Performance

Gary Tischler • September 10, 2014

Deborah F. Rutter, the new president of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, its first female president, and only the third to hold the post, was in the middle of her first official day at work September 2 when she took time to talk on the phone.
“My office looks terrible. There’s boxes and stuff all over the place,” she said. “We had a staff meeting to meet everyone which was absolutely great. It was a very warm occasion. I was so impressed with the people here, and I’m really looking forward to the daily process of working together.

“Actually, the most important part of the day was of course deciding what my daughter would wear to school,” she said and laughed.

Even in a half hour phone conversation, you get the impression that Rutter doesn’t stand on ceremony much. She’s down to earth, accessible, moving from conversation about day-to-day living, moving to Washington from Chicago, talking about how to engage new audiences, about music and its “power to transform.” She’s at turns eloquent and vibrant, funny, professional and warm. President of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association for over a decade, Rutter was named to succeed Michael Kaiser who ended his 13-year tenure on September 1. When the Kennedy Center presented her to the press last December, Rutter exuded both confidence and affability, embracing with gusto the challenge of leading what is often considered the nation’s premiere cultural and performing arts center.

There was, of course, a reason for the confidence. She was something of a transforming agent in Chicago, spreading the reputation of the CSOA out into the city and community, persuading legendary Maestro Riccardo Muti to head the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as its 10th music director and displaying a bent for collaborative efforts, city-wide festivals, large-scale educational efforts, a gift for fund-raising and a passion for the works of contemporary classical composers . During her tenure in Chicago, famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma became the first Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant.

Still, it’s plain that while under Rutter the CSOA became a force not only throughout the city of Chicago, but nationally and internationally as well, heading up the Kennedy Center is a different matter. That’s because of its various pieces—theater programming, jazz, the National Symphony Orchestra, the Washington National Opera, which came under the center’s wing only recently, Very Special Arts, Young People’s Program, the annual Kennedy Center Honors and the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, the last two of which result in very public red-carpet festivities and events.

“I realize the challenge,” she said, “and I look forward to it.” At the time of the announcement, she said “It’s an honor and a challenge to continue to build on the tremendous work that Michael Kaiser has done here for the past 13 years.”
While September 2 was her official first work day, she’s been busy meeting with people all along and scouting the city and the center. “We moved here and now live in American University Park, which we found to be a great place. It’s residential, it’s close to things, there are all kinds of things within walking distance. Our daughter Gillian goes to Sidwell, and she sings in a choir, which I think is terrific because that’s where you learn about working with others, about collaboration to produce beautiful music and sounds.” Her husband Peter Ellefson teaches at Northwestern and Indiana University and plays the trombone. Rutter herself grew up playing the violin and piano.

During the course of speaking with Rutter, I allowed that I hadn’t been interested in classical music when I was in high school, that I was a rock and roller. “Don’t kid yourself,” she said. “At one time or another, we’re all rock and rollers. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a fan of the Kinks, Sting or Dave Matthews, you listened to rock and roll at some point and it’s not forgotten.”
She said that she was “was amazed at the depth and breadth of the every-day programming at the Kennedy Center, and at the audiences’ interest in what the center offers.” “I was happy to be able to attend the NSO’s Labor Day concert which had to be moved inside to the Concert Hall because of the weather and it was absolutely thrilling to see how people were happy to be there.”

“There are so many tent poles, and silos, to the Center, the different departments, and one of the things I thought was that whatever event was going on—a concert, an opera, a ground-up musical, a dance or ballet performance, that the center’s various parts would interact and reflect individual productions—that a single project would resonate among and inspire the rest of the building.”

“Sure, I will miss Chicago. It’s a unique American city. It’s a tough place in many ways, strong and receptive, and all the myths and personas of the city are true,” she said. “But you don’t lose friends in this business. You will always see and connect with people who work in this field. And this city, as I’m beginning to see, has its own personality. It’s totally different.
“We have this historic place here. It’s connected to history, and it’s a monument as well as a performing arts center,” she said. “But there are always different ways to bring the arts to the community and the community to the arts.

She shared the experience of being at a concert for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s “Truth to Power” festival at which Jason Moran, the Kennedy Center’s jazz director, performed original blues compositions with conceptual artist Theaster Gates. “Jason is such a gifted, innovative player and person,” she said of Moran.

That kind of collaboration attracts here as well. “I’m very excited about the “Little Dancer,” she said, referring to the Kennedy Center’s musical production about the relationship between the Impressionist painter Degas and the model for his famous ballerina sculpture which begins in October and coincides with a special exhibition at the National Gallery of Art.

Gary Tischler • September 3, 2014

Joseph Marcell has become Lear again.

The native of St. Lucia, board member of Shakespeare’s Globe, member of the Royal Shakespeare Company and one-time global television star, is on another tour of “King Lear,” the Bard’s grandest, most difficult, most compelling tragedy.

This Shakepeare’s Globe production will be coming to the Folger Theatre for a limited run September 5-21, bringing Marcell in full dudgeon – raging, as Dylan Thomas said, against the dying of the light. Shakepeare’s Globe’s production of “Hamlet” played for a limited run earlier this summer.

