Performance

Gary Tischler • March 13, 2014

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.

Gary Tischler • February 27, 2014

Anoushka Shankar, the world renowned and world-class sitar player and interpreter of classical Indian music was talking about her latest album, “Traces of You,” in a phone conversation last week.

Listening to her and to some of the songs on the album like the single, “The Sun Won’t Set,” and the title track, you get a sense of the personal nature of her music and its universal appeal. It’s about what art—be it performed, recorded, written, painted or sculpted—reaches for a particularism that goes straight to the personal heart and imagination of the viewer and listener and then becomes magically universal.

This is what usually happens in the best and most successful creative endeavors. Whether receptively popular or consciously artistic, the results often seem mysterious—a “don’t know how” kind of happening that arrives with inscrutable blessings.

This is, it seemed to me, especially true for Shankar, the daughter of a legend in the world but more so in her roots, the wife of a film director who has taken risky approaches to cherished classical material in his work, and the half sister of a singer whose broad popularity nevertheless has it own mysteries.

“Traces of You” is often talked about as a highly personal work, in the sense that many see it as a tribute and musical ode to her father, Ravi Shankar, the legendary sitar player who popularized classical Indian music to the world. He became a prominent figure in the annals of rock and roll after rock musicians, especially Beatle George Harrison, took up the music. Shankar died at the age of 92 in December 2012. “It was a time of tremendous change for me,” Shankar said. “My father died while we were in the midst of recording “Traces of You,” and, of course, it was a tremendous loss for me and, I think, for all the people who loved his music.”

Everything about the album seems on the surface, and in its descriptions and particular sound, a way of turning loss into watchful celebration and memory. Anoushka invited Norah Jones, her half sister and Ravi Shankar’s daughter by a different mother, with whom she had worked before, to sing several of the pieces on the album, including “Traces of You” and “The Sun Won’t Set” and “Unsaid.” “It turned out to be a good experience, having her there, working with her. Instinctively, Norah understood what we were doing together.” They had both lost their father, and that is always a loss freighted with meaning and memory for everyone.

For Anoushka, the music is very much about and full of her father, with whom she toured, the man who trained her and gave her first sitar, the towering influence in her life. It is very personal and connected to family. There is the presence of Jones, the music of her father, and there is the fact that Joe Wright, her husband with whom she has a two-year old son, Zubin, directed the video of “Traces of You.” Another song, “Monsoon,” had its roots in 2009, when, she said, “I was just in the process of falling in love with my husband-to-be.” Wright himself shares an affinity for making original creations out of classical sources in such films as “Pride and Prejudice” and his recent astonishing version of “Anna Karenina.”

She is noted for her mastery of the sitar, for her beauty and for her fight for causes—especially about sexual violence against women, an issue that has been in the news in India. She is also noted for expanding the reaches of Indian classical music into jazz, American classical music and tango, sending it out until it returns somewhat changed, not so much fused as slightly altered and richer for the flight. “I love expanding the music while being faithful to it,” she said. “It has always been universal at its heart, Indian, but more.”

That’s why the album seems in many ways very specific and personal, but also uncommonly generous and kind in many of its aspects, an acceptance of life in all of its forms. “The music is very specific, but it has been drawn in and accepted by the world,” she said. “I know what I’ve done with my music, who I am, but things always change. I can’t predict what I will be doing musically in the future.”

“Look what has happened, this has been an enormous time in my life in the sense that I have grown with the music, I met my husband and fell in love, I’ve become a wife and mother, I’ve lost my father, all in a relatively short time,” she said. “All of this affects the music, the composing. I am not who I was several years ago, or when I was a child or an adolescent in California.”

She is, in some ways, the embodiment of the idea of the personal and universal being played out in art and life all the time. Looking at her—and for that matter remembering her father and his pioneering influence—you often see this beautiful woman, deft, not dramatic but a presence, sitar and sari. The image and the accompanying music seem exotic, different from, say Iowa or California, where she was a prom queen. At the same time, it familiar, the atmosphere speaks musically to common experience. The instrument itself seems difficult and ungainly, but yet, she elicits and plays music as clear and complicated as a proverb, and as easy as rhythm from it.

Describing how the album for Deutsche Grammophone evolved, she said “A lot of it happened unconsciously. Life took a journey of its own, and the music followed that form. The sitar leads the listener through the album like a narrator.”

