Performance

Gary Tischler • May 20, 2016

Even though “The Rhinegold,” the opening salvo in Washington National Opera’s and Artistic Director Francesca Zambello’s much anticipated production of Richard Wagner’s complete Ring Cycle, is — at around two and a half hours — the extravaganza’s smallest and shortest component, it by no means lacks size or importance.

As the prologue to what follows, the increasingly tragic saga told in “The Valkyrie,” “Siegfried” and “Twilight of the Gods,” “The Rhinegold” is critical as a kind of prelude and chronicle of a disaster foretold. It’s the vehicle that sets things in motion on an increasingly precarious and spectacular path.

But it’s also a work that has its own identity, its own rich rewards, in which Zambello makes visible and audible some of her reverential and referenced concerns, giving this production (and presumably the whole WNO “Ring of the Nibelungs” cycle) resonance with the chaotic times we live in.

Not altogether clearly, this production is set in a quasi-modern, global-warming-era America, albeit a somewhat mythological one. Matching their raw, clean tone to the musical one, the sets echo both pristine wilderness vistas and high-tech industrial vibes that are a retreat from the natural world.

Wagner’s music — especially in the beginning — serves as a majestic, irresistible engine that advances the story and the emotions it contains. It’s a tone-setter, a kind of promise of things to come, presented by a huge WNO orchestra, under the intelligent and forceful baton of Philippe Auguin, as a kind of proud gift. This is especially true in the opening sequence, illustrated by one of those projections of the natural world created by Jan Hartley and S. Katy Tucker, a parade of gurgling, swirling imagery.

In this world, we encounter the Rhinemaidens — Woglinde, Wellgunde and Flosshilde (love those Wagnerian names), ably and seductively played by Jacqueline Echols, Catherine Martin and Renée Tatum — gaily splashing in the river, playing on the rocks as they tease and generally enrage the dwarf Alberich, sucker-punching him with an all-consuming desire, which leads to his discovery of the gold which can only can be taken by someone who is willing to renounce love. And who would do a thing like that?

Elsewhere, Wotan, the ruler of the gods, is nettled by his wife Fricka for having allowed the giants Fafner and Fasolt to take her sister Freia away in exchange for the giants building his new abode for the gods’ Valhalla. Also on hand: Froh, Donner and Loge, a trio of gods as millennial types. Wotan learns of the theft of the gold, and he and Loge descend into the underground mines and caverns of Niebelheim, where they encounter Alberich and his brother Mime and a horde of dwarves. Alberich has not only used the gold to make a magical chain that makes him invisible, but has forged a ring that can make him all powerful. Wotan and Loge steal the ring and everything else. Alberich casts a curse of destruction on the ring.

Wotan is forced to give all the gold and the ring up in order to save his sister-in-law from the giants, but he and the gods have Valhalla. And so it begins, as they step on a gangplank that could be the road to heaven, or an invitation to the Titanic.

This is resounding, magic stuff, magic of stagecraft, magical music, a creation of a deeply lived-in world. Zambello has staged the complete cycle before, but a complete cycle is a first for Washington. It’s well worth the wait.

Even as a precursor, “The Rhinegold” is part Greek tragedy, part warning, with nature — both the natural world and the best and the beast in human (and divine) nature — on display. It comes at you in sections: the playful but disastrous encounter between the Rhinemaidens and Alberich, the wide-open spaces where Wotan contends with his family, the other gods and the giants and the blazing, burning underground.

In the Ring Cycle, Wagner envisioned something on the order of total theater, where design, music, theatrics, and drama became welded together into something passionately new. In the era of the great romantic operas, the cycle must have seemed exactly that: totally new, and not a little overwhelming in its ambition, perhaps even something of an affront to the senses. Not that Wagner’s music doesn’t have its own form of romanticism, the kind that sweeps everything before it.

“The Rhinegold” is carried by the music, but it’s the weaving together of a plot with its later consequences, and a group of characters played by performers who sing extremely well and, I’d say, act even better and convincingly, that carry you away. I was especially impressed by Gordon Hawkins as Alberich; his singing isn’t the most precise, but the sheer energy, relentlessness and bullying in his voice evokes a hunger for sex (if not love), ownership, power and control that is frightening, especially in these our times. It’s desire run rampant that’s on display here. The Ring itself embodies a kind of primitive force that says the wearer can literally have it all.

Wotan — sung and played with quiet, steady force by Alan Held — is also drawn to it, but uses it instead to save his family from the giants. Particularly evocative among them are two young gods, including a sharp, edgy and slick Ryan McKinny as the hammer-wielding Donner and William Burden as Loge, singing with a strong, clear voice, evoking a very contemporary coolness.

Gary Tischler • May 16, 2016

Just before the start of the third and last act of “Twilight of the Gods” — which is also the last act of the complete Ring Cycle being staged by Washington National Opera — some of the people who had attended all four productions in the course of a week looked around and nodded at one other in the seconds just before the lights would dim again one last time.

