Performance

Gary Tischler • February 23, 2015

Robert Earl Keen, the premier Americana music singer-songwriter and “Americana” star from Texas has a natural way of talking—and, we guess, writing. It’s like the beginning of natural-born memories, conversational, and without too much heavy lifting.  Sort of like the way he sings,  his voice is direct in delivery, you remember the way it sounds, not necessarily how long a note is held or the timbre.  As he’s said before about his voice, “You get used to it.”

The 59-year-old Keen has been around a while to amass a reputation, lots of tunes and albums (18 to date), beginning with “No Kinda Dancer,” and now his latest—just out this month —“Happy Prisoner,” a bluegrass-themed trip back to his listening and playing roots, which includes a cover of bluegrass legend Bill Monroe’s “Footprints in the Snow.”

He’s come to bluegrass territory, playing music from the album, at the Birchmere in Alexandria, Va., Tuesday night, a place which bills itself as “America’s Legendary  Music Hall,” in an area and state which happens to be a hotbed of “Americana” music and bluegrass.

“It’s a great place,” Keen says of the Birchmere. “Been there before. I loved it.  The album, the music, bluegrass, that’s like going back.”  He’s also said before, “I can’t think of a better thing on a Saturday morning than to tune into a bluegrass station, and get it going with that music and you listen, and you say ‘well, okay, let’s get started.’ ”

Keen is more or less a musician’s musician, singing, playing, writing in the “Americana” field in the sense that he works hard, travels all the time, tours and loves being in front of a live audience,  in clubs, parks, stadiums and venues all over the country. “There’s nothing better than singing in front of people,” he says.

“This is our roots,” Keens says of Bluegrass music. “It’s where all the other stuff comes from—folk, country,  cowboy music, all the sounds and rhythm are in there.  And Monroe, he’s the greatest, if you had to do that and Flat and Scruggs and others.”

Keen is from Texas, through and through and through, growing up in and around Houston, picking up English rock and Willie Nelson, and after getting a degree in English in 1980, starting writing songs and playing,  initially, you guessed it, “bluegrass.”  “It’s my roots, too, it’s what I started out doing.”

In the mid-1980s, he also started out doing albums—his first was in 1984 “No Kinda Dancer.” His album titles, like his song titles, are resonant of what you might call people’s music,  country and folk flavors, with a little bit of Texas spice. “No Kinda Dancer” was followed by “West Textures,” “A Bigger Piece of the Sky,” “Gringo Honeymoon,” “Picnic,” “Farm Fresh Onions,” “Ready for Confetti” and others.

“I think there were a lot of people doing so-called “Americana” music before it even became a genre or category,” Keen said.  “My buddy Lyle Lovett was doing it, and all of a sudden, it’s a Grammy category. But I think it’s several strands of music or offshoots of the strands, like country, from all over the country, from Nashville to Willie (Nelson), to folk, traditional music, regional,  bluegrass and so on.  I guess I fit in the category—so does Roseanne Cash, Lyle, Emmy Lou Harris.  It’s a pretty rich, diverse and broad category.  A lot of  it is acoustic.  It’s based in exceptional instrumental playing as well as in the emotional power of lyrics and stories.”

“I believe it’s an art form, sure,”  he said.  For Keen, the words mean a lot—he was an English major, after all.  “Yeah, they do,”  he said. “I like to write, I like to write songs that could stand alone and be read for themselves.” We talk a little bit about John Stewart, the former Kingston Trio member who was probably an “Americana” pioneer, and top-notch songwriter (“Daydream Believer”).  “He was a terrific guy,” he said. I knew him. Really good writer. Really good songs.”

Keen is proud of being a Texan—he’s lived there in different parts all of his life. “It’s got this mystique—the music, too, but there’s a lot of jokes about it, too.”

“We’re doing this by way of all acoustic,” he said.  “It’s embracing the music.   I didn’t write any of the songs. Me and the band put it together.  Lyle sings on it.”

