Performance

Gary Tischler • April 27, 2016

Whatever your level of digital competency, I’m sure you’ve stopped and wondered exactly what kind of superhighway we’re collectively traveling on, and where the latest app is taking us on the never-ending treadmill known as the internet.

How private is our private life? Who’s communicating with us in the disembodied replies to our queries? Who’s watching and recording our every peck on a keyboard, click on a mouse, touch on a screen?

“The Nether,” a remarkable play by Jennifer Haley — and an amazing piece of stagecraft that’s at once gripping, really smart, imaginative, dramatically disturbing, even poetic and, yes, more than a little creepy — tackles just about any question you might have about our rapidly changing technological capacities, which allow us to confront and evade reality at an alarmingly accelerating rate.

Directed by Shana Cooper with a gifted cast headed by Washington veteran Edward Gero, “The Nether” is getting a dazzling production at Woolly Mammoth through May 1. The play can work as a detective thriller about unraveling identity, asking what is a crime in our brave new world, or as a dystopian sci-fi story. It could even be mistaken for an extended and lavishly decorated episode of Special Victims Unit, the long-running NBC cop show that specializes in sex crimes.

The play imagines a world — it could be decades away, or a month — in which the internet, where people already spend an inordinate amount of their professional, personal, imaginative and breathing time — has expanded to become the Nether, a digital space where virtual reality is as common as waking up and going to sleep.

In this world, a man named Sims is under investigation by Nether police for creating a difficult-to-hack sub-world called the Hideaway — subscription-only, apparently — where customers can spend time in a detailed recreation of a Victorian environment, geared toward an aesthetic of finely honed visual and intellectual beauty. This historical-artistic setting is a way of glossing over its real purpose: to enable users to spend time with, have sex with and do horrific violence to an avatar of a little girl. It is, in other words, as one observer commented, a daydream for pedophiles.

That notion is always there, underlying (and sometimes undermining) the plot, debates and twists and turns of the play. Sims, the creator and virtual ringmaster of the Hideaway, played with insistent evasiveness by Gero, is being interrogated by a police officer, bluntly portrayed by Gabriela Fernandez-Coffey. He does intellectual battle with his tormentor, rationalizing, using the privacy defense, above all trying to evade responsibility.

Sims — also known as Poppa in the Hideaway — puts forward an old argument: wouldn’t it be better for people to be allowed to commit virtual or fantasy crimes in the Hideaway than act out in the real world?

In the Hideaway, visitors adopt other identities. The star object of desire — for Poppa, for a youngish swain, for customers — is Iris, a virtual little girl who is at once precocious, intelligent, smart, funny and appealing, deftly played by 18-year-old Maya Brettell.

It should be noted that the entire enterprise seems virtual. The more odious implications of the Hideaway are handled with discretion and imagination. There are no graphic depictions of sexuality or violence. What’s haunting is the talk about the future of the virtual world and the internet and how we live in it, outside of it or even deeply lost in it — as one character appears to be, to the point of becoming a permanent resident or “shadow.” It’s talk, sharply written and argued, that’s already being bantered around coffee tables and chat rooms, sometimes erupting from dreams.

One of the ideas embedded in the play is that the world has denuded itself of reality. The steadily eroding environment, the disappearing plants and animals, the machines that do everything that brains and muscles should do, have made it difficult — in this world — to keep it real. This has created a niche for places like the Nether, places where anything that can be imagined, dreamed or desired can be fulfilled, made real or achieved.

“The Nether” — which in its staging seems feverishly detailed — may be in the end neither here nor there, but some of it (perhaps most if it) is coming up, straight ahead.

Click.

Gary Tischler •

Is there life after being a major star in the world of ballet?

If you’re Damian Woetzel, a principal dancer at the New York City Ballet from 1989 until his retirement from the stage in 2008, the answer is yes — and then some. Woetzel was a definite star. Choreographers like Jerome Robbins, Eliot Feld, Twyla Tharp, Susan Stroman and Christopher Wheeldon all created works for him.

“I think for dancers it’s never very easy to make that decision and know when to make it,” Woertzel said in an interview.  “But I think if along the way, you’ve already made some decisions and observations about the world of dance and performing arts,  and done some things that take you outside performance, but are creative nonetheless, you get a pretty good idea of what to do next.”