“My god,” one woman said. “It’s over. I can’t believe it. It’s kind of sad.”

There was quite a bit of that “We few, we happy few” feeling about this unprecedented mounting of the entire “The Ring of the Nibelung” at the Kennedy Center by WNO Artistic Director Francesca Zambello. The experience was exhausting; the last production alone was six hours long including two intermissions. The entire cycle racked up approximately twenty hours.

But the experience was also exhilarating. Even as the cycle presented challenges of stamina and — in the age of the short attention span and Twitter — forced abandonment of our devices for prolonged periods of time (Act 1 of “Twilight of the Gods” was two hours), the four productions built a momentum of excellence rarely seen — or heard, for that matter. This Ring came as close as you can possibly get to Richard Wagner’s notion of “Gesamtkunstwerk,” a synthesis of remarkable music, poetic and free-form writing and a compelling narrative.

The production got off to a clean, affecting start with the prelude of “The Rhinegold” and never looked back, running like a powerful, speed-building train through “The Valkyrie,” “Siegfried” and “Twilight of the Gods” in a way that focused the heart, the imagination and the mind, carried along by Wagner’s magnificent music, presented in a way that made it a true partner and facilitator of the narrative, as well as providing enormous pleasures in the playing and listening.

Wagner tossed around and inserted leitmotifs — musical identifiers of themes and characters — like some medieval farmer throwing seeds for a hundred different vegetables. Some, such as Siegfried’s trumpet sounding and the Valkyrie theme, are practically Muzak in our pop cultural memories, but all of them serve as reminders, like musical magic breadcrumbs.

In the Ring, this becomes important throughout, because characters at various times recap how they got to a particular point in the narrative, often repeating the same story from a different point of view, pushed along by the music. Everyone has their story to tell, each in their own expository and musical way. The result is that by the end of it all, you can’t get the characters — those who survived and those who did not — out of your head for a long time.

In “Siegfried” and “Twilight of the Gods” (in German, it’s “Gotterdammerung,” more akin to “Armageddon” than to twilight), it’s the hero awakened to his many tasks of heroics: slay the dragon, capture the gold and the ring, defeat the god Wotan, pierce a ring of fire, awaken the warrior princess Brunnhilde and, most difficult of all, fall in love. In “Twilight,” it’s betrayal, tragedy and murder, as well as the gigantic self-sacrifice of Brunnhilde, which results not only in her immolation but in the destruction of Valhalla.

“Siegfried” is a true heroic epic, an adventure and a fulfillment of a great love finally achieved and experienced. It’s the Siegfried and Brunnhilde show, with great moments by two old foes, an unmatched schemer in a narrative that has quite a few and, of course, the dragon.

The dragon, which is a transformed version of Fafner the Giant (who murdered his brother to gain the gold, the ring and everything), looms like a solid steel monster, impenetrable but not undefeatable, as it turns out. He’s a dark, huge, menacing creation of the modern age, of modern man, a clanging, battery-driven menace that Siegfried overpowers and kills. He also does away with Mime, the whiny, plotting, overweeningly-greedy-with-a-large-and-sweaty-sense-of-entitlement brother of Albrecht, the mining dwarf who originally stole the Rhinegold and fashioned a ring from it, a ring that bears his deadly curse.

American tenor Daniel Brenna is an energetic, full-throated Siegfried, chomping at the bit, ignorant as only an innocent can be, a superhero for his age, but posturing like a modern one. He has a single-mindedness and a directness that are both appealing and annoying. He has no sense of mortality or of the seriousness of killing either the dragon or Mime.

In Siegfried, we begin to see more clearly Zambello’s subtext of environmental rust and decay; Siegfried himself seems to have been raised by Mime in a trailer park that was used badly by a twister sometime in the past. The projections designed by Jan Hartley and remounted by S. Katy Tucker are increasingly dominated by industrialism run rampant, with polluted water, factory smokestacks, rusted trains and blighted urban landscapes. The theme — the conceit, if you will — is never forced. Rather, its use is accumulative. It becomes an overlay, an atmosphere in the design.

Wotan — so ably sung and played by Alan Held, makes a final appearance here, first in a scene with Alberich (the remarkable Gordon Hawkins), in which they walk like the tramps in “Waiting for Godot,” with amiable, almost nostalgic banter, and then as the last obstacle to Siegfried’s rescue of Brunnhilde.

“Siegfried” climaxes in an astounding courtship and fulfillment of Siegfried’s and Brunnhilde’s love. It’s a long, almost proud duet of mutual attraction, misunderstanding and coming together as fate wanted and would have it. Brenna and British soprano Catherine Foster (who missed doing the role in “The Valkyrie” due to injury) rise to the occasion in sweeping vocals — especially Foster, who has to navigate through the realization that she is no longer mortal, that she isn’t who she is and also that she has been rescued by the love of her life. This results in the initiation for Siegfried of the idea that love is not just an overpowering passion but a tug of war. Brunnhilde’s “I-love-you-don’t touch-me” exclamations confuse him more than trying to figure out how to kill the dragon.

