Performance

Gary Tischler • July 16, 2015

It’s 10th anniversary time for the Capital Fringe Festival, the annual summer performing arts festival that keeps on moving and keeps on staying.

Ever since the Capital Fringe Festival—which runs from July 9 to August 2 — appeared in and around Washington ten years ago as one of the many offsprings of the Edinburgh, Scotland, Fringe Festival, it has made yearly strides to become something more than a fringe thing.   It has become, by now, an imbedded, always fresh, always surprising enterprise, part of the Washington performing arts community, and was so rewarded with a Helen Hayes Award not so long ago.

Every year, sometimes by the skin of its teeth, the Fringe presents its gaudy package of theater and performing arts baubles, the work of a large, eclectic group of theater and performing arts artists and groups from Washington and all over the country.  Here are the classics reworked, new one-man and one-woman shows about everything under the sun, bawdy comedy,  clowns, new plays with new views done in new styles, music, dance, burlesque and vaudeville. 

Surprise is always the key element, but there is a certain spirit involved, too—an almost breath-taking inviting tolerance of the different, the new, the never-heard-of before.  In the past, the venues have spread all over the place, downtown, in Southwest, in bars, churches, art spaces, adding another eclectic layer to the proceedings.  

Under the leadership of co-founder  and president and chief executive officer Julianne Brienza, the festival has moved to at first survive, then branch out, preserve, and moves forward, and the festival has managed to do so with aplomb.  This year, it seems almost permanent after the festival purchased a former gallery space as its headquarters in Northeast Washington at 1358 Florida Ave., NE, which serves as the Logan Fringe Art Space, and one of the venues (actually two, since there are two theaters in the space) for the festival.

With that move, the festival—game and big as ever with 129 productions spread out across three areas plus additional venues—has became a part of the locus of where a good chunk of D.C. change is taking place, which might seem perfect for the possible audience of the festival, a younger-skewing audience in search of the irreverent, the informal, the brand new, the amusing and serious, which might speak to the times we lives in and the upcoming weeks as well.

Essentially, the Fringe Festival will be centered around three neighborhoods—Trinidad, Brookland and H Street NE or the H Street Corridor. These are all burgeoning, rapidly changing and culture and restaurant-bustling neighborhoods, in fairly close proximity to each other.  Trinidad will haves the Fringe Festival headquarters, including Trinidad Theatre. Other venues include the Tree House Lounge at 1006 Florida Ave., NE, Jenks & Son at 910 Bladensburg Road NE, the Gilbert C. Eastman Studio Theatre at Gallaudet University, 800 Florida Ave. NE and the Playground also at Gallaudet University.

Brookland venues will include the Morris & Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation Theater at the Dance Place, at 3225 8th St. NE, the Hyman M. Perlo Studio at Dance Place, the Brookland Artspace Lofts Studio at 3305 8th St NE, banished? ARTillery (that’s how it is written), at 716 Monroe St. NE and Ward Hall at Catholic University.

H Street NE, where the trolley car is still not operating in a hot neighborhood, Fringe Festival are centered around the Atlas Performing Arts Center at 1333 H St. NE, sites of many Fringe performances last year, and at the Argonaut at 1433 H St. NE and Gallery O on H, at 1354 H St. NE.

Other venues around the District include the D.C. Columbia Arts Center in Adams Morgan, the Mead Theatre Lab downtown at Flashpoint, the Japanese American Memorial at New Jersey Avenue, Louisiana Ave and D St. NW, the Anacostia Arts Center at 1231 Good Hope Road SE and the Pinch at 3548 14th St. NW.

According to the festival website, there are 129 performing arts group schedule to do their thing, many of them are from Washington, D.C., Virginia and Maryland, but not exclusively. Surprise is probably the order of the day, but the name of the groups and some of their offerings might give you a hint of things to come—plus there are musical offerings at Fringe with late night cabaret and a music in the library program.

Here’s a dash of what’s up thoroughly at random:

“Belle and the Beasties” from the Actors Repertory Theatre; “Vanek Unleashed,” Alliance for New Theatre.org; “Sonata: The Naked Project” from Annexus; “Augustus the Sissy” from Dana Galloway; “It’s a Circus Out There,” the Federal Theatre Project;  “District of Cara” from Local Yogurt Productions; “Neighborhood 3:  Requisition of Doom” from the new Molotov Theatre Company; a Shakespeare sendup called “To Err is Falstaff” from Falstaff production and “The Winter’s Tale” from We Happy Few Productions; “The Second Coming of Joan of Arc” from Theatre Prometheus; “The Giant Turnip” from Beech Tree Puppets; “From Seven Layers to a Bikini Top in Less Than Five Hours” from Andrea Schell from California; “Bond, An Unauthorized Parody” from Tasty Monster Productions; “Dancing Ophelia” from Trajectory Dance Project; “Wombat Drool” from Uncle Funsy Productions; “The Last Burlesque” from Pinky Swear Productions of Virginia;  “The Life of King John: The Reprisal” from the Rude Mechanicals of Virginia. 

