Performance

Gary Tischler • November 27, 2012

Jekyll & Hyde”, the pop-rock-musical version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous novel about a doctor who tries to separate good from evil and instead runs afoul of evil inside himself in the horrific person of Edward Hyde, may have been a grand guignol. It’s an entertaining novel, but it’s a strange sort of musical.

The show—now on a road trip before returning to Broadway from whence it came—has its own problem with schizophrenia or even multiple personalities in terms of being a musical. First of all, it’s been redone in terms of some new songs added, another repositioned and restaged, all of which may be fine, but we’re going to go with what we saw at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House having seen nothing else except an old Spencer Tracy movie version of the novel.

As contemporary musical entertainment, this production delivers to what appears to be a loyal fan base, conjuring up a good deal of spectacle and imaginative staging, plus the added attraction of a high-powered and top-drawer cast. The problem is not in the stars—which includes Constantine Meroulis (a runner-up on the fourth American Idol series) pop and r&b star Deborah Cox and the terrifically gifted Teal Wicks (Elphaba in “Wicked”). The problem is that the production, originally conceived as a concept album starring Colm Wilkes and Linda Eder, before going to Broadway where it ran for several years, even with the tinkering still seems derivative of other shows—there’s a whiff of “Les Miz”here and there, and stronger in terms of look and feel, “Phantom of the Opera”, and who knows, arena rock shows in some of its music and singing.

“Jekyll & Hyde”—conceived by Frank Wildhorn, with book and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse, music by Frank Wildhorn and direction by Jeff Calhoun—certainly knocks your eyes out in horror-movie fashion and with up-to-the-minute staging stuff—a scene in which Hyde and Jekyll occupy the stage at the same time makes use of video technology, as opposed to what used to involve the shaking of long hair.

It seems to me that the music is what passes for much too much Broadway composing these days—it’s made for voices who have learned to hold a note, complete with vibrato for a durable length of time that comes close to asphyxiation. This sort of music—the best of it can be heard in “Bring Him Home” from Les Mis and “The Phantom of the Opera”—is impressive when it contains operatic, pitch-felt emotions and brings audiences out of their chairs, but there are times here when its just an impressive feat not a moment of heartbreak. And the lyrics include feats of rhyming that are not in the least startling, but predictable.

All of that being said, as the emperor in “Gladiator” might put it, I was entertained, if not thrilled. Some of that had to do with the comfort zone of a familiar plot—a doctor playing god by eliminating evil from man’s makeup, gets too strong a dose of it, and ruins himself by bringing to life his inner psychotic,with murderous results.

Hyde, sung in growly, loud, raspy style by Meroulis, storms across the stage laying everything to waste, most notably the members of the board who run the hospital where Dr. Jekyll works. They’re a loud, vivid bunch of Victorian Age one percenters, a regular rich rogue’s gallery from a haughty grand dame, a lecherous, predatory bishop, a useless barrister, to a pompous model of a British major general, of the kind that Gilbert and Sullivan skewered regularly. Hyde does some skewering also.

Jekyll, going deeper into the muck, has to solve the problem of his women—one of them Lucy, a true lady of the night with a heart of gold and Ella, his delectable fiancé. The two are mightily dissimilar both in performance and voice—Cox plays Lucy with warm realism, her rangy pop voice hitting every song out of the park, including the appealing “Bring on the Men” and Teal has a chandelier-breaking voice and performing skill that brings a thankless part to life.

Meroulis throws himself into the task with such fervor—over the top in acting, on the money with his hold-on-to-your-seat rock arena voice—that you might want to ask for a recount on the American Idol vote.

This “Jekyll & Hyde”, which is taking another shot at Broadway, is as good as it can be,never more and never less than that, given the material. In the theater, that’s enough for a worthy night out.
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Robert Devaney • November 26, 2012

Last Wednesday, The S&R Foundation hosted the DC Jazz Festival Annual Trustee Reception at the Evermay Estate in Georgetown. The reception included a cocktail party, followed by a performance by 10-time Grammy winner Paquito D’Rivera performed with guitarist Yotam Silberstein and pianist Alex Brown.

Before the performance, Dr. Sachiko Kuno a founder gave opening remarks, as well as DC Jazz Fest founder and executive producer Charlie Fishman.

During his performance, D’Rivera switched between alto saxophone and guitar to play Jazz Meets the Latin Classics. The setlist included some original compositions, as well as playful takes on well-known classical music pieces.
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Gary Tischler • November 21, 2012

With the current production of “The Aliens” at the Studio Theatre, Washington theatergoers will have had an opportunity to take in the entire output of the very hot, young playwright Annie Baker-although she’s said to be working perhaps not surprisingly on a translation of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” and a new play is slated to debut in New York in January.

