Performance

Gary Tischler • April 11, 2014

The pianist Simone Dinnerstein, the late-blooming star of the classical musical world, is—to put it in Willie Nelson’s terms—”on the road again,” and she’s not traveling light.

It’s not that Willie Nelson has anything to do with the occasion, but you wouldn’t now be surprised to find out that he did.

In 2007, Dinnerstein soared into the musical stratosphere with her recording of Johann Sebastian Bach’s “The Goldberg Variations,” a kind of daunting test that pianists worth their salt or fingers seem compelled to play or record, and not just because it’s an intrinsically difficult piece, but because others have climbed that particular mountain, most notably Glenn Gould.

Dinnerstein soared with the “ Variations” and her self-financed recording on Telarc Records in 2007, scoring the number one classical recording that year, and tackling the challenge at a time when she was pregnant. Last year, she went on tour with a program of “The Goldberg Variations,” stopping at the Music Center at Strathmore. Not only that, but she came out with the album “Night,” collaborating with singer-songwriter Tift Merritt, an eclectic program of new works and classical music.

Now, she’s coming back, this time on Sunday, Feb. 9, in a 3 p.m. recital at the Kennedy Center’s Concert Hall, presented by the Washington Performing Arts Society. She’s once again with her old boon companion and lifetime passion, Johann Sebastian Bach, performing his 15 two-part Inventions, which headlines an eclectic program that includes Beethoven’s Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op 111 and two very different contemporary composers, Nico Muhly and George Crumb.

In addition, her most recent recording on Sony, “J.S. Bach: Inventions and Sinfonias,” debuted in the top spot on the Billboard Classical Chart in its first week of sales.

“The first time I ever encountered the ‘Inventions,’ I was nine years old,” she said. “I thought then I could never play them, that they were wholly beyond my abilities. Bach meant the ‘Inventions’ to be educational tools for musicians, a guide for teachers and musicians. But they are much more than that, they taught me about duality, about two voices. I’d always thought until then that music was melody and accompaniment. When you listen—and musical training is as much about listening as it is about playing—you hear two continuous and independent voices.”

“I like the presence of the works by Crumb and Muhly. Crumb is fearless with his compositons, in terms of what he tackles. Muhly is still young—he’s in his thirties, he’s written the opera, “Two Boys,” and he’s working with old, traditional English Virginal music while at the same time being something of a minimalist.” The connection to Bach’s two voices becomes obvious when you listen to her talk about the music.

She will be playing Crumb’s “Eine Kleine Mitternacht Musik,” which is a nine-movement suite for amplified piano, based on Theolonius Monk’s 1940’s jazz standard “Around Midnight.” On its face, it seems like an illustration of resonant point counterpoint.

Muhly has composed works for ensembles, soloists and organizations, he did the score for the film, “The Reader,” for which Kate Winslet won an Oscar. Muhly’s work, he has said, was designed “to be navigation challenge for Simone Dinnerstein, who, aside from her technical prowess, has an emotional and interpretive virtuosity I was very interested in exploring.”

She will be playing Muhly’s “You Can’t Get There From Here,” commissioned by the Terez Music Foundation, which was named after a World War II concentration camp.

“I love this program,” WPAs President Jenny Bilfield said. “And I love that this program focuses the lens on the tandem of talents of composer-pianists spanning several centuries.”

Dinnerstein has brought something else with her: her cherished “Bachpack” initiative, complete with a digital piano by Yamaha, bringing the piano, and herself and her unique gifts and some of Bach’s Inventions to District schools over a period three days, working with children and using the Yamaha Remote Lesson technology found in the Disklavier reproducing piano. Dinnerstein began the Bach packing initiative, in 10 New York-area schools in January. She has also founded Neighborhood Classics, which was launched at P.S. 311, where her son attends school and her husband teaches.

This week, she brought the program to Lafayette Elementary School, Watkins Elementary School, Savoy and Patterson elementary schools, the Washington Latin Public Charter School and Ballou High School as well as Duke Ellington High School for the Arts in Georgetown, participating with Ballou through the Disklavier piano technology this Friday.

She’s also hosted a master class with adult amateur pianists at the Washington Conservatory of Music in Bethesda.

Gary Tischler • March 31, 2014

Gaetano Donizetti often takes you to the dark side in operas like “Anna Bolena” and “Lucia Di’Lammermoor,” but with “The Elixir of Love” (L’elisir d’amore) he comes on a little like a Hollywood toastmaster, arms spread wide, singing “Let Me Entertain You.”

Donizetti and the opera, entertain you mightily, as does the Washington National Opera production, directed by Stephen Lawless, at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House now through March 29. The opera may provide all kinds of difficult, even exhausting opportunities for the leads singing the roles of its often mismatched young lovers, Nemorino and Adina, but its plot has sawdust in it, coming not from the sunlit barn where it’s set, but from ancient comedy tonight strains, to vaudeville and burlesque bits and the kind of bits and pieces that strain a fair amount of incredulity.

You can nit-pick this kind of thing as old-fashioned (when did you last see an eye-patch switched for laughs?), but I think it may be best to think of this “Elixir” as a glass of high-grade champagne, and not the cheap wine that the canny salesman and rogue Doctor Dulamara is selling as an all-purpose love potion.