That’s just a few from a list of 129.  The rest you should be able to find by visiting the Capital Fringe Festival, along with ticket prices—reasonable, more than, times, locations, information about the shows, principals, and so on. And on.
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Gary Tischler • July 2, 2015

Robert Kellett van Leer, most recently managing director of the heralded European arts consulting firm Wonderbird, will fill the newly created position of senior vice president of artistic planning at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Following other recent hirings, van Leer, who has dual American and Dutch citizenship, will complete Kennedy Center President Deborah F. Rutter’s senior management team. He begins work July 6.

“Robert brings a wealth of multidisciplinary arts experience and creative leadership to the table, and I am excited to partner with him and our creative curatorial team of administrators and artistic leaders to shape the artistic vision for the center in the years to come,” said Rutter. “His commitment and innovative approach to the artistic endeavor will build and expand on our mission to provide innovative programming that reflects the core of John F. Kennedy’s legacy.”

At Wonderbird, based in London, van Leer did strategic cultural consulting with preeminent performing-arts and visual-arts organizations and philanthropic corporate clients. Previously, he was managing director of Nederlands Dans Theater, one of the world’s leading dance companies, where he increased revenues threefold, managed a budget of $15 million and supervised a staff of 110.

Earlier, he was head of music at London’s Barbican Centre, transforming its concert hall into a creative center for the commission, curation and presentation of global music in a multi-arts context. He also held positions with Wigmore Hall in London and Lincoln Center in New York.

“To work with the extraordinary artists and experienced, talented programming professionals at the Center across such a wide spectrum of the performing arts is a particular delight for me,” said van Leer. “Working together alongside our colleagues in education, as well as partners old and new, will provide the creative opportunities to manifest the voice of the Center for a new era while respecting the original vision.”

Gary Tischler • July 1, 2015

The singer-songwriter-memoirist-performer-author-rocker Storm Large is a sort of gaudy cruise ship that has sailed exotic, dangerous and, naturally, stormy musical (and probably personal) waters for a number of years. Large — her given name is Susan Storm Large — is a star to anybody who’s encountered her, and a legend in places like San Francisco and Portland,
Oregon, where she lives and performs.

But Storm Large and Frank Sinatra? The combination hardly seems likely for someone who quite successfully fronted a rockish-punkish-and-beyond band called The Balls (as well as other bands including “Storm and Her Dirty Mouth”), who was a contestant on “Rock Star Supernova,” who blogs on her website in blunt and honest terms and has written and performed her harrowing, affecting memoir “Crazy Enough.” She is an American original.

But then, so was Sinatra. Large will be part of “Let’s Be Frank: The Songs of Frank Sinatra,” organized by NSO Pops director Steve Reineke. The tribute will feature Reineke and piano man Tony DeSare conducting — and what Reineke terms his own “rat pack” of swell singers, including Ryan Silverman and Frankie Moreno, in addition to Large. The show will be presented in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall June 5 and 6 at 8 p.m.

“I always liked the whole idea of the Rat Pack and Frank Sinatra, all those kinds of very cool atmospherics,” Large said in a telephone interview. “I have an enormous amount of respect for him as a singer. I think he was the kind of guy who was always prepared. He trusted the lyrics, he made sure that he got the emotional truth of the songs. That way, his approach was blue-collar, which is where he came from.”

It’s not the first time Large has been at the Kennedy Center, a huge venue when compared to places like the popular Joe’s Pub in New York and clubs in Portland and San Francisco. She was here in 2012 with the eclectic pop group Pink Martini and the NSO Pops, performing to sold-out audiences.

“She was remarkable on that occasion, and she’s a remarkably talented singer,” Reineke said of Large. “Back then, she had to appear, on very short notice, for the group’s lead singer China Forbes who was ill.”

“She’s a fantastically gifted singer, and she’s grown so much—from rock to jazz to cabaret,” Reineke added. “She’s brave and tough and very sweet.”

She’ll be singing duets, songs like “Come Rain or Come Shine,” as well as solo numbers, notably “My Way” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”

“I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” by Cole Porter song is about obsessive love. “I don’t do it like most people. It’s usually upbeat, confident, buoyant. Mine is a little different — it’s more like you have this big love that you can’t get rid of. It’s like you can’t stop thinking about it. It’s like a woman who sits in her car in the rain watching her lover. She’s a little like a stalker.”