Next for Woetzel became quite a diverse and big thing: he’s already choreographed several ballets for NYCB, has performed in films and television, got a M.P.A. from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, was honored with the inaugural Gene Kelly Legacy Award on the anniversary of the great American popular dancer and movie star’s birth, taught a class at Harvard Law on the performing arts and law. In 2009, he was named to the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, where he worked to create the Turnaround Arts Program, which brings arts education to a number of the nation’s challenged school districts. He collaborated with Yo-Yo Ma to create ArtStrike, which has become a format for artists to engage in public service.

He is currently (since 2007) the director and producer of dance and music performance and artistic director at the Vail International Dance Festival and has produced portions of the Kennedy Center Honors, an arts salute to Stephen Hawking and the first performance of the White House Dance Series. 

He is also a very visible director of the Aspen Institute’s Arts program, focusing on the arts and education, social justice, economics and diplomacy.

There’s a theme to this thick resume — several of them, in fact — involving collaboration and cooperation across disciplines (not only arts disciplines) and genres, with a deep focus on education. It’s become clear that the Kennedy Center and other institutions are taking this approach to heart, seeking out new audiences and new forms of arts.

“Much of what I’ve done is to work with other artists, active or retired, to increase arts education, to get artists who come from different disciplines and genres to work together and create new works that will appeal to broader audiences,” he said. “There’s no such thing as one kind of music, one kind of dance, one kind of theater.”

One of the outcrops of this approach is “Demo,” a series of performance arts events produced and choreographed by Woetzel that brings together diverse artists working together on a theme. The first occurred last fall with “Demo: Time” and featured the participation of poet and scholar Elizabeth Alexander, soprano Jacqueline Bolier, cutting edge flutist Claire Chase, dancer Robert Fairchild, violinist and composer Colin Jacobsen, dancer and actress Carmen de Lavellade, comic actor Bill Irwin, composer and singer Gabriel Kahane and dancer Tiler Peck, who was the star of the Kennedy Center production of “Little Dancer.”

The second installment, titled “Demo: Place,” to be performed at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater Friday and Saturday, practically defines the word eclectic and the idea of collaboration as a fusion of inspiration and flight. The headliners are Memphis jookin’ dance pioneers Lil Buck and Ron “Prime Tyme” Myles.

“Lil Buck is an eclectic, adventuresome, really gifted artist,” Woetzel said. “And the idea here is a kind of tour, a cultural time and travel machine.” “Jookin,” he writes in the program notes, “is a dance that is a developing style born on the streets of Memphis only a few decades ago. The heart of the style is growth through improvisation and cross pollinating. It’s about building a new language, a common language that other artists can build on. . . . Art is always specific but it has a universal resonance, it comes from one place or another, but it can bind us together in the world.”

That spirit is evident not only with the presence of Lil Buck and Myles, but such performers as musician Sandeep Das, Johnny Gandelsman on violin, the great and high-spirited star of Gaita, Christina Pato from Galicia, Wu Tong on the sheng, David Teie on cello and singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Kate Davis.

Gary Tischler • April 22, 2016

Knowledgeable political sages and strategists keep trying to tell you that a developer and reality-show host who lives in a penthouse in New York City somehow had his fingers on the heartbeat of working class folks in America, especially the kind that lived in towns in the Midwest, Southwest, central California and everywhere else where the factory closed, the dime store is charging a dollar and the honky-tonk bar and the white wood church stare at each other from across the street.

Don’t you believe it. If you want to know who had his fingers, and an aching heart on the heartbeat of regular folks, listen to some of the songs of Merle Haggard, the poet of hard times, too many beer bottles in the garbage bag, hopes beat on by betrayal, hard-won mistakes and love lost and regained to last and endure.

Haggard — whose face often resembled his name in later years — died at the age of 79, and the whole world of country music that could remember back more than past the birth of “American Idol” mourned and felt the loss: from Dolly Parton to Travis Tritt and any old singer who can still put a hitch and twang in his voice and make it sound like forget-me-not cards from a high school sweetheart, or the train fading over the horizon.

Haggard hard a hard-knock life and sang like a writer. His songs weren’t much full of hard-to-decipher metaphors, or veiled, hidden meanings. He was, after all, inspired to become a songwriter and singer when hearing Johnny Cash as a prisoner in a prison. He was a scion of all the families that moved out west during the Depression, the self-proclaimed Oakies, leaving lost farms and jobs behind in the dust bowl that was then Oklahoma. They settled in central California, principally Bakersfield, the flattest area in California, right between the mountains and greenery of Northern California and the goofy Hollywood skyscapes of L.A.