You can quibble here and there: individuals sometimes get lost in the crowd here, especially Italian bass baritone Simone Alberghini as the quasi-villain of the piece, Sergeant Belcore, the blustering enlisted man who thinks he’s a general with an army, and vies for the love of the heroine with an overblown sense of his own prowess.

Here’s the thing, though. Donizetti’s score is gorgeous, smooth, romantic and soaring. It has a little bit of everything in it. It goes down easy and leaves the young American tenor Stephen Costello and, in the production I saw, soprano Sarah Coburn to shine as Nemorino and Adina, the young lovers. (Coburn shares the part with Soprano Ailyn Perez, who happens to be Costello’s real-life wife. Perez will sing the part March 26 and 29, and Coburn will be singing March 25 and 28)

Costello is hitting Washington in grand style—his rangy, clear tenor voice was one of the individual highlights in the WNO’s powerful production of “Moby Dick,” and he makes for an appealing Nemorino, the hopeless and sometime hapless hero yearning for the love of Adina. This becomes heart-breakingly and movingly clear in the great aria, “Una Furtive Lagrima”, in which his love—both hopeful and hopeless—shine through. Both Costello and Coburn proved smooth and flawless in finessing bell canto thrills and trills, Coburn handling the aria “Prendi, per Me Sei Libero” with great warmth.

Along comes the good Doctor Dulcamara, a bit of a scoundrel, who convinces Nemorino that a shot of love potion (poured from a handy bottle of cheap wine) is just the thing to win him the fair, but sometimes fickle, Adina, who has promised to marry the oily sergeant.

The snake oil of a plot that’s part of the opera like sawdust in a Dodge City bar is harmless because there’s a lot of musical good wine and champagne to drink in. The giant barn that constitutes the set is the kind of place where you can have a wedding, a sing-along, a feast or a hoedown. The sun is always shining. Just outside are golden fields of sun-touched wheat for bread or pasta.

This production of “The Elixir of Love” is just the sort of opera that is for people who don’t normally go to the opera. It’s a painless , but rousing, introduction, or, as one friend of mine put it, a “perfect American production of an Italian opera.”

As love potions go, this “Elixir” might not be quite a “Number 9,” but it gets the job done as a number eight.

The Washington National Opera production of “Elxir of Love” runs through March 29 at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House.
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Gary Tischler • March 26, 2014

Listening to Hal Holbrook in a phone interview, it’s easy to think that Mark Twain might still be alive, even if you’ve never talked to Twain in person.

We’re having the conversation because the accomplished American actor is bringing “Mark Twain Tonight” back to Washington. The show will be at the National Theatre April 4 to 5, perhaps in the nick of time, and with the star, once again, burning with a passion for the part.

In rumpled whitish hair and a white suit, Holbrook has been doing his one-man show for years, going back to 1954, when the Cleveland, Ohio, native first performed the role at Lock Haven State Teachers College in Pennsylvania.

Ed Sullivan put Holbrook-Twain on his show in 1956, and Holbrook made it to Off-Broadway in 1959. He performed the role again in a production at the New York World’s Fair in 1964 and 1965. In 1966, “Mark Twain Tonight” went to Broadway for the first (but not the last), and the following year it was presented on CBS. Holbrook won an Emmy. He would return to Broadway and continue to tour with the show.

Holbrook said he has performed as Mark Twain more than 2,000 times over 60 years of his life. There is a very good chance that he never performed it the same way twice, so rich is the material, so endless is Holbrook’s love for the man and the part.
He is 88 years old now, and you have to ask: Why do you do it?

“Why do I do it?” Hobrook said. “Why, because it keeps me alive, man. It keeps me alive. It makes my blood run. It makes my heart beat faster every time I do it. It keeps you young and interested and curious and passionate. It’s hard sometimes. I do all my own research, I change the material a lot. Sometimes, you never know where it exactly goes. He did the same thing you know. That’s what he became, Mark Twain on the road, on tours, talking about America, God, politics, greed, the big business guys. Nothing has changed.”

“I can’t wait to get to Washington, let me tell you,” he said. “I can’t wait. I don’t have to change a thing. I don’t have to update him. He’s as current as all get-out. We’ve got the same things going on, the gap between rich and poor, the intolerance of the zealots.”
“He speaks to me, you know,” Holbrook said. The voice was garrulous, rich in timbre. “I don’t mean literally, I mean in terms of what he says. He speaks to all of us. Because he does what other people don’t do: He tells the truth. That’s what always separated him from everybody else, it’s why he was funny. Because he’s not just a comedian. He tells the truth and the truth is always funny, to begin with, because you hardly ever hear it. So people laugh, but they also listen.”

“When I first starting doing him, I was trying to figure out how to survive on stage by myself,” he said. “That seemed to be the hardest part. I wanted to get the laughs then. Now, well, I need to do it, because it’s worthwhile. Plus, there aren’t that many good parts for a guy my age any more.”

Maybe. But he seems to find them or, anyway, they find him. He had an Oscar nomination for supporting actor in 2008 for “Into the Wild.” He was in Spielberg’s “Lincoln” and the well-received “Promised Land” last year. He works. You guess he needs to work for the sake of it.

Twain did the same thing. He did it to make money, for sure, and he had created this Mark Twain character. Moreover, he was both a great American novelist – “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is still being banned after all these years – and a great and mordant observer of American mores. “Shaw called him the American Voltaire,” Holbrook offered.