Anoushka Shankar is presented by the Washington Performing Arts Society at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium, 8 p.m., Nov. 15.

Gary Tischler •

These are heady days for the venerable
National Theater. The oldest theater in
town is looking better than it has in a long
time, and it’s full of energy. Sporting a physical
makeover done this summer, the National
is the site for something that hasn’t happened
there in years, a pre-Broadway tryout run of
a new musical, “If/Then,” a show with some
giants talents involved, on stage and off.
Not only that, but the National is having its
first season subscription series in many years, a
full slate of shows going well into next year. In
fact, a run (Dec. 25-29) of “Gershwin’s Porgy
and Bess” will follow “If/Then” during the
Christmas season.

All of this makes it an exciting time for
Steve Traxler, co-founder of Jam Theatricals,
based in Chicago, which, along with SMG of
Philadelphia is the National Theater Group’s
new programming team.

“We’re just glad have “If/Then” here. We’re
really excited about it, because there’s so many
really terrific, talented people involved in it,
it’s a brand new show, headed for Broadway,”
said Traxler, a veteran producer of Broadway
shows, both musicals and dramas.
“David Stone—he did such a great job with
guiding ‘Next to Normal’—is the producer and
he was looking to be in Washington, and so
we are honored and lucky to have the show.
Is there risk in doing something new? Sure,
there’s always risk when you get involved in
any show, on Broadway, in music, anything.
But you can’t do anything that’s really excellent
without taking a risk. That’s what I believe.”
In addition to producer David Stone, famous
for guiding the off-beat contemporary musical
“Next to Normal” (“If/Then” also has a contemporary
setting) through a process that led
through Arena Stage and eventual Broadway
success, was also one of the producers of
“Wicked,” a mega-hit which is still running on
Broadway and on the road. Not coincidentally,
there are a lot of people involved in “If/When”
that know each other, including composer
Tom Kitt and lyricist Brian Yorkey, as well as
director Michael Greif (Signature’s “Angels in
America”) who were the creative masters of
“Next To Normal”.

The star is Idina Menzel, the woman with
the incredible beautiful and rangy voice who
starred as Elphaba, the green witch of “Wicked,”
a role which got her a Tony. Menzel plays a
woman making choices in her life, looking for
a second chance. She’s reunited with Anthony
Rapp, with whom she appeared in “Rent.” “If/
Then” also features LaChanze, who won a Tony
Award for Celie in “The Color Purple.”

Pre-Broadway runs were once a staple
at the National Theatre. “The National just
has this amazing history, which is so appealing
to me, personally,” Traxler said. “It’s
Washington’s oldest theater, and, programming
wise, certainly, we aim to restore it to its old
standing as a place for new works, great shows
and plays and performances, as well as special
events.”

The first subscription season includes
Green Day’s “American Idiot” in February,
a return of “West Side Story”, as well as
“Stomp”, “Mamma Mia”, Hal Holbrook still
doing “Mark Twain Tonight”, and “Blue Man
Group.”

Talking with Traxler, you realize he loves
theater, shows, the stuff on stage, the people
that do it, write it, sing it, act it. He’s what
you might call a careful enthusiast, somewhat
like his mother, a movie buff. He and his Jam
Theatricals got into theater in the 1990s, and in
2002, he turned to producing.. Before that he
had worked with an aging Frank Sinatra to put
on his last performance in Chicago. “That was
an experience I’ll never forget,” he said. “The
man was a true professional.”

Jam Theatricals and its principals have won
six Tonys: for “Spamalot,” “Glengarry Glen
Ross,” “The History Boys,” “August: Osage
County,” “Hair” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia
Woolf.”

Traxler was also one of four producers
on “August: Osage County,” the harrowing,
hit family play. The film version—for which
he’s also listed as a producer with Harvey
Weinstein—opens this Christmas. “Weird, I
mean it’s not exactly holiday stuff, but it’s
Oscar time, you know,” he said. It just might
do pretty well, given a cast that includes Meryl
Streep and Julia Roberts.

And now: “I just got into town,” he said.
“We’re really excited about this being here at
the National.”

(“If/Then” will run at the Naitonal Theatre
through Dec. 8 and is scheduled to have its
Broadway opening at the Richard Rodgers
Theatre in the spring of 2014 on March 27.)

