Joyce DiDonato at the Kennedy Center
• July 26, 2011

Unless you’re a classical music and opera fanatic, you may not have heard of Joyce DiDonato. But take my word for it—and I’m no expert in this field—Joyce DiDonato is a woman on the verge of a major breakthrough. She is as hot as you can possibly be in the here and now, driving critics to a kind of ecstasy in their descriptions of her.

Try this one: “it is a remarkable package that DiDonato offers: a mezzo cast in milk chocolate, but so smooth and agile that it can reach up to a diamond-bright soprano as well as sink to a rich, chesty alto. And then there is that instinctive charisma: she is always engaging, always sparkling…”

This quote is from the Times of London, probably not prone to comparing a singer’s voice to chocolate very often.

We caught up with DiDonato by phone as she was making her way by car from Houston to Dallas. DiDonato is at the Kennedy Center’s cavernous Concert Hall this Tuesday for a recital of works by Haydn, Chaminade, Hahn, and most notably Rossini, a composer whose music she consistently knocks out of the ballpark.

Even though Texas had been hit by seriously bad weather at the time, DiDonato didn’t seem to mind. “It’s not that long a trip,” she said. “And I love road trips, anyway. You see so much of the country, the real country. It’s not just dropping down in an airplane, get picked up and go to the hotel, go to rehearsals and perform.”

You’re on level-headed ground talking with her; she doesn’t do diva airs, even if she calls her blog Yankee Diva. Yes, she has a blog, which has now been more or less merged with a very attractive, diverse and comprehensive website

“I want to do more than perform, more than sing, more than be on that stage,” she said. “I want to communicate my love of the music, my love for the fans that follow my work, what I learned day to day, and the world I live in.”

She’s pretty savvy about this sort of thing. Check out her website—it’s a regular wonderland of performance, reviews, bios, pictures, thinking out loud and news of what’s next. She is right now the middle of an eight-city recital tour with pianist David Zobel, of which the Kennedy Center appearance is a part.

It’s hard to imagine her by herself on a big stage like the Kennedy Center accompanied only by Zobel. But if anything can fill the stage and the space, it’s probably DiDonato. She has a way of expressing charm, enthusiasm and passion about her work just by talking about it, let alone performing and singing.

“I like doing both,” she says of opera and recitals, “but they’re very different challenges. In an opera, there’s a certain amount of safety net. It’s an enterprise of tons of people. You’re never really alone, and it’s a family kind of thing—a team effort, if you will. In a recital, you’re pretty much alone, no safety net. It’s you, the accompanist, the music and most important of all the audience. And you can’t for a second lose the audience. That’s what makes it challenging, and I love that. It’s risky out there, and I don’t mind it one bit. I’m not the kind of person who believes you have to be perfect if that sort of attitude keeps you from taking risks.”

She already has honors—too many to name, but notably Gramophone’s Artist of the Year. And she recently came out with a new album, “Diva, Divo,” in which she alternates traditional operatic heroine roles with “pants” roles arias. “I love doing them,” she says. “It gives you a lot of insight into everything, and you really have to use all aspects of your voice.”

She is accessible and, at 42, one of those energetically attractive blue-eyed blondes whose rich array of hair begs to be constantly shaken and stirred. Over the phone she sounds a little like what she looks like on performance videos: strong-voice, high-energy, warm—a born storyteller without any fussiness.

“Some people have done this girl-next-door thing with me, as was done with Beverly Sills,” she said. “You know what some people said: she had a wonderful smile, she was sweet, but she had steel when it was required. Well, I can be tough when I need to be, I know what I want musically, how I want to do it. I don’t mean I’m temperamental, there’s just not a lot of time for that sort of thing.”

She performed here with the Washington National Opera right after 9/11 in Mozart’s “Cosi Fan Tutte”, an opera not done here again until last fall. “I can’t say I remember much about that,” she said. “It was such a strange time to be here, to be doing what I’m doing.”

She is by all accounts one of the finest interpreters of Rossini you can find, having done “The Barber of Seville” in many venues, including a performance that is becoming legendary for its above-and-beyond-the-call-of-duty aspect. The production in London was rolling along nicely in the first act at the Royal Opera House, when DiDonato tripped and fractured her fibula. She waved off a doctor, and appeared in Act 2 on a crutch. If that doesn’t get you a standing ovation, nothing will. And it did.

“The show must go on, right?” she said, and laughed almost sheepishly. Recently she was in a production in Houston of the much more modern opera “Dead Man Walking,” about a man on death row and the nun who tries to help him. “To me, an opera like that is an emotionally shattering experience. I am so glad I had the opportunity to do that.”

All this from a girl named Joyce Flaherty, born in a small town with the classic small-town name of Prairie Village, Kansas. “Yup, really small town,” she said as we compared notes on growing up in small town Midwest America. “You weren’t really exposed that much to classical music and opera, although I liked it. At most I had dreams of becoming a pop singer maybe, or teaching music in high school.”

You can almost see her as a schoolmarm, getting kids enthusiastic about Rossini and the like. She is not one of those girls who had voice lessons from age three and worked in the local opera company, or a child prodigy whose gifts were recognized early. “I didn’t know I had a voice, in the senses of having a gift for this,” she said. “It’s still a work in progress, as far as I’m concerned.”

It wasn’t until college at Wichita State University that she became interested, especially after performing in a production of “Die Fledermaus.” She was hooked, like a girl falling in love for the first time. She did graduate work at the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia, and from that point she became serious, and rose fairly quickly to the top.

Not bad for a kid from a family of seven children, Irish through and through (DiDonato was a name acquired from her first husband. She is now married to Italian conductor Leonardo Verdoni). “No kids yet. No pets,” she said. “We lead a pretty hectic life, although we live in Kansas City.”