In “Twilight,” things go south for the lovers, but end in triumph for the literal ring and for the Ring that is Wagner’s (and perhaps opera’s) crowning achievement. Certainly it was such for Zambello, but equally for Philippe Auguin, the WNO orchestra conductor who restored the music to its brilliant qualities, overriding the opera’s sometimes exaggerated reputation as a personification of Teutonic mythology.

What’s so affecting and surprising about the enterprise is how intimate an epic it is. There are so many full and focused scenes in which only a few characters occupy the stage and our attention, to be replaced by a gathering horde in the mines, a small group of gods, a warrior force or sheer spectacle: the death of the dragon, the arrival of the Valkyries, the fiery imprisonment of Brunnhilde and, of course, the destruction of Valhalla itself.

In the end — and from the beginning — the Ring Cycle was a rewarding experience, in ways one suspects that few audience members ever anticipated. We few, we happy few, indeed.

Gary Tischler •

Four operas and some 20 hours later, one feels a powerful residual effect from the first round of Washington National Opera’s production of Richard Wagner’s “The Ring of the Nibelung,” the Ring Cycle for short. The audience at the Kennedy Center Opera House (especially those folks who, like me, took in the whole cycle) felt a little like ocean-liner passengers encountering turbulent but exhilarating seas.

It’s hard to get the saga out of your head. From “The Rhinegold” to “The Valkyrie” to “Siegfried” to “Twilight of the Gods,” the music reverberates, the characters linger: Wotan and Brunnhilde, the Rhinemaidens, Alberich and his relatives, the Valkyries themselves, the dragon, the giants and the gods, the tragic lovers. The whole supernatural bunch is ever not so gentle on my mind.

It’s difficult to encapsulate the entire cycle, or to do it justice with single reviews. So here are a few observations and thoughts on the Ring (the second cycle winds down this week and the third will begin Saturday).

A 21st-Century American Experience. There is an encyclopedic array of clichés associated with Wagner and the Ring, not the least of which is that the operas are a compendium of Nordic and Germanic mythology, of gods and monsters and heroes that sprang from the dark forests and rivers of pre-modern Germany.

If that’s the case, then director Francesca Zambello has stripped the work of its more obvious Teutonic references related to helmets and posturing (although Nordic-type helmets were being sold as souvenirs), turning it into a contemporary classic and intimate epic about humanity’s relationship to nature and failed stewardship of the natural world. This is obvious in the evocative projections by S. Katy Tucker and Jan Hartley, with their illustrations of polluted rivers, factory smokestacks and cityscapes.

But it’s also in the design and the look of things and people. Valhalla looks often like a Manhattan board room; Siegfried, raised by mordant, obsessively greedy Mime, seems to be living in a trailer park that has fallen on hard times; and the Rhinemaidens, in “Twilight,” are searching the refuse of a polluted Rhine like homeless waifs. It’s relatable throughout, without pounding the audience over the head.

Bad Boy Wagner. Wagner himself, historically, has a reputation for being a terrible human being, arrogant, profligate, almost misogynistic. Without making an argument in his defense — personal character shouldn’t be a central issue where art is concerned — one wonders how (if Wagner was a human monster) to account for the creation of Brunnhilde, Wotan’s daughter, the true heroic figure of the cycle, whose sense of accountability and heroic sacrifice make her the critical character in three of the operas.

The Two Brunnhildes. When British soprano Catherine Foster suffered an injury in rehearsal that prevented her from portraying Brunnhilde in “The Valkyrie,” she was replaced by Christine Goerke, who was performing “Siegfried” at Houston Grand Opera. The segue, back and forth, was seamless, with both sopranos delivering outstanding performances.

The Conductor Also Triumphs. This was, in terms of both critical and audience response, a huge triumph for WNO conductor Philippe Auguin, who supported the singers and led the orchestra in interpreting Wagner’s music with a nuanced mastery — and without being overly Wagnerian (except when necessary).

Stand-Out Performances. One of the most memorable performers was American baritone Gordon Hawkins as Alberich, the evil dwarf who steals the gold, makes the ring and curses the ring. Hawkins sang the part powerfully and, even more impressive, acted it in ways that brought out all the complicated characteristics of the part. The scene in “Twilight” when he’s almost seductively urging his son Hagen to kill Siegfried and steal back the ring is a prime example of the dual nature of the cycle as an intimate epic.

I was touched by the plight of the young lovers, brother and sister, Siegmund and Sieglinde, portrayed with high-dudgeon passion by Christopher Ventris and Meagan Miller in “The Valkyrie.” And for sheer consistency, Alan Held brought the right size to the role of chief god Wotan. This god behaved like a god, and was tortured by his very human decisions. Kudos also to the Rhinemaidens, headed by Jacqueline Echols and including Catherine Martin and Renée Tatum.