Gary Tischler • February 3, 2014

There was a time—during the 1970s,
the 1980s and a little beyond—when
Georgetown and its surrounding areas
vibrated with the sound of music coming
from all sorts of venues, up and down M
Street, on Wisconsin Avenue and on K
Street by the waterfront.

Almost all of that is gone, surviving only
as legend. Neil Young recently issued an album
based on his appearance at the Cellar Door, and
there was a movie documentary shown on PBS
about the golden age of the Bayou. Only Blues
Alley, still presenting top-tier jazz in a classy
(and one-of-a-kind setting) remains, just off
Wisconsin Avenue in Blues Alley, NW.

But wait. There’s a new kid on the block,
or rather there are new kids on the block.
That would be David and Karen Ensor, who
remember the Georgetown music scene well and
hope to begin to revive that scene with Gypsy
Sally’s, a new music club which opened last fall
under the Whitehurst Freeway at 3401 K Street,
also known as Water Street that far west in town.

The club—more of a total environment than
just a music venue—specializes in the elastic
genre of Americana music, which goes back
as far as folk legends Woody Guthrie and Pete
Seeger (who died yesterday) and runs through
Appalachian-rooted banjo music, the kings and
queens of singer-songwriters (Emmy Lou Harris
and Bob Dylan) come to mind. It’s got its own
Grammy category (Harris and Rodney Crowell
won the best album honors). It’s roots music
steeped in tradition, but it is also as new as
tomorrow, when the next legend, packing a
guitar on his or her back, comes in and sets up
on the main stage at Gypsy Sally’s.
We stopped by Gypsy Sally’s on a quiet,
icicle-cold mid-week afternoon to talk with
Karen and Dave Ensor, the couple who are
fulfilling a long-held dream and hope to jump
start a Georgetown music renaissance.

“We remember that time when if you were
talking about D.C. music, you were talking pretty
much about what was going on in Georgetown,”
Karen said. “But right now, as far as Georgetown
is concerned, what was left was Blues Alley and
that was pretty much it. I think we complement
Blues Alley, right down the street from us, and
maybe we can start something going again.”

“We love Georgetown, we live here, we’re
raising my two teenaged daughters here,” she
said. “Almost ever since we knew each other, we
wanted to open a club. That was what we wanted
to do. We looked all over the city at first, but
then a friend of ours told us about the space here.
He said, ‘You’ve got to check this out,’ and we
did. We thought the space was perfect for what
we had in mind.”

“It’s more than just a rock club or something
like that,” said Dave Ensor, who knows a thing
or two about rock clubs. “We’re trying to give
folks an experience, so that they have options
about how they want to experience things here,
or what they want to experience.”

David, a local from Northern Virginia, spent
some time in Los Angeles, wanting to be an actor
at first, then working with bands, including his
own. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think you really
have to want to be an actor. It’s really hard. I
think music suited me better. I did everything—
singing, playing, the roadie thing, the process,
you know. But I got to know a lot about how the
business operated, what it took, touring, getting
gigs, booking, the mechanics of setting up bands
in venues.” He calls himself a big fan of Bob
Dylan and Cat Stevens.

The Ensors make a circular kind of couple in
the sense that they round each other out, opposite
on the surface with a passionately held dream
that they’re working on together.

She was raised in the South, went to
Vanderbilt, has a law degree from the University
of Maryland, is a registered nurse and
businesswoman. She’s an admitted Dead Head,
i.e., super-fan of the Grateful Dead, but also
of the kind of rock-and-roll—a rite of passage
in the South—personified by the sound of the
Allman Brothers. She’s high-energy. He’s more
reserved and cautious, except when he’s talking
about music. He still has the kind of quiet
charisma of a guy who would be comfortable in
front of a camera or raising the roof on a rockand-
roll stage. He came back from L.A. in
1990 and had an album in 2009, called “Building
a Life,” and he still teaches guitar. He acquired a
nickname—“Silky Dave”—which seems exactly
right in a good way.

Gypsy Sally’s—the name apparently comes
from an old Townes Van Zandt song called
“Tecumseh Valley”—displays an eclectic
personality.

When you get the tour—minus the music,
but with lots of atmospherics—you get the
seating arrangement, a tiered experience for a
capacity of 300 with both seating and standing
(and if you’re inclined) dancing room.