She’s often quoted as having an aversion to being called a “star.” “That can be such a trap,” she said. “It’s the music, getting better, giving your audience an experience that will enrich them, that they won’t forget. I mean sure it’s nice. And no question, we have a very, very good life, traveling all over the world, performing in a very rarefied atmosphere. But I think my upbringing keeps me grounded.”

Or as grounded as a self-described “Yankee Diva” can get.
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Anna Deavere Smith Does Not “Let Down”
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At the end of “Let Me Down Easy,” Anna Deavere Smith’s provocative, shattering play about health care in America now and the hour of our death, Smith stands alone on a stage littered with castoff costumes, clothing, food, props, bottles, pencils, lying on the floor. It looks like the aftermath of a party or a food fight—or an abandoned emergency room where a life-and-death struggle has just taken place.

It’s all that remains of the 20 people portrayed by Smith during the course of an uninterrupted and rangy evening in which she explores, in her inimitable fashion, the arena of our health and bodies, and the pains we sometimes endure because of the way we deal with falling ill, and the moment when we come face to face with the finality of death. By a shift in vocal timbre, a way of walking or sitting, an accent, a laugh, a sprawl on a couch, a way of talking, outstretched arms, a tie, a coat, a cowboy hat, she explores and portrays the geography of our culture.

Smith, an impressively talented, cogent and curious, woman functions as playwright, actress, writer and interviewer for “Let Me Down Easy,” a project somewhat similar to others she is well know for. There was “Fires in the Mirror,” which examined the aftermath of a race riot in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and “Twilight: Los Angeles,” which focused on the devastating and violent 1992 riots in Los Angeles. But while these previous works also saw Smith portraying dozens of real people alone on stage with remarkable dexterity and even-handedness, they were focused on specific, dramatic and explosive events. “Let Me Down Easy” is much broader in its scope and approach.

While the massive national health care reform legislation, passed amid much bitterness last year, provides a framework for a large extent of what concerns the people in this play, there is a lot more going on than might be contained in even such a sweeping legislative effort.

“Let Me Down Easy” is about specific people, many of them quite well known to most of us for one reason or another. Athletes, like the controversial American Tour de France bicyclist Lance Armstrong, who overcame cancer and rode to greater achievements. Sportswriter Sally Jenkins. A boxer. A rodeo bull rider. Model Lauren Hutton. Television movie critic Joel Siegel, dying on a couch of colon cancer. Playwright and performer Eve Ensler, of “The Vagina Monologues.” Former Texas Governor Ann Richards. There are doctors, medical academics, a musicologist, a choreographer and a physician at Charity Hospital in New Orleans who experiences the terrifying ravages of Hurricane Katrina.

Such a diverse group of voices, of men and women from various walks of life expressing similar and differing concerns, at first produces an unformed, disconcerting narrative, like trying to grab Jell-O with your hands. But the effect, in time, is accumulative, and it arrives with shocking and powerful clarity, and with gentle but undeniable finality. It may not be a definitive destination, an over-arching theory or philosophy, or even ready-made solace, but it is a destination, an arrival, and an ending.

There have been complaints that there are too many celebrities here and that the play is unfocused or mish-mish. Maybe so. Maybe it’s too big a subject to have a definitive story line or conclusion that you can take to the bank or to the church. And it’s fair to say that the better-known people portrayed here add less to the total than those not so well known. While much of “Let Me Down Easy”—a theatrical blues riff with multiple meanings—concerns itself with terminal illnesses and how it is dealt with by hospitals, the medical community and patients, there are sections on the ailments and issues peculiar to athletes, as well as how society deals with women’s bodies and their functions (hence Ensler and Hutton).

But many of the characters share a common plight against cancer, a battle, sometimes successful, sometimes not. And suddenly there is very little distance between women like Richards, the sharp-tongued former governor of Texas dying of cancer, and Smith’s own aunt, Lorraine Coleman, a retired teacher.

There is a surprising bit of laughter in the play—some as a result of Smith’s fabulous work as a mimic, mime and master of comic timing—but the constructed and performed production picks up power as it goes along. A kind of dread aching to be relieved ensues somewhere in there. Smith gives us Kiersta Kurz-Burke, a physician at the New Orleans charity hospital who has been ignored and abandoned for days during Katrina; Eduardo Bruera, of the Anderson Cancer Center, talking about “Existential Sadness”; Joel Siegel, only in his fifties, flat on his back, the face projected dramatically on a wall, dying of colon cancer; and Trudy Howell, the director of a South African orphanage where children deal with the loss of parents and their own impending deaths, entitled appropriately, “Don’t Leave Them In The Dark.”

“Let Me Down Easy” has a restless feel to it, but it also has the sure touch and magic of Smith’s abilities as an actress, that gift of playing many parts convincingly with minimal props. Over and above the identifying tricks of such props, or the brilliant use of her voice and inflections of accents, tone and vocal speed, there is something else that convinces us like a punch to the heart. True, Smith is a terrific actress—you’ve all seen her in films and as a national security adviser on the defunct “West Wing” series—but that’s technique. What makes her work soar is her own empathy toward the people she’s put on stage; it’s as if she’s caught souls in a glass jar. She’s not a chameleon. Some recognizable part of her is always there. It’s not as if she somehow disappears into a person. It’s more like she joins with them.

“Let Me Down Easy” doesn’t function so much as drama; rather the people that we come to know as they swagger, suffer, snack, snort, laugh and dream are a kind of self-portrait of us. What we often hear are sentences we’ve heard, or what we will ultimately say ourselves sooner or later.

We’re left with a salve, like fresh water, And Smith stands alone in a bow, the stage littered with the debris, the left behind stuff of human beings.