Being a part of the experience of the Ring was exhausting, not necessarily in the physical sense (although sitting for so many hours in a chair had its effects), but in an emotional and mental way. It required focus, it came at you like a long, unending parade and it washed over you with sublime music.

Many critics and audience members had seen other Rings and compared. But even without that, you sensed every night that this Ring, which began on a high note, got better and better as it went along.

Gary Tischler • May 4, 2016

If you’ve felt some turbulence in the air amid all the springy weather we’ve been having here of late, it was probably a bit of foreshadowing.

Storm Large is back in town at the Kennedy Center, and she’s keeping good company.

Large — full name, Susan Storm Large — the full-deal singer, author, songwriter, actress, recording artist and former (2006) finalist on “Rock Star: Supernova,” is back. This time, she’s here for three concerts, in which she performers Kurt Weill’s “The Seven Deadly Sins,” today through Saturday, April 30. It’s something of a departure for a singer who’s gone from tour and club rock star to being part of Pink Martini to singing with the NSO Pops here in a Frank Sinatra concert last year.  

“Yeah, that’s quite a bit different,” Large said in a telephone interview while she was taking time out in her Portland home. “It’s a challenge, I gotta  say. There’s a lot of that Teutonic, serious stuff  going on here. Very, very dark, and not so much melodic and romantic music, and I’m a romantic. But you find your way in. You find the true things and the way to make it your own — the things that speak to you.”

Weill, who famously partnered with Bertolt Brecht on scathing anti-establishment musicals like “Happy End” and “The Three Penny Opera,” also teamed up — for the last time — on “The Seven Deadly Sins,” a relatively short work, with Brecht. “It’s the story of two sisters, named Anna l and II, who may personify facets of one woman and who leaves her childhood home in Louisiana and travels to seven different cities in seven years, during which she experiences the aspects of the seven deadly sins and their opposites. 

“She finds all of the seven sins, like envy, wrath, sloth, greed and so on, but also their opposites,” Large said. “It’s not easy, but I actually love the music and the challenge it presents me for me. You have to keep embracing new challenges. I just keep on moving as I get older. You kind of grow up, you know.”

Large had performed “The Seven Deadly Sins” with the Oregon Symphony. She’s a legend in Portland, where she was part of a punk band called “The Balls” for years and where she had a reputation for musical and emotional honesty and a dramatic, flamboyant and high-energy stage presence. The Oregon Symphony was scheduled to take the piece to Carnegie Hall, but because of financial and travel constraints it couldn’t do it. “They asked me if I could be a part of this with the Detroit Symphony as part of the Spring for Music Festival.” Her answer was an emphatic yes.

It’s not her first prom with Brecht and Weill. Large starred as Sally Bowles in an Oregon theater production of “Cabaret” in 2007, but then she did a searing, nakedly honest, auto-biographical musical memoir called “Crazy Enough,” which ran for 21 weeks and was a hit in such diverse settings as the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the Adelaide Festival in Australia and the legendary Joe’s Pub in New York. The book version — which is noted for its revelations about a dark childhood, abuse and youthful heroin addiction as well as her life as a rock star — was named Oprah’s Book of the Week and won the 2013 Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction.

Even on the phone Large is a forceful, vivid presence. She can segue from profanity-peppered chatty talk to a keen, intelligent awareness of her musical challenges and approaches. She takes compliments like a sweet, demure lass.

She performed with Pink Martini in 2011 at the Kennedy Center and last year released a remarkable album called “Le Bonheur,” a remarkable run through an entirely eclectic, torchy, rock and blues-imbued and just about heart-breaking group of songs that you tend to return to. They include her unique version, hot-to-the-heart-and-ear, of Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” as well as his “It’s All Right With Me,” the unforgettable rockish ballad, “Unchained Melody,” “The Lady is a Tramp,”  the American boulevardier Tom Waits’s great “Saving All My Love For You,” the spritely “Satellite of Love” by Lou Reed and two of her own compositions, the ravaging “A Woman’s Heart” and the anthem “Stand Up For Me”.

To get the full stormy effect of Large, check her out on her YouTube list: tall — six feet — and blonde. A full-ahead woman, whether she’s in front of orchestra or a punk band or by herself in the spotlight. She’s physical, funny, smart and death-defying.

Large performs with the National Symphony Orchestra at 7 p.m. Thursday, as part of the NSO Declassified Series at 9 p.m. Friday and at 8 p.m Saturday. James Gaffigan conducts and the vocal quartet Hudson Shad will also be on hand for the performances, which also include Rodgers’s “Carousel Waltz,” Ravel’s “La valse” and Dvorak’s “American Suite.”

Georgetowner •

Contemporary social and political issues — the daily headlines of our lives — make compelling material for live theater.

Since 9/11, that seems to be especially true for everything to do with Islam. Thinking and talking about the Middle East, about religious identity and meaning, about the threat of terrorism, about followers of Islam — including those in America and those wanting to come to America — have all managed to find their way onto our stages.

