Performance

Gary Tischler • June 17, 2013

The D.C. Jazz Festival is roaring to a big close this weekend, with some big concerts still remaining on tap, including the Roots in Southwest.

Here’s a look at some of what’s left:

Friday, June 14

Jazz Meets the Latin Classics—The Paquito D’Rivera Pan Americana Ensemble explores the classical sounds from Latin Americfa in “Jazz Meets The Latin Classics” at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater at 7:30 p.m. D’Rivera, the festival’s co-artistic director and NEA Jazz Masters leads an all-star ensemble with guests Brenda Feliciano, and Berta Rojas exploring Piazzolla, Lecuona, Rodrigo, Villa Lobos, and D’Rivera’s own works.

Susana Baca—at the Howard Theatre, 8 p.m.

Lee Konitz with the Brad Linde Expanded Ensemble—at the Atlas Performing Arts Center, 8 p.m.

The Brubeck Brothers Quartet: Tribute to Dave Brubeck, 8:30 p.m., Hamilton Live

Pharoah Sanders—Legendary player at the Bohemian Caverns, 8:30 and 10:30 p.m.

Saturday , June 15

The Roots—The great contemporary group fusing hip hop, jazz and blues at the Kastles Stadium at the Wharf; doors open at 3 p.m.

The Karriem Riggins Quartet, the DC Jazz Loft Series Blowout Show, at D.C. Jazz Loft Pop-Up Hall, 7:30 p.m. and 1:30 a.m.

The Brass-A-Holics, GoGo Brass Funk Band, 8:30 p.m. Hamilton Live.

Sunday June 16

John McLaughlin, Howard Theatre, 8 p.m.

Gary Tischler • June 6, 2013

Virtuoso and legendary drummer Roy Haynes and his Fountain of Youth Band kicks off the 15th D.C. Jazz Festival June 5 in fitting fashion at the Hamilton, one of the festivals main venues with its Jazz at the Hamilton Live series.

It’s a big night in more ways than one: Haynes is a walking, drumming honorary member of the history of jazz and fittingly will be given the 2013 DCJF Lifetime Achievement Award.

Roy Owen Haynes has had a lasting impact on jazz—he came out of the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston to become one of the most recorded drummers in the history of jazz. He’s had a career that lasted more than 60 years even bridging the gap to the rock-and-roll generation, including Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stone, the Allman Brothers Band and Page McConnell. If you want to check out just where Haynes belongs in the parade of jazz, you might want to get a musical biography CD set, called “A Life in Time—The Roy Haynes Story,” released in 2007. On it are musical highlights from the life, time and music of Haynes, with recordings that feature Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan, Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, Chick Corea, Pat Metheny as well as Haynes’s own Hip Ensemble and Fountain of Youth Quartet.

Better yet, check out You Tube, always a treasure trove of jazz music, including one in which Haynes and the great saxophonist Sonny Rollins talk over old jazz times or a jam session with Haynes and Chick Corea. Even better still, there’s a video called “Blue ‘n Boogie” and one featuring Stan Getz, Gary Burton, Steve Swallow and Haynes as well as a Terri Lyne Carrington Tribute to Haynes. Carrington, by the by, will be performing “Money Jungle Provocative in Blue” June 8 at the Hamilton as part of the festival.

Opening on Wednesday, 7:30 p.m., for Haynes is Nasar Abadey and Supernova.

Another jazz fest highlight on Wednesday is Marc Cary, performing “Solo Piano: A Tribute to Abbey Lincoln” at the Bohemian Caverns on U Street.

On tap for June 6, Pianist Allyn Johnson, called by many the “Dean of D.C. Jazz,” will be at the Phillips Collection at 5 p.m.; Trumpeter Nicholas Payton XXX will be at Hamilton Live at 7:30 p.m. and Lonnie Liston Smith will perform at Bohemian Caverns at 8 and 10 p.m.

Jordan Hellmuth • June 3, 2013

The ninth annual D.C. Jazz Festival is dancing its way back to the District this June with more than 125 shows across the city. Jazz will take over the city June 5 through June 16.

