Performance

Gary Tischler • February 28, 2013

When it comes to “The Convert,” a breadth- and breath-taking play about the clash and loss of culture by Danai Gurira, it’s hard to say who was more courageous in this undertaking. Is it Woolly Mammoth Theatre’s artistic director Howard Shalwitz for taking on this three-hour-with-two-intermissions play about the seemingly long-ago (1895) and very distant colonization of what is now Zimbabwe in southern Africa or playwright Gurira for her ambitious, respectful and emotionally detailed play?

But then Woolly Mammoth and Shalwitz are known for their risk-taking enterprises. It is not entirely a surprise to find “The Convert” there or Gurira’s work, either. Two of the works of the playwright, who was born in the United States and grew up in Zimbabwe, have already been staged at Woolly—the searing “In the Continuum” about two women with AIDs in which she acted and for which she won a Helen Hayes and Obie Award and “Eclipsed” about the captive women surrounding an African warlord.

Still, “The Convert” is no small undertaking. In exploring with heartfelt intelligence the effects of British conquest on tribal and native culture, Gurira has chosen to leave any British or white presence out of the play, except as topics and points of at turns conversation, arguments, anger, rage and frustration. The British are never present but ever-present as the English, the masters, the whites, the white man or tribal slang words for blacks trying to be white.

The characters in “The Convert” are all from Rhodesian tribes of the period, the Ndebele and Shona, and they’re all dealing with questions of identity, conquest, allegiance to the old and curiosity about the new, especially Christianity, and , in particular here, Catholicism. You have Chilford, a young would-be-priest who now runs a Catholic church, trying to convert his friends and acquaintances, educated, devout and vehemently contemptuous of the old ways that include ancestor worship. His housekeeper Mai Tamba brings her niece Jekesai into his care, to keep her from an avaricious uncle who wants to marry the young girl of to a rich man in exchange for goats.

When we first see her, Jekesai is half naked, thoroughly a village girl. She has a presence that only grows through the course of the play—she takes to “conversion” with all the passion of a newbie, loving Jesus, converting others.

She is surrounded not only by Chilford, who wants to become a real priest with a parish of his own, and whom she continuously addresses as “Mastah,” but also by his friends Chancellor, a businessman and dandy who’s taken up the white man’s way with Wildean flair, and his fiancée, the unbuttoned, smart, and ill-named Prudence, who speaks the King’s English better than the king. There is also Tamba, a friend from Jekesai’s bridal days. Jekesai seems often to be straddling a line. She seems to love the sermon-based theology, the possibility of a better future and for sure not having to marry old men with goats, but she misses her mother, her childhood, the reassuring and ghostly presence of ancestors.

The playwright takes her time with all these persons. She unravels them before they unravel under the tension of a devastating uprising where loyalties are tested and violence descends on their lives—and the roles of master and servant, the British and the whites, are revealed for what they are.

The audience is pulled every which way—and I don’t think just skin color will sway you towards love or resentment or passion for individual character. Clearly, Gurira has invested her heart and mind in Ester and just as clearly Nancy Moricette as Ester has invested a magnetic force into her acting—she commands the stage even when others are marching across it, or when she’s not present. She’s the tipping point in this play: where she goes the play goes and in Moricette you have a formidable talent.

Not that Dawn Ursula doesn’t give Moricette a run for her money as Prudence. Ursula brings Shavian spark to her role, a bitter sarcasm invades her lines. She’s beautiful, but for her it’s not enough to subsist on her beauty or charm, because she lives not only in a man’s world, but in a white man’s world on top of that. You see also that the women dominate the play, Starla Benford as Mai Tamba precipitates the action with her pleading, her fussiness, her thinly disguised contempt for the religion she pretends to embrace. The men—especially Alvin Keith as the often snarling and effete Chancellor shows his contempt not only for the rulers, but the ruled, and women in general giving new meaning to conflict in a character that’s often also immensely appealing.

You might have hoped that this play would be not quite so extreme in length, but it’s hard to figure what you could drop or throw out. The situation bears some explaining, given that Cecil Rhodes—unless you’re a history buff—is hardly a household name any more. Nor are the baleful stories of tribal subjugations of the South African region by the British and the Boers a part of everyday conversation.

You don’t have to know a lot of history here—some helps—but you do have to be able to recognize a powerful beating human heart in the character of Jekesai.

“The Convert” runs at the Woolly Mammoth through March 10.

Gary Tischler • February 22, 2013

You’ve heard the sayings, usually by someone older with a functioning memory, a plaintive statement about the passing of time and people, ways of doing things, values, genres and items that have been thrown into the dustbin of history.

Such as: “They don’t make ’em like that anymore,” “Things (movies, music, kids, politics, hair styles, chicken soup) aren’t what they used to be,” or the bleak exclamation point sentence, “I didn’t know he or she was still alive!”

Lately, I find myself being one of those persons, saying things like that.

So, here goes again. Pop music isn’t what it used to be. And they don’t make westerns the way they used to. In fact, they hardly make them at all.

Patti Page and Harry Carey, Jr. I didn’t realize that they were still alive, until they passed away a week ago.

I mention Page and Carey because they were examplars and professionals in forms of of popular entertainment which have all but disappeared.

Page, who died at the age of 85 on New Year’s Day, was a star and a bit of a legend in the field of what is best described as adult pop vocal music—not quite in the lofty range of, say, a Frank Sinatra or Doris Day—which dominated the music charts in the late 1940s and right up until the mid-1950s when Bill Haley rocked around the clock like a John the Baptist of rock-and-roll until the King himself arrived soon thereafter in his blue suede shoes, loving you tender.