Consider that Ari Roth’s new Mosaic Theater Company has just wound down its Voices from a Changing Middle East festival with plays like “Hkeelee,” “After the War,” “Promised Land,” “I Shall Not Hate” and “Wrestling Jerusalem.” Beginning with his previous stint at Theater J, Roth has been something of a pioneer when it comes to plays touching on the Middle East and on the tense and intense relations between Arabs and Jews, between the West and Islam.

The work of Pakistani American playwright and writer Ayad Akhtar, which deals with Islam and cultural identity in America, are on Washington-area stages this month. Akhtar’s “The Who and the What,” about a Pakistani American female writer working on a novel about women and Islam, will be staged at Round House Theatre in Bethesda from May 25 through June 19.

Akhtar won a Pulitzer Prize for “Disgraced,” his intensely dramatic play about an assimilated Pakistani attorney confronting his identity during the course of a dinner among friends and relatives in New York.

“Disgraced,” which had two different productions in New York, including a successful Broadway turn, is at Arena Stage through May 29, directed by Timothy Douglas. Arena has been a veritable political hotbed this season, what with the Georgetown-political-salon-centric “City of Conversation” by Anthony Giardina; “Sweat,” Lynn Nottage’s play about the effects of industrial decline in America; and “All the Way,” Robert Schenkkan’s searing, Tony Award-winning play about LBJ attempting to get a Civil Rights bill through a recalcitrant Congress during an election year.

“Disgraced” is about as hot-button a play as can be, especially during the current presidential campaign, as it focuses on the fate of Amir Kapoor, a Muslim American, a Pakistani and a corporate attorney at a high-powered New York Jewish-owned law firm.

For actor Nehal Joshi, a Burke, Virgina, native, who’s had a varied career full of challenging roles, the role of Amir is “tough,
really intense.”

“It’s so contemporary, it’s so hard-hitting. It doesn’t pull any punches. There’s no black or white stances,” Joshi said. “Amir is a Muslim, but he’s almost totally assimilated. He works for this really top-notch law firm and is set to make partner, and his wife is this really creative, intelligent white woman who’s working on a project dealing with Islamic art. His nephew somehow persuades him to do legal work for an imam who’s been accused of having connections to terrorism. And from there, we have this dinner hosted by his wife, with his Jewish friend and his African American wife, who works at his firm. And during the course of it all, things are said, questions are raised, and he’s forced to confront himself, his feelings about the Koran, about his religion, about his place in America.”

“You have to find yourself in that part,” he said. “And you know, I’ve run across it. How people react to you, your name or how you look. And they make assumptions without knowing you at all. My family isn’t Muslim, they’re Indian, but even so, you have to think of history. And in New York, after 9/11, even though he’s living in some ways the American Dream, there’s no way that you can avoid your identity.”

Joshi comes across as thoughtful, not just about the issues in the play, but about acting, and the acting world, the parts he’s gotten and taken and what he’s done with them. “I’m really glad to be back here at Arena,” he said. “It’s a kind of home. And you do things here, you stretch, you go against the grain.”

Probably the biggest Arena memory for him was playing the part of the peddler as an ethnic Middle Eastern character in Molly Smith’s production of “Oklahoma.” His peddler was funny, engaging, a guy trying to catch both his Western version of the American dream and a winsome local girl, who was also being courted by a cowboy.

“That was unusual for audiences. You don’t usually think of that character that way, but there’s historic precedents for it. There were many immigrants in the West then. It was the place where you could start over, and there were, in fact, peddlers like that.”

Georgetowner •

Contemporary social and political issues — the daily headlines of our lives — make compelling material for live theater.

Since 9/11, that seems to be especially true for everything to do with Islam. Thinking and talking about the Middle East, about religious identity and meaning, about the threat of terrorism, about followers of Islam — including those in America and those wanting to come to America — have all managed to find their way onto our stages.

Consider that Ari Roth’s new Mosaic Theater Company has just wound down its Voices from a Changing Middle East festival with plays like “Hkeelee,” “After the War,” “Promised Land,” “I Shall Not Hate” and “Wrestling Jerusalem.” Beginning with his previous stint at Theater J, Roth has been something of a pioneer when it comes to plays touching on the Middle East and on the tense and intense relations between Arabs and Jews, between the West and Islam.

The work of Pakistani American playwright and writer Ayad Akhtar, which deals with Islam and cultural identity in America, are on Washington-area stages this month. Akhtar’s “The Who and the What,” about a Pakistani American female writer working on a novel about women and Islam, will be staged at Round House Theatre in Bethesda from May 25 through June 19.

Akhtar won a Pulitzer Prize for “Disgraced,” his intensely dramatic play about an assimilated Pakistani attorney confronting his identity during the course of a dinner among friends and relatives in New York.

