Performance

Gary Tischler • September 17, 2012

If you want to know something about American performing arts culture, look at the annual Kennedy Center Awards and who is honored. This year, it appears especially eclectic.

This is a trend for the Kennedy Center Honors that’s been moving apace ever since it embraced the arenas of pop music, including not only a Sinatra but giants of blues, rock and roll and country music.

This year, it is legendary bluesman George “Buddy” Guy and one of the loudest and best of the super rock groups (think the Rolling Stones, the Beatles and the Who), Led Zeppelin, and its surviving members, getting honored.

Also selected for a Kennedy Center Honors salute is late-night talk show host and comedian David Letterman (Johnny Carson being the forerunner in this sub-category), one of the finest classical ballerinas and dancers to grace the world of ballet and dance, Russian Natalia Makarova, and Dustin Hoffman, arguably one of the finest modern film actors in the last 50 years, to stand alongside the likes of Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino.

Makarova, who is 71, came to America in 1970 and assayed a memorable turn in “Giselle” for the American Ballet Theatre and built a memorable career.

Letterman is an icon, not perhaps in an artistic sense, but in the sense of his role as late night host, a more cerebral, ironic and even cool version than, say, the more put-upon Jay Leno.

Guy won six Grammy awards playing and making Blues music, a guitar player who oddly influenced a generation of British players (including members of Led Zeppelin) as well as Eric Clapton.

The Led Zeppelin rockers—Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and keyboardist John Paul Jones—have with this honor made it all the way up the “Stairway to Heaven.” Their rock and roll, often full of anthems, lengthy riffs and pure, powerful playing has lasted and so have they—still plying their trade as musicians and super-stars.

Hoffman we remember well in “The Graduate,” “Tootsie,” “Lenny,” “Rain Man,” “Midnight Cowboy,” “Kramer Vs. Kramer,” “All The Presidents Men” and so on and so on, still trucking, still working hard at 76, becoming a very funny man in the “Focker” movie, playing Ben Stiller’s father. He was also a memorable Willy Loman on stage in “Death of a Salesman.”

Georgetowner George Stevens, Jr., is once again producing the Kennedy Center Honors which will be held Dec. 2. Stevens himself is getting an honor this year. It’s been announced that the film director and founder of the American Film Institute will receive an honorary Oscar at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Board of Governors’ Dinner in Los Angeles Dec. 1—one day before the big show here in D.C.

Gary Tischler •

“The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity” by Kristoffer Diaz is quite a package. It carries a lot of stuff, themes, metaphors and even some poetry, plus a pyro-technic presentation that will wow you.

Down at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre, with director John Vreeke almost convincing theater folks to cheer, hiss and boo for the villains and heroes of this Pulitzer-Prize finalist play by a really gifted new writer, audiences become two audiences. Right there, that’s a very cool thing to happen: people actually get directed, they respond to the demands of the character and the play’s setting. For Woolly audiences, this is not your everyday happening: they’re comprise a tricky grab-bag of tastes, they want their crude moments wrapped in sophistication and their meaningful moments to have some edge, intellectual heft.

“Deity” has all of that, plus a staging that will knock your socks off, accompanied by loud music and noise, videos and punch and spark. It has Diaz’s gift for nailing the pow-pow and tech-tech, multi-culturalization of our more urban spaces in terms of language, its new, fractured phrases and words, its speed and rhythm.

But it’s about . . . wrestling.

So-called professional wrestling at that, that loud, booming, self-marketing sport of raw wrestling, quasi-street fighting, megaphone combination of star-power pull and bull, fake violence made to maybe turn graphic, its carny writ large, and there’s still one born every minute.

There’s precious little not to like here, except maybe the not surprising premise, which is that it’s really sad that wrestling is so duh-damn phony, false and inauthentic. This situation is a tragic one for at least one of the four protagonists in this play. The underlying theme, it struck me, was that wrestling is phony and false, as reflected by American culture (see reality shows, or don’t see). Might as well complain that the dust bowl has too much dust.