Haggard got famous for a time for maybe the wrong reason. He penned a song that seemed to express the silent majority of the days in the 1960s who scowled at hippies, druggies and liberals. It was called “Okie from Muskogee,” a midsized town in Oklahoma, and derided such things as burning draft cards and smoking weed, as in “we don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee,” which, for Haggard, apparently was a little white lie, given that he admitted to smoking the very same stuff before or after concerts.

He was a nitty-gritty, authentic country singer who could play and write, and his music always sounded like the real stuff in real life. He was up there and around Willie Nelson, who was famous for smoking marijuana and also looked as if he left half a beard on, and another type of country man, Buck Owens, who wore glittery jackets and had a wavy hairdo and a voice that oozed twang (not to mention a national television show).

As a writer and singer, Haggard was right up there with Hank Williams, minus the flashy, rock-star personality, the charisma and the early death. Look at pictures of his young-man version and you could see how he could get in trouble with women. He had that pitch-black-hair handsome stuff going for him like Cash and Elvis, but he was also, up close and personal, a lot more raggedly real.

His songs were about marriage and how hard it was, money and how not having enough put a worry and a scowl on your face, survival, the thing with booze and what too much of it did to you and how it made a train wreck of families.

In his love songs — which were often frisky as well as sorrowful — he echoed George Jones in his rueful delivery and regret-filled lyrics.

You don’t have to quote Merle. You can find all that you need to know in his songs, just the titles alone, from the great ones: “Will We Make it Through December,” “If We’re Not Back in Love by Monday,” “I’m going to Break Every Heart That I Can.” The titles are like a book of life, a life he lived: “I’m Always on the Mountain When I Fall,” “A Drunk Can’t Be a Man,” “A Working Man Can’t Get Nowhere Today,” “After I Sing All My Songs,” “Ain’t Your Memory Got No Pride At All,” “Are the Good Times Really Over,” “Beer Can Hill,” “Better Off When I Was Hungry,” “Bottle Let Me Down,” “Amber Waves,” “Cocaine Blues,” “Daddy Won’t Be Home Again For Christmas,” “Don’t Seem Like We’ve Been Together All Our Lives,” “From Now On, My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers,” “For the Good Times,” “Fightin’ Side of Me,” “Ham Boogie,” “I’ll Leave the Bottle on the Bar,” “From Graceland to the Promised Land.”

The titles — hundreds of them — read like a book of plainspoken notes and poetry from a guy writing things down at the end of the bar, waiting to catch the bus to work or the train out of town, missing what he’s missing, savoring what he got, pride in country and country music, regret at the mess we make of things.

Haggard, if you listen to him, has a familiar hitch, distinctive as a particular memory that comes rushing at you out of nowhere, in his voice. It’s a little tremulous something, a kind of lingering over a note without stretching it to the breaking point. Loretta Lynn does it in her new (yes, new) album “Full Circle,” and there are versions of it in most of the great country singers.

The songs sounded good on the radio, but they look and sound good on YouTube, too, like a revelation sitting next to you for inspection and comfort.

Gary Tischler • April 20, 2016

Filmfest DC, the Washington, DC International Film Festival, may not be as big as it once was, but it’s still pretty big — still capable of generating various kinds of film buzz, still a rich array of special programs and, most important, still full of opportunities to see unusual films from far, far away that you otherwise might not.

Headed by Tony Gittens, founder and director, and Shirin Ghareeb, deputy director, Filmfest is marking its 30th anniversary this year. It opened April 14 with two near-legendary performers — Kate Winslet and Judy Davis — starring in Australian director Jocelyn Moorhouse’s witty drama-comedy “The Dressmaker,” about a once despised resident of a small Aussie town coming home to care for her mother.

The festival closes April 24 at AMC Mazza Gallerie with Philippe Falardeau’s “My Internship in Canada,” a satirical sendup of politics, after which there will be a last-night party.

Along the way, there’s a journey of 75 films from 45 countries over 11 days, with quite a few original and unusual choices remaining. As always, there are categories, prizes, special events and series. This year’s special categories include The Lighter Side, with comedies from all over, including France’s “21 Nights With Pattie”; Denmark’s “Men and Chicken”; another film from Canada, “No Men Beyond This Point”; “How to Tell You’re a Douchebag,” an edgy American entry; and the optimistically titled (all things considered) “Sweet Smell of Spring” from Tunisia.

