Performance

Gary Tischler • November 3, 2011

Rich Bloch is a 60-something labor arbitration attorney, serving most notably as a neutral arbitrator for the National Football League and other professional sports organizations.

Rich Bloch is also a professional magician and a performer.

Both things are true. Bloch likes to keep the two things separate. He does not do magic tricks for 300-pound linemen and their agents.

Nor does he bill himself as a lawyer-magician when he’s performing at the Woolly Mammoth with his show “Best Kept Secrets,” where story-telling, humor and performance blend with Bloch’s finely honed magical abilities and, for want of a better phrase, bag of tricks, which includes card tricks, the famous Harry Anderson’s Last Monte, the world’s fastest tricks, and the assistance of his wife Susan, who is actually a Georgetown University law professor.

“To me, they’re two different worlds, they really are,” Bloch says. He and his wife live on Cathedral Avenue. He has two grown children, both of them attorneys. Also present are a number of pets, cats, a sheepdog, and a giant macaw who reportedly does card tricks.

“Both of the things I love to do — being an attorney, practicing the kind of law I do and being a magician — have enormous rewards, but you can also get frustrated. When that happens, you just pass through a door and go into the other world.

“I simply tell people that 80 percent of my professional life is being an attorney, and 80 percent is being a magician.”

Now that’s magic.

Bloch has been a practicing — and it takes enormous amount of practice, too — magician for several decades, and done well at it. He’s highly respected in a boundless community where magic and all the stuff that goes with it — tricks, equipment, professional secrets, show business and uniforms — are an important part of life. He’s performed on cruise ships, in Las Vegas and regularly at Hollywood’s Magic Castle, where he’s been a five-time nominee as Stage Magician of the Year.

Bloch first got interested when he was seven, which was in New Jersey in a time when cities and towns had magic shops. “I was seven, my father had passed away, and my mother, a remarkable woman, was on the road a lot as a traveling saleslady,” he said. “There was this shop on the corner, and it was a fascinating place, run by this old man, and, because it seemed I had to, I said to him you’ve got to hire me as an assistant. He said, ‘what kind of experience do you have?’ And I said, experience, I’m seven. But then, I remembered I had heard about a magician named Ted Collins, so I said my dad was Ted Collins. He said, ‘that’s impressive,’ and he hired me. And I was walking out, so I asked him his name, and he said, ‘Ted Collins.’

Magic.

“It’s a very special world,” he said. “But it’s more than just tricks and mystery. That’s once reason I’ve been doing this hour and a half show, that’s what it is. And that’s a different world.”

The Woolly Mammoth Theater is known for its edgy new plays, and draws a very different sort of audience than might be found at magic shows. “It’s a challenge, but that’s what I wanted to do, to entertain, to perform, to involve people in the magic show,” he said. “I love the small space, the intimacy and how you can interact with the audience, make them part of the show. I don’t do huge illusions, you can’t, but I do a varied repertoire of magic. I have a lot of equipment, and I wear a white tuxedo suit, one with a lot more pockets than most suits.”

“It’s taking things to the next level for me, and I think the response has been really good,” he said. “Good for me. It’s not the same. It’s not just about tricks, but it is about magic and it is about magic and me.”

In conversation, Bloch is self-deprecating, funny, really smart about his two roles and about magic in culture. He’s given considerable thought and feeling to what he does, and what a magician does.

“There is a difference between tricking people, deceiving them, and in creating illusions, moments of make-believe that seems real because it is,” he said.

Bloch, one thinks, makes magic magical.

“Best Kept Secrets” will be performed at the Woolly Mammoth Laboratory Theater March 31, April 1-4 and June 9-13.

Gary Tischler •

The Shakespeare Theatre Company’s production of George Bernard Shaw‘s “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” is gorgeous to look at, often out-loud funny, even more often sharp and witty and wonderfully acted. It’s also, in the end, devastating and cruel. Call it a comic tragedy, a tragic comedy. Mostly, put it on your theater calendar if you haven’t done so already.