The tragic anti-semi-hero in this play is one Mace, a thin, wiry-muscled athletic small guy and fall guy, who understands the sheer beauty of wrestling, and furthermore, knows how to wrestle. But he’s been slated and fated to act the clown, the villain, the loser in wrestling’s every match, but he takes pride even in that, in doing that well. He hates his status but loves the world he lives in. “In wrestling, I make the other guy look good, that’s my job,” he says. “And there’s an art to that.” Mace, played with alarming, sometimes dangerous energy by the gifted Jose Joaquin Perez, understands his role—keep your mouth shut do your job. “I do the heavy lifting,” he says. That’s also what Mace does in this play—he’s the one that is the narrator, the story teller, like Sister Mary Ignatius, he explains it all to you, perhaps a little too much, and in fits and starts. “That’s not really what the story is” is not a phrase you want to hear too often in a play.

Mace is the fall guy for Chad Deity, a muscled, buffed, gleaming, grinning body of charisma. He’s a wrestling, celebrity deity, who can’t wrestle worth a spit, but he has the one thing that’s required: he’s a super-star. Both of them, each in their own way, work for EKO, the pitchman, marketer, owner, promoter and everything for something called THE WRESTLING, an accredited organization that holds power over all.

Enter one VP, a young magic man from the ghett-o, of Indian (as in India) origin who picks up hoops like its no big thing, speaks all the languages of the world, including street, hood and urban of everywhere, who cares not a fig for wrestling or its code, rules and, beauty and grace, its plots of bad guys and good guys and fake aches and hurts. But Mace thinks he’s his way up—and convinces EKO of it, too. Suddenly VP becomes the Fundamentalist, with his sidekick, the former Mace becoming a walking Mexican cliché called Che Chavez Castro, complete with sombrero. The play suddenly turns into a kind of serious farce about us and them, and given this week’s news, probably even a little more disorienting than it already is.

Nothing good can come of this—Deity remains a star, VP wants to undermine wrestling, and EKO can make dirty money and glory out of anything. But there are times in this production that you don’t even notice any of the deeper things going on—you’re too wrapped up in the ring that’s settled on stage from above, in the crashing fake noises as bodies fly around like missiles. It’s true that it is a smaller, more intimate ring. (Imagine all this in the Verizon Center, accompanied by thousands as opposed to a hundred or soin the theater.)

It’s, all said and done, exciting, dramatic, you discover again that wrestling, like reality shows, like politics, are amazingly theatrical. And Perez as Mace, the fast-talking Adi Hanash as VP, the amazing Shawn T. Andrew as Deity and veteran Michael Russotto as EKO are like foils and co-conspirators in a story about battles whose scripts have already been written. They make it worth your while.

Gary Tischler • September 13, 2012

Annie Baker is kind of sneaky, or at least she writes plays that feel like they’re written by a cat burglar.

Her plays—including “Body Awareness,” now receiving an affecting, imaginative staging at Theater J, as well as the hit, “Circle Mirror Transformation,” performed at the Studio two seasons ago—sneak up on you. They’re not so much disarming as surprising—like the moment in a story where someone wipes the dirt off the orphan’s face and finds out he is heir to the kingdom.

The way Baker operates is to set you up. She lets you make assumptions about characters, about what’s likely to happens next, then makes you throw the assumptions in the trash as you move along. It’s not that the assumptions are wrong, entirely, or that some things that you see coming from a distance doesn’t happen. It’s just that the seeming simplicity of her work and her use of language, her authenticity, if you will, seduces you into thinking that the play is simple, too, that it can’t be rescued from its apparent pitfalls. It’s complicated, and awkward, but it opens your eyes and heart at the end.

“Body Awareness” is an earlier work and centers around an event called “Body Awareness Week,” a celebration of just about politically correct cliché in the world, including the sin of irrefutable, high-minded dead-seriousness. At its center are Joyce and Phyllis, a lesbian couple in a household that also includes Jared, Joyce’s 21-year-old son from a failed marriage, who the couple believes is suffering from Asperger’s Syndrome, a belief which Jared bitterly and sometimes savagely fights. Phyllis, supremely confident in her view of the world, a professor at the local college, is running “Body Awareness Week,” with a kind of flinty assurance and cheerfulness resembling that of the Church Lady. Throw in a very laid-back, somewhat-on-the-make photographer named Frank Bonitatibus, who’s got a show in the festival of artsy photographs of naked women, and you’ve got a self-awareness-and-the-rumblings of discontent-week in the house.