Holbrook, of course, is in the pantheon of fine American actors, with an ability to play memorable roles on stage, in films and on television. He was a villainous foil to Clint Eastwood’s “Dirty Harry,” playing a law-and-order zealot. He was the wise broker to Charlie Sheen’s hustler in “Wall Street.” He portrayed an assistant secretary of state on “The West Wing,” appeared on the popular sitcom “Evening Shade” and played Dixie Carter’s swain on “Designing Women.”

That was a part he played in real life, also. She was the enduring love of his life. They married in 1984. Both he and Carter appeared at the Shakespeare Theatre Company, Holbrook as Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice,” Carter giving remarkable performances in two plays by Oscar Wilde.

“She was an original, and I loved her dearly,” he said. “She had courage, intelligence, talent, humor and grace and a remarkable capacity for forgiveness, for which I was grateful.”

Carter passed away in 2010.

Twain saved some of his sharpest jibes for politicians, as in the famous: “Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress . . . but I repeat myself.”

“I can’t wait to unleash Twain on Washington,” Holbrook said. For sure, we could use a dose of Twain, and the presence of Hal Holbrook, too.

Gary Tischler •

On the heels of “World Stages: International Theater Festival 2014,” an eclectic festival of new theater, new styles and new ideas that took up most of March, the Kennedy Center – in collaboration with Hi-ARTS, producers of the Hip-Hop Theater Festival – launched “One Mic: Hip-Hop Culture Worldwide” on March 25. It runs through April 13.

Going beyond the music, “One Mic” essentially explores hip-hop as a uniquely American art form and culture that has spread from its multi-ethnic roots in the U.S. to become a worldwide phenomenon. The festival highlights MCing, DJing, b-boying and graffiti writing, hip-hop’s four cornerstones.

Entering territory not often explored at the Kennedy Center, on March 28-29, actor, rapper, and multi-platinum recording artist Nas joins up with the NSO Pops to reimagine his debut album “Illmatic.”

On April 4-5, March Bahmuthi Joseph’s “red, black and GREEN: a blues (rbGb),” produced by MAPP International Productions, interweaves several art forms to bring “the stories and voices of Black America into the center of a timely conversation about race, class, culture and the environment.”
The Revive Big Band, led by trumpeter Igmar Thomas, shares its hybrid sound of hip-hop, R&B and jazz with fans of the three genres at a performance at the Kennedy Center Jazz Club on April 4.

Dance gets its turn April 6, when Jonzi D, hip-hop artist, educator and director of “Breakin’ Convention” in England, leads a showcase of hip-hop dance at the Eisenhower Theatre. Project Soul Collective from South Korea, Sébastien Ramirez and Honji Wang from France and Companhia Urbana de Dance from Brazil will perform.

Catch up with the latest hip-hip styles – krumping, beatboxing and the role of b-girls – when “Fresh Noise: A Mashup of Youth Voices” is staged for young audiences, directed by Monica Williams, in the Family Theatre, April 12-13.
There’ll also be lots of free performances on the Millennium Stage.

For all the information on performances and tickets, visit the Kennedy Center website: kennedy-center.org/onemic.
Something New at Studio Theatre’s 2nd Stage

Playwright Declan Greene’s provocative new play about anime-obsessed high school students, “Moth,” gets a production at Studio Theatre’s 2nd Stage, with D.C. actor and longtime Studio collaborator Tom Storey directing. 2nd Stage Artistic Director Keith Alan Baker calls “Moth” a “character-based play, focused on these two young people recreating a terrible shared moment.” The show runs April 9 to May 4.

The Two Henrys, Falstaff and Prince Hal

Familiar faces and folks are back at the Shakespeare Theatre Company, where Artistic Director Michael Kahn joins veteran actor Stacy Keach as Falstaff in productions of “Henry IV, Part 1” and “Henry IV, Part 2.” The two plays, which will run in repertory through June 8, are about power and parenting, fathers and sons, war and peace and the education of a prince. High-water marks for Shakespeare, they are at turns gripping and funny, as well as tragic. Keach, who was seen last here in the title role of “King Lear” (he’s also done “Richard III” and “Macbeth” at STC), is the boisterous, cynical, hard-drinking knight who acts as one kind of father figure for Prince Hal (Matthew Amendt), heir to the throne occupied by his distant father Henry IV (Edward Gero).

Gary Tischler • March 20, 2014

I was coming home in a cab to get ready to attend the annual Series of Legends concert to benefit the Duke Ellington School of the Arts at the Music Center of Strathmore, featuring rock-pop legends Sting and Paul Simon yesterday.

Guess what was playing on the cab radio?

“Everything Little Thing She Does Is Magic” by you know who. And if you don’t, too bad for you. I thought, what could possibly go wrong? The answer to that question is the tag line to the story about the woman who once come up to the late uber-movie star Cary Grant, known for his eye-candy smooth class, and asked: “Do you know what’s wrong with you?” A quizzical Grant asked, “I don’t know, what?” ‘’Absolutely nothing.”

There was absolutely nothing wrong with the night which was an affirmation for the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, the ongoing parade of gifted young artists—dancers, musicians, singers in groups and as individuals–for its co-founder (with Mike Malone) Peggy Cooper Cafritz, for an exhilarating demonstration of star power when it engages with and for a worthy cause, as Sting and Simon, who are touring together so ably showed.

