Performance

Gary Tischler • August 17, 2015

On the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater’s stage, it’s not that easy to spot Stuart Ward among the crowd of musicians milling around with audience members on a set that very effectively imitates a Dublin pub. He’s in there somewhere among the crowd of fiddle players and violinists, the accordion player, the red-headed woman, the big publican and the assorted audience members who’ve braved it out and come waltzing on stage for the half hour or so prior to the start of “Once,” the Tony-Award winning musical having a road stop here through Aug. 16.

You’ll recognize him soon enough—he’s the guy, playing the “guy” part in this sweet, big-hearted but oddly un-sentimental show about a guy named just “guy,” love-lorn and locked up with his music, and a girl named “girl”, a spritely, blonde, optimistic Czech émigré and single mother who has inspiration written all over her, and how they connect through music surrounded by an endearing group of eccentrics and regular folks blissfully playing and making music through the course of things.

The minute Ward, with that rugged-sensitive two-day beard handsome-but-shy look, picks up a guitar, you, and the rest of the people in the play notice him. That guitar is “guy’s” connection to the world and his own heart and that of the audience’s, and, as in the course of things, the “girl’s” heart, too.

And from then on, you’re in their world, and the fact that half of the characters somewhat disconcertingly are from Prague seems perfectly natural, and that the “guy” and the “girl” should start to have feelings toward each other. That’s as natural as having a Guinness in a bar with similar, fizzy-feel-good results.

And that Ward should be at home with a guitar is pretty natural too. “I’ve been playing guitar since I was six,” Ward says in a telephone interview with The Georgetowner. “I’ve been doing that since seems like most my life.” On stage, the Englishman drifts easily into an Irish accent, and a little bit of a lilt remains over the phone.

Ward, who plays guitar for English rock legend Sir Cliff Richard, tried out for “Once”—formerly a cult independent small film turned into a West End musical-cum-Broadway musical—and was an understudy. “I got to go on a few times, but mostly I watched and waited and learned, and it was such a phenomenal show, so new and different.” When the national show was starting up, he was asked to take over the lead “boy” part in a show that won a ton of Tonys.

“It’s something very special that happens here,” he says. “There are actually a few shows like that in England, with that kind of music and process, musicians playing parts, they’re organic. Ask me, I think it’s the coming thing—there’s so much more room for the audience to react and even participate, this thing of being able to go up on the stage before and during intermission.”

“I love the music in this show, playing the tunes, singing the parts,” Ward said. He feels connected to the part of “guy.” Ward says, “He’s a little locked up and expresses himself with the music, that’s how he shows his emotions, and I guess I’m a little, a lot like that myself.” He says his co-star, Dani De Waal is “a gift,” adding, “She’s such a natural, it’s just so easy to work with her.”

This seems to true of almost all of the characters—there isn’t a one that doesn’t grab an instrument at one time or another, even the banker from Cork, who works up a pretty mean cello.

“The music’s a lot of things—there’s traditional—and non-traditional Irish music, folk music, thumping rock music, ballads, and somewhere in the audience, there’s something for someone.”

He loves touring. “I feel like I’m really seeing America,” he said. “It’s a lovely country, so varied, so generous.”

A natural actor, he becomes something else when he sings. “I have a musical career, so that’s a thing I’m passionate about.” He has a CD out called “Pictures.”

To watch him—and De Waal—perform the Oscar-winning song “Falling Slowly” is to see Ward take hold of himself. It’s like something pure coming out of his heart, a heart slowly filling up and sprouting wings musically.

If you check him out on YouTube, you can see that he takes to American roots naturally, by way of the tribe of Celts and Liverpool.

There’s a black and white video with Ward in the famous Sun Studios, picking up a guitar, surrounded by portraits of Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis, reaching all the pain and sorrow, the high notes, the heart of Roy Orbison’s “dreams.” He seems in the midst of rock and roll, the South’s Blues, all at home. As he is on stage, and not just “Once” in “Once”.

Gary Tischler •

If you spent your whole summer catching all or many of the performances and acts at the Wolf Trap’s Filene Center, you might just ran the gamut of every kind of musical genre that exists, from pop rock to rhythm and blues to country, to opera and symphony music, to classic jazz to classical music.

It’s enough to make your musical head spin—in just one week, you can go musically from here to there, beginning with the clean, clear, optimistic and original vocal stylings of the Indigo Girls (Tuesday), neo-soul, singer-songerwriter and Grammy Award winner Jill Scott (Wednesday), to the reunion of Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals (Thursday), and folk and Americana legend Rufus Wainwright (Friday).