“Disgraced,” which had two different productions in New York, including a successful Broadway turn, is at Arena Stage through May 29, directed by Timothy Douglas. Arena has been a veritable political hotbed this season, what with the Georgetown-political-salon-centric “City of Conversation” by Anthony Giardina; “Sweat,” Lynn Nottage’s play about the effects of industrial decline in America; and “All the Way,” Robert Schenkkan’s searing, Tony Award-winning play about LBJ attempting to get a Civil Rights bill through a recalcitrant Congress during an election year.

“Disgraced” is about as hot-button a play as can be, especially during the current presidential campaign, as it focuses on the fate of Amir Kapoor, a Muslim American, a Pakistani and a corporate attorney at a high-powered New York Jewish-owned law firm.

For actor Nehal Joshi, a Burke, Virgina, native, who’s had a varied career full of challenging roles, the role of Amir is “tough, really intense.”

“It’s so contemporary, it’s so hard-hitting. It doesn’t pull any punches. There’s no black or white stances,” Joshi said. “Amir is a Muslim, but he’s almost totally assimilated. He works for this really top-notch law firm and is set to make partner, and his wife is this really creative, intelligent white woman who’s working on a project dealing with Islamic art. His nephew somehow persuades him to do legal work for an imam who’s been accused of having connections to terrorism. And from there, we have this dinner hosted by his wife, with his Jewish friend and his African American wife, who works at his firm. And during the course of it all, things are said, questions are raised, and he’s forced to confront himself, his feelings about the Koran, about his religion, about his place in America.”

“You have to find yourself in that part,” he said. “And you know, I’ve run across it. How people react to you, your name or how you look. And they make assumptions without knowing you at all. My family isn’t Muslim, they’re Indian, but even so, you have to think of history. And in New York, after 9/11, even though he’s living in some ways the American Dream, there’s no way that you can avoid your identity.”

Joshi comes across as thoughtful, not just about the issues in the play, but about acting, and the acting world, the parts he’s gotten and taken and what he’s done with them. “I’m really glad to be back here at Arena,” he said. “It’s a kind of home. And you do things here, you stretch, you go against the grain.”

Probably the biggest Arena memory for him was playing the part of the peddler as an ethnic Middle Eastern character in Molly Smith’s production of “Oklahoma.” His peddler was funny, engaging, a guy trying to catch both his Western version of the American dream and a winsome local girl, who was also being courted by a cowboy.

“That was unusual for audiences. You don’t usually think of that character that way, but there’s historic precedents for it. There were many immigrants in the West then. It was the place where you could start over, and there were, in fact, peddlers like that.”

Gary Tischler • April 27, 2016

“Jersey Boys” on tour seems almost like a recurring, regular thing — like the seasons¸ you might say — and here they are again, through April 24, at the National Theatre, part of Broadway at the National.

And yet, this award-winning (Grammy, Tony, Olivier) musical, which has been around since 2005, never drops in like a lazy old uncle, telling — or singing — the same old stories in the same old way. This particular showbiz musical still has the buzz of something that somebody put together for the first time. It’s gritty, fresh and packs a punch.

The fact that this show — about the life and times and career and superstardom of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, a uniquely American rock-and-roll group that vied at one time for attention, fame and record sales with the Beatles and the Beach Boys — also works like a greatest-hits album in the flesh doesn’t hurt, of course.

“Sherry,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “Walk Like a Man,” “Dawn,” “My Eyes Adored You,” “Big Man In Town,” ”Let’s Hang On,” “Rag Doll” and the inimitable “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” … these songs stir memories and seem new all at once.

There’s a reason for that, and a reason why Frankie Valli is at the center of the sound. It was his way with a falsetto range that made the songs (penned by the gifted Bob Gaudio, the creative core of the group) unique, giving them a style, almost a genre, all of their own.

Ever since “Jersey Boys” debuted on Broadway in 2005, there have been many performers who wore the mantles of Gaudio, Tommy DeVito and Nick Massi, as well as many Frankie Vallis. Every Valli should, in theory, be the same, but that’s not the case. Every Valli seems to make the man, the voice and the songs his own, but not in a way that you’d ever forget Valli.

That’s the case for Aaron De Jesus, a veteran Broadway musical performer (he’s toured or performed in the monster hit “Wicked,” in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” and in the more traditional “Guys and Dolls”), who says that while he’s done Valli for a while now, it wasn’t always easy. “The hardest thing is the falsetto,” he said. “It’s what makes the lines and the song, but it’s not all of it. I’m a natural tenor, so that was difficult for me at first. You tend to concentrate on that at first.

“I’m familiar now, I’ve been doing this [in the Las Vegas production and on tour] for some time now,” he said. “And you know what’s interesting? It never, ever gets old. What’s surprising is how much depth there is to this show. It’s not just a musical, it’s a piece of theater, a play. It has more than its share of dark moments, and everybody in the group gets their say. Every time out, you find stuff, you dive in.

“In this show, you get to use your acting skills, you have to. Because these guys, those four guys, they were something. Frankie Valli came by several times, at different times. He really cares about the show, he offered tips, he was very accessible.”