D.C. is still very much a “jazz town,” as it was when festival director and founder Charlie Fishman decided D.C. was just the place for a jazz festival in 2004. Nine years later, jazz is as alive as ever in D.C. This year’s encompassing concept, “Jazz Meets the Latin Classics,” highlights the Latin flavor of the classic roots of D.C. jazz.

Jazz at the Hamilton Live returns for a second year for D.C. Jazz with live jazz nightly throughout the festival. Events D.C. presents the “Jazz in the ‘Hoods” program, stretched jazz from corner to corner of the District, featuring Jazz at the Howard Theatre and the CapitolBop D.C. Jazz Loft Series. The Loft Series will wrap up with the all-night Blowout Show at D.C. Jazz Loft Pop-Up Hall on June 15.

The D.C. jazz world is buzzing about the Roots, which will conclude the D.C. Jazz Festival June 15 with a show at a new jazz fest venue, Kastles Stadium at the Wharf.

Keep a lookout for D.C. Jazz Festival tickets on Facebook and Twitter giveaways from The Georgetowner.

Visit www.dcjazzfest.org for a complete list of show times, locations, and ticket information.

Georgetowner • May 23, 2013

On May 14, The Georgetowner, Culture Capital, and the Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington celebrated the Arts of D.C. at the home of Michele and Jack Evans. Sponsored By Long and Foster Real Estate, the evening won praises with hors d’ oeuvres prepared by Sebastien Archambault of Blue Duck Tarvern, John Mathieson of BLT Steak and Frederik De Pue, chef and owner of Table and Azur.

To see and read more of this event, pick up the May 22 issue of The Georgetowner.
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Gary Tischler • May 16, 2013

The Washington Ballet’s production of “The Sun Also Rises,” Ernest Hemingway’s acclaimed novel of the “Lost Generation,” ended a brief run at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater this weekend, and that’s a shame.

It’s unfortunate that the ballet, created by Washington Ballet’s artistic director Septime Webre, wasn’t seen by more people, because it was a rare mesh of art and entertainment, the interpretation of a great work of literature through dance adding a layer onto our appreciation of the gifts, talents and time of Hemingway.

Webre didn’t re-imagine the book, nor did he slavishly perform an act of dignified homage. It was something much better—a kind of improvement of the original by adding tactile texture, a visual environment that was kinetic and often spectacular, a richness of music and movement, and an energy that was often downright dazzling. It allowed dance to add a different sort of emotion to the whole, without taking away Hemingway’s directness, his naturalistic prose style, a blunt honesty and tension which worked its way into the choreography of the pas de deux, the solos and the out and dances.

It was a considerable artistic achievement on the part of the Washington Ballet, its company and, especially, Webre, the kind that in the least should be re-mounted in another season, as was Webre’s ballet of “The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s quintessential novel about American success stories, which now appears to be enjoying a financial, if not entirely a critical success as a Baz Luhrmann film, starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

Webre’s vision achieved this: it fleshed out the novel to give us the heart and spirit of the times. It immersed us into the imagined details of time and place, something Hemingway did with muscular prose and pitiless, sometimes pithy, dialogue. We could see how the characters—the sexually and spiritually wounded journalist Jake Barnes, the pugnacious, aggressive Princeton boxer Robert Cohn, and Lady Brett Ashley, the dazzling, charismatic and restless woman the two men both love—live, spend their days and nights, shadowed and haunted in Paris and in Spain by the war to end all wars, and instead laid the groundwork for World War II.

It’s 1926, Paris, and crowds—the ballet company of couples, gendarmes, artists, romantic rivals, writers, dancers, bartenders, hangers on, street ladies and just ladies and girls, a Greek count, and can can dancers, and boxers are always on the move—dancing in the hotel, eating and dancing and flirting and bristling in the Paris days and nights. Jake loves Brett, and Brett loves Jake but sleeps with other men. Robert wants Brett but fails to keep her. And the stage is always full—except when it’s not and a couple of times the rich, growly voice and presence of E. Faye Butler makes for a presence, singing American blues as in “You Got to Give Me Some,” like dirty rice in a jambalaya.