In photographs of her, the overall impression-while attractive-seems slight and wispy, and that also is the initial impression you might get of her plays—”Circle Mirror Transformation”, staged at the Studio several years ago, “Body Awareness”, staged as Theater J’s season opener this year, and now “The Aliens”. Insofar as Ms. Baker is concerned, that is probably a misleading impression. With her plays, it’s a wrong impression, although that’s not so obvious to the naked mind or heart. Certainly her track record-numerous awards including Obies and Outer Circle Critics Awards-and critical acclaim almost everywhere her plays have been staged-belies any sort of lack of depth and power.

Baker’s work is tricky and sneaky. It has a cumulative effect, like a junk yard dog at the pound you don’t immediately think of rescuing, let alone loving. It’s an odd process, watching one of her plays—you get twitchy with impatience almost right from the start—until there comes a point where you’re nailed to your seat with angst and alarm, the glue being an odd sort of empathy.

It isn’t that Baker simply abandons traditional dramaturgy. Each of the three plays has a requisite number of secrets that emerge with varying degrees of power. The secrets, while effective and punchy dramatically, are almost beside the point. It’s the characters and language that count and one of Baker’s gifts is to be able to articulate, with realism, poetry and humor, the general inarticulateness of American personal communication and interaction. She has her thumb on what it’s like to be alive in today’s world.

She is also a writer who manages to work from a particular locale and region. William Inge’s Midwest comes to mind in her case. New England generally and suburban, small-town Vermont in particular and make the specific universal. The members of an amateur acting class in “Circle Mirror Transformation”, the lesbian couple living in a small university town, and now the two classic slackers hanging out barely in the back of a restaurant in “The Aliens” are specific to a place, but we already know them, and recognize them.

That’s important, because Baker-although she can be funny, and knows her way around emotional combat zones, doesn’t necessarily make it easy for audiences, if not critics. That’s especially true with “The Aliens”, while it has beautifully-and-smartly written dialogue, also has great big patches of silence in which no one says anything, in which you can hear and see the characters breathing. This can be a stretch for some audiences used to bang-bang writing, or evocative language, or yelling and screaming familial battles. Beckett comes to mind, but not so much Mamet or Shakespeare where the rest is silence not the beginning.

“The Aliens” is a three-character play, and we first see two of them, KJ and Jasper, in the back of a delapitated restaurant, amid garbage cans and a degraded old wooden table-bench-chair ensemble. KJ, looking a little like a ragged, undersized beached whale, is lying on top of the table, nearly out cold, sometimes humming, but otherwise not saying a word. Jasper, tall, thin, with a ragged beard like his chum, is pacing nervously, chain-smoking some odious cigarettes.

Nothing happens for quite a while. Jasper paces, KJ breathes in and out, with the hums. It seems almost that Baker is testing the boundary line where some people might walk out. Certainly people fidget. Anyone would. Silence may be golden but its not sacred.

But they do begin to talk about things: Jasper’s breakup with his girl, about Charles Bukowski the poet, about a friend of theirs that lives on a wind farm. These two you recognize as slackers who define the word, thirty somethings, lost and vaguely creative. They used to haves a rock band called-tadah-“The Aliens”-and Jasper is working on a novel quite seriously. He reads a lengthy, steamy sex scene from it to KJ who admits to getting aroused.

Along comes Evan, a high schooler who appears to be nervous about them being in the back. “It’s not allowed,” he says, but Evan too is something of a wayward spirit, fearful of a lot of things, he’s also part of a nearby music camp. Soon enough, Evan, wisely, sharply played with smart confusion by Brian Miskell, ends up under their spurious and quite scorched wings.

The first act can be trying, because it clearly sets up the second act, which is devastating. To varying degrees, this has been Baker’s process in her other two plays. Something happens–can’t say what–and life changes like it always does, and yet, things remain difficult to say, to express, but still: this time, in addition to long periods of silent breathing, you can hear hearts in pain, wanting to scream, dance or sing something perfectly. They can’t of course, but they try, they always try in Baker’s world.

In a play like this, the audience watches everything like a hawk for clues. Young women seem charmed by the guys. Thirty-something guys seem to retreat into themselves, whether they’re alone or not. It was a guy with a purple tie who jumped out of his seat at the end, clapping.

In the end, “The Aliens” is like a mystery play. It seems to be true to life. The characters in the play keep trying to fill in gaps in language. They reach for words that elude them, but you can see them reaching. The kid’s words—when others don’t come—are always “um…cool”, still the catch-all words of at least three generations.

Watching this play is like crawling through a minefield with a spoon. You’re afraid it, they and you, are going to blow up. Scott McKenzie as KJ and Peter O’Connor as Jasper convey their dusty, long friendship with such art that, led by director Lila Neugebauer, almost everyone finishes the journey safely, accompanied by the shedding of, not blood, but heartfelt emotions.