Before rock seriously put a dent into the popularity of crooners like Eddie Fisher and Vic Damone and even songstresses like the hugely popular Doris Day, Page hit the top or near the top of the charts regularly like a gong, marrying a tad touch of country to songs like “Tennessee Waltz” (a number-one hit in 1950) and the super-hit novelty song, “How Much is That Doggie in the Window?”—plus a series of haunting and hugely popular ballads.

Although Page’s hit-making power faded with the onset of rock-and-roll and the rowdy 1960s, she continued to record and perform, in Branson, Mo., which is ubiquitous with singers wearing the mantle of legend.)

You suspect that there was something mysterious about Page, who never looked like she trained in the Mickey Mouse Club , but sprang, full-blown, into the public eye as a woman, not a girl. And a very attractive woman at that, reddish curled hair and fashionable 1950s clothing. She looked a little like the glamorous sister of the Beaver’s mom.

There were singers like that during this early “Mad Men” period. They provided songs for “Your Hit Parade,” the popular Saturday night show in which two men and two women sang the top hits of the day, generated by the likes of Page, Day, Jo Stafford and Perry Como and others.

“Your Hit Parade” died of cardiac arrest brought on by rock-and-roll—not many of the “Parade” performers were adept at handling a tune like “Jailhouse Rock.” Only Pat Boone—a crooner-turned-wholesome rocker managed to adapt to the new environment, although he would never threatened the tempo of either Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis or Chuck Berry.

Page soldiered on, turning out records, touring and singing her own brand of country-tinged balladry right into the 21st century until her retirement several years ago. So prodigious—and high quality—was her output that she was due to receive the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. She sold more than 100 million records.

In 1978, a singer named Sharon McKnight wrote and recorded a song called “Put Another Nickel in the Jukebox and Bring Back Patti Page.” Jukeboxes, it should be noted, are not much, if at all, being made anymore either.

Something else—beside the songs of Patti Page—was hugely popular in the 1950s, although also beginning to lose its traction and hold on the popular American imagination. That would be westerns—a genre of movies that began when movies began, and in the 1950s, was at its peak, with a slew of B movies, top-notch and big-budget Hollywood films, and television series for both adults (“Gunsmoke”) and young cowpokes (“Range Rider” and “Hopalong Cassidy”). John Wayne was the biggest western star in Hollywood (and maybe the biggest star, period), and John Ford was the pre-eminent director of western movies like “The Searchers,” “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” and “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,” the middle part of his 7th Cavalry trilogy. Part of the Wayne and Ford group was actor Harry Carey, Jr.

Carey was in many of Ford’s and Wayne’s movies, not as a star but a supporting player—his blondish, curly hair early later turned into something more frontier-like. He was a member in good standing of a group of people known informally as the John Ford Stock Company, a group that included Wayne, Victor McLaglen, Ward Bond and Maureen O’Hara, who still survives. Ford, as Carey duly noted in his book, “Company of Heroes: My Life as an Actor in the John Ford Stock Company,” could be both loyal friend and horrible, cruel task master. No one—not even Wayne—escaped Ford’s ire.

Most memorably, perhaps, Carey was the blond second lieutenant who vied for the affections of a very young Joanne Dru with John Agar in “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,” Ford’s most elegiac western about the 7th Cavalry—populated almost entirely, it seemed, by Irishmen, as fine a piece of work by an American as exists in Hollywood film archives.

Carey, who died on Dec. 27 at the age of 91, appeared in more than 90 films. Like his father, who was featured prominently and often in westerns in silent movies and then talkies, often under the direction of Ford, Carey was a fixture on the honored roll call of character actors. He worked with Wayne, or “The Duke” 11 times, and in many of Ford’s films, including the last western made by Ford, “Cheyenne Autumn.”

Carey also appeared on numerous television western series, including “Wagon Train,” “Bonanza” and “Gunsmoke,” and for his television contributions he was honored with a Hollywood Walk of Fame star and was inducted in the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Okla. He was married to Marilyn Fix, the daughter of another great Hollywood character actor Paul Fix.

When you think of Carey and “Yellow Ribbon,” you can hear the officers of the 7th Cavalry, wearing yellow kerchiefs, dusty cap and sabers, riding to Monument Valley, Ford’s favorite filming site.

And let’s not forget: They don’t make them like that anymore.

Gary Tischler •

Some things you should know about “The Motherfcker With the Hat,” a scabrous, oddly lyrical, mightily profane play by the gifted newish playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis, which is now receiving a riveting, compulsively engaging production at Studio Theatre under the direction of Serge Seiden.

The “mother” word in the title—and in the program and posters and in many publications but not in the Georgetowner (and not the Washington Post either) — is heard many times along with pretty much all the words in the lexicon of four-letter and more words bound to tick off people who are offended at their appearance. I would add that even if you are likely to be offended, come ahead anyway. Attending this production is a brazen chance to feel many acts of recognition (and contrition): to cringe and laugh because you laughed, to see men and women (and, of course, that sneaky apparition, thine own self) at their addictive, profane, wounding, can’t help f—–g up, fit-to-bust into tears or fist pounding, nakedness including one instance of literal male full-frontalness.