Webre appears to have just let his imagination roam—conjuring up great giant mystical masks at a parade for the running of the bulls in Pamploma, creating a bullfight, letting the can-can dance loose in a rush of bright skirts and garters and yelling. The backdrops are flickering silent movie newsreels of the times, giving us a hint of the frantic energies on display and the even bigger disillusionment it hides. And always, Hemingway’s words appear as opera-like supertitles, most memorably when Jake offers that he and Brett being in love would be “fun.” “It would be hell on earth,” she says

Hemingway let the couples’ frustration at being unable to complete their love stand as a symbol of the huge frustration and cynicism that arose after the catastrophe of World War I. You get a sense of that in the dancing—tense but also deeply sad—of Jared Nelson—and the dances involving him and Brett, performed with a mysterious lightness of being that is compelling by the talented Sona Kharatian.

Billy Novack’s original music and arrangements heightened the sense of the particular and familiar. It had a frenzied melancholy, flavored by flamenco, a touch of Brel, Chevalier and Piaf as well as a soulful beat that hung over the production.

It wasn’t perfect—it had to go where it had to go. It included a fishing trip that is much praised in the novel for its description of action and nature but doesn’t result in a visual or dance equivalent.

History—and their own melancholy—defeats the characters in the end no matter how strong their feelings. Webre illustrated it with one grand, overpowering image that filled the stage. La Vie en Rose, indeed.

Georgetowner • May 10, 2013

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Gary Tischler •

The German-born singer Ute Lemper is making one of her frequent jaunts to Washington, this time at the Sixth and I Street Synagogue, courtesy of the Washington Performing Arts Society May 18. Even though I’d never seen or heard her, the reputation, the name, and the marketing always struck me as resonant—she’s the siren singer of Brecht and Weill, wearing the black-strap, blonde mantle of Marlene Dietrich and Lotte Lenya.

And then again, not. Cabaret singers are members of a large and funky tribe to begin with. It’s a tribe of originals, some of them out and out jazz or blues singers, others the men and women who keep the Great American Songbook alive in hotel bars and sometimes lesser or bigger venues. They present themselves not only as singers but actors, shamen and wizards and late night witches, not necessarily of the Glinda type. They’re personas, actors as much as singers.

She is all that and then again not and so much more. Trying to catch up with her on the Internet can make you dizzy. Her biographical material makes her seem like an urban legend after a while. You would think that nobody does this much and is still looking for mountains to climb, not the next thing, or the new thing, but the thing she hasn’t done before.

Here’s a list: Munster, Germany, where she grew up, mother of four, Bambalurina, Charles Bukowski, Lily Marlene, Pigalle, Edith Piaf, Sally Bowles, Kurt Weill, Pablo Neruda, Lola, Peter Pan, Jacques Brel, the Carlysle Hotel and Joe’s Pub, Mackie Messer, the Panama Drive Band, Weimar and New York, Vera Kelly and a poodle.

The only common thread among all of these references is Ute Lemper, it’s all part of her life, the persona, the woman on stage and off.

“I like what I’m doing, “ she said in a telephone interview. “I can look back on it and think, ‘Well, maybe I haven’t had what you could call a huge, or big career’, but on the other hand, I’ve done and I’m doing what I want, I have the freedom to that, to try new things, to keep learning, and I have a rich life.”

If you define big by household name, the roaring of celebrity, drowning in the click of cameras, money that you couldn’t possibly spend, then maybe she can say she hasn’t had a big career. If you define big by the quality and size of density and variety, she has had a huge and heady career.

“I think, everything else being said, it was Weimar and Brecht and Weill that really influenced my choices,” she said. Lemper, was born in Munster, in the northern part of Germany, and she’s keenly aware of German history, angry about it, with the word “rage” coming up in some of her interviews. She is not a sleepwalker when it comes to context. “Brecht and Weill, they were perfect for each other when they worked together—not necessarily as friends, but the music match to the words, and the kind of words and characters were dark, the songs were dark but they had a jaunty edge to them as well, they engaged the audience in uncomfortable ways.”