“Let Me Down Easy,” written and performed by Anna Deavere Smith and directed by Leonard Foglia, will be performed at Arena Stage through February 13. For more information visit ArenaStage.org.
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Spring Performance Arts Preview 2011
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The Kennedy Center
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Maximum India Festival
March 1-20

New York City Ballet Three mixed Repertoire Programs: April 5, 8 and 10; April 6 and 9 and April 7 and 9.
April 5 – 10

Paul Taylor Dance Company
March 22-24

Peter Brook’s “Fragments”
April 14 – 17
The acclaimed genius focuses on five short works by edgy, bare-bones genius playwright Samuel Beckett (“Rough for Theater 1,” “Rockabye,” “Act Without Words II,” “Neither” and “Come and Go”) at the Eisenhower.

Barbara Cook’s Spotlight Vocal Series
March 25
Actress and singer Ashley Brown (the original “Mary Poppins”) at the Terrace Theater.

The National Symphony Orchestra presents “The Trumpet of the Swan: A Novel Symphony”
March 27
Based on a book by E.B. White, with music by conductor Jason Robert Brown. Starring John Lithgow, trumpeter Christopher Vendetti and DC actors like Craig Wallace, Michael Willis and Naomi Jacobsen. Two concerts.

Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies”
May 7 – June 19
___

The Washington National Opera
—

“Madame Butterfly”
February 26 – March 19

“Iphigenie en Tauride”
May 6 – May 26
Placido Domingo himself, departing as head of the WNO at the conclusion of this season, will perform in this Greek tragedy, composed by Christoph William Gluck. Running for eight performances, Domingo sings alongside soprano Patricia Racette.

Donizetti’s “Don Pasquale”
May 13-27
For something lighter, try this classic comic opera starring renowned American bass-baritone James Morris.

Placido Domingo Celebrity Series
February 27 & March 12
Domingo’s lasting legacy, his vocal celebrity series, will this time feature tenor Juan Diego Florez, February 27, and Welsh Bass Baritone Bryn Terfel, March 12.

The Washington Ballet performed “Le Corsaire”
April 6 – 10
___

The Music Center at Strathmore
—

Among many offerings, there are:

Hilary Hahn performs this Sunday at 4 p.m.
February 27

Itzhak Perlman comes to town with Rohan de Silva on piano.
May 1

Bryan Adams and his “Bare Bones Tour”
March 11

Comic writer David Sedaris
March 31

Jazz songstress Nancy Wilson
April 22

___

Ford’s Theater
—

“Liberty Smith”
March 23 – May 21
Geoff Packard, who wowed audiences in the title role of “Candide,” takes on another title role with “Liberty Smith,” a new musical by Michael Weiner, Adam Abraham, Marc Madnick, and Eric R Cohen. It’s a tall-tale musical approach to the early founding days of American history with 23 musical numbers.

___

The Shakespeare Theater
—

Oscar Wilde’s “An Ideal Husband”
March 8 – April 10
Oscar Wilde will get the full treatment by the Shakespeare Theater Company under the veteran and able direction of Keith Baxter. The threat of scandal, an obsession during Victorian times, buzzes over an upstanding and rising aristocratic type in this Wilde gambol through British social mores.

“Old Times”
May 17 – July 3

___

The Studio Theater
—

“New Ireland: The Enda Walsh Festival”
March 15 – April 25
Featuring the works of acclaimed Irish playwright Enda Walsh, the festival brings back the Druid Theater Company with its production of Walsh’s “Penelope.” The festival is new artistic director David Muse’s effort to broaden Studio’s international reach and includes productions by the Studio Theater of Walsh’s “The Walworth Farce” and “The New Electric Ballroom.” Walsh herself will be on hand, along with Tony-winning director Garry Hynes. There are readings, plays, films and a daylong symposium on New Irish arts.

“Venus in Fur”
Opening May 25

___

Arena Stage

—

“The Edward Albee Festival”
March 5 – April 24
With lots of events, plays, talks and side activities, and it’s all about Albee.

Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
February 25 – April 10
Perhaps the main event of the Albee Festival, the Steppenwolf Theater Company’s production of the acerbic drama stars Tracy Letts and May Morton as George and Martha.

Edward Albee’s “At Home at the Zoo”
February 25 – April 24

“The Chosen”
March 8 – 27

___

Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

—

“The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs”
March 21 – April 10
Most intriguing prospect and title goes to this one-man show by solo performer Mike Daisy, wherein he discusses the stigma and the harrowing truths of the world’s most mysterious techie icon.

“BootyCandy,” written and directed by Robert O’Hara
May 30 – June 26
O’Hara, who just took home a Helen Hayes Award for “Antebellum,” will be turning out this kaleidoscope of sassy sex education, which discusses growing up gay and African American.

___

Some other things to look for:

—

“WAM2!” features Mozart’s operas “Don Giovanni” and “Cosi fan tutte,” produced by the In Series at the Lang Theater of the Atlas Performing Arts Center.
March 4 – 6, 11 and 12

“Voices Underwater”
Opening March 7
The electric and eclectic Rorschach Theater returns with this new play by Abi Basch at the Georgetown Lutheran Church in Georgetown.

Ken Ludwig Returns the Love
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-The eminently successful playwright Ken Ludwig insists that no one has ever called him a dinosaur.

“My kids maybe sometimes,” he said. “But as far as I remember, no one has said that to my face or in print.”

Well, there’s always a first time. Ken Ludwig is something of a dinosaur. And I mean that entirely
as a compliment.

In the theater world, Ludwig is like one of these environmentalists that runs all over the world trying to save species of animals from extinction.

In Ludwig’s case, he’s almost single-handedly kept alive such genres as the pre-Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, stage adaptations of young people’s literature, plays that can be called farce, star-studded (or not) comedies about theater, movie and show business folk, and the oft-remembered but rarely sighted “well-made play.”

