons.
The thing is that I found in my net travels that
Denk wasn’t just good, heck, he was great, amazing,
deft, quick and smart, eloquent, challenging,
sometimes funny and very versatile.
And I’ m not talking about the music or his
playing, although most of the adjectives can do
double duty for Denk.
I’m talking about his writing, articles for
the New Yorker, to begin with, but also an online
blog his site called “Think Denk,” which
are dense with observation, mood, thicket-like
forays into alternate realities, they’re the kind
of blogs that give bloggers a good and worthy
name, especially an entry called “The glamorous
life and thoughts if a concert pianist,” which reveal
his sharp, wicked, often self-deprecating humor
which gave rise to a thought that if you ever
got insulted, somehow, by Denk, in person or in
passing, that you might mistake it for a badge of
honor.
All this, by the way, occurred even before
Denk had been named one of the 24 major talents
to receive a grant from the MacArthur Foundation,
the so-called “genius grants” in September.
I’d only encountered Denk—who tours frequently,
and in the past has done so with uberviolinist
Joshua Bell—on a spectacular album released
by Bell called “Joshua Bell at home with
friends,” home being a New York residence that
included a full-scale studio, some of the friends,
Denk among them, including trumpeter Chris,
flautist Elizabeth Mann, Sting, percussionist
Joaquin “El Kid” Diaz, singer Josh Groban,
Broadway star Kristin Chenoweth, singer and
vocalist Frankie Moreno and Baritone Nathan
Gunn, to name a few.
Bell, Denk and Gunn combined on a rendition
of part Rochmaninoff’s “O, Cease Thy Singing,
Maiden Fair” on an album that was musically,
genre-diverse, a fair example of classical
stars reaching often far and wide to expand their
audience and their interests and challenges.
Denk isn’t exactly an example of a classical
artists with an interest in merging his gifts into
the pop scene, but his musical interests are nevertheless
diverse and intense, especially his devotion
to the work of 20th century American composer
Charles Ives and the Hungarian composer
Gyorgi Ligeti, whose etudes were part of “Ligeti/
Beethoven”, which he recorded for Nonesuch
Records last year.
Denk made his recital debut at Alice Tully
Hall as the winner of the William Petcheck Piano
Debut Recital Award from Juilliard in 1997. He
has appeared regularly over the years on tours, or
with the Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, London,
New World, St. Louis and San Francisco.
But now—the Goldberg Variations, which he
has already recorded and is touring on. I ran
across one of his articles, essays, blogs or musings,
called “Why I Hate the ‘Goldberg Variations.’
” The Variations, which Denk says are
a kind of one-upmanship of Handel on the part
of Bach, is a little like “Hamlet” in the theatrical
canon for performers, pianist become Ahab chasing
the Bach Moby Dick variations.
“I did say that, I know, but it’s not like I
hadn’t been doing the variations,” Denk said. “I
avoided it for a long time, because, well, lots of
reasons. For one thing, everybody is going to
compare you to the Glenn Gould version(s) of
the variations. But you know you will eventually
confront them, and it’s a feeling of dread. So it
will be my version.”
In the admittedly somewhat tongue-in-cheek
article, he says and repeats, “Yes, I’m suspicious
of the Goldbergs’ popularity. I worried for years
that I would be seduced into playing them, and
would become like all the others—besotted, cultish—
and that is exactly what happened. I have
been assimilated into the Goldberg Borg.”
The fact that he should be using a Star Trek
anology tells you something about Denk, although
I’m not sure exactly what. He writes in
a way that he talks—full sentences, paragraphs,
wayward thoughts seeming to be teleported—
beam me down, Scottie—he is a version of the
man that photographer Walker Evans urged us all
to be—when you go out in the world go out with
a hungry eye, and in Denk’s case, hungry ears,
hungry thoughts.
There are in that vast palace and kingdom
sever NPR segments with Denk, walking
through his Manhattan residence where he practices,
writes, and thinks and does and looks out
his window to the street below. At only 43 years
of age, there is something this grey-white haired
man in slacks and a black t-shirt working, practicing,
deft fingers, against a background of an
army of books, including variations of Proust.
“It’s full of odd things, I know,” he says. “I practice
an enormous amount of time,” he says to us.
‘You have too. This is the life you lead. It’s who
I am.” He teaches, he reads, he has, you suspect,
a big circle of friends, because even over
the phone, or in his writing, you guess that he’s
the kind of man who is enormously stimulating,
good company , a curious soul who whose table
talk is interesting, but a man who knows how to
listen, a quality which you would think is obvious.