There’s a series of noir, spy, crime and thriller moves called Trust No One, including “The People vs. Fritz Bauer” from Germany, about the man who prosecuted Adolf Eichmann; “The Last King” from Norway; “A Patch of Fog” from the U.K.; and “600 Miles” from the U.S.

Fittingly, there’s a triad of films called Cine Cuban or Films on Cuba, a Justice Matters series sponsored by the D.C.-based CrossCurrents Foundation. There is a series of films on music, something of a tradition with the festival, called Rhythms On and Off the Screen. And there are awards: the Circle Award, the Filmfest DC Audience Award and the Signis Award.

Arch Campbell, the city’s longest-running writer, critic and commentator on film, heads “An Evening with Arch Campbell and Friends,” April 21 at Landmark’s E Street Cinema, with fellow critics Jane Horwitz of the Washington Post, Travis Hopson of WETA Around Town and Jason Fraley of WTOP Radio.

Here are some highlights of the remainder of the festival, many of them speaking to the collaborative power of contemporary filmmakers.

“21 Nights With Pattie” is a French film, directed by Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu, about a woman who travels to her hometown for her mother’s funeral. Unfortunately, the corpse is missing (April 22, AMC Mazza Gallerie).

“3000 Nights,” which has the participation of film makers from France, Palestine, Qatar, Jordan, the UAE and Lebanon, is a fictional film by documentarian Mai Masri on the subject of the condition of Palestinian women in Israeli prisons (April 21, Landmark’s E Street Cinema, and April 23, AMC Mazza Gallerie).

“The Brand New Testament,” from France, Belgium and Luxembourg, posits the question: “What if God were one of us?” (April 21 and 22, AMC Mazza Gallerie).

“Dough,” directed by John Goldschmidt, is a U.K. entry with character actor and star Jonathan Pryce as a Grinchy Jewish baker trying to keep his family business together (April 20, AMC Mazza Gallerie).

“The Last King” is a Norwegian movie set in medieval times (1204) about men trying to keep the heir to the throne safe from powerful bishops (April 21 and 22, Landmark’s E Street Cinema).

“Nina” is a movie biography about the highly dramatic, emotional and brilliant American vocalist Nina Simone (April 20, Landmark’s E Street Cinema).

“Notfilm/Film” is a U.S./U.K. film about the making of “Film,” the silent movie clown Buster Keaton’s film based on a screenplay by the famously elliptical playwright Samuel Beckett (April 24, National Gallery of Art).

“Belgian Rhapsody” is a musical from — you guessed it — Belgium about rival jazz bands (April 23, Landmark’s E Street Cinema).

For cinemaniacs, there’s “Rebel Citizen,” a documentary about famed cinematographer Haskell Wexler directed by Pamela Yates (April 22 and 23, Landmark’s E Street Cinema).

The complete schedule, summaries and ticket information are available here.
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Gary Tischler • April 18, 2016

A number of years ago, I saw a play in which the author declared in the program that what we were about to see was not really a play, but a poem.

He was right. It was not a play, but a poem, which — while affecting — didn’t work as a piece of theater.

Something similar is at work at Theater J in the admirable, affecting and sometimes powerful production of “Falling Out of Time” by celebrated Israeli writer David Grossman, famous both for short stories and works of nonfiction. An exploration of human grief, “Falling Out of Time” feels and looks and is played and performed like a ritual. At times recalling the chorus in Greek tragedies, it could be a dramatic or cathartic church service, a memory of a dream or even a long poem. It resembles a recessional and processional with speaking parts.

I don’t mean to suggest that the production isn’t moving; it almost always is, once we get the hang of the people involved and what they are attempting to do. The people and their plight are the saving graces of “Falling out of Time,” because grief is the burden of being human. We will all suffer losses, along with the prospect of our own disappearance from time.

“Falling Out of Time” concerns itself with the acutely painful and terrible loss of children, as suffered by those left behind. It’s a personal issue for Grossman: his son, an Israeli soldier, was killed in the Lebanon War at a young age, and his loss is, if not the centerpiece, the jumping-off point for the work.

“I want to go there,” says the character identified as the man to his wife, meaning (as we learn through the course of this no-intermission work) he wants to fall out of time to be in proximity to his son — not dead, but not living in this time either. It’s not the simple desire to see the lost loved one, but the deeper need to have contact with the world in which he exists, to find meaning and relief from the fact of death, by entering its world.