The song list will give you the flavor: “Hot Corn, Cold Corn,” “99 Years for One Dark Day,” “East Virginia Blues,” “T for Texas,” “Old Home Place,” “Wayfaring Stranger,” “Steam Powered Aeroplane and others, including: “Footprints in the Snow,” the Bill Monroe classic, which is a story, a song, which starts out with “Now, some folks like the summertime, when they can walk about . . . ” and builds to an end. 

For Keen himself, yes, the road does go on forever, as he likes to say. He wouldn’t have it any other way.

Robert Earl Keen, “Happy Prisoner: The Bluegrass Tour” with Bonnie Bishop, 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, Feb. 17, the Birchmere, 3701 Mount Vernon Ave., Alexandria, Va.

Gary Tischler • February 19, 2015

It is America’s first great ghost story by a beloved legendary author and involves a headless horseman—yes, there is—the fiery Puritan preacher Cotton Mather, the school teacher Ichabod Crane, the British spy Major Andre, witches burned at the stake. All of this adds up to the perfect, adventuresome and spectacular ingredients for the Septime Webre-conceived and -choreographed Washington Ballet production of “Sleepy Hollow”  which makes its world premiere at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater for seven performances Wednesday, Feb. 18, through Sunday, Feb. 22.

“Sleepy Hollow,” which also features guest artist Xiomara Reyes, a principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre as Katrina Van Tassel, is the third installation in Washington Ballet’s “The American Experience” series, which develops original full-length ballets based on iconic American literary masterworks. “The Great Gatsby” and “The Sun Also Rises” were the first two produced to kick off the series.

Webre said he was attracted  to Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” in which a headless horseman is prominently featured, along with a school teacher and his love, because it represented an opportunity to create something spectacular and  theatrically thrilling.  Webre has woven the familiar tale into the Salem witch trials, the American Revolutionary War and a love triangle with the help of a spectacular cast and design team.

The  musical score by composer Matthew Pierce features ancient Gaelic lyrics and hymns performed by a 14-piece orchestra and 18 choristers from the Choristers of Washington National Cathedral Choir.  Included in the design team are costume designer Liz Vandal, scenic and properties designer Hugh Landwehr, lighting designer Clifton Taylor, projection designer Clint Allen, librettists Karen Zacarias and Bill Lilley and puppet designer Eric J. Van Wyk.

All the familiar characters are here: the vengeful headless horseman, three witches, the geeky Ichabod Crane, the lovely Katrina Van Tassel and the town rowdy, Brom “Bones” Van Brunt.

Webre said he chose “Sleepy Hollow”  for the American Initiative series “not only for the grabbing imagery, but because Washington Irving is America’s first true celebrity author. This was a man that made his pen a pistol and made fiction an American  profession.”

The score by Pierce, who created the music for Washington Ballet’s “Alice (In Wonderland),” the company says, “creates  an atmosphere that  lends a cinematic quality to the production. He imparts a fresh and bold energy to the early 19th-century, story-based folk music and country fiddling that inspired his score.”

The large cast also includes Luis R. Torres as Cotton Mather,  Jared Nelson or Corey Landolt as Ichabod Crane, Brooklyn Mack or Gian Carlo Perez as the Headless Horseman,  Reyes or Maki Onuki as Katrina Van Tasssel, Jonathan Jordan or Miguel Anaya as Brom “Bones” Van Brunt.

Performances are 7:30 p.m., Wednesday (preview); 7:30 p.m, Thursday; 7:30 p.m., Friday; 1:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., Saturday; 1:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m., Sunday.

Gary Tischler • February 18, 2015

When soprano Renée Fleming appears in recital with Russian pianist Olga Kern at the Kennedy Center on Feb. 23, as part of Washington Performing Arts’ Star Series, she’ll be on familiar footing. So will her audience, because in the world of classical music, Fleming, with 50 operas to her credit, is just about the most familiar face that lives, breathes and sings in these times.

You can expect Fleming to be in fine form, performing songs by Schumann, Rachmaninoff and Strauss, not because the music comes easy to her, but because she gives it impassioned attention. That’s where the love especially exists.

“The Rachmaninoff songs are new to me, but I’ve done the Schumann and Strauss pieces before,” she says, every inch, one way or another, the diva – a description she doesn’t particularly mind. “You can embrace that without thinking of it in terms of high-strung temperament. It’s about the utmost quality in the performance, and doing all the things that are required with being a singer, a performer, at a high level.”