The reasons? The main ones are Elizabeth Ashley and Amanda Quaid as mother and daughter, and, this being Shaw, protagonists and antagonists. This being a Shakespeare Theatre production, you can be sure that director Keith Baxter can take a good share of the credit.

Baxter has directed a number of terrific comedic productions here, including two Oscar Wilde plays starring Dixie Carter, who was supposed to have starred in this production but succumbed to cancer.

Ashley fills in, and there is no question that this Mrs. Warren is Ashley’s Mrs. Warren. Mrs. Warren, to set the scene, is a hugely successful proprietor and manager of a string of brothels, a profession which has allowed her a regal life and the ability to raise her daughter Vivie in a country house and give her the Oxford education that has made her a steely, very modern young lady.

Set early on in the country, it has a first act full of revelations, which are less devastating perhaps than they ought to be. Vivie was never aware of her mother’s history or lifestyle, but accepts at first the fact that it was the only route to prosperity for her mum, who came from a poverty-tainted background.

Alas, what she doesn’t know is that mom isn’t about to give up the business; it’s too lucrative, too successful, it allows mom to be mom. And that’s where the two women — strong-minded, stubborn, each with her own code — clash to the pain of both.

This is a play about cynicism, hypocrisy, the good old English class system and, of course, the effects of wealth and power. It’s not a fight for love or glory, but a battle for the high ground.

Quaid’s Vivie is lovely, all cheek and bones, she stands so straight that sometimes you think somebody should slap her for her principled stands. Ashley’s Mrs. Warren, on the other hand, moves like a billowing battleship, all guns blazing in dresses that can’t even come close to stifling a giant willful spirit.

In this battle, there are the usual suspects of characters: a parson and a parson’s son who chases Vivie madly, an older creative type (wonderfully played by Ted Van Griethuysen) and a cynical lord who’s Mrs. Warren’s not-so-silent partner. Still, they are mere foot soldiers in the battle between mother and daughter, and none of them have an ounce of the two women’s solidity.

“Mrs. Warren’s Profession” runs at Sidney Harman Hall through July 11. [gallery ids="99153,102844" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

In the annals of Broadway lore, the late James Kirkwood’s “Legends!” is considered to be, well, legendary.

Well, yeah, but not in a good way, necessarily.

It’s not that Kirkwood didn’t have a good rep. He was co-author of the book “A Chorus Line,” for which he received a Tony and a Pulitzer Prize, not to mention several well received novels, including one called “P.S. Your Cat Is Dead.”

But “Legends!”, in which two aging female stars and divas are being coaxed to star together in a new play by a rabid producer type, is not a very good play because it doesn’t know what it’s supposed to be. It first turned up in 1986 as a vehicle for two legendary Broadway stars, Carol Channing (“Hello Dolly”) and Mary Martin (“South Pacific”) of very different gifts and temperaments and flopped out of town without making it to Broadway.

In more recent times it turned up as a vehicle for Joan Collins and Linda Evans, who fought like cats on television’s “Dynasty,” and again did not travel far and wide.

Looking at the Studio Theatre’s current production of “Legends,” conceived by legendary drag artist Lypsinka (aka John Epperson), who stars in the lead role alongside James Lucesne, you wonder why they didn’t do this in the first place 24 years ago.

I mean, this “Legends!”, if not legendary, is a hoot. And now we more or less know what it was meant to be: a barn-burner for two divas playing two divas. Who better than two men who know really know how to get attention with dresses, high heels, lots of hair and makeup?

Somehow, “Legends,” which could look awkward with Martin and Channing and silly with Collins and Evans, now looks, moves and acts like great entertainment.

The old play has changed a bit. The women are two movie stars who could be Taylor, could be Davis, could be Crawford or Turner, but it never goes quite so crazy as to turn into “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”, although there’s a thought.