Sometimes, as was the case with legendary jazz stylist Diana Krall last Saturday, you get the best of many possible worlds. Krall—she’s married to Elvis Costello, is the mother of two, a native of British Columbia—is notable just by walking on stage, letting the blonde shake out and singing with a clarity that seems both effortless and powerful. A pre-eminent jazz singer, she’s lately been branching out, or rather looking backward a little in terms of musical offerings and interest, beginning with the album “Glad Rag Doll,” which explored 1920s man-woman blues, and most recently, with “Wallflower,” which made up large parts of her concert with the Wolf Trap Orchestra.

In “Wallflower,” Krall looked to the music of her youth, specifically songs written by some of the top song-writers of the late twentieth century, including the title tune “Wallflower,” by Bob Dylan, which, if you missed the concert, you can catch on YouTube with Krall singing in an off-handed, but moving manner. It’s as clear as a troubadour singing a farewell song. While hitting personal and popular jazz tropes, Krall made “Wallflower” a key part of the concert, trolling the album list, which includes such songs as “California Dreamin’” (Michelle and John Phillips), “Desperado” (Glenn Frey and Don Henley of The Eagles, just announced as 2015 Kennedy Center honorees), “Superstar”, which the late Karen Carpenter sang, Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s “Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word,” as well as Jim Croce’s “Operator,” among others.

Diversity remains the watchword at Wolf Trap all through August—opera with “Madame Butterfly,” Aug. 7; “The Music of John Williams” (Aug. 8) and the music of “Star Trek” (Aug. 2), and “The Rodgers Family: A Century of Musicals” (Aug. 1 and 2); ever popular rockers “Counting Crows”on Aug. 10; the one-of-a-kind Lyle Lovett and His Large Band, Aug. 14; country stars “Little Big Town” on Aug. 26; the rare-fried make you jump rock stars “ZZ Top”; the Jersey Boys themselves, Frankie Vallie and the Four Seasons, Aug. 19; the return of Gladys Knight and the Pips, Aug. 22; blasts from the past “The Beach Boys”, August 23 and 2013 Kennedy Center Honoree Santana and the great vocalist Kristin Chenoweth, August 28.

Makes your head spin.

Gary Tischler •

The Glimmerglass Festival at Cooperstown—in its 40th anniversary at Cooperstown in upstate New York this year—has a very Washington vibe to it, and not just because festival director Francesca Zambello is also the artistic director of the Washington National Opera.

The first two  of this season’s four productions included a powerful and stirring performance by bass-baritone Simon Owens in the title role of Verdi’s “Macbeth” and noteworthy appearances by bass Solomon Howard in “The Magic Flute” as the magician Sarastro and as the ill-fated Banquo in “Macbeth.” Owens came from a triumphant starring role in this spring’s WNO production of  Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman” and Howard, a member of the WNO’s Domingo-Cafritz Young Artists Program, starred as Muhammad Ali in the new opera “Approaching Ali” two seasons ago at the Washington Opera, as well as appearing as Sarastro in the WNO’s production of “The Magic Flute.”  

In addition, Tazewell Thompson, who directs Vivaldi’s “Cato at Utica” here, is well-remembered as a veteran director at Arena Stage here, and Zambello directed “Candide” for the festival.

In the gorgeous lakeside setting at the Alice Busch Opera Theater, we saw the festival-opening productions of “The Magic Flute” and “Macbeth.” On the surface, you couldn’t imagine two operas that were as different in tone and story as these works by Mozart and Verdi.  Yet, in key ways, they had some distinct qualities in common. Most notably, the two productions shared unique and imaginative approaches to design and concept, and outstanding singing among the lead roles.

Director Madeline Sayet, working with sometimes startling sets by Troy Hourie and costumes by Kaye Voyce, gave us a version of the familiar and often done “Magic Flute” that seemed fresh in the re-telling and singing.  Conceptually, the production mixed and matched a nature-driven and magical set, resonant of a Native American look (which in turn echoed in the local Cooperstown history, where James Fenimore Cooper is a major figure).   It’s still the same but slightly newer story in which a bewildered hero named Tamino wanders in search of himself into a strange forest where, with the inept assistance of a local lad named Pagageno, he must go an a quest, win a princess, thwart the Queen of the Night and face the wizard Sarastro.

We’ve seen it a lot—at the WNO or in a movie version by Ingmar Bergman, no less.  But this production has a fluid speed, a winning hero in Sean Panikkar who has both charisma and singing ability to spare, and is matched by soprano as the Jacqueline Echols as the heroine Pamina.  Soprano So Young Park did not quite have the acting chops for the role of the Queen of the Night, but, vocally, she jumped at the opportunities in the role with rousing and bravura singing.

“Macbeth,” Verdi’s first encounter with Shakespeare, hasn’t often been seen in Washington, but this production, directed by Anne Bogart with an eye for the main dramatic chance as well as an eye for detail, shows you why composers often turn to Shakespeare for their source material and inspiration.  So do singers as well evidence in the spectacular performance by Owens in the title role, and he was well matched by soprano Melody Moore as Lady Macbeth.