Mock-complaining, he says the Variations
are deliberately boring, but that “they’re so good,
you don’t notice it.”
I haven’t heard his version, but I have heard
Simone Dinnerstein’s version, and you can hear
and see what a commitment it is.
Back in the 19th century, Americans in salons
might have sat absolutely still for it—this was the
world of Emily Dickinson, Melville and Whitman,
all of whom he admires and reads.
You presume Proust is on the list, all of
which may account for the tone of his writings,
the sheer excellence of it.
I particularly liked his written reaction to the
fact that the Library of Congress wanted to included
his blog in the library, or a seemingly panick
stricken blog, titled “Bizarre Boston Blog, in
which his cure for living in a state of emergency
is to banish real emergencies by making trivial
matters emergencies.
In any case, all genial protestations aside, I
am willing to bet that Denk’s “Goldberg Variations”
won’t be a battle to overcome boredom,
that his will be in the playing (which critics have
often noted for its generosity) and in the feeling,
be another variation, his own.
Tom Clancy: Great Stories With Surprising, True Heroes
October 7, 2013
•Tom Clancy, author of dozens of mega-million best-sellers sharpened by his knowledge of high-tech military gadgetry that often made him seem like a prescient consultant of the future, died at 66 this week, just as his next best-seller (no question about it) that features his hero Jack Ryan was set to be published in December.
By profession, Clancy was an insurance man, although, after his success, he often liked to dress in a style that screamed ex-military, even though illness kept him from serving. What he ended up being was neither insurance man nor intelligence officer nor GI Joe, but the kind of writer of block-buster novels that endeared him to millions of readers, probably most of whom are men.
With his money, he managed at one point to buy a tank all his own, and I supposed he was entitled. He probably would be the first to say he wasn’t writing literature, but he does belong right up there, in contemporary terms, with Stephen King, John Grisham, and later David Baldacci and others, even Joe Patterson, who is not so much an author but a machine and a factory all rolled into one.
Clancy’s first book, about a rogue Soviet submarine on the loose in the dark days of the Cold War during the Reagan Administration was published by the Naval Institute Press, a small publishing house located fittingly in Annapolis, specializing in naval history of all sorts, but never in fiction. Clancy’s price for “The Hunt For the Red October” was $5,000, which wouldn’t cover train fare to a submarine base in California these days.
Lots of folks discovered Clancy, including President Ronald Reagan, who put it on his reading list. Clancy never had to sell another insurance policy after that. “Red October” was made into a major Hollywood movie that starred Alec Baldwin, and Sean Connery as the Russian sub commander. It was the kind of movie Hollywood did really well—not so far removed from humanity like the Stallone, Schwarzenegger and Willis movies of the time, let alone Chuck Norris. It was filled with action, populated with interesting characters, starring top stars and made with no expenses paid. You didn’t have to be embarrassed watching them.
This is something Clancy’s work had in common with that of King and Grisham—their books made great thoroughly professional and entertainingly first-class movies. Baldwin played Jack Ryan, and then gave up the part to Harrison Ford in two other excellent Clancy books that become films: “Patriot Games” and “Clear and Present Danger.” Later, Ben Affleck played a younger version of ryan with Morgan Freeman as his mentor, and Baltimore hit by a nuclear bomb in “The Sum of All Fears.” Chris Pine stars in “Jack Ryan: Shadow One,” opening December. Ryan, in subsequent novels, rose to become President of the United States.
Those books became great movies—as good as Stephen King’s many movie version of his novels (except for Nicholson in “The Shining”) as good as Grisham films of his books like “The Firm” or “The Pelican Brief.”
Clancy—like the best of story tellers if not the best writer like a Faulkner or even a King—invented a kind of history, a whole world that looked and sounded familiar, what with the weaponry, the conspiratorial battle of armies and intelligence services, and he created heroes who behaved like heroes.
That’s not a bad legacy.
There’s a picture in the Washington Post tribute which shows Clancy in a room thick with wall-to-wall books, reading one of them (we know not which). Chances are that the book was written by someone else, and so were the ones in the room. Patterson, on the other hand, could fill the room full of his own books, something that would probably never have occurred to Clancy.