It’s bawdy, sure. There’s the male stripper, the black maid named Aretha, who makes racist jokes at the expense of the girls, there’s hash-laced cookies and a producer-agent who gets completely whacked out, played like a crazed cat by Tom Story.

Mostly, there’s Lecesne, who could be doing a sendup on Joan Collins by way of Liz Taylor, playing the famously slatternly Silvia Glenn as if he had just escaped being cast as the matron of the Kardashian clan.

Mostly, there’s Epperson/Lypsinka, a performing original if there ever was one, who did whatever nipping and tucking on the “Legends!” book that’s occurred. But he always brings something unique to every woman he ever becomes on stage, a kind of almost menacing wisdom that ends up being both affecting and really funny. This was most evident in “The Passion of the Crawford.” Here, but it’s softened some, it’s become a little more self-conscious and knowing, and, as always, wonderfully weird and glamorous.

“Legends!” runs at the Studio Theatre through July 4. [gallery ids="99154,102852,102849" nav="thumbs"]

Jenna Dewitt •

‘Florida Days’

As part of the Fringe Festival this month, Rachael Bail’s “Florida Days” premiered at The Apothecary on July 10.

The play, performed by the McLean Drama Company, follows the journey of Betty, a Southern girl living in Brooklyn, New York. Betty, played by Elise Edwards, transforms from fiery young journalist to a wife and mother while her world crashes down around her. The audience seems transfixed by the depth of Edward’s talent. Her character’s chemistry with Thomas Linn’s character, Vincent, is equally apparent. The onstage couple carries the production with a truly convincing portrayal of two lovers facing life’s hardships while seeking the deeper meaning of it all.

The physical appearance of the production could be described as minimalist, with few costumes, about 10 props in all, and projected images on a back wall instead of sets. Yet nothing is lacking. The comparatively few materials only aid the intensity of the emotions portrayed. Even the audience’s seating seems to transform from a few church pews, since the first scene is a wedding, to benches in a blue-lit coffeehouse, when the action quickly transitions to New York City. The setting then remains in New York for most of the play, despite the title. The Apothecary, a tiny dance studio with exposed brick and unpainted wood, conveyed the sense of watching this family in their city home, living off of Vincent’s salary as an opera conductor.

Though the quality of acting from much of the supporting cast leaves much to be desired, Edwards and Linn give performances of which they should be proud. For a small community theater group the company showed potential, and will be a group to look forward to in future festivals.

I would give “Florida Days” three out of five Fringes.

No Gentlemen of Verona

Elizabethan English flows aplenty with this renovated Shakespeare play. “No Gentlemen of Verona,” Joshua Engel’s take on “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” takes place in the 1940s.

The time period works surprisingly well for the play, though the explanation of that specific adaptation is a bit hard to follow. According to the program, it was successful in Engel’s past experiment with “Much Ado About Nothing” and was thus chosen for the time period for this venture as well. Mobsters, Navy sailors and bright red lipstick make the setting work, however, and make the show more relatable to a modern American audience.

The Rude Mechanicals were as quick and witty as The Bard himself could have expected. The cast’s past experience with Shakespearean dialogue shows in their skillful delivery. It is obvious that the members of this all-female troupe not only know their lines, but they fully understand their meaning. In fact, it is as if they naturally speak Elizabethan English in their daily lives. The few trips over the complex lines were quickly remedied and never skipped a beat.

Overall, “No Gentlemen of Verona” is a comic delight for Shakespeare lovers that enjoy a new spin on an old favorite.

I would give “No Gentlemen of Verona” four out of five Fringes.

Gary Tischler •

“Passing Strange,” the first revival of the hit off-Broadway beyond-category musical now getting a jolting production on Studio Theatre’s 2nd Stage, really is passing strange.

