Performance

Gary Tischler • December 8, 2015

’Tis the season. Especially for young people.

This is all the more true in the world of theater and performing arts. As usual, Tiny Tims, Scrooges, Sugarplum Fairies and princesses abound. But kids (and adults) might want to check out something beyond the usual holiday fare for delightful stories and inventive stagecraft.

For the Christmas holidays, we give you: “A Lump of Coal for Christmas,” a world premiere by Norman Allen, after a book by Lemony Snicket (aka Daniel Handler), starring the gifted young actress Erin Weaver as a lump of coal. The show runs at Adventure Theatre MTC in Glen Echo Park through Dec. 31.

We give you: “A Year with Frog and Toad,” an Imagination Stage production of the hit Broadway and Tony-nominated musical about the adventures of the two best friends, running through Jan. 10.

We give you: “Elephant & Piggie’s We Are in a Play!” in the Kennedy Center’s Family Theater through Jan. 3.

You wouldn’t think that anything involving a lump of coal could be right in the wheelhouse of the spirit of Christmas, or that a work by Lemony Snicket, famous for his series of children’s books called “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” would warm seasonal hearts and cockles. And if you peruse the Snicket book titles, you might think you’re in for a dark ride. What could be happy about “The Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming,” “The Miserable Mill” or “The Vile Village”?

“A Lump of Coal for Christmas” may be off the well-worn holiday paths, but it has its own charms and inevitable rewards of joy. How can you go wrong with a lump of coal that wants to be an artist and helps turn “a child’s worst nightmare into a dream come true.” And that’s alive and pursuing its dreams with a series of adventures and encounters, including a very famous Christmas presence (if not present).

Norman Allen is the author, and Washington treasure and actress Holly Twyford is the director. Twyford has also performed at Adventure Theatre in “If You Give a Pig a Pancake.” Wayne Chadwick is the music director, Deborah Wheatley does the sets and Frank Labovitz is the costume designer. Also in the cast are Elliott Kashner, Eric Messner, Sammy Strent, Rachel Hynes, Judith Ingber and Kevin Grieco.

“A Year with Frog and Toad” started out as a series of children’s books written and illustrated by Arnold Lobel and became a musical written by brothers Robert and Willie Reale. In 2003, after workshops and brief runs, it opened on Broadway and won a Tony nomination.

The charm of the musical and the books centers around the small, often funny adventures of woodland creatures, the main characters being Frog and Toad. When Frog learns that his best friend Toad doesn’t receive mail, he has a snail deliver a letter. The journey of the letter sparks adventures in which the friends “go swimming, fly a kite, bake cookies, tell scary stories, and go sledding down a steep hill.” Songs also ensue, including “Get a Load of Toad” and “I’m Coming Out of My Shell.”

Director Colin Hovde, who is producing director at Theater Alliance, calls it “a celebration of kindness and playfulness and, frankly, that is something that we can all stand to be reminded of these days.”

Jobari Parker-Namdar (Lyle the Crocodile) returns to Imagination Stage as the laid-back Frog, while Stephen Edwards Horst makes his debut here as the serious-minded Toad. The choreography is by Rachel Leigh Dolan and the music direction is by Deborah Jacobson.

In another friendship of opposites, there’s Elephant Gerald — slow, formally attired and said to be prone to melancholy — and his friend Piggie, who is, well, piggie-like: perky, always smiling and full of fun.

In “Elephant & Piggie’s We Are in a Play!” Elephant and Piggie are the best of friends in a musical romp that features such issues as how two friends play with one toy, what to wear to a fancy pool costume party and sharing (or not) your ice cream.

The show is based on a best-selling series of children’s books by Mo Willems. Joe Mallon as Elephant Gerald and Shayna Blass as Piggie. The “nutty backup singers” are called The Squirrelles. Commissioned by the Kennedy Center, the play has a script and lyrics by Willems, music by Deborah Wicks La Puma and choreography by Jessica Hartman. Jerry Whiddon directs.
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Gary Tischler • December 7, 2015

It’s pretty plain by now that Alan Paul, the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Associate Artistic Director and resident musical genie. knows his way around a Broadway musical. More than that, he has a gift for getting to the heart of  a show and lets you see it beating and beating some more.

It’s a kind of knack that Paul’s got, and we’ve already seen it in his productions of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (2014 Helen Hayes Award for Best Director of a Musical) and “Man of La Mancha.” Now, he’s gotten his hands on “Kiss Me, Kate,” the Cole Porter musical from 1948, with a pedigree that’s equal parts high class poodle and back-stage mutt.