As with “Circle Mirror,” the characters are flawed, and initially at least, not particularly likeable. They have annoying qualities at first blush: Phyllis, who preaches the gospel of gender and language PC, has a tendency toward the pedantic translating into a superior tone; Joyce oozes earth-mother protectiveness and accommodation; Jared, whether he has Asperger’s or not, is a bundle of treacherous emotions that are difficult to deal with and Frank, in his cool vest, thin-legged often-washed bluejeans and beard, is an aging hippy, his male libido barely in check. He is also a catalyst for friction between the two women and the source of manly advice (of the worst sort) for Jared, who’s never had a girlfriend and calls himself an auto-dactic.

In an hour and a half with no intermission (this was also the case for “Circle Mirror”), “Body Awareness” director Eleanor Holdridge deftly lets the play take its time and lets us almost move in with the characters and the sparse space of the set which is the cabin-like home owned by the couple. In the process, you get lots of talk, edgy combative talk, awkward painful talk spoken with a naturalness that turns the characters into people you start to care about, almost in spite of themselves.

That’s one of Baker’s gifts and concerns: how hard it is for people to community, to speak the truth, not because they’re hiding something, but because they don’t know how. So, you get glimpses of the “Body Awareness” events and occasions, you get to see Jared’s painful, needy world (Adi Stein is terrific in the part), you hear snatches of the couple’s history—Joyce explains that Phyllis is her first girlfriend, wheras “Phyllis came out in kindergarten, she’s always known who and what she was.”

Often funny, often painful are the prickly arguments between Phyllis and Frank and Phyllis’s hostility towards the “male eye,” i.e. art, pictures and anything that objectifies women. Susan Lynskey gives Phyllis a frustrating edge, as in an all-edges quality which is sort of like sun tan lotion warding off the sun, while Marybeth Wise manages to create a Joyce who is at once warm, expansive and completely awkward. In a weird way, it’s what makes her appealing, funny and sexy. Frank, being the dog he is, sees that right away. Michael Kramer lets you see Frank’s carelessness, his need to be liked, to worm his way in. It’s an aggressive kind of irresponsible charm. He stops just short of hitching up his jeans by the belt and strutting.

Yet, all this conflict has the effect of re-arranging feelings and illuminating who the characters really are in the end. They seem like a group portrait of Dorothy and her companions, breathless after the dangers of Oz, knowing at last their own hearts.

As a play, “Body Awareness” is a kind of small gift for an unspecified occasion, like a really fine, if not trendy, bottle of wine, to be savored. It’s at Theater J at the Jewish Community Center on 16th Street through Sept. 23. Go for it.

Gary Tischler •

It’s hard to doubt that somewhere in the course of a long career of jabbing Texas politicians and officials with the written-word equivalent of a cattle prod that some state senator or party chairman or Bush family hanger-on, with teeth-clenched respect, allowed that she had a set of male equipment, the highest compliment a man can pay a woman he’s not trying to sleep with, but who makes him nervous anyway.

Whatever the case, Molly Ivins didn’t need it. She had something better—flat-out, unrepentant courage.

Now, she’s got something almost as good to help keep her memorable wit and entirely human qualities alive: She’s got Kathleen Turner, who stars as Ivins in “Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-ass Wit of Molly Ivins,” now at Arena Stage’s Arlene and Robert Kogod Cradle Theater through Oct. 28.

It’s as if Ivins, who died in 2007 from breast cancer, was once again delivering political thunderbolts that made you proud, laugh, or squirm, depending on who you were, with her syndicated column, in a long career as a journalist from the New York Times to the Texas Observer.

Turner—movie star, outspoken supporter of liberal and progressive causes, mother, award-winning stage actress, and a still hot memory in the minds of many male movie goers of the 1980s for her performance as the femme fetale in the noirish “Body Heat”—is a perfect fit to march onstage and be Molly Ivins. If Turner’s famous voice—a rough shade deeper than in her “Body Heat” days, but just as impossible to ignore—has an equivalent somewhere, the words in Ivins’s column fit the bill, so it’s terrific that Turner’s speaking her words out loud. They’re going to echo loudly.

There’s a I’ll-do-it-my-way quality to both women. You can hear it over the telephone in an interview with Turner, or the way she tackled a glaring spotlight—“Whoa…can you give me a break here?”—as she sat down for a Newseum event, “An Evening with Kathleen Turner,” moderated by Shelby Coffey III, remembered here as the former Post Style section editor, and in the company of Margaret Engel, who co-wrote “Red Hot Patriot” with her twin sister Alison.