When “The MF With the Hat” play hit Broadway in 2011, it got Tony nominations, if not big audiences despite the presence of Chris Rock. Didn’t see it, but I liked this one very much — not because it’s necessarily a great work of art, but because the characters engage you so much. On the surface, you can just sort of gape at and enjoy a guy like Jackie, fresh out of prison, wanting to move on up and in with his girlfriend, Veronica, a powerfully passionate and foul-mouthed girl with a habit, or Ralph D, Jackie’s cool customer AA sponsor, who games the wellness and consciousness raising world like some well-meaning huckster who believes his own jive, or Victoria, Ralph’s embittered, hungry wife — and not to forget Cousin Julio, who’s got Jackie’s back while periodically giving hints of being a very bad dude, even when’s he’s cooking up organic breakfasts in a colorful apron.

Guirgis’s gift is to paint that world fully and to place his characters in their proper environment. These persons are all about some sort of addiction or another: they behave badly all the time, they screw up, they lie, they cheat (on each other), they can’t handle the fact that they’re unfocused, disaster areas bound to pounce on a minefield as if it’s clear sailing. But, boy, are they out there, and because every third word begins with an “f” or “mother” or some variation thereof, they seem almost to be poetic.

Jackie just wants a life: he’s got a job, he’s going to celebrate a birthday, he wants to take his girl to the pie place, and, whoops, he sees a man’s hat lying on the floor, a hat not his own, jaunty. He jumps on the bed like a beagle and accuses, “. . . smells like Aqua Velva and dick.” Veronica denies it, and she’s good at it , because she wears tough ‘tude like a prom dress. “I’d kick a three-legged cat down the stairs before I say I f—–g love you,” she contends.

Jackie runs to Ralph D, who looks like Kris Kristofferson on the make, smooth-bearded, white dude, but his wife’s got him nailed when he asks her to mix a smoothie for his pal. “Go f— yourself,” she says, and there’s a reason. There are, after all, only two candidates as to who owns the hat, and one of them is gay.

Jackie’s got no clue: he’s torched and scorched repeatedly, partly cause he’s got a code, which he sticks to except when he’s not cheating on Veronica, or leaving a pal in the lurch, or guzzling up booze. He knows his predicament. He can’t handle the world, he wants stuff and things and love, but he hasn’t got the skills. Still, Drew Cortese gives him an odd mix of potential violence, razor-like, and pouting tenderness, which is no match for Quentin Mare’s Ralph D who could self-justify with the gifts of a reasonably raging prophet. Gabriela Fernandez-Coffey is sexy and seething as Ralph’s wife. All she’s got are her looks and smarts, which she uses exactly when they’re not wanted.

Rosal Colon’s Veronica is so gut-wrenching and real. She’s no prom queen, and there are the lines of coke. But there’s something about her—her way with gritty words, the way she keeps her body in check, her sheer fierceness. It makes you wish she were off the white lines and into love.

And then there’s Liche Ariza as Cousin Julio who has a kind heart, a sense of obligation, a spirited smartness no more than when he wants to present himself as a kind of sly killer.

In this play, if they were all on the stage but in total darkness, at the same time, knowing the lines, the steps and moves, they’d draw blood, there’s be wreckage from body contact, sex and violence. Luckily, they keep the lights on, but, in the end, we recognize, and secretly empathize. You don’t have to be a Nuyorican to recognize all the times when you just couldn’t help yourself.

Gary Tischler • February 19, 2013

For me, it’s hard to interview John Eaton. You get to talking.

Eaton, who has appeared at the Barns at Wolf Trap for years bringing his special brand of talk-chat, keyboard playing and bottomless knowledge, has a singular passion. He loves the music of what’s loosely known as “The Great American Songbook”: the great American composers, the great lyricists, the Gershwins, the Porters, the Rodgers, the Harts, the Parrishes, the Cahns, the Hammersteins, the Arlens, the Weills, the men, for the most part, who wrote uniquely American music that was also the country’s most enduringly popular music in a parade of unforgettable works and songs.

You get to talking. As you go along, Eaton, who is anything but an academic, works at it. For him, all that music which he has played for 50 years now in one setting another, from hotels to clubs, to jazz joints and juke joints, to the White House, for the Smithsonian, and touring all over the country is as alive as the latest rap lyric—and with a richer pedigree.

He’ll be doing two appearances at the Barns—on Saturday, Feb. 16, with “A Salute to the One-Hit Wonders of American Popular Music” and on Saturday, March 30, joined by bassist Tommy Cecil in “A Juke Joint Jam Session.”

The one-hit wonders are probably not going to be the kind of rock and or country songs done by people who hit and achieve their 15 minutes of musical fame like “The Banana Boat Song,” the very good “Since I Met You Baby” or “Harper Valley PTA.” What you’ll get will be the classic “As Time Goes By,” written by a fellow by the name of Herman Hupfeld, a song that eventually ended up being done by Dooley Wilson in the film “Casablanca”—with a melancholy Humphrey Bogart urging him on with “You can play it for her. You can play it for me” along with songs like “Willow Weep For Me” and others.

“These are songs that became classics, they’re part of the Great American Songbook, ranging through the early 1960s,” Eaton said. “It’s the authors who are unfamiliar to the general but the song—we can all sing them, or at least several generations of people can.” If you look it up, you see strange names with great songs: Ann Ronell, who wrote “ Willow Weep for Me,” or Irene Higgenbottom, who wrote the Billie Holiday classic “Good Morning Heartbreak.”

Eaton—now 78 years old and still playing regularly and no doubt will do so sitting down or standing up forever—has the two Barns concerts as well as a four-part seminar, “A Salute to Great American Song Writers” that features the music and discussions about Irving Berlin, Franke Loesser, Vernon Duke, Kurt Weill and George Gershwin on Feb. 26, March 5, March 12 and March 19 at the Smithsonian Institution, where he has conducted series on the songbook for years.