(“The Aliens” is now at the Milton Theatre at the Studio)
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Gary Tischler • November 19, 2012

Linda Lavin is a Broadway baby.

Oh, sure, she had a huge hit television series as the harried, funny, wise waitress “Alice” for nine years beginning in 1976, and she’s done films and television. But her heart, her core, her voice, if you will, belongs to Broadway.

We caught up with Lavin, who’s performing at the Kennedy Center in the Barbara Cook’s Spotlight cabaret series at the Terrace Theater, Friday, Nov. 16, on the telephone just as she was moving.

“You’ll have to excuse me, the movers are here,” she said. She and husband Steve Bakunas are moving to New York after 17 years in Wilmington, N.C., where they ran the Red Barn Studio, a community theater art studio and school, happily, and left quite a stamp. She founded the Linda Lavin Arts Foundation there “to promote and foster the advancement of the performing and visual arts, with special emphasis on arts in education.” She also acted and directed in many of the plays there, including a memorable production of “Driving Miss Daisy” and “As You Like It.”

“It was time, but it’s a little hectic,” she said. “I ordered Chinese, and they’re here. We have to move the piano.”

Something in her voice sounds a little like Alice on a hectic day in the diner. She’ll be in DC –back again after a triumphant turn in the Broadway-bound “Follies” at the Kennedy Center last year—singing. “The songs are sort of a reflection of me,” she said. “There’s a lot of variety there, not just Broadway show tunes, but different kind of songs, different moods, a little story-telling, love songs.”

She sings the way she acts—honestly, fiercely, tenderly in a way that’s unforgettable. Her gig was a hit at 54 Below, a snazzy club in New York. And she has a certain comfort zone here: Bakunas is on drums, and jazz violinist Aaron Weinstein is also in the band.

And the reason she’s a Broadway baby? That’s where she started, for one thing, going back to “It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman,” when she sang “You’ve Got Possibilities.” It’s where she did “Broadway Bound (Tony Award),” the last part of Neil Simon’s autobiographical trilogy. It’s where she followed Tyne Daly in “Gypsy” and belted out Mama Rose’s laments and anthems. It’s where she was in a revival of “Collected Stories” and collected three other Tony nominations. More recently, she starred opposite Stacey Keach in “Other Desert Cities” and the acclaimed family drama “The Lyons” by hot playwright Nicky Silver.

And of course—she sang “Broadway Baby”—in a powerful outburst of feeling and defiance in “Follies.”

“Yes, I think you can safely say that theater, Broadway, that’s my home, my place, where I thrive,” she said. She explains the variety of characters—united by eccentricity passion and strength—by noting that there’s “a lot of different women inside of me. I don’t think I’ve heard all of them yet.”

“Alice,” of course, identifies her, marks her with familiarity to millions of people still. She’s not complaining. “What ‘Alice’ did, it freed me,” she said. “It made me very rich, which is not a bad thing. But I think, too, that so many women immediately recognized themselves in the role, in who she was. It was about women who struggled, the women they talked about in the election this year, who don’t get paid the same as men, who get through the day. That part is always a part of me.”

“It’s a big deal, this move, we created something here in Wilmington, and it was all very special,” she said.

Lavin, who was married twice before, has been with Bakunas, an actor, artist and musician, for a long time. They married in 2005. When it was a suggested that he might be “a keeper,” she laughed an Alice laugh. “He better be,” she said. “No, he’s a wonderful man, a great guy.”

That would be the guy playing the drums as Lavin takes the stage at the Kennedy Center.

Gary Tischler • November 6, 2012

THE KENNEDY CENTER

THE NATIONAL SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
The season starts officially in grand style for the 82nd year with the Season Opening Ball, as the charismatic NSO and Kennedy Center music director Christoph Eschenbach conducts and world-class star violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter performs Felix Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, headlining a varied program on Sept. 30 in the Concert Hall.

The initial non-gala event for the NSO will come Oct. 4 to 6, when Eschenbach conducts mezzo-soprano Kelley O’Connor singing Lieberson’s “Neruda Songs” as part of a romantic program that includes works by Wagner and Tchaikovsky.

NSO Pops
Hometown lady Roberta Flack is back in her home town with the NSO Pops Orchestra in “Roberta’s Back in Town” featuring many of her famous songs as well as songs from her new Beatles-keyed album, Oct. 25 to 27. Steven Reineke conducts the NSO Pops Orchestra with Flack, who’s famous for such hits as “Killing Me Softly” and “The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face.”

Kennedy Center’s Own Jazz Club
With the passing of the legendary Billy Taylor, the KC Jazz Club now has a new artistic advisor in Jason Moran, a young innovator who will add a new spirit to the expanding KC jazz scene. The center also has a new performance space in the center’s atrium, the Supersized Jazz Club.

