Performance

Gary Tischler • December 30, 2013

Larry Cahn is on the road again, and he likes it.

Right now, he’s playing Walter Hobbs, the apparently cold, money-oriented businessman who’s landed on Santa’s naughty list in the touring company of the hit Broadway musical “Elf,” which was a hit comedy for Will Ferrell playing an oversized Santa’s helper and finding a dad in James Caan, who co-starred as Hobbs.

It’s all at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House through Jan. 5, with Will Bloom as the “Elf” in question. “I got the part of Walter Hobbs the old-fashioned way,” said the veteran actor and performer Cahn, no six degrees of separation from Caan. “I auditioned for the part.”

In a cast that includes a lot of wide-eyed, high-energy young performers, especially Bloom, Cahn is the kind of been-there, all-purpose professional that every road company needs and usually has. “You do this long enough, and you realize you’ve done a lot over time,” Cahn said. “Sometimes, there are dry spells. But this is fun. We did it in Chicago where I have a lot of friends and memories, being a Northwestern guy, and I have to tell you, what they call a snow storm around here is nothing.”

“This is just a really great family show,” Cahn said. “It keeps you busy. It’s aimed straight at the heart. We were working on it in October, in Kentucky, and we did a rehearsal in a school as a performance, you know, making sure we were getting right, an open rehearsal, and it was amazing to me, anyway. That was a great audience.”

If you see pictures of Cahn you think you recognize him. Even over the phone the voice sounds accessible and familiar. “I can do everything, that’s for sure, always have,” Cahn said. “A little bit of this, a little bit of that. I can carry a tune. I can dance a little. I’ve done television and movies, witnesses and parts on ‘Law and Order’—and that one, used to be the life blood of New York actors.”

Back in the 1980s, when a periodic revival of “Anything Goes” was produced, Cahn had numerous roles in the production: he was Reporter No. 2, he was in the Chanty Quartet and a member of the Lady Fair Quartet, he understudied both Billy Crocker and Lord Evelyn Oakleigh.

Cahn understudied eight different roles in the company of “The Graduate” in 2002. That was the play which starred Kathleen Turner in the iconic role of Mrs. Robinson. “There is an actress, a star, that you would do anything for,” Cahn said. “She insisted that we were all part of a family, we were all in it together, down to earth, blunt, honest, with a big heart.”

“Touring the country like this is hard, sure, but it’s invigorating,” Cahn said. “When you’re in a tour, you get to see the country, all sorts of different audiences. I wasn’t worried about the movie. The movie was the movie, you know. James Caan—well, you don’t try to imitate him or sound like him. It was a fun movie. This is, to my mind, a great entertainment.”

Cahn is a New Yorker, but he also spends time in Los Angeles with two dogs. “I’ve got to get a dog for my apartment in New York,” he said. “But it’s tough on them, when you’re on the road.”

Washington isn’t exactly unfamiliar to Cahn. He was in a production of Ken Ludwig’s “Lend Me a Tenor” at the Kennedy Center, a touring production of “The Pirates of Penzance” at the National Theater, and a musical called “Is There Life After High School?” “You remember that?” he said. “Wow. It’s good to be back. The town has changed a lot since then.”

Gary Tischler • December 12, 2013

Broadway may be rocking. It might have Spiderman and Cindy Lauper and “Wicked” and “If/Then”, the next perhaps big thing by spring. For sheer entertainment value, however, you cannot beat the comfort zone of a spectacularly well-done production of a golden oldie or what we still think of as the Broadway musical.

Two examples are on display now and worth the bucks and a visit. At the Olney Theatre in Maryland, there’s director Mark Waldrop’s faithful, quite spectacular version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The King and I,” driven by a warm, royal performance by Paolo Montalban. At the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Harman Hall, there’s Bruce Dow headlining in show-hogging but also show-sharing fashion a rollicking, hells-a-popping production of 1962’s “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” which is actually a whole bunch of funny things. Both productions feature Broadway musical composers and writers at the top of the form for the genre with with R&H for “The King and I,” and Stephen Sondheim providing the music (including the wowser opener, “Comedy Tonight”) for “Forum.”

Both shows also have stars (Dow and Montalban) who have to overcome the giant shadows cast by the original creators, made larger by movie versions: Zero Mostel, who starred as the Roman slave Pseudolus in both the stage and movie version, and Yul Brynner, who’s gleaming, bald head and charismatic stage presence became almost indelible in the stage version (including a reprisal while he was dying of cancer) and the movie version with Deborah Kerr.