As a Washington native, Yale graduate and member of the literary society St. Anthony Hall, Eaton talks about music with passion and humor. He is unassuming with a Garrison Keller kind of drollness. But get him to talking about the value of the music, and you’re on a roll. “Part of the problem sometimes becomes that this music—the Gershwin music, the Ellington music, the Rodgers and Hammerstein and Cole Porter music—was every bit as much a part of the popular scene as rock and all of its relatives are now. That music came from jazz and the blues, and made its way into all parts of society.” The songbook was the stuff of MGM and other musicals, such as “Oklahama!” and “Anything Goes” of Broadway, the Vaudeville circuits and New York concert halls.

Among these scenes—the hotel bars of swells, the jazz joints and clubs—were places Eaton grew to know well. “Once I started playing the piano, that was it for me,” he said. “I knew who I was, what I was going to do with my life.” He played for the Reagans at the White House, he has played at Blues Alley and at the Bayou before it became a legendary rock venue.

He played with such legendary jazz folks as Zoot Sims, Benny Carter and Clark Terry. “We always think of classical music—the European variety of Mozart and Beethoven and so on as a high art form. But this—Gershwin and Ellington, especially, and all the rest of them, too—they are America’s classical composers. You could say that easily, as in “Rhapsody in Blue” or “An American In Paris” or in Ellington’s work. But if you take the songbook as a whole, all that music, you have essentially homegrown, American music—made in America. And that’s what I do—to me it’s now, and yesterday, but it’s as fresh and great as any music every written.”

Never having had the pleasure of being in the presence of an Eaton performance, I did have the pleasure of an Eaton conversation. When he talks about the songs, the music and the songbook, there’s a lot of love coming out. We tell our stories to each other: for me being at the Metropole on Times Square in New York, hearing Lionel Hampton and jazz for the first time; for him, all the notes on the keyboard, resurrecting songs.

“You know, when the music revolution really hit in the 1960s, some of us, like me, didn’t know what to do, we thought it was over, rock and roll, the British invasion, the Beatles and Dylan,” he said. “But that hasn’t been the case. Today, I notice something—now the audiences are diverse, young, older and old, men and women, black and white. The music is a part of our lives today.”

In no small part, that’s thanks to a guy named John Eaton, story teller, piano man, talker and player.

John Eaton, the Barns at Wolf Trap: Saturday, Feb. 16, 7:30 p.m., “A Salute to the One-Hit Wonders of American Popular Music”; Saturday, March 30, 7:30 p.m., “A Juke Joint Jam Session”— www.WolfTrap.org.

Nico Dodd • February 18, 2013

“The Bayou, D.C.’s Killer Joint” premiered Jan. 31 at the AMC Loews Georgetown, only yards from where the legendary music joint stood for decades.
The new documentary chronicles the story of the Bayou, the jazz venue turned rock-and-roll bar on K Street near Wisconsin Avenue. A labor of love, the project is produced by Metro Teleproductions and Dave Lilling, Bill Scanlan, Vinnie Perrone and Dave Nuttycombe.

To celebrate the film’s completion, a reception was held before the Jan. 31 premiere at Georgetown’s AMC Loews, the complex which covers the Bayou location. The event was catered by Wingo’s and Potomac Wine & Liquor.

The venue’s intimate atmosphere and big name acts were a big draw for concertgoers. The Bayou’s legal capacity was 500 persons. In comparison, 9:30 Club’s capacity is 1,200 persons.

“When they were getting ready to get on stage, you were breathing down their necks,” said Charlie Clark, who grew up in Arlington with the Tramonte brothers, whose family owned the Bayou from 1953 to 1980.

The Bayou is famous for hosting some of the biggest acts in rock-and-roll from the 1960s until it closed New Year’s Eve 1998 (Jan. 1, 1999). Foreigner’s club debut was there, as well as U2’s second concert in America. U2 was the opening act for D.C.-based punk group, the Slickee Boys. Mark Noone, lead singer of the Slickee Boys, was at the reception. “They were nice Irish guys,” Noone said. “I had trouble understanding them.”
The documentary took 14 years to finish. According to producer Vinny Perrone, it was “in many respects, a tortured undertaking. It almost didn’t make it,” he said.

Initially, the filmmakers filmed approximately 100 interviews. They did not want to release the film until they got interviews with famous musicians who performed there like Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen and U2. Those interviews were able to be secured, but other interviews with former owners, managers and other performers create an in-depth portrait of the place.

The film will be showing on Maryland Public Television Monday, Feb. 25, at 9 p.m.

Although the film has been finished, the filmmakers are still about $30,000 in debt from making the film, a non-profit project. On Feb. 17, the Hamilton is hosting The Bayou Presents “Last Call” a benefit concert featuring a long list of musicians who played there.

Visit the film’s website for more information.
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Gary Tischler • February 14, 2013

Unsurprisingly, the phone rings right on time. I have some mixed expectations about the sound of Hilary Hahn’s voice—after all she’s been playing the violin since she was four years old and as a student at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, which makes for a grand total of 29 years of violin playing, all over the world, all over the place.

There’s no wear and tear in the voice–just friendly, inquisitive statements and answers to questions, sometime the tone of somebody who knows every inch and note and bit of musicology you can master living the life of a classical music star. Hahn will be giving a Washington Perforning Arts Society recital, accompanied by pianist Cory Smythe, at the Kennedy Center’s Concert Hall Saturday, Feb. 16. She is in the midst of a major tour with a program, the contents of which characterize where her musical life has led and now leads her.