“I’ve Got You Under My Skin” is also part of “Le Bonheur,” a remarkable album which she produced last year with Robert Taylor and musicians James Beaton, Scott Weddle, Greg Eklund and Matt Brown. It’s almost a natural flow from her rocker days to Pink Martini to this album, which astonishes with its selection of songs, from Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart tunes to “Unchained Melody,” a longing song which the Righteous Brothers turned into a megahit, “Saving All My Love for You” by the iconoclastic Tom Waits and the charming, puffy-go-lightly “Satellite of Love” by Lou Reed.

There are also two songs written by Large herself, “Stand Up For Me,” a straight-up inspirational anthem, and the moving “A Woman’s Heart,” somewhere between a love song and a rueful lament.

Songwriting is yet another aspect of this queen of creative multitasking. She’s a great storyteller, intelligent and cogent in her opinions, awfully funny and often profane.

Large comes from Southborough, Massachusetts, attended a famous private school, where her father Henry was a history teacher and football coach, and went to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. “I think sometimes my parents weren’t sure when I went out the door where I was going — to school or running away with the circus.”

You can track her career and persona erratically on the Internet. On YouTube, watch her in a club in Mill Valley doing not just the song but the lead-up to “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” a 1983 super-hit which shows off Large’s playful, rocker side, as she tells the story of a song written on a napkin. She’s a natural-born clown; she loves making faces. And she’s hard to ignore as a presence, a dazzling, six-foot, hard-striding blond woman whose voice is as big as her shadow.

“I think you grow up a little as you go along, the things you can do, what you want to explore,” she said. “You go deeper into the music. You live your life more. I’m 46 now. You can’t do 300 shows a year all of the time.”

Listening to her talk, reading hair-raising parts of her memoir, seeing her on YouTube and listening to that voice, you get how she relates to and is at home in the deepest part of Frank Sinatra’s songs.

Her voice — like her walk and talk — is rangy, and in its push to put emotional truth out there is marked by her persona, her experience of the sex, drugs and rock-and-roll life, as well as the highs and lows of vocalizing. Her voice really gets up there, but it’s hard to say whether it can break a wine glass. For sure, when Susan Storm Large sings, she can break your heart.

Gary Tischler • June 24, 2015

When directors and designers come face to face with the daunting task of staging a piece of classical theatre—a “Hamlet,” or a “Lear,” the world of Falstaff or the Spanish classics, or a Moliere—the temptation, even the urge to contemporize, to make relevant a work from the past is often irresistible.

That’s certainly almost an imperative at work in the production of “Tartuffe,” Moliere’s most famous, and perhaps most difficult, play now at the Shakespeare Theater Company.

Ostensibly in the lists as a comedy—as are all of the 17th century playwrights works—“Tartuffe,” more than most has its dark sides, it’s frustrating, “good” people behaving idiotically. And it’s “bad” people behaving far worse than you might image. If Tartuffe, the most nearly savage of Moliere’s villains in his avarice, his heartless manipulations and will to power, is a monster, then Orgon, the good and disturbingly pious man is almost his equal as Tartuffe’s enabler. He’s a monster of thick-headedness pinned to his own sense of wisdom and authority that is tyrannical to a fault.

“Tartuffe” has been done often at the regional theater level, but never by the Washington Shakespeare company, and strictly speaking this is a co-production with South Coast Repertory and the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, directed and designed by Dominique Serrand, who is co-artistic director of “The Moving Company.”

This production has already been staged elsewhere in California at Berkeley Rep, for one, where it received a lot of critical acclaim. Contemporary relevance is the goal here, but what often happens in high concept productions of the classics is a kind of tug-of-war between style over substance. This “Tartuffe,” it seems to me, is a kind of a draw, wherein the style of the play, a barrage of contradictory intentions, is trying to become the substance of the play.

“Tartuffe” is about a lecherous, primal and almost gifted grafter, who sets his sights on the wealthy Orgon, the very proud and pious head of a family that includes servants, a marriageable daughter, his younger (and smarter) and beautiful wife, a brother, and sundry others. Tartuffe pretends to be the most pious of pious men, even more than Orgon himself, pretending to want nothing while trying to take everything. Orgon, smitten hopelessly with Tartuffe, promises him his daughter, his money, his house, all except his wife Elmire, whom Tartuffe pursues relentless and with oily passion.

Proceedings proceed to the brink of disaster as Orgon is on the verge of losing his daughter, his house and his wealth.

Serrand has approached this material as a kind of horror story, focusing on religious fanaticism, social tyranny and hypocrisy, where people are always on the move, posing or re-arranging themselves or disappearing upstairs or downstage. There is a lot to like in his approach—the slapstick set pieces in the first act are loud little mini-silent movies in their comedic effects.