“We love it that you can do that if you
want,” Karen said. You also have a dining
option, with a menu that’s ripped from the
pages of some of today’s healthier and funkier
cookbooks: hello hempseed fudge brownies, as
well as hempseed hummus, Lake Caesar Salad
and voodoo potato chips. “We wanted above all
for people who come here to find their comfort
zone, to be comfortable,” she said. “We know
we have great venues in the area—the Birchmere
or the 9:30 Club. But in one place you can’t
stand, in the other you can’t sit. Here, you can
do both. That’s for starters.”

“This isn’t just about nostalgia,” Karen
continued. “It’s about contemporary music, a
particular kind of music. It’s the Americana
genre, roots music, singer-songwriters, with
bands and groups that tour and record nationally,
but also new musicians, local musicians, we
hope it will be a place for that kind of thing, too.
We’re not hip hop or Euro-pop or anything like
that, there’s plenty of other places in town that
do that.”

You can get a sense of the music just
by the sound of the band names who are
either coming there soon or have already played
there—the incomparable Kelly Willis, for
instance, or “Covered With Jam” with Ron
Holloway, Lindsay Lou and the Flatbellys, the
Walkaways, Yarn, Steel Wheels, the Railers,
Rico America and the Midnight Train. It’s a
flavor, tinged with banjo and guitars, railroad
cars and diners and songs written by young men
and women waking up feverish with a line that
sticks in their minds, a beat and a rhythm you just
have to fashion a song out of. Upcomers include
a Johnny birthday celebration on Feb. 26, John
Hammond on Feb. 19 and the Flashband Project.

Physically, Gypsy Sally’s comes at you
in sections. It’s on the second floor of a
building that fronts K Street with the restaurant
Malmaison.

When you walk in you’re in the Microbus
Gallery, which features an old “hippie bus,”
designed to give you a feeling for the rustic days
of touring cross-country or hanging out with Ken
Kesey and his merry pranksters.

Exhibitions are a regular thing here, too.
The William Adair construction, “The Golden
Doors to Infinity,” which honors the late and
legendary musician Gram Parsons, and “Martyrs
of Rock,” portraits of lost rock musicians—Jerry
Garcia, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Sid Vicious
and others—by Walter Egan will be seen here,
beginning Feb. 4.

There’s also the Vinyl Lounge, with its own
entrance, a shiny bar, and a small stage—for
open-mike nights—and a collection of vinyl
records, singles and albums, which are making
something of a comeback these days. On the
stand, you can see a collection of old albums,
including the blue hues of a Dylan greatest hits
album. You can bring your own—records, that
is—and play them.

“We care about each and every artist—
roadie or lead singer, or drummer or bass man
who comes in here,” Karen said. “That’s what
we’re about on the whole. It’s the music and
musicians and the audience.”

To meet that goal, Karen and Dave split the
stuff that keeps Gypsy Sally’s going.

“Dave knows everything about the music
business and being a musician—the setting up,
the mechanics, the burnt out fuse, the decibel
level, all the music and creative stuff,” she
said. “Everything on paper, that’s me—the
books, the money, the dates, the business end.”

Together, they’ve got Gypsy Sally’s
humming to a point where people might hear an
echo all over the city up on Wisconsin Avenue
and M Street, the way it used to be. [gallery ids="118495,118491,118486" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler • January 31, 2014

Peter Pan is old. The boy hero—who
refused to grow up, who could fly and
who lived in Neverland—is beyond “back
in the day.” He goes way back to 1904 and the
first book and stories penned by J.M. Barrie,
featuring Peter, Wendy and Captain Hook. He
moved to the London stage and silent movies.
Then, proceeded to the Disney cartoon and to
when Mary Martin, a middle-aged woman and
Broadway star played him on stage and in a live
television production. Recently, he goes back
to Robin Williams and Julia Roberts as Tinker
Belle in Stephen Spielberg’s “Hook.”

Nobody who could be called a lost boy—or
girl—today would remember any of this.

Not even Joey deBettencourt, the 27-yearold
actor, now on stage at the Kennedy Center,
who gets to say—somewhat awestruck—surrounded
by his fellow lost boys:

“I am … Peter,” transforming from a character
called “boy” to, well, you know.

The national touring company production of
of the five-time Tony Award-winning Broadway
hit, “Peter and the Starcatcher” is running now at
the Eisenhower Theater through Feb. 16.