It has the powerful quality of being familiar at some universal level that goes beyond its specific time, place and people, and yet, taken at face value, it’s fresh, original, musically and physically vibrant, ungainly, loud, innocent and knowing all at once. It’s like some time machine from another planet where the occupants jump out jamming, playing new notes you can’t remember but know by heart.

The musical — created by the artist known as “Stew” and Heidi Rodewald — has quite a fine pedigree: workshopped at the Sundance Institute and premiered at Berkeley Rep in California, it made a big splash both on Broadway and off and picked up a handful of Tony nominations and awards, including 2008 Drama Desk Award for best musical and New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Musical.

In a lot of ways, “Passing Strange” is part of the canon of an age-old literary device deployed by everyone from Werther to Wolfe (Thomas) to Hemingway to Joyce to “Almost Famous.” At its most elemental, it’s a recount of the coming-of-age travails and journeys of a young artist, a 1970s African American version, to be exact.

But in one way, the best way, this production feels, plays and makes the audience feel as if the whole couple of hours had been lived and imagined right on the spot, as if the pumping, jumping, wailing rock band and youthful, mostly black cast had just invented themselves right here and now. This is an engaging production that, passing strange and all, invites you in, regardless of race or color, age or whatever.

Briefly, it’s about a young, pre-rap black man, rebellious, restless, raised in relative safety in middle class Los Angeles, trying to find the “real,” his authenticity as an artist in the 1970s.

His trip is narrated by his older, later self, taking him from a reefer-smoking choir member in his church to his first lust and love in Europe by way of Amsterdam and a bellicose Berlin, where art is radical, political and just as hard to define as on a street corner in LA.

It’s a musical journey, often humiliating, funny and enlightening, one in which the young man, full of himself and new experience but without a clue or guide, parades his own alluring inexperience and his new friend flock through the mess. Experience stings and has its price — listen to such numbers as “The Black One,” “We Just Had Sex” or “Come Down Now.”

The music itself is pure power-driven rock and funk provided by keyboardist Christopher Youstra and his band.
The young man and his wiser self complement and comment on each other and engage the audience throughout the show, the lanky, breathless, high-energy Aaron Reeder as “Youth” alongside the guitar-slinging, rough-voiced and hypnotic Jahl L. Kersey as “Narrator.”

Three women take on equal power poles in the show: Deidra LaWan Starnes as the boy’s mother, who has an affecting, much-too-rare emotional power when she’s on the stage, Jessica Francis Dukes as the sweetly appealing free-spirited Marianna and Deborah Lubega as the rough-and-ready, punked-out Desi.

Here’s a shout-out to Director Keith Alan Baker, who over the years has staged such soul-rattling musicals as “Hair,” “Jerry Springer: The Opera” and “Reefer Madness: The Musical!”, and has topped himself here.

There’s certain knowing qualities and references in the show — a song about avant-garde French movie director Jean Luc Godard and talk about “Jimmie Baldwin,” the late, great African American novelist and essayist who wrote the book(s) on black exile and authenticity (“Go Tell It on the Mountain”, “Nobody Knows My Name,” “Another Country”) long ago.

In the end, like so many youthful journeys, self-knowledge often comes from clicking your heels: look homeward, youth, there’s no place like you-know-where, or in this case, in a rousing number called “It’s All Right”.

Go there. You’ll meet somebody you know, most likely yourself.

“Passing Strange” is at the Studio Theatre’s 2nd Stage through Aug. 8.
[gallery ids="99174,103169,103172" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

David Mamet’s “American Buffalo” premiered 25 years ago, assuring the playwright’s reputation as an American master, a man who had written an enduring theater classic.

Today, it still seems fresh in its language and feeling, in its inarticulate expression of the importance of the American business ethos in the nation’s life, even its dankest, smallest, lowest places. At the Studio Theatre, where outgoing Artistic Director Joy Zinoman shows again that she get the essentials of familiar material, in which the three petty thieves and low-lifes get to cry out and trumpet their own “attention must be paid,” their own plea for importance.