Bogart offered up several thematic conceits that may have been unsettling to classicists. She split the witches into three groups of “apparitions,” operating in a setting that appeared to be 1930s or pre-or-post war England. The extras that we see often seem to be typical Londoners, in suits, with briefcases and baggage, coming from the market. They’re the ordinary folk that are used to unsettling effect in a second-act set piece which, shows the true suffering of the denizens of Macbeth’s tyrannical kingdom.

While Moore has her musically difficult and powerful moments, it is Owens who bears watching and listening to throughout. Decked out at first as a triumphant but brusque general heavy with medals, he has some uncertainty in his bearing at the beginning, it’s a slow process whereby Owens, with his acting and singing, gradually and frighteningly becomes Macbeth in full, no more so than in the famous Banquo’s ghost scene at a banquet where he repeatedly jumps on a table to joust with the ghost and victim of Macbeth, an apparition no one else can see.

Verdi—with music that offers the full range of emotion and style—does Shakespeare justice with a big assist from conductor Joseph Colaneri.  The libretto often stays strictly true to the Bard’s most famous speeches from “Macbeth.” If you’ve never heard Shakespeare truly sung, this is your chance.

All four operas, plus other offerings, will be performed through most of August.  For Washington opera lovers, it’s worth a trip to see what’s going on at Glimmerglass. “The Magic Flute” will be performed Aug. 7, 10, 14 and 23. “Macbeth” runs Aug. 8, 13, 15 17 and 22.  “Cato in Utica” will be performed Aug. 9, 16, 20 and 22, and “Candide” runs Aug. 6, 8, 11, 15 and 21.
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Gary Tischler •

In a Broadway theater world where the search for the next big thing is always on, “Dear Evan Hansen,” the new musical having a world-premiere run at Arena Stage through Aug. 15, has a lot going for it.

In many ways, it’s a thoroughly modern musical, with contemporary music, themes and central characters, and with rising theater artists at the helm. The show — about a young man who pretends to have been a close friend of a troubled high school student who’s committed suicide — is the work of a group of artists who’ve already made names for themselves on Broadway. And the cast is both an exciting and calming mixture of young and older pros.

Directed by Michael Greif, whose credits include “Grey Gardens,” “Next to Normal” (which was rebooted for Broadway at Arena Stage) and “If/Then,” starring Idina Menzel, which had its pre-Broadway run at the National Theater two seasons ago, “Dear Evan Hansen” has a book by Steven Levenson, who penned “The Unavoidable Disappearance of Tom Durnin” (staged at Roundabout Theatre), as well as scripting and co-producing the hit Showtime series “Masters of Sex.”

The music and lyrics are by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, noted for the hit “A Christmas Story: The Musical” and “Dogfight,” produced Off Broadway at Second Stage Theatre (and, coincidentally, being staged at the Keegan Theatre in Dupont beginning Aug. 22).

Ben Platt is headlining “Evan Hansen” as Evan Hansen, bringing some major movie mojo to the project after being the male lead in the hugely successful “Pitch Perfect” movies (1 and 2) and appearing with Meryl Streep in “Ricki and the Flash,” now playing at a Cineplex near you. He made his Broadway debut as Elder Cunningham in “The Book of Mormon.”

For Michael Park, playing alongside another Broadway veteran, Jennifer Laura Thompson, as the shaken parents of Connor, the teen lost to suicide, “Dear Evan Hansen” has been a unique experience. “Being in a show like this from the beginning, an original American musical with all that phrase implies, is exciting. It’s really being part of the process from the beginning, from inception, all the readings, the workshops, the rehearsal. And it’s still changing. This project remains electric and alive even now, because this is the first time it’s gone in front of a paying audience.”

The hope, of course, is that the show will eventually wind up on Broadway. Like some of the other shows involving the creative team of Greif, Levenson, Pasek and Paul, it’s part of an ongoing attempt, on Broadway and in the theater in general, to find the kind of musical that taps into the temper of the times and pushes the genre forward.

Park may be best known for playing Jack Snyder on the hugely popular daytime soap opera “As The World Turns,” for which he received two consecutive Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama.

His theater credits are varied and rich. He was in the original cast of “Smokey Joe’s Café” and played Billy in “Carousel,” the difficult part of Gooper in a recent production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and Mr. Bratt in “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” Off-Broadway, he was in “The Threepenny Opera” at A.C.T., “Hello Again” at Lincoln Center and “Violet” and “The Burnt Part Boys” at Playwrights Horizons.

He was also in the live television productions of “Peter Pan” and “The Sound of Music” on NBC. “That can be scary,” he said. “It’s sort of like theater in the sense that it’s live, but there’s no audience. But then again there’s an audience of millions.