Marcell is sure to be remembered not just as Lear but as Geoffrey, the imperious butler on “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” the ’90s television sitcom which made Will Smith a huge star. It didn’t do badly for Marcell in the recognition department.

“I realized when we toured that this show struck a chord worldwide, from England to Turkey,” Marcell has said. He told reporters about an incident when he was touring with Lear at Brighton in England. There comes a point when Lear asks himself (and the audience to some extent), “Who is Lear, who am I?” Someone in the audience yelled: “You’re Geoffrey.”

He is the first black actor to portray Lear for the Royal Shakespeare Company. The part is exhausting for any actor, but “it strikes a chord with people,” said Marcell. “It is tremendously difficult, but it speaks to us. He’s a very complicated character. He is a warrior king, autocratic, prideful, but he’s become tired of 50 years of fighting and killing. He makes mistakes in judgment.

“He will not accept that he is old. That’s the crux of the matter. He can’t accept that he can’t any longer have his way and, tragically, he sets the stage for his own further downfall. It’s a generational battle as much as anything with the other two daughters.”

To Marcell, there is nothing like performing on stage.

“In touring, we’ve been in all sorts of venues, all kinds of theaters, big, small, outdoors, indoors, which makes every performance completely different. You cannot duplicate it. The outdoor-indoor thing is about space as much as anything. You have to project more, get the voice beyond the first two rows, and you’re also at the mercy – or, in one instance, the blessing – of Mother Nature.

“We had an outdoor performance once, in the afternoon, and right during the scene where Lear is wandering with the fool in the barren landscape, full of wind and fury, and he’s raging and blind in the dark and rain, why, we had a big storm come up, wind and rain and all that, and we played through, and it was like nature supplied our special effects. It was simply rough magic.

“In a theater like the Folger, indoors, compact, small, it’s different, things become more intimate, a kind of pact between actors and audience. There’s a world of difference between playing outside and inside, certainly there is.

“It’s very special to be where I am, to do what I do,” Marcell said. “But to be at the Globe, to be where it all started in some ways, to play The Big One, that’s challenge and gratifying.”

Gary Tischler • August 28, 2014

Remember this? During the summer of 1963, 17-year-old Frances “Baby” Houseman is on vacation in New York’s Catskill Mountains with her older sister and parents. Mesmerized by the racy dance moves and pounding rhythms that she discovers in the resort’s staff quarters, she can’t wait to be part of the scene, especially when she catches sight of Johnny Castle, the resort’s sexy dance instructor.

In 1987, this was the scenario for a little movie called “Dirty Dancing,” made by a small studio, and headed by a cast of little known performers named Patrick Swayze, as Johnny Castle (is that a great name or what?), Jennifer Gray as “Baby” (Is that a great name or what?) with Cynthia Rose as Johnny’s dancing partner Penny Johnson.

“Dirty Dancing” turned out to be a smash hit, provided a few numbers to the soundtrack of our lives, especially “I’ve Had the Time of My Life” and made a sexy star out of Swayze, who did more of the same in “Ghost” and “Roadhouse.”

It also become a very successful musical with different productions in far-flung places like Australia, Germany and the West End in London. Now, it’s time for the North American tour of “Dirty Dancing—The Classic Story On Stage,” running Aug. 26 through Sept. 14 at the National Theatre in Washington.

This production is also a 10th anniversary celebration for the show which was first performed at the Theatre Royal in Sydney, Australia, in 2004. The show opened in 2011 in the West End in London with an 11-million pound advance.

Eleanor Bergstein, who wrote the original screenplay for the movie and the book for the show, said, “The company for the North American tour is beautiful and truthful.”

The show at the National, which kicks off an extended tour across the United States as well as Canada, has a brand new cast, headed by Samuel Pergande as Johnny and Jillian Mueller as Baby, with Jenny Winton as Penny Johnson. Mueller has had some experience in starring in a movie musical, heading a national tour of “Flashdance” recently.

With an orchestra and singers providing vocals with such songs as “Hungry Eyes,” “Hey Baby,” “Do You Love Me?” as well as the memorable hit “I’ve Had the Time of My Life,” “Dirty Dancing” is still the same old story. It’s all about the dancing, dirty and otherwise.

That’s a good thing for Pergande and Winton, both of whom bring considerable experience from the world of ballet, with both spending time with the renowned and very electric and eclectic Joffrey Ballet.

Pergande, who trained with the Milwaukee Ballet School, the San Francisco Ballet and the Bolshoi Academy in Moscow, has appeared with the American Ballet Theatre and with the Joffrey under Gerald Arpino, the co-founder of the Joffrey. Pergande was in two different companies of “Dirty Dancing”, including understudying Johnny in the London Cast. He’s also been with the U.S. national tour of “Billy Elliott” and worked with Cirque du Soleil.

“It’s very different, when it comes to dancing,” Pergande said. “The music is different. You do different things in terms of moving around. It’s edgier. Your body has to adjust to different stresses. Your energy level is different. In some ways, it’s harder. In other ways, it’s not. You bring different tools to dancing in this show.