“I don’t worry about what I haven’t done,” Hahn says. She’s calling from Tallahassee, Fla., where she’ll be heading for the airport in half an hour for a flight that will take her to San Francisco, exemplifying her nomadic touring life. “I don’t know what I’ll be playing 20 years from now, what kind of music. I’m always looking for ways to improving, to keep learning, how to best honor the people I’ve learned from, the music I love.”

The program for her Saturday performance at the Kennedy Center includes “Faure, Violin Sonata No. 2 in A major, Op. 13″; “Corelli, Violin Sonata No. 4a in F major, Op. 5” and “Bach, Chaconne from Partita No. 2 in D minor for Solo Violin, BWV 1004.” The last is a Hahn favorite. For her, it is demanding, challenging and rewarding.

“Bach brings out the best in me, I love the challenge,” Hahn says. “Bach is, for me, my touchstone. He keeps me honest.” For many musicians, Bach seems to remain a slightly taller god in a crowded firmament.

Then, there are — to name a few — Anton Garcia-Abril, Richard Barrett, David Lang, Du Yun, Michiru Oshima, Kala Ramnath and others, all of them composers of new music, encores lasting from five to ten minutes or more. “I started thinking about commissioning new kinds of encores for this century,” she said. It’s something she’s given a great deal of thought, and she included an open on-line contest for the 27th composition. The winner of that was Jeff Myers’s “The Angry Birds of Kauai.” In short, she was seeking to play a new kind of encore for our times and beyond.

I have to own up here: I have two of her CDs, but I’ve never seen and heard her perform in person. She has led the life of a prodigy and moved into her teens and young adulthood relatively smoothly. For the uninitiated or less-than-aficionado, it’s probably hard to pick out an individual violinist (or pianist or cellist) by style or sheer sound from just listening on a record. My first real exposure to violin music was a concert at the Music Center at Strathmore (where Hahn has performed) by Yitzhak Perlman, which led me to Anne-Sophie Mutter, Hahn, Joshua Bell and others. What strikes me while listening to Hahn is how clean and precise is the direction from sound to heart. She removes any obstacles that might be to feeling with laser focus.

Hahn talks somewhat the same way—she went way beyond prodigy and grew up in her performances and her recordings and her work before a generation of music lovers, the Virginia-born kid from Baltimore, now with souvenirs from hotel rooms in the greatest cities of the world and praise like a critical ticker parade from peers and critics.

Hahn has aptly handled her fame in a thoughtful way. Visit hilaryhahn.com to see that she’s very much her generation’s child, savvy about the internet and its uses, creating a site where she interviews other musicians on video, answers all sorts of questions, updates her tours and activities, puts up entries for a journal of postcards and, in general, invites her fans into her life. On her site, she answers questions about life on the road, how she works and her music. She mixes her charismatic seriousness with vivid chatter. She sounds that way on the phone, engaging, respectful, and witty–whip smart.

Classical music these days is seeing a lot of genre and form crossing. Bell not so long ago did an album with “a few of his friends” that included Josh Groban and Sting, a foray into pop, jazz and other genres. Yo-Yo Ma has taken up some blue grass.

But nobody has done a collaboration with the German pianist and composer Hauschka (aka Volker Bertelmann), who works both the edgy rock scene and the edgier shadows of classical music like John Cage and plays the prepared piano (pianos which included other materials to produce different sounds). Hauschka and Hahn spent ten days in Iceland working together to produce what would eventually become an album called “Silfra.”

“Everything stems from improvisation, which usually isn’t a part of classical music,” Hahn says. “But it’s also exciting and frees you to try new things.” One of the new things must have been the sound of ping pong balls, one of the ingredients of this particular prepared piano.

A YouTube video shows the two of them prepping, playing (in both senses of the word) in the company of producer Valgeir Sigurdsson. The music you get the hear seems sometimes discordant, playful and yet beautiful. Sometimes, Hahn seems to making tunes meant for Irish gypsies.

“There’s no reason not to get involved with other genres,” she said. “I’ve worked with singer-songwriters like Tom Brosseau and Josh Ritter, and that kind of mixing of genres and styles is invigorating.”

On YouTube, you see the concert and recital mistress Hahn, with or without orchestra, alone but hardly lonely. In one case, before a Mendelssohn piece, she walks with strong strides to her place on the podium in a blazing, bare-shouldered red gown. She shakes a violinist’s hand firmly, places the violin in place, smiles and begins. The music has no hesitation. It’s a full launch.

“When you come, listen to the audience,” she says. “I love hearing what the audience hears and thinks.”

Displaying Hahn’s ease at crossing genres, another YouTube video, recorded in Moscow, shows and tells. The alt and brawly indie rock group “And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead” performed in what sounded like a rowdy club when this small young woman with a violin came on stage, all in black—jeans and sweater—and launched into “To Russia, My Homeland,” striding the stage like a rock star, playing with great power and beauty all the same, like some really cool but wayward player at a biker bar. The crowd cheered, whistled and yelled. Someone from the band said, a little in awe, “Hilary Hahn.”

The scene at the Kennedy Center on Saturday will no doubt be different, but there will also be someone to say, a little in awe, “Hilary Hahn.”

Gary Tischler • February 11, 2013

“Our Town” by Thornton Wilder, now enjoying a splendid 75th anniversary production at the Ford’s Theatre, is a paradox, a contradiction—in its aspirations and results, in the feelings it engenders and the way it has always and continues to be regarded. The play garners large amounts of affection with an almost equal amount of disdain and criticism.