“This is a very touching, moving show,” he said. “Playing a parent, well, I know about that, and it touches you deeply and easily. I’ve been very lucky to do the things I’ve done. I have a good and real life, and that keeps you grounded. I’ve been married for 20 years to my wife Laurie Nowak, who’s a music therapist, and we have three children, daughters Annabelle Jayne and Kathleen Rose and son Christopher Michael.” He understands all sorts of audiences, including the somewhat insular, fanzine world of soap operas. “Fame, celebrity, all of that is nice if it comes, but I’m an actor who loves the work, and loves my life.

“I think Broadway — especially the world of Broadway musicals — is always trying to find a new voice, a new way of creating work that touches an audience, for its music, for its drama, or style and theme. I’ve been around it a lot and it’s a crowded field. Those songs by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller were wonderful. I’ve done Rodgers and Hammerstein and ‘Business’ as well.

“I think this is a pretty special creation. It’s original, down to earth, it is romantic and moving at the same time. I love being a part of it, of getting to work with everybody here. It’s very much a part of our times, and in that sense it’s very alive, and I think it will attract that elusive new audience that’s out there.”

Gary Tischler • August 7, 2015

Barring unforeseen circumstances, by the time anyone reads this, the folks at the Keegan Theatre — which is to say, founders Mark A. Rhea and Susan Marie Rhea — will have come full circle.

Keegan will have settled into its newly and finally renovated theater on Church Street just off Dupont Circle, giving both a climax and new beginning to a story that had its start in the 1990s, when Keegan was a fledgling, nomadic enterprise with a not-always-certain future.

Their 2015-2016 season will have opened with a production of Tennessee Williams’s classic play “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” which resonates in American theater history, but also in a highly personal way both for the Rheas, who are co-directing, and the company.

“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” is famous on a larger stage as one of the great playwright’s bigger Broadway hits, and as a gaudy 1958 MGM film starring Elizabeth Taylor at her zenith, as Maggie the Cat in a negligee; Paul Newman as Brick, her boozing, haunted husband; and Burl Ives as the formidable (and dying) Big Daddy. The play won a Pulitzer Prize for Williams. The original 1955 production was directed by Elia Kazan and starred Barbara Bel Geddes as Maggie and Ben Gazzara as Brick; a 1974 revival, directed by Shakespeare Theatre Company Artistic Director Michael Kahn, starred Elizabeth Ashley as Maggie and Keir Dullea as Brick, with Fred “Munster” Gwynne as Big Daddy.

“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” was the first play Keegan staged, in 1997-1998. Not only that, but the last time the company took on the play, during its 2001-2002 season, Mark was Brick to Susan Marie’s Maggie the Cat.

“Oh, God, yes,” Susan Marie said. “This production, with all that’s going on, is so special to us. We’re opening the season with a play that began our history. We’re directing actors in roles that we played. All of this while the finishing touches to the renovations are still being done. And, of course, it means something very special on a personal level.”

We’re talking as the smell of fresh wood, long planks of wood on the side of the lobby, still lingers in the new theater.

“We had known each other, and worked together before [in the “The Taming of the Shrew”], but something happened during the course of the ‘Cat’ production,” she said.
“Our relationship deepened,” Mark said. “I mean, this play asks so much of you, you have to really dig deep and expose some parts of yourselves which under normal conditions people might never get to see. We fell in love, deeply.”

“He proposed and, I think perhaps a year later, we were married. We’ve been together ever since,” said Susan Marie.

So part of the story of Keegan — actors falling in love while acting in a searing, emotionally draining play — is a love story. A love story that includes the building of a company, regular tours in Ireland (Galway, County Killarney, Cork), staging plays and making theater in a certain way, with each bringing particular gifts to the process.
Mark, whose background is Irish, has a deep passion for Irish theater, plays and playwrights. “They’re dark and funny, and character driven,” he says.

“We’ve almost always done the Irish tour,” says Susan Marie. “We take American classics — Tennessee Williams, Miller, Mamet, Albee — and bring them to Ireland. In Europe, and for sure in Ireland, that’s what people really want to see and experience — that is, our classic plays — and, of course, many people have seen the ‘filums,’ as they say it.”

In the Washington area, “We’ve been everywhere,” she says. “Arlington, Northern Virginia, in churches and schools. It was something of a vagabond existence, but we built an audience over the years, and we have an audience now.”

The theater on bucolic Church Street, which used to be a private school, has attracted an eclectic set of companies over the years: outliers from the suburbs like the award-rich Synetic Theatre, theaters without homes, and New Playwrights. Keegan had been there off and on until, a year or so ago, in the midst of a full and successful season, the opportunity arose to buy the theater for over $2 million, accomplished with a special fund drive.

Renovation proceeded apace, though not necessarily with ease. Even as the opening approached, there were still things to be done, permits to finalize and agonizing details to finish off. But the new theater, with more open air and glass-enclosed views of the leafy setting — not to mention enough bathrooms for everyone — is a big improvement on the past, without losing the most important thing Keegan offered as a theater environment: intimacy.