“I loved working with Mr. Arpino,” Pergande said. “He taught me so many things. But the main thing is this: you present yourself as a man, as someone imposing, on stage. He caught me once in a rehearsal. I guess I was sort of striking a pose, looking up at the skylight. He said, ‘Sam, what are you doing? What are you looking at? You should be looking out for your woman.’ ”

“Mr. Arpino meant I should always be watching my partner, the ballerina, taking care of her, the woman dancer,” Pergande said. “Mr. Arpino said that’s what you’re there for, your partner relies on you and needs to feel safe with your strength and abilities.”

That’s probably even more true for a show like “Dirty Dancing” where the dancing is fast, sharp, full of lifts and girls leaping into the arms and strong hands of their partners.

“Exactly,” Pergande said. “You have to be there for her.”

Jenny Winton, who plays Johnny’s dancing partner, agrees. “Ballet is very different,” Winton said. “And for me, it’s the first time I’ve done anything like this and he [Pergande] has been wonderful. He’s a great dancing partner, and you learn so much from him. Your body has to make some adjustments to the music in the show. You’re doing something almost totally different—ballet is all about lines, and a kind of fluid movement. This is all about sharp cuts and quick moves.”

Winton was trained at the San Francisco Ballet School, a Bay area girl, whose parents still live in the Haight Ashbury—the hippie haven of the 1960s. She, too, has danced with the Joffrey Ballet in 2009. “Mr. Arpino had already passed [in 2008] by the time I came to the company, but everybody talked about him,” Winton said.

“It’s an amazing show,” Pergande said. “I’ve seen the audiences. They seem to know all the lyrics. They’re passionate fans of the show.

Pergande knows he’s having to deal with a shadow–the “ghost” of Patrick Swayze. “I know that’s there,” he said. “You can’t think about it. I mean, you bring your own gifts to the part, your skills, your own passion. It’s just something I don’t think about.”

Georgetowner •

When actors pass away, more than one person is lost, and more than loved ones and family feel the loss and are diminished. I was reminded of that when I heard the news of the death of Tana Hicken at the age of 70 last week at her home in Baltimore.

Hicken was a resolute, magical gem of the Washington area theater community. She left her mark and memories everywhere she worked, which included everything from Arena Stage, where she was a part of the ground-breaking production of “The Great White Hope” in 1967 and became a company member, to Everyman Theatre and Center Stage in Baltimore, to the Studio Theatre, Theater J, the Round House Theatre and theaters in Milwaukee, Minneapolis, to Hartford, Conn., to the Stratford Festival in Ontario. Her workplaces were as diverse as the roles she played—the range was phenomenal. Once you saw her in action, you never forgot her.

You never forgot Tatiana, Emily Dickinson, the addicted mother in Eugene O’Neill’s arduous, challenging “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” mad Margaret, reciting the king’s murders in “Richard III,” the vain egoist actress Arkadina in “The Seagull,” the flinty, tough-minded and tough-hearted grandmother of “Lost In Yonkers,” the vibratingly stubborn and creatively courageous woman in Athol Fugard’s “The Road to Mecca,” the grandmother back-boned with idealistic struggles encountering her grandson in “4000 Miles” or matter-of-factly summing up a road-wreck of confusing identities in “The Comedy of Errors.” We could all go on and on, and the result would be a parade of characters created from the page and her own gifts, marching down our memories forever.

This is what happens here, if you are a theatergoer on a frequent basis in our region, you accumulate characters because this is what happens in theaters and on stage. You walk away with stuff in your head, lines said a certain way, a shake of the head, a lean body standing straight as if to ward off affection, a fairy queen seen in a new way, calculating, smart and daring. It’s the only way we can remember actors. This is what they do to us when they are doing it right. They make not themselves unforgettable, but the parts they play, the people they become.

Hicken called her work acts of “transformations,” which is true and real, I suspect, for all actors.

Whenever you saw Hicken at work, here, there and everywhere, you were reminded of what a rich company of actors is at work in the region. If repertoire companies are rare, the sheer volume and quality of professional actors working in the Washington area’s theater companies is nothing short of amazing and rewarding. If you were fortunate enough to write about Washington theater, your memories are abundant—they come in scenes, in lines, in moments, from the work of remarkable actors and performers. This is what theater performance is all about—the sound of voices calculated to reach the farthest seats without shouting, the fact that you think you hear whispers, that the audience is in the company of fleeting moments made permanent by the sheer force of the talent of the actors on stage, and the sweat, the ideas, the back and forth of rehearsals that go into the process.

You may in the course of things have had opportunities to interview the actors, or talk with them on the phone, or share off-stage moments, occasions which make the memories of the work more vivid. Because it is the work that entangles us. The really good ones—and Hicken had 20 Helen Hayes nominations and some wins to show for her work—transform us, carry us with them, into the lives being created on stage.

I talked with Hicken on the phone when she was in the midst of playing the part of the gritty, very political old lady living in New York after a lifetime of fighting the establishment, confronted with the arrival of her young and troubled grandson on her doorstep in “4000 Miles” by the gifted playwright Amy Herzog (her “Belleville” kicks off the Studio Theatre season in early September). She was a little amazed about being considered a star on the Washington theatre scene. “My husband Donald and I have lived in Baltimore for years. That that’s what we consider home,” Hicken said.