There are others here — all of whom have suffered a similar loss, the death of a child, a death from an illness, an accident, a drowning, all of them sons and daughters now gone, the space they occupied in the lives of fathers and mothers hugely empty and full of unassuaged pain. There is a centaur, his body rooted below the surface, a chronicler of life in a village and his wife, a cobbler and his wife, a teacher, a count, a midwife.

As the man embarks on his journey, explaining the need to go, the others, one by one, tell their stories. And one by one they embark on the same journey, conducted by walking up the stairs and across a lane midway through the audience, down to the stage and back and around again. One by one, they “fall out of time” and join what sometimes resembles that dance of death from Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal.” They are joined together, holding hands, sometimes apart, until they come to the place, the “there” of there, to commune with what is left of their children in the other place and time, imitating death.

Mind you, you could get very involved in all this, and with the litany of sorrows and stories expressed by people onstage. They’re very individualized in terms of how they look, their clothes, their manner of moving, their voices, so that we feel for them. But they are not in the end either characters or people; they are, well, walking, touching, echoing poems of their own sufferings.

Because of this, the play is not really theater, it is literature. That’s very difficult for actors to play. There are some very fine actors doing their best with what they have, including Edward Christian as the ranting, raving centaur, the imposing John Lescault as the Duke, Michael Russotto as the ragged chronicler and the always impressive Nanna Ingvarsson as the chronicler’s wife, with Erika Rose giving the wife of the grieving man a down-to-earth freshness that the play badly needs.

Adapted and directed by Derek Goldman, “Falling into Time” is beautifully written, and it has the same power that some poems do, which is to make certain moments unforgettable. But it needs to be a play to truly complete the circle that it’s created.

Gary Tischler •

We are coming up on April, and April is the month of William Shakespeare — who was born on an April day in 1564 and died on an April day 52 years later, 400 years ago. (We know he died on April 23, which may or may not have been his birthday.)

Inevitably, we will talk about words, words, words. And, inevitably, we will talk about “The Tragedy of Hamlet,” Shakespeare’s most famous play, a play voluminously full of words.

Yet, right now, we have a “Hamlet” without words, and it’s not at Synetic Theater. It is instead the “Hamlet” of choreographer and Ballet Austin Artistic Director Stephen Mills. This “Hamlet” is an intense, under-two-hours ballet fueled by the driving, insistent music of Philip Glass and performed in grand, classic and very physical and emotional style by the Washington Ballet at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater. It runs through April 3.

Watching the production — beautifully and starkly danced in a modernistic set — is to get to the heart of the story, without necessarily getting the full effect of the layered, dense meaning within the play. Stripped of words, danced by a high-energy cast and jet-fueled by the music of Glass, the play becomes something of a staged action movie.

Dressed up in high contrast — peopled by not just one ghost, but apparitions that dance in visually effective unison with Hamlet — Mills’s version sets key moments in “Hamlet”: the celebration of the new king and queen, the play-within-a-play, an achingly beautiful duet by Hamlet and Ophelia, the confrontation between Gertrude and Hamlet, the killing of Polonius, the descent into madness, death and funeral of Ophelia and the climactic duels and deaths of, well, just about everyone.

This is dance as effective, affecting storytelling, highlighted by color: Hamlet is in red and most everyone else is in black and grey. In ensembles and solos, the dancers manage to convey the tensions — both toxic and intoxicating — of the court. It’s a speeded-up process that starts out with the sheen of outward beauty, but soon exposes the underlying struggle between guilt and anger, love and hate. The tools are not words, but muscle and bone, pointe and flight, wings and knuckles and leaps.

In this “Hamlet,” there is a certain amount of clarity about what’s what: very little of the what-to-do-what-to-do? grappling by Hamlet finds its way into the language of movement; everything is directed toward a resolution that builds and builds with a kind of inevitability. The music by Glass is nervous, string-filled, pushy, almost whip-like in its effect.

Nothing illustrates the power of this approach more than the role of Ophelia, danced in this production by the remarkable newcomer Venus Villa. Slight of build, she seems on the verge often of breaking into two. She’s vulnerable but also crazy-strong, well matched with Brooklyn Mack’s high-flying Hamlet. Her growing madness and her loss is devastating, in ways that few theatrical or cinematic versions have approached.

You lose some things in “Hamlet” as a dance, but the way that Mills recasts “Hamlet” as pure story is breathtaking in its own way. It’s remarkable how much can be said without words and how much can be done when words are whittled away cleanly in the play’s climax. You end up watching carefully, trying not to miss when Claudius puts poison in the chalice and when Gertrude drinks the wine, even as Hamlet and Laertes make the whole world a duel.