Count this writer and critic in the affectionate corner, in regards to “Our Town,” and more generally, the works of Wilder as both playwright and novelist. This is not the place to talk about “The Bridge at San Luis Rey,” “The Eighth Day” or even Wilder’s career. We’re concerned with this production of “Our Town.” At this time and without hesitation, I would urge anyone with a mind or half a mind to go see it, experience it. I would urge children—accompanied by adults, if not critics—and young people and old people however slow of foot, and the residents of this city as well as visitors to see it, or the transient, if not transcendental stewards of our government to go see it.

The paradox—for directors and less so actors, not to mention the audience—of “Our Town” is that its three acts are rooted in invigorating, palatable specifics of time and place, yet are presented almost as abstractions—bare stage, uniform costumes, minimal props as when the play first saw the light of stage many decades ago. In addition, the characters behave and talk and come armed with memories and knowledge only of where and who they are living in a small American town and place—Grover’s Landing, N.H., in the early years of 20th century America. From the get-go, the play strives for the poetic universal, for the idea that its contents have wings and are ticketed to travel through time and universe. It means to echo and mirror whatever place, time and space it exists in a particular performance.

So, here we are in Washington in the year 2013, 75 years ago the play’s first production, a little more than 100 years past the setting of the action of the play when it opens. Some of us have heard these words spoken before. These characters and citizens of Grover’s Landing have lived for us before on some other stage, or on television back in the 1950s or more recently. The words are pretty much the same, and the characters are the same–but then again, they’re not. How things are said will be different, and how the people look will be different, and so on. Somewhere in there, something in what’s said, or a movement, or a voice, will strike someone differenty, maybe irritate them or pain them sadly. Important, too, is the fact that we are different.

Wilder shows us three things: a typical day in Grover’s Corner, the courtship and marriage of George Gibbs and Emily Webb, the son and daughter of the town’s chief doctor and editor of its newspaper, respectively, and then the dark third act where death and the meaning of the whole damn thing rears its clear-eyed head. He means to make us face our own lives, or more generously and broadly, have empathy for our humanity and its devastating limits. It is neither fully nor specifically a sentimental play for which it is often mistaken. In some ways, it is a remarkably cruel play–not because it is merciless, but because it is true. There is no question that the play has been played with sentiment and jerked for its tears the world over in all the languages known to man–and most publicly, for being the source of inspiration for the Sammy Cahn song “Love and Marriage.” Yet there is little if any sentiment here. This production, under the direction of Stephen Rayne, moves unavoidably and bravely to its conclusions.

The portrait of Grover’s Corner, it seems to me, is accurate about small town tastes, sentiment and rhythms, a town in Teddy Roosevelt’s time, where you might spot a car or two, where the constable and milkman made their rounds, where Dr. Gibbs comes home from delivering babies and where the poor Polish citizens might live. There are secrets in this town, but they’re of the kind known to and gossiped by everyone, especially the state of the clinically depressed church organist. We meet the Webb and the Gibbs family, see their children, Emily and George as teens and then boy and girl, who begin to get an inkling that they might love each other.

I think everyone here comports themselves as who they act to be—the anxious Mrs. Gibbs who wants to see Paris desperately, Dr. Gibbs who has adopted an avuncular tone of wisdom which seems to be expected of him, the resonating authority displayed by Editor Webb and the exasperation often displayed by his wife in dealing with gardens and children. The touchstones of the family seem so real that you might think, if you ever went to New England, you would find their names on tombstones in a town that doesn’t exist.

There is always a person called the stage manager to lead us through his—I would bet he’s been played in Moscow, or in Warsaw, or small town high school productions. I have seen Robert Prosky play him to fatherly ends at Arena Stage , I have seen Frank Sinatra—yes, the Sinatra—in a television production where Paul Newman was George and Eva Marie Saint was Emily. I have seen Newman play the part on television. The stage manager—has been played every which way, including by a woman, the fine actress Pat Carroll who herself once played not just Mother Courage but Falstaff. And now we see the African American actress Portia play the part, in a way that I think suited the place and the time and gave the play immediacy and accessibility.

Portia’s stage manager is of the sort that is inviting. No nonsense, she is friendly, as if to suggest that this is important to the audience, but also a proceeding in which their presence is welcome, critical. She seems more plain spoken, a little more close to the audience than others, but always keenly aware that this is a matter of import, not in a pompous, church-and-classroom sort of way, but rather as part of a echoing conversation.

She talks about one of the town’s departed, at a point already near the end of the play when you viscerally, if not actually, believe in the town and its people and the words, a young man who had fought in died in the Civil War to “protect the union even though he hadn’t seen more than 50 miles of it.” He died, she notes, looking up at the martyred president’s box, to defend the United States. Then, you remember that, to these folks, Abraham Lincoln and the bloody war were recent memories not history.

This production also brings home to me that “Our Town” is a play about theater and its place in our lives—after all, we see the stagehands, the actors and such gathering on stage, one by one or in twos, finding their place, a chair, a corner—here comes the actor—the authoritative Craig Wallace, playing Mr. Webb, and here is Emily, sitting in a chair, and here comes Fred Strother who plays the constable, and John Lescault as Joe Stoddard the local historian, and Tom Story, bringing his Simon Stimson, the organ player on stage, and so forth.

By using the barest of stages and no props—you hear a horse whinnying, or the sad or loud notes of trains charging into town—you understand better what the theater has always done right from the first traveling story teller, to the Greeks in their amphitheatre, using masks, which is to imagine ourselves and times past and now. For a writer and journalist, I suddenly noticed a pretty blond girl sit down and pick something up and appeared to be holding and scanning. It was Alyssia Gagarin, who played Emily with poignancy and keen and keening awareness, as Emily holding up and reading a newspaper which wasn’t there. It seemed to me at least a sharp, even wounding illustration of the coming fates of newspapers.

