Performance

Gary Tischler • October 29, 2015

If you look up the name “Charles ‘Sancho’ Ignatius,” you can find him listed as “writer, composer,” known for his “influence over abolitionists, his published correspondence” and being, under the heading of ethnicity, a “black Briton.”

If you look up Paterson Joseph, he is listed as being born in London and being an actor from 1998 until now.

For two nights at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater on Friday and Saturday, Oct. 23 and 24, the two men, Ignatius Sancho,  actor, essayist, writer, composer, grocer, a black Briton born as a slave, friend to David Garrick and Laurence Sterne, and the first black man ever to vote in England, and Paterson Joseph, an actor, writer, sometime cook, at home in roles created by Shakespeare as well as in the HBO Series “The Leftover,” also a self-described black Briton, converge, become one, when Joseph brings his play, “Sancho: An Act of Remembrance” to the stage, as both actor and star. And therein lies a tale.

Joseph—who has led an actor’s life since 1988 with much acclaim and success on the stage — including the Royal Shakespeare Company in films (“The Beach” with Leonardo DiCaprio) and television (in the cultish “Doctor Who” series and in “The Leftovers”) — did not discover Sancho online. He read a book, and he saw a painting.

The painting is famous, being the work of William Gainsborough, probably the greatest British painter and portraitist of the18th century.  The painting was made at a time when Sancho had already achieved some standing and some apparent means. He looks a bit questioning, but comfortable in his skin and clothes, which are those of a gentleman of the time.

But it was the  book called “Black Britain” (which included the portrait) by historian Gretchen Gerzina, which affected Joseph’s feelings and thinking dramatically when he discovered it in 2008.  “Truth be told, I hadn’t known anything about Sancho at the time,” he said during a phone interview. “I think there are a lot of people—myself included—who probably there hadn’t been a major presence of black English people until the arrival of a large group of immigrants from Jamaica. I mean we all knew about the slave trade  and the islands and all of that, but here was this full-bodied man, who had risen up from service, learned to read, raised a large family, became interested in the theater,  rose in society and became a highly vocal and literate advocate for banning the slave trade.”

“He was the first black man to cast a vote,” he added.

The voice on the phone is affable, free-wheeling, easy with humor and sports a decided English accent.  It’s a voice—an actor’s voice, you think—that is spurred by curiosity, in a general way, but also the kind that even as you hear it, you imagine him listening, gathering information.  He  relishes the discovery of Sancho, but wonders that he perhaps should have known about him.  “We actors tend to be a bit self-absorbed,” he said.

“His story—and it’s a complicated, meaningful, but also very theatrical story—resonated profoundly with me, certainly,” Joseph said. “He is a forefather for all of us, for one thing, and he had a life full of accomplishment.

“Right from the beginning, I’ve been wanting to do something with his life, to do this,” he said. “So here we are, it’s the first time for this in the United States.  I’m not given to be being a writer so much, but this project comes from me and it means an enormous amount to me. Plus, it’s history, and I do love period pieces.”

Joseph’s already led a rich acting life. “One of the things that interested me about him was that he was friends with Garrick,” he said. “Garrick was in his way a revolutionary force in English theater, and in the way Shakespeare was done. The producers and directors of that time tended to rewrite Shakespeare, they would tack on happy endings to the tragedies—imagine an upbeat Hamlet, things like that.”

“Sancho was also a writer,” he said. “He wrote to and for the newspapers on everything, but especially the abolition of slavery. He wrote letters to the English novelist Laurence Sterne (‘Tristram Shandy’) to get him to support and lend his weight for abolition, which he did.” Sancho was on the side of Great Britain during the Revolutionary War.

“I think Sancho is a thick, dramatic story,” Joseph said. “It’s different from the American black historical narratives like ‘Roots’ and ‘Twelve Years a Slave.’ It’s original and rather idiosyncratic.”

Listening  to Joseph, you get the sense that this project is a kind of legacy for himself as well as Sancho.

“Acting has been my life, and it’s been remarkably rewarding in many ways,” Joseph said. “That world, especially in the theater, is always changing for everybody in terms of audiences and in terms of roles and race.  There are always things in the theater and as an actor, that are indelible.  I had the opportunity to perform in ‘Julius Caesar’ as Brutus in South Africa.  That play, by the way, was Nelson Mandela’s favorite Shakespearean play.  And Brutus—perhaps the play should have been called ‘Brutus’—is critical to the play, but he’s complicated. He struggles with the deed and the aftermath constantly. He is not prone to act quickly, somewhat, yes, that’s right, like Hamlet.”

Charles Ignatius Sancho and Paterson Joseph­ seem made for each other.

Georgetowner • October 26, 2015

It’s pretty plain to see that Jason Moran, the artistic director for jazz at the Kennedy Center, is quite the explorer, quite the collaborationist, quite the expansionist.
It was pretty evident back in September, when he curated “Finding a Line: Skateboarding, Music and Media,” set in a skate park constructed on the center’s front plaza. The festival kicked off the new “Jason+” series, which features Moran, a virtuoso jazz pianist with his own group, in cross-genre and cross-discipline collaborations.

“It’s a continuing examination, a deeper exploration of what you can do with jazz, how it can be transforming and transformed, both,” Moran said. “We’re talking here about teenaged skaters, a world-renowned classical pianist, a contemporary dance choreographer who stretches the boundaries of his own discipline. It’s kind of a holistic approach to music, and to jazz, because jazz has a global presence, and a global vision.”