I don’t mean to suggest now that he’s re-staged, produced or mounted new productions of old plays—otherwise known as revivals—no sir. He has written well over a dozen plays that are basically examples of all of these genres, as authored not by George Kaufman, Mark Twain, P.G. Wodehouse,
or anybody else you can name now tap dancing in show biz heaven, but by himself.

“I’m not a dinosaur,” he said. “I don’t see myself that way, let’s put it that way. I write and create plays that are in the form or genre of plays that I’ve loved, or forms of entertainment that I love. Most of them are comedies, which are, as you know, are serious business.”

Example one, and the latest: the world premiere of “A Fox on the Fairway,” now at the Signature Theater in Shirlington through November 14. It’s a comedy—farcical, no doubt—about golf.

“Specifically, it’s about two American country clubs and some of its members competing for an annual trophy,” Ludwig said. “From there, you can just imagine.”

Now think for a moment, who made a literary sideline of writing wry comedic books and stories
about golf, besides American sportswriter Dan Jenkins?

It’s none other than the great comedic British stylist P.G. Wodehouse, the man who gave the world “Jeeves,” the impeccable, perfect literary butler.

“Exactly,” Ludwig said. “I love comedy, and Wodehouse is an example of a certain kind of style of writing comedy. Writing comedy in book form is terrifically hard. So is writing comedy for the stage. To my mind, it’s the most difficult art form in literature because, first and foremost you have to make people laugh—out loud, preferably—chuckle, smile. In the theater, you don’t want silence during a comedy. It’s a kind of homage to Wodehouse, yes, but it’s very American also.

“I loved Wodehouse. I loved his golf stories. I loved Jeeves. I love J.B. Priestley, whose writing
has a little more edge. They’re both great stylists.”

So ‘A Fox on the Fairway,’ you can be sure, is going to be funny. “We heard good things during performances for preview audiences,” Ludwig said.

There are other things Ludwig loves—besides his family. He loves old movies, you guess. He loves show tunes and the great composers of the American songbook like George Gershwin and Cole Porter. He loves comedy. He loves classic and popular literature and stories, like those by Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson. He loves show biz people, of which clan he is now a certifiable and certified member.

He says what he tries to do with his plays is to look at them in a fresh way, to make them come alive for contemporary audiences. That’s probably true, but there is a greater force at work here. Put simply: it is love.

Ludwig brings a first-love quality to his work, the boyhood crush you never get over, the grateful
love for whomever gave you that first kiss that was really stupefying, the first movie you ever saw that made an indelible impression, the love you still feel for all the lyrics you can’t get out of your head like “Summertime,” “Porgy” or any Gershwin and Porter tune, the love you feel for the great clowns and their pratfalls and that moment during a comedy when there are three people hiding in closets and three people coming through the door.

All of this stuff sounds old fashioned—dinosaur-like if you will—except for one thing: it works for him and for us. He doesn’t do revivals, but his own plays are continually being revived and performed on Broadway (“Lend Me a Tenor” most recently) and in just about every regional and local theater in the country and around the world.

Consider that his very first produced play, the aforementioned “Lend Me a Tenor,” is a side-splitting comedy about the world of opera and was produced by none other than Andrew Lloyd Webber, a gentleman with a fairly decent show biz track record who once wrote a musical called “Jeeves.” Or consider “Crazy for You”, the 1990s musical that he wrote in the mode of Gershwin’s original musical which won a Tony for him (He also pulled off a similar epic with a production of Gershwin’s “An American in Paris”). Consider the stage versions of “Treasure Island” and “Tom Sawyer” and “The Three Musketeers,” geared toward young audiences and the family trade. Consider one of my personal favorites, that of “Shakespeare in Hollywood,” a grand, affectionate comedy about the making of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at Warner Brothers Studio in 1930s Hollywood. Consider “Moon over Buffalo,” already revived and an adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s “The Beaux’ Stratagem” or “Leading Ladies.”

Now take a look at Ludwig’s website and check out where Ludwig plays are, or have been playing. Why, they are just about everywhere: Aurora, Ohio, Broadway, the Crested Butte Mountain Theater, The Minstrel Players, the Villainous University Theater, the Scarborough Theater in Ontario, Canada, “Moon Over Buffalo” in Moldova, The Three Musketeers, in London, “Crazy for You” in Melbourne.

High-minded critics haven’t always been crazy for Ludwig. But theatergoers have. Those plays live on, in much the same way that the forms, writers and shows that Ludwig loves so much live on in his mind. In a way, he’s returning a favor of happiness found, happiness returned.

“As somebody said: tragedy is easy, comedy is hard,” Ludwig said. Actors like Barry Nelson, Hal Holbrook, Carol Burnett, Joan Collins and the late Dixie Carter have shown that.

Not bad for a guy who’s also a certified lawyer and graduate of Harvard Law School, family man, husband to wife Adrienne (also a lawyer), and father of Olivia and Jack, resident not of Hollywood or New York, but of Northwest Washington. And he just keeps on rolling because, well, the game’s afoot. Oh wait, that’s the title of his next play (subtitled “Holmes for the Holiday”) about William Gillette, the great actor who made a career of playing Sherlock Holmes on stage.

“The Odd Couple”: All the Laughs, and a Bit More
•

Oscar Madison and Felix Unger. The slob and the neatnik. We know these guys, since, like forever. They’re Jack Klugman and Tony Randall. They’re Walter Matthau and Art Carney and or Jack Lemmon. They’re “The Odd Couple.”

Yeah, those guys driving each other nuts like a married couple and delivering sure-fire laughs to thousands, millions of theatergoers, and movie and television viewers.

Neil Simon, until he actually got a Pulitzer
Prize for “Lost in Yonkers,” used to complain regularly that he wasn’t taken seriously enough as an artist. He claimed people considered him just a superstar gag writer and author of hit plays—which in turn became hit movies, and in the case of “The Odd Couple,” hit television series.