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM

“A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” which comes to us by way of ancient Rome, reminds you mostly of a circus. No, wait, a carnival. Wait, no, it reminds you of a vaudeville show. Better still, a burlesque show. Sometimes, it even seems like an old television variety show, or maybe the tail end of a house party in ancient Rome (or a campus toga party), after Bacchus has been served much too well.

Director Alan Paul is the great, inventive ring master, the barker, the backstage organizer who put this show together, but it’s Bruce Day who does the heavy juggling of its many disparate and, often, desperate parts. “Forum” would not work without Dow as Pseudolus, the slave longing to be free and a citizen of Rome, who goes the extra league and then some to achieve that end. But it would also be impossible to imagine “Forum” without each and every member of the cast , so knit together tightly are the bits, and the fast pace of the laugh-a-second, eye-candy, bawdy, zany show.

Everybody—every character—in “Forum” at one time is somebody else—even the three houses which dominate the set of a block on a street in Rome—are mistaken for the other houses. The only thing you can trust on stages is that something funny and unexpected is about to happen, not always on purpose.

You may or may not have noticed that vaudeville and burlesque haves re-appeared as forms for entertainment around town—here and there in a club, a small theater, a bar—as people seem to have a sudden longing for bad old jokes, performers who can juggle and dance at the same time, singers of the old school and strippers who don’t take everything off.

You can get all of this in “Forum”—the show’s roots are firmly planted on warp-speed comedic lines, some of them nonetheless first heard in Nero’s day, timing cued to slamming doors, panic, and deft, but straight faces that might burst into screaming at any second. It’s like a three-card monte game, a “where’s the pea under the cup” street game, a hustle and a bustle—lots of bustles. In fact everything comes in threes—three houses, three versions of almost every character, and the fact that the courtesan-heroine-ingenue (three again) cannot count past three.

We have not the space or inclination to reprise all the intricacies of plot here—perhaps over drinks some other time. Suffice it to say that slave Pseudolus can gain his freedom from Hero, the clueless scion of his house who has been bowled over Phylia, the winsome, dim, blonde resident at the brothel-house of Lyceus next door. Pseudolus needs to get Phylia for Hero. Trouble is, she’s already been sold to the thunder-thighed Miles Gloriosus, a Roman commander of overweaning self-delight. From this stems every disguise, misstep, lie, double-and-triple crossing, love and death potion and antic in the show. It leaves you kind of breathless.

So does Dow. He has the task of making you feel you’re part of the plot, you’re in the joke, you’re having so much fun that you don’t care if one of the doll babies gets dropped, or a joke falls as flat as a courtesan’s bust, although you can’t tell by the courtesans. Dow is endearing, frisky, seductive, flat out funny, while making Pseudolus a yearning human being, even when he’s out of breath. But he’s not alone: take Hysterium, the aptly named named head slave of the house of Senex and Domin, which sounds like a sex game. Tom Story turns him into a screaming, whiplashed skinny mound of jello trying to keep up with Pseudolus’s plots and also portray a corpse near the climax of the show.

Philia—a virgin who knows how not to seem like one—is an absolute love potion, as portrayed by Lora Lee Gayer. She is deadpan, deft at malapropism and possesses a sleepy, dangerously short but agreeable attention span and a killer voice. She is a gem in a very large ocean of performers.

Let’s not forget the courtesans, announced complete with specialties, reminiscent of the “Gotta Have a Gimmick” strippers in “Gypsy” (now at the Signature), and the wonderful Proteans, who scramble to be soldiers, servants, slaves, cohorts while running and prat-falling and marching. And everyone can sing—best of all Dow with a show-opening that’s a show-stopper—the remarkable “Comedy Tonight.”

You can you top that? How about the lady that opens the second act conducting the orchestra and ends up twirling tassles and not like a cheerleader? Comedy tonight? Hell, yes.

THE KING AND I

“The King and I” has its comedic moments, most of them, oddly, provided by Montalban as the King of Siam, a ruler with a sly, imperious sense of humor as well as sense of entitlement, which he has trouble hanging on to.

If “Forum” predicts Sondheim’s fast-paced runs of music and tunes, if not his seriousness and sophistication of purpose, then “The King and I” epitomizes Rodgers and Hammerstein’s dramatic and purpose-driven theatrical sensibilities, while re-defining and even inventing musicals.

“The King and I” premiered in 1951, while Americans were fighting a war in Korea, still owning bloody memories of its war with Japan, and only less than a decade ahead of entering the fray in Viet Nam, all of them clashes of cultures, among other things. The King of Siam, long in a line of such kings, is fending off western incursions in the 1860s, including cultural ones that challenge notions of kingship, power and slavery. The West is in his palace in the person of Anna, and her son, hired to tutor the many royal children, including the king’s heir. To the king—challenges to his power over his many wives, learning western ways while upholding tradition—it is “a puzzlement,” none less than Anna herself, with whom he struggles, interacts, and has a relationship which ripens into friendship if not romance.