I remember seeing her as Tatiana in an Arena Stage production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and thinking that I had never thought of her in that role, which was a failure of imagination, on my part, not hers. She brought out a sharp, sizzling, and combative quality in the role that made her very much a match for her husband Oberon, and poignantly overwhelmed after falling in love with an ass.

In the later parts of her career, she was on stage twice with one of the other gifts to Washington theater, the actress Holly Twyford, in “Lost In Yonkers” and “The Road to Mecca.” Her performance in “Yonkers” at Theater J was astonishing, and, like all of her work, unforgettable.

Ari Roth, artistic director of Theater J, called her “one of the great ones.” Joy Zinoman, founder of the Studio Theater, called her a “singular artist” and “a great actress.”
There will be a tribute at Everyman Theatre on Sept. 15. The Studio Theatre will hold a tribute to Hicken on Sept. 29 at 7 p.m.

Gary Tischler • August 20, 2014

“Sometimes, it’s hard to believe it all,” said Eric Schaeffer, the Artistic Director of Signature Theatre, which has begun its 25th anniversary with a characteristic production—in terms of the theatre’s history—of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park with George,” now running through Sept. 21.

This anniversary season will be full of what you might call Signature’s signature, its outlook, viewpoint, production history, interests, mission and style, and yes, there will be some emphasis, to paraphrase the late Robin Williams’s riff from “The Birdcage,” on “Sondheim, Sondheim, Sondheim” throughout the year.

Sondheim provided the theatre and Schaeffer with its breakout hit back at the start of the 1991-92 season, when it mounted an electric, critically acclaimed production of “Sweeney Todd,” Sondheim’s dark and exciting take on the murderous barber of Fleet Street. “It was just our second season, and that, for sure, jumped us right out into the public eye. It’s still a little startling when you think about it.” The show won a slew of Helen Hayes awards, which was a big deal for a theatre that was only in its second season, operating out of a renovated garage in an iffy neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia.

“You’ve got to remember a little of what theater in Washington was like twenty-five years ago,” Schaeffer said. “Outside of Woolly Mammoth, which was always edgy, and reveling in plays by new playwrights, it was pretty much a large-venue scene,” Schaeffer said. “In terms of musicals, certainly, and straight plays, we were doing something different, and we still are.”

Schaeffer clearly has an affinity for Sondheim, whose often dark, daring works don’t necessarily travel well into the hinterlands. “I think he’s unique in the history of American musical theater—certainly what he did was a departure from what came before. You never know what he’s going to do next. I mean, who else would write a musical about a serial killer in Victorian England, about presidential assassins, a very dark version of Grimm’s fairy tales, and the life and loves of the French Iimpressionist scene.”

The theatre was started 25 years ago by Schaeffer and Donna Magliaccio and has consistently pioneered all kinds of theater efforts. It’s stated mission was “to produce contemporary musicals and plays, reinvent classic musicals, develop new work, and reach its community through engaging educational and outreach opportunities.”

It’s fair to say that Signature has done just that, mounting plays by new authors, serving up Sondheim (and Sondheim-like) musicals, and workshopped and fully formed new musicals (“Giant,” a musical version of the George Stevens film class and Edna Ferber move comes to mind), as well as providing new playwrights, many of them local, a venue to explore their work.

There’s more. In 2007, Signature moved to new digs in Shirlington Village, a spiffy space with a main stage and two black box theaters. The relocation caused a certain amount of economic revival in the area, much as Arena and Studio, and Woolly and the Shakespeare Theatre have done in their respective neighborhoods. It attracts about 70,000 theatergoers a year.

Schaeffer been a true theatrical pioneer. He directed key productions in the hugely successful and celebrated Sondheim festival at the Kennedy Center a number of years ago. He’s been a champion of collaboration. Recently Signature’s co-production of “Hello Dolly” with Paul Tetreault’s Fords Theater shared a Helen Hayes Award for best resident musical. The rewards have been many—320 Helen Hayes Award nominations and 82 Hayes Awards.

“I think the collaboration, working with others, and with authors, encouraging new scripts, keeps everything exciting,” Schaeffer, who’s now working on a production of “Gigi” for the Kennedy Center’s theater season, said.

In December, the curtain goes up on the world premiere musical version of the hit movie, “Diner,” by pop-rock star Sheryl Crow and film director Barry Levinson. A revival of the musical “Elmer Gantry” and “Sex With Strangers,” a new play by Laura Eason directed by Aaron Posner hit the boards in October.

And in 2015, there will be “Simply Sondheim” in April. It’s an original tribute and revue created by Schaeffer featuring six Signature performers and a 16-piece orchestra celebrating the gifted American genius and in many ways, Signature’s inspirational soul. Signature has done 23 productions of Sondheim works over the years, including this second go-around with “Sunday in the Park with George.”

The George in question is impressionist painter Georges Seurat, famous for his “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” which is the focus of the musical. The musical, by Sondheim and James Lapine, won a Pulitzer Prize for drama, one of the few musicals to ever win that award.

“Sondheim’s creations were different from anyone else,” Schaeffer said. “That’s also what we’re trying to do—new and original shows, new ways of approaching old shows.”

Gary Tischler • August 7, 2014

“Carrie: The Musical,” now at the Studio Theater’s 2nd Stage, carries a lot of baggage.