Moran comes by his collaborative tendencies naturally. He’s married to mezzo-soprano Alicia Hall Moran. (They have 7-year-old twin sons, Jonas and Malcolm.) “She turned me on to and got me to listen to more atonal kinds of classical music, which was something of a revelation to me, since at the time I was heavily into Duke Ellington, which is more melodic kind of music.”

The most recent example of putting musical genres together was “Jason+Jeremy,” a collaboration (and co-presentation with Washington Performing Arts) in which Moran and classical pianist Jeremy Denk performed as dueling pianists. “Neither one of us knew what the other would play, how it would work out, and so we sort of played with and off of each other. At one point, Jeremy talked about trying out a Charles Ives piece, and that made me think about old Negro spirituals, and in that way, we came back to jazz, to the core music. Jeremy can play just about anything, and that’s sort of what it’s about. No one thing is purely jazz, or purely classical, or purely anything. There are other elements out there, and what we did was to explore that and come up with new things.”

That’s also at the heart of the Jason+ program on Oct. 28-30 with choreographer Ronald K. Brown and his dance ensemble Evidence. Moran and his Bandwagon jazz trio will play on stage at the Eisenhower Theater through the dance pieces “The Subtle One,” “Why You Follow” and “Bellows.”

“We’ve never done that, playing live music with a dance piece,” Moran said. “And they’re different pieces, it all adds something to the piece, and the piece demands something from our music.”

Brown founded Evidence in 1985, which means the company is marking its 30th anniversary. He’s known for creating choreography for jazz legends like pianists Ahmad Jamal and Mary Lou Williams. “His dance creations are rooted in West African, to basic rhythms. They’re infused with that kind of tempo and feeling.”

“The Subtle One” is a dance premiere, commissioned in part by the Kennedy Center, with the music composed by Moran. “Why You Follow” is an exploration of rhythmic Afro-Cuba stylings. “Bellows” is a solo piece taken from the work “One Shot,” the nickname of photographer Charles “Teenie” Harris, who documented the life of a single African American community — that of Pittsburgh — over a 40-year period.

Other Jason+ projects will include: “Jason+Mason,” the Mason being Kennedy Center Composer-In-Residence Mason Bates, a March 5 performance in the Crossroads Club in the center’s atrium; and a collaboration with tenor saxophonist and NEA Jazz Master Charles Lloyd on April 29 in the Terrace Theater.

“I think this sort of approach will bring in new audiences,” Moran said. “At the Kennedy Center, collaborations are like incubators of new forms and genres. Jazz is in many ways the most innovative kind of music — it takes in from everywhere.”

Gary Tischler • October 22, 2015

During the course of the opening night performance of “The Guard,” (part of the ongoing Women’s Voices Theater Festival in the Washington area), the usual pre-performance formalities are always engaged in—thanks to benefactors, donors and supporter, and, in this case, a shout-out to the playwright, if they happen to be in house.

From a distance, you could see a blondish woman rise out of her chair and take a modest head bow for the ensuing applause.

“For me that was quite a moment,” said Jessica Dickey, the playwright in question. “I had my loved ones there, my family and my partner.  It was special, I have to say.  It was special having my play performed here in Ford’s Theater. That was a little different, to say the least.  And it was that moment, too, when you sort of let go of your creation, it’s completely belongs to others now, the people on the stage, who inhabit the characters, and everyone else.”

Ford’s Artistic Director Paul Tetreault, one of the founders directors behind the women’s theater festival, knew of Dickey’s previous work and commissioned her to write a play for the festival.  The result was something a little different but from but also in the tradition of the theater in the sense that weighty matters were being discussed, disguised as drama, and in the most accessible  and sometimes even profane ways.

She laughed when we talked on the phone about some of the language in the play, which is an exploration of art in the life of human beings of all sorts, primarily, but not excluding, a museum guard who could be working at any of our city museums.  Somehow, in the course of things, people grieve over loss, guard the premises, talk about the art on the wall—Rembrandt—and see how, in the presence of art, life becomes richer even with the impending death of a loved one.  In the course of things, Rembrandt himself, as well as Homer, the subject of a painting, take the stage both vividly, and quite colloquially.

We asked Dickey about her approach to such weighty matters—it’s in the DNA of her previous plays, which includes a haunting, well received work on the massacre of Amish children, and Confederate re-enactors of the Battle of Gettysburg.  She’s also currently working on a play about Galileo’s daughter.

“Well, I hadn’t quite thought of things as weighty per se,” she said. “I think art deals with things we confront and encounter and inspire us to think about life. And I am a writer, and an artist, as well as an actress. So, this is how I express myself.”

She expresses herself extremely well in the theater, and over the phone.  As on stage, so in person by way of conversation, she is funny, and smart, with popular references and language (the word “dude” comes up)  mixing in with sharp, referenced observations.  One thing that’s probably worth knowing about her is that even on the phone she sports a spirited, full-throated laugh, which probably means that she’s a person worth telling a joke or funny story.

“The Guard” came out of a visit to the National Gallery of London, and observing a guard there. Out of this came much—the play is a full-bodied contribution to not only the festival but the theatrical canon.