While some of us may be overly familiar with the material, its power has not lost its effectiveness. At Olney, some of that comes from the (as usual) parade of the king’s children, a set that’s entirely Asian, but also pragmatically effective, along with beautiful costume design by Kendra Reign.

While Eileen Ward makes a formidable challenge to the king, she’s also an actress who can bring off classic R&H songs, such as “I Whistle a Happy Tune” and “Hello, Young Lovers.” The highly anticipated “Shall We Dance” number is brought off with swirling charm and energy by Montalban and Ward.

Neither Ward nor Montalban haves the best voice in the cast—that easily belongs to Yoonjeong Seong who can hold a note with passion and then go a little higher than it was written in “We Kiss In a Shadow.”

It’s impossible to compete with the memory of Brynner—and Montalban doesn’t try. He makes the part his own with those touches of humor, a different look to be sure, but a warmth, sometimes displaced by anguish and confusion. He is a very human, often struggling, king—but a king, nonetheless.

Both “Forum” and “King” are classics, which seem—50 and 60 years after their debuts—to be fresh as anything on Broadway stages today.
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Georgetowner • December 10, 2013

I kept thinking, as I watched Mikhail Baryshnikov navigate the stage of the Lansburgh Theatre in “Man in a Case,” a theater piece from the Washington Shakespeare Theatre Company by way of the Hartford Stage in Connecticut, what this might be like without him.

Watching him move, gesture, do no more than a 30-second series of moves to the blues, a little skip-and-glide, watching him collapse on a bed, or put something yearning and languid in a tentative gesture of unfulfilled love, you remember who he is. At the same time, you see him as the men on stage, you get a little lost in the Chekhov stories he inhabits along with a wonderfully eclectic and eccentric cast of performers.

It’s all a little puzzling, this echo of other lives and identities.   A young woman, kind of Chekhovian in a loose scarf, confessed that she was a little confused, as she walked out of the theater with her companion.  “Don’t worry, sweetheart,” he said. “It’s just Chekhov.”

That it is, but it’s also a little more than that.  This is the work of Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar of Big Dance Theater, who combine dance, theatre and video and achieve an effect that makes audience members feel more like casual witnesses.  It’s an odd effect. When you walk in, you see folks at a long wooden table, there’s pop music—Petula Clark?—the people are hunters, who begin to talk about the efficacy of wild turkey calls.

Videos end up on screens, on tables, they’re tools to broaden the story, make faces and feelings bigger, but like the later Carly Simon song, seem to be not so much tools as toys after a while. They’re —lookee here—echoes of ourselves, because, you think, surely these characters don’t know the music.

The piece—and it is more piece than outright, formal play—is a riff on Chekhov’s riffs on love in two of his short stories: “Man in A Cage” about a professor of Greek  in a school in a small obviously Russian village and “About Love” about a man with a married woman. In the end, well, it is just Chekhov.

Baryshnikov plays the headmaster who is most at home within the strictures of rules, habit, the strait jacket of allowed behavior as well the poetry of government circulars. He narrates this tale of a love affair that only Chekhov could write properly and brings another dimension to things. The dimension that Baryshnikov brings—he is a small, but always charismatic, presence—is the Russian echo to the two stories. He came to the West from a repressive system and a world where a break in the order of things was ominous. Now, the ballet prince and king is a majordomo.

The Greek master professor is an object of both derision and fear. It’s as if everyone knows he’s taking notes on changes in the emotional and intellectual, the behavioral atmosphere, this figure in a dark coat, awkward and clumsy, at one point clumsily being pushed to dance.  Imagine that: a clumsy, awkward Baryshnikov.

It’s what makes him scary in the end, until, inevitably, he meets a girl whom he’s expected to marry. She undoes him bit by bit with laughter, a kind of fleshy silliness. She’s a disturbance in the field who causes him an ultimate kind of embarrassment until he’s still. That again is hard to think about: him still unto death.

In “About Love” is carried by his languid narrative voice. It’s a tale of circumstance that is so peculiarly Russian, evoking not the Soviet system, as the first might have, but Pushkin, Chekhov, even mad Tchaikovsky. In the telling, sometimes taken up by others, the man describes his growing love, unrequited, and what it does to the woman in question.