Performance-wise, vocalist Kurt Elling comes to the Terrace Theater on Oct. 27, while at the KC Jazz Club, now in its second decade, Mulgrew Miller and his trio, who opened the club in 2002, returns Oct. 5. Pianist and organist Dr. Lonnie Smith appears Oct. 6, and the vibrant Israeli clarinetist Anat Cohen comes to the center Oct. 19. The legendary Heath Brothers Jimmy and Albert “Tootie” appear Oct. 20. Moran and his group, The Bandwagon, appear Oct. 26.

History Comes Calling
Two very special concerts which showcase how music can bear witness and drive and interact with social change will be hosted by the Kennedy Center. On Oct. 14, there’s “This Land Is Your Land,” an all-star concert that pays tribute to the folk singer and troubadour Woodie Guthrie, who celebrated and sang of about working people, drifters and a nation in the midst of the Great Depression. In the process, he influenced and continues to influence generations of folk and blues singers, including Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan and his own son Arlo Guthrie. Gathering together for this “Woody Guthrie Centennial Celebration” include such top musicians as John Cougar Mellenkamp, Arlo Guthrie, the Old Crow Medicine Show, Tom Morello, Rosanne Cash, Judy Collins, Ry Cooder, Jackson Browne, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and others.

Coming Oct. 17 to 20, “Songs of Migration” is a musical salute to the great songs of migrants of the African continent created by trumpeter and composer Hugh Masekela, singer Sibongile Khumato and James Ngcobo.

The Barbara Cook Spotlight cabaret season opens Oct. 12 at the Terrace Theater with Maureen McGovern, who transformed herself from a pop singer to a great Broadway and cabaret performer.
And let’s not forget who’s getting the Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain Award for American Humor: Here’s Ellen, that is, Ellen DeGeneres, will get the prize Oct. 22 in the Concert Hall.

WASHINGTON PERFORMING ARTS SOCIETY
The Washington Performing Arts Society has been the top presenter of performing arts talent, both established and rising for over 40 years, connecting with venues large and small, from the Kennedy Center to the Music Center at Strathmore to the Harman Center to the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue.
Highlights for the next month or so include:

Israeli-born pianist Inon Barnatan kicks off the Hayes Piano Series, named after WPAS founder Patrick Hayes and his wife and with a mission to feature rising piano stars. Barnatan will be performing works by Debussy, Ades, RaVel, Britten and Schubert at the Terrace Theater Oct. 13.
Also on the immediate schedule are pianist Richard Goode (Terrace Theater, Oct. 11); Rob Kaplow’s series “What Makes it Good?” with pianist Brian Ganz focusing on Chopin (Oct. 14 at Baird Auditorium); violinist Paul Huang (Terrace Theater, Oct. 25); pianist Andras Schiff (Strathmore, Oct. 30) and superstar violinist Joshua Bell (Strathmore, Nov. 1).

THE MUSIC CENTER AT STRATHMORE
The Music Center at Strathmore, now in its seventh season, continues to supply performance seasons characterized by eclecticism and diversity, mixing the offerings of partners like WPAS, the National Philharmonic and the Baltimore Symphony with its own programming.

The center kicks off the season with Virginia’s own and America’s own rock-out pop star Pat McGee, as in the Pat McGee band which will feature a lineup that includes members of McGee’s very own high school band (Sept. 28).

Meanwhile, the torchy, iconic and always one-of-a-kind Patti LuPone continues the center’s American songbook series with “Matters of the Heart” (Oct. 5 and 6) in a concert of love songs featuring the works of a wide range of composers from Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim to Randy Newman, Jimmy Webb, Brian Wilson, Judy Collins, Dan Fogelberg, Joni Mitchell and Cyndi Lauper.

On Oct. 20, the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, described as “anarchic” and mind-bogglingly versatile brings the great, re-discovered ukulele to bear on music by the likes of the Who, Beethoven and Isaac Hayes.

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Marin Alsop, brings a season prevue performance to Strathmore, with excerpts from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, “West Side Story” and Christopher Rouse’s Ku-Ka-Ilimoku” among others, with Alsop presiding and offering commentary Sept. 13.
The National Philharmonic Orchestra will opens its season at the center with “Beethoven: The Power of Three” with Orli Shaham on piano and NPO director Piotr Gajewski conducting.

THE EMBASSY SERIES
Since 1994, Embassy Series founder Jerome Barry has been practicing his own form of cultural and musical diplomacy, and in the course of things, managing to create a unique and lasting Washington cultural institution. By doing what he and the Embassy Series did—a series of concerts by established and rising American and international musicians and artists performed in many of this city’s well-situated embassies, international cultural centers and residences of ambassadors—they managed to introduce an accumulatively large audience over time to the international community in our midst and vice versa.