If you go to Lemper’s website, you’re greeted by the covers of six of her albums—“Pablo Neruda, a song cycle of love poems”, “Last Tango in Berlin” (a kind of compendium which will be part of her concert), “Ultimate Tango”, “Berlin Nights, Paris Days”, “The Bukowski Project”, “Ute Lemper Sings Brecht and Weill”. Taken together, they’re a summation of her concert performance, career and persona. You’ll find Yiddish songs here, Brecht’s brittle and merciless political songs which haunt us still, the Tango, the music of Paris and Weimar Berlin, compositions by Lemper on the theme of the elegant Chilean poet Neruda and the not so elegant poet of one-step-from-the-gutter and protagonist of the movie “Barfly”, the growly, jazzy and late Charles Bukowski.

“I don’t lead a dramatic personal life,” she says. “I am dramatic on stage, I suppose, that’s like acting, you put on the glamorous dresses, the hair, it’s a persona for the music. I have four children—two grown and two at home, two and seven. My husband is a musician himself so we have a language for that and we understand each other.”

Watch her videos on YouTube. Watch her do a full-blown number on “All That Jazz”, all blonde, voice going over a cliff, flying, it’s a new razzle dazzle, complete with showgirls, she’s all arms and legs. In another concert, she’s doing “Mack the Knife”, German and English, and she asks the crowd to whistle with her. She’s a good whistler.

“I don’t know what it is,” she says, “people don’t whistle anymore. When I was a girl—I always wanted to sing, I’d bicycle to school singing, or whistling. You don’t see that any more—people are all hooked up on the phone.”

She is a true citizen of the world in the sense of having lived in Germany, Vienna, Paris, and now in New York. Vienna is where she was part of the “Cats” phenomena, playing Bombalurina, the redheaded cat.. “I hated “Cats”,” she said. “Every day, singing the same song, and it was very physical, exhausting, really.”

She was also Sally Bowles in “Cabaret”, which was more to her liking, and Velma Kelly in “Chicago” (for which she won the Laurence Olivier Award for lead performance in a musical in 2009). But she is most at home with her concerts, which has led her to become a singer-songwriter, into a partnership with the Vogler string quartet, and with Stefan Malzew, a versatile musican—he plays piano, clarinet and accordion, which allow all sorts of sounds to emerge during the course of a concert.

Lemper has a certain fearless quality to her—on the phone she’s conversational, but in her music, and with her rangy voice, she startles and surprises you, you don’t know whether she’s going to run right over the audience or if she’ll need to be rescued, she’s a growler, her melancholy tones are modulated by whether she’s singing French or German, or English, she can scream and move around with a kind of triumphant elation.

Her music is intense, which you don’t always get in conversation. Talking about Bukowski, and his dark soul, you hear a poodle in the background of her home, or a brief break to change an appointment with the dentist, the reassuring sounds and rhythm of domestic, daily life. And all that jazz.

Ute Lemper will be performing at the Sixth & I Historic Synogogue on Saturday, May 18 at 8 p.m.

Gary Tischler • May 9, 2013

The boys are back.

We’re talking Ernie and F. Scott, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the American chroniclers of the Lost Generations, the major contenders for the authors of the GAN, otherwise known as the Great American Novel, the major actors in the idea of novelists and writers as personalities and celebrities.

We’re talking “The Sun Also Rises” and “The Great Gatsby. We’re talking the star-crossed lovers Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley and Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan. We’re talking the new ballet of “The Sun Also Rises” by the Washington Ballet May 9 through 12 at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater. We’re talking the buzz and anticipation around Australian director Baz Luhrmann’s film version of “The Great Gatsby,” which has already had a red carpet premiere in New York and has critical tongues, pens, blogs, and tweets vibrating and shaking up iPads and iPhones around the world.