Taken together, the man in the case, wrapping his heart into cold confusion with pamphlets and routine and the man and the woman and the love they lost are both like a dance, choreographed between here and now and where they came from.  Something about it all is highly affecting, beguiling, sad and human—not the least of which is the presence of Mikhail Baryshnikov.  And that’s not just Chekhov.

“Man in a Case” runs through Dec. 22 in the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Lansburgh Theatre at 450 7th St., NW. [gallery ids="101573,148325" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler • December 6, 2013

Pseudolus is back in town at long last, and so is Bruce Dow.

Pseudolus can trace his lineage back to the old Roman farces written by Plautus, and to “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” the 1962 musical with a score by Stephen Sondheim.

The musical had an out-of-town tryout right here in Washington at the National Theatre, and Jerome Robbins lent a hand with the book before the show made it to Broadway and became a memorable musical, Sondheim’s first major effort, although a long
way from the types of musicals that he would become famous for.

Dow is returning to Washington in the sense that he was here playing Bottoms in the Ethan McSweeney-directed version of the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and what a memorable Bottom he was at that, playing the stage-struck leader of the so-called mechanicals who had quite a midsummer night himself, ending up wearing the head of a donkey with Titania, the queen of the fairies.

“That was a wonderful experience, the whole production was just a delight to do here,” said Dow, who calls himself mostly a North American, being born in Seattle and raised in in Vancouver, Canada, living a goodly time in Seattle and now being somewhat between residences. He plays Pseudolus, a part he’s played before, including a memorable production at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, Canada. “So, I’m glad to be doing this here.”

Pseudolus, the slave who schemes mightily and cannily to gain his freedom during the course of “Forum,” cast a long shadow, as does “Forum” itself, especially in its Richard Lester-directed film version, which starred Zero Mostel as Pseudolus, and featured such legendary clowns as Phil Silvers, who turned down the role on Broadway, and even Buster Keaton. Silver would return to head a Broadway revival, while Nathan Lane starred in still another version.

“You don’t ever try to compare yourself to Zero, or to the film,” Dow said. “It’s just not smart. The movie was a movie, it was very strange, zany, and so forth, but it’s not the show, the play, it’s not theater.”

“It has tremendous music in it, this was Sondheim’s first really big show, so to speak,” Dow said. “It’s more than ‘Comedy Tonight.’ It has wonderful ballads, and it has a lot of resonance. This was a show in which many of the main characters are slaves, who want more than anything to be free. You can feel that if you really listen to the song ‘Free.’ ”

“The roots are of course vaudeville, everybody in it originally came from that milieu, with its time-honored farce and physical humor and vulgarity,” Dow said.

“I knew when I was a child that this was what I wanted to do and my parents encouraged me,” Dow said. “I got superb and broad training at the University of British Columbia. I wanted to be an actor, but I had such good professors, and learned about so
many things that I joined their MFA in directing program.”

Luckily, Dow returned to acting and did a lot of it and all kinds of it at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, including two stints in “Forum,” playing the host in “Cabaret,” various clowns and character parts in Shakespeare plays, including a stint as Trimulco in a production of “The Tempest,” which starred Christopher Plummer.

He also went to Broadway in roles in productions of “Jane Eyre,” “The Music Man” and most recently “Jesus Christ, Superstar” in which he played Herod, singing nifty lines like “You’re the Great Jesus Christ, the Great Jesus Christ, walk across my swimming pool.”

Herod was a revelation to many people—this was a full blown, full-bodied, avid character—you can catch Dow singing to Jesus on YouTube, dancing, hoofing, eyebrowed and gowned, draped around a piano.

His training and his track record and that American-Canadian thing, his versatility seems not just something he learned but a quality he has. He can do Japanese-style theater, he can sing (two CDs, cabaret and pop music), he can hoof a little, he’s a clown of the highest and lowest order (there was no end to his Bottom, a truly original personification), he has written two shows. On the phone, you hear the eager clown, but also the guy on a quest.

“I think that line between comedy and tragedy, serious straight plays and musicals and musical comedies is very thin,” he said. “I’d like to do some things, ‘Timons of Athens,’which is rarely done, it’s a great challenge I think. Beckett’s tramps, they’re desperate, but they’re funny too, they’re clowns, after all.

It would not pay to tag Dow as a clown, or any other specific tag. He’s more like Bottom, a mechanical born to be a theatrical, a man of the imagined worlds and people of the theater.

“A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” runs through Jan. 5 at the Harman Center for the Arts; www.ShakespeareTheatre.org.
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Gary Tischler • November 26, 2013

There is perhaps nothing so mysterious in show biz as the sound of tapping feet, or, in one of its many disguises, the (“gimme that”) old soft shoe, or the slide, it makes hardly any sound. What all forms of tap dancing do is to make the audience happy, for reasons that are not that easy to figure out. In performance terms, it is a holy mystery.