But often, this production seems to trying to have its cake and save it for a rainy day. It starts out in rhyming intonations, then drops into more modern speech with occasional bouts of rhyming. There seems to be no particularly good reason to do this.

It’s difficult to escape Moliere’s world of 1643, except of course for the fact that Moliere deals in archetypes—his plays are about and satirize quack doctors, misers, meddling heads of families, misanthropes, frauds, tyrants and religious zealots. They are with us always, and are quite easily recognized. Moliere’s particular gift was one of dexterity in the absolutist world of Louis XIV—he could attack religious zealotry, but not the church, he could satirize social tyranny, but not the king.

Steven Epp as Tartuffe is a self-assured rat—he’s sexy, confident and sly—trying to seduce Ermine, he flips open a breast plate to bare his chest, much like an eager knight of old popping a cod piece. He’s the kind of religious tyrant who talks about blasphemy even while being casually blasphemous. In one of the more chilling lines, he says to Elmire while trying to straddle her: “I can consecrate any evil I do.” Sofias Jean Gomez, who was the sprite Ariel in “The Tempest” at STC last year, makes a temptation out of Elmire for almost any man, even in her deception, she never stoops to pretending to be stupid.

The Orgon house is a curious affair—bright and full of light, it resembles the abode of a Calvinist trying to be stylish.

Tartuffe always has at his side, or in corners or passageways two assistants, oily, creepy men who catch small birds and snuff them out just to show that they can. There is in this house always a threat, of spying, of being caught, of any horrible thing at all. This may echo our own age of no privacy whatsoever.

You can see just how carefully Moliere had to tread by the way he ends things. Orgon and his family are saved by the king, or his agent, who recognizes Tartuffe for what he is. I saw one production—years ago at Arena Stage— in which the king arrived by helicopter in all his Sun King glory to save.

Serrand adds his own touch by having Tartuffe marched off whipped and carrying a cross, perhaps smiling. Could it be that Tartuffe has been Tartuffed?

The play, in fact, ends in a confusion of panic. Too much has happened for the day (if not the play) to be saved.

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Gary Tischler •

What makes for a world-class jazz festival?

The obvious answer is world-class performers. The DC Jazz Festival, now in its 11th season — running June 10 to 16, with a special preview night June 5 — has plenty of those. But that’s just for starters.

It’s become a national and international festival, to be sure, but it is truly rooted in Washington — and spreading to every nook and cranny of it. The festival is a sublime testament to the multifaceted city that hosts it: capital of the nation, gathering place of world leaders, but also fundamentally a city of neighborhoods, with a rich jazz history of home-grown stars and venues of its own.

Certainly, everyone has their eyes on two venues that have recently become a major part of the festival: Jazz at the Yards, presented by the DCJF and Events DC at the Capitol Riverfront; and Jazz at the Hamilton Live, presented by the DCJF and the Washington Post at one of the city’s top nightlife and dining spots.

With jazz-flavored programs of all sorts, the festival seeds a very receptive city landscape, 125 performances in all, across 40 venues. The hugely popular and effective Jazz in the ’Hoods, which includes the Capital/Bop DC Jazz Loft Series and the East River Jazz Series; Jazz ’N Families Fun Days at the Phillips Collection; and new jazz artists presented in conjunction with the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage are just but a few examples.

The Yards will welcome a host of big, and rising, stars. On June 12, the New Orleans brass-funk band the Soul Rebels will perform along with vocalist Sharon Clark in a free concert. On June 13, the line-up includes the hip hop, rap star and composer Common, who won an Oscar for “Selma”; the amazingly original young bassist-singer-composer Esperanza Spalding, who will be presenting her new project, “Emily D+ Evolution”; Nigerian Afrobeat star Femi Kuti and the Positive Force; and one of D.C.’s finest jazz stars, the brilliant saxophonist Marshall Keys.

The Yards is a total, full-flavored jazz experience, set in a beautiful, green urban park overlooking the Anacostia River, with beverage tastings, chef demonstrations, cabanas, a marketplace and family friendly activities.

The Live at the Hamilton series, June 10 to 16, includes such stars as the Bad Plus Joshua Redman, the scintillating edgy group Snarky Puppy, the Jack DeJohnette Trio, featuring Ravi Coltrane and Matthew Garrison, the John Scofield Überjam Band, the Stanton Moore Trio and the Charlie Hunter Trio. Latin jazz pioneer and superstar Paquito D’Rivera and his Quintet will open the series with Edmar Castaneda.

In terms of the city, the gem of the festival may turn out to be the all-pervasive Jazz in the ’Hoods series. Varying in size and style as well as in location, the venues include restaurants, straight-up jazz clubs, libraries, museums and galleries.