It reminded me of the time, a long time ago, when I was convinced to don tights and become an extra (Osric 2) in a local production of Tom Stoppard’s frantic “15-Minute Hamlet,” and how quickly the time passed. A three-hour play compressed itself into bodies and stories. The late British film director Lindsay Anderson once staged a version of the play that began with all the dead bodies on the stage and commenced the story from that point.

After a while, the ballet takes on a curious aspect: it is a ghost of itself, a skeleton of every “Hamlet” you’ve ever seen on stage or screen. All the Hamlets seem to flicker in the back of your head, filling in what you’re watching, captivated.

Gary Tischler •

“American Idiot,” the Green Day/Billie Joe Armstrong rock musical about a kinetic, confused and lost group of post-9/11 suburban small-town youths has already been extended through April 16 at the Keegan Theatre in Dupont. As semi-contemporary musicals go, it’s a current Washington must-see. It could probably run longer.

We’re talking not so much about my generation, but someone’s generation. And the show echoes forward and backward to them all, with rippling guitar riffs, painful ballads and an energy you won’t find on too many stages.

“American Idiot” actually was birthed and perhaps spawned in 2004. It became a super-album by the group Green Day and Armstrong, its charismatic leader, he of the zombie-like heavy eyeliner and lean, mean and boyish stage persona. With punkish as well as Who-ish “Tommy”-like roots, it became a surprise 2009 Broadway show and hit (although minus Green Day and Armstrong).

What’s affecting about the production at the Keegan — directed by founders Mark and Susan Marie Rhea — is the energy, the way it seems like a prolonged, authentic outburst of feeling and confusion, and the way it pays respect to the music. For artists sort of bagged in the punk-garage milieu, the music is surprisingly varied, mixing jump-off-the-stage guitar-god numbers with those plaintive ballads. A uniformly terrific cast aids and abets the proceedings with a full investment of physicality and emotion; the mix seems painfully wrought by tears, lighter fluid and dynamite sticks.

It seems to me, too, to be a generational musical from a period during which the sureties of youth were punked. There was no sure-thing after graduation, little time for adventure and a bag full of doubts about the end of the rainbow for many young people of the time, who are perhaps the same group that’s come to angry maturity now.

In “American Idiot,” they’re already angry. “Welcome to a new kind of tension/all across the nation,” the cast sings in the title song … don’t want to be an American Idiot/one nation controlled by the media.” It’s a far different notion than in the 1960s, when they were singing in the Bay Area “all across the nation/there’s a new vibration … people in motion.”

These kids, headed more or less by the “Jesus of Suburbia,” are eager to get out of suburbia into the open-armed “city,” only to find chaos, desire and nothing much to embrace. There’s Johnny, feverishly played, often like a zombie-clown, by Harrison Smith, in Billie Joe Armstrong apparition form; Heather, by Holly Janiga; the soaring-voiced Eben Logan as Whatshername, Johnny’s love, forever but not quite; and Christian Montgomery as the creepy-appealing St. Jimmy, the drug dealer who brings a box of bliss and sorrow and needles.

The music is terrific. Songs like “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” “Favorite Son,” “Give Me Novocaine,” “She’s a Rebel,” “Extraordinary Girl” and “Know Your Enemy” define the times and the young people.

You don’t have to a member of any particular generation to get this. The music and the musical echo like low-lying roadside bombs, or broken limbs and broken hearts. It reminded me of “Hair,” one of the first generational rock musicals, which Keegan, incidentally, did proud with an expansive production some years back. It appears from one visit that everyone has poured their hearts into this production; it sways and rocks and sometimes cracks in the smallish space here. And the audience, on this visit, rocked back.

If Baby Boomers can respond to this and see some other one of their own selves in it, then “American Idiot” may be more than just grounded in its own time and place. Maybe soon or sometime later we’ll have a definitive Millennial musical. In the meantime, we’ve got this production of “American Idiot.” Go see it. You’d be an idiot not to.

Gary Tischler •

Bruce Levingston — pianist, composer, founder and artistic director of the music foundation Premiere Commission — looks in his photographs like the essence of the concert pianist. He has the dramatic and handsome look of the artist as public figure: sensitive, serious, intellectual.

He’s been called one of “today’s most adventurous musicians” by the New York Times and “a poetic pianist with a gift for inventive and glamorous programming” by the New Yorker. The Times listed his album “Heavy Sleep” as one of the Best Classical Recordings of 2015.