In the process, he also built bridges by producing concerts in such places as the Iraqi Cultural Center, the Cuban Interest Section and the Middle Eastern community reflecting their music and culture as well as receiving strong support from the European community and its traditionally Western classical music and performers.

This year’s season begins at the Embassy of Latvia with the popular violinist Lorenzo Gatto, with Robert Giordano on piano on Oct. 4, followed by an Oct. 10 concert at the Embassy of Hungary, with mezzo-soprano Veronika Dobi-Kiss and George Peachey on Piano. On Oct. 19, the Fairfax Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Christopher Zimmerman and with Edvinas Minkstimas on piano will perform at the Embassy of Austria. And on Oct. 31, Andre Goricare, the silent film pianist, will perform at the Embassy of Slovenia.

THE FOLGER CONSORT
The Folger Consort adds another aspect of Londonmania to our all-London summer consciousness with a return to its roots and opening its season with “London: Music from the City of Shakespeare,” Sept. 28 to 30 at the Folger Elizabethan Theatre.

THE CHORAL ARTS SOCIETY
Choral Arts opens its season Oct. 21 with “La Musica Latina,” a program of Latin American music from ballads to swinging salsa and rumba music, under the baton of new director Joseph Holt, with the Choral Arts Chamber Choir at Lisner Auditorium.

THE WASHINGTON BACH CONCERT
Washington Bach Concert celebrates its 35th season with a six-concert season, beginning with “Kings and Commoners,” a selection of music commissioned for state occasions, including works by Handel and Bach on Sept. 23 at the National Presbyterian Church.

THE IN SERIES
The beyond-category institution begins its 30th anniversary season “Prelude: Songs We Love” on Sept. 29 and Oct. 1 with a program of opera, cabaret, dance and zarzuela, no less.

DUMBARTON CONCERTS
Dumbarton begins with the Vida Guitar Quartet, comprised of some of England’s finest guitarists: Bizet’s “Carmen Suite,” Turina’s “Prayer of the Bullfighter” and de Falla’s “Love, the Magician” at the Dumbarton Methodist Church in Georgetown Oct. 20.
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Gary Tischler •

Vlad the Impaler, the original real his- torical figure from which sprung Bram Stoker’s fictional , blood-sucking anti- hero and the emergence of ballet as a dance art form are separated by less than a century, give or take.

It seemed to many that Dracula’s story—the one Bram Stoker wrote in the era of Victoria’s buttoned-up, repressed England—and ballet might make for a dreamy narrative match on the stage. That’s exactly what happens in the Washington Ballet production of “Dracula,” choreographer Michael Pink’s gory, heated, very bloody and seductive version of the tale at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater, now through Nov. 4.

Narrative ballet—from “Swan Lake”, to “Don Quixote,” to “Romeo and Julet”—as opposed to more abstract works of modern dance, have always seemed to me like the dream version of a story, it’s dreamt essence lying at the core of the tale, just as opera is fevered version of the same tale, with the emotions riding on the music, and drama and plays carry the narrative with character and words.

On those terms, “Dracula” surely feels like a dream, even if that dream resembles more often than not a nightmare. Actually, it begins with a nightmare, one dreamt by the much- put-upon Jonathan Harker. This “Dracula” is remarkably faithful to the Stoker tale, with its bedeviled, haunted Harker, the bug-eating, madhouse resident Renfield, who acts as a kind of portal for Dracula, the beguiling Lucy and her swains, Lord Arthur Godalming and the rifle-toting, buckskin-wearing American Quincy Morris, a very romantic-looking, Byronian Dr. Van Helsing, and Mina, Harker’s fiancé, the real object of Dracula’s sinister affections, as well as assorted couples, female vamps, gendarmes, and peasants, including a horde of infected victims of Dracula.

The production itself lets out all the stops with Lez Brotherson providing a set and costume design that encompasses Dracula hallmarks — the stark sanatorium, the imposing staircases, the castle, the graveyard, beds and cof- fins, all bathed in a score by Phillip Feeney full of bells and whistles and screeches and pounding heartbeats, the ominous sounds of a hungry heart accompanied by an impending feeding frenzy.

This production, (which was originally directed by Christopher Gable) has different casts in different productions, with Jared Nelson cast in the red-caped and ninja-black role of Dracula. This is about Dracula, no question, and his overpowering will to feast. The production – a nerve-wracking and haunting two hours plus event is wrapped, and stacked around the architecture of three seductions in which Dracula overpowers Harkin, visiting his castle on business, the flirtatious, enchanting Lucy at what appears to be a gala brunch of couples moving up and down a staircase, into chairs and out on to a dance floor, and Nina at night, alone in a bed, beckoning her to his bloody, bared chest.