The shows will range from the jazzy, classy Bohemian Caverns club off of U Street, where you can also find the atmospheric Twins, the Rumba Café in Adams Morgan, the Atlas Performing Arts Center along the bustling H Street Corridor, the Anacostia Arts Center, the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage, the Sixth and I Historic Synagogue in the bustling downtown areas, Bistro Lepic on Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown, the Dorothy I. Height/Benning Neighborhood Library, Dukem Jazz on U Street, the Phillips Collection, the UDC Recital Hall, Tudor Place in Georgetown, the Honfleur Gallery, to the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens.

At a special annual awards reception at the residence of the Japanese ambassador on June 4, the DC Jazz Festival Board of Directors will present its annual awards: the 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award to jazz drummer and educator Billy Hart; and the 2015 John Conyers Advocacy Award to Amy Austin, former publisher of the Washington City Paper.

If you don’t know where to start, given the sheer volume of quality programming, DC Jazz Festival Artistic Director Willard Jenkins has some suggestions:

June 5

The DCJF Preview Night at Westminster Presbyterian Church. Lenny Robinson and Friends, including saxophonist Elijah Jamal Balbed, pianist Mark Meadows, bassist Herman Burney and vocalist Alison Crockett, perform at the church, known for its weekly Southwest Jazz Nights.

June 10

The James King Duo at Tudor Place. D.C.’s own first-call bassist and international touring artist perform in the beautiful setting of Georgetown’s Tudor Place.

June 11

Gretchen Parlato and Lionel Loueke at Bohemian Caverns. The thoroughly idiosyncratic, unprecedented voice-guitar duo performs at the legendary U Street club.

June 8, 10, 12, 13 and 14

Emerging artists on the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage. Saxman Elijah Jamal Balbed, vocalist “Sweet Lu” Olutosin, vocalist Alison Crockett, the worldly ensemble Sine Qua Non and the groove active brass band Crush Funk Brass.

June 13

AACM@50 at the Hecht Warehouse. To celebrate the AACM’s 50th birthday, CapitalBop presents the Ernest Khabeer Dawkins Orchestra, performing Dawkins’s new Nelson Mandela Afro opera and the Organix Trio with flutist Nicole Mitchell, cellist Tomeka Reid and drummer Mike Reed. Honorable mention: Thundercat at the Hecht Warehouse June 12.

June 12

The Bad Plus Joshua Redman at Hamilton Live. The genre-defying acoustic trio the Bad Plus welcomes into its laboratory one of the great tenor saxophonists of our time, Joshua Redman.

June 14

The Cookers at Sixth and I Historic Synagogue. The Cookers is one of the most spiritually soulful, most explosive acoustic units in all of jazz. The band consists of seven bona fide bandleaders, including saxophonists Billy Harper and Donald Harrison, trumpeters Eddie Henderson and David Weiss, pianist George Cables, bassist Cecil McBee and drummer Billy Hart, a 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award recipient.

June 15

JazzAlive at UDC. One of the surefire artists on this program is D.C. native and fiery alto saxophonist Bruce Williams, backed by a UDC Jazztet led by the director of the UDC jazz program Allyn Johnson.

Gary Tischler • June 18, 2015

“Newsies,” the touring Disney hit musical now at the National Theatre through June 21, is something of a throwback—all the way to the days when Teddy Roosevelt was not president of the United States but governor of New York.

It’s also a rare bird—a musical that combines contemporary set-making (industrial-strength moving parts) with something so rare that it seems fresh. That would be dancing: dynamic, youthful, energetic and athletic dancing that sparks the proceedings almost for its own sake.

Oddly enough, for a big Broadway show, it’s practically accurate, in the sense that there really was a strike of Newsies, the young boys of New York City, who sold the peps, the screaming headline newspapers of the Pulitzers, the Hearsts, the Post, the Times, and others, and paid for the privilege at cutthroat rates.

When the coldly calculating Pulitzer, who could win a Pulitzer for meanest tycoon, raises the price for the newsies, most of them orphans living under deplorable conditions in an era when child labor was still rampant, they do the unthinkable. They go on strike. They’re led by the charismatic but troubled Jack Kelly, who’s helped by the plucky and brave (not to mention cute as a button) reporter Katherine, who gets them a front-page story and picture.

Will the newsies—most of them singing and talking in all the dialects of Brooklyn and the Bronx—triumph against all odds? Can a pumpkin become a coach? This is a Disney effort, after all.

For anybody with a long history or a major in movie shorts, these boys—tough, but sweet and full of dreams that kids in the ghettos of the time carried around like other kids carried toys—are right out of the old Bower Boys series: the only thing missing is a dog.