We’re talking with Septime Webre, the artistic director of the Washington Ballet, who knows a little something about both writers and both works. In 2010, Webre staged the ballet version of “The Great Gatsby,” at the time the most expensive ballet ever done by the Washington Ballet, and staged it again in 2011. Now, he’s taking on that most macho exemplar of honor, duty, doing things cleanly and straight and honest, Ernest Hemingway’s novel, “The Sun Also Rises,” which happens to be just as visually and atmospherically fetching as “The Great Gatsby.”

“They were very different men,” Webre said, as we talked underneath giant masks that would be part of a 1920s Spanish street celebration scene for the running of the bulls in Pamploma, Spain. “They were very different writers. They lived differently, and they were stylistically different, especially in those two books. Fitzgerald’s style was very lyrical, poetic. Hemingway wrote in short, terse, sharp sentences. In fact, somebody told me that my choreographic style—the moves, the sharp, short movements—corresponded very much to Hemingway’s.”

We talked before the beginning of a rehearsal at a studio in the Washington Ballet school and headquarters on Wisconsin Avenue, with French waiters, gendarmes, men dressed in boxer (as in fighters) shorts, Can-can dancers, elegantly thin young women in ballet slippers as street walkers, partiers and the like, wearing outfits with patterned shades of gray, black and white, arrived casually.
“It doesn’t initially sound very plausible, I suppose,” Webre said. “The idea of ballet of Hemingway’s work. I suspect he may have thought that ballet was not manly, somehow, which is ironic.”

Webre laughed, but the Cuban-born choreographer also respects the man and his writing.

“The more I thought about it—and by the way I was at the running of the bulls last year in Pamploma and I’ve lived to tell about it,” he said. “But the energy, this very Spanish culture thing, not just the running, but bullfighting. And it’s hard to understand for many people, but it’s about grace and courage and honor, that’s certainly what Hemingway believed. I saw bullfights in Mexico when I was a kid in Texas. And I read ‘Death in the Afternoon,’ [Hemingway’s dense and detailed book-length essay on everything you ever wanted to know about bullfighting].”

“The words may be short and sentences lean and direct,” Webre said. “But this book contains a rich, detailed world—you have the 1920s expatriates in the 1920s café world. There were streetwalkers and artists, and writers, that whole world inhabited by Jake Barnes, the writer who was rendered impotent by a wound he suffered in the trenches in World War I. There’s Lady Brett Ashley, who loves him deeply but is promiscuous because of her frustration and there’s the cynical writer and boxer Robert Cohn. You have the music of the times—we have E. Faye Butler again, and we have composer Billy Novack, and blues , we have tango and flamenco, and Hemingway’s words. You know, you look underneath the sparse language—and there’s such a whole, detailed world teeming, a kind of spirit, anguished and frenetic, of disillusionment about the war and its aftermath.”

You could look at this ballet version of “The Sun Also Rises” as a kind of bookend to “The Great Gatsby,” which Webre also staged, recreating the America’s Roaring Twenties, an equally frenetic world about loss and illusion, in which the dance and dancers (Jared Nelson, who plays Jake also danced Gatsby) fleshed out the dreams we dreamed after reading “Gatsby” for the first time.

“The Sun Also Rises” opens May 9 and ends May 12. Right in the middle of the run on May 10 is the nation-wide opening of Luhrmann’s “Gatsby” with Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby, Carey Mulligan as Daisy, and Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway, the narrator. It’s coming with all the attendant boom boom a Luhrman-DiCaprio entry might engender. Critics who have seen it are already buzzing and bumblebeeing about it: some love it, others probably not so much. The thing to remember is that Luhrmann is not the first to go after Gatsby. There have been several versions, including a silent version, a 1940s version starring Alan (“Shane”) Ladd and a 1974 big, expensive lavish version starring Robert Redford as Gatsby, Mia Farrow as Daisy and Sam Wasterson, (not yet a DA) as Nick, Bruce Dern as Tom Buchanan as well as Lois Chiles and Scott Wilson. Jack Clayton directed this version, which made a lot of money inspired 1920s’ clothing booms and styles, perfumes and maybe even F. Scott’s, the Georgetown restaurant.