“Cat” will run through July 25. Other shows in the 10-play season include a new musical, “Dogfight,” in August; “The Dealer of Ballynafeigh”; “An Irish Carol”; and Green Day’s “American Idiot.”

Gary Tischler •

One thing you can say about the folks at the Keegan Theatre: they don’t shy from a challenge.

To inaugurate its new and permanent digs at the Keegan on Church Street in Dupont Circle, co-directors Mark and Susan Marie Rhea chose to open with Tennessee Williams’s  still startling and ferocious 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” in all its three-hours-plus fury, a play that on scale of one to ten in terms of tasking and testing actors and directors as well as the patience and will of the audience is around an 11.

If that wasn’t enough, the official opening performance July 30 heightened the difficulty level with the cancellation of two preview performances due to weather difficulties that occurred during the last finishing touches to the renovation.

That probably accounted for a certain under-rehearsed quality to parts the production, but it also ratcheted up the raw emotional qualities of some of the longer scenes, and the Keegan’s gift and history for intimate directness. What you got was a true, authentic version of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,”  which in terms of its history is a play full of the ghosts of legendary past productions and a brilliant, if entirely muddled all-star movie version to haunt actors and directors. 

The renovation includes new entrance and a glossy and glassy outdoor sheen, plus the addition of several new rest rooms throughout the theater, an addition that was entirely welcome for a play lasting three hours plus, three acts with two intermission.  

It’s a taxing proposition for an audience, but this is the reward: the realization in the end of just what a forceful masterpiece of American theater this Tennessee Williams play is, what a gift for language, mixing crudeness with poetic imagery, he had, how he managed to peel the onioned layers of lies the characters hold savagely close, and how this more than 60-year-old play resonates so sharply today.

The Keegan stage has remained the same—it makes any production an exercise in intimacy. With the characters in “Cat,” this is a proximity that can sear.  

Here we are again in the brilliantly white bedroom, occupied by the self-described Maggie the Cat in the most alluring slip in stage history, holding forth, pacing more like a lioness than a mere cat, laying out the Southern situation, gathered here in this thousands of acres-estates for the birthday of Big Daddy, her husband’s overbearing father. 

Big Daddy may be dying, but he thinks he’s dodged a cancer bullet.   At stake is love and hatred and Big Daddy’s estate.  Maggie wants it for herself and her husband Brick, haunted by the death of his best friend Skipper,  refusing to have relations with his wife, guzzling booze by the shot glass at an alarming rate until he hears the  click that stops his pain.  His lawyer brother Gooper and his snooping, snooty wife Mae have produced a passel of what Maggie calls “no-neck monsters,” five kids with another on the way.  Big Mama, strident, emotional frets over Big Daddy’s health.

Williams, a gay man and Catholic son of the South, takes his time with the characters—in a long first act, Maggie, played with  the intensity of a striving but unsatisfied woman, using her Southern accent like a musical story-telling instrument by company member Brianna Letourneau, dominates the stage, alternatively haranguing and trying to seduce her husband Brick, trying to prod and provoke him into life. 

When Big Daddy arrives, he comes on with strength, bolstered by news of an apparent escape from the Big C judgement, and he revels and reeks of the life force that he carries with him—he’s an inhaler, a dominate storm force. It’s a kinetic performance by Kevin Adams.  It’s not in the big, bigger-than-life bigness of a Burl Ives or even James Earl Jones. It’s mainly real and layered.  Adams makes an aria out of storming into the room and yelling, “What’s that smell? I smell . . . mendacity.” He lingers over the little-used word, as if it were a bomb that was stealthily building to explosion.

This “Cat” is directed and laid out to the point where every word counts. You strain to listen and hear it right, accompanied by the atmospherics of that family house, veranda, walkways, voices heard from outside, a storm exploding, servants walking in and out singing fragments of gospel songs, peeking in, passing by. 

In this scene—once occupied by the likes of blue-eyed Paul Newman in the movie version—Kevin Hasser is a great deflector as Brick. He pushes aside accusations, the allure of Maggie, Big Daddy’s attempts to push him into action.  That understated quality to this Brick is as haunting as every drinks he pours and downs.

The production isn’t perfect. It’s rough around the edges, but never at the core. Sometimes, the sheer length of it can bludgeon the audience member, who’s bearing witness.  

You watch this, and you see that has the quality of a classic play. It has the ability to drag you in and make you hear the music of our times. 

The movie version muddled the issue of the true nature of Brick’s relationship with Skipper, which appeared to be homosexual, even though Brick denies it.  “No,” he says. “Not that. People hate that. It wasn’t that. People think it’s disgusting.”  That phrase just a few days after gay marriage became the law of the land resonates mightly.  So does the plantation mentality and atmosphere in which Big Daddy strides so confidently, given recent events.