These dances—and that’s what they are, almost classic manifestations of ballet, but also almost Olympic-style athletic feats—show us Dracula’s magnetic, physical powers, as well as his hypnotic powers and for Nelson—and also for the dynamic Jyum-Woong Kim—the require- ments for the parts are a display of emotions, strength and lean-muscled strength so that the effect on the audience is as hypnotic as those of his victims.
These three pa-de near-deaths are interjected like a stiletto into the production, which includes the desperate presence of Renfield, a kind of ritualized, loud, brazen and bloody peasant folk dance which ends with the sacrifice of a wolf.

In England, there’s a ball, and as much flirtatious, happy, stylized, fashionista and high energy style dancing to make you almost forget who’s coming to dinner. In this production, Nicole Haskins, makes for a heartbreaking Lucy, she’s so full of energy, such forgiveable flirtation that her submission to Dracula and her trans- formation into a bloody-tooth, virally hungry otherbeing is a tragedy.

The presence of Dracula—for the audi- ence—even when he’s not in plain sight provides the tension of a violin bow, it speeds up the nar- rative, no matter what’s happening. This way, it becomes an adventure tale which moves to a kind of action climax, one, by the way which is as graphically violent as a stage production can
manage.

Pink’s “Dracula” is like a loud, almost unbearably and frightening dream, the tale remembered at some primal level, becoming real. In this season, that’s not a bad fright night.?

Gary Tischler •

Cab drivers ask about these things. “Long, yes?” he asked. “Very long?” “Yes, it was long,” I replied. It clocked in at just under three-and-a-half hours. But maybe not long enough.

When you are talking about Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” time, quite often, but not always, flies. Ideally, you forget where you are, forget all your troubles, and become immersed, like going under, knowing you don’t have to worry about holding your breath.

“I saw ‘Amadeus’ when I was young. Mozart, yes, and the ending was about that, yes?” asked the cab driver. I saw “Amadeus,” too, when I was young, or not so young. Ever since I’ve wanted to see the opera, considered by many to be the best opera ever by anyone, no comfort to Salieri there. Well, here we were at last, better late than never.

This may be a shameful thing to admit, seeing—and hearing—“Don Giovanni” for the first time at my age, and I am a little bit ashamed. But not so much. On the other hand, it makes you feel chipper and young, knowing that there may yet be other great things to experience for the first time—winning the Powerball lottery, finding a signed Dickens book, meeting the Dalai Lama or Angelina Jolie, whichever.

Right now, there’s still time to see the Washington National Opera Company’s superb, bracing production of “Don Giovanni” (Sept. 29, Oct. 1, 4, 7 , 9 and 13), and it’s really, really worth it, whether you’ve seen it 100 times or never, whether you’ve got all the time in the world or the clock is running out.

You get a real sense of what Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was all about during the course of this production and it’s not actor Tom Hulce’s giggling man-child, but a deft, facile, include-the-whole-experience, bona fide ahead-of-his-time, modernist genius of a composer, raising every form and bit he touched to another level. That’s why “Don Giovanni” is considered the best—it lacks nothing except brevity. Wagner may have thought he was in the running, but Richard Wagner lacked a capacity for humor of any sort, at least in his operas. “Don Giovanni,” disconcertingly unclassifiable, is rich in humor—low and high, sly and naughty, earthy and witty, acting as a kind of sneezing pepper for an opera that wears and discards the mantle of a dark, philosophical tragedy until the end. In short, this is serious stuff that’s also funny, sensual and sexy, uncommonly deep and grandiose. And it flits from serenades to dances, to arias, to soaring symphonic orchestral music, sometimes all at the same time with such ease that you barely take breath between transitions. The music—the real, meaningful content—is a joy.

A friend of mine asked me the other day if I was going to see “Don Quixote” that night. I, of course, corrected him, but afterwards, thought that’s not so far off. “Giovanni” or Don Juan is not that far removed from the Spanish knight tilting at windmills and seeing saints in sinners and his trusty sidekick Sancho Panza are not that far apart. They’re exact opposites of extremes: Quixote has banished thoughts of sex and seduction totally from his mind—Giovanni thinks of nothing else. Quixote rides to the rescue, Giovanni is the man people—women—need rescuing from. Giovanni is all about his id, his world view and in that sense he is Quixote’s twin.

But life and operas and music and genius aren’t that simple. What we’re offered at the Opera House is a palette of complications paced close to perfection by director John Pascoe, who’s also provide the oversized sets and the odd costumes, apparently set in Franco’s Spain, but here and there mixing it up with Mozart’s time. He puts you right in the action—and there is a lot of action—with Giovanni, having attempted to seduce and then rape Donna Anna, killing her father and on the lam with his exasperated servant Leperello in the first 20 minutes or so.