Certainly, she’s the best-known diva. She’s been called “the people’s diva,” because she crosses the boundaries of classical music and leaves the world of her opera roles often, almost with a certain amount of glee.

She can be heard in the “Lord of the Rings” movies singing in Elvish. For the 2010 album “Dark Hope,” Fleming abandoned her familiar soprano tones to take on pop-rock compositions, including Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and Willy Mason’s “Oxygen,” which Fleming tosses out like a gift of bouncy music.

Blessed with good looks, she remains striking and glamorous. She followed the traditional pathways to musical stardom, more or less: studies in school, graduate studies, a Fulbright scholarship, appearances in small operas companies and, a big leap forward, winning the Metropolitan Opera Auditions at 29 (when she also sang the part of the Countess in “The Marriage of Figaro” at Houston Grand Opera in 1998).

The rest is a prodigious and world-whirlwind success story – singing in pretty much all the major houses, singing many of the major roles to critical and popular acclaim. She became a star, a diva, call it what you will.

But that world – sometimes confined both musically and in terms of lifestyle – changed. If you became the kind of megawatt star that Fleming has become at 55, the expectations shift. She believes that, for one thing, opera is a world that’s expanding, with brilliant new works from contemporary and modern composers. This belief led her to performing as Blanche DuBois in Andre Previn’s opera, “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

“I don’t think classical music stands still, nor should we rely only on an existing great-works repertoire. We need new music and forms and should embrace them.”

She’s gotten past a divorce after 11 years of marriage, has two daughters, Amelia and Sage, from that marriage and in 2011 remarried after being set up on a blind date by her friend, novelist Ann Patchett (“Bel Canto”).

“We’re very good friends,” she said of Patchett. “The book is beautiful, it lends itself to opera.”

She is curating an opera based on the novel for the Chicago Lyric Opera, which commissioned the project. She is a creative consultant for the Chicago Lyric Opera.

There’s more. She hooked up with the Kennedy Center in 2013, heading its American Voices project. She sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the Super Bowl, wrote a book (“The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer”), and she is well known for being part of numerous charitable and educational projects. Which is why she’s recommending a book called “The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload.” “This is important, it really is, because there’s so much going on in everyone’s lives,“ she said.

Change begets change. Fleming and her husband, who live in New York, recently bought a home in the Palisades neighborhood near Georgetown.

And oh yes, she’s taking to the stage in the comedy “Living on Love”, based on an unfinished Garson Kanin play, scheduled to open on Broadway in April. She plays a famous—wait for it-diva. These days, anything can happen. With Fleming, that’s no longer a surprise.

Georgetowner • February 13, 2015

While some are fretting about Friday the 13th, an underwhelming Valentine’s Day or “Fifty Shades of Grey,” this weekend brings the chance to go in an opposite and happy direction. How about Disney on Ice: “Worlds of Fantasy”? The ice spectacular — put on by Feld Entertainment — is at the Verizon Center through Feb. 16.

Disney’s “Worlds of Fantasy” showcases skating and enchanting characters from Disney/Pixar’s “Cars” and “Toy Story 3” and Disney’s “Tinker Bell” and “The Little Mermaid.” See Lightning McQueen race across the ice, Buzz Lightyear and Woody bicker, Tinker Bell’s Pixie Hollow and Ariel’s undersea kingdom. They all come to life on the ice, as young and old recall their favorite Disney moments. No shades of gray here, just vibrant color and characters around the ice rink. There is a show tonight, Saturday has three shows and Sunday two, and on Presidents’ Day, one last show. Check DisneyOnIce.com for details.
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Gary Tischler • February 7, 2015

Simon Shaheen is performing at the Sixth and I Street Synagogue, one of Washington’s more eclectic performance venues, through the auspices of Washington Performing Arts at 8 p.m, Saturday, Feb. 7. 

That won’t tell you much.  Shaheen himself, in a phone interview this week, said there will be his group, five members, playing various instruments.  He is a renowned player of the ‘oud (pronounced “ud”) as well as a classical violinist, and he tells us that the concert is a mixture of traditional Arab instrumental music, along with some recent compositions  of his, as well as duets, singing, the violin.