But Huntz Hall and Leo Gorcey (the old Bowery Boys stars) couldn’t hold a candle to these kids. These boys can dance, they can stomp, the can do somersaults, giant splits and leaps, and they handle anything from a broom to chairs as dancing partners. The big numbers—“King of New York,” “The World Will Know,” “Carrying the Banner,” and “Seize the Day”—are really big dance numbers and they sweep up the audience in their wake. It’s the engine and energy that drives the show and its melodramatic, penny dreadful plot, in which the hero, Jack, yearns for a saner, quieter place like “Santa Fe,” where he hopes to live with his pal Crutchie. (You guessed it, there’s a kid with crutches.)

“Newsies” started out as a 1992 movie which starred Christian Bale (soon to become “Batman”), but flopped mightily. Undeterred, Disney turned it into a wham-bang Broadway musical, which became a major league hit, with a big, youthful following made up with many adolescent girls enamored of the young hero. You could tell by the whistling and squealing.

The book is traditional Disney fare, including a lot of boy-meet-girl, a hero who wants to be an artist, a wise-butt little kid, nasty strike breakers, the imperious Pulitzer in his nest, and so on. It has its echoes—the newsies include among their demands fair wages and safe conditions for children working until they drop in the slums. For some of us who were born and raised in the pre-computer days of ink-stained presses, the show carries a little bit of nostalgia—we remember, if not the actual voices, at least movies in which newsboys yelled “Extra, Extra!” and newspapers were a booming business from which we received, for a dime or a penny or a nickel and a quarter (today’s Post is $1.50), a days worth of entertainment, gaudy, big headline news, births and deaths, the Katzenjammer Kids and the Lone Ranger, Miss Lonelyhearts, and sensational news of movie stars and distant places. Or something like that.

“Newsies,” for all that, is a money’s worth entertainment that delivers a high-flying show,fair-to-middling music (Broadway has yet to figure out just what the music in Broadway musicals is supposed to sound like), a Disney story and world-class dancing.

Georgetowner • June 16, 2015

The DC Jazz Festival, which runs from June 10 to 16, announced the recipients of its two major awards last week. 

The 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award will be going to world-renowned drummer and educator Billy Hart and the 2015 John Conyers Jr. Jazz Advocacy Award was awarded  to former publisher of the City Paper  Amy Austin.

The Lifetime Achievement Award—previous awardees have included Kenny Barron, Sadao Watanabe, Roy Haynes, Ron Carter, Jimmy Heath, Eddie Palmieri, James Moody, Ellis Marsalis, George Wein, Buck Hill, Clark Terry, Hank Jones, Billy Taylor and Dave Brubeck—will be given to Hart at the June 14 Sixth & I Synagogue concert by the all-star and rising acoustic jazz ensemble the Cookers.

Hart  is one of the most recorded drummers in the jazz world and has performed with most of the important jazz musicians in history.   Hart, 73, was raised in D.C. and grew up playing alongside such R&B legends as Otis Redding, and Sam and Dave and then with local legend saxophonist Buck Hill.  He also played with guitarist Wes Montgomery and NEA Jazz Master Jimmy Smith, and later recorded with McCoy Tyner, Wayne Shorter, Weather Report’s Joe Sawinul and others.

Hart teaches at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio and is adjunct faculty at the New England Conservatory of Music and at the New England Conservatory of Music.

Austin was feted at a special opening reception for the DC Jazz Festival at the Residence of Japanese Ambassador Kenichiro Sasae June 4.  The John Conyers Jr. Jazz Advocacy Award is presented each year to an individual or organization which has actively supported jazz and the DCJF.  The award is named for Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), who introduced the unanimously passed bill HR-57 in 1987, a bill that declared jazz “a rare and valuable American treasure to which we should devote our attention, support and resources to make certain it is preserved, understood and promulgated.”

Austin — who was introduced by At-large Council member Elissa Silverman, who was once a reporter and “Loose Lips” columnist for Washington’s City Paper — said, “I am honored to be recognized by DC Jazz Festival with the Jazz Advocacy Award in the city of D.C., one with many passions. Jazz and particular the DC Jazz Festival serves as a uniting force across populations and diplomatic boundaries. I’m thrilled to celebrate jazz as a forever growing force of D.C.’s urban heritage.”

Attendees at the reception—which included DC Jazz Festival founder Charles Fishman, executive director Sunny Sumter, current artistic director Willard Jenkins, television news anchor Maureen Bunyan and other dignitaries—were treated to a spectacular concert by gifted young jazz composer Miho Hazama, who conducted a 13-member jazz ensemble which played works composed by Hazama, including music from her album “Journey to Journey,” which contained the essence of both the formalities, and rigorous aspects of jazz and its free-wheeling improvisations.

Gary Tischler • May 21, 2015

Anton Chekhov, the great Russian playwright of comedic melancholy, is either spinning in his grave or sporting a modest smile these days.