But he’s also a man who understands and believes in the transformative power of music. And to that end this native of Mississippi has confronted issues surrounding the intersections of art, race and politics, premiering new compositions that echo those issues in America.

Levingston has been busy this week, with the premiere of new work at Carnegie Hall tonight (April 4) and, on Wednesday (April 6), an appearance at Georgetown University with President John DeGioia, premiering Nolan Gasser’s “An American Citizen.”

“The Carniegie Hall event features the remarkable bass-baritone Justin Hopkins performing Gasser’s ‘Repast,’ which honors the Civil Rights era leader Booker Wright,” Levingston said in a phone interview. “The Georgetown premiere is also by Gasser. It’s about a former slave, John Wesley Washington, and the portrait that was done of him by Southern artist Marie Hull.”

“Of course, my upbringing figured strongly in all this,” Levingston said. “Those issues evolve, but they’re also a part of who everyone is. These are strong parts of the lives of Southerners. There’s a reason that so many artists come from there — writers, musicians, composers, artists.”

Levingston also wrote a book about Hull, “Bright Fields: The Mastery of Marie Hull.” Along with performing “An American Citizen,” he will join in a discussion about the painting and its subject, which inspired the piece. It’s all part of a program called “Creating ‘An American Citizen,’” at 5 p.m. in Gaston Hall.

“I feel there’s a strong connection between visual art and music,” Levingston said. “Notes are like words, they contain emotions, they contain visual elements and imagery. We’ve had records of all these instances of movements and individuals — Picasso, Debussy and Matisse — the art inspiring music, the music inspiring art.”

“I think composers, and musicians are storytellers as well, and so are visual artists,” he said.

Gary Tischler •

Septime Webre — casual, blue jeans, pullover and checkered shirt and hair flying — was in his element. He was saying goodbye, sort of, to his last 17 years as artistic director of the Washington Ballet, but also hello “to my next 17 years, by which time I’ll be 70.”

Webre was his own star as the first spring headliner in Georgetown Media Group’s Cultural Leadership Breakfast Series, now at the Cappella hotel. An almost preternatural storyteller, he covered his progress through his years at the Washington Ballet, nurtured for many years by founder Mary Day, and the last days of his tenure (he steps down at the end of June).

“This sort of feels like a victory tour, like the baseball players do,” he said. “It’s so good to see so many supporters here, including my former chairman of our board Kay Kendall and others, and it’s wonderful to talk about the company. I’m really, really proud of what we’ve done here in this city, which, when I got here, didn’t have what you could call a diverse arts community. The city was still a little quiet then, and truth to tell, the food wasn’t much either.”

What he encountered was a company that did traditional programming, notably the yearly “Nutcracker” (which Webre expanded, and made expansive to the point that it included hundreds of young dancers). “I think, initially, we were thinking about new choreographers, new dancers, a new group of more diverse people, young dancers like Brooklyn Mack who grew into their persona and into being able to use all their gifts.”

“I loved Mary Day, she was the founder, she was our visionary person,” he said. “She was elegant in everything she did, she was something else.”

Webre arrived from Cuba with his family, the seventh son in a pretty creative bunch. “On a beach in the Bahamas, two of my brothers and I created an entire Versailles complex on the beach with sand.”

He recounted the phases in his time leading and choreographing for the company. “You start out with Balanchine. And, at that time, all the serious people were like art people: everything abstract, no narrative. But I discovered something about myself. I liked being a storyteller, I like doing the big ballets, new ones.”

To that end, he revolutionized things. He started a series of full-length narrative works that included “The Sun Also Rises,” “The Great Gatsby,” “Alice in Wonderland,” “Sleepy Hollow” — pretty big productions. And, by the way, “The Sun Also Rises” was “basically a great ballet about erectile dysfunction,” he noted.

“To me,” he said, “it was about building a company, young dancers, the school, THEARC [in Anacostia] and so on. And we discovered our niche. The Kennedy Center was bringing in all the great ballet companies, doing the big ballet pieces, and that was fine, but we could do something that identified us as a Washington company. It was a niche for a different kind of creativity. Sure we did some of the classics, but that was never all we did.” He referred to bringing choreographers such as Twyla Tharp and Mark Morris to Washington.

“And I believe in diversity of programming, of artists and dancers,” he said. “I recognize that when people come to a program that they want to be able to see themselves up there.”