“That was fun,” she said of the Newseum event, “I like having fun.” Over the phone, the voice is down to a light roar, like a mother bear in a relaxed mode.

“I think we share some things. We have, I know, the same outlook, similar causes and political tendencies,” she said. “I am, if you did not know it, a member of People for the American Way. I am a chairman for Planned Parenthood. I support Amnesty International, among other causes.” Ivins wore her politics, which was liberal mixed in with a little verbal rage and lots of passion and in-your-face-humor.

Verbally, or on paper, both women share a common outspokenness, a big life story and a bigger-than-life-persona.

They could make an impression one way or another: Ivins with her 6-foot-1 presence and bright red hair; Turner with her physical sensuality, her voice, her acting chops, her movie star quality and directness. They both have led somewhat turbulent lives. It’s the nature of the beast when you become a movie star early on, although Turner objects to the “overnight” description. “I’d been working for quite a while. So, it’s not like I hadn’t been around,” she said of her, well, overnight rise to mega-stardom in “Body Heat.” “It was disconcerting, sure, with all the attention, the movie star thing, and it’s tough to handle.”

Her body of film work contains more unforgettable gems, which overrides the dross. You couldn’t get a better jump stardom jump start than “Body Heat,” “The Man With Two Brains” (in which she was as funny as Steve Martin), “Crimes of Passion,” “Romancing the Stone”, the hit woman to Jack Nicholson’s hit man in “Prizzi’s Honor,” and the remarkable movie about a marriage gone bad and mad, “The War of the Roses.”

“We [Michael Douglas and director Danny DeVito] were all proud of that,” she said. “That ending, the three of us had to fight for that, we battled with the studio on it and won.”In “Roses”, the movie took itself to where it was headed all along, and it was not a happy ending.

If you look for both women on YouTube, you see something else, the quality of sharp humor, insistence that attention must be paid. It’s mixed with tough honesty, evidence of big lives lived richly, with wind warnings.

“Molly could fill a room. She had presence. She cared passionately about politics. She had a huge heart,” Turner said of Ivins. “It’s important to me that I do her justice when I’m on that stage being her. The humor has to be there, and it is. Doesn’t matter where you are, people respond to that. I admired her immensely, no question.”

Ivins was no question, liberal-left, or as she’s quoted as saying in the press materials: “I am a liberal and proud of it. Fish gotta swim, and hearts gotta bleed.”

To her, work was everything: she left the New York Times, or was let go, depends who’s talking, to return to work in Texas, a base from which she blasted Texas politics and political figures.

Listen to Turner talk about the stage—where she was a triumphant Martha in a revival of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” by Edward Albee—you can hear some of the passion that Ivins must have felt when the words were rolling sharply and perfectly. “There is nothing like it,” she said of being on stage. “There’s a connection, a kind of conspiracy with the audience, that you are here at a moment that will never be repeated, that this is special, original, one-of-a-kind. I feel that way every night. It’s always fresh.”

For Ivins, Turner said she did not do any special research. “The words are already there, and you have to trust that. But I want the humor to be out there. I like making people laugh, making them crack up.”Things were not always top-of-the-world for Turner. In 1992 she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, a debilitating disease which left her in constant pain. “I was told I might not walk again,” she said.

Still, she’s persevered. She remains in the ring, on stage, active in politics, and here in Washington, you can expect to see her at numerous events. And until the end of October, you can find her on stage at the Kogod Cradle, resurrecting Molly, making people think, making people laugh as the 2012 election campaign rolls on to its conclusion like a severe weather warning.
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Gary Tischler • August 20, 2012

It’s August, and in the course of a hot summer month 50 years ago, screen icon, sex symbol, tragic muse to many a play and novel, actress Marilyn Monroe died of an overdose, in somewhat mysterious and still speculated about circumstances. She was only 36 years old. Her ex-husband American baseball legend Joe DiMaggio for years afterwards brought flowers to her tomb in Hollywood.

The American Film Institute is commemorating the 50th anniversary of her passing with a special series of some of Monroe’s finest films through Sept. 16 at its Theatre and Culture Center in Silver Spring.

The selected films show off the character of Monroe’s gifts, talents, and charisma and hold a key to understanding the hold she has on American imagination. Some of the films may date in content and style, but her gifts continue to shine through.