“You know, what we do is so intimate,” she said. “I like to be involved in the process, not in terms of interference, but how it works—plays these days undergo a lot of versions, readings, workshops and finally the rehearsals, and the closer it gets to the finished play and its production, the further removed you become. I was offered  to attend a meeting of the board here—maybe it was just routine—and I accepted, and it was exciting and informative.

She is not, as she will be the first to admit, shy. “I was a bit of an athlete when I was in school, I played boys basketball when I was little, and I’m in the theater and an actress. We’re in the business of story-telling—look at what’s happening in television, these continuing stories.”

“In this play, I was interested in the things that last in memory and time,” she said. “As a writer, you wonder if your work will last, will be around long after you’re around. The stage itself, acting, that disappears the moment it’s done which is ephemeral.”

“As far as the festival goes, to me, it’s a remarkable thing,” she said. “I mean that it’s being done at all, and on such a scale where a whole theatrical community is basically committing to this at the beginning of a season, all premieres, at all levels.  I’m incredible glad to be a part of it.  It’s been quite an experience.”

In many ways, her work—and Jessica Dickey herself, are quite an experience.

Gary Tischler • October 15, 2015

The haunting, embracing play “Chimerica” by the young, gifted British playwright Lucy Kirkwood is ambitious, swiftly paced as well as sharply and intelligently written. It is a long, powerful offering about the fate of two modern nations as embodied by a moment in history, given a smart and swiftly paced production at the Studio Theatre with artistic director David Muse at the helm.

About the only thing that “Chimerica” isn’t is a part of the massive ongoing Women’s Voices Theater Festival, which features around 50 world premieres, all written by female playwrights throughout the Washington theater community. Technically, “Chimerica” isn’t a world premiere, although it is the work of Kirkwood, probably the hottest young playwright in Britain right now. The play–with dozens of  scenes dealing with 23 years in the history of American-Chinese relations–was a smash hit in the West End. In any case, Studio also world-premiered “Animal” by Clare Lizzimore Sept. 30 as its WVTF entry.

At well over three hours, “Chimerica” is a challenge, for actors, for Muse and certainly for the audience. It runs from 1989—when a fledgling (and fictional) American photographer manages to shoot the iconic image of a young Chinese activist with a shopping bag defying a row of tanks in Tiananmen Square—to 2012, when that same photographer, by now disillusioned, is covering a presidential campaign while wondering whatever happened to what the world described as “tank man.”

The question soon turns into a compulsive, obsessive search for the identity of the man who performed a clean act of moral courage, the kind of act he sees as missing from his own life and the world.  Soon enough, that search consumes him, to a fault, while in China, an old friend of his, still grieving over the death of his wife, watches as a neighbor dies a painful, lingering death from the withering effect of pollution, a by-product of resurgent China’s powerful economy.    We follow a small army of characters, Joe the overbearing photographer, his friend Zhang Lin, as he alerts Joe about the pollution through e-mails and gains the attention of the Chinese party police, much to the consternation of his brother, Joe’s fellow conflict zone photographer, his boss at a publication which, by all accounts, stands for the New York Times and Tessa, an attractive British marketing consultant drawn to the hyper Joe.

Lots of thematic balls are in the air—the overarching progress of Chinese-American relations, the power and meaning of images in the internet world, the need for heroic figures and heroes, the difficulty of dealing with love in a helter-skelter atmosphere, the clash of cultures and politics, the desire for fame and meaning at the same time.

In some ways, even with its great length, “Chimerica” is decidedly cinematic. It functions as a dangerous political thriller, a mystery, a tough play written with both intelligence and humor, and a tolerant, even generous, empathy for all of its characters.

You’d think there would be lag time in a play like this, but Muse has directed with a keen sense of sharp scenes and pacing, aided by a set that uses two box-like constructions to serve as everything from a one-room apartment in Beijing, an art gallery, back alleys and sophisticated New York party settings, aided vividly by imaginative projections. It’s a kind of immersion for an audience in search of intelligent, engaging new plays and productions, and “Chimerica” lets the audience engage with the material, because everyone involved seems fully engaged as well.

One of the hallmarks of Studio productions under Muse is a focus on acting and actors, which may come as no surprise that the theater is the site of the Studio Acting Conservatory, still headed by founder and former artistic director Joy Zinoman. 

In a large cast, Ron Menzel has the most difficult task in portraying Joe, who is easily the most frustrating, bombastic, annoying character in the play. Joe has a typically American moral arrogance, a self-immersed energy, a dose of paranoia, engaging in a reckless pursuit of a truth that may not after all be worth knowing in the larger scheme of things. But he has a presence that is undeniable and which serves him well, given that Joe is the engine driving the plot like a, well, tank, with almost a similar effect.  But Rob Yang, as the mourning Zhang Lin is the heart of the play, he inhabits a sadness mixed with humor and courage that in its own way is as reckless as Joe’s in terms of its results.

Tessa Klein gives a rueful, sexy quality to a young woman who wears her insecurity on her cocktail dress sleeve, hard-living, and appealing.  There are other fine turns—the veteran local actor Paul Morella as Joe’s editor, a knowing resignation by Lee Sellars as Joe’s fellow action junkie, a sympathetic turn by Kenneth Lee as the much-put-upon brother of Zhang Lin, among many others.