The other mystery besides its giddy, happiness-inducing quality—who knows, if Napoleon had seen a tap dance before making up his mind to go to Moscow, he might never have went—is that to the eye of the beholder, the whole thing looks as easy as selling chocolate.

Except that it isn’t.

“Nothing about it is easy,” said Maurice Hines, the celebrated Broadway performer, dancer, singer and legend of tap, in a recent interview. “It’s supposed to look easy. That’s part of the trick, but it sure isn’t easy, I can tell you that. It’s not work, in the sense that you gotta love tapping if you’re going to be a tap dancer, but it’s hard work in the practice, the doing it right, and just about everything it can do to body, muscle and bones, when those taps hit the floor, you feel it practically all the way to your teeth.”
If anybody ought to know about tap, it’s Hines who’s spent his life in show biz and tap. So, now he’s at Arena Stage, back in Washington, a town he loves, doing “Maurice Hines is Tappin Thru Life,” now through Dec. 29 at the Kreeger Theater.

Here’s a tip about tap: be prepared to warm up with warm feelings, maybe an itch to want do a little tapping underneath your chair yourself. Guaranteed is that for a while you will absolutely not think about Obamacare or the Redskins.

“Yeah, I think for a while there, it was something of a lost art, in terms of people studying how to do it, people teaching it, or tap numbers not being part of big Broadway musicals so much,” Hines said. But Hines, who has taught master classes in tap to folks and is always on the look out for the next generation of tap dancers doesn’t just dance—he teaches. In his case, those that teach, teach because they do it and have done for all of their lives.

The show, directed by Jeff Calhoun, is also a tribute to his kid brother Gregory, his charismatic partner in dance, star singer and actor who died of cancer ten years ago. “My little brother,” he said. “When we were little kids in growing up in Harlem, there was a story about us already, and we didn’t even know how to dance. Mom would take us out, and people would stare at us. And somebody would ask, what are they doing. And somebody else would say, “Look at them walk.”

“It’s about my life in tap, about Gregory, about our musical influences, the people whose music I listened to all my life, like Ella—Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Lena Horne, Nat ‘King’ Cole and Judy Garland. These are the folks who were an inspiration to me. Watching them on stage, in a theater, in a club, you got the sense of how great it is to be a performer. They did everything with class.

That’s a sense you get about Hines, too, if you saw him in the Arena Stage as Nathan Detroit a number of years ago (Sinatra did the movie version), if you saw his work in “Sophisticated Ladies,” the Duke Ellington show which was an Arena production at the Lincoln Theater a few years back, you get a good sense of him. You notice not only how light he is on his feet, you notice how he gets from here to there, still and all, just like a kid, although with style and elegance and something unforgettable, like a millionaire’s after shave lingering in the room. And if you saw him with his brother in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Cotton Club”—they played tap dancing brothers—you got a sense of them together.

“Tap’s been not just a part of my life, it’s a part of the country’s life,” he said. “You go back to Mister Bojangles, to the Nicholas Brothers, that’s a part of our history.”

Hines is joined by the Manzari brothers, John and Leo, a pair of gifted dancers he discovered while casting “Sophisticated Ladies,” along with the Heimowitz Brothers, Sam and Max, students at Knock on Wood Tap Studio, who started dancing about the time that Gregory and Maurice did.

“Like everything else, tap changes, life changes,” Hines said. “Savion Glover just got people all excited all over again with his form of more contemporary tap dancing.” Other things have kept the mystery real—the young people’s film “Happy Feet,” and 1989’s “Tap,” which starred Gregory Hines.

“Tap” is a tapestry, whose ingredients are words and moves, song and dance, the kind that re-arranged our dreams and parts of the American lexicon, the naming of the moves is like a long poem’s roster of moves and ways of moving around a stage or a living room, down the street, in a tux, or jeans, on a street corner. Listen to the music, watch the move: the pullback, flap heel, running flap, wings, the shim sham shimmy, the paddle roll, the paradiddle, stomp, brushes, scuffs, spanks, riffs, the single and double toe punch, hell click, hot steps, over-the-tops, New Yorkers, Shiggy Bops, chugs, and cramp roll turns. The hard tappers see themselves as musicians, making music.