This was a high-end fundraiser for the District’s pre-eminent arts school, which will help fund the school’s major renovation, with attendees filling the grand foyer of the Music Hall at Strathmore in a VIP reception and the acoustically renowned and beautifully designed hall for a stirring and few songs left unsung. The event raised at least $1.2 million for the high school at 35th and R Streets.

This was the Seventh Annual Performance Series of Legends fundraiser, which began in 2006 with comedian Dave Chappelle –an Ellington alum—headlining. Other stars that followed included another Ellington alumn, opera star Denyce Graves, Earth, Wind & Fire, Smokey Robinson and Patti LaBelle. Stevie Wonder was an early headliner, and he was scheduled to appear with Sting and Simon, but could not appear because of the death of a close relative.

That was just about the only sad note in an evening when donors, well wishers, media, culture mavens and politicians mingled in the grand foyer, the media at one point setting up a kind of Sting watch (can you call it a Sting sting?), until he appeared from the very VIP Comcast Circles Lounge with donors, smiling broadly and walking fast. (See The Georgetowner’s photo.)

In the foyer, politicians and elected officials mingled and schmoozed—Democratic congressman Chris Van Hollen, Montgomery County Executive Ike Leggett, retiring Virginia congressman Jim Moran, and a raspy-voiced D.C. At-large Councilman David Catania, an independent, who had just announced that he would be running for mayor of D.C. in the November general election.

Inside, the night turned into something truly special, on a stage packed with the youthful talent of the Duke Ellington band and chorus, and guitarist Reilly Martin, who played with the verve that could give some of the pros on stage a run for their money.

Duke Ellington School CEO Rory Pullens, beaming with pride, announced, “You know what Sting said? He said those kids blew me away.”

The kids were always there. They’re these tumblers, that guitar player, the hand-clapping choir which achieved gospel tones, all the young girls and boys playing trumpets, oboes, flutes, the French horn, clarinets, drums, violins and such. Among them might be future stings, future song stylists, rappers, tap dancers, classical musicians, opera stars and jazz singers and players, rock and rollers and divas.

“We’re in the presence of the future,” Sting acknowledged, and then began a set, later joined by Simon, that erased any doubt that this might be one of those perfunctory, well-meaning musical efforts that would leave you parched for something better.

It doesn’t get much better than this. With Duke Ellington student dancers, singers and musicians, setting the stage with “Demolition Man” and “Synchronicity.”

Sting—aka Gordon Matthew Thomas Summer—looking lean and clean in dark-wear and precisely little left short hair, showed himself as the ever-growing and versatile stylist that he is, beginning with a crowd-pleasing “Englishman in New York,” one of his first solo efforts after becoming a super-star with the 1980s group, “The Police.” This one was—as is much of his work now—infused with world stylings and sounds, a little bit of Reggae, a little exotic, full of a wistful kind of bounce. He sang the Middle East-infused “Desert Rose” (some of it in Arabic), “Seven Days” and the classic Police song “Every Breath You Take.” At one point, manically and a little maniacally beautiful with his playing, electric fiddle player Peter TIckell wowed the crowd into a standing ovation.

Out came Paul Simon, once of Simon and Garfunkel, the soulful inspiration of imagination for a generation of 60s outsiders—“Hello darkness my old friend” goes one song, “Mrs. Robinson….Jesus loves you more than you can know”—came out, small but casting a huge musical shadow. They sang the Simon and Garfunkel classic, “The Boxer.” Simon then sang Sting’s “Fragile.”

“I suppose you know Paul and I are touring together,” Sting said. (The two will be at the Verizon Center tonight.)

“I remember when we were just starting out, jumping into cars and playing half-empty bars all over America and loving it,” he said and asked Simon to exit the stage. Sting sang Simon and Garfunkel’s “America” and made it his own “… We’ve all come to look for America.” He sang The Police’s “Message in a Bottle” and everyone standing, dancing and singing.

Then, everyone came back on stage. They sang “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” one by one, and then with the Duke Ellington Chorus, and then Sting again taking a lyric, and making the song more robust, stirring, a little more brave.

And then, like you might have wanted, they closed it out with “Every Breath You Take.” And everyone again was standing, dancing and singing.

Departing, I thought of the lyrics: “Everything you do is magic. Every little thing she does turns me on.” The kids, Sting, Simon. Every little thing they did was: Magic.

Gary Tischler • March 14, 2014

The actor Richard Thomas knows a little about icons. He’s pretty close to being one himself.

After all, he became something of an icon in the 1970s, when he played John-Boy Walton, Jr., on “The Waltons.”

The hugely popular television series – about a big family growing up during the Depression and World War II in Walton’s Mountain, Va. – ran for nine seasons. It’s still remembered for its closing good-nights among family members, as in “Good night, John-Boy.”

To this day, he remains John-Boy to thou- sands of fans, even if he’s in his early sixties now. He’s not bothered by that. “I call it the gold- en pain,” Thomas said in a telephone interview.

John-Boy may have become an iconic fictional figure. However, playing a living former president of the United States, that’s something else again.

Thomas will be playing President Jimmy Carter in the world-premiere production of “Camp David” by Lawrence Wright, directed by Arena Stage Artistic Director Molly Smith. “Camp David” will run Mar. 21 through May 4 in Arena’s Kreeger Theater.