In this production, it’s worth noticing the audience—this one, a day after the production opened seemed prone to want to clap with or without prompting, and seemed to be a part of an extension of the town itself.

On the 75th anniversary of “Our Town,” this production is a showcase, not only of the gifts of the artists and actors involved, but also of the inventive spirit and imagination of Thornton Wilder, who in giving us “Our Town”, gave us our towns and the places in which we live and the life therein.

“Our Town” runs through Feb. 24 at Ford’s Theatre. [gallery ids="101149,140886" nav="thumbs"]

Nico Dodd • January 10, 2013

There is lots going on during the few weeks before the Presidential Inauguration. Check out these concerts, featuring local artists and music industry veterans.

BeauSoleil avec Michael Doucet at the Barns at Wolf Trap

Thurs. 1/10 @ 8 p.m., Tickets: $27

See cajun music legends BeauSoleil at the Barns. Since 1975, BeauSoleil have been bringing traditional cajun music to the masses. They were also the first Cajun band to win a Grammy Award, BeauSoleil first won Best Traditional Folk Album in 1997 for L’amour Ou La Folie and a second Grammy for Best Zydeco or Cajun Music Album in 2008 for Live at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. Since the Barns are such an intimate venue, this promises to be a party.

Gerald Albright at Blues Alley

Thurs. 1/10-13 @ 8 & 10 p.m., Tickets: $43

Saxophonist Gerald Albright is bringing his smooth jazz skills to Georgetown’s own Blues Alley next Thursday. The Grammy-nominated artist has performed for U.S. presidents and has sold more than a million albums. He has even played with Phil Collins.

Honor by August at Howard Theatre

Sat. 1/12 @ 8 p.m. Tickets: $12 in advance, $15 day of show

Homegrown talent Honor By August formed while students at Georgetown University. Honor By August is a modern rock band with a big focus on songwriting. Their sound has been compared to Switchfoot—a band HBA has opened for—and Kings of Leon. The band is celebrating being signed with Rock Ridge Music, a record label and management company that serves artists such as Reel Big Fish and Tony Lucca of NBC’s The Voice. Honor By August’s upcoming album, Monuments to Progress, is coming soon.

Thievery Corporation at 9:30 Club

Fri. 1/17,18 & 19, Tickets: $45

The DC-based DJ duo is bringing its diverse sounds back to 9:30 Club for three nights. DJs Rob Garza and Eric Hilton started performing as Thievery Corporation back in 1995, and have been moving audiences around the world ever since. Groove is the operative word. Thievery shows are always memorable and sell out quickly, so get your tickets now!

A Tribute to Robert Egger at the Hamilton Live

Mon. 1/7 @ 6 p.m., Tickets: $100

This special event is honoring Robert Egger, founder of D.C. Central Kitchen, as he leaves the nation’s capital to start L.A. Kitchen. The folks at the Hamilton are putting together a band that will feature members of the Cramps, Fugazi, Thievery Corporation and the Razz. This event promises to be a great sendoff for someone who has made a positive impact on our community. All funds raised will benefit Egger’s organizations. Cocktails and food will be served, 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.; the tribute will take place, 7:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. Music and fun after that until 10 p.m.

Gary Tischler •

William Shakespeare was supposed to be a pretty fair story teller.

A blind poet by the name of Homer wasn’t so bad, either. His work—his one (two, counting “The Odyssey”) story, told over and over again—continues to compel attention and to bring us back to our core of hearing stories.

A teller, not a writer, Homer was an outloud poet, if he was anything—although we know even less about Homer than we do about Shakespeare.

Homer sang his tales, and they’re still around. “The Iliad” about the war between Greeks and Trojans, with the gods joining in like some Olympian pugilists, starring Achilles, Hector, Agamemnon, Priam, Helen and Paris, and a cast of thousands of warring combatants before the gates of the city of Troy—its other name is Ilium—about 4,000 years ago.

We all know the story. We’re familiar with it from tales told at school and books we were forced to read in college, and movies we saw and plays we saw that used the great war and the Greek warrior-king Odysseus’s eventful journey home as jumping-off points to tell us about ourselves. We saw Kirk Douglas sailing, Brad Pitt fighting and various Helens launching a thousand ships.

But it’s still the same old story—a real fight for love and glory—best told in the semi-dark, around, if not a campfire, at least on a bare and barren stage, by one man, who, if not blind, could pass for the real deal, if he had lived and told the same tale all over the world, on stages, on street corners, amid the tents of other warriors and fighters, in castles for a piece of lamb, in taverns for a drink and a memory

That’s essentially what’s happening at the Studio Theater where artistic director David Muse helmed a production of “An Iliad,” adapted by Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare from a Robert Fagles translation of Homer’s epic poem.

It features one man: a ragged man, the story teller, who speaks with such power and clarity, that you believe every word he says, because he sounds as much a witness as a poet—a witness, it should be made clear, to all the brave, ravenously courageous and horrifyingly destructive wars men have ever fought over things they’ve soon forgotten.

Scott Parkinson looks very much the part of a man whom you’d spot for a few drinks in a bar, just to listen to him talk. The talk is about the last weeks of the war, about Agamemnon’s destructive fight with the great warrior Achilles, about the loss of Achilles’s best friend, about his towering rage, about his foretold doom, about the Trojan warrior Hector, about loss and rage, and war’s discordant and affecting music.