Kirkwood, in “Chimerica,” which won the Laurence Olivier and Evening Standard Award for Best Play in 2013, has a certain audacity in this play. She has an intelligence that gives the audience a gift by inviting into the world we live in—quite an amazing amount of it. If the ending may not be as surprising as it should be, it still packs a jolt, a shot to the heart.

“Chimerica” may not be a part of the festival, which is bringing us an abundant explosion of the work of talented female playwrights, but Kirkwood is surely one of the most talented playwrights working today.  That’s worth celebrating and checking out.

“Chimerica” runs through Oct. 18 at Studio Theatre, 1501 14th St. NW.
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Gary Tischler • October 13, 2015

The world of world class violinist is replete with legendary artists and super-nova performers from reigning stars like Joshua Bell,  or Yitzhak Perlman the master, the Italian Giuliano Carmignola,  Stephane Grappelli  or giants from the past like Jascha Heifetz and Yehudi Menuhin, or Fritz Kreisler, or among the ladies current stars like Hilary Hahn and the Dutch mistress of the violin Janine Jansen.

The violin world is also full of rising stars, and among them is the young Ukrainian native of Odessa, Aleksey Semenenko, who already has a certain sheen of stardom about him after becoming the second prized winner in the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels and being named artists of the month in March of this year by Musical American Magazine.

Semenenko, who lives in Cologne, Germany, who has appeared at the Kennedy Center, already put a memorable stamp on his appeal in the aftermath of last year’s Embassy Series concert at the Embassy of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg with a program that included works by Chausson, Schubert, Tchaikovsky and Rossini. 

There are all kinds of violinists playing all kinds of music in venues all over the world. Semenenko’s singular gifts are not of flamboyance, but of something you can call soulful precision.  He’s not the violinist as showman or dramatist who makes you look at him.  What he does is an ability to play with the goal of perfection that’s often achieved, and the end result is that you feel the music as if it was aimed straight at your heart,  singular, deeply felt. He doesn’t make you watch as much as he makes you listen and feel.

Semenenko, who will perform in the second Embassy Series of the season at the Embassy of the Ukraine in Georgetown Oct. 6 and 7,  has been playing the violin since he was six years old.  He studied with Zoya Mertsalova at the Stolyarsky and one year in, had done Vivaldi’s “Violin Concerto in A inor” with the Oderssa Philarhmonic Orchestra.  “It is a very difficult instrument to play as anyone can tell you,” he said. “My father played the clarinet which is very different.”

Talking to him, you can see that he has a certain required single-mindedness in his approach to his chosen life as a classical musician.  “Practice,” he said. “It is always about practice, practice. It is hard work, of course.  But it is also very, I don’t know, a passionate experience. When you go on a stage, that is a moment that’s very intense, and you have to stay calm, to focus.”

“Mozart,” he says. “He is the most difficult composer to play, but also the most rewarding. You’ve achieve something when you play  one of his composition in a way that is satisfying. You try to do your very best with Mozart, becauses his music touches you so deeply.

He listens mostly to classical music.  “For enjoyment, for pleasure,” he said. “I don’t listen to too much pop music, there’s not that much interesting, I think.  But, yes, I always like the Beatles when I was young and still.” He says that classical music needs to draw young audiences—“It is not just a matter of new music, but new audiences,” he said.

A New York Times critic described one of his performances  and his strengths this way: “He chose works that highlighted his strengths, a powerful technique, rich tone and passionate approache. There was a fluidity and warmth to his playing throughout the program, which concluded with a joyous, bravura performance of a Paganini show piece.”

The bravura with Semenenko  comes in the play—there’s no headshaking, no striking gestures, merely the grand beauty of his playing and the music.   He treats the music not just respectfully, but with inspiration worth of music as art.

Semenenko will be playing with fellow Ukrainian Inna Firsova on piano.  The program will include works by Beethoven, Tartini, Ysaye, Tchaikovsky and Bizet.

Gary Tischler •

I have noted this before—the sheer amount of diversity of ambition, content and talent in the 50-plus play Women’s Voices Theater Festival now going on which can be gleened just by reading the titles.

It’s better  to see for yourself, of course, otherwise you might miss just how some of these plays seem sometimes obviously, sometimes deceptively to match the missions of their venues, as well as the overall concept of the festival, which is to fully display the gifts of a wonderfully large group of women playwrights in the course of two months and a little more.

The recent “Women Laughing Alone With Salad” by Sheila Callaghan is a play so chock full of contemporary memes about women and women and men and gender in general that it seemed right at home on the Woolly Mammoth stage—where everything you think could pop up, usually does.  

Two new plays—“The Guard” by Jessica Dickey at the Ford’s Theatre and the recently closed  “texts & beheadings/Elizabeth R” created and directed by Karin Coonrod at the Folger Theatre—exemplified what this festival is all about with every play that’s  on our stages during its course, which are meetings with the unexpected, new forms of theatre and theatricality and imaginations and performances that go beyond genre and gender.

At first blush, “The Guard” might seem an odd choice for the Ford’s Theatre, which nevertheless commissioned it and whose artistic directed Paul Tetreault was one of the founding movers behind the festival.   “The Guard” includes some explicit language rarely and likely not ever heard in the theater­­—which is as much a national museum as it is a theatre—language which also seemed entirely appropriate to its characters.  