This prequel to Peter Pan is based on the
best-selling novel by Dave Barry and Ridley
Pearson. It began off-Broadway before to its successful
Broadway run. It is now in the midst of a
national tour that has taken deBettencourt, who
is part of a 12-member cast that is on stage all of
the time, all over America. I caught up with by
phone in East Lansing, Mich.

“The touring part of this is amazing,” said
deBettencourt, sounding a little like one of those
wide-eyed boys that included Peter before he
was Peter Pan. “It’s a whole different kind of
life, but where else could you see so much of
this country, at this level, not only being in a new
city, but performing before different audiences?”

DeBettencourt has had some experience touring,
but “nothing this extensive, this expansive,”
he said. The Skokie, Ill., native was a member
of the Chicago-based Griffin Theatre, whose
self-described mission is “to create extraordinary
and meaningful theatrical experiences for
both children and adults and building bridges of
understanding between generations that instill in
its audiences an appreciation of the performing
arts.”

That’s a mouthful, but “Peter and the
Starcatcher” seems exactly the kind of theatrical
project that’s in line with the Griffin approach,
appealing as it does to both young and adult
audiences.

“That’s exactly so,” deBettencourt said.
“You should see the differences in the audiences
when we have a matinee where a lot of
young people and children are on hand. That’s a
lively audience, hugely responsive. The kids get
into it. A night audience is a little different, but
also responsive, in a way you can sense.”

DeBettencourt, who last appeared in the
more adult-oriented play, “Punk Rock” by
British playwright Simon Stephens. “That was
very different, even difficult,” deBettencourt
said. “It’s about young people in the age of
school shootings, but it’s set in England where
that kind of thing isn’t supposed to happen.”

“It’s amazing to be with this show,” he said.
“My fiancé (Julia Beck, an education director
who runs arts programs for children in hospitals)
heard about the auditions for “Starcatcher” and
said ‘you’ve got to do this.’ So, I auditioned,
and I felt really strongly about the show. I was
asked to come to New York to audition again,
and here I am.”

“I’m glad to be here in Washington at the
Kennedy Center, and it’s also going to be a
kind of family thing,” he said. “I have aunts and
uncles who live in Bethesda, Md.”

“This is a different—but also old—form of
story-telling,” he said. “It’s adventure. It uses
old props and costumes. It’s a show with music
and a kind of origin and prequel to the Peter Pan
story—pirates, villains, a Hook-like character,
orphans being kidnapped, a high seas adventure—
one of the ships is called the Neverland.

“What I really like about being in this is that
it’s a play, a show, that tries to connect directly
to the audience,” deBettencourt said. “It’s not a
matter of making people work, but rather having
a truly shared experience. It’s not a literal kind
of thing. It’s the theater. You’re asked to imagine
things, believe things. It’s not something you
can get anywhere else, and I believe that people,
in this tech age, are hungry for such a experience.
I’ve seen it in the audience.”

“There’s no app for that,” I suggest. “Right,”
he says. “I’m going to steal that.”

Like the “boy” becoming Peter. “The thing
is that you know, not wanting to grow up also
means knowing you’ll never have certain experiences,”
deBettencourt said. “And that’s a loss,
too. But there is always the star catcher, the
magic, all of that. Right here on stage.” [gallery ids="118498,118502,118493" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler • January 23, 2014

It used to be that Hollywood trolled Broadway for often terrific movie versions of hit musicals: the whole Rodgers & Hammerstein canon from “Oklahoma” to “The Sound of Music,” Lerner & Lowe’s “My Fair Lady” and “Camelot” or “Anything Goes” and “Kiss Me Kate” from Cole Porter.

These days—with some exceptions—it’s Broadway producers who are culling movies for their musicals, with mixed results. Remember “The Addams Family” (first, a TV series) or “The Producers”? Just recently three such road versions of the Broadway originals have hit the Kennedy Center: “Sister Act” (from the Whoopee Goldberg movie), “Elf” and now “Flashdance,” which runs in the Eisenhower Theater through Jan. 19.

At least “Flashdance” has some musical cache to it. The movie was a surprise hit in the 1980s for Jennifer Beals in a tale about a gorgeous young woman, who is a factory worker by day, a strip club dancer by night, and dreams of becoming a ballet dancer. The movie overrode its improbable Cinderella story with a stripped-down plot, some hot numbers by a body double and a several anthem-like rock numbers. Like “Dirty Dancing” from the same period, it became a hit.