Everyone remembers the source material. “Carrie” was one of horror novelist’s Stephen King’s first big successes in 1974, with its story of a high school girl who is an outcast, lives with a scary ultra-religious mother and has tele-kinetic powers. The 1976 movie version, directed by Brian de Palma and starring Cissy Spacek in the title role with Amy Irving and Piper Laurie, became a huge hit, resonant with teens and adults alike, and scary as all get out. There’s also a fairly recent but not so successful movie remake.

On top of that, there’s “Carrie: The Musical,” legendary in a not so good way, a production staged on Broadway in 1988 to the tune of around seven to eight million dollars in production costs, with a three-day run after some scathing reviews, making it the one of Broadway’s biggest flops ever.

But wait: Things aren’t so bad on 14th Street in D.C. after all. “Carrie: The Musical” isn’t “Carrie,” the movie, by any means, but it’s hardly flop-worthy in its Studio incarnation, directed by Keith Alan Baker and Jacob Janssen, and featuring a big-voiced, moving star turn by newcomer Emily Zickler as Carrie White.

The musical—described often somewhat mistakenly as a rock musical—remains the work of composer Michael Gore with lyrics by Dean Pitchford and a book by Lawrence D. Cohen, which hews fairly closely to the book, with some differences.

As a musical, “Carrie” is more of a pop-rock opera: there are 25 musical numbers performed by a fierce, high-energy cast, a mix of soaring, sometimes searing and soft ballads, jump up and down guitar-driven power numbers. The songs and the music aren’t necessarily memorable—there’s no “Wicked”-like “Gravity” number, for instance, but taken as a whole, they make their impression, carry the story along with energy and fit the material emotionally.

And it’s the whole that counts here, not so much individual incidents, although individual cast members Zickler, Barbara Walsh as her crazed, God-sick mom, Maria Rizzo as Sue, a sympathetic class mate, Robert Mueller as Tommy Ross, the likeable star jock who wants to be a writer, and Eben K. Loan as the hating, hateful high school mean queen Chris do stand out.

It’s still the same old story—Carrie, a 17-year-old misfit in high school and ignorant of sex and the world, discovers the onset of menstruation in a shower with her classmates, for which she is mercilessly bullied. She lives with her mother, who keeps her away from boys by locking her up in a closet and forces her to pray constantly.

Sue Snell, the school nice girl who’s dating Tommy, the star jock, takes pity on Carrie, and makes her try to fit in by making Tommy ask her to the prom. The result is all too familiar to most of us, even if the original novel is 40 years old.

It is the staging as much as anything that pulls you in here. It’s the intimate setting of the smallish fourth floor theater at the Studio, with the results that you’re always fairly close to the actions and the actors, who emote, dance group and re-group, and sing their hearts out within sometimes inches, and feet of the audience. And the directors and designer make do mostly with imagination—this is not a million-dollar set, but a door opening here, closing there, lights shifting the scenes and acting as a kind of malleable, moving set. There’s nothing fancy here, except the choreography of shifting the groups around the stage, until all of them become familiar. What’s special isn’t the blood and guts but the young characters on stage.

There are some effective, kinetic (no pun intended) moments here—“A Night We’ll Never Forget,” which opens the second act, is resonant of the cast preparing for the dance in “West Side Story,” Zickler displaying vocal and emotional range in Carrie’s plaintive “Why Not Me?,” the lovely “Unsuspecting Hearts” and “Once You See,” Walsh singing powerfully her own youthful memories in “I Remember How Those Boys Are.”

Because Zickler has made Carrie so appealing with her uncertainty, her yearning to be normal, her painfully shy stance with Billy, the story moving at a train-wreck speed, makes you afraid for her, it fills you with dread, but also expectations. How will they stage her ragingly destructive power, how will the ultimate bad trick of the bucket of blood work out?

Well, it’s not the movie, but it still has the power to shock. Wisely, I think, the production lays off high-tech spectacle. Carrie’s power may be horrific and weird, but it’s the deed that counts.

The musical-opera has a lot of punch, surprisingly so, given the reputation of the original production. There’s a lot of talent on display here, fresh, volatile. It’s a full-throttle reminder that life can still be like high school. It’s not rock and roll, but I like it.

Gary Tischler •

That’s some bird, that stupid f—–g bird.

That would be “Stupid F——g Bird,” the play by director-playwright Aaron Posner, now getting resurrected in zingy, audience-pleasing style for a late-summer run at the Woolly Mammoth Theater. It will be directed by Woolly’s stalwart ‘s artistic director and founder Howard Shalwitz.

You might remember that “SFB,” Posner’s deft, irreverent riff on Anton Chekov’s “The Seagull” in a very contemporary and near-interactive mode debuted last summer as a play commissioned by Woolly as part of its “Free the Beast” program, an ambitious ten-year project that supports new plays (some 25 new works) through workshops, commissioning and research.

And look what happened.

It’s not every day that a regional theater gives birth to a play that is so defiantly theatrical that it succeeds beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. The play won two Helen Hayes awards for Best New Play and Best Resident Play for the 2013-2014 season. Not only that the play moved on to very successful- productions in Boston and Los Angeles.