He deserved better, but god bless him, he sure could make you laugh.

“The Odd Couple” is often used as Exhibit A of a big laugh machine. The production, now at Theater J at the JCC, is also Exhibit A for the case that Simon had a legitimate complaint. People forget. This production, with two of DC theater’s more gifted actors in the leads, shows again and for sure that Simon was writing about people who struck a chord with audiences, not just because gags and jokes came out of their mouths faster than a speeding bullet, but because they had something to say about who we were ourselves.

Simon, in short, was funny because he struck a nerve—because we men and women, single and married, old and young, all recognized ourselves in his characters. For men of a certain age, that’s especially true of Oscar and Felix, the most polar opposites who ever ended up sharing the same living space (except perhaps for Ernest Borgnine and Ethel Merman). For them, laughter isn’t just the best revenge, but also the best disguise.

We are so familiar with the plight of Oscar and Felix that we think the play is one joke after another, a barrel of laughs. And it still is in the sure hands of director Jerry Whiddon. The actors are equally commendable. Rick Foucheux plays Oscar Madison, a grumpy, divorced and perpetually broke sports writer. J. Fred Schiffman is Felix Ungar, an edgy, fussy, neat freak news writer who’s just been thrown out of the house by a long-suffering wife.

The laughs are still there—Oscar’s apartment where he and Felix hold a weekly poker game is alone worth the price of admission. When pigs fly, this is where they come to rest. The space, as imagined by designer Misha Kachman, looks like a city dump with a ceiling and windows where old milk cartons, beer bottles, cigarette butts, dirty ashtrays, and frayed couches share space with yesterdays socks and newspapers. It is a man’s cave, a man who’s completely forgotten how to clean up after himself and his friends.

When Felix can’t be found, but does finally show up at the poker game, there’s concern for the forlorn, wounded, almost-but-not-quite suicidal grown waif. Oscar, who hasn’t gotten over his own divorce, takes him in. The rest is basically a pain-filled, funny, destruction derby, especially when Oscar lures two expatriate British ladies from upstairs down for a disastrous couples dinner party.

Often, this material is played almost strictly for laughs: the nuances in the script get trampled by the situations, even when they revived the play with a female cast a couple of decades ago, starring
Rita Moreno and Sally Struthers.

Here the nuances, thanks to the actors, arise out of the situations to the point where you see Oscar and Felix for what they are: a couple of lonely guys, unused to being alone, who recreate exactly the atmosphere that caused their marriages to fail.

It isn’t just that Oscar is the ultimate cigar-smoking, milk-rotting-in-the-fridge slob; it’s become a proud habit with him. And Felix is the ultimate fussy, I-love-to-cook, control-freak type who goes so far as to wash the poker cards. These are ingrained habits that are bound to drive the other men crazy. And they do. And it’s funny. And it’s sad. And it’s just like men get sometimes when all they can do is what they’ve always been doing.

I don’t mean to suggest that “The Odd Couple” doesn’t retain the power to make everyone in the audience laugh. It does. It’s just that this production, thanks also to a great supporting cast, reveals itself to be a terrific play full of characters, instead of caricatures. Watch the two guys together on the stage: Foucheux’s Oscar stands up like a wad of paper unrolling itself; he’s all round valleys and paunches, balding a little at the top. Felix, next to him, often holding a duster or cooking utensil, is all straight lines, white shirt, tie, shiny, perfectly tied shoes, edgy face—you could get a paper cut just touching him. And they can’t help themselves, just as when Oscar drops a cigar butt on the floor in final exasperation and grinds it out with his feet, and Felix guilt trips him or nags him like a fussy mother or wife.

“The Odd Couple” is still funny as all get out. But now, when the laughter stops for a second, we see who Oscar and Felix are. They’re us guys, unfettered by the imagination.

“The Odd Couple” runs through November 28 at the Jewish Community Center on 16th Street.

‘Circle Mirror’ Shows Promise for Direction of Studio Theatre
•

 

-David Muse makes his official debut as the new artistic director of the Studio Theater (he succeeds founder and long-time A-D Joy Zinoman) by directing “Circle Mirror Transformation.”

This is not a debut accompanied by trumpets blaring, and neither is Annie Baker’s muted but ingratiating play about a group of people who are part of an acting class in a small community in Vermont. But the play and the production send out several promising signals about the future,
each in their own way.

“Circle Mirror Transformation” signals a new voice, for one thing, in playwright Annie Baker, who’s made it a point to transform the often inarticulate way we speak and communicate today into a kind of music and poetry — a revelatory method that leads, like acting, to a kind of truth.

It’s an understated play with a little bit of this and a little of bit that. It has soap opera elements, theater stuff, acting stuff, and it’s both contemporary and naturalistic in its look and sound and old-fashioned in its dramatic elements. Baker seems to suggest that acting arrives at difficult truths by way of artful, hard-learned artifice, much in the same way that literature arrives at the same destination by way of fiction.

While the production often seems loosey-goosey and unformed, Muse’s direction and Baker’s writing keep things directionally focused: “We and the folks at the acting class are going somewhere here, and the road and destination seem uncomfortably familiar.”

In the program, Baker says that “the way human beings speak is so heartbreaking to me—we never sound the way we want to sound. Speaking is a kind of misery.”

You can see that observation in action in “Circle Mirror Transformation.” This is especially true for the three students: Schultz, a yearning, confused, recently divorced man full of inarticulate, shiny wounds; Theresa, the bright-eyed, sexy former actress and especially Lauren, the quiet, painfully shy teenager who wears her hoodie like a turtle wears its shell.

The school is run by the insistent, work-it, risk-taking Marty and her husband James, who’s middle-aged, phlegmatic, and a walking disappointment.