The promotional material describes him as a man on a mission to incorporate and reflect a history of Arabic music.  He is called a Palestinian ‘oud and violin virtuoso who also goes beyond traditional Arabic music, infusing his compositions with jazz and Western classical styles.

Shaheen is quoted as saying, “I want to create a world music exceptionally satisfying to the ear and for the soul. . . . This is why I selected members of the group who are all virtuosos in their own musical forms, and whose expertise and knowledge can raises the music and the group’s performance to spectacular levels.”

All that tells you a little more.

But there is more, much more to Shaheen, centering around the idea of duality, as he will tell you himself. 

The early life is a thick measure of what duality can be: a Palestinian born in the village of Tarshiha in the Galilee, where he was a member of a musical family—a brother, who lives in New York, as does Shaheen, makes  exquisite ‘ouds, while his father, Hikmad, was a professor of music and a master ‘our player.

“There is no question,” he said, “that my father was the largest influence on my life. It’s almost as if I couldn’t have been anything else but someone who played the ‘oud.”

Shaheen started playing at the age of five, and, to him, it was the music of a large culture that went far back in time and continues into the future.  “Music, and traditions of music, are living things, they are not dead to the touch or the ear, they change.  Music is constantly becoming, adding and subtracting, becoming richer. . . . There is no last word in music. It’s always evolving.”

He studied music at age six at the Conservatory of Western Classical Music in Jerusalem, graduated from the Academy of Music in Jerusalem in 1978 and moved to New York for graduate studies at the Manhattan School of Music and music education at Columbia University.

When he came, he stayed and became a U.S. citizen.  Shaheen, too, was constantly adding and subtracting, evolving.

“Obviously, there is a great deal of duality in my life,” he said. “In music, with the pursuit of exploring  and playing traditional Arabic music (with the Near Eastern Music Ensemble), there is the traditional and with the group Qantara, there is the exploration of new forms, jazz and such. 

Shaheen is a Palestinian, a Catholic, an American, who spent his  growing youth in Israel and came to America.   He is a musician, a performer, a composer and an educator.

“You could say there are some dualities there,” he said.  “A few, but they are not separate from one another.   No one is one thing. No music is one thing.  I always get surprised when people focus on religion or some other singular form of identity.   A musician once identified himself to me—he said he was from New York and that he was Jewish.  And I wonder about that, not just this instance but to others.  I am a Catholic, for instance, but that’s not all I am. “

When Shaheen talks about traditional Arab music, he’s talking about the music of daily Arab life, the rituals and common place glories of particular lives and settings—the market, the mosques, the dinner table, the weddings and passings, the local eating establishments, all of which move to music without necessary being musical.

“When I say ‘Arab,’ I mean the worlds closest to the Mediterranean, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, the old world,”  he said. “I tour all around the world, in the Middle East, I come back to my birthplace every year.  The expectations in today’s audiences in the Middle East is they want to hear traditional music, the way it was played long ago with traditional instruments. They want to hear it as authentic and true.  “

He explores other forms, particularly jazz, world jazz, which has evolved, too, it’s added to itself from other kinds of music.

“Arab music comes from the table, from the lives of families. It is full of poetry,”  he said.  “It is a rich table that’s set with the music.”

In the world, Shaheen is, not so much a rock star, as a figure embodying certain kinds of playing—he plays the Western canon, too, on  the violin—a man who does more than make music—he makes musicians, too.

We talk a little about a great Egyptian singer, Mohamed Abdu Wahad, considered the father of classic Arab music.  Shaheen recorded an instrumental album of his songs.  “The man had many phases in his life,” he said. “Late in his life, he reportedly lost his voice.  But look at the body of work in his life.”

“When you try to understand Arab music, you have to think in terms of rhythms and melodies and how they’re connected,” Shaheen said. “It is deeply lyrical.”

In an online video, taken from his famed album, “Blue Flame,” you can see and hear him playing the ‘oud by himself.  The result, far from strange, is infectious in a serious way.  It is exactly what he says, a rhythmic dance full of melody, hypnotic.