‘Million Dollar Quarter’ Returns to the Kennedy Center With a New Jerry Lee Lewis
October 2, 2013
•The folks with “Million Dollar Quartet” announced on Twitter that it was one city down for the start of its national tour after taking down the house at the Pullo Center in York, Pa. Next stop: the Kennedy Center for an encore performance.
That explained why we were talking by phone last week to John Countryman, the 24-year-old newbie in the cast of the show, in York. “Million Dollar Quartet,” the Tony Award-winning Broadway show about a one-of-a-kind get-together of legends on Dec. 4, 1956, at the Sun Records Studio of producer Sam Phillips in Memphis, stars Tyler Hunter as Elvis Presley, Scott Moreau as Johnny Cash, James Barry as Carl Perkins and Countryman as Jerry Lee Lewis. The latest actor to play Lewis, Countryman’s had changed dramatically this year in a very short time.
Countryman, who played piano and sung with a still active rock group, “The Dirty Names,” had auditioned for the role of Lewis, the piano-riffing, rock-and-rolling notorious rocker of “Great Balls of Fire” and “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On” fame and understudied a short stint in Chicago. “I auditioned again but I hadn’t heard anything so I kinda thought nothing was happening,” he said. By then, “I had to get a job, I was working in a bank.”
And Countryman got married. He and his wife Jennice were on their honeymoon when he got the call making him the next Jerry Lewis.
“It was crazy,” he said. “It was a dream come true. It was—you can’t imagine. I mean talk about changing your life around. But once, we all got together, this thing became like a family—like everybody looks out for everybody else.”
Countryman had been a fan of Lewis every since he started listening to the music when his mom played golden oldies. “That’s sort of how I got into all that kind of music,” he said. “You get a real sense of how rich it all is. It still rocks, and I love playing the music, being Jerry Lee. The killer. It’s just a great experience, an amazing show.”
What is original about the show—which, by the by, was directed by Signature Theater Artistic Director Eric Schaeffer –is that the lead performers—Countryman, Hunter, Moreau and Barry, play live on stage. The audience experience is one of being—if you use imagine or your memory, whatever the case may be—in the presence of legends. It’s like a live concert within the framework of a snapshot day in the lives of legends. With a book by Floyd Mutrux and Colin Escott—a rock-and-roll historian and something of an expert on Sun Records—and a salty, authentic-looking set by Derek McLane, “Million Dollar Quartet” catches the protagonists at a critical time. Elvis, who drops in with a girl who also sings, is already well on the way to becoming king of rock and roll. Lewis is a sassy, brassy newcomer who wants to impress Phillips, and Cash is also established. Phillips has already lost one star and is thinking about joining a major recording firm.
All of the stars shine, and the music is as familiar as a really loud lullaby or two—and Countryman gets to blast out “Great Balls of Fire” and “Whole Lot of Shaking Going On” around turns by Perkins, Cash and Elvis—that is, Barry, Moreau and Hunter. “It’s the style and everything,” Countryman said. “It’s how he plays, he had a real talent, because moving around a piano the way he did, like nobody else. That was special and those rolls and everything, man. I love doing this. I love Jerry Lee Lewis, always have, first time I heard him.”
Countryman saw the man who was dubbed “The Killer” a while back. He was much older, and a little battered, moving slowly across the stage. “But, yeah, the minute he got there, the minute he sat at that piano, he killed,” he said. “He was the killer, same guy. He could really play. That’s a good memory.”
“Million Dollar Quartet” is at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater Sept. 24 through Oct. 6.
Legendary Rat Pack Comes Alive at Strathmore
October 1, 2013
•It’s tough to get a vibe going on a conference call. You can’t see anybody. It’s usually strictly business, and people are always interrupting or waiting to say something.
Talking with Sandy Hackett and his wife Lisa Dawn Miller, however, you definitely get a vibe of show-business allure and legend, not to mention talk and memories of Las Vegas and L.A. days and nights, the time of the Rat Pack in Vegas—maybe true stories and the sound of the easy slick slide of cards on green tables.
Hackett and Miller are all about songs and dancing. They come with a glittering show-biz pedigree. Hackett’s father was the late Buddy Hackett, one of the country’s premier comics and comedic actors who was connected by long-standing friendship and work with the Frank Sinatra-led legendary Rat Pack. Miller is the daughter of another legend, world-class Motown songwriter Ron Miller, master of hit and classic songs, who wrote hits for Stevie Wonder, among others.