We see all of them right at the beginning, lying in a circle at the studio, which is lightly cluttered with a mirror. They’re doing an exercise, an acting exercise, in which they try to count to ten one at a time without anyone counting at the same time, interrupting, or jumping in. In other words, it’s a clean, nearly-impossible exercise in team-work and empathy.

Throughout the play, which is preformed without interruption for nearly two hours, you get exercises which resemble a kind of group therapy, as opposed to anything to do with the theater. The group takes turns “being” each other, hence the initially startling appearance of Jim talking about “my husband.” They try telling stories along a string that is taking a story word by word from one place to another. Interspersed are moments of reality, where the characters interact and relate, and those interactions reverberate in the exercises and vice versa.

That’s especially true of Theresa, played with almost anything-goes, playful energy by Kathleen McElfresh. She’s bounding, bouncy, mobile, and uses every part of herself — the flouncy hair, the long legs, arms, fingers, body — to become a kind of focus point, a magnet for the two men and wary distance for the other two females.

Things happen that probably shouldn’t, but the process itself is what counts. There’s a five-point build-up to the play as we do what they do: at first we keep following Theresa around, then Schultz’s plaintiff voice makes itself heard, and then we note the tensions and old hurts that are part of James and Marty’s marriage. We barely register Lauren’s goth-ish, quiet ten and her voice, barely audible at first. She’s closed in.

But it’s with the final two exercises — a risky write a secret on a piece of paper, then pick out of a hat and read it, and an imagination of what happens after – that we realize that it’s Lauren who’s been paying attention the most, not the least of which was an earlier comment asking, “when do we start acting?”

If MacKenzie Meehan, who plays Lauren with thorough, skinny-teen authenticity and stops-and-starts, is a stellar surprise, Jennifer Mendenhall as Marty is the play’s elastic but tough glue — it’s center and heart and soul. She holds everyone together, even when she comes close to falling apart. We’ve known and seen Mendenhall a long time, especially at the Studio and the Woolly Mammoth, and we’re always struck by her particular brand of guileless, sexy and open-faced naturalness. She doesn’t hide much and can therefore wound you at the oddest moments.

For Muse, it’s a solid start — a bid for a long relationship with the audience worth building. (“Circle Mirror Transformation” runs at the Studio Theater through October 17.)

Till Fellner at the Embassy Series: A Resounding Climax
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-Most worthwhile efforts have small beginnings, and this is also true for the Embassy Series, the unique musical events put together every year by its director, Jerome Barry, now in its 17th season.

Barry began his series of concerts/receptions at Washington embassies, ambassador’s residences and occasionally cultural centers with a core spirit. Many early offerings were held at European embassies like the Embassy of Austria and the Federal Republic of Germany.

The cultural core of the early concerts was the music of what may be Europe’s greatest cultural contribution to the world—a kind of library of great 18th and 19th century composers from Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, Brahms, the Strausses, Haydn and others whose compositions amount to the great and lasting saving grace of the German-speaking nations and peoples of the continent.

With them came the pianists, the violinist, the quartets and ensembles and trios, the flautists and cello players, the young as well as the world-renowned to play the works of European geniuses in settings and atmospheres unique to the music. Recitals, solo performances, sonatas, the E-minors and B majors, and all the technical bravura and skills are all important here. They are the missals for the body of European music’s masses and scriptures.

Over time, the Embassy series concerts have expanded into the wide and wider reaches of the world, embracing the rest of Europe, Russia, the Slavic countries, Latin America and the Middle East. With its acceptance came a wider scope of music with different sounds, emphases and instruments, which sprung from the fountain of different cultures and traditions.

But the Series always returns to the great composers, the great wellspring of European music, and even now such concerts are unique in and of themselves.

In that sense, the recent appearance of Till Fellner, the rising-star pianist, at the Embassy of Austria was so illustrative of the performance of classical music that is really classical beyond the music.

Fellner came to Washington to conclude his project of playing the complete cycle of Beethoven Sonatas—all 32 of them—on a journey that included New York, Washington, Tokyo, London, Paris and, appropriately, Vienna, where Fellner was born and which is home to a gilded, triumphant musical reputation and aura.

On the Sunday afternoon of his performance before a sold-out audience, Fellner completed the cycle by playing Sonata 30 E major, op. 109, Sonata 31 a flat major, op. 110 and Sonata 32, C minor, op. 111. The numbers, of course, tell you absolutely nothing unless you are an aficionado of Beethoven’s sonatas, or know your way around the little manifestos that describe how a piece will be played as in (for No. 32): Maestoso—Allegro con brio ed appassianata Arrietta: Adagio molto semplice e cantabile.

This is not meant to be even remotely a critical piece, which, in any case, this writer isn’t qualified to do. But I’m pretty good on history, setting, atmosphere, feeling and response. And I know a super-star when I hear one—here I mean Beethoven—and a budding super star when I see one. The Sonatas Fellner played are works from 1820-1822, and music history suggests that they were meant to be of a piece.

Fellner performs, behaves, and plays like a man dealing with a masterpiece. This is not just a question of technique, but a kind of presence, where the artists become a priest –my fingers to God—who is inspired and inspiring to listen to. All great pieces of art, and perhaps most especially of music, have a religious quality to them even if composed, written and created by agnostics or atheists. They are offerings meant to penetrate the great void and give it density, nuance, glory, suppleness, a kind of knowing. They are like sacrificial smoke rising up in swirls. The Sonatas do that like King Lear’s lament, Rembrandt’s touch of light.

Great musicians, always in their own ways, behave accordingly. There is a ritual involved, and a pact with audience and player. Unlike music and performances from other areas of the world, which have aspects of naked emotion and celebration in them, a kind of intense sociability, concerts like this one require, and always have, a certain embrace of stillness. The object is not to clap your hands, but to sit on them, or to stroke your mustache or listen intently with your eyes and heart. A performance such as this calls to action that part of the brain that can hear a lapse in technique, a missed key, or the buzz of a fly two blocks away.