“Flashdance, The Musical” has the same improbable plot, with the heroine, Alex Owens now a true working class gal who falls in love with the company heir to the business, stands up for her fellow workers hard hatters on the steel mill line, still works in an odd strip club where they don’t actually strip and is generally a tough cookie who still wants to be a ballet dancer.

The musical also appears to be about an hour longer than the original film, with songs from the movie like “Gloria” (a hit for the late Laura Brannigan), “What a Feeling,” “Maniac” and the title song as well as “I Love Rock and Roll.” It also has another 16 songs, with music by Robbie Roth and lyrics by Robert Cary and Robbie Roth, which are serviceable if not the kind of songs that make you want to try them at a karaoke bar 20 years from now.

But here’s what’s good about “Flashdance.” It has—like the movie—enormous energy driven by a high-spirited, attractive cast who sing and dance with gusto and deliver lines with the aplomb of stand-up comedians, especially David Gordon as Jimmy, who actually wants to be a standup comedian in New York, but settles for returning to the club and his girlfriend Gloria, the appealing Ginna Claire Mason, the two of them dueting on “Where I Belong”.

But truth to tell, it’s really Jillian Mueller, a fiery, dance-dervish performer with a big voice who carries the show. She sings, hoofs, performs and breathes life into the proceedings whenever she’s on stage, which is pretty much always. Small, high-driving and high-stepping, emotional and passionate, she’s got the makings of a Broadway star, she does everything as if it’s worth giving 110 percent and carries you with her. It’s amazing that her voice has held out for the course of the tour—she has a number of anthem-like songs to sings, the kind where you’re in the spotlight feet firmly planted, head out and up, defiant and moving forward and just sort of belt it out. She also gets splashed with water while dancing emoting on a chair, a signature scene from the movie and poster.

As far as “I Love Rock and Roll” goes, Joan Jett owns that one way long ago, lock, stock and rock and leather jacket.

Gary Tischler • January 17, 2014

From South Africa—“Mies Julie,”
an adaptation by Yael Farber for
the South African State Theatre of
Strindberg’s “Miss Julie” 14 years
after Apartheid makes its Washington
debut at the Shakespeare
Theatre Company’s Lansburgh
Theatre Nov. 9 to 24.

Lynn Redgrave by way of Kathleen
Chalfant—“Shakespeare For My Father,”
a one-woman play written by the
late actress Lynn Redgrave about her
Shakespearean actor father Michael, will
receive a staged reading at the Folger
Theatre Nov. 11, in conjunction with
the Davis Performing Arts Center at
Georgetown University.

A new and restless “Sleeping Beauty”—
Cutting edge and powerhouse British choreographer
Matthew Bourne returns to the
Kennedy Center with his company New
Adventures to the Opera House for his distinctive
and haunting version of “Sleeping
Beauty,” a gothic, supernatural love story
fitting for the times. Nov. 12 to 17.

A True Family Saga at Studio, “The Apple Family Plays”
by Richard Nelson consist of two plays, “That Hopey
Changing Thing” and “Sweet and Sad,” which will play
in repertory at the Studio Theater Nov. 13 to Dec.
29, directed by Serge Seiden and with a cast of stellar
Washington players, including Jeremy Webb, Kimberly
Schraf, Sarah Marshall, Ted van Grithuysen, Elizabeth
Pierotti and Rick Foucheux.

One of Our Favorite Things: Rodgers
and Hammerstein’s classic musical about
Anna and the King of Siam, “The King
and I” gets a staging fit for the holidays
at the Olney Theatre Center Nov. 14
to Dec. 29. Starring Paolo Montalban
as the King and Eileen Ward as Anna,
directed by Mark Waldrop.

Tappin’ Through Life—Legendary Broadway and
stage performer, jazz singer, dancer and actor
Maurice Hines will star in the jazzy, high-stepping
journey of his own life, featuring the Manzari
Brothers, running Nov. 15 to Dec. 29.

Christmas in Twelve Days—“The Twelve Days
of Christmas,” directed by Michael Dove, and
based on the traditional holiday song by Renee
Calarco will be the Christmas production
at Adventure Theatre in Glen Echo Park Nov. 15 to Dec. 30. [gallery ids="101535,150046,150054,150052" nav="thumbs"]