All of this funnels in like cocktail ingredients as to why we’re having this three-corner, pool-shot conversation. “Sandy Hackett’s Rat Pack Show,” which is at the Music Center at Strathmore tomorrow night, Friday, Sept. 27, at 8 pm.
Both Hackett and Miller hasten to say that the Rat Pack Show is not a tribute show. It is a kind of theater piece, a flamboyant recreation of a time in the 1960s, when the so-called Rat Pack centered around Frank Sinatra, featuring Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Joey Bishop and others—and depending on the night and time—graced Las Vegas with its presence and put on memorable entertainments at the Sands Casino.
“There are a lot of tribute shows around, truth be told,” Hackett said. “But we’re doing something different.” Hackett said of the show which ” . . . we’ve been doing about four years or so now. This is a theatrical production which lets folks get a sense of what it might have been like to see the Rat Pack live on stage in 1960.”
Miller and Hackett put together and wrote a show based on their own knowledge and experience. Hackett grew up around members of the pack, including Joey Bishop, who was the last surviving member. “To me, Bishop was Uncle Joey,” Hackett said. “He was the one that wrote most of the material, the comedy material, that gave things some sense.”
Back in 1960, the Rat Pack—there was no official membership—was a kind of Hollywood designation of what was then a group of very cool persons, headed by the very cool Sinatra, whose song stylings sold millions of albums and who was a major and often talked-and-gossipped-about movie star as well as a friend of JFK by way of Peter Lawford. The Pack included the gifted Sammy Davis, Jr., the seemingly always-in-the sauce Dean Martin, Bishop, Lawford and, sometimes, Shirley MacLaine.
“People thought this was a long-standing, yearly thing as far as the Vegas thing goes,” Hackett said. “It wasn’t. It lasted a month in 1960 when they were in town filming ‘Ocean’s 11’ [a hit precursor of the current George Clooney-led series of films with Brad Pitt and Matt Damon]. They stayed a month. And at night, they would do this show in the Sands. That was it. But it was memorable, and they were memorable.”
“The show is not a recreation,” said Hackett, who plays Bishop, who was never in the show, but was in the movie. “We’ve added some Miller songs, and the presence of a woman, the one woman Sinatra never forgot.”
By anybody’s guess, that would be the sultry movie star Ava Gardner, with whom Sinatra had a tempestuous, tumultuous, passionate affair in the 1950s which almost ruined him. “I play the woman that Sinatra never forgot,” Miller said. “I get to sing one of my dad’s songs ‘Wasn’t I a Good Time?’ Mind you, we don’t call her Ava. Some people might think it was his wife Nancy or the children whom he loved so much. We let the audience decide.”
Not that the old Sinatra Rat Pack music is neglected. “I Did It My Way,” “Mack the Knife,” “For Once in My Life” and a host of others are heard, sung and remembered in uncanny renderings by the cast, headed by David DeCosta as Sinatra, Doug Starks as Sammy Davis, Jr., Tony Basile as Dean Martin, Sandy Hackett as Joey Bishop and Miller as Frank’s one love. DeCosta, while he can’t be Sinatra, gives him his due and manages to resurrect more than hints of that great voice of experience and confidence, rue mixed with wry and rye.
“We’re all about respect for the music,” Miller said. “I couldn’t help but learn that from my dad. He knew his way around a song. Some of them are part of the show like ‘For Once in My Life.’ So, this is not a tribute show, but part of it is a tribute to the great songs.”
Hackett is working on a book and a show about his father, whose pre-recorded voice (as God, no less) is heard in the show. He would have been right at home in the banter and humor, Rat-Pack style that is audience-involving, brash and irreverent in that cocked-hat, boozy, don’t-give-a-damn but also personal style that characterized any gathering of that legendary group, be it movie, party or showtime, or after-hours bar-time.
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Two Tales of Two Losses, at Arena and Woolly
September 25, 2013
•I cannot think of two plays that might be more different than “Detroit” by Lisa D’Amour and “The Velocity of Autumn” by Eric Coble, both works by relatively new, but definitely rising and shining, playwrights.
“Detroit,” the season opener at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre (through Oct. 6), and “Autumn”, which is the season opener at Arena Stage (through Oct. 20), march to the tune of different drummers and rhythms, with different concerns and ambitions. The productions are physically different and treat the audiences to different views and viewpoints, literally. “Detroit” is, in some ways, a circus in which the elephants and clowns have escaped together, wreaking havoc. “The Velocity of Autumn” is more of a chamber work, a two-character play in which rueful, sometimes bitter-and bitter-sweet rise to the surface to do battle with here-and-now contemporary anxieties and fears.