Every Valli is different, of course, even Valli himself. What De Jesus brings to the part is a stubborn humanity, a self-awareness, a decency and a keen appreciation of friendship and family, even when Frankie fails, often, as a father and a husband. He sings clearly and with great honest emotion, and doesn’t use the high notes as a kind of trick.

What’s interesting about the show, and what makes “Jersey Boys” still seem raw and real, is the milieu. These are real Jersey boys, from the mean streets, the neighborhoods, those once dominated by the godfathers, where young boys growing up wanted to be cops or firemen, but often ended up in jail for breaking and entering or petty theft. They listened to street-corner groups and doo-wop music.

The Four Seasons started out as the Lovers, and ran through names by the score until Gaudio showed up to give them a sound, and songs perfect for the high-pitched, emotionally rich voice of Valli.

This is a show about fame and its ill and great effects, about life on the road, about things that happen, love and marriage and the death of a child. Even as you swim in the songs — love those songs — you still get moved by the life on stage. You laugh, often, sigh a little and just sort of surrender.

It should be noted that Clint Eastwood (of all people) made a pretty original movie out of this material. And the beat does go on, Valli is still touring with a new set of Four Seasons. Hang on, hang on, to what you’ve got, indeed.

Gary Tischler •

The current struggles of the 2016 presidential campaigns — even now, as they steamroll toward the summer conventions unresolved as to who the Democratic and Republican nominees are likely to be — have taken on an apocalyptic tone, as if Trumping and trampling the outsider battles and insider strategies.

Go see “All the Way,” the Broadway hit about Lyndon Baines Johnson and his epic struggle to pass a landmark civil rights bill and get re-elected in 1964 — at Arena Stage through May 8 — and you’ll see that, by comparison, maybe the current contretemps, much of it centered around the candidacy of Donald Trump, aren’t so huge, let alone historic, after all.

And when it comes to vulgarity, the Donald is doing child’s play, or at least middle-school work (something often noted by present-day observers), when compared to the titanic outbursts and style of the Texan LBJ. His references to squeezing the privates of rivals and opponents who stand in his way are numerous and witheringly pungent.

Jack Willis originated the part of LBJ at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and Brian Cranston starred in the role on Broadway to much acclaim, but it’s Willis who embodies Johnson, who’s become president after the assassination of John F. Kennedy the year before. Willis doesn’t exactly try to imitate the mannerisms or even the speaking style of LBJ; he does something better: he makes him outsized, not so much physically, but by his sheer, sweaty, loud, hyperventilating and tenacious presence. This LBJ can exhaust the audience, almost as much as he wears down his rivals and friends alike.

Playwright Robert Schenkkan has written and made an epic. It’s nearly three hours long and peopled with just about every notable political and Washington figure alive at the time. It’s the White House that makes LBJ the king of Washington. All the comings and goings — except for those of Martin Luther King Jr., who’s trying to push LBJ while trying to tamp down the more impatient urgings of his close advisors and followers — funnel to and from the White House, interwoven with telephone calls and television clips.

Today’s politicians and presidential wannabes might complain that LBJ was exactly the kind of Washington insider who controlled the game and policy of the times, and it’s true. Historically and on this stage, LBJ is a wheeler-dealer, an arm-twister who made people yelp, a crude, super-smart and physically electric leader. Willis’s Johnson insults his wife, browbeats his vice-president-in-waiting Hubert Humphrey, handles the dangerous and Machiavellian J. Edgar Hoover, manipulates the Southern senators and tries to wrangle the civil rights bill through Congress like a rodeo rider, never giving up, often hanging on for dear life. He compromises, he digs up arcane senate and committee rules, he controls the process. He’s a master psychologist who could use a shrink himself.

The problem with a lengthy play like this is that there’s an amazing amount of historical stuff going on here, and Schenkkan tries to get it all in. That includes the stirrings of the mess and muck of Vietnam, the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi, the attempted blackmail by Hoover of just about everybody — but especially King, who’s won the Nobel Peace Prize and is vulnerable in his personal life. We see the beginnings of the South, once securely Democratic, heading towards the GOP.

The second problem is that this could very well be a one-man show (which has been done before) because of the sheer bluster and size, the humanity of Johnson. Nobody quite manages to break through to take over the stage, except Bowman Wright as King when he is arguing with his own group, including his wife, the passionate Stokely Carmichael and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy. This is a reserved, thoughtful, even quiet King, not the famed orator and impassioned leader.

Everyone else is somewhat in the shadows, and perhaps sometimes unfairly portrayed, as is the case for Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic Party’s “Happy Warrior” from Minnesota who, as played by Richard Clodfelter, seems hardly the party’s most optimistic battler for justice as LBJ dangles the vice presidency before him.

Willis gives us a full and rich LBJ, often unpleasant, often, a little like Nixon, insecure and paranoid, but a man who meant to change the nation by sheer force of will, with the help of a memory that knew where the bodies where buried. His belief in bringing justice to African Americans and fairness to the poor came from his own mean beginnings as a Texas schoolteacher, and he embraced this belief with strong arms and tight knuckles. He may have lacked elegance, but he had more than enough heart and vision.