As for the future? “I’m ready for the next thing. I want to concentrate on my work as a choreographer, a creator, and move on to work with other people — here, to be sure, but in Australia, in Istanbul, in Europe and other places. I’m looking forward to the next thing. I’m not moving, although my partner and I will be having a place in New York.”

He’s still a Washington guy, and something of treasure here: unique in his style, his outlook, that fizz and energy he brings to every encounter. “No question, I’m a workaholic, that’s where it all comes from.”

He’s Septime Webre, going out in style.
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Georgetowner • April 6, 2016

In April, we celebrate both the Bard’s birth and his death. There is no official birth date for Shakespeare, the world’s most celebrated playwright and writer, but he was baptized April 26, 1564, and he died April 23, 1616, at the age of 52.

All of which makes the Folger Shakespeare Library a great place to be this month. Throughout 2016, the venerable American institution of all things Shakespearean is celebrating 400 years of Shakespeare with exhibitions, performances and other special programming under the umbrella of “The Wonder of Will.”

The whole country will be able to see the touring exhibition “First Folio! The Book That Gave Us Shakespeare.” Copies of the 1623 book — of which the Folger owns 82 of the surviving 233 in the world — will tour all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, landing at 23 museums, 20 universities, five public libraries, three historical societies and a theater. At selected sites, a touring production of “The Gravedigger’s Tale” will also be seen.

At the Folger, on Capitol Hill just past the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress, the big birthday party will be Sunday, April 24, with face painting, wandering minstrels, clowns, jugglers, a cake and the presence of Queen Elizabeth (the first, not the second) herself.

The day before, Saturday, April 23, the Folger will host a day of international live streaming, in which actors, scholars, artists and community leaders will share their connections to Shakespeare.

Having just completed the exhibition “Shakespeare, Life of an Icon,” on April 7 the Folger will open “America’s Shakespeare,” which will focus on how Shakespeare has become America’s Bard through letters, costumes, books, photographs and film. It closes July 24, to be followed by “Will & Jane: Shakespeare, Austen and the Cult of Celebrity,” beginning Aug. 6.

Musically, the Folger Consort will be performing “Shakespeare and Purcell: Music of The Fairy Queen and Other Works,” April 8 to 10.

The Folger gala will be Monday, April 18. A few days later, the wacky Reduced Shakespeare Company will return for the world premiere of “William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (abridged),” running April 21 to May 8. In May, the Folger will wrap up its theater season with Aaron Posner’s “District Merchants,” a contemporary version of “The Merchant of Venice,” directed by Michael John Garcés.

“We still pay attention to Shakespeare because, no matter how networked our world becomes, he remains one of the ultimate connectors,” said Michael Witmore, director of the Folger. “In a sense, Shakespeare wrote the preamble to modern life.”

Shakespeare remains, is, was and will always be the most contemporary of authors. Directors, adapters and performers try to find ways to contemporize Shakespeare’s plays, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, although — forsooth and in truth — they don’t need it. I may be irritated to hear the word “prithee” time and again in the plays, because it sounds like a forced anachronism, but then again we may yet feel the same way about David Mamet’s four-letter explosions someday. The Bard doesn’t date, the plays and the writing are a bottomless well from which our modern times continue to echo outward and upward.

People still make the argument that the Bard wasn’t really the Bard. Personally, I have no doubt that William Shakespeare wrote the plays — for money, for esteem, for profit and prosperity and perhaps for posterity. Someone once said that a man who doesn’t know he’s a genius probably isn’t. I think Shakespeare may have guessed that he was special in his talent but probably didn’t think of himself as a genius. I think he thought of himself as a man of the theater, the modern version of which he practically invented.

He not only invented theater, but profoundly influenced the performing arts. The words certainly were the point of it all — the stories he purloined from ready-made sources — but there are musical, operatic, and vaudeville versions of Hamlet (not to mention a wordless one recently at the Washington Ballet).

Shakespeare to this day does what show business does: entertains us and makes us laugh, saddens us and makes us cry buckets and, most of all, without trying, makes us think of our own humanity. In his plays, we are not just at the theater, but on stage ourselves. In every Shakespeare play, there is something for someone: a pratfall, a joke, a fairy queen, a monster, a magician losing his magic, a king losing his kingdom, the outsider trying to find his way in an alien society and a parade of hypnotic, strong, beautiful female characters, which their swains and male contemporaries never quite understand.

That is the wonder of Will, just like today.