“We thought it would be great to look at it again, from the audience standpoint and from the artist’s—the actors, myself, Aaron and the designers,” Shalwitz said. “And you know, this whole thing has just been amazing. It’s a kind of phenomena, yeah, sure. I mean, you remember the thing where Con asks the audience to give him advice on how to win back Nina’s affections, right? Well, the preview audiences were ready for it. This time, I think we saw a lot of repeat attendees from last year’s productions.”

“I just think Aaron came up with something new, but it was a trick thing, you know,” Shalwitz said. “I think he (and the whole production team) accomplished something very difficult to bring off. You can read this and not necessarily get the whole sense of it. It wasn’t a rip-off of Chekhov, or some sendup that totally disrespected the original, because that play was full of pathos, but was also, in its own quieter way, funny and nearly tragic. We always know what play we’re in. And so do the actors. We’re here now, so to speak.”

Which is why an actor comes on the stage and says, “Start the f—–g” play.

The “SFB” in question is a seagull who, in both the original and Posner’s version meets an unhappy end by the hand of Con, the angst-ridden, mother-issues semi-hero of this saga, a would-be-poet-artist-playwright who wants to discover new forms, a new kind of art and new life in the utmost serious way. He’s also in love—grandly, operatically, hopelessly, and close to suicide —with Nina, a feverish, beautiful young would-be actress with whom he’s staging a new-form play for the benefit of his mother Emma, who is a famous star of stage, screen and everything else, as well as for her new lover, a famous writer.

We’re in familiar territory here. These are Americans who could be found in People Magazine, theatricals of the celebrity world. Here’s Posner, making it here and now as in “here we are,” the oft-repeated phrase that Nina uses in Con’s little play.

“Aaron found new forms, too, for contemporary theater,” Shalwitz said. “The actors talk to the audience. They’re self-aware of being in a play. They want involvement. They don’t want to be alone with their problems, and so it is a new form. That pathos in the original is here, too. I think it’s changed a little from where we started. With that, audience connections, it changes a little every time out. “

The language—pungent (life sucks, or the f-word like a loud intruder at a party) also manages to be poetic, a delicate balancing act for actors. There are times when the play seems almost too smart and hip by half, too inside-theaterish. But when you have a cast like this one—the same one that appeared in the original—such a complaint can be reduced to a quibble.

“It’s been some time for the actors and the designers, too, so they don’t have the habit of doing the roles for some time,” Shalwitz said. “They’ve done other parts, and will move on to other parts—Kimberly Gilbert, who plays Masha, is going to play the lead in ‘Marie Antoinette,’ our season opener.”

Gilbert, a Washington treasure, in fact, is one of the acting standouts in this production, playing Mash, the cryptic, depressed young woman, who’s smitten with Conrad—Con to us—but settles for Dev, a practical guy who thinks he has little to recommend him, but ends up with Mash. Mash is a jewel, albeit with some ash on her—she introduces the acts playing the ukulele, dressed in punk black and singing sad songs (“Life is disappointing”) in a kind of bright-eyed, knowing way that contradict the content. Gilbert has a gift for understated emoting and emotion, which is perfect for Mash.

While Kate Eastwood Norris, in the part of Emma, the slightly aging diva actress, Cody Nickell as the facile super-writer Doyle, Darius Pierce as Dev, and Brad Koed as Con and Katie Debuys as Nina are all fine in inventive ways. It’s Rick Foucheux who grounds the play and straddles the line between Chekhov and Posner, then and now, nuanced and way cool, with aplomb as Sorn, the good doctor. He’s the observer, and he’s us in a way—astounded at the keen and keening emotions of the various lovers and would-be lovers. He’s like an audience to a feast, bemused, and moved, and by being his own expansive self, he explains it all to us.

What Shalwitz, Posner and company have accomplished is indeed to present something new. A new form, it respects and then invites the audience and knows that it’s always a complicit partner in a play being performed. As I’ve said more than once, there’s no app for that.

*”Stupid Fuc—g Bird” runs at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre through Aug. 17.*

Gary Tischler • July 17, 2014

If you were alive and young in the 1950s and early 1960s, Elvis may have been king of rock and roll, but the Everly Brothers—Don and Phil—and their music and songs went straight to the top of the charts right along with him.

The duo had hits like “Wake Up Little Suzy,” “Cathy’s Clown,” “All I Have To Is Dream,” “Bye Bye, Love,” “Bird Dog” and a host of others which every teenager worth his name memorized. They had a look—part country, part rock and roll and part pop, two young guys from the south, a little pre-Conway Twitty, pompadoured hair, guitars, the whole package.

And they’re back, in a fashion, on June 28 in Georgetown.

Newmyer Tribute Productions will present a Tribute to the Everly Brothers at Gypsy Sally’s on K Street in Georgetown Saturday with doors opening at 5 p.m. It’s a tribute, featuring some of the area’s top award-winning groups and musicians, including David and Ginger Kitchen, Jelly Roll Mortals, Dede Wyland and Bill Williams, Ruthie Logsdon, Greg Hardin and Bill Starks (of Ruthie and the Wranglers), Buck Stone and Michelle Murray, Willie Barry, the Hummingbirds, Louie Newmyer, Andy Rutherford, Jimi Lethbridge, Amy Sullivan, Bill Baker, Derek Brock and the Lofgren Brothers (Tom, Mike and Mark).