What’s evident is that Paul, as a director, is something of a swain when it comes to what appears to be a life-long passion for the  musical. He’ll bring out the best in the form by returning to its original charms and bring them out with gusto—like someone energetically and with love rubbing an old dusty bauble found on the road and returning it to its million-dollar diamond status to the point that it looks brand new, kissed for the very first time.               

“Kiss Me, Kate,” although it hasn’t been performed very often, is very familiar material from very familiar veins. It is, after all, based on Shakespeare’s “Taming of the Shrew,” an endlessly entertaining—if sometimes politically incorrect—battle of the sexes as implied by the title.  There is some of Cole Porter’s most dazzling works—witty and funny, to be sure, like Noel Coward set to music at times, but also passionate, fiery, even jazzy.  There is the classic MGM movie version of the show in which Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson starred, and in which some pretty terrific dancers named Ann Miller, Bobby Van and, yes, Bob Fosse tapped, legged and danced their hearts out.

Best of all is that in Paul’s hands, “Kiss Me, Kate” is a hands-down love letter to show biz, to the impulse in people to charge out of nowhere and holler, “Hey, I know, let’s put on a show.” Here are the usual and unusually talented suspects like a star with an ego, a diva with a temper, a leggy, blonde hoofer, a bunch of guy dancers who could jump through the ceiling and land softly, stage hands and dressers and guys with rolled up newspapers and sleeves, a couple of mobbed-up bill collectors  and even a pipe-smoking general with eyes on a blonde and the White House.

These are the ingredients, the materials of many a musical—“Guys and Dolls” comes immediately to mind—and Paul treats them as if they’re lucky charms, never seen by man or woman ever before. He lets us experience them anew. The effect is like being hit repeatedly in the head with a soft rubber duck. It knocks you around, but you jump up for more.

This is not musical theater in the vein of “Carousel” of Rodgers and Hammerstein, or Stephen Sondheim. This is theater as a party, a screwball comedy,  where everybody has an ace up his sleeve. It’s a show, within a show, about putting on a show.

Here we have Fred Graham and Lili Vanessi, once married but now divorced, joining edgy forces to put on a production of “The Taming of the Shrew” in an out-of-town opening in Baltimore, where, as we all know, it’s just too damn hot. They hate each other so much that you know it’s true love. There’s also Lois Lane, the jazzy blonde playing Bianca, involved with Graham and her boyfriend, a profligate gambler named Bill Calhoun (the terrific Clyde Alves),  who plays Lucentio.  There is also a General, who looks more than vaguely familiar and who’s engaged to Lili, and First Man and Second Man, two spiffy (who wears spats anymore?) guys looking to collect a debt.

And there’s music and dancing, dancing and singing and, gosh, that fellow Alan Paul is sure in love with this stuff—and so am I.   Paul is the delirious guiding hand to this, and Christine Sherrill and Douglas Sills carry the show with their comic timing, their terrific voices and uncommon stage presence, not to mention comedic timing.  They can even make a song like “Wunderbar,” which is straight out of the Nelson Eddy-Jeanette McDonald songbook, seem sweetly new, not to mention the almost uncharacteristic (for Porter) passion they bring out in “So In Love.”

But watch what happens: out comes Robyn Hurder, an epitome of what I like to think of as Broadway Babies, proof why gentlemen prefer blondes, singing the almost demure “Tom, Dick or Harry,” then in the second act,  blasting out “Always True to You in My Fashion,” an out-and-out vamp of a song, which Hurder as Bianca-Lois delivers with call-back oomph.  Earlier, the second act opened with a “Too Damn Hot,” full of dance solos, rhythm and some blues, a whole backstage cast number that builds and builds to the point where the hope persists that it may never end.

This is also true for the famous “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” in which Bob Ari and Raymond Jaramillo McLeod—they could both pass for Nicely Nicely Johnson—work their way through a soft shoe, while navigating their way through Porter’s blissful rhymes  (“Othello-good fellow”).  They come back again and again, until at last they don’t, which is oddly disappointing.

Shakespeare gets his due here—the scenes from the actual “Shrew” are done adroitly to much laughter and amazement, a result which we’re sure, was also achieved in London in days of old.

But then, in Paul’s hands, with Porter’s help, all this everything old is new again.