It’s not much, and it’s everything. So scruffy-good is Parkinson, so casual, so many-voiced that soon enough you hear the clash of spears and swords, the screams of wounded men, and the anguish of people wounded to their souls with loss. “The Iliad” is as before and always, a great story, but in their adaptation Peterson and O’Hare have made it so much more. It is a huge story, bounding and echoing across lands, borders, time and space. We know without being told that this story has always been about us, about war, about what it does to us, an invention, not of God or gods, but of our own, where men, leaders and spit-upon-privates carrying spears can catch a sense of something god-like and monstrous in the rivers of blood that are spilled.

All that’s there on the stage are the tools of the trade—of story-telling, not war—a trunk, a shaggy coat, a stick, a woman (Rebecca Landell) in a flowing white gown, playing the cello beautifully and serving as a kind of chorus, movie score and subtle carrier of grief to come. There are stage lights that look like masks or discarded armor, but that may be your or my imagination.

Mostly, Parkinson is the teller of tales—sometimes funny, sometimes sage and sagacious, sometimes sarcastic, sometimes like a man carrying old wounds and memories. He tells the tale, but it become something more. It seems to involve everything from the Crusades, to the Persian wars, ancient and modern, to Vietnam, Afghanistan, all those forays by one group of nationals or alliances into the lands of another group of nationals and alliances, to come to grief, to cause great destruction and create new stories over and over again.

That’s the underlying minefield of this tale, the tragedy of mankind, but its surface is full of phosphorus, the hot blood and rage of individuals, their deeds and deeds undone. Parkinson plays all the parts—the ragged poet, but also Hector and Achilles, and Priam and Achilles, the king and the greatest warrior, meeting in the middle of the night after Achilles has killed Priam’s son Hector. The meeting of king and warrior has a calming effect on Achilles after Priam begs for his son’s body. It’s as if the stage suddenly filled up with people in the silence and became dotted with tears.

Parkinson also follows Homer’s telling of the tale. This poet stops before the creation of the Trojan horse, the foretold death of Achilles, the destruction of Troy, the awesome fall of a Bronze-Age Asian civilization, its aftermath of epic journeys and the stuff of Greek tragedies.

When the actor is done you feel like leaving a giant tip, or a wreath to wear, some token of appreciation that you’ve understood every word, even the haunting spackles of ancient Greek.

“An Iliad” runs through Jan. 13.

Gary Tischler •

That Quentin Tarantino. He’s such a cut-up.

After bowdlerizing and generally having a grand old time with the Holocaust in his fantasy-action-god-knows-what-genre movie “Inglourious Basterds,” Tarantino, never a director to cringe from any subject, now matter how low or high, has tackled slavery and race in America to unhinge our sense of history further and to bolster the survival of the mashup genre.

And what a mess this mashup of a movie called “Django Unchained” is. And I say this with all due respect to the hordes of critics and way-cool Tarantino fans who have sung the praises of the movie, while duly noting the director’s gleeful use of blood-spurting violence and the n-word.

I think Tarantino is a brilliant director who bleeds cinema, talks cineaste and has probably seen every bad B movie ever made. Here’s a brilliant guy who, unfortunately, has never made a brilliant movie. He’s made brilliant sequences, scenes, segments and such, but never a movie that amounted to something that you could hang a feeling or a revolution on. If they gave Oscars for parts of movies, why give him one for best performance by an actress, playing a character under the influence of heroin (“Pulp Fiction”), best use of gangster yakety-yak (“Reservoir Dogs”), most suspenseful, tense ten or 15 minutes to open a movie for “Inglourious Basterds,” best performance by a German actor in an 1848 American setting (Christoph Waltz in “Django Unchained”), best dissertation on the origin of the name Brunhilde and how it came to be bestowed on slave woman (“Django Unchained”).

Tarantino has been praised for tackling such a serious subject as slavery—and presenting it realistically and gruesomely—horrible scenes of whippings and Mandingo fighting, for instance. But you know what? The cruelties practiced by slaveowners and overseers are no secret. It seems to me that we’re supposed to be edified by these scenes, and horrified, and educated, but should we also be entertained? I know it’s exhilarating to see those awful guys (and one woman) to be slaughtered by the righteous Django in the film’s climax, but should this be quite so much fun? You can kill Adolf Hitler in a movie, but it’s harder to end slavery. Django said it much better when offered to be a bounty’s hunter’s partner: “Killing white people and getting paid for it? What’s not to like?” That stings, and it’s sharper than the literal-minded slaughter of the guilty at the end, especially the way Django metes out justice the hard way against Samuel Jackson’s embittered, viscous Uncle Tom character. It almost makes you wonder how Django would have handled Mammy, the stubbornly and blindly loyal slave of Scarlett O’Hara.

It seems to me that Tarantino can’t help showing off, being wickedly funny or showing how smart he is. That doesn’t make “Django Unchained” profound, it makes it at bottom a little silly, which undermines the seriousness the subject deserves. I don’t mean Steven Spielberg serious—although Spielberg, a frequent target of the cool, hip critical world, gets to the heart of the matter in “Lincoln”—but serious in the manner of respecting the audience’s intelligence instead of indulging your own smartness

It should be added that all the actors—Jamie Foxx as the hero, Waltz as his German partner, Jackson, Leonardo DiCaprio in a relishing turn as the corrupt, effete owner of the plantation named Candiland, and Kerry Washington as the heroine, are pitch-perfect, and the writing as always, is sharp. What “Django Unchained” lacks, and what most if not all of of Tarantino’s movies lack, is size, which is to say greatness. Nobody—except smart-ass critics—loves a smart ass.