Ron Newmyer, the producer from BandHouse Gigs, is known for producing an array of tribute concerts over the years at a variety of venues, including Strathmore, the Hamilton, the Fillmore and the Barns at Wolf Trap, including tributes to the music of Woodstock, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Simon and Garfunkel and the English Invasion.

“The Everly Brothers had an enormous influence on other groups that followed,” Newmyer said. “The Beatles, for one, really were impressed by their harmonies, and that’s what the Everly Brothers were about. They weren’t exactly rockers. They were part rock, part country and pop. They had enormous success with their songs, and that’s saying something since they recorded when Elvis was king.”

“It’s especially fitting now that we had a tribute to them, since Phil Everly died in January,” Newmyer said. “People are going to get a chance to hear all the popular songs like ‘Suzy’ and ‘Dream,’ but they’re also going to hear songs that they’ve probably never heard before.”

One of the top performers in the tribute concert will be Ruthie Logsdon along with her fellow players from Ruthie and the Wranglers, Greg Hardin and Bill Starks. If you haven’t heard or seen Logsdon at some point during the last 25 years, you don’t’ get out much. “We’ve played everywhere we can play,” she said. “Festivals, county fairs, clubs, and all kinds of venues in the area.” It’s paid off, too—Ruth and her fellow musicians—who now write most of their own songs, have won dozens of Wammies—from the Washington Area Music Association, and are considered by many to be one of the top examples of fast-paced, rock-a-billy, twangy, infectious music makers.

“We don’t do too many slow sings,” Logdon said. “We’re naturally upbeat.”

“I used to be the girl that hung out with musicians, and I’d say, yeah, I’d like to sing, sure, hey, guys, I can sing, kind of thing, I was kind of shy,” she said. But she’s gone far beyond that. Listen to the Wranglers, her natural way with both a twangy, slow ballad, or upbeat, authentic countrified hillbilly music, you can see why the group makes for a popular show.

“When we play, all of us, there’s just such joy and energy in doing it,” she said. “It never gets old. We’re always writing. We’re always playing. It takes a lot of work. You’re always touring. You’re going from radio station to radio station.”

While Logdon is also a graphic artist, most of her friends are musicians. “That’s the world I live in,” she said.

“The thing about the Everly Brothers is that it’s the harmonies,” she said. “They’re just unforgettable. They’re so beautiful.” For the tribute Saturday, Lodson said, “We’re going to do some songs people may not be familiar with, duets and the like. We’ll be doing ‘Gone, Gone Gone,’ ‘Long Time Gone’ and ‘Over So Many Years.’ ”

Ruthie and the Wranglers celebrated 25 years of Wrangler Twang a week before at Gypsy Sally’s.

Gary Tischler •

One of the great joys of the Capital Fringe Festival is that a theatergoer—avid, serious or just tasting—is sure to encounter an experience of the kind that they won’t get anywhere else. Given the volume of theater groups, shows and performers, this is not a guarantee or promise of quality or excellence, which is something that reveals itself in the performance, but it is a promise of things different and new.

Something similar has always been at work in any production put out there by Scena Theater for over two decades under its artistic director and founder Robert McNamara at venues throughout the D.C. area, operating as a kind of one-theater, mini-fringe outfit over time. Eastern European plays, the classics back to Greece, explorations of dada, Fassbinder, modern Irish playwrights, short plays by the avant garde giants like Beckett, Genet and Ionesco, there was always something that was new and refreshing, and often never seen before on Washington stages.

I cannot be entirely sure about this, but one thing you rarely saw in any of McNamara’s and Scena’s productions was McNamara himself, even though he is a veteran and experience actor. By way of the Fringe Festival, now we get a chance to see McNamara the actor in a production that seems to be the very essence of what McNamara and Scena, and by extension, the Fringe is all about.

In “Report to the Academy,” McNamara portrays Red Peter, an ape who has seemingly buried his ape self in order to survive in the human world, and who’s now reporting on his life as a quasi-human to an audience of academics, and ourselves. It’s based on a story by Franz Kafka—the great novelist and short story writer from Prague who write terrifying stories in German about issues of identity in modern society. Gabriele Jakobi, who directed Brecht’s “Mother Courage and her Children” at Scena,” directs “Report to the Academy,” which is being performed at the edgy Caos on F gallery.

Red Peter may be an ape, but don’t confuse “Report to the Academy” with the serendipitous arrival of “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” in your local cineplexes. Red Peter is no Caesar. He’s a being trapped between two worlds, trying to understand himself and the world he lives in. McNamara arrives on stage almost in a limping dance, carrying a tightly-wound cane, he looks on first sight like a slightly tipsy, shaggy vaudeville trouper, or perhaps one of the tramps in “Waiting for Godot,” canvassing the audience with eyes that appear at turns curious, sly, contemplative, challenging.

What follows isn’t so much a report as a story, a contemplation of a journey, of becoming—almost—human, the process of transformation with losses and gains, gains and losses.