Mostly, much of this production is a gift, not only to the audience, but to Tennessee Williams.

“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” runs July 7 through July 25 at the Keegan Theater at 1724 Church St. NW. 
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Gary Tischler • July 16, 2015

The 11th D.C. Jazz Festival ended Tuesday in an expansive stretch of concerts all over the bustling Washington landscape, stretching boundaries, embracing new genres, serving youth — with occasional backward glances at this most American of musical forms.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, on June 11, Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman died at the age of 85. Coleman was a jazz giant from the past who was also always about its future. Once you start reading about him, and listening to some of his particularly free and flowing music (on You Tube, if not elsewhere), you get lost in his story and his music.

Coming out of Texas, he aim was to set jazz free, blowing the alto sax, composing, arranging, playing most often with his jazz family of cornetist Don Cherry, bassist Charlie Haden, drummer Billy Higgins and others, including pianist Paul Bley. Sometimes he played with his son Dernardo on drums. He also played the trumpet and the violin.

He was — once he knew what he was, which was, as described in many a headline, a “jazzman” — always pushing, looking ahead in the same way that Charlie Parker was, rearranging the whole damn thing. Hence, and soon enough, in 1959, came “Tomorrow is the Question!” — a boppy, beyond-boppy and singular composition that posited an answer to the question of “What Is To Be Done?” The answer: “The Shape of Jazz to Come.”

This seems immodest, but it was also true. Critics called it avant garde, as they would some of Miles Davis’s work.
Coleman’s music was a strange kind of avant garde. It had melodic spurts, sweet stuff and blues and rambling, rumbling moments of sax and horn. It could be mistaken for another version of Americana, deeper and more wounding while optimistic. His music was often controversial: praised by the likes of Leonard Bernstein, but not so much by Davis himself, who called him “all screwed up inside.”

No matter how far you stretch jazz or decompress it, or bastardize it or marry and fuse it to something else, it always brings with it its favorite child, improvisation. That’s the genius of jazz, that’s how you bend it and blend it at the same time. Jazz without improvisation (for a minute or twenty) is really jazz without its soul, if not its heart. Coleman understood that, which is not to say that he wanted the music to change to the point that nobody understood it, or worse, wanted to listen to it.

You get a sense of where the train went off the tracks into the future in “Free Jazz.” One player called it organized chaos.

But it’s also the kind of thing you’re still likely to hear on a given night in some drifty club, a quartet, the sax going on off, out of bounds, getting joined in disjointed fashion by a horn, drums coming on soft, then in a fury, and bass catching up, drifting off, coming right on in. If there’s a piano, well, something different.

It’s a funny thing, this envelope pushing. Stick around long enough, and everybody recognizes who you are at last, and that you’ve touched everyone. The obituary in Rolling Stone by David Fricke, for instance — called “Ornette Coleman: The Man Who Set Jazz Free” — recalled a story about Jerry Garcia playing on Coleman’s album “Virgin Beauty,” the point being that Coleman, like Parker, influenced everybody, everywhere.

On You Tube, the music gives you an idea of a journey: “Free Jazz,” the classic “Lonely Woman,” “Bebop with Hard Bop,” “Skies of America,” which one critic said Virgil Thompson would have been proud of. The tributes in the comments came in American, in Japanese, in German, Arabic, French and Spanish, rest in peace and swing.

Coleman’s spirit lives in every new note, and every old one too. The jazzman is home.

Gary Tischler •

Over the 40-some years of its existence, GALA Hispanic Theatre, under the leadership of founders Hugo and Rebecca Medrano, has proven to be an eclectic institution that, while culling Spanish-speaking culture for iconic works, has also pushed the envelope with productions of new ones.

Still, in all of its history of bringing receptive Washington audiences classic plays by Spanish authors — from Lope De Vega to Lorca — as well as newer works from Latin America, and a treasure trove of musical and family presentations, it’s likely that the Medranos and company haven’t tackled something quite as challenging and unusual as the show now playing at the GALA stage in the renovated Tivoli in Columbia Heights.

That would be “Las Polacas — The Jewish Girls of Buenos Aires,” an edgy, salsa- and tango-tempered musical about … sex trafficking. The “Polacas” are young Jewish girls from Poland who were lured to Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital city, by false promises of marriage or work in the 1920s.

Like GALA’s website, the production is bilingual, Spanish and English — GALA, incidentally, stands for Grupo de Artistas Latinoamericanos — with projected English subtitles. Performances continue through June 28.

Written by Argentinian playwright Patricia Suárez-Cohen, with music by Mariano Vales, the show is a commissioned production, which is to say that it’s a ground-up work by GALA, a fact that, alone, should make the project daunting for all concerned.

Recently, we talked to founder Hugo Medrano, as well as Samantha Dockser and Martín Ruíz, two critical members of the cast of “Las Polacas,” at the theater.