Thomas will be joined by veteran stage and screen actor Ron Rifkin as Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Egyptian actor Khaled Nabawy as Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Tony Award nominee Hallie Foote as first lady Rosalynn Carter.

Named for the presidential country retreat near Thurmont, Md., “Camp David” centers on the events and difficult negotiations surround- ing the talks held there in September 1978. The resulting Camp David Accords, the ground-breaking peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, are still in place 35 years later.

The historic peace treaty remains the singular, uncontestable achievement of the Carter Administration. While it was not enough to help Carter earn a second term, it was the kind of accomplishment that gave him a prominent role as a former president. It echoes throughout Washington, where many players from the Carter Administration, and the administrations before and after, are still active.
We reached Thomas in a break between rehearsals. His voice still sounds as youthful as it did during a 1987 Georgetowner interview, when he was in town to play another historic figure in “Citizen Tom Paine.” “Gosh, that was a long time ago. Wasn’t it?” he said. “A lot of years.”

“Playing a living president, that’s quite a challenge,” Thomas said. “I read the script and found it impressive. It was an engaging script, a theater piece about real events, solidly grounded. And here I am, and here we are.”

“People forget what happened, and most people don’t know the details,” Thomas said. “It was a very human process among three men who had ideas and ideals, a big sense of themselves, and it was extremely difficult. It was dramatic.”

President Carter is a public figure about whom people have strong feelings, one way or another. Here in Washington, Carter’s involvement in the talks was one of those occasions when news of historic proportions became local news, too.

“You have to avoid certain things,” Thomas said. “You’ve got to watch the accent, the things you’re overly familiar with. You can’t put him on a pedestal or you’ll be playing a statue. You can’t slip into stereotypical things or try to do an impersonation. It’s a little nerve-wracking, initially. In the end…I try to think of him, not as president of the United States, but as a character in a play, because that’s what I do.”

It is expected that the Carters will be in attendance at the official red carpet premiere on Apr. 3. “Well, that could be a little extra pressure, I guess,” he said. “That awareness will no doubt add a little to the night.”

“Camp David” is produced by Gerald Rafshoon, White House communications director in the Carter administration, who brings intimate knowledge along with access to tapes made by the president during the negotiations.

Playwright and screenwriter Wright is also the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.”

Thomas was excited to be back in Washington. “It’s such an unusual town, and I love working here,” he said. “It’s a great theater town.” He worked with legendary director Peter Sellars at the Kennedy Center in “The Count of Monte Cristo” and a trio of plays by Samuel Beckett. Thomas also played the title role in “Richard II” at the Washington Shakespeare Company.

Thomas and his wife, Georgiana Bischoff, have a large family with seven children, including triplet daughters from his first marriage. “They’re all grown up now,” he said. “That’s one of the biggest roles you can have, being a father and a parent.”

Ralph Waite, who played Thomas’s father on “The Waltons,” passed away Feb. 13. “It was a huge loss,” Thomas said. “He was like a second father to me. I lost my father last year.”

“Camp David” will run March 21 through May 4 in Arena Stage’s Kreeger Theater.

Gary Tischler • March 13, 2014

After the young actor Andreu Honeycutt has staggered downstage and out, apparently wailing, after they’ve put away the large lynching rope, after the explosion of n-words in the last minutes of the play and the telling of horrible racist jokes, after all that and the two hours preceding all that, there’s an awkward silence that descends over the audience at “We are Proud to Present…” at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre.

The audience, squared off across the stage in different sections, eventually claps, but the six actors in the play do not return for a bow. In some ways it seems awkward to clap, like cheering at a funeral or the site of a bloody traffic accident. Nobody’s helping us out. So, we wander out kind of dutifully, and there are the actors, handing out programs and smiling expectantly.

Even for Woolly Mammoth Theatre, with its long history and reputation of presenting new, edgy theater nobody else does, in ways that are driven by daring, sometimes discomfiting, staging, “We Are Proud to Present…” is unusual, like a daring and beautiful woman going out for a date dressed as a menacing clown.

This isn’t really a play in the usual sense. Worked out in detailed, rehearsed ways, it nevertheless resembles a provocation, an improvisation, a little like a street performance with lots of grounded details, not to mention the tail end of a day. And, in what amounts to a recent trend with Woolly productions, its immersive, inside-and-out activities surround the performance — chores to do if you choose — along with information provided to excite debate and talk. Add in the re-arrangement of the furniture of the theater, so to speak. Also, there are echoes and contexts from other plays, books, history to chew on and a zig-zag course from out-and-out-laughter to discomfiture to silence that you can actually hear.

We should afford you the full title, which may or may not spark recognition from audience members: “We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, formerly Known as Southwest Africa, From The German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915.”

The play—actually a play within a play—is about six actors trying to put together a play about Kaiser Wilhelm-era imperial Germany’s occupation of said Sudwestafrika (now Namibia) as a way of getting into the colonial games of great power nations, chief among them Victorian Great Britain. During the course of that occupation of an area populated by several different tribes, chief among them the Herero people, the Germans tried the usual imperial gambits of pitting tribes against each other. In the end, they took the course of attempting a mostly successful genocide of the Herero people because the Herero had resisted and fought back. Orders were given to kill the males and force women and children into the desert. When it was all over, some 100,000 Hereros had died. In 2004, 100 years later, Germany apologized for what happened.