“As far as I’m concerned, my brother was the greatest tap dancer that ever lived,” Maurice Hines said.
“I miss him, and I think of him every day,” Hines said. “I used to call him up wherever we might happen to be. I still find myself starting to do it at times. So, this is my tribute to him. To all the tap dancers, but to my kid brother, especially.”
At the Kreeger, there will be songs and rhythm, the sound of feet hitting the floor, the almost-sound of a slide and glide, the old soft shoe, maybe a shaggy bop, a paradiddle.

Guaranteed to make you happy.

Gary Tischler • November 25, 2013

Singing in America is once again a really big deal. From voice competitions on network television ranging across vocal genres, to the critical importance of singers in opera, to “Glee” on television and Broadway musicals where big, rangy voices, which are the hallmarks of shows like “Wicked,” are in demand.

It’s entirely fitting then that the Kennedy Center is presenting an unprecedented three-day (Friday, Saturday and Sunday) festival of voices and singing, called “American Voices.” It’s equally appropriate that soprano Renee Fleming, one of the premiere American and world-class singers will be moderating, curating and leading the festival.

“Everywhere in our country’s popular culture—from ‘Glee’ and ‘106 &Park’ to ‘American Idol,’ ‘The Voice’ and ‘Nashville,’ at sporting events and national ceremonies—the art of singing is suddenly center stage. This festival will explore, across a range of genres, the artistry, business, technology, pedagogy and community of American singing,” Fleming said.

The festival will also feature some of the top vocalists and singers in the country, holding master sessions and performing in the centerpiece “American Voices” concert, 8 p.m., Saturday, Nov. 23, at the Kennedy Center. In addition, there will be several symposiums on a variety of subjects, concerning music and singing in America today.

Fleming will also be a part of the “American Voices” concert, featuring Sara Bareilles, Kim Burrell, Kurt Elling, Ben Folds, Sutton Foster, Josh Groban, Alison Krauss, Norm Lewis, Eric Owens and Dianne Reeves with the National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Steven Reineke.

Heading master sessions will be Eric Owens on classical music at 2 p.m., Friday, Nov. 22; Dianne Reeves on jazz at 8 p.m., Friday, Nov. 22; Alison Krauss on country music at 10 a.m., Saturday, Nov. 23; Ben Folds on pop music at 3:30 p.m., Saturday, Nov. 23; Sutton Foster on musical theater at 11 a.m., Sunday, Nov. 24; Kim Burrell on Gospel at 3 p.m., Sunday, Nov. 24. Fleming will head a Sunday wrap-up session. All master sessions will be held in the Terrace Theater and will be moderated by Fleming.

There will also be symposiums in the Atrium: “Vocal Health and Illness: Insights into the Past, Present and Future,” 4:30 p.m, Friday, Nov. 22; “The Business of Technology of Popular Singing Today”, 1:30 p.m., Saturday, Nov. 23; “Voice Training Today” 1:30 p.m., Sunday, Nov. 24.

There will also be free performances at the center’s Millennium Stage by the jazz vocal group Afro Blue and Washington National Opera’s Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist’s Program Friday, 6 p.m., Friday, Nov. 22; Gospel singer Vanessa WIlliams and the country band Mama Tried, 6 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 23, and musical theater performer Erin Driscoll and multi-instrumentalist Jon Carroll, 6 p.m., Saturday, Nov. 24.

Gary Tischler • November 18, 2013

With “Love in Afghanistan,” playwright Charles Randolph Wright has written a play that covers a lot of bases and touchstone. It’s contemporary, while dealing with centuries-old customs. It’s got the familiar “Romeo and Juliet” and “Madame Butterfly” elements in it. It’s a play about the differences between men and women, Americans and Afghans, love and commitment or love versus commitment.

On the surface or at first glance, “Love in Afghanistan”—at the Cradle at Arena Stage—also appears to have powerful, original characters: Roya, a young Afghan woman, committed to working for her countrywomen, and Sayeed, her sophisticated, urbane and cosmopolitan father, both of them living among the Americans, working as interpreters. Then, there’s Duke, a swaggering, super-charming pop, rap and hip-hop star, here to entertain the troops, and his mother Desiree, a high-power business woman, living in Dubai.

At first, it’s a tale of boy-meets-girl, boy-wants-girl, girl is charmed but resists the American pop star with a keen sense of entitlement. He pushes, she yields, a little, until she finally agrees, pretending to lead him to a man that would act as his guide in a trip to Kabul, which is out of bounds for the visiting super star. The guide is actually Roya, resorting to her habit as a child of dressing up as a boy to get work and help her family, a centuries-old practice called bacha posh.

Stopping for coffee, they almost become the victims of a terrorist bombing, which, since it involved Duke, makes unwanted headlines.