And away we go, always sidetracked when Giovanni spies an available woman or unavailable (it matters not). He’s pursued by Donna Elvira whom he dumped and left with child, he spies a fetching young peasant girl Zerlina on the day of her wedding to Masetto and attempts to seduce her not once but any time he can, he’s hunted by Donna Anna and her fiancé Don Ottavio who want to avenge her father’s murder, and he’s chased by a mob before the statue of the man he murdered comes to his villa for dinner and takes him at last away to hell, unrepentant to the last.

And that’s not the half of it.

It pays to have a great “Don Giovanni” in this part. He must have the chops, the voice and the looks and Russian bass Ildar Abrazakov has all three, because you have to, if not be sympathetic to Giovanni, at least feel his powers. Otherwise, we’re just dealing with a rapist, a boor and a killer. For a bass, Abrazakov sings with great power, sure, but also with surprising range. Consider for a moment when he’s decides to seduce yet another woman with a street-level balcony serenade (the famous “deh, vieni alla finestra”). He’s on his knees, the voice lowers, pleading, sweet, an ode to beauty and desire, it’s pitched to passion and wanting, it’s so moving you can imagine someone’s really smart and pretty sister falling for it. It caused at least one man in the audience to elicit a loud “Bravo!” and loud clapping.

The cast is more than supportive: American soprano Meagan Miller, supple, strong and working with throat trouble and triumphing as Donna Anna; Italian soprano Barbara Frittoli, singing freely and with great passion as the conflicted and in-love Donna Elvira; Argentine soprano Veronica Cangemi as the bewildered peasant girl Zerlina, injecting continual fresh energy into the proceedings.

In the program, a writer refers to Mozart’s “Shakespearean Diversity,” and that’s exactly so. The richness of content in “Don Giovanni”—and Mozart had considerable help with his favorite librettist Lorenzo da Ponte—contains, like “Hamlet,” the world. And it’s a big world, after all.

Gary Tischler •

The voice on the phone didn’t give many clues. I expected to hear Janis Joplin’s growly, smoky voice, but,
after all, I was talking to Mary Bridget Davies. Davies stars in the current run of “One Night With Janis Joplin” at Arena Stage. She takes the stage performing, being, acting the part of Joplin, who for a time in the 1960s was the queen of rock and blues in America before she died of a heroin overdose in 1970.

Davies talks smartly, movingly about Joplin, the person and the music, the blues. She’s had plenty of experience herself singing the blues, and, well, being Janis. If you catch any of the videos on YouTube, the Joplin persona and voice and way of singing rises easily to the surface, and catches you full force.

“One way or another I’ve been singing her songs for a while,” Davies, a thirty-some- thing woman who hails from Lakewood near Cleveland, Ohio, says. “Even when I was little, people tell me I was jumping up and down on the couch singing ‘Piece of My Heart.’ ” That would be Joplin’s signature heartbreak song from her initial hit album “Cheap Thrills” back in 1968, when she bowled the rock world over with her emotional blues style and let-it-all-hang-out persona.

“I’m not her, in that sense,” she said. “But you know, when I get on stage in this show, there are times when I just sort of let her take over, I’m singing a song, and there she is and I just step aside.”

“One Night With Janis Joplin,” staged in partnership with the Cleveland Play House and written and directed by Randy Johnson, is a show on the order of a concert, but also a trip through the sources of Joplin’s particular bluesy style, by way of Sabrina Elayne Carten as the blues singer paying homage to African American blues singers like Etta James, Bessie Smith and Aretha Franklin.

Davies got the role after the original actress backed out, but she was more than ready. She had already performed in “Love, Janis,” had already the affinity for Janis’s music, had parents who were genuine members of the rock and roll, blues and country rock world, played and fronted with Big Brother and the Holding Company, Joplin’s original band, and has her own blues band and record her own albums.

“Yeah, you could say she was a big part of my life all along,” she said. “This is something special. It’s like being her on stage at least, and that’s okay, more than okay. She lived quite a life. She had this unique gift she didn’t even know she had. One day, she sang and she knew she could do it and that was that. The first kind of music she heard was “Summertime”, which she sang herself.” When she got the role, she played it in Cleveland and it was like a homecoming for her. One critic wrote that “While there never has been and never will be another Janis Joplin, Mary Bridget Davies is awfully damn close.”

“I think audiences really get it into it—and you get all kinds of people, people of that gen- eration, people my age, maybe even young, not teens so much unless their folks bring them,” she said. “I think they have the same reaction as people did back then. It’s the raw emotions. The songs are so out front, they get to you.

That was Joplin’s stock in trade—she laid herself out there, just about without any let up through songs like “Piece of My Heart”, “Me and Bobby McGee”, “Cry” and the difficult, wrenching “Ball and Chain”, a regular mountain for singers to climb.