That aside, the play, written with intelligence, wit and an obvious love for its characters,  was a play dancing with big themes—the nature of grief, the nature of art, and the humanity of artists from aspiring copiers, to gifted poets, to Homer and Rembrandt themselves, seems entirely at home here, with its innate love of and respect for history.

Dickey, who is herself an actress as well as playwright, has tackled big themes before—as in “Charles Ives Take Me Home,” “The Amish Project,” a one-woman show about the shocking killing of Amish children, and “Row After Row,” a play about Civil War re-enactors. 

“The Guard” has its focus a veteran guard at a well known museum, which houses Van Goghs and Rembrandts, including “Aristotle With a Bust of Homer.” It’s another day on the job—a young, obviously shy girl comes to copy the painting, a younger guard bursts with enthusiasm, and a new kid on the block arrives, irreverent, a street artist and a bit of a volcano.  The guard—played with a tart warmth by Mitchell Hebert is distracted—his partner and husband, a well known poet, lies at home, dying.

From this situation, Dickey takes us to the world of Rembrandt—where the artist is dealing his frustrated son, his fading glory, and working on the Homer painting while plying his young mistress with gifts—and to the world of Homer himself, a bigger-than-life and quirky, quarrelsome figure played with terrific aplomb by the magnetic Craig Wallace, a Ford’s and Washington regular.  In the end, we return to the guard and the love of his life Simon and you might say, so it goes, but it is much more than that. 

The play has taken us places we rarely get to go in the theater before coming to an end that can be predicted but whose effects are still surprising in how they touch us.  We’ve got to think about big things—art and death, and all that, and how it happens and is linked—through the lives of people we recognize as living in our world, and that’s no small achievement. And in trying also to make us see the artists—the poet Homer, the painter Rembrandt—as human beings, it makes us think of them that way, if not entirely with provable accuracy. 

The staging—that movement between worlds—is accomplished with unassuming dexterity by director Sharon Otto and terrific sets by James Kronzer.  The writing is smart and compassionate, and the acting is anchored by the veterans—Hebert doubles as Rembrandt and Wallace is affecting as the dying Simon.

The younger actors are up to the task—especially Kathryn Tkel who seems to radiate warmth almost naturally as both a grieving art student and Rembrandt’s lady—and Josh Sticklin as Dodger who approaches art full of brio and daring—“touch it, let’s all touch it” he says of the master’s painting. 

Briefly, watching Karin Coonrod’s artful approach to Queen Elizabeth I in “texts & beheadings,” reminded me, oddly enough, of Shakespeare, here in this small temple to Shakespeare. In this production, by Compangnia de’ Colombar, Coonrod has offered up four actresses as four different Elizabeths, none of whom look like the previous stage and movie versions we’re used to seeing.  Deep in our hearts, we know Elizabeth was actually Bette Davis, or Helen Mirren.

In fact, the actresses—Monique Barbee, Ayeje Feamster, Juliana Francis-Kelly and Cristina Spina (speaking at times in Italian)—amount to a woman both familiar and strange to us, ending up full-bodied and full-voiced, speaking often from poems, letters, edicts and recorded conversations by the queen.

They also ended up as an answer to a question asked many times—how did Shakespeare, the exemplary playwright of her reign, also manage to write so many modern-sounding, educated, smart, funny and strong female characters, especially in the comedies.  The answer surely must be that he had a fine example of an extraordinary woman to draw from, his own queen and monarch, who was known to have a fine sense of humor (often bawdy), was strong, keenly self-aware as woman and queen, understood power. 

Here in this play you heard that some woman, and who, in this place, had echoes in Rosalind, in Portia, in Lady Macbeth, and Lear’s daughters, in Juliet and Desdemona, in the queens, and in Katharine that shrew who was never truly tamed.
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Gary Tischler • October 1, 2015

The performance arts world—specifically but not exclusively the world of classical music and opera—has been debating the issue of appealing to younger audiences while trying to hang on to its dwindling traditional core audience for quite some time now.

There’s always a critical clamor for new works and new ways of presenting traditional material, but the Washington National Opera, no slouch in that department this season, opened its 2015-2016 with a decidedly familiar and traditional piece, Bizet’s “Carmen,” which, along with such other popular stalwarts as “Madame Butterfly” and “La Boheme,” are often described as operas for people who hate operas.

But there may be a solution that lies in this grand, crowd-pleasing and emotionally affecting production: the notion that you can have your opera cake and eat it, too. The answer may lie in presenting a familiar work like “Carmen” and do it with an eye toward uniform excellence in such a way that the production elicits the opera’s considerable musical and dramatic virtues. If your production is full of almost uniformly outstanding musical qualities from the star turns to the chorus and orchestra, maybe there’s no need to take a radical approach to make things “revelant,” an approach that has sometimes soured a few productions elsewhere.

This production is remarkably brisk, moving swiftly through a three-hour, one-intermission evening in an engaging way. It’s intense and passionate when it needs to be. It creates a world that seems lived in both musically and emotionally by its characters. It makes you listen and respond.

For the long-standing opera audience, it delivers the expected pleasures and desired results. But here’s another notion: newer audiences, and there were quite a few younger folks in the audience who seemed to appreciate the proceedings, are seeing and listening to something with new eyes and ears, and to many of the them, this is surely a lot fresher material than an Elvis impersonator.