His mostly 19th-century plays, which chronicled the decline of Russia’s privileged and landed classes, remain a source of fascination for 21st-century playwrights and — more important — 21st-century audiences, especially in Washington.

First, there was “Stupid F—–g Bird,”  a take on “The Seagull,” staged twice at Woolly Mammoth Theatre, followed by “Life Sucks,”  a riff on “Uncle Vanya” at Theater J last season.  Both were written by director-playwright Aaron Posner.

Posner is also directing “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” the Tony-Award winning play by Christopher Durang now at Arena Stage. At the same time, we have “Uncle Vanya” itself, by way of playwright  Annie Baker who’s modernized the language for this production at Round House Theater which features an all-star cast that includes Joy Zinoman (who in her time as founder and artistic director of Studio Theater, staged and directed an award-winning production of “The Three Sisters”).

Round and round it goes. There is even a comedic production—by  way of the New York Three-Day Hangover Theater Company called “Drunkle Vanya” at the Pinch Bar on 14th Street through April 25.

For the play that probably contains more references to—and probably reverence for—the Chekhov canon, you have to go to “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” hereafter referred to as VSMS, in the theater-in-the-round confines of the Fichandler at Arena Stage. 

Christopher Durang remains one of the most scathing, full-of-surprises satirist and comedic playwrights in American theater. In plays like “The Wedding of Betty and Boo,” “Sister Mary Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You” and “Beyond Therapy, ” he displayed a sharp eye on American culture. He poked tough love fun at what passed for modern society and did it with verve and imagination of the kind that made your eyes roll and your migraines start up.  Where else could you see a priest give a sizzling imitation of bacon frying on a griddle in “Betty and Boo”? Consider how Sister Mary Ignatius explained God’s answers to all our prayers: it’s just that “most of the time, the answer is ‘no.’ ”

Something seems to have happened to Durang with “VSMS.” He appears to have mellowed a little. He has afflicted his characters with painful modern crosses to bear and little wherewithal to withstand the pain, but he’s also bathed them in the warm (and sometimes fuzzy) light of hope. This is also good for the audience, which has opportunities to become fully engaged with these often hapless, self-centered, funny, sad (in a thoroughly Chekhovian way), glib, defiant characters.  At a recent matinee performance that I saw, the audience did just that and then some in a surprising and clearly visible and audible show of emotions. 

Durang makes sure we know we are in Chekhov land.  Vanya and Sonia are both from “Vanya,” and Masha is one of the “Three Sisters”, but could pass for the monstrous mother of “Seagull.” There is also Nina, a budding young actress beauty who embraces and worries over an assignment to play an molecule with all the nervous seriousness of a Broadway ingénue.  Spike is entirely with it in the here- and-now. He’s an actor wanna-be (he just missed landing a spot on “Entourage”) and Masha’s boy toy.

We’re not in a Russian dacha, but a big old house in Bucks County, Pa., where brother and sister Vanya and Sonia, in old bathrobes, start their caretaker day and get into a fight about coffee—or wait for their favorite birds to show up at the pond.  There’s also a housekeeper named Cassandra, tangled in braids, omens and warnings, from another world entirely, the old Greeks or voodoo New Orleans.

In marches Masha, a movie star in some decline but still acting acting the star and queen and a barely clothed Spike in tow. Things happen: there’s preparations for a costume party down the street. Masha wants to sell the house, which would evict the aimless Vanya and Sonia.

All of this is typical Chekhov material,  but we don’t need to know Chekhov plays to get this. In fact, a funny thing happens.  Somewhere along the way as things started to fall apart, all of the audience—which at this matinee was made up of mostly baby boomers, and two or three busloads of high schoolers—got involved.   When Sonia, (played with a startling range of emotions by Signature Theater star Sherri L. Edelen) bereft of love all her life, suddenly gets a call from a would-be-suitor, you could see many audience members were leaning over in their seats to see what she’d do, thoroughly engaged. 

Then, there was the attentive silence when Vanya (played with irascible spirit and warmth by Eric Hisson), having written a play which did include molecules, global warming and other matters, explodes into a roaring, raging riff after catching Spike texting. “We wrote letters back then. Yes, we licked stamps then,” he yelled, making it sound like Nora Desmond’s anthem, “We had faces then.” He launched into a dirge about all things lost to the Internet age, including coonskin caps, “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet,” and the habit of snail mail.  Nobody snickered, and everyone applauded.

Sometimes, things happen in the theater:  chief and often among them, the notion that we—the audience—are all in this together.  I suspect that happens often in “VSMS,” no matter what the makeup of the audience.  To be sure, it’s full of laughs, great writing, startlingly original performances—the worried star quality of Grace Gonglowski as Masha, Rachel Esther Tate’s warm Nina and Jessica Frances Dukes as Cassandra.