“Kiss Me, Kate” runs through Jan. 3 at the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Sidney Harman Hall at Sixth and F Streets NW.
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Gary Tischler • December 4, 2015

The Embassy Series—the long-standing Washington concert series which brings audiences to the city’s embassies and ambassadorial residences for performances by both established and rising and often classical music stars—held a Dec. 2 concert at the Embassy of France where a memorial to the victims of the recent terrorist attacks in Paris still held sway at the gate.

Although the concert—with the passionate French star Virgil Boutellis-Taft on violin and South Korean Yoonie Han on piano—was on the schedule, it soon became something more in the aftermath of the November 13 attacks in Paris. The concert was dedicated to the victims of that attack, just as another concert back in February was dedicated to the victims of the attacks of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and on a Jewish market on Jan. 7.

In some ways, this was supposed to be an occasion of triumphant sadness and respect, as well as an illustration of the balm and soothing effect of music, how it lets people understand one another and stand together, an aim which succeeded but against the intrusions from the news of yet another unfathomable act of mass violence which trailed arriving audience members like soot.

History, it seems, is no respecter of occasions. Only hours before, news spread that another “active shooter” situation at the Inland Regional Center in sunny San Bernardino, California.   By the time we arrived at the embassy, we already knew that at least two to three shooters were involved and that 14 persons had been murdered.

In this atmosphere, after new French Consul General Michel Charbonnier moved the gathering with his introductory remarks and after Embassy Series Director Jerome Barry had led the audience in a rousing singing of “La Marseillaise,” the music and the musicians did their work on memories, both of the day and the time before.

Something about the way these youthful artists carried themselves, made us look and listen, almost insidiously, like ingesting medicine you didn’t know you were taking. They did it by the choice of music, how they played it and how receptive the audience was to it. This is not something you can critique on technique, because emotion, now simmering, now softening, prevailed.  The pair made a study in small contrasts.

Boutellis-Taft casts an image of something like a 19th-century poet out of “La Boheme,” a studied casualness in handsome look belied his intense playing—with an immersion in the shorter piece “Caravan” by the 20th-century composer Andre Hossein, whose biography reads like a multinational novel and which began the concert. He and Han played in close physical proximity, with Han, as is sometimes the case with pianists, seeming to be studying the keys intently, with furrowed brows.

Yet, they provide a partnership—Boutellis-Tafts casts about for impossible notes and finds them, adept. He is at ease in familiar work and totally immersed in music that is less so as in Phillippe Hersant’s “Chants du Sud.”

The effect is gradual up to a point. Consider Han beginning her playing of “Claire de Lune,” a work by Debussy, a work so familiar that it elicits almost instant sighs.  She treated the music and its playing as if she were handling a sleeping baby, with a tenderness and precise emotion that seemed made for the occasion.  She followed that with a pounding abstract piece of music that took you completely out of yourself, also fit for the occasion.

Moments piled upon each other like that so that the occasion for the concert receded, and the alarms and noises of the events in California receded also.   They ended with Camille Saint Saens’s “Danse Macabre” with its changing moods and motions—dancing death after all, followed by the rooster announcing the sun—played superbly.

It’s only later that you think, coming home, as the nightly news approached, that we are, after all, living in a “Danse Macabre,” both eager for and dreading the details of the latest atrocity.
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Gary Tischler • November 30, 2015

Listening to Kaitlyn Davidson, the young Broadway performer who’s taken over the role of Ella, aka Cinderella,  in the touring company of “Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella,”  you could be forgiven for thinking just a little that she’s perfectly suited for the role because she seems to have embraced the identity with unabashed fervor.

Davidson will be on stage with the production at the National Theatre, Nov. 18 to 29, so be prepared for some magic and razzle dazzle.  This is the familiar fairy tale from the R&H team, their only production which originated on television, starring Julie Andrews in the title role.

“There are a lot of spectacular things to see—the transformation, the rise out of drudgery, a fairy godmother, too. But this is a more modern setting,” Davidson said, speaking from Atlanta, Georgia, where the show had been running.

“This is a young woman I think young girls and little girls can relate to,” she said. “I see it all of the time now. You see all those little princesses at the stage door, or in the audience, and some of them show up dressed like a princess, they’re kind of shy princesses. I get that. I kind of like that, but you know, it isn’t just about being a princess. It’s about doing what you want to do, not just finding the prince, but the best person you can possibly be.”