The halting, push-and-pull courtship of Roya, who is dedicated to the cause of Afghan women’s rights has its charms, as does Duke. However, Duke is more about what he wants, than who he wants, going to great lengths to help Roya and her father, including a trip to Dubai where some things that you might expect to happen don’t, and some that you don’t expect do.

In a play that features a pop star and a cultured father in the leads, it’s ironic that the women are the most memorable, appealing characters. They understand each other and protect each other. The men, when push comes to shove, revert to being men. The results of the play’s dramatics tend to diminish the male characters, and there’s a failure to communicate here that doesn’t quite seem believable.

Khris Davis as Duke is all way cool swagger, high energy, a kind of irresistible force that is very resistible when it comes to Roya. She’s obviously a little smitten, and she, in a nod to the irresistible force that is American hip hop and video, is familiar with the young man’s work. Duke, having been raised in the Gold Coast neighborhood of Washington, D.C., is having a hard time with his second album generating street cred. He sees Roya as a kind of object of his determined affection—at best, someone in need of his generosity and help. Oddly, the father concurs in the end.

Old prejudices and habits die hard here and makes the play a kind of halting affair. But not altogether—and that’s thanks to the remarkable actress Melis Aker, who makes Roya an unforgettable character, a strong young woman, aware of the risks, even fearful of them, busy committed to who she is. That kind of commitment may not be apparent to Duke, but Aker makes it real for the audience.

Robert Devaney •

It isn’t easy being Ta’Rea Campbell these days, but it sure sounds like a lot of fun.

Campbell—who has had so far an impressive career in Broadway-style musical theater that might take some folks the better part of a lifetime to achieve—is starring in the national tour of “Sister Act,” the hit Broadway musical take on the popular 1992 Whoopi Goldberg comedy. Campbell plays, and Whoopi played a diva on the lam from the mob who enters a San Francisco convent and makes it a hideout. Laughter then—and laughter and music now—ensued.

The show is now at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House through Nov. 10 as part of an extended tour that’s a hectic pace for Campbell, who’s starred in “The Lion King,” “The Book of Mormon” and “Aida” among other hit shows.

“I have to admit this so far in my career has been the most challenging thing I’ve ever done,” the Philadelphia native said. “It’s hard work, but it’s fun because the role is so much fun. And when we were doing rehearsals, I met Whoopi who was looking in. She was the most fun, the nicest, most helpful person, just couldn’t be better. I admire her a whole lot, but you can’t just imitate her. You have to find your own way in it, how it relates to you. Seeing her in ‘The Color Purple’ and the movie itself inspired me to want to become an actress.”

“You know what it is,” she said. “This is it. This is me. There’s a lot of responsibility there, you expend a lot of energy. In “The Lion King,” I was only on stage for less than an hour. Here, I’m on stage pretty much all of the time. That’s work.”

But Campbell sounds like the optimist, glass-half-full or probably mostly full type, and she’s been wowing them all across the country. The biggest wow probably occurred in April in Philadelphia, where the show played there for a short run. “That’s my hometown,” Campbell said. “That’s where I grew up. Everybody I knew came, my family, everybody. Here’s the thing: because the show’s setting has been changed from Las Vegas to Philadelphia, the first line of the show is naturally ‘Hello, Philadelphia.’ That was kind of a big line for me.”

Campbell started out wanting to be a dramatic actress. “I still want to do that, but you know, in this business, things happen,” she said. “You can’t envision the future. Everybody’s got dreams. Mine were a little different. I studied acting, but ended up in musical theater, which has been an amazing experience.”

“What’s great about this show for me is that I can do everything in it—sing (disco, gospel). I can clown it. I can act. So, it’s kind of perfect.”

“I’ve been blessed,” Campbell said. “My boyfriend, who’s a musician, he’s a violinist, and I got engaged. He’s working in New York where I live. I get to take Stevie, my beautiful Chihuahua-Beagle mix with me. Stevie is great company.”

“Sister Act” features a score by Alan Menke and is directed by Broadway veteran Jerry Zaks.

Gary Tischler • November 11, 2013

Everyone knows about three of the most famous ballets in the world—“The Nutcracker,” “Swan Lake” and “Sleeping Beauty,” all of which are set to the gorgeous, astonishing music of Pyotr Tchaikovsky and are 19th-century dance and music creations of surpassing magic.

Now, “Sleeping Beauty” is at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House Nov. 12 through 17, but it is not just Tchaikovsky’s “Sleeping Beauty.”

It is now squarely “Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty,” which is to say that it is the work of the renowned, very cool and very different British choreographer and his New Adventures company, which returns with memories of his 2007 visit with his dance version of “Edward Scissorhands” still fresh in the minds and imaginations of those who saw it.