But mostly, it sparkles with communal acts of recognition, from a century ago and from right now.

“Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike” is at Arena Stage through May 3.
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Gary Tischler •

There is often comedy in operas, but there are few comic operas, certainly not the kind that Giaochino Rossini put together—“The Barber of Seville,” his first success, and “Cinderella” or “La Cerentola”, which he wrote in 1816, on the heels of the success of “Seville.”

Both operas are highly entertaining, and often laugh out loud funny, and both might be called the opera versions of cinematic rom-coms, in the sense that the action is spurred by romance and love, the idyllic kind that overcomes all obstacles as in the case of “Cinderella”.

“Cinderella,” sourced from a French fairy tale by Charles Perrault, which may account for its very likeable lightness, as opposed to the often grim output of the brothers Grimm. As a generic subject—a lovely young girl loses her beloved father and is pushed into the role of a dirt-sweeping servant girl, run ragged by haughty, cruel in-laws until her essential goodness and good looks triumph to snare a prince in search of a princess.

The images and themes of “Cinderella” are never far from the public eye. There have been ballets, fictional stories, television and stage musicals, and a classic Disney cartoon complete with a pumpkin that turns into a carriage and beloved mice and a fairy godmother.

This year, the Disney folks re-visited the story again in a big box-office live action film, directed by Shakespearean great Kenneth Branagh, no less. The story of a virtuous princess, a handsome prince, and noteworthy villains never seems to lose its appeal.

Now, we have the Washington National Opera ending its 2014-2015 season with a spritely, lively, full-of-eye-candy and blessed with musical and vocal bravado production of Rossini’s enduring success. It runs through May 21 at the Kennedy Center Opera House.

Purists might cringe at this thought, but this is one of those operas and productions that’s a crowd pleaser for the whole family—for fussy, comforted boomers, for millennials who get the jokes and for budding princesses dressed up for the occasion by their moms. A larger audience of thousands will get to view the production when it’s simulcast for free at Nationals Park May 16 as part of M&M’s “Opera in the Outfield.”

There are even mice, a half dozen or so of them, the friends of the princess-in-waiting, scurrying about, consoling friends and protectors of Cinderella, who dotes on them. This is an exercise in stage whimsy, and for those with a low tolerance for whimsy … well, too bad.

This is not quite the same old story—there’s no lost slipper (a piece of mother’s jewelry serves the same function), no evil stepmother, but there are two spectacular evil stepsisters in high-rise, high-color wigs, given full-bodied passion, nastiness, humor and drama by Domingo-Cafritz Young Artists Soprano Jacqueline Echols as Clorinda and the mezzo-soprano Deborah Nansteel as Tisbe.

“Cinderella” should be one of those accessible (as in “Carmen” or “The Magic Flute”) operas for people who supposedly don’t like operas. It’s practically a textbook case for opportunities to admire and be in a little awe of music full of pitfalls and difficult to sing. Rossini wrote “Cinderella” at top speed , and the music seems to have a little breathless quality to it, it is as if the orchestra were part of a running marching band. It’s not music or singing made for contemplation, including two bravura sections which end in characteristic Rossini crescendos, as six characters pass the vocal ball back and forth, sometimes seeming to levitate.

Aside from the sisters—and an energetic Simone Alberghini as Dandini a fake prince—it’s the Italian baritone Paolo Bordogna who has the showiest role as the wicked stepfather modestly named Don Magnifico. He sings his arias and words faster than a machine gun, puffs himself up like a red-faced puffin and struts like a short man trying to be tall.

Goodness wills out, but it has a tougher go of it in terms of the music, which rises to inspiration, but not necessarily and perforce to singing that makes you jump out of your seat. What rising star mezzo soprano Isabel Leonard manages to make of the part of Angelina (as in Cinderella) is to give the part and the music a great deal of warmth and grace, if not drama, which is just so, given the nature of the character. It’s really hard to bring purity and goodness to great musical heights—Cinderella is, after all, the most forgiving creature on earth, which foregoes a political career. But, in the end, she shines too, as does Russian tenor Maxim Mironov as Don Ramiro, the prince.

When the sisters and Don Magnifico and Dandini are on stage, the production acquires a brash stylish, almost tongue-in-cheek knowingness to it, but when Cinderella takes center stage, it becomes quieter, an overlay of some lovely remnant of the story whence it came.

For an opera that has so much vocal virtuosity in it, the first act is something of a haul at a hefty two hours. But conductor Speranza Scappuci and director Joan Font pull together to keep things at a pace where the hours, although they do not pass swiftly, pass engagingly.