“We recognized that this could be a major challenge for us,” said Medrano, who seems to thrive on challenges. “The subject is not the most likely for a musical, for one thing, but it has a historic importance, in that this actually occurred, long before people talked about such things and gave it a name. We wanted to make a musical to give it a flavor, a theme, a setting — which is Argentina and Poland in the 1920s. It’s the kind of thing that needs to find its audience, not just among Jewish people, but a universal one.”

It probably helps that Medrano is a native of Argentina, as is Ruíz, the striking actor who plays Schlomo, the seductive protagonist who helps lure young girls to Argentina, where a life of prostitution awaits.

“The most important thing was that we had to find the right young actress to play the part of Rachela. She had to be the right person, believable right off the bat. She had to embody that part,” Medrano said.

And that’s how they chose Samantha Dockser, a 20-year-old senior BFA acting major at the University of Miami, in Coral Gables. Dockser, who is from McLean, Virginia, is performing her first professional role — the lead role in the production.

With dark long hair and fine features, Dockser has the kind of unassuming loveliness that a girl like Rachela requires. “I saw the notice for the audition and I thought, maybe I could do this, and it didn’t hurt to try.” She got the part.

“She’s a young girl, an innocent, and she is vulnerable to a man like Schlomo, who’s charming and handsome and all of that — and she has no idea what is going to happen to her,” Dockser said. “But she’s also strong and defiant. I can relate to her age, but in terms of the reality of the situation, that’s empathy and imagination.”

“It’s difficult material,” she said. “Ruíz’s character hits me at one point, and I was worried that my dad would get upset watching that. But he understood what was going on.”

For his part, Ruíz is glad to be reunited with GALA (where he appeared in “Momia en el Closet: The Return of Eva Peron” in 2011). “It is a wonderful place to work. The projects are unusual. The people are like a family,” he said through a translator. “I think, you know, that Schlomo presents himself as a kind of romantic revolutionary or anarchist, you know, changing society. And that can be appealing to a girl like Rachela. But it’s her mother who essentially sells her to him.”

On stage you can see a kind of mountain of mementos of the girls’ former life in the villages of Poland: luggage, a toy ocean liner, clothing and books, and the like.

Being here, in this theater, you become mindful of Medrano’s and GALA’s long history and how the Tivoli venue has changed and solidified GALA. The company — which has also presented music, including salsa, flamenco and tango — has occupied many spaces, but it only obtained a permanent home, in 2005, after it won a bid to become part of the renovated Tivoli.

In earlier years, Medrano often acted in the plays, winning a Helen Hayes Awards for best actor in a resident play, for his star turn in “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”

Staging “Las Polacas” may seem like a challenge and something of a brave choice, but it’s also emblematic of how Medrano and the people who have supported GALA — audiences, artists, fundraisers and trustees — have gotten this far, enriching the city with a unique tapestry of Hispanic performing arts. [gallery ids="102112,133813,133811" nav="thumbs"]

Ari Post •

There is a moment in artist Shirin Neshat’s short film, “Munis,” where a dead man is lying on the ground of an empty stone courtyard beside a dead woman. “In place of past and remembrance,” says the dead man, speaking in Persian, “all that remains are my dreams.” The scene is a sort of magical encounter between the recently deceased, and the statement is not so much a symbol for anything as a blunt expression of sociological displacement.

The short film follows Munis, a young Iranian woman in Tehran in the summer of 1953, as she listens to radio reports of clashes between supporters of the Mosaddeq government and unnamed “opposition groups” aided by “foreign forces.” As the radio conveys Mosaddeq’s exhortation to the Iranian people to “stand firm,” Munis’s brother enters, chastising her to get ready to meet a potential suitor. She ignores him, but he yanks the cord from the radio, severing her only link to the outside world.

Stepping outside to the rooftop of their home, she listens to protestors chanting in the distance. Munis then looks down to see an injured demonstrator collapse on the street below. She stares at him for a long moment, and then leans forward and falls silently to her death — or rather, she drifts weightlessly as a feather to the ground.

Lying beside the dead man on the ground, Munis’s conversation with the dead man commences. She comes into his dream, and we find her suddenly amid a throng of proShah demonstrators, at first observing and then shaking her fists and yelling slogans of resistance as the crowd is ruthlessly dispersed by the military. Only in death can she finally participate in the strange carnival of political unrest.

It is impossible to disentangle Shirin Neshat’s work and biography from the turbulent recent history of Iran, the country where she was born in 1957 and lived until 1975. As she herself observes, “Every Iranian artist is, in one way or another, political. Politics has defined our lives.”

“Shirin Neshat: Facing History,” now on view (through Sept. 20) at the Hirshhorn Museum, seeks to illuminate the political and cultural influences that have informed Neshat’s creative life. The first Hirshhorn exhibition organized under the directorship of Melissa Chiu, the show confronts the complex cultural dynamics of our day with work that offers a transnational perspective, an invaluable perspective for understanding the contemporary art world.