Davidson is exactly where she wants to be. “I love my life now,” she said. “I grew up in Kansas City, and ever since I can remember I’ve wanted to live a life in the theater, doing the big shows, being on Broadway.”

“We’ve been on the road a while now, and now that I’m doing Ella—(she went from dance Captain, doing the role of Gabrielle), things have changed a little bit, sure.  And sometimes, when you’re in an airport with your luggage and all that, sometimes, I’ve had people come up to me if I was in that show, if I was “Cinderella,” and that’s kind of startling at first, but it’s sweet, too.”

Davidson is a Midwestern girl by way of Overland Park, Kansas, and Kansas City, and holding a musical theater degree from the Cincinnati-College Conservatory of Music, but she’s right at home in New York.  “This is where you want to end up being,” she said. “This is where the musical theater is.”  She’s done pretty well for herself, including the highly praised “Nice Work of You Can Get It,” in the original cast and as an Assistant Dance Captain, and played in the National Tour of “White Christmas,” the Irving Berlin classic based on a movie. 

“I performed in regional theaters, but ‘Cinderella’ has been my big experience. I played in the ensemble cast, and I’ve been a wicked  stepsister on the tour. And now, it’s the slippers.  We’ve been on tour for a year now, so this is quite a happy family. My folks got to see me in Kansas City. So, that’s a great experience for me and them. That was like a hometown return.”

“There are some new things in the show, so it’s a little different from the original,” she said. “But no stinting on the magic, believe me. I think it’s a little more accessible to today’s audience.  But no, there’s no lack of magic, that’s for sure.”

Andy Huntington Jones—isn’t that a prince-like name?—is Prince Topher,  and the cast also features Liz McCartney as the Fairy Godmother, Blair Ross as Madame, the wicked stepmother, Kimberly Faure as Gabrielle and Aymee Garcia as Charlotte.

Gary Tischler •

If you didn’t know about them, you probably wouldn’t expect much from a musical group that calls itself Anonymous 4, but here they are anyway—back in Washington 7 p.m., Sunday, Nov. 22, at Sixth & I Historic Synagogue under the auspices of Washington Performing Arts,  having done quite a bit in close to 30 years not to live up to their name.

It’s a special time for the group,  which was more or less born in the spring of 1986 when four women with an abiding interest in medieval and renaissance choral music got together for a music reading session in New York.   Specifically, they were interested in what medieval chant and polyphony for women would sound like, which, as a topic seems rarefied and specific, and destined to remain so.

In the interim, the women, which included  founding member emeritus Johanna Maria Rose, became Anonymous 4 , which has produced more than 20 recordings, many centered in the roots of their special interests, which have sold two million copies under the flag of Harmonia Mundi USA, singing music that ranged from the ecstatic music and poetry of the 12th-century abbess Hildegard of Bingen, music that dates back to the A.D. 1000, 13th- and 14th-chant  and polyphony from England, France and Spain and songs ranging from gospel works to carols as well as contemporary songs that fall under the umbrella of American folk music and Americana.   They have toured the world over and acquired a passionate following of fans.

They have performed often in Washington—at the Kennedy Center, with WPA—but what makes this particular occasion special is that it will be their last appearance here as a group, as part of something like a farewell tour. They are retiring as a group.  Special, too, is the fact that the concert will be focused on their most recent album, “1865: Songs of Hope and Home from the American Civil War,” an unearthing of popular songs from and during the war.  There is also the fact that Anonymous 4 will be working with Bruce Molsky,  who was described by Mother Jones Magazine as “easily one of the nation’s most talented fiddlers.”

“I guess it will be kind of emotional, and historic,” said Marsha Genensky, who  is part of the current group with Susan Hellauer, Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek and Ruth Cunningham.  “I think it’s been an amazing time, to be doing this so long, to discover so many different kinds of audiences out there, to do the kind of music that we do.  But it has been a long run.”

Genensky, who lives in the Bay Area in northern California with her musician husband Ernie Ridout, is the groups principal researcher, archivist, administrator and representative.  “I guess I’m the one that pulls things together, but really this is like a family,” she said.

Anonymous 4 has moved from the sacred, spiritual choral music that came out of European cities and cathedrals and monasteries to embrace music that was part of most their childhood and adolescence. It was folk music back then, those clear female voices of the likes of Joan Baez, and they came out of American history, and this work comes out of an interest in historical American vocal and singing styles and music, and began with two other works,  “American Angels” and “Gloryland”.