Different the two plays are, and that’s as it should be, but they are also bold examples of playwrights dealing with the way we live and connect — or not — now. Not so oddly, the two are also often very funny, even if the laughter gives you pause and sours the echo of the last giggle. More importantly, to my mind, both are electric and powerful examples of why—in a world increasingly experienced through the magic filter of a plethora of gadgets and digital toys—we still almost urgently go to the theater, not, God forbid, because it’s good for us, but because it holds up a mirror to life in the hands of gifted artists, playwrights, designers and actors. What happens and how things happen and move in front of us at performances of these plays are every bit as right now as anything we access through the apps on our devices, on our phones, computers and pads.
In “Detroit,” playwright Lisa D’Amour, who is part of PearlDamour, an Obie-award winning interdisciplinary performance company with Katie Pearl, is chronicling, in high-dudgeon, low-comedy, angst-ridden and kinetic fashion, the societal crumblings that have occurred in the wake of a still wounded national economy, particularly those affecting the younger middle class, made up of those who once worked but now are hanging by their fingernails — and of those who completely derailed into drug-filled anarchy.
Which is to say we give you Mary and Ben, who own a house in a slightly decaying suburban development just outside of trembling Detroit, and their new neighbors, the antsy, hyper-ventilating Sharon and Kenny, who moved into a relative’s house next door, after, they say, having met and fallen in love in rehab. Mary and Ben have invited have invited Sharon and Kenny over for a barbecue, a telling little almost obligatory social gathering.
Ben and Mary are in dire straits: she works in a law office, he’s just lost his job at a bank, but says he’s working day and night building a website offering financial advice. Sharon and Kenny are something else again—they have no furniture, and apparently subsist on junk food, but they’re rich in flaky, lightning-like energy and give off a kind of stormy anything-can-happen, half-sexy, half-mordant vibe. They have a kind of freedom—to completely implode, flee, reach out, sing and dance, travel to the forest or to ruin, theirs or anyone else’s. They’re a kind of naked, made-up mystery.
Director John Vreeke has staged the goings-on like a disjointed parade—things fall apart, nobody gets to where they’re going, the clowns are constantly stepping on nails, hurting themselves and each other. Much of this—the clashes between Ben and Mary’s attempts at normalcy with Sharon and Kenny’s almost rock-and-rollish anarchy—is funny, but it’s done against a background, where we –the audience—cannot escape the flying debris. The designers have put two sets of chairs front and back, with the stage—the two back yards and flimsy-appearing homes—in the middle. Every now and then, the houses are flaked and patterned by traveling videos played on their exterior and serenaded by stormy and discordant music.
It’s a comic tragedy in some ways. You can see how the anything-goes, barely contained dance of Sharon and Kenny undoes Ben and Mary, who put up a fight but are drawn to them, nonetheless.
You’ve got a quartet of terrific actors, especially Gabriela Fernandez-Coffey as Sharon, who combines an appealing, puppy-sexy way with the pain of someone being eaten alive by electronic impulses. Danny Gavigan makes a good mate for her—patient, confused, dazed and jumble, while Tim Getman acts the part of a man fraying before our eyes. Emily Townley keeps trying to keep her head above water through all this. It’s like she can handle almost anything except that incoming tidal wave that’s forming not so far away. But then, the struggles of the two couples are on display almost every day in our travels, our news and blogs. Things fall apart in real life. In this play, which seems like a tale told of real life in another country but looks like a familiar street.
Woolly—in its staging, in its environmental lobby works and in all this — continues to be Woolly, amazingly edgy, right here and quite a bit ahead of the game, our forward-looking theater pied piper.
By contrast, “The Velocity of Autumn” seems less problematic. It’s easier to look at the characters, hearts and mind, problems to solve, secrets to reveal. But the more you stay and the longer you listen, the closer it gets to being a risible, long-lasting memento you’ll carry with you.
It sure sounds a little crazy: Alexandra—an elderly woman whose children want to take her out of her brownstone in Brooklyn and put her into a nursing home—resists by threatening to burn down the house with an impressive array of Molotov cocktails. All it takes is the flick of a lighter, which she holds firmly in her hand.