Presenting Neshat’s work in a sequence that allows viewers to experience an unfolding of history through the artist’s eyes, the exhibition opens with “Munis” (2008), set in 1953 during the coup that ousted Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq from power and consolidated the rule of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. It then moves to the photographic and video works Neshat made in response to her first visits to Iran since the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979. Finally it progresses to her monumental photographic series, “The Book of Kings” and “Our House Is On Fire,” created in the wake of the Iranian Green Movement protests of 2009 and the subsequent Arab Spring uprisings across the Middle East.

Consistent in all of these works is Neshat’s depiction of women as a sometimes hidden, but potent, source of resistance and strength. Often in contrast to their male counterparts, Neshat’s female characters are rebellious, always taking action.

In Neshat’s short film “Turbulent,” a man sings a charming waltz of an Iranian song to a group of men, who cheer merrily. As soon as he concludes, a woman, projected onto a screen on the opposite wall, emits a sound then slowly accelerates into a startling, unpredictable, gut-wrenching surge of musical expression, part song, part force of nature. It is not a mere performance such as the man delivered — it is something simmering from deep within that comes roiling to the surface. The men watch her from the opposite screen, stunned, speechless and unmoving.

The raw power and emotional energy of this video will likely floor you. And that would be enough. But it is worth knowing, going in, that in Iran, women are forbidden from singing in public.

So while this exhibition might at first seem oppressively political in its message, and out of place in an art museum, Neshat’s works are deeply human meditations on freedom and loss, at once personal, political and allegorical.

“Munis,” for instance, is part of a larger project that Neshat pursued between 2003 and 2009 to create a series of video installations — and even a feature film — based on the 1989 magic realist novella by Shahrnush Parsipur, “Women Without Men,” which tells the stories of five women whose troubled lives converge in a mysterious orchard.

Despite the complex and dynamic historical and political implications, there is such raw, aesthetic beauty to everything in the exhibition that you can allow yourself to deal with the art on its own terms. Neshat’s vision and delivery is so clear and powerful, it feels natural to let the art unfold simply before you.

This is work that is searching for liberation in expression and finding it in strange places, beyond the judgement of politics and the politics of judgement. It is found within, underneath the government-sanctioned hijabs that women are required to wear around their heads, beyond the strict Iranian constitution that controls both the public and private lives of women in the society.

Neshat finds freedom in the internal expression, and writes it large for those who don’t have the privilege to release it. [gallery ids="102113,133807,133810" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

The Chamber Dance Project, the innovative dance company founded by celebrated choreographer Diane Coburn Bruning, made a spectacular debut and became a D.C. resident with its inaugural season here last year at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater.

The company is in the midst of a second flurry of programs in year two through June 28 at the Lansburgh Theatre, where it’s in-residence, with a program oriented towards imaginative innovation of the kind you’re not likely to see anywhere else.

The program is a heady brew sparked by the presence of a roster of solo dancers from companies in Cincinnati, Atlanta, Milwaukee and Washington performing world premiere works with contemporary ballets and dances by four choreographers, complete with a live string quartet. The works are classic in echo and resonance and contemporary in style with athleticism, sensuality, and “arresting emotional shifts.”

The Chamber Dance Project will be performing two programs, including a world premiere of choreographer Darrell Grand Moultrie’s “Wild Swans,” founder Diane Coburn Bruning’s “Arranged,” and D.C. premieres of Ann Carlson’s “Four Men in Suits” and Bruning’s “Journey.” In addition, they will be putting on Bruning’s powerful “Exit Wounds” and “Time Has Come” as well as Jorge Amarante’s tango-flavored “Sur.”

Every performance includes CDP’s popular “structured improv”, in which the troupe builds a dance from audience suggestions.

There will also be house concert’s with the string quartet, open rehearsals, and preview performance As part of the group’s outreach organization, the CDP is donating 300 tickets to area youth and veterans

Dancers include Francesca Dugarte, Morgann Rose and Luis R. Torres from the Washington Ballet, Jacob Bush from the Atlanta Ballet, Chris Lingner from the Cincinnati Ballet, and Davit Hovhannisyan and Luz San Miguel from the Milwaukee Ballet.

Program A—“Wild Swans”, Arranged”, “Four Men in Suits” and “Timer Has Come” will be performed Friday at 7:30 p.m., and Sunday at 7:30 p.m. at the Lansburgh Theatre.

Program B—“Journey”, “Wild Swans”, “Exit Wounds” and “Sur” will be performed tonight at 7:30 p.m., and Saturday at 1 p.m. (Family Matinee Program) and 7:30 p.m. [gallery ids="102125,133742" nav="thumbs"]