This, then, was a production that was engineered to please operas buffs and newcomers alike. It had a certain freshness to it that went with the rewards of a familiar plot and familiar music. Director E. Loren Meeker didn’t tweak the proceedings too much. It’s a production that has been staged in other places—but added a spicy as well as somewhat stately flamenco sheen to the night, and updated the setting to what could have been Peronist Argentina or Franco’s Spain, what with the notable military presence.

Evan Rogister conducted a score notable for being melodic and, well, operatic, with elan and flair, and it’s the music that tells the tale here. Although there were sequences that featured spoken dialogue the way Bizet had originally done back in its Paris Opera Comique debut in 1875, to considerable critical controversy, some critics even claiming that it had too many Wagnerian qualities.

That’s hardly true—what it has is a kind of French verve (it’s sung in French) on top of a decidedly Spanish look, and feel, and even sound, with some of the music arising from traditional Spanish folk music. It’s an opera that’s beautiful to listen to, almost all the way through. You could shut your eyes and still be moved and carried away by the drama and music.

This “Carmen” also had, on opening night, a fine “Carmen,” which is absolutely necessary, in the French Mezzo-Soprano Clementine Margaine, who’s had considerable acclaim with the role, and makes for a vivid Gypsy femme fatale. That’s probably where the expression came from: her strutting stances, her disdainful attitude and a stone-strong confidence in her allure, and the ultimate effect of it. This Carmen is big trouble for any man with a heart beat, especially in her “Habanera” and when she sings about her considerable charms and the inevitability of the disasters of love, and her passionate need for freedom.

The honorable naïf that is Don Jose, a sergeant in the billeted military unit in a small village never stands a chance, in spite of his engagement to a local village girl Micaela (sung sweetly by Janai Brueger), and his love for his sainted and dying mother. Soon enough, he’s under the sway of Carmen, who loves him passionately in her fickle fashion. Soon enough, he’s in deep with her brigand gypsy pals, and soon enough, she leaves him for the more sophisticated but equally smitten matador. On opening night, American tenor Bryan Hamel as Don Jose was the musical and dramatic essence of anguish, especially in the climatic scene when he struggles to win back a defiant Carmen even as he hears the cheers of the “Toreador Song” coming from the arena.

All of this is flavored in rich atmospherics, and the strong presence of young singers in the formations of villagers, soldiers and bandits, it makes for a rich, colorful evening, the kind of night were you can become immersed in a vividly created world of music and drama on stage.

(Morgaine shares the role of Carmen with another French Mezzo Soprano Geraldine Chauvet, as does Hamel share his Jose with American tenor Michael Brandenburg. “Carmen” will be performed at the Kennedy Center Opera House through October 2.)

Gary Tischler • September 22, 2015

For the true movie stars, the accolades never quite end.

That was surely the case for the incandescent Ingrid Bergman, who was, as the veteran Washington movie critic Arch Campbell noted, “one of the great female stars of all time,” and who was honored yet again with a stamp ceremony at the House of Sweden in Georgetown on Sept. 9.

The U.S. Postal Service, in conjunction with their Swedish counterparts Posten AB, commemorated Bergman in a special ceremony at House of Sweden, with a Hollywood Forever Stamp which features the luminous actress in a classic photograph by Laszlo Willinger from the 1940s, when Bergman achieved celebrity, fame and her first Oscar.

The ceremony included the unveiling of two Swedish stamps. Mostly, it was an occasion of celebration, which included a Hollywood-style dance party where glam-sparkling young attendees joined the party to the music of the Cotton Club, which swayed between contemporary and disco sounds, while couples, many of them who had not been born when Bergman passed away in 1982, danced the night away.

Mostly, it was Ingrid Bergman everywhere you looked—posters from her famous Hollywood movies like “Notorious,” “Gaslight,” and of course “Casablanca” filled the walls, along with posters for lesser known films from her early, youthful career in Sweden.

Guests could also get an idea of the size of Bergman’s career—and her long-lasting impact—from exhibits put together by the Swedish Film Institute. There were also clips from her films, including a tender scene from “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” the 1940s adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s novel about the Spanish Civil War, which starred a stoic, brave Gary Cooper and Bergman as the stunning Maria, complete with short blonde hair and eyes so blue they defined the color.

Bergman had a remarkable career, given that she was a young girl from Sweden, who had built a strong career there and came to Hollywood in 1939, after being discovered by David O. Selznick (“Gone With the Wind). She was brought to Hollywood to star in “Intermezo,” a redo of the Swedish original, which had Leslie Howard as her co-star. Selznick, according to his son, had some doubts—she couldn’t speak English, she was tall, she sounded too German and her beauty was unconventional but affecting.

She starred in a number of films small roles in “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” and “Gaslight,” for which she won an Oscar, as well as “Joan of Arc,” “Notorious”, “Saratoga Trunk” and “Casablanca,” a film that defied its period setting and became a classic, re-discovered by future generations.

Pia Lindstrom, a noted television news professional in New York and San Francisco, in an interview after the ceremonies, said that her mother “was the perfect screen actress. All the acting was in the face, the eyes, she was the personification of screen acting—her face contained all the emotions, she could be charming, flirtatious, serious, passionate. She acted for the camera, not the other actors. That was her audience, the light would hit her eyes, and she lit up the screen.