“1865” also celebrates the 150th anniversary of the Civil war and as a concert, seeks to resurrect the musical moods and tropes of the period.  “These are the songs  and the music that people heard, read, and sang themselves, both in the North and South,” Genensky said. “You have to remember that these people lived in a time when there was no recorded music, no internet, no CDs and no instant information. Thousands of soldiers were marching off to war, leaving behind families, friends, children and husbands and lives.  People didn’t know what happened to their loved ones, or what was going on for long periods of time. They had to rely on the mail. They literally didn’t know whether a father, a brother, a son, was alive or not—or had survived a battle. So, there was a certain kind of atmosphere over the music that was being written in those days.”

You can hear that clearly just in the titles along, how they crossed political and sectional concern and addressed loneliness and loss, uncertainty and absence.  “Songs like Stephen Foster’s ‘Hard Times, Again No More,’  ‘Abide With Me’ or ‘Tenting on the Old Camp Ground’ were equally popular in the North and South,” Genensky said. “Songs like that were the number one hits in their day, in terms of sheet music sales.”

“What’s remarkable is how many of the songs survived down the generations,” she said. “These were songs that became a part of traditional music, but they were also passed down and sung.  People knew the lyrics.”

“We’ve had a beautiful time together, all this time,” she said. “I think we want to move on to other things, other projects.”

Even on its last concert tour, it’s a safe bet to say that Anonymous 4 is anonymous no more—especially online, where their fan base has seen them, in some sense, as musical other-wordly superheroes.  One voice from a comment section—which can be merciless—read,  “The first time someone played a recording by these ladies for me, I thought ‘That must be what angels in heaven sounds like.’ ” Continuing on that theme, another commenter, anticipating a concert, wrote, “This is what heaven sounds like, I’ll bet.”

Georgetowner • November 19, 2015

It may be the holidays, but all the world’s a stage. Some of D.C.’s upcoming theater and opera is tied to the spirit of the season, and the rest is there to brighten and deepen our short days and long nights. Here are our top picks.

Appomattox — Washington National Opera presents Philip Glass’s acclaimed opera, a modern American epic which links the Civil War and Civil Rights eras. Solomon Howard plays Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass. Kennedy Center, Opera House, through Nov. 22.

Semiramide — Washington Concert Opera takes on Rossini’s rarely performed opera, with coloratura soprano Jessica Pratt and mezzo-soprano Vivica Genaux. Maestro Anthony Walker is back for his 14th season. Lisner Auditorium, Nov. 22.

Pericles — Shakespeare’s adventure tale comes to D.C. from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, directed by Joseph Haj and complete with dazzling projections and live music. Folger Theatre, through Dec. 20.

Akeelah and the Bee — The Children’s Theatre Company’s world premiere of Cheryl L. West’s play based on the film, and directed by Charles Randolph-Wright. Arena Stage, Kreeger Theater, through Dec. 27.

Guys and Dolls — Frank Loesser’s musical about Times Square swells, showgirls and gamblers, directed by Jerry Whiddon. “Luck be a Lady,” indeed. Olney Theatre Center, through Dec. 27.

Kiss Me Kate — This production, directed by the gifted Alan Paul, stars Douglas Sills and Christine Sherrill. Shakespeare Theatre Company, Sidney Harman Hall, through Jan. 3.

Oliver! — Lionel Bart’s smash Broadway musical tale of Dickens’s urchin, directed by Arena Stage Artistic Director Molly Smith, has settled in. Arena Stage, Fichandler Stage, through Jan. 3.

Holiday Memories — Tom Hewitt directed this adaptation of Truman Capote’s memory piece, featuring Christopher Henley. Theatre on the Run, Arlington, Nov. 25–Dec. 20.

Black Nativity — Langston Hughes’s celebration of music, faith and Black identity. Anacostia Playhouse, Nov. 25–Jan. 3.

Motown The Musical — The story of Berry Gordy, who discovered Diana Ross, the Jacksons, Smokey Robinson and other stars who remade R&B in the 1960s. National Theatre, Dec. 1–Jan. 3.

Stage Kiss — A new play by the incomparable Sarah Ruhl, directed by Aaron Posner. Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Dec. 2–27.

Bright Star — Love and redemption in the American South of the 1920s and 1940s in a show from Grammy and Emmy award-winner (and movie star) Steve Martin and singer-songwriter Edie Brickell. Kennedy Center, Eisenhower Theater, Dec. 2–Jan. 10.

Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind — The Chicago-based Neo-Futurists bring back a favorite, but entirely original, mini-play. Not, we understand, for the faint of heart. Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Dec. 7–Jan. 3.

Hansel and Gretel — WNO’s Holiday Family Opera. Kennedy Center, Terrace Theater, Dec. 12–20.

Matilda, The Musical — Based on Roald Dahl’s beloved children’s novel, the show that became a Broadway hit comes to D.C. Kennedy Center, Opera House, Dec. 15–Jan. 10.

Stars of David: Story to Song — Now for something completely different, a musical revue celebrating Jewish public figures from Ruth Bader Ginsberg to Gwyneth Paltrow, directed by Shirley Serotsky, based on the book by Abigail Pogrebin. Theater J, Dec. 22–27.

Gary Tischler • November 18, 2015

In many important ways, “Appomattox,” the dramatically revised work by composer Philip Glass and librettist Christopher Hampton, is the most original and in-the-times-and-moment opera ever staged by Washington National Opera.

Even with the news in the world and the United States overwhelmed by the Paris terrorist attacks and their aftermath, “Appomattox” speaks to the times we live in, to the here and now. It challenges, and ultimately haunts, an audience in ways that traditional and more familiar operas rarely if ever do. In doing so, it becomes in the end a triumph of cooperative artistry — of words, dramatic narrative and music acting in concert, of acting and singing, of visual power that attempts to match that of painting and film.

The original “Appomattox,” also by Glass and Hampton, largely focused on the Civil War. It has been recast as Act One of the expanded opera. But this ambitious world-premiere production goes on to link the ending of the Civil War — with all of its promise and considerable hope for the freed slaves — to the Selma days of the 1960s, specifically, the negotiations and battles over the Voting Rights Act.

Afterward, when audience members are alone with their thoughts, the entire enterprise seems to place itself squarely in our daily life, this American year of Ferguson and Baltimore, of police shootings and the current outcries and demonstrations in response to the continued presence of racism in our society, in our cities and on our campuses.

That call for a national debate about race may for a time, or longer than that, be drowned out by the shock and threat now posed by terrorism, whose face is the nihilistic and implacable force of ISIS. But the effect of a work like “Appomattox” lingers nonetheless on several levels, primarily because it such a purely American piece. And while it is operatic in its emotions, “Appomattox” avails itself of few operatic tropes.

You’ve probably never seen so many historical personages as you will in this opera, which runs over three hours: Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses and Julia Grant, Mary Todd Lincoln, LBJ, Martin Luther King, Jr., a young civil rights activist named John Lewis, a white civil rights activist from Detroit named Vi Liuzzo who was murdered by Klansmen, J. Edgar Hoover, George Wallace and a host of others — including Edgar Ray Killen, the horribly foul Klansman charged in the murders of three civil rights workers in Mississippi at age 80, years after the killings in 1964.

This is history writ large. Convincingly, like a nonfiction drama, it works almost cinematically. In fact, “Appomattox” functions more like a spoken drama in which the dialogue is sung, glorified (music-ified, if you will) and embellished in astonishingly beautiful choral works, notably the opening gathering of soldiers singing “Tenting on the Old Campground.” In the second act, the chorus erupts into a truly glorious “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (“Glory, glory, hallelujah!”), which bass Solomon Howard, as Martin Luther King, Jr., takes over in an aria of triumph.

Most of the parts are double cast. Howard, for instance, plays both King and Douglass and has pointed conversations with LBJ and Lincoln in both parts. I say conversations because the encounters, like many in the opera, come off genuinely conversational and natural. Glass’s difficult music also seems in partnership with the words. The music is respectful, the tone muted; it decorates more than emphasizes, with one singular exception, noted below.

Tom Fox takes over parts of the second act as LBJ. He is the profane — very profane — president in all his crass empathy. His singing in fact makes his brash, hardtack profanity even more effective.

The connection between time periods is made at the end of the first act when, after a massacre of black troops in Louisiana, a reporter for an African American newspaper despairs of the future in a searing turn by Frederick Ballentine. One hundred years later, the promise of the vote is about to be achieved.

This is an American opera, loud and emotionally on the money. It probably contains more raw language (including numerous expressions of the N-word) than anyone may have experienced in an opera. Most chilling is a conversation — unrepentant, hateful, smug, cruel — between Killen (played powerfully by David Pittsinger) and James Fowler (Keriann Otaño), a policeman charged in the death of civil rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson. Here, Glass’s music takes a turn into unknown territory, becoming a kind of insane explosion of sounds, a counterpoint to the calm, bitter, racist conversation between the two men.