Six actors — three black, three white; two women, four men — have gathered to create a play that deals with that history, but their only source material are letters written by German soldiers to their families, none of them referencing what happened or offering descriptions of the tribal population. They are full of Victorian romantic and sentimental cliches about hearth, home, love and children, missing the fireside and the wifely presence.

Initially, led by the director (in a spirited, decisive performance by the compelling Dawn Ursula), the cast members struggle, they are actors after all, of various degrees of commitment, all of them with enough ego to spare. This cast is made up of actors playing actors in search of a part and understanding of the material. The world they’ve entered suggests, at least, Pirandello’s mystifying “Six Characters in Search of An Author.”

The squabbling among them is initially about the roles: there’s the angry young black actor, the aforementioned Andreu Honeycutt, who has no interest in playing Germans and reading German letters, an older black man played by the commanding Michael Anthony Williams, and two white men—the arrogant one, played with odd confusion by Joe Isenberg, and the older guy, played with contained force by Peter Howard. There is also the generic white woman, who gets to have a name—Sarah—played with aplomb and sometimes quaint, silly goofiness, by Holly Twyford, who, asked to feel sad about the death of a cat, guts out a cat wail.

Much of this is initially very funny—actors after all often offer a ridiculous face to the world—but as they continue to fail to come to grips with the subject—the murder of the Hereros—racial concerns rise to the fore.

“We haven’t dealt with what happened,” says the angry young man, and he tries to get them into that area. There’s talk of appropriating suffering, appropriating roles, until prodded by their director, they come face to face with the monster in the historic woodshed.

When the young white actor has to shoot a defenseless Herero, he at first can’t do it. “I’m not like that,” he says. “I can’t do this.” But, of course, he can, and now we are in the thick of it: songs of loss and home and massive suffering. In a kind of not surprising, but nevertheless shocking, segue, we appear to be in the American south. The white actors are talking “Cracker Southern,” and the rope is raised. It becomes hard to swallow, because there is a temptation to say stop.

The play by young playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury walks into the muddy waters of comparative crime, of the unsettled cloud of race American style, not to mention the Holocaust, also perpetrated by Germany, and other genocides of all kinds. The segue into our times, or the times just preceding, is not smooth. It happens all of a sudden and here we are, and suddenly everyone gets quiet.

Does it add up that way? A question that’s raised, but only individuals can answer it. As it is, the proceedings lets you look not only at yourselves, but across the way at other members of the audience who sit silent, crossing legs, scrunched up, or a couple that hold hands strongly, after appearing to argue, the faces changing every bit of the way. It’s uncomfortable to look at people like that because surely they’re looking at you.

“We Are Proud to Present” is all of a piece in recent theatrical offerings by Woolly Mammoth—last year’s almost stately “The Convert,” which dealt with Christian missionaries in Africa, “Detroit,” which was configured somewhat similarly physically, and “Appropriate”, a wildly feverish play about buried secrets among members of a white Southern family written by an African American playwright.

However worked out this play was, and it was done with care, it had the look of stuff that happens every day to most of us: life and death, cab rides in which a driver offers up the notion that there may be such a thing as a coming apocalypse, the hurly burly of demographic change in this city.

“We are Proud to Present … “ runs at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre through March 9.

Gary Tischler •

If you can imagine the Washington National Opera as a Nantucket whaling company, then you can congratulate it for finally landing the great white whale of contemporary opera: composer Jake Heggie’s and librettist Gene Scheer’s “Moby-Dick,” now at the Kennedy Center through March 8.

Unlike mad and fiery Captain Ahab’s doomed, mad expedition to destroy the white whale, the opera, making its long-awaited East Coast debut, doesn’t end in disaster. It is an invigorating, emotionally powerful, poetic and visually astonishing triumph. The production is fueled emotionally by Heggie’s accessible and richly varied music and Scheer’s poetic libretto, which echoes the novel’s style and 19th-century American poetics.

While an entirely operatic opera with all the elements in the operatic toolbox, “Moby-Dick” is also a very American opera. It’s almost a spiritual and emotional anthem to the era’s literary strivings. This isn’t just a question of language—the opera is written and sung in English—but one of style and themes. Throughout the nearly three-hour course of the opera, you hear (and see) the strains of what Walt Whitman heard, you hear American voices, transcendental strivings and New England religious and biblical tones, the salty, dangerous and lonely lives of whalers alone on the ocean.

The opera doesn’t arrive newly minted. It was first commissioned for the Dallas Opera—jointly with the San Francisco Opera, the San Diego Opera, the State Opera of South Australia and Calgary Opera—and had its world premiere at the Dallas Opera in 2010. The San Francisco Opera production was staged in 2012. For Washingtonians who had not seen the production, it existed as a kind of much-talked-about and much-written-about rumor.

To begin with, all the stories about the physical and technical aspects of the production are true: on stage, “Moby-Dick” is a spectacle of projection, lighting and a physical apparition which is both highly complicated and affecting. It’s sailors on ropes, decks and shadows, in whaling boats seemingly bobbing in fierce storms on high seas, sets that sometime dwarf the characters like the shadow of a giant white whale. The wizards who helped re-recreate the physical presence of the whaling ship Pequod include Robert Brill (set design), Jane Greenwood (costumes), Gavan Smith (lights) and Elaine J. McCarthy (projection design). It’s McCarthy we presume who’s responsible for the magical projection that hooks stars and ship together in the opening sequence.