Shaheen, as he did in the aftermath of a snow storm that hit Boston, commutes back and forth from New York, where he lives, to Boston, where he is a professor at the Berklee College of Music.

“I teach violin, cell and mandolin, and hopefully,  we’ll incorporate some Middle Eastern instruments, like the ‘oud, the qanun.”

He incorporates teaching and education elements and workshops in many of his performance, as “a way of spreading the music, giving back.”

What you remember, though, is an idea, that music is transcending, that it can rise above the fray, that it can, simply by being played with passion and exceptionalism, drown out the sounds  that divide the world.

It’s not something he might say—politics is hardly ever tender on the ears.  But music, his own compositions,  the traditional Arab music that he plays, they come from all of our lives, musicians playing their instruments, singing joyful laments, around a tables full of food and drinks.

Georgetowner • February 5, 2015

“Dunsinane,” the National Theater of Scotland’s production of David Greig’s semi-sequel to the Scottish Play, is certainly not “Brigadoon”—and it’s not “Macbeth,” either. Yet, if you take to Greig’s references, it could be Afghanistan.

It is what it is—something of a theatrical marvel in our midst now at the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Harman Hall.  It’s actually not like anything at all. It’s original and raw, imaginatively staged, powerfully enacted by an ensemble cast, and, freakishly in some ways, as sharp and horrific as the morning headlines.

Which is utmost strange, since it is set in 11th-century Scotland, a cold place full of bogs, warring clans and danger.    At least that’s what it appears to the grunts of the English army in its red-crossed livery, freezing, dodging arrows and broadswords, battling through the slop and moors.  We are in a story that begins at the end of Shakespeare’s play “Macbeth.”   The soldiers are being yelled at by their officers, as they try to be trees in the forest of Birnam, advancing on the king’s castle Dunsinane.       

There is a battle—which the English win.  Macbeth—laid on and low by MacDuff—is dead.  Lady Macbeth is not.  And it’s a good thing—she apparently did not commit suicide but remained to protect her son, conceived with her first husband, whom Macbeth murdered.The presence of Lady Macbeth, here called Gruach, a  vibrantly witchy, smart and strong woman with blazing red hair and a wicked sense of humor and history, and her son means nothing but trouble for the English commander Siward, a decent, blunt military type, who’s  been sent to install Malcolm as the rightful kind and maintain the peace.

You almost immediately wish Siward a “good luck on that one,” because he’s going to need it.  Not only does he not have a clue about the nuanced way of Scottish negotiation (“seems” is a big word here, as in all is not what it seems to be, not ever) but he’s seduced by the earthy, beautiful Gruach, who does not call herself the Widow Macbeth.  “She’s going to be a problem”, Siward says to Malcolm, a wine-and-women-loving monarch who likes to seem weak, so that he can go on about his treacherous business.  “Not if you kill her, now,” he suggests to Siward.

When Siward, every the practical, sane Englishman, comes up with a plan where nobody has to die—Gruach marries Malcolm, her son becomes the heir—it’s exactly the wrong idea, and results in horrible bloodshed and endless war.   Siward,  a soldier at heart begins to grow weary and heartlessly cruel.  “What did you do with the prisoners,” he’s asked after a raid on a village.  “I burned them,” he says, a response that unsettles not only the characters in the play, but the audience, given news of recent events in the Middle East.

The playwright means for us to think about our times—this is a play about conquest and invasion, strangers in a very strange land, the inability in a hit and run war of atrocities on both sides in which neither side understands the other. The Scots speak an impenetrable brand of Gaelic all their own, with words in which the consonants are at war with the vowels, and their customs and music do not soothe the occupiers.

The production is staged on a staggered-step set which looks primitive, hard on the feet, unforgiving, a giant cross with a circle from pagan days dominating the scenes. The play is not  Shakespeare—it’s closer in tone to something before Shakespeare, sometimes ritualistic and primitive in its language, but it’s also as modern as the sound of chopper blades.