In a sense, concerts like these are indeed like being in church. It’s smoke and incense and faith and appreciation; apt enough since much of European composition begins with church and ended up there too.

Felnner has the requisites of a star player. He knows it’s not enough to wear a black tuxedo to the chair. You have to spread out the tails in a certain way. You must every now and then, with a shake of the head and a wave of the fingers coming up from the keys, add human drama to the notes. At 39, he maintains those boyish good looks that seem to be built into the genes of future pianists, so that when he bows, it is a polite but not quite humble act.

No need for humility, in any case. Playing the last three sonatas seemed not just a climax to a personal musical journey, but a journey in and of itself where movements soar, tremble, and achieve a grand serenity in the end.

A Modern, Muddled History of Afghanistan In Three Acts
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Even while talking with Nicholas Kent on the phone, you could hear the murmur in the background.

Kent, the artistic director of the Tricycle Theater Company in England and the man responsible for putting together “The Great Game”, an ambitious three-play project on imperialism and other forays into Afghanistan at Sidney Harman Hall which ended last Saturday, was delighted by the buzz in the background. That would be audiences from the first two parts of the trilogy, talking it up about what they saw.

“That was one of the concerns about taking these plays on an American tour,” said Kent, who also directs “Black Tulip”, one of the mini-plays in the second part of the trilogy. “We didn’t know how the audiences would react. Obviously, it’s a very timely subject for Americans as well as Europeans, given the state of the commitment of the American military effort there.”

“The audiences,” Kent says, “have been amazing. There’s really a reaction here. It’s not like people are sitting there dutifully taking their medicine of serious or historic drama.”

In Washington especially, that was bound to happen, although it takes theatrical stamina and determination to take in all three plays, which feature the participation and writing efforts of twelve playwrights. The trio of plays actually comprises about a dozen plays of varying lengths. “We basically sent out a call for plays, and we got quite a result.”

Afghanistan looms large in the Barack Obama presidency. It haunts the minds of the U.S. body politics, and the cost of the effort in human loss can be seen almost every day in the small dramas provided by funeral corteges that make their sorrowful way to a plot in Arlington National Cemetery. “The Great Game”, a phrase coined by the eminent chronicler of the British Empire Rudyard Kipling, is an effort to tell the story of three great power efforts — futile on the first two, school’s still out on the last — to control events in Afghanistan. Part One is called “Invasion and Independence” and focuses on the British Empire’s efforts there, some of them ending in major massacres and defeats up until 1930.

Part Two chronicles the Soviet Union’s efforts to create a subject state by way of invasion, and the CIA’s varied forays there, helping the Mujahedeen’s anti-Russian rebellion. The same group would eventually morph into the Taliban. Part Three, “Enduring Freedom”, are the stories of the American presence after 9/11, a story that remains unfinished if not undone. “Obviously, Afghanistan is a hugely important event in terms of the United States,” Kent said. “That’s why we thought it would be an appropriate undertaking, especially in Washington.”

Kent’s Tricycle Theater Company is an odd mixture of a theater, and very much reflects the interests of its director. “I think sometimes people here think we just do plays they see as political, or archival, or documentary,” he said. “We also do entertainments, if you will, like “The 39 Steps”, or straight plays, including “The Great White Hope.” You do want to have an audience – it’s theater after all.”

But the so-called tribunal plays are what sets Tricycle and Kent apart from the rest of the theater world. Kent has staged plays about the war crime tribunals created in the wake of the break-up of Yugoslavia, about the British in Ireland, about Apartheid in South Africa and the Nuremberg Trials, as well as Guantanamo. Much of the dialogue in these plays comes from verbatim transcripts and documents of trials.

Kent chafes when people see him as a left-wing ideologue. “I’m not a lefty, per se. It’s not about lefty, right wing and things like that. It’s about justice, history, not forgetting. It’s about understanding history and its repetition. You shouldn’t really talk about Afghanistan if you know nothing about what’s gone on there for centuries.”

This sort of approach to history and theater can be highly affecting and dramatic in and of itself. During the course of a performance of the play about the Nuremberg trials, which included actors playing Hermann Goring reciting testimony from the trials, an elderly Holocaust survivor in the audience became so distraught that she stood up and shouted at the Goring character , yelling “Liar, murderer.”

“It was quite astonishing, yes,” Kent said.

“I don’t see these plays as political plays,” he said. “I don’t see myself that way. If you’re going to call my interests something, call them humanitarian.”

“The Great Game” is still of great interest to Americans here. Of course in Washington, the CIA, the government, the defense department, the state department, the national security and intelligence apparatus located here could fill several theaters for several weeks at least. It would be nice to think they’re checking out “The Great Game.”

Meanwhile, we can still hear the buzz, the murmur in the background. Though the troupe just left Washington, the first stop on its US tour, it will be in NYC from December 1-19 at the Public Theater. Check the Tricycle Theater website at www.tricycle.co.uk [gallery ids="99202,103429" nav="thumbs"]

Tammy Grimes: Some Kind of Genius
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-Even if she hadn’t announced herself, the voice on the phone, a little whispery, a little dramatic, not as strong as in some other years, was still instantly recognizable. “Hello,” the voice says. “This is Tammy Grimes.”

Of course it was. Tammy Grimes, the legend.

She came to Washington for a concert as part of Barbara Cook’s “In the Spotlight Series” on cabaret singers; a category which seems almost whimsically focused to define Grimes. Cabaret singers are by and large original in such a way that they can be compared to no one else.

As she was in the 1980s when we talked to her in the midst of a concert gig at the now defunct Charley’s, a tony, jazzy, New Yorkish night club on K Street in Georgetown, Grimes is in the Duke Ellington mold: beyond category.