“I think my mother was most happy, when she was in front of a camera,” Lindstrom said. “I mean, here was a girl who had lost her mother early on, and her father in her teens, and acting was a way to retreat into make believe. And she had a tremendous gift for it.”

Everyone remembers “Casablanca,” where she was Bogart’s girl, the city was full of refugees, Nazis, suave Frenchman, forgers and thieves, and Bogart said “just play it, Sam” and “Here’s looking at you, kid” and she said, “We’ll always have Paris” and we still do.

She led a big and often turbulent life—leaving her husband and family to take up with the Italian director Roberto Rossellini while filming “Stromboli.” The affair caused a scandal in the United States—apparently she was condemned from the Senate floor. She married Rossellini, and divorced him after three children (one of them was Isabella Rossellini), and eventually returned to a forgiving Hollywood. She triumphed again with “Anastasia” and “Murder on the Orient Express,” winning an Oscar each for best actress and best supporting actress. She ended her career in triumph—directed by Ingmar Bergman in “Autumn Sonata” and portraying Golda Meir while battling cancer.

“I think she was forward looking in the sense that she did what she wanted,” Lindstrom said. “She was very strong willed. I don’t know if you call that feminism. I think it was her. After all, she spent most of her life being married, and she spent most of it working.”

She could haunt you for a long time, if you encountered her on film. She dominated her pet project “Joan of Arc”— a not particularly good film—with her portrait of Joan in which she triumphed and suffered passionately, combining a stunning spirituality with a hint of carnality. Not everyone can bring that off.

Now, she has her own stamp, as if she needed another way to remember. But the image seem classic, and when you see one, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to whisper “Here’s looking at you, kid.” [gallery ids="102308,126972,126966" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler • September 17, 2015

Thinking about going to the theater in Baltimore? During a recent visit to Baltimore, we talked with the artistic directors of two companies that, in different ways, exemplify the idea that theaters are a critical part of the community.

A mainstay of the Mount Vernon neighborhood, Center Stage, which has been presenting plays in Baltimore since 1962, is only a few blocks from the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, now launching its second season at its impressively restored and converted digs near Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.

As they look to their respective 2015-2016 seasons, both Kwame Kwei-Armah, Center Stage’s electric, forward-looking artistic director, and Ian Gallanar, founding artistic director of Chesapeake Shakespeare, continue to expand notions about what a theater company can and should be in contemporary times.

Kwame Kwei-Armah took over the reins at Center Stage — a Baltimore institution — after the 20-year tenure of the highly respected Irene Lewis ended in 2011. Lewis had already begun looking for ways of expanding the company’s audience in ways that better reflected the makeup of the multi-ethnic community. Kwei-Armah, whose parents were born in Grenada and who came from London with a big, eclectic, multi-tasking reputation as playwright, actor and director (he has an OBE for services to drama), ramped up her quest in his own inimitable style.

Gallanar founded the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company in 2002 as a group of like-minded artists who wanted to make the Bard’s works more accessible to a broader audience, often in unusual settings — like “the Ruins,” the mostly exposed remains of the former Patapsco Female Institute Historic Park in Ellicott City — as well as through forays to public schools. But settling into a landmark bank building and a modern theater of 260 seats certainly ramped up the stakes.

When you talk to Kwei-Armah in his office, you’re confronted with a pacer; he seems to be thinking about several things at once, even while focusing on one idea. The board of trustees has already extended his contract and audiences have increased during his brief tenure, lured by a more varied programming, new plays — some of them by Kwei-Armah himself, such as the world premiere of “Beneatha’s Place,” about the characters in “A Raisin in the Sun” — and new ways of tackling classic drama.

“People, the people of a community, have to see themselves in what’s going on onstage,” he says. “It’s not just relevance, but truth and authenticity that matters. And there are lots of ways of doing work that is meaningful, difficult, entertaining, certainly.” He likes to stir the pot a little, and it’s apparently working.
The 2015-2016 season includes a two-show residency at Towson University in the spring, due to a major renovation at Center Stage’s Calvert Street home.
“It’s an exciting time for us,” Kwei-Armah said.

The season opens with a world-premiere stage version of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” (Sept. 11-Oct. 11), followed by the popular musical “The Secret Garden” (Oct. 30-Nov. 29). Then there’s “X’s and O’s (A Football Love Story)” by KJ Sanchez, co-commissioned by Center Stage and Berkeley Rep. “That’s a play that will resonate here but broadly across the country, because football is such a big part of people’s lives and culture in America,” said Kwei-Armah.

We talked with Gallanar (who has a bit of the Shakespearian thespian look about him) in Chesapeake Shakepeare’s new space. “What we wanted in terms of design was to have a theater that made the Shakespeare experience intimate. We wanted it to be a little like the Globe in the olden days,” he said. The company kicks off its season with the mismatched-lovers-matching-up play “Much Ado About Nothing” (Sept. 18-Oct. 11). Then comes “Titus Andronicus” in Grand-Guignol style, which Gallanar is looking forward to directing. Also on tap: “A Christmas Carol” with a Baltimore twist; “Wild Oats,” an 18th-century comedy by John O’Keeffe; and “Macbeth”.

Where does community intersect with theater? That time for both the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company and Center Stage came in the spring when demonstrations and disturbances of the most visibly destructive kind broke out in West Baltimore.