Sioibhan Redmond has played this role a lot on other tours, but she never seems anything less than electric and fresh.  Gruach is a witch of sorts. While she has forceful sex appeal, she also is a purveyor of curses that appeal real in the yelling and saying, especially at plays end.  Against that kind of power,  Darrell D’Silva as Siward is all sharp edges, like a battering ram, his white hair making him at times look like a soldier as prophet. He is a straight-ahead man who gets lost in a thicket of blood.  His soldiers want to go home—some of them brave, some of them not,  some of them masters of the first chance like the wily Egham, a kind of medieval Milo Milenbender, some of them awe-struck like the everyman boy soldier played with wide-eyed wonder by Tom Gill.

Ewan McDonald is sharp and funny as Malcolm, and Helen Darbyshire makes a sad, affecting presence as the hen girl.

Being part of this production even as a spectator makes the events on stage feel strange and foreign. We know the old stories, and we have our new sagas all our own. After a while, everything is a representation of something unsettling, something both foreign and uncomfortably familiar, as it plays itself out on  a stage inundated in snowflakes.

— “Dunsinane” runs at Sidney Harman Hall through Feb. 21.

Gary Tischler •

“Gigi” is back, but then again she’s not.

Whether this new (it has a new book by screenwriter Heidi Thomas) version of an old movie musical which became a Broadway show will become a Broadway hit depends a lot on the kind of audiences it gets, and how those audiences respond.

“Gigi” now in a pre-Broadway tryout run at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater through Feb. 12, is markedly different from the movie—a 1958 all-star MGM musical, directed by VIncente Minnelli—or a 1970s staging which did not do all that well.

Few people may remember the stage production—something of a first in its time since it was a Broadway show based on a movie musical, instead of vice versa. But the Lerner & Lowe musical already had its critics—it was considered by some to be “My Fair Lady” light, and indeed, the similarity remains, in the staging and in the music.

“Gigi” is framed in references to other shows—the movie, the play, “My Fair Lady,” even the recent from the ground-up Kennedy Center musical, “Tiny Dancer,” which was also set in Paris during La Belle Epoch at the end of the 19th century.

As it stands, this “Gigi” delivers on the entertainment—the familiar songs are sung with knowing passion, the sets and costumes are outstanding, and Signature Theatre’s artistic director Eric Schaeffer frames this version in a welcome, if not surprising, melodrama.

The producers have cast Vanessa Hudgens—a graduate of Disney Studios “High School Musical”—in the starring role, obviously with an eye to appealing to a younger, contemporary audience. Hudgens—small, dark-haired, nimble, energetic and appealing—handles the role with enthusiasm. She’s that high-strung young adolescent who carries authenticity around as if it were part of her quaint school uniform.

The original film—based on a short novel by the famed French writer Colette—featured a cast of mostly French stars—the luminous Leslie Caron as Gigi, the suave Louis Jordan playing the older debonair swain and the indefatigable Maurice Chevalier as an aging roué.

In this production, Gigi has become a little older—18 —and the object of her affections, Gaston, has become a little younger, so the January-to-December aspects of the original romance become more like an August-October affair.

This—and having Gigi’s aunt and grandmother sing the infamous “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” song—sung by Chevalier with twinkling eyes in the film—provides a more-or-less acceptable gloss on the show’s story, which is about training Gigi to become a mistress to a wealthy, older man. This version—with Hudgens standing up for herself and true love—might go down a lot easier for a modern audience whose members are still looking for love in all the wrong chat rooms.

The show is all about 19th-century Paris—with the new Eiffel Tower, the world’s fair, Maxim’s, men in top hats and women in fantastic gowns, kept girls flashing diamonds—as a kind of theme park of French mores and fashion.

In the film, Minnelli—always a great visual stylist—gave everything a sophisticated sheen, sort of like a big-budget foreign movie and Leslie Caron had the kind of incandescence which is hard to transport to the stage. The sheen remains, but the sophistication is lagging, for which we can actually be grateful.

For this production, Howard McGillin is the roguish roué Honore Lachaille, with the kind of affability that suggests that roués are full of rue. Gigi’s protectors—Mamita, played with strong-voiced warmth by Victoria Clark, and Aunt Alicia, played with alarming and beguiling cynicism by Dee Hoty—command the stage when they’re on, while Corey Cott , strong voiced and handsome, plays what amounts to the perfect boyfriend—Gaston LaChaille, inventor, zillionaire, lover, celebrity, sort of a younger, single George Clooney of the boulevard.