And probably by now, so thickly is she held in the affections of New Yorkers and by people who care more than they should about Broadway lore and stories, she’s also probably beyond criticism. She continues, in her mid-seventies, to fiddle around the edges of her creation, that is, her story and herself.

“Well, I’ll be singing songs by Tom Waits, Jimmy Buffett…” she said almost blithely, as if they might be the standard repertoire for a woman who rose to become a Broadway star for decidedly un-Buffett, un-Waits-like material.

But then again, maybe not. If Grimes repeats anything a lot, it is a simple thing. “I like songs that tell stories,” she says to me on the phone, and again to us in the audience of the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater. The story she tells, of course, is her story, and so a concert like this, and others written about New York, are about her. They are familiar stories, and the songs are pertinent to them; about two ex-husbands, two Tonys (“The Unsinkable Molly Brown” and “Private Lives”), about Cole Porter, Noel Coward and Truman Capote, about loss and love, family and children, theater openings, parts made her own and parts she never got.

Hence, “Moon River.” She tells me the story over the phone, and it’s like we’re just talking. There was the time that, ”Truman Capote–we were friends–said that he’d written “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” with me in mind. He saw me as Holly Golightly, and he promised that he would get me the part in the film. And of course, Audrey Hepburn got it.” And on the phone it’s a matter of fact telling, a good story, with no hard feelings or regret in it, because those things happen and Truman is Truman and that sort of thing not said, but implied. On stage, she tells the same story, but here it becomes a no-regrets bridge, a way to launch into her anthem, “I Ain’t Down Yet” from “The Unsinkable Molly Brown,” the Meredith Wilson musical about a particularly defiant survivor of the sinking of the Titanic.

For sure, Grimes is a legend, but it’s hard to say exactly what kind of legend. Noel Coward discovered her after her hearing her sing. he had dinner once with the shy Cole Porter, whose “The Oyster Song” she makes a hugely enjoyable enterprise in performance. “We were both shy, I think,” she said. “We spent the whole dinner not saying a word.”

Imagine that. She has plenty to say, of course, and more to sing. She talks about her ex-husband Christopher Plummer, the grand actor, “a beautiful man.” “He still is and now we get along just fine,” she said. “And we had our beautiful daughter, Amanda. Honey, if you’re listening anywhere, please call home.”

The higher registers of her voice are something of a tremulous adventure now, but the lower range is alive with danger, feeling and unpredictable adventure. She sits most of the time now during her concerts, although she will walk to the mike and grab it forcefully. And she sings “The Pirate Song” from Kurt Weill’s “Three Penny Opera” and kills it. The song has all the vengeful menace that it offers up.

Sometimes you suspect people haven’t always known what to do with Tammy Grimes. She’s made a number of mostly forgettable films and done all sorts of unruly television work including her own brief show.

But it’s Broadway and New York that are the stars in her crown, where the cheering still goes on as it does with the Terrace Theater audience, as well as at the Metropolitan Room. Walter Kerr, a legendary drama critic, flat out said, after seeing her as Molly Brown, “She is a genius.” The question is: what kind of genius?

Listening to her sing-tell Waits’ “Martha,” or Buffett’s “He Went to Paris,” or “You Better Love Me While You May,” you pick up on her strength more than the fragility, and the tremendous loss the death of her husband, the composer/arranger Richard Bell must have been. She doesn’t hide it. She merely swings into “You Gotta Ring Them Bells” or something similarly fist-clenched and forward-moving.

For me, and I suspect for New Yorkers who have heard and seen her at the Metropolitan Room, she’s an urban unicorn, a legend for whom, when they appear, the slate is always clean and the stories always rich.

Grimes is the kind of performer who is a reminder that you don’t go to the theater or the cabaret to forget.
You go to remember. And Tammy Grimes, while she may forget a lyric here or there, has a rich store of memories and music.

She came back with everyone standing up clapping for an encore: “I’m going to sing ‘The Rose.’” I heard her sing that song on a wintry night in Charley’s, snow on the ground. Bad news in the news like today. She pushed up the rose and made you remember.

Future of Music Policy Summit
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Musicians are invited to discuss with professionals about how to be successful in the music industry and answer the big question of how to make money as a musician at the “10th Anniversary Future of Music Policy Summit” (October 3rd to 5th) at Georgetown University.

The Future of Music Coalition is a national non-profit organization that fights for musicians in the constantly evolving industry of music.

The keynote speakers for the conference will be Rocco Landesman, Chairman for the National Endowment for the Arts, and Victoria Espinel, U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator. The line-up includes a presentation by renowned musician and producer T Bone Burnett, who just took home an Academy Award for best song for his work in the film “Crazy Heart,” starring Jeff Bridges. The conference costs $259 to attend, but there are a limited amount of $20 special priced tickets for students.

The conference begins Sunday October 3rd with “Musicians Education Day,” featuring a presentation by Ariel Hyatt who will offer a master class on music marketing and social media. The day focuses on topics such as fan analytics, direct-to-consumer case studies, and the possible impact of health care reform on musicians.

October 4th and 5th of the conference will focus on the future of the music industry, the role of the government in sustaining creative communities, artists as cultural ambassadors, and the viability of music delivery moving to “the cloud,” or a service that would provide a database of music where people could listen to what they want when they want if they are members of a service that provides such a database.

Monday night there will be the “Dear New Orleans” benefit concert at the Black Cat. The concert will feature New Orleans musicians and artists from the benefit album “Dear New Orleans,” which was produced by Air Traffic Control to mark the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the floods. Doors open at 8 p.m.

Tickets for the concert are $20. VIP tickets are $100 which gives attendees the opportunity to meet some of the artists before the show. The concert benefits efforts to help support and rebuild New Orleans’ unique musical and cultural traditions.