But, as somebody once quipped, you shouldn’t come out humming the sets or the lights, however impressive. Opera is about music, words and music, singers and singing and, in many cases, fevered drama. As literature, “Moby-Dick” is nothing, if not operatic, dealing with obsession, man’s place in the cosmos, and relationship to the almighty, not to mention being a tragic adventure fully muscled with the brawn of an emerging America.

After all, this is about Captain Ahab, the one-legged leader of the Pequod, and his pursuit of the white whale Moby-Dick, who stole his leg from him. It’s about Starbuck, the reasonable and moral first mate, Queegqueg, the island harpooner, the cabin boy Pip and the sailors like Flask and Stubb, and the newcomer and sometime narrator of the tale dubbed the “greenhorn,” otherwise known as Ishmael, alone on the vast ocean, far from Nantucket.

This production is an intimate marriage of music and libretto. It brings out, if perhaps not all the essential details of Melville’s massive masterpiece, the key elements of the heart of the book. Heggie has become something of a master of the contemporary opera musical narrative form. He is the composer of “Dead Man Walking,” which has become a staple and received 40 productions as well as “Out of Darkness”, a trio of Holocaust stories. The music is remarkably varied. It’s a kind of ship of treasures itself, often wandering into pure songs, intimate duets between “greenhorn” and Queegeg, and Abab and Starbuck or arias (notably Ahab’s and the “greenhorn”). With echoing sea shanties or bursting like a wave, there’s no sameness in this music. This is a little remarkable given that all the action takes place on a single ship.

Just as critical is Gene Scheer’s libretto. Noted American playwright Terence McNally, who had the initial impulse to make an opera out of “Moby-Dick,” was originally slated to do the libretto but bowed out because of illness. Scheer, who has worked with Heggie on other projects, instead took over and produced a libretto that more than complements the music. It’s a marriage. Scheer finds the style and words of the characters and the time and the book, you can, as Whitman did, hear America singing, along with the Puritans and bible thumpers as well as strong-armed, brave and rum-loving sailors.

From the beginning imagery, the production moves from spectacle to wonder, to intimate scenes, buoyed by strong singing and believable, often touching acting. Two of the performers—the young American tenor Stephen Costello as the “greenhorn” (aka Ishmael), and American soprano Talise Trevine in the pants part of Pip were in the Dallas and San Francisco productions. They anchor the production: Costello with a clear, rangy, heart-touching voice, commanding without being pushy, especially in the aria “Human Madness,” accompanied only by an oboe. The greenhorn’s relationship with the Pacific whaler Queegeg is touching, as they cement their friendship and the greenhorn sings about learning the other’s language.

This is one of the strengths of the production—the surge from spectacle to intimacy. There are times when the overpowering sets tend to diminish the characters on stage. It’s a fine line to walk. That whole idea of man in the face of impossibly large forces is a thematic content after all. I would have like to see a little more charisma and force from tenor Carl Tanner’s Ahab when he’s singing out of a crowd, but he’s very affecting in his scenes with the stoic, pragmatic Starbuck (baritone Matthew Worth).

On the whole, guided with imagination by director Leonard Foglia and conducted with energy by Evan Rogister, “Moby-Dick” is an engaging American opera. It is something we’ve seen rarely here, an epic American experience, and a lodestone of inventiveness in almost all of its aspects. It ends—as it should—with the right words, the right tone, the right image, just so.

“Moby-Dick” is playing at the Kennedy Center’s opera house through March 8.
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Gary Tischler •

You read about him, you talk to him, you see his life and resume, and you think life probably couldn’t get much thicker and fuller for Washington Concert Opera Artistic Director and Conductor Antony Walker.

Here we were, on a long distance call from Australia, where he was raised, and where he would return to conduct a production of “Carmen” at the Sidney Opera House, directed by Francesca Zambello, the artistic director of the Washington National Opera, thinking out loud about home, hearth and the WCO’s next production, Giuseppe Verdi’s “Il Corsaro,” on March 9 at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium.

“I understand you’re having a bit of snow,” he said. “It’s not too bad here. But being so far away, even though I love it here, you miss Georgetown.” Walker lives in Georgetown with his partner Lauren, their daughter, Genevieve, who is not yet one-year-old, and their 10-year-old border collie mix named Sadie.

“I love Georgetown,” he said, “I love the sense of history here.”

Walker is also a rising presence in the world of opera and classical music. In his early forties, he got high marks from the Sidney critics on “Carmen.” They wrote: “It’s a joy to be carried along by his [Walker’s] zesty reading of a score that in lesser hands can sound over-familiar or routine.”

“ ’Carmen,’ in a way, is the exact opposite of what we do at Washington Concert Opera,” Walker said. “It’s the most familiar of operas, even to people who don’t often go. And it’s a full-scale dramatic piece, the whole of opera, sets, and costumes galore.”

Walker has been artistic director and conductor of the Washington Concert Opera since 2002 and also serves as music director of the Pittsburgh Opera and artistic director of the Pinchgut Opera in Sydney. Since his professional debut in Sydney in 1991, he has conducted more than 200 operas, large and smaller scale choral and orchestral works as well as symphonic and chamber works with companies all over the world. On the opera stage, he has led performances by the Metropolitan Opera and numerous major opera companies.