Artfully paced and directed by Tazewell Thompson, this beautifully acted and staged production paints — in its broad narrative strokes, striking characterizations and rich and jarring music — a vibrant, even burning, canvas that portrays the jagged course and imbedded wound of racism in America. It will sweep you up.

“Appomattox” runs through Nov. 22 at the Kennedy Center Opera House.

Gary Tischler • November 16, 2015

There’s a kind of historic convergence around the new, extensively revised production of the epic and ambitious opera, “Appomattox,” making its Washington National Opera premiere Saturday, Nov. 14, at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House.

Originally penned by renowned composer Philip Glass and librettist Christopher Hampton in 2007 around the time when challenges to the voting rights act were being mounted, this “Appomattox” celebrates historic anniversaries of that same Voting Rights Act 50 years ago and the end of the Civil War 150 years ago.  It also comes at a time of increasing racial tensions across the U.S. over police shootings of African Americans and demonstrations over overt acts of racism on U.S. college campuses, one of which led to the resignation of the University of Missouri president. 

The very presence of “Appomattox,” which envisions critical meetings between presidents and civil rights leaders—Frederick Douglass with Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr., with Lyndon Baines Johnson—echoes loudly in these times.  Douglass, a former slave and eloquent abolitionist, was trying to influence Lincoln, while King was negotiating voting rights with Johnson. 

The issues may be different in 2015, but the central issue remains race in America and how both black and white Americans are still struggling with it.

The opera echoes mightily for Solomon Howard, the rising star African American bass, who takes on the roles of Douglass and King and feels the weight of that responsibility, as well as the convergence of time and place in this city, where he grew up, with he and his family often struggling.

“The opera really speaks to this place—this is where Douglass lived, where Lincoln lived, where King gave that glorious speech and met with Lincoln, where civil rights demonstrations and anti-war demonstrations were part of our landscape,” said Howard, who lives in Virginia. “Everywhere you look there are reminders of the struggle for freedom and civil rights, and what it meant. It echoes in my own life, also.”

“So, yes, I feel that responsibility to do Douglass and King justice, to do right by them, historically and artistically,” he said. “But you can’t be self-conscious about this in the sense that you’re thinking about it every second. These are real people, and my job is to make them real to the audience not stick figures and you do this through singing and acting.  Acting, I feel, is critically important to opera, and that didn’t always used to be the case. 

“You know, you can feel that atmosphere in this city—this is a place where the news plays out daily, and the reminders are all around us—the Lincoln monument and King’s special place. This is where much of our history, America’s history, happened and played out publicly.”

Howard says the music of Glass, who is considered a minimalist and atonal, is a challenge, but a welcoming one.   “People may be surprised,” he said. “The music in some ways functions like a score for a movie, keying emotions. It’s powerful and in terms of singing, if not listening, difficult, certainly.

To some extent, Howard, who rose into the ranks of leading performers with the WNO and elsewhere from the opera company’s Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist program, has some experience in portraying an American icon.  Howard starred in the stirring one-hour opera, “Approaching Ali,” which had its world premiere at the Kennedy Center two years ago, a production that put the spotlight squarely on him.  “It’s daunting,” he said.  “But it’s the kind of challenge where you can bring much of yourself to the project, you’re making a difference in ways that are not quite like working in a more traditional opera.”

One can hear his voice beam over the phone, talking about “Ali.”  “You know, I met him [Muhammad Ali] this year,” he said. “That was something.  It was amazing.  He’s frail, of course, and all of that which goes with it.  But still—meeting the champ, that’s special, very special. It was an honor.”

Howard is a star on the rise, as is Eric Owens, with whom he co-starred as Banquo in Verdi’s “Macbeth” as well as having a leading role in “The Magic Flute” at this year’s Glimmerglass Opera Festival in Cooperstown, New York, where WNO Artistic Director Francesca Zambello is also the artistic director. He was Banquo to Owens’s Macbeth, in a moving performance in which he showed that Macbeth’s murder of his best friend Banquo was his final descent into darkness. Howard will have big roles in the WNO 2016 production of Wagner’s “Ring Cycle.”