“Gigi” is more than adequately entertaining. It’s like the best sort of ice cream that goes down smoothly. It’s scheduled to open at the Neil Simon Theater in April. Bon chance.

Gary Tischler •

Just earlier that day, Holocaust survivor Manny Mandel had recited the Kaddish, the traditional Jewish prayer often said by way of mourning at the U.S. Holocaust Museum where candles were lit and music played and dignitaries spoke in observance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The day also happened to be the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi death camp where millions of the over six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust died.

And Mandel was there at the Embassy of Hungary that evening to once again recited the Kaddish as part of a special evening at the embassy, which included a deeply diverse, and often emotionally wrenching concert presented by the Embassy Series. The concert featured baritone Jerome Barry (the Embassy Series founder and director), the gifted and young cello player Jacques-Pierre Malan, and pianist George Peachey, who provided a steady and solid underpinning for much of the program.

Mandel and Barry noted that the Kaddish, in this instance, was not about death, but about life and the living, and about the how the incomprehensible number of lives lost were lived.

Auschwitz was the place where approximately half-a-million Hungarian Jews perished in a steady stream of shipments and deportations from Hungary in the Nazis’ last act of horror toward the close of World War II, never stopping in their pursuit of the Final Solution. This occurred in spite of often heroic efforts by many Hungarians to stop, delay or prevent the tragedy.

It was an auspicious evening at the Embassy of Hungary—this was the last official evening for Hungarian ambassador to the United States, His Excellency György Szapáry, who is returning to Hungary on Saturday, Jan. 25.

If the Kaddish is about life, not death, then the concert and its contents—like a mural, a book, a packet of all the lost things the victims carried, including the substance of their lives—became something of a perfect illustration of life, not death.

The concert included musical poems, dances, children’s songs and Hassidic Prayer Chants, three selections from a rabbi’s commentaries on the Talmud, musical memories of childhood, in the manner of E. E. Cummings and the true spirit of young hearts flying, songs from the Holocaust, vivid evocations of life in the ghettos and camps of Poland and Vilna in Lithuania and the so-called Partisanerlid (Partisans’ Song), which members of the resistance sang like a loud but private badge.

Words, in these selections of music, mattered—they conjured weather, nights and days, the ashes in the air, the danger of daily existence, the grind of death and loss, and the spring-insistence on the continuance of life amid the systematic onslaught of destruction.

The concert, or rather the recreation all of the individual lives lost with words and music, was a remarkable achievement of the playing, the singing and the creation of music as a reverent, respectful illustration of content.

Barry, a teacher, singer, cantor, linguist and Vietnam veteran rose to the occasion by treating the material—those songs, those recitations, those poems—with a natural delivery without an inkling of emotive style. The singing was not about calling down the sky or even bearing overbearing witness. It was more an expression of universal kinship. It came from identity, training, experience and empathy that flowed naturally to and from him.

The youthful and gifted cellist Malan brought the strength and depth of the instrument to bear, especially in the playing, with Peachey, of Gabriel Fauré’s “Elegie,” which was described by one writer as the composer’s rare “expression of pathos.”

The concert—dedicated to the victims of terrorism in Paris and the Holocaust—was not an occasion that was principally an opportunity to critique. It seemed to many a kind of work of delicate musical carpentry, built piece by piece from not only the music, and the words, but from the details of lives lived and lost forever. It came from hard nights, pieces of bread rarely received, long journeys to doom, but also still the familial and familiar stuff of daily life, where God is, in spite of all, a strong presence, visible in the invisible, in a pair of shoes, in a stick made to be a toy, in the kind of mark, Pompeii-like, made by the living where they stood, prayed, ate, shivered and comforted each other in community.

Consider the works by Hungarian poet Hannah Szenes, who was killed by the Nazis in 1944: her work “Eli, Eli;” “My God, My God/May these things never end;” “The sand and the sea/The rustle of the water/The lightning in the sky/Man’s prayer.”