Monroe was not the first sex symbol brought forth by films, nor the last. She was not America’s sweetheart or the most beautiful woman ever to grace the silver screen, but she was a kind of dream that men—and women, those that dream of fame, glory, stardom and celebrityhood and its contents and discontents—still dream. For men of pretty much all ages of that time—young boys, cads, millionaires, intellectuals and muscle boys, even a president—she was a kind of reality show. She had a kind of welcoming openness that made you think about idle prospects if only you might be sitting at the same lunch counter with her.

Her life was also something of a cautionary tale of the price of fame, how debilitating and crushing a burden it could become as it was for her. She married an American sports legend and an American intellectual and literary legend, which speaks to her need for adoration and intellectual respect. Neither worked out: Joe DiMaggio’s departure being brief, having mistakenly assumed that she could turn Marilyn into a good Italian boy’s housewife. The marriage with Arthur Miller lasted longer, and resulted in two offspring for Miller, the screenplay for “The Misfits” and the classic play “After the Fall.”

She was quotable, and stories and rumors surrounded her like a light mink coat. “What do you have on when you’re in bed?” she was asked. “The radio,” she replied. And, having entertained the troops in South Korea amid huge adulation, she told her husband the New York Yankees’ Joltin’ Joe, “You’ve never heard such cheering.” He replied: “Yes, I have.”

Among the AFI’s selected films: “Monkey Business,” a black-and-white dizzy comedy with Cary Grant, with whom she held her own in the banter and laughs department; “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” in which she was the gold-digginest of blondes alongside busty brunette Jane Russell, singing “Diamonds Are a Girls Best Friend”; “The Prince and the Showgirl,” in which she was an appealing showgirl to Laurence Olivier’s rather dour prince; “How to Marry a Millionaire,” standing and wiggling tall next to Betty Grable and Lauren Bacall; a classic and beautiful and affecting performance as a showgirl courted by a cowboy in “Bus Stop”; the dark thriller “Clash By Night”; the sharp, tightly written “The Asphalt Jungle,” in which she had a small but, as always, memorable part as a gun moll; and the unforgettable and by-now classic “The Misfits”.

Legends have grown up around this drama about a woman in Reno for a divorce, hooking up with modern cowboys Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift under the direction of John Huston.

By all accounts it was a tough shoot: Marilyn popping pills and late all-the-time; Clift not much better in his declining years; Gable dying of a heart attack soon after shooting’s end; Miller battling with Marilyn and Huston. It was perhaps Gable’s finest film, and he said as much after seeing rushes. The movie haunts and all the people are haunting and haunted by it. Another writer and I heard Eli Wallach, who played Gable’s buddy talk about it years ago over a lunch interview at Georgetown’s departed classic saloon and restaurant, Nathan’s. Wallach resurrected the film and Monroe before our eyes as if it were yesterday.

It was yesterday, 50 years ago.

For information on the Monroe movie commemoration, visit the AFI website.

Gary Tischler • August 10, 2012

Ever wonder why Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and artistic director Howard Schalwitz refuse to lose their edge, get stale, play safe, stay full of surprises that pop out consistently out of their burlap sack that they call theater?

Go see “Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play,” by the astonishingly gifted playwright Ann Washburn and wonder no more. Washburn induces a state of wonder, provokes, makes you squirm and laugh, and think about tomorrow, if you’ve stopped doing that.

To be fair, “Mr. Burns” won’t be everyone’s cup of gizmo tea, but then nothing at Woolly ever is. I watched what seemed to be the beginnings of quite a lengthy argument between a couple who saw the action before them on the stage quite differently, the kind of thing that can only happen at a theater, a political debate, a demonstration or a football game.

Washburn accomplishes this by imagining a post-apocalyptic world—to climax Woolly’s apocalyptic-themed season—inhabited by a rabbity group of survivors in an America where the grid has broken down, nuclear generators have erupted, and the population has been reduced to an unforgivingly small number. How would people—any sort of people—react to this, what would they choose to remember, cherish, reject? What cultural artifacts would remain within them just waiting to be retold?

How about “The Simpsons”?