He is big and getting bigger and is very much in demand, but you also suspect that the work he does with the WCO is close to heart. “We have a slogan,” he said. “It’s all about the music. It’s not an either-or thing. It’s a different way of seeing, experience and hearing opera, for that matter. It’s the stage, the singers, the orchestra, the conductor, performing a full opera, no sets no costumes. In a way, you ‘see’ a different sort of opera. It’s much more intimate. And, as a conductor, you’re very much exposed. You’re a part of everything in a way that everyone can see.”

“We’ve also specialized in doing operas that are rarely performed, works by composers everyone knows, but works that aren’t done often,” Walker said. “It’s not because they’re obscure or because they’re not good. I think ‘Il Corsaro’ is a masterpiece or very near to it.”

“It’s very characteristic Verdi,” he added. “This was a time of revolutionary passion in Europe and Italy. It was Byron’s time, too, and you can hear and feel that in this opera.”

Tenor Michael Fabiano takes on the title role of the pirate and corsair Corrado, with the noted lyric soprano Nicole Cabell, starring as Corrado’s great love, with Tamara Wilson, named Washington’s singer of year in 2011, as Gulnara, in the the Washington Concert Opera production of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Il Corsaro,” March 9 at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium.

Gary Tischler • February 28, 2014

As Arena Stage Artistic Director Molly Smith reminds us, the play now at the Fichandler at Arena is called “Mother Courage and Her Children”—not just “Mother Courage,” as it sometimes is—implying that the character played in gruff operatic style by the great Kathleen Turner is motivated primarily by her maternal instincts.

That may be true, but there’s no solace for the audience or for Mother Courage in Bertolt Brecht’s astonishing epic, which the author of “The Three Penny Opera” and a host of almost tribal theatrical jeremiads against war, greed, militarism, big business and corporate interests began writing in 1938, on the eve of World War II, and only two decades after World War I, when “the war to end all wars” ended.

The play—hugely theatrical, casting a wide net—almost always has a way of looking both specific and humanly abstract. Certainly, that’s where Smith is going. She means to connect Mother Courage, her three children, a camp follower, a minister, a chef and sundry scoundrels, brutal soldiers, camp followers, and civilians from the Thirty Years’ War to the present and our own times and country with the presence of soldiers in present-day uniforms.

The suggestion that we’re always in some sort of Thirty Years War isn’t wrong, but given that we’ve conducted our winding-down and current war and most recent war in a way that our populations are disconnected from them in a way that the protagonists of this play are not, the idea is not as searing as it should be. The mix of present-day clothing and weaponry, not to mention contemporary colloquial profanity, does bring us closer to the characters that populate the Fichandler in-the-round stage, which looks like a bombed out-pit of debris from wars coming and going.

The problem with the ironically nick-named Mother Courage is that she tries to balance what she thinks is her astute business acumen with her love of her children. That acumen is mostly greed, driven by fear. She is fiercely neutral, without ideology, with a burning passion to save her children and her cart of goods, a kind of moving canteen that she and her children carry across the battlefields of central and western Europe. They skate just barely by, never sure, never safe, in a particularly savage war which ruined what was then Germany for decades.

Turner’s Mother Courage has a kind of gruff passion. She has verbal size and distinction. She knows the values of goods and her own shrewd self. She has the survivalist courage to take on whatever’s coming down the pike, which is always unexpected , unfair, unsavory, and unpleasant. She and her children—a big, tough strapping boy Eilife, played with a strong presence and even stronger voice by Nicholas Rodriguez, the vulnerable but numbers-wise boy she calls Swiss Cheese, played with pathos by Nehal Joshi, and Katatrin, solemn, quickly moving and silent, played with astonishingly loud silence by Erin Weaver—stagger across the muddy fields, cratered and shell-serenaded landscape like watchful wayfarers.

Mother Courage is a part that can be done with scurvy, sexy humor—or it can plain done in, without humor. Turner is, at turns, funny and calls on her gift for sexuality when it is appropriate but with ease, and the love for her kids—a really tough love—is nevertheless self evident. It seems to blind her when it’s hitched to her greed. She’s like a con man who thinks war is just another mark she can outwit.

As an experience, this production, which features gloriously thrift-shop costume designs by Joseph Salasovich and a spectacularly beat-up war set by Todd Rosenthal, is almost overwhelming. It’s like being parachuted into a place you’ve avoided all your life. It’s a dangerous place. It has the unkempt odor of religious passions which can turn murderous in a second. It’s full of loss and constant change—one day you’re a camp follower, the next day, you’re a colonel’s mistress, which is what happens to a Grisabella-like Yvette played with loud charm by Meg Gillentine.

The production also has the gifts of David Hare’s tough translation, which knows the different between honest colloquial grief and polemics, and new music composed by James Sugg. Turner sings in the key of knock-you-over, when she’s doing “Mother Courage’s Song” and straight from the torn heart with “Lullaby.” Rick Foucheux displays a fine, touching voice in “The God Who Was a Man” as well as putting on a display of complexity in his role as the chaplain. The music is presented like there’s a circus band of gypsies and jazz men following the proceedings.

In the end, of course, everything Mother Courage does puts her children in danger, and they fall or disappear one by one, as she nevertheless hangs on to her cart. Those last images remind you of any war, of Lear, of great, imagined losses. And when the production does that, why that’s a kind of courage in and of itself.