“People said, well, she doesn’t exactly look like Janis, but then they get into it, and it’s some- thing different,” she said. “You have to wonder what she would have been like if she had lived.”

She’d be in her late sixties, or a little more, like her “Big Brother” band mates, and, Davies thinks “could have been like the soul or god- mother of country rock and the blues, because in truth, nobody sings like that anymore.”

Nobody, except maybe Mary Bridget Davies.

Gary Tischler •

Opening nights in the theater are always fraught with a certain danger, an intensity—and intenseness—of feeling that probably won’t occur later during the normal run of a show or production.

That was especially true in the case of “One Night With Janis Joplin,”, the Arena Stage-Cleveland Playhouse biographical showcase of the life, time and roots of the 1960s blues-rock singer-become-legend who died of an overdose in 1970 at the age of 27.

The opening night performance had an electric feel to it, a wobbly-time-machine feel, and an almost total willingness on the part of the audience to join in, dive in and swim in the pool of rowdy, rock and blues driven music that carried the evening along. There was, even before things got going, an air of anticipation, with people—a good many of them of that baby-boomer generation which embraced Joplin, the girl from Port Arthur, Texas, with gusto in live performances and with record sales.

In fact, Arena is enjoying a kind of festival of rowdy, strong Texas women what with Kathleen Turner as journalist Molly Ivins also in the building. There’s enough attitude here to make the building levitate.

The production was set up as a kind of live concert—as in “Set One” and “Set Two”—with star Mary Bridget Davies delivering an uncannily authentic—in voice, in emotional feeling—performance as Janis Joplin. She did not so much resemble Joplin—she sports an open, lovely face and is a little more full-bodied than Joplin—as become her, in all the mannerism of hair shaking, dress, eye-rasing, and in a true voice both in speaking and singing, and bare-naked emotions, especially when she and some of the more wrenching songs in the show—“Cry Baby,” “Ball and Chain,” “A Woman Left Lonely,” “Piece of My Heart” and “Me and Bobby McGee” among them—meshed and became one.

But director and creator Randy Johnson added something else that turns the show into a kind of celebration of women and the blues by adding the amazing Sabrina Elayne Carten as the “blues singer,” in turns as several African-American female blues singers like Bessie Smith, Etta James, Aretha Franklin and Odetta, to name a few, who turn up as embodiment, influences and pioneers of the kind of blues Joplin herself so fully realized. When the two are together—or apart—they add to each other and the music, and when Carten jumps into the persona of Franklin, in a rousing rendition of “Spirit in the Dark” that ends the first “set,” they do what a member of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band once told me they did with audiences—they gets their feet to tappin’ and their hands to clappin’. Davies and Carten make them downright crazy.

This isn’t a “real” concert piece, nor do much of Joplin’s less appealing excesses of drugs, booze and heartache in terms of her relationships with men get in, although Davies, like Joplin herself, manages to get in every piece of broken, bleeding wounds into her singing. Joplin had her troubles, fears, anxieties and blowups and blowouts, and she pretty much took the pain she felt and put it like bandaids in her music. On stage is where Joplin found love—“There isn’t a man that could make me feel like that,” she says. That being said, the set, ramshackle and rich in detail, could pass for the Fillmore or the Avalon, two San Francisco rock and roll palaces where Joplin performed.

Joplin’s recorded music—and this rendition—lasts because it was emotionally authentic and searing. If Joplin talking about her life on stage—when she says words like “blues” and “lonely,” they carry miles and miles of mileage—leaves out some of the juicier, awful parts, so be it. We know them already.

I cannot pretend to be totally objective in critical terms about this show. It took me back, having seen Joplin at a smaller venue and been moved by her music at the creation in the Bay Area. But I honestly feel something happened that night—what with Joplin’s brother and sister in the audience, some folks dressing hippie-style or Joplin-style, buzz in the lobby, and rocking and rolling almost from the beginning without letup. I heard a young woman behind me scream piercingly, explaining later that she was letting off steam because “they don’t scream at rock concerts in Seattle.” I found myself remembering most of the lyrics to most of the songs, with the exception of the wrenchingly sweet “Little Girl Blue,” a Rodgers and Hart offering.

Davies had you believing that you were watching and listening to Joplin. She gave her specific mannerisms, a kind of child-like, perky smart, knowing intelligence, and saved the desperation for the songs, difficult, exhausting performances with notes in outer space and feelings raw and naked.

Inevitably, the production loses a little steam when you’re getting to the end, which is signaled by the onset of “Bobby McGee,” a song written by others, sung by many, but which she made her own. I heard one woman in the lobby, reading some bio notes on the wall, say almost angrily how her death “was so stupid. She wasted her life.” To which I can only add, that too, is why we’re because she died that way, and young.

This one night stays with you—at least partly because you don’t want it to end and because it reminds you that she’s already gone.