That’s right, “The Simpsons,” the hugely popular adultish cartoon sitcom which created a host of fans, some of them fanatics on the Star Trek order, with a large volume of shows to embrace and clutch dearly to their hearts, like talking teddy bears. That’s what a group of disparate but not yet desperate survivors more or less thrown together in a woody Northwest area begin to do, at first starting to grapple with their shared memory of “The Simpsons,” then slowly focusing on a particularly cherished and legendary episode, a parody of the Martin Scorcese’s remake of “Cape Fear,” starring Robert DeNiro, called “Cape Feare.”

You don’t have to (although it must surely help) be a “Simpsons” fan—I have never watched a full episode but have friends who had a Bart Simpson puppet in their window—to get what’s happening or even join in. It’s people—frightened, tentative, afraid to let go of the past which has just been essentially destroyed—trying to recreate it, as civilizations always have. By remembering the sleekly villainous Sideshow Bob or Bart cowering in a movie theatre in front of him because of death threats, they remember moments. More than that, these people, these characters take it further, in later years, as they form a traveling performing company—reminiscent of traveling carnivals, mystery plays, circus and amateur theater groups of yore—trading in memories of “Simpsons” scripts, trying at the same time to rebuild a culture.

It sounds odd—and it is creepy weird and touching—but it’s also amid all the outrageousness, a portrait of something important, an illustration of how ordinary folks embrace a culture of sorts. It may be that, as a society, we might not remember high culture, but some form of culture broadly shared, not Ophelia necessarily and not Homer’s Illiad but Homer Simpson.

As a group, the characters are hard to remember as named individuals, but impossible to forget as people. Initially, they carry with them guns, booklets with lists of names of people—relatives, friends, lovers, the local mechanic, who might have survived. We don’t know who they are exactly, what they did, where they specifically lived, what or who they lost. They sear themselves into our own dreams by the way they behave and that’s a function of the gifts of the actors.

There is, for instance, the magnificently-voiced Gibson, played with awesome affect by Chris Genebach—he’s tall, bald, gleaming almost, with a way of speaking that echoes manly singing, with the added plus that he can do Gilbert and Sullivan. There’s the thin, bounding Maria, played movingly, like some wounded Jackie-in-the-Box windup ballerina by Jenna Sokolowski, and the affecting, singular and insistent Matt, played by Steve Rose, and Jenny, hesitant, pushy, kind of daffy and sexy, and mysteriously affecting as played by Kimberly Gilbert, a Woolly regular who keeps getting better and better every year.

Much of this is very funny—the attempts to reproduce commercials of the period, to wit — and profoundly funny-sad. Consider a moment when one of the characters insists that Homer and Bart be authentic and real. “They’re cartoons for God’s sake,” another insists. “You can’t hurt them.” It’s a big issue: what we invest, how much of our hearts and souls, in our culture.

The test of the play is the last part in which we see the real thing, or as close as it gets: Mr. Burns (the people-hating, sleazy and greedy nuclear plant owner in the TV series) revealed as the villain, and the Simpsons in horrible peril. Is it real, or is it memories?

How we respond as individuals and members of a group—we, the audience—is what decides the fate of the play, of course, which is the first step toward renewal in a post-apocalyptic world—or in a world that is changing faster than the speed of sight.

“Mr. Burns” runs at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre at 641 D Street, N.W., through July 1. [gallery ids="100838,126124" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

You got trouble, right here in River City, Harold Hill, Marian the Librarian Paroo and 76 trombones.
Sound familiar?

You guessed it. It’s “The Music Man,” an American musical classic, and just the kind of show, set in small-town America, populist and popular, made for endless summer stock and dinner theater seasons — and the kind of show critics looking for songs from the dark side love to sneer at.

In other words, like a fast ball over the plate for Babe Ruth, it’s perfect for artistic director Molly Smith and Arena Stage. They hit Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma” out of the park in Arena’s pressure-filled inaugural offering at its expensive new digs in Mead Center for American Theater by making the venerable musical feel as fresh and as good as a dream dreamed last night.

It’s also perfect for Broadway musical stars Kate Baldwin (as Marian the very same librarian), and Burke Moses as Harold Hill, that sly salesman-con man brimming with enthusiasm and rascally charm as he tries to sell the folks of River City on the idea of a full-blown boys band complete with bright uniforms. Hence, the 76 trombones’ song.

Baldwin and Moses in a conference call just before a scheduled mid-day rehearsal revealed themselves to be American musicals enthusiasts and veterans, who see the form as fresh and challenging, a boon for audiences.