Juliana Zovak •

FilmFest DC, the largest international film festival in the District, is back, running from April 14 through April 24.

The festival first came to the district in 1987. This year it celebrates its 30th anniversary. Opening night is tonight, April 14, at AMC Mazza Gallerie, with a showing of “The Dressmaker,” an Australian movie starring Kate Winslet that was nominated for five Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts awards.

Over 11 days, the festival will screen 75 movies, including foreign films, dramas, comedies and international shorts. Cine Cubano is showing three different Cuban films that feature life in contemporary Cuba.

In addition to the film screenings, the festival will host panels, workshops and Q&As with people in the business, from actors to directors to producers.

Landmark’s E Street Cinema and AMC Mazza Gallerie are the primary venues. Other events will take place at the Embassy of France and the National Gallery of Art.

A full schedule of events can be found here.

Gary Tischler •

The time is approaching. The Gods will awaken, rise and fall. Battles will be fought. There will be fire and dragons and Rhine maidens, heroes, giants and dwarves, magic rings and spears and swords, forbidden love, chaos and destruction, nature itself threatened.

Sorry, it’s not the upcoming Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

It’s the Ring Cycle, Richard Wagner’s epic total-theater quartet of operas. This is Washington National Opera’s first complete “Ring” production, directed by Artistic Director Francesca Zambello and rooted in her 2011 production in San Francisco.

There will be three sets of cycles of the work Zambello calls “the pinnacle of opera,” beginning with the first opera in the first cycle, a performance of “The Rhinegold” on Saturday, April 30. “The Valkyrie” follows on May 2, “Siegfried” on May 4 and “Twilight of the Gods” on May 6. The three cycles will be presented through May 22.

“It’s based on the San Francisco production, but, remember, a lot of time has passed since then, and I think the entire work is pertinent to our own lives. And I also think it resonates in the popular culture,” Zambello said. “We’re in the age of ‘Lord of the Rings,’ ‘Star Wars’ and fantasy and superhero culture with male and female heroes. ‘The Ring’ is a heroic epic, it’s full of gods and demigods, but also about man and his relationship with nature, and the destruction of the environment, all of which echoes today. I think the themes can be found in contemporary culture, politics and policies, in our society and the things that concern and haunt us today.”

While the Ring has often been controversial to some people in terms of its Teutonic mythologies and themes, Wagner was trying to achieve universal themes with the richly ambitious music, the dramatic diversity of the score and the concept of theater itself.

“He was beyond 19th-century romantic opera and music, he was after something revolutionary,” explained Zambello.

Wagner always dreamed of a kind of “total theater,” in which music, dance, librettos, scores, drama, setting and story blended into a gigantic whole. You can stage each opera separately, but the totality is beyond category, in fact daunting as a complete work. With the Ring, Wagner came as close as any artist to achieving that goal.

Zambello not only believes in the contemporary quality of the Ring, but has set the operas in stage environments that seem contemporary, modern, industrial, sharp and edgy, even apocalyptical and post-apocalyptical; this is a Ring for the 21st century. She sees the Ring as a way of staging an American epic: “The timeless themes of the Ring — the destruction of nature, the quest for power, the plight of powerless — are beyond the Nordic realms of long ago. They’re also in America’s own stories, myths, visions and iconographic images in the post-9/11 world.”

The enterprise has generated a number of astonishing pieces of data. Each cycle consists of 17 hours, including intermissions. There are 2,650 title slides. Indicative of its industrial strength, the production uses 13,000 feet of chain, 130 overhead chain motors, 950 pounds of propane, 2 elevators and 500 lighting instruments, plus 920 liters of liquid nitrogen.

The human total: 370 people on stage, backstage and in the pit, with 94 orchestra members, 74 choristers, 63 crew members, 56 supernumeraries, 39 principal singers, 33 members of the production staff, 210 members of music staff and one conductor (that would be NSO conductor Philippe Auguin).

There will have been 230 rehearsals of about three hours each leading up to the opening.

We had the opportunity to drop by the Opera House on a weekday afternoon recently for a rehearsal of “The Valkyrie,” the second of the four operas, in which Wotan, the king of the Gods, is forced to tragically confront a challenging son, Siegmund, who falls in love with Sieglinde, who happens to be his twin sister (which spells trouble), as well the fabled female warrior and daughter of Wotan, Brünnhilde.

Two things become clear during the course of the rehearsal. We are in a tempest on stage, what with a ring of fire, the warrior Valkyries parachuting from the skies and Wotan and Brünnhilde in a tragic battle on the limits of loyalty and love. It’s also clear that, like the one-of-a-kind “Tristan and Isolde,” the world of the Ring is expansive, all embracing, all-out and both fulfilling and exhaustive. For those visiting that world, it might be wise to write a will: you never know what could happen on such a journey.