Something similar may happen with the current version. And it’s got Luhrmann’s way with against-the-grain music with a stone-cold crazy soundtrack which is very now and the next thing, but 1920s, not quite. Thus, there’s buzz about the hot single from Gatsby being “Young and Beautiful,” the evocative beyond-genre moody song penned and sung by singer-songwriter Lana Del Rey. Only Taylor Swift is missing from contempo pop music makers on the sound track: Jay-Z, Beyonce, Jack White of the White Stripes, Emeli Sande and the Bryan Ferry Orchestra, Will.i.am, Fergie with Q Tip and Goonrock, Gotye, Coco O of Quadron, Kanye West and Jay-Z with Fran Ocean and the Dream, the inimitable Florence and the Machine and the XX.

Hemingway’s books have also been popular with movie makers, who never get it right, according to Ernie. He liked Ava Gardner as a Hemingway heroine in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Sun Also Rises.” There have been three versions of “To Have and Have Not,” the most famous being the one in which Lauren Bacall asks Bogie if he knows how to whistle, two of “A Farewell to Arms”, at least one of “For Whom The Bell Tolls,” and two of the short story, “The Killers,” the last version seeing Ronald Reagan’s last acting job as a mobster.

In the race for the Great American Novel, both “The Sun” and “The Great” stood in the top five along with “Moby Dick” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Hemingway won a Nobel Prize for literature but ended his life by suicide. Fitzgerald married the ravenously talented and wild Zelda and died young at 41 in Hollywood of a heart attack.

At the rehearsal, you could spot her right away. Dressed in thin black, an intensely, beautiful face, often, as dancers must, staring into a mirror, like a fighter shadowboxes. This was Sona Kharatian. This was Lady Brett Ashley if she wore ballet slippers.
“It is a challenge to be Lady Brett,” said Kharatian, who hails Armenia and has been with the company for 14 years. “You have to let people see her frustration, her passion. She wants attention. She loves Jake and wants to be with him, but she goes to other men. She’s kind of a tragic figure. ou have to be able to speak with body language, not just dance, but how you carry yourself, your persona coming through your body.”

“It’s very different from what I’ve done,” she said. Kharatian was the Red Queen in “Alice,” Juliet in ‘Romeo and Juliet” and was Myrtle—the mistress of Tom Buchanan in “Gatsby,” “That’s a different kind of role,” she said.

“The last lines of the books tell you everything about the differences between Hemingway and Fitzgerald as a writer,” Webre said, as he quoted first “The Great Gatsby” and then “The Sun Also Rises.” “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past.” “Oh Jake, we could have had such a damned good time together,” Lady Brett. “Yes,” Jake replies. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” The End.

In a movie, Gatsby and Daisy are young and beautiful forever. On the stage at the Kennedy Center the can-can dancers, Lady Brett, the soldiers, the bullfighters, bear us swirling, ceaselessly into the past, like passengers on the Kilimanjaro machine which writer Ray Bradbury imagined to take Hemingway to a better ending.
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Gary Tischler •

When was the last time you had a conversation about Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller?

Or about a fellow by the name of Albrecht von Wallenstein, the most famous general—on both sides—to emerge from the ruinous Thirty Years’ War in Europe? It raged between 1618 and 1648 and consumed large parts of Europe in bloody religious and national conflicts, with armies marching and pillaging across the states and kingdoms that comprised what is now modern Germany.

Actually, quite a few people have had occasion to talk about both historic figures, courtesy of Shakespeare Theatre Company director Michael Kahn, who is directing Schiller’s “Wallenstein” as part of that theater’s hero-traitor duo of plays—the other is Shakespeare’s Romanesque “Coriolianus,” directed by David Muse, about a hero-general who refused to court the Roman plebians in order to become the First Man in Rome.