You’d think that in a contemporary play where a cellphone doesn’t ring, there would be a whiff of the anachronistic, that rust might have settled on the play. But in the 1970s world of Don, Teach and Bobby, ineffectual small-time crooks, thieves and hustlers, the time is now, and it’s not going to get any better.

By now, Mamet’s way of writing dialogue — repetitious, stinky with street debris, loss, and the fallout of small dreams ill considered, has acquired a cachet all of its own, it’s often imitated — like Hemingway’s sparse style and his tough private eye imitators Chandler, Hammett and Ross MacDonald. In fact, it’s often parodied. It sounds hard-nosed and earthy, virtually real, except that its rhythms aren’t real at all, and they have a kind of jazzy musicality to them.

Repetition is a way at arriving at the point of a conversation for this trio. Don is a small lookout for the next opportunity, not the main chance. He runs “Don’s Resale” shop, a place that’s half storage house for stolen goods, a quarter junkyard, and a quarter pawn shop, with a bit of accidental antique shop thrown in. The three — Don, slow, empathetic, patient; Teach, a jacked-up, nervous man with nothing in his life except for his time in the shop; and Bobby, the hyper junkie who acts as if he’s burning up all the time — are thieves of one sort or another. They operate on the fringes, and mostly outside the law.

But to them, boosting a truck, breaking into a house and working with other crooks is all part of the great American enterprise of going for the dollar, of a business where everyone’s entitled to a share of the proceeds. This one time, they’ve convinced themselves that a man who bought an American buffalo nickel from Don is loaded with rare coins which they plan to steal from his house.

Easier said than planned, let alone done. Theses are guys frozen with inaction, jealousies, insecurities, drenched in bad habits attained in poker games and too much time spent together. Their talk doesn’t get results, and they improvise bad notes like a drunk sax player.

Ed Gero, who plays the frustrated, often flummoxed Don, is the glue of this production. He’s the shaky sun around which the other two roll as they vie for his attention, for his approval, for the go-ahead. Gero has a soft solidity here, an exasperation that comes from owning junk, but also from love. Peter Allas as the gun-toting Teach looks like one of those guys who’s always stirring the pot where trust lies buried. And Jimmy Davis is disturbing as the needy, skinny, pushy junkie Bobby.

Russell Metheny’s shabby, rich set of a shop is a wonder. It looks lived in, like an ornamented prison.

Zinoman lets the actors have their way with the words, where the heart and shabby souls lie. “American Buffalo” is often funny, but it’s always tense, dangerous and touching, sometimes all at once. Try to imagine the “Seinfeld” cast of folks as low-lifes, and you get the idea. “Don’t forget, we gotta do the thing?” “The thing? What thing?” “You know, the thing, we gotta do it.” “Oh yeah, the thing. We gotta do the thing.”

Which isn’t exact. But you get the drift. It’s like smoke and music from the past coming into the here and now.

(“American Buffalo” runs through June 13.)

Gary Tischler •

It’s June. It’s summer. And you’re probably wondering: what happened to the annual Duke Ellington Jazz Festival? Isn’t it about that time of year?

It is. And the Duke Ellington Jazz Festival, sure enough, is on and going strong. Except that it’s not called the Duke Ellington Jazz Festival anymore. It’s called the DC Jazz Festival and right now it’s going on all over the city.

The name change is a big deal, along with a few other changes that are different from the previous five festivals, which have grown by leaps and bounds during that time.

The festival kicked off June 1 and runs through June 13, and includes new venues, new stars, an under-the-stars concert at Carter Barron, a tribute to James Moody and a major concert headlining major record star and jazz chanteuse Roberta Flack. It includes the ever popular and growing Jazz in the Hoods and the whirlwind presence of Cuban jazz star Paquito D’ Rivera, who will close the festival with what promises to be a unique concert at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater.