The concert veered and trembled through three piano dances, songs from the Holocaust including the familiar Ani ma’amin, believed to have been composed by Reb Azriel David, a Moditzser Hassid when he was in a cattle car on the way to Treblinka. ?

The musical details piled up, like remembrances left at shrine, but living memories, not dead flowers, and the marvel that people in the midst of all this still thought to look up at the sky.

Many of the musical offerings were sung in Yiddish, with an ironic underpinning, in which you notice how familiar it sounds, how close to German en toto, in consonants and vowels they are and you wonder again how we came to this in that time, and how it echoes to this time, a time of technological wonders, and new horrors.
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Gary Tischler •

“The Widow Lincoln,” a world premiere of the new play by Stephen Sill at Ford’s Theater, presents to the audience Mary Todd Lincoln in a lone room, surrounded by giant stacks of baggage and luggage, by ghosts, and memories in the aftermath of the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, time abruptly stopped, the future unknown.

The new play is part of “Ford’s 150: Remembering the Lincoln Assassination,” a series of events marking the 150 years since Abraham Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theatre in 1865.

“The Widow Lincoln” is a difficult play about a difficult person. The Kentucky-born Mary Todd Lincoln was reviled in the South where she was considered a traitor, not trusted in the North because of her Southern background and criticized in the press and among the city’s social gossips for her spending large sums on outfitting the White House and herself. She was considered an outsider, a Lady Macbeth figure by some. She was, it would appear, ill-prepared for the cloudy role and standing of first lady, but she embraced it dramatically in a way not seen since Dolly Madison. She had few friends, with the exception of the passion of her life, whom she still refers to as Mr. Lincoln or “father.” She was also close to the Elizabeth Kackley, her dressmaker and a former slave.

Mrs. Lincoln was even less prepared for the role of national widow—it was as if a chasm had opened beneath her feet, with the past out of reach, the present tumultuous and the future unknowable.

New York actress Mary Bacon portrays a Mary who is bewildered, keen and heavy with grief, angry, at turns charming and blustering, the White Houses bully. Her grief is enormous, all the more so because it is chaotic and full of a gigantic confusion.

Bacon doesn’t pretty up Mary. She avoids pulling at any sort of strings, heart or otherwise. She doesn’t sentimentalize. Bacon’s widow is a monument to grief’s pain and confusion and its willfullness, too. She speaks to the audience—to us—often, always in the tone of a question, as if we could lead her out of the wilderness.

Mary Todd Lincoln spent 40 days in a locked room in the aftermath of the assassination, attended by Keckley, a servant girl and a guard, who, it turns out, has a secret. She wears black, but does not attend her husband’s funeral—she gets news of the progression of the body and coffin as it travels, mournfully, watched by hundreds of thousands of people in Harrisburg, New York , Albany, Philadelphia, Chicago and Springfield, where Lincoln’s body still rests outside town.

An unseen commentator provides a kind of narrative from newspaper reports—how “negroes were not allowed to attend the proceedings in New York” and how thousands turned out in heavy rains along the way.

Mary is watched over by shadows, ghosts of families who have lost people in the war, ghosts of slaves. Laura Keene, the actress and star of “Our American Cousin” commiserates with Mary and paints a portrait of the hard life of an actress. There is a séance, there is a strange conversation with the guard and there is an appearance by Queen Victoria, who gives Mary advice about grief.

There is, in short, a kind of life on stage, where Mary, all the while sometimes raging against Andrew Johnson, against the Washington tribe which criticized her, avoids leaving the room until she must.

She is, it’s plain to see, avoiding a future as the widow, one that history tells us was painful, difficult, life as a lonely woman often fending off bouts of melancholy and near-madness.

Bacon is the standout here. She is ably abetted by Sarah Marshall as Queen Victoria, Caroline Clay, who gives Keckley a vibrant, down-to-earth energy and Kimberly Schraf as Laura Keene in full theatrical regalia.

This is one of those times in the theater—this theater—where you pay attention to your surroundings. You see audience members at intermission taking selfies, with the empty presidential, flag-draped Lincoln box above the main floor. With this play, the setting becomes poignant, ghostly, and you think at times that you can hearing voices from another time.