The Thirty Years’ War—a continental civil and religious war of God and territorial gain along with the great Swedish king and general Gustavus Adolphus, the leading figure opposite Wallenstein, the star general for the Holy Roman Empire forces—isn’t much written about any more. Only Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage,” set amid the suffering of the collaterally damaged peasants, used the war as a setting. Ironically, the Shakespeare Theatre staged that play –with Pat Carroll in the title role—a number of years ago, and now it’s a part of the 2013-14 season at Arena Stage with Kathleen Turner in the lead.

“Wallenstein” was originally a trilogy written by Schiller, a German playwright and contemporary of Goethe. Best known to the common folk for his “Ode to Joy,” now the anthem of Europe, Schiller had Shakespearean ambitions in his history plays. The play has been compressed into a highly focused look at the rise and fall and tragedy of the great man, who in the course of the play is both hero and traitor when he seems to switch sides.

“I don’t see it a play that’s just about the Thirty Years’ War, I mean we’re talking about it now, but not many people do,” Kahn said in an interview. “I wanted to do it because it was a play by Friedrich Schiller, and because Schiller was very much like Shakespeare, he thought in big, epic, meaningful terms, he embraced history and turned it into poetic, intense drama.”

If ever there was such a thing as a mini-boom in performing Schiller outside of Europe or his native land, Kahn managed it right here in Washington. He has staged “Mary Stuart,” “Don Carlos” and now “Wallenstein,” which is in part about the uses, and misuses of power, a subject which rings like a bell in Washington .

“I think this is going to be my last Schiller, period,” Kahn said. “There’s not much left to do, in any case. I can’t see doing “William Tell,” for instance or anything else.”

“The original play is nine hours, a trilogy in eleven acts,” Kahn said. “It’s never been done in the United States as far as I know. Hopefully, it won’t be the last time.”

Kahn has a reputation for doing well for condensation—he pulled together all of Sophocles’ “Oedipus” trilogy into one consuming and powerful play, “Henry IV Parts One and Two” into one play and “Henry VI”, all four parts, into one single night of riveting theater, not however, cutting the famous “First of all, let’s kill all the lawyers,” which is embedded in one of the plays which features a city plebian rebellion.

“We’re doing this in repertoire with “Coriolanus,” which is to say that the same actors are in both plays something which hasn’t been done in a while,” Kahn said. “Both David (Muse) and I felt there were themes about leadership, war, politics and disagreements about military strategy that prove tragic in both plays. It’s been suggested that Coriolanus, who saves Rome, then betrays it after he ignores what he considers to be the rabble, is very much like some contemporary politicians, in his unwillingness to display a common touch.”

“Wallenstein” is further enhanced by as translation by America’s former poet laureate Robert Pinsky. “I think the play echoes for us,” Kahn said. “The disagreements—the war and among the leaders of the conflict—result in a standoff. I think we know something about political standoffs today.”

“What I’ve always loved about Schiller is that he has that same gift for dealing with complex issues and events through drama that Shakespeare did,” Kahn said. “He is the Shakespeare of Europe in that sense. His characters are great men and historical figures, but they’re characters, complex and human.”

Thanks to Kahn, Schiller is very much alive in Washington and the United States.

“Coriolanus” and “Wallenstein” by the Shakespeare Theatre Company run through June 2 at Sidney Harman Hall.

Gary Tischler •

New Washington National Opera Artistic Director Francesca Zambello has said that, in addition to classic opera works, the WNO would be emphasizing American themes, works and artists.

You cannot get much more American than the final spring season production of “Show Boat,” the Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein III quasi-opera and quasi-prototype of American musical which contains within it all the great American themes of race, show business, the more melodramatic sufferings surrounding of love and family, as well as almost every form genre of popular American entertainment, theater, and music performed and created here up to 1927, when it premiere at the National Theatre, no less.

As presented and molded by Zambello, originally at the Chicago Lyric Opera, much of this “Show Boat” seems almost old-fashioned—so much so that it seems both authentic and daring. It’s authentic in the sense that you would imagine with little effort that this is just how the show might have seen the light of night when it was first staged—there are touches of melodramatic acting in the style of the time, large-gestured (and big-hearted) emoting that seem not so much flowery as genuine, ballroom music, a touch of rag, a big hunk of sad, some vaudeville funny and gorgeous music of all sorts.