We first see Alexandra sitting snugly in an easy chair in a cluttered living room, the door to the stairs barricaded, the cocktails in evidence, a room full of books and old records. There’s a big window where her son, Chris, can be seen clumsily trying to climb the tree and get in, scaring her and him half to death.
And so it goes. Chris, who’s been absent for years, is on a mission of reasonability, but he doesn’t have a clue what’s really going on. Old secrets, old wounds, older loves and resentments, losses and memory churn through the air like wounded birds who can speak. Chris is a failed artist, whereas his mother was an artist who painted abundantly.
This is material that could quickly and easily turn maudlin and—the critics’ satan sin— sentimental, but it doesn’t. First, because director Molly Smith lets the play—no intermission, 90 minutes—flow along with ease as well as urgency. Second, because Coble is a terrific writer, he treats his character with a combination of tough love, affection and halting respect and honesty.
Third and, probably most importantly, are Stephen Spinella as Chris and Estelle Parsons as Alexandra. Spinella makes rueful humor and a spindly awkward clumsiness sources of charm, just an edge away from panic. Parsons is, as most know, a theater treasure, who was most recently in “August: Osage County,” a terrific gift for actors. She is also remembered for her Oscar-winning role in the film “Bonnie and Clyde.”
Parsons’s Alexandra, raccous, angry, resentful—“I just want to be left alone. I’m good at it.”—could get on your nerves. She’s not warm and fuzzy, but she has a gift that she hoards and treasures, and that’s what it’s all about. It’s about art as well as people. It’s the gift that is in danger, the ravages of lost memory.
Things happen here that happen only in the intimacy of theater. The feelings engendered in our presence make their way into ours, and the words lodge our in memory. In this play, it’s about parents and children, mothers and sons, and some of us remember right then and there.
McLean Drama Company Presents a 10-minute Play Festival in D.C.
September 23, 2013
•Each year, the McLean Drama Company sponsors a 10-Minute Play Contest. The first-, second- and third-place winners have their plays presented by the drama group at a selected venue. This year’s MDC 10-Minute Play Festival features national contest winners’ plays that are being performed in a staged reading at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company Melton Rehearsal Hall, 641 D St., NW. Opening night is 8 p.m., Saturday, Sept. 21. Sunday matinee is at 3 p.m., followed by a “talk-back” with the audience, players and playwrights. Ticket price: pay what you can.
Rachael Bail, founder and president of the McLean Drama Company, is a playwright, producer and journalist. She is a former Voice of America editor and Supreme Court correspondent, who now lives in Washington, D.C., and originally began the drama company in McLean, Va., but has moved the staged readings to Washington. Renana Fox, also of D.C., is the director, and Ely Lamonica is artistic director.
MDC’s mission is to present and inspire dramatic writing and new American plays, by playwrights from Northern Virginia, the Greater Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area and nationwide. In the past, MDC has performed at the Capital Fringe Festival and the 450 seat Alden Theatre in McLean, Va.
This year’s winning plays are: the first prize winner, “The Brazilian Dilemma” by William Fowkes, a comedy about relationships; second prize winner “Peppered Precinct,” the story of sexual harassment in a police department, by Cynthia Morrison and “Nik & Ida,” scientist Nikola Tesla against the world, by Jerome Coopersmith.
This is MDC’s first experiment with “Pay What You Can” admission.
For more information: www.mcleandramacompany.org.
View our photos of the winning plays taken during rehearsal by clicking on the photo icons below. [gallery ids="101440,153762,153765,153756,153752" nav="thumbs"]
Jenny Live in D.C. at WPAS
September 17, 2013
•Just being around Jenny Bilfield,
the new president and CEO of the
Washington Performing Arts Society,
you get the sense she’s the kind of
person that can fill and command a
room, whether it’s a board room, a concert hall
stage, or a small downtown D.C. coffee shop
on this occasion.
Although she’s been around less than a
year, Bilfield, the artistic director of Stanford
Live at Stanford University in California since
2006, she already sounds like a Washington
D.C. booster. That, you suspect, comes out
of her deep appreciation and sense of place. A
New Yorker, she acknowledged that her work
and time at Stanford changed and enriched her,
and that’s exactly where she’s coming from
in her approach to her new job—taking over
the reigns of an organization with a long (48
years) history as a premier world arts presenter
and arts educator. She comes across as accessible,
really smart, unpretentious, and probably
knows more about most things you’d care to
talk about in conversation.