“We were doing ‘Romeo and Juliet’ at the time,” Gallanar said. “We had a matinee at which students from the school which had interacted with the police earlier were at. It was amazing. They were absolutely engrossed. They talked, they yelled and interacted with the action vocally. They saw it as a play about two gangs. It was very real and very theatrical at the same time. “

At Center Stage, “Marley,” an original musical authored and directed by Kwei-Armah about the late reggae legend, was about to open. He and the company decided to go to West Baltimore to perform songs from the show at the entrance to the MTA subway station next to the burned out CVS that had appeared on TV.

“It was just something we decided to do. We are part of the community of Baltimore, and that’s part of Baltimore. The whole thing — the response by the people to what we were doing there — was exactly, I think, what theater should be doing.”
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Gary Tischler •

If you’re a D.C. theater-goer, you’d be forgiven if you’ve gotten the impression that this has been the summer of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul in Washington.

The talented musical hotshots first surfaced at Arena Stage this summer with the world premiere of “Dear Evan Hansen,” a contemporary musical about the complicated life of an angst-driven teen trying to get the girl in the worst and best possible way.  The show—which had, in addition to Pasek and Paul, a top-notch team with book author Steven Levenson , director Michael Greiff (“Next to Normal,” “If/Then” and “Grey Gardens”), and star Ben Platt (“Pitch Perfect,” “Ricki and the Flash”)—was a hit here, with pretty much unanimous critical and audience approval.  As a results, its slated for an Off-Broadway debut  at Second Stage.

Now we get “Dogfight,” an earlier Pasek and Paul effort which got critics going in New York but failed to be a popular hit.  The folks at Keegan Theatre, now permanently settled in its renovated but still intimate Church Street space are staging what is just a challenging a show as “Hansen” with tight verve and imagination, given us another opportunity to take a good look at the work of the dynamic duo that appears to be (mostly successfully) trying to reshape the musical to reflect the times.

“Dogfight” is a different kettle of dramatic tea than the smoother “Hansen”—if it’s not easy to create a musical around the subject of teen suicide and bullying as “Hansen” was, it’s even harder to make a sustainable show which features as its plot-driver the nauseous idea of too-young-soldiers about to be shipped out to Vietnam holding an ugliest date contest.

But you can now see a little more clearly certain ticks and gifts shared by Pasek and Paul in these two shows. They’ve created music which is as close to a reflection of contemporary pop music as may be possible. It’s not necessarily new, but it’s narrative-driven, serving the needs of a difficult plot in both cases.   They also appear to have their finger on the pulse that might bring in that elusive blockbuster audience of millennials—the two composer-authors (both 30), seem to be in sync with their young characters.

“Hansen” was very much a part of these our times—“Dogfight” is set in 1963, the beginning years of blood-letting in Vietnam as a group of young, teenaged marines set out on a last night out in San Francisco (which everyone refers to as “Frisco,” a sure sign you’re not a native to locals).  Three of the leading jarheads call themselves the “bees,” as in Birdlace, Boland and Bernstein.  They’re an exuberant trio, accompanied by high-energy pals looking for girls and sex, about which they appear to know little, the 1960s apparently not yet in full flower-power bloom.

The very thought of the dogfight—apparently some sort of tradition with the trio—can fill an audience with dread. It’s one of those horrible by-products of buddy outings fueled by beer and testosterone which is predictably a painful disaster, especially for the women who are tagged for participation.

Birdlace, the nominal “hero” of the trio,  charismatically played by Franco D’Affuso with lean, strutting and awkward intensity, picks out Rose, a shy, warm young waitress with folk-singing aspirations (these were the days of Dylan, Woody Guthrie and Joan Baez at brash, youthful zenith) and with no fashion style, a dark-haired, inexperienced  girl whose physical charms remain purposefully hidden.  But, with actress-singer Isabelle Smelkinson (who’s still a student at American University) inhabiting her, she manages to shine like a San Francisco Bay lighthouse. It’s such an appealing and authentic performance of intelligent, if clumsy, innocence that she makes every scene she’s in seem as real as today.

Birdlace and Rose (could be a singing duo) meet cute with an argument over Woody Guthrie until the whole scheme breaks open at a ratty club with a dance contest hosted by Chad Wheeler as a lounge singer straight out of an SNL routine by Bill Murray.

If the proceedings in “Dogfight” move along less smoothly—there’s an ugly, near rape of a prostitute in the first, and the Vietnam war setting seems to have been derived more from movies and plays (think “Streamers, The Musical!”) than the real thing—the show, especially as pulled off by the Keegan group under the youthful co-direction of Christina A. Coakley and Michael Innocenti, has more than a few moments.  

What might have been an unsettling piece of theater somehow finds its sea legs, spurred on by some terrific songs—“Nothing Short of Wonderful,” “It’s a Dogfight,” the aggressively cynical “Hometown Hero’s Ticker-Tape Parade” and brassy plot-driven songs and sweet ballads alike.  

Posek and Paul, you realize, are looking to do right by the American musical by re-imagining its sound and tone, but also by creating characters that, after horrible moral mis-steps are looking to do the right thing.   In the end, “Dogfight” isn’t about a creepy plot ploy, or even Vietnam.  It’s about a boy and a girl finding each other, and finding each other comely and simpatico in the best way, losing each other and trying to find each other again.   That’s not so bad a thing, especially when you have Smelkinson playing Rose. She’s a winner.