Bourne, a former dancer, set out on his own to create and re-create different, stranger and all the while more accessible versions of classics—his “Swan Lake” featured all-male swans and his “Nutcracker!” with the exclamation point promised renewed energy. Bourne’s “Sleeping Beauty” is right on time in the age where our interest in all matters romantic and gothic, including the undead and vampires, seems never quite to peak, what with a new “Dracula” a hit on network television.

“Sleeping Beauty”, with its fairy tale of the princess who, along with her kingdom, is put under a spell that puts everything to sleep for years and years, only to be awakened by the kiss of a prince, seems in the telling, an old children’s tale, romantic but also, well, a little sleepy. But Bourne, never shy about changing things, has set his version—still with the great music—in the fin-de-siecle turn of the 19th into the 20th century, when interests in fairies and vampires, and gothic horror tales were the passion of high-style Europeans, to begin with. Bourne’s version moves through time, from fin-de-siecle, through the Edwardian age until Princess Aurora wakes up more or less in our present day.

Gary Tischler • November 7, 2013

Lou Reed—who, it was said in an American Masters PBS special, brought rock and roll to the avant garde or is it the other way around—died just a few days before Halloween. Means nothing, but I hope somebody at some party puts on his lean, gaunt, hollow-eyed mask of a face, grabs a guitar and plays more than a few riffs of “Baby Jane,” or like a pied piper heads out into the night and the wild side, doo do doo, doo do doo, doo do doo.”

Reed, the Brooklyn native and world citizen of the wild side—as in “Take a Walk on the Wild Side”—and the Velvet Underground are in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. There are a thousand reasons, because his name and music bounces around like a pinball wizard in all the tell-tale hearts of rockers and rockers as somewhat mad poets and rockers as intellectuals. He’s a legend in his own time, mind and New York, if not Graceland. He—and the Velvet Underground, the strange rock-out but dark, and darker group he led with violinist John Cale—wasn’t your typical rock and roll god, he was more like Loki than Thor.

According to the Rolling Stone obituary, Reed once said that his entire career, taken together amounts to a kind great American novel. Don’t know about that—”Moby Dick” is the big fish for me—but maybe it’s the Reed life and work that should be the subject of a great American novel, or e-book at least. So, get to it, somebody, before things get waylaid, misquoted and forgotten.

The Washington Post obit dubbed him “The Velvet Underground Visionary.” While that is true, I think he was more than that. Everywhere you look in the nooks and crannies of rock and roll, the New York art scene, in the generals of the defiant punkers, the glams (hello, David Bowie), you find a piece of Reed, and another stroll on the wild side. But it’s true—the Velvet Underground, discordant and full of not just musical discord, was rich in talent, vision, rock lyrics that went where no one had dared to go, but could also scare the beejesus out of you while breaking your heart, or in “Baby Jane’s” case, make you dance until you died.

Everybody—outside of Dylan—owed something to Reed: David Byrne, David Bowie, the alt rockers, garage rockers, the big boys in the arena, the little ones in every aspiring 9:30 club joint, the New York too cool kids out all night, and not a few real poets.

What Reed was was a writer of songs, and singing them, he seemed to be a sleep walker, creating in a dream. Go online now and roll through his fugues and songs, and his “Perfect Day” and “Heroin,” the latter approached with caution. Small wonder, his college English professor at Syracuse University was Delmore Schwartz, who was neither easy nor happy-go-lucky, but lyrical as an unpredictable cloud, and in the end, died too young.

He met if not his equal certainly somebody simpatico in Andy Warhol, the two of them could pass for brothers, a different shade of pale. Velvet Underground, which was preceded by pitch-black groups called the Warlocks and the Primitives, rehearsed rehearsed at Warhold’s factory and recorded sometimes with Warholish singer Nico, all strange and blank.

“Baby Jane” and “Rock and Roll” marked a turn: these songs, if you listen to them, reveal rock-and-roll.

Reed’s second wife was Laurie Anderson, herself a sharp rebel and pioneer of new music. Not surprisingly, perhaps, in 2002, he recorded an album centered around the works of Edgar Allan Poe. He also collaborated with Metallica.

Reed had a self-admitted major problem with alcohol, which may or may not have been punctuated by waltzes with heroin. He had had a liver transplant. He was 71 when he died Oct. 27.

In “Sweet Jane,” he sings, “Standing on the corner,/suitcase in my hand/Jack is in his corset, and Jane is hervets/and me/I’m in a rock’n’roll band/Hah!”

“Hah!” Indeed, Mr. Reed.