“This is such a terrific, unique place,”
she said. “We [composer husband Joel Philip
Friedman, 12-year-old daughter Hallie, a rescue
dog and a few parrots) live right next to the zoo.
We can walk to the zoo.” This is said with all
the verve of a genuine enthusiast, a woman
who can generate enthusiasm for just about
anything. She is seen as, has a reputation for,
and talks a lot about risk taking. In terms of
classical music, for instance, she’s known for
a passionate commitment to encouraging new
work and compositions, in addition to holding
fast to established artists and work which is the
hallmark of most presenters and their seasons.
“If you look at this year’s Stanford Live
season, some of which I’m responsible for, if
you run across some names that you may not
be familiar with, I’m probably responsible,”
she said.
She seems to have gotten a handle on the
unique qualities of Washington pretty quickly.
“You have a rich and diverse performance art
world, so many venues from the big to the
small, it’s full of opportunities to do many
unique things. You have a city that’s rich in
neighborhoods too, and it’s full of gifted artists
that work and perform right here. You can draw
from that. You have unique opportunities for
arts education. You have the embassies and
the whole international framework to draw on.”
Reginald Van Lee, executive vice president
of Booz Allen Hamilton and chairman of
WPAS’s Board of Directors said that “Jenny is
a visionary with a proven track record of success
who is passionate about the arts and their
role in the community. She is the right person
to lead WPAS’s new strategic plan and build
upon our core strengths: rich, educational and
community engagement programs, the nurturing
of young talent, and presenting the finest
artist of our classical, jazz, dance, and world
music performances.”
Upon the announcement of her appointment
in January, Bilfield said that “WPAS is an
essential, deeply valued anchor of the Capital
region’s cultural scene and has earned a sterling
reputation as a premier American arts presenter,
and an engine of high-impact arts education
programs and alliances. I feel the same rush of
energy and optimism that I experienced when I
joined Stanford University in 2006.”
That rush, that energy is on full display,
when she’s touting the new WPAS season,
tellingly built around the theme of “The City
Is Our Stage,” the neighborhoods in the city,
the diversity, the opportunities for expansion
and new partnerships. “We hope to engage
audiences and artists for the long term, and
get people to participate in the arts, not just by
going but by being a part of the whole,” she
said. “Audience here are very committed, very
smart and intelligent, and receptive, I think, to
new forms and ideas.”
At Stanford, she transformed Stanford Live,
from being a university presenter to a producing
organization along the lines and size of
WPAS, and was also instrumental in bringing
the vision for the Bing Concert Hall to fruition.
“The challenges here are not the same,” she
said. “WPAS exists in a unique place and is
a unique organization, with unique opportunities.”
She provided a hint of how she might
approach her new tasks, in a kind of farewell
interview with the San Jose Mercury News.
“Ultimately,” she said then, “specificity and
sense of place are central for me. My litmus test
is that our vision, mission and programs need to
reflect the unique DNA of the organization and
its community. …Washington Performing Arts
Society has had a significant impact upon the
cultural life of Washington D.C., from nurturing
new talent to substantive arts education,
and serving as a destination for outstanding
performers at venues around the city.”
It’s obvious that she’s already gotten the
vibe of the city’s cultural DNA. It would
appear that it matches hers.
Jane Austen Film Festival at Dumbarton House, Sept. 18
September 16, 2013
•Dumbarton House will host the Jane Austen Film Festival on the lawn of its North Garden on Wednesday, Sept. 18. This free showing of “Pride and Prejudice,” starring Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen, puts action to Jane Austen’s most famous novel. It is about a headstrong young woman, Elizabeth Bennet (Knightley), entering womanhood with four sisters, a crazy mother and no men that seem worthy of her time. Elizabeth is thrown when she meets Fitzwilliam Darcy (Macfayden), a rich and seemingly pompous man. She puts all her energy into hating and avoiding him, until she finds his hidden side.
The show will start around sunset or approximately 8 p.m. The lawn will open at 7 p.m, 2715 Q Street entrance only. Tradewinds Specialty Imports, Dean & Deluca, and Café Bonaparte will be selling food and drink. No pets or smoking allowed. Please bring blankets. You can thank Long & Foster and Christie’s International Real Estate for sponsoring this event.
The museum will be closed during the event but is open Tuesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Visit the Dumbarton House, the Headquarters of the National Society of The Colonial Dames of America, during that time to experience its rich history — DumbartonHouse.org.