It’s a bravura performance by McNamara on a stage that has nothing but a table and a chair, a little lighting and a little day music. Red Peter isn’t bitter. He has obviously thought long and hard about his predicament, about human beings, himself as an ape, himself as a human. He recounts his capture and being shot: “I was hit twice, grazed on the cheek for which I bear a scar, and in the body, a more serious injury.” His dilemma became simple to him—he was being held in a cage, in which he could not sit, stand or lie down. “I had to find a way out , there was no way out, you could only squat,” he says, in dreamy words that seem part lecture, part a discussion of pain.

In order to be free, he understood that he had to abandon his apeness. “They plied with me liquor, “ he says. But he also got to interact with his captors, simple, sometimes brutal sailors by acting like them—drinking, shaking hands, and all that act entailed. “Humans seek freedom, total freedom, which is not natural, as experienced in nature,” he said. Whimsically, he recalls seeing trapeze artist flying true and through the air, being caught, flinging themselves into air. “It was an illusion of freedom.”

The ape, in the end, learns to speak—and in a very nuanced way, like a pedagogue who is also a poet. He launches on a career on the vaudeville stage, a successful one at that. In the process, he gives himself up, a kind of imposed cruelty. “It was either the stage or the zoo,” he explains.

As he tells his stories, you see a kind of self-awareness that is shockingly sad as well as funny. He cannot recall himself in the mirror. And McNamara gives himself little bits, like an actor, a vaudevillian, a song and dance man. His limp often changes, his gait has a foot dangling at times, at other times dancing, he slouches, stands tall, and occasionally, spurts of ape yips and laughter, desire and joy come out of him, as if escaping by memorized accident.

Many writers and observers see the story as a fable and parable about assimilation, which could certainly be true, given Kafka’s own issues about his identity (see also “Metamorphosis”). These days, with a heightened societal awareness of cruelty towards animals, that issue also pops up per force.

McNamara—in his studied, layered ways, his ticks and tricks, his intensity and his unstill ways—makes Red Peter someone, somebody, neither ape nor a man, but a living, thinking, speculative being with a searing soul.

“Report to an Academy” is at Caos on F July 15, 19, 25 and 27. Go to the Fringe Festival website for details at capitalfringe.org

Richard Selden • June 30, 2014

“We’re radical subversives,” asserts Joe Horowitz, former New York Times music critic and author of eight books, including a 2005 history of classical music in America that the Economist named one of the best books of the year.

Horowitz is executive director of Post-Classical Ensemble, a D.C.-based “experimental orchestral laboratory” that has completed ten seasons of thematic, cross-disciplinary programming and educational collaboration, with another on the way.

On June 12, the Austrian Cultural Forum hosted an event announcing the ensemble’s 2014-15 season, which will include two of its signature immersion experiences: “Iberian Mystics: The Confluence of Faiths,” part of the Kennedy Center’s Iberian Festival in March, and “A Mahler Portrait.”

The event was also a launch party for Post-Classical’s new Naxos CD, “Dvorák and America,” featuring the “Hiawatha Melodrama,” a work for narrator and orchestra created by Horowitz and Dvorák scholar Michael Beckerman using excerpts from the “New World Symphony” and Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha.”

The culminating event of next season’s Mahler programming will take place on April 28 at the Austrian Cultural Forum, when baritone Christoferen Nomura will sing “Songs of a Wayfarer” and the “Abschied” from “The Song of the Earth” with the ensemble. In between, the audience will watch a playlet about the marriage of Gustav and Alma.

Among the related events is a Nov. 23 performance at Georgetown University of Mahler’s “Symphony No. 4” and “Kindertotenlieder” by the Georgetown University Orchestra conducted by Angel Gil-Ordóñez.

Madrid-born Gil-Ordóñez is music director of both Post-Classical Ensemble – which he cofounded with Horowitz in 2003 – and the Georgetown University Orchestra. Former associate conductor of Spain’s National Symphony Orchestra, he studied with Pierre Boulez and Iannis Xenakis in France and worked closely with legendary conductor Sergiu Celibidache in Germany.

Gil-Ordóñez, who met Post-Classical’s cofounder through a mutual friend in 1997, says that Horowitz “opened my eyes about the future of orchestras.” Horowitz immediate adds: “If there is to be a future.”

The two have created a unique model in which, first, a small orchestra of excellent musicians plays works that are in one way or another outside the standard classical repertoire; and, second, these works are put in context through film and other visual media, drama, dance and commentary. Post-Classical’s tenth season, for example, concluded with a bilingual multimedia presentation, songs of the Mexican Revolution and a screening of the 1936 film “Redes” accompanied by a live performance of the score, composed by Silvestre Revueltas.

Next season is also Post-Classical’s second as ensemble in residence for Dumbarton Concerts at Georgetown’s Dumbarton Church. The ensemble performs in the center of the church, and Gil-Ordóñez praises the acoustics, especially in the lower range: “This octave between cello and bass is extraordinary.”

*Post-Classical will present a program called “Bach and the Divine” at Dumbarton Church on Nov. 15, when bass-baritone Kevin Deas will sing the solo cantata “Ich habe genug” with the ensemble. Another work, “Nun ist das Heill,” will be performed with audience members singing along. Georgetowner readers who like to sing are encouraged to sign up for the optional rehearsals by emailing info@postclassical.com.*