Visually, “Show Boat” is a wowser of a spectacle with a big stage piece representing the showboat the Cotton Blossom, moored in Natchez, Mississippi, that is of a size and vivid color that you think it just might keep right on rolling onto the stage like old man river. And there is that cast of 100—not only the main characters, but African Americans who live and work on the boat and keep it floating with back-breaking toil, but townspeople, gamblers, dock workers, girls and boys, kids and old folks back home.

In some ways, this production is a little beyond category. While it’s not strictly speaking an opera (it has dialogue, with overhead subtitles), most of it is sung, and there is always music running through the story unobtrusive but telling like, well, a river, or rivulet, repeated themes and bits of song and melody. It also seems to be the first true American musical comedy with the kind of seriousness of story and theme that wouldn’t again be achieved until “Oklahoma” emerged in the 1940s. (“Porgy and Bess,” while it contained similar story and thematic material and a mixture of musical genre, was an opera, nevertheless, a decidedly American opera, which Zambello has directed here in the past).

“Show Boat” is about the people on the boat and the times they live in and through, with all the travails of daily life, and the trauma of melodrama, of the kind of theater the boat presents, along with bits of song and dance, on the river. There’s the genial and long suffering Captain Andy, who runs the show, can do a soft shoe in a pinch and is as tolerant of others as possible in the times. There’s the work-weary Joe. There’s young Magnolia and the star-crossed Julie. There is the riverboat gambler with the resonant (of soaring tenors and smooth-voiced, no-accounts) name of Gaylord Ravenal.

“Show Boat” is based on a nervy novel of the 1920s by Edna Ferber who also penned “Giant” and has nothing but troubles for its characters. Magnolia falls for Ravenal, marries him, has a child by him and is dumped by him after one last losing streak. Julie is a product of a mixed black and white marriage and is married to a white man, a situation which was illegal in the segregated South.

There are songs (and there is music) which are achingly familiar and come through the filters of various styles—“Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” and “My Man (Bill)”—are two of the finest ballads on the theme of helpless love ever written. Soprano Alyson Cambridge kills them with a great trembling power and juice as Julie. “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” becomes at various times transformative, when Queenie (a part whose Mammie-like qualities are sabotaged by Angela Renee Simpson with earthy power and humor) joins Magnolia and Julie in a fast-paced dance and a ragtime number when sung by Magnolia years later at the Tracadero. Simpson also fuels the great prophecy-like “Misery’s Coming” with raw foreboding.

Most of the cast members are not household names by any means, but fairly soon they ought to be. You have to single out Morris Robinson who takes on a song sung by legendary performers like Paul Robeson, but who makes it his own with a range that steadily finds its most direct way to the heart. Movie versions and record versions, to my experience, never hold a candle to the real thing, which is a song marching out to you.

Michael Todd Simpson does a curious thing with the part of Ravenal, attractive, smooth, smitten but also keenly aware of his weakness, of who he is and will be. It’s a tricky business to play a melodramatic part. Simpson uses a melodramatic style in such a winning way that you can see why the clear-eyed Magnolia is swept clear off her feet. They bring the house down in their love-at-first-sight “It’s Only Make Believe” rendition, doing a song that comes straight out of the operetta songbook but manages to sweep everything before it.

But it’s Canadian soprano Andriana Chuchman who is the heart and soul of the show—her portrayal of Magnolia—who suffers greatly, but endures without sentimentality, and rises to become a Ziegfeld star—is so spot on, so likeable without being treacly, that she embodies the spirit of the production which is to fill every bit of music, drama, every ache and feeling and hitch and rag dance move with so much gusto that it feels authentic.

This “Show Boat” is not only make-believe but is also the real thing—a true American entertainment.

The Washington National Opera production of “Show Boat” runs through May 26 at the Opera House of the Kennedy Center.