All eyes will once again be on Howard in “Appomattox,” but he won’t be alone, In addition to Douglass and King, other familiar American historical figures will stride the stage: Robert E. Lee (David Pittsinger), Uylysses S. Grant and Nicholas Katzenbach (Richard Paul Fink) Julia Grant and Viola Liuzz (Melody Moore), and J. Edgar Hoover (Robert Brubaker), among others. Tazewell Thompson directs, and Dennis Russell Davies will conduct. `

“Appomattox” will be performed Nov. 14, 16, 18, 20, 21 with a Nov. 22 matinee at the Kennedy Center Opera House.

Georgetowner • November 12, 2015

The accent over the phone is English, and the background and history seem decidedly English, Oxonian or Cambridge to some extent, a place where university is a word without a definite article. The man who’s speaking is a gentleman named Jonathan Howard who speaking both with speed and precision.  Yet, he’s part of a musical group whose appeal is universal to a fault—they have been, in one  incarnation or another, just about everywhere, high and low, Asia and America, concert halls and churches, cathedrals and musicales.

The group is. once and for all and after all, the King’s Singers, a hugely popular  British a cappella vocal ensemble, which, for 47 years, have expanded the idea and the experience of the enjoyment and appeal of contemporary music all over the world.  The singers will be at St. John’s Episcopal Church on O Street in Georgetown 5 p.m., Sunday, Nov. 15, in a concert that is likely to contain both music intricate and music joyful, music steeped in tradition, and music composed, if not last week, at least in this century.

Given the nature of time, Howard is part of a six-man group that has varied with the passing of time. Howard, a bass, joined the group in 2010.  Its oldest current member is David Hurley, a countertenor who joined the group in 1990, the most recent members are Julian Gregory, a tenor, and Christopher Gabbitas, a baritone. The group also includes Tim Wayne-Wright, another countertenor, and Christopher Bruerton, another baritone.

“I am sometimes am astounded that I am where I am at all, and that we go where we go,” Howard said. “This is the way it has always been, of course, the group re-forms over time, but there is always a mix. David [Hurley] grounds us, brings the memories, the traditions that are part of the previous incarnations.”

Loosely speaking, the group was formed in 1968. The singers are or were, indeed King’s men, in the sense that they attended King’s College in Cambridge, England.  The original members were all studious types, being choral scholars—they performed madrigals, choral works with an ever increasing dose of more modern music, less formal, but still heavy in the traditions of choral music.

“I think the singers, including our bunch, tend to have similar backgrounds, university in one form or another,” Howard said. ” Some of us have experience in composition, all of us know the structure and workings of both classical and contemporary music. We know by now our audiences, and they vary, and that always amazes me.  In this concert, in a smaller venue, which we like, you get a great degree of intimacy, a feedback from the audience, it’s like being in an old drawing room, in some ways, there’s much more response.”

These days, the group is reflective of what is going on in contemporary music, contemporary composition and audiences. “I don’t mean we’re rock and rollers per se,” he said. “We’re a choral group, but we do include things from the great American songbook, for instance, or the Beatles.  The songs of the Beatles, in fact, are ready-made for choral performance. Think of “Eleanor Rigby,” “Penny Lane” and “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”—what you can do with that as a group.”

The group comes to Washington “quite often”— the Kennedy Center, the Washington Cathedral, but it travels, Howard said, “all over the country. It’s great way to experience the country. “  The singers are in some ways musical chameleons, tradition bound, but flexible in identity.  When you view a video of their “Down By The Riverside”, they could pass for a very tony but very accessible barbershop quartet.

“All our music is about integrity, authenticity of the music,” Howard said.

The group has won Grammys, but more importantly, they’ve won over audiences.  In his biographical statement, Howard says he considers the King’s Singers “the world’s greatest a capella group.” He’s astonished at the accumulated repertoire which includes “Gesualdo’s Tenebrae Responsaries for Maundy” and the Great American Songbook in back-to-back concerts.

The King’s Singers come to Georgetown by way of Lutz Hall, in Annville, Pennsylvania, and are off to Middlebury, Vermont, after Washington, D.C. On Nov. 18,  the group will travel to Krakow, Poland, for a concert with Filharmolnia Krakowskas, and fly back the next night to All Saints Chapel in Sewanee, Tennessee, which could be down by the riverside.

The King’s Singers, 5 p.m., Sunday, Nov. 15, St. John’s Episcopal Church, 3240 O St. NW. Tickets, $40; students, $25. For more information, call 202-338-1796 or visit StJohnsGeorgetown.org. Free parking is available at Hyde-Addison Elementary School across O Street from the church.