“It’s an American classic, and I’ve been dying to play Marian, because there’s so much to the role,” Baldwin said. “She’s a complicated woman, she’s a librarian and a music teacher. So, for this small town, she’s sort of the keeper of the cultural flame.”

“It’s one of those musicals you grow up with–that and “West Side Story,” which came out around the same time,” Moses said.

“The Music Man” by Meredith Wilson made its debut in 1957 and won out over the then-somewhat revolutionary “West Side Story” for the Tony Award for best musical. It starred Robert Preston, brimming with confidence and energy as Harold Hill, and newcomer Barbara Cook as Marian. Coincidentally, Cook will be appearing at the Kennedy Center in June.

Both Baldwin and Moses bridled at the idea that reprises and revivals of shows like “The Music Man” are somehow old fashioned. “They get done because they’re great shows,” said Baldwin, who dazzled on Broadway in “Finian’s Rainbow” and regionally in “My Fair Lady.” Baldwin, who has worked with Molly Smith before at Arena Stage when Smith reprised what was then a rarely done revival of “South Pacific,” said, “I think she [Smith] has a genius for making shows like this fresh and meaningful for contemporary audiences.”

“Let’s look at it this way,” Moses said. “What kind of opera season would you have if you did only new operas? If you stopped doing ‘Butterfly’ or ‘Aida’ because they’re old fashioned? Well, it’s the same for revival of classic musicals like ‘The Music Man.’ “

Smith has found a way to make her vision of “The Music Man” resonate for today’s audiences by setting it not in turn-of-the-century America circa the early 1900s but in Depression-era Iowa. The town is hurting, colorless and here comes this man with this energy and all this color. It shows the possibility that Hill, a con man, will run off with the money he’s raising for school band uniforms, a real disaster for a small town. On the other hand, it asks: what could raise the spirits of a struggling small town more than the prospect of band music and colorful uniforms?

“I know what it’s like to be a salesman,” Moses said. “And what it’s like to be Hill. In college, I sold quasi-encylopedias and children’s books, door to door. I can’t say I was very good at it. I did Harold Hill in summer stock when I was somewhat younger. Back then, you didn’t know quite what I was doing. I really love the part now. You embrace that energy.”

Hill is the con man who cautions the River City folks about the dangers of pool and sells them on the exuberant joyful noise of music in “76 Trombones” and, in his way, courts the shy but also eager Marian.

“What I’ve learned to do in preparing for this is to do what Kate tells me to do,” he said. “It’s easier that way. Naw, I love Kate. She just sort of sweeps you up.”

So, what about Marian, the librarian, and how do you prepare for that? “Well, I read a lot,” Baldwin quipped. “It’s such a cliche. She’s complex, she’s brave, she’s this cultural figure in town. But Hill kind of surprises here: he makes her broaden her horizons and think of new ideas.”

“Hill is an outsider,” Moses said. “Although she’s very much a part of the town, she’s also an outsider. He’s the guy who jazzes things up.”

Musically, “it’s a joy to sing the songs in this show,” said Baldwin, who has a highly-praised soprano voice. “I’m like this frog horn, next to this beautiful voice,” Moses added. That’s probably being a little modest since he originated the role of Gaston in the Disney-Broadway production of “Beauty and the Beast.”

“What I really would like to do, in terms of a bucket-list item, is “Sweeney Todd,” Moses said. “Hill and Sweeney … like light to dark.”

Talking with them, as the actors bantered, seems after a while like you’re in the room, waiting for rehearsal, waiting, even eager, for showtime. “Well, actually, I’m a little sleep deprived,” Baldwin said. “Colin, my one-year-old whom I have with me here, woke me up at 6:30 this morning.”

(“The Music Man” runs at Arena’ s Fichandler Theatre through July 22. Directed by Molly Smith, with choreography by Parker Ease and musical direction by Lawrence Goldberg, the cast also includes Will Burton, Juliane Godfrey, Nehal Joshi, John Lescault, Barbara Tirrell, Lawrence Redmond and others as well as five D.C.-area youths–Ian Berlin, Heidi Kaplan, Jaimie Goodson, Colin James Cech and Mia Goodman–chosen from an all-day casting call.) [gallery ids="102453,121098,121103" nav="thumbs"]