There’ll be big stars, major players, young up-and-comers, and Washington local artists, established and rising. Jazz will be in the air and in the neighborhoods, and the festival will draw on all the resources, audiences and institutions this city offers and which are unique to it.

I visited Charles Fishman, the festival’s founder, year-round promoter and jazz kibitzer, and formerly the producer for the late jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie in his basement office in his home in Adams Morgan.

“We’ve got an official downtown office now,” he said by way of greeting. “But I still do most of my stuff out of here.”

If there was such a thing as a “jazz” office, it’s right here. Fishman, a thinnish middle-aged man, is on the phone trying to arrange travel arrangements on his computer for Flack, “a dear, long-time friend” who was a last minute replacement for Dianne Reeves, who had to drop out as the headliner for the Lisner Auditorium Concert on June 13, which also features the Roy Hargrove Big Band and a guest appearance by Roberta Gambarini. “She did me a big favor here,” Fishman said.

In between answering his cell and looking at his airline Web site, Fishman explained the name change and other changes.

“Number one, the festival had been growing every year. It was getting a growing reputation as a destination festival, we were expanding, we kept adding programs that were really all about the city, like Jazz in the Hoods and the Rising Stars, and working and partnering with other groups and institutions like mad,” he said. “Duke Ellington, for that matter, is very specific to this city, but that’s too focused on one person.”

“What we wanted to do, we wanted to brand the city,” he said. Fishman talks like an enthusiast, a traveling salesman, the guy you meet on a train who pulls out pictures of the wife and kids he loves madly, proudly. You sense that Fishman’s big loves — wife, family, jazz, city, with the order changing depending on who’s around or what he’s doing — are all-encompassing. He thrives that way. The office is as cluttered as an improvisational sax riff from out of the clear blue something: there’s a Grammy he won with Dizzy on a wall, there are stacks of New Yorkers, a poster of a big-cheeked Gillespie and, right in the middle of the floor, a shiny set of blue drums that belong to his precocious five-year-old son Moses.

“Every festival worthy of the name is about the place, that’s the way you know it — Newport, Monterey, the big cities and so on,” he said. “And we’ve got so much to offer here as a jazz town.

“Look around you sometime, the place is flourishing again, there’s places that have jazz musicians playing, like the revitalized Bohemian Caverns and all of its history on U Street. We’ve got local legends here, not just Duke, who lived and played down on U Street, Shirley Horn, Buck Hill and all the rest, and new people like Thad Wilson. There’s a glorious history here we can draw on.

“We’ve got cultural institutions who have concerts, we have support from the tourist business, we have the embassies. It’s no news that jazz is huge overseas. We have our museums, the Kennedy Center. We have a local history. We have terrific local musicians, young and up-and-coming, and they play here, they add to the richness of the music.

“So, basically,” he said, “we thought the festival should be about the city, and that the name should be about the national and international impact of the nation’s capital. There’s no better place to showcase and celebrate America’s singular original art than in Washington, D.C. This is not to say that we won’t continue to honor the enduring legacy of D.C. native son Duke Ellington.”

Not with all those jazz players coming out of Duke Ellington School of the Arts, that’s for sure.

Fishman is co-artistic director this year with Paquito D’Rivera, who will, among other things, headline the Paquito D’Rivera and the Jelly Roll Morton Latin Tinge Project June 13 at the Terrace Theater, a unique evening that arose out of a grant in which trumpeter and arranger Michael Philip Mossman added a Latin flavor to some of the legendary blues giant’s pieces, such as “King Porter Stomp,” “Wolverine Blues,” “Finger Buster,” and “Pearl.” It was Morton who reportedly said that “If you can’t manage to put tinges of Spanish in your tunes, you will never be able to get the right seasoning.”

The concert will include D’Rivera, Mossman, Pernell Saturnino and the string ensemble Quartette Indigo.

For complete information on schedules, tickets, times and dates and performers go the festival website at www.dcjazzfest.org.