Performance

Gary Tischler • May 9, 2013

The boys are back.

We’re talking Ernie and F. Scott, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the American chroniclers of the Lost Generations, the major contenders for the authors of the GAN, otherwise known as the Great American Novel, the major actors in the idea of novelists and writers as personalities and celebrities.

We’re talking “The Sun Also Rises” and “The Great Gatsby. We’re talking the star-crossed lovers Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley and Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan. We’re talking the new ballet of “The Sun Also Rises” by the Washington Ballet May 9 through 12 at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater. We’re talking the buzz and anticipation around Australian director Baz Luhrmann’s film version of “The Great Gatsby,” which has already had a red carpet premiere in New York and has critical tongues, pens, blogs, and tweets vibrating and shaking up iPads and iPhones around the world.

We’re talking with Septime Webre, the artistic director of the Washington Ballet, who knows a little something about both writers and both works. In 2010, Webre staged the ballet version of “The Great Gatsby,” at the time the most expensive ballet ever done by the Washington Ballet, and staged it again in 2011. Now, he’s taking on that most macho exemplar of honor, duty, doing things cleanly and straight and honest, Ernest Hemingway’s novel, “The Sun Also Rises,” which happens to be just as visually and atmospherically fetching as “The Great Gatsby.”

“They were very different men,” Webre said, as we talked underneath giant masks that would be part of a 1920s Spanish street celebration scene for the running of the bulls in Pamploma, Spain. “They were very different writers. They lived differently, and they were stylistically different, especially in those two books. Fitzgerald’s style was very lyrical, poetic. Hemingway wrote in short, terse, sharp sentences. In fact, somebody told me that my choreographic style—the moves, the sharp, short movements—corresponded very much to Hemingway’s.”

We talked before the beginning of a rehearsal at a studio in the Washington Ballet school and headquarters on Wisconsin Avenue, with French waiters, gendarmes, men dressed in boxer (as in fighters) shorts, Can-can dancers, elegantly thin young women in ballet slippers as street walkers, partiers and the like, wearing outfits with patterned shades of gray, black and white, arrived casually.
“It doesn’t initially sound very plausible, I suppose,” Webre said. “The idea of ballet of Hemingway’s work. I suspect he may have thought that ballet was not manly, somehow, which is ironic.”

Webre laughed, but the Cuban-born choreographer also respects the man and his writing.

“The more I thought about it—and by the way I was at the running of the bulls last year in Pamploma and I’ve lived to tell about it,” he said. “But the energy, this very Spanish culture thing, not just the running, but bullfighting. And it’s hard to understand for many people, but it’s about grace and courage and honor, that’s certainly what Hemingway believed. I saw bullfights in Mexico when I was a kid in Texas. And I read ‘Death in the Afternoon,’ [Hemingway’s dense and detailed book-length essay on everything you ever wanted to know about bullfighting].”

“The words may be short and sentences lean and direct,” Webre said. “But this book contains a rich, detailed world—you have the 1920s expatriates in the 1920s café world. There were streetwalkers and artists, and writers, that whole world inhabited by Jake Barnes, the writer who was rendered impotent by a wound he suffered in the trenches in World War I. There’s Lady Brett Ashley, who loves him deeply but is promiscuous because of her frustration and there’s the cynical writer and boxer Robert Cohn. You have the music of the times—we have E. Faye Butler again, and we have composer Billy Novack, and blues , we have tango and flamenco, and Hemingway’s words. You know, you look underneath the sparse language—and there’s such a whole, detailed world teeming, a kind of spirit, anguished and frenetic, of disillusionment about the war and its aftermath.”

You could look at this ballet version of “The Sun Also Rises” as a kind of bookend to “The Great Gatsby,” which Webre also staged, recreating the America’s Roaring Twenties, an equally frenetic world about loss and illusion, in which the dance and dancers (Jared Nelson, who plays Jake also danced Gatsby) fleshed out the dreams we dreamed after reading “Gatsby” for the first time.

“The Sun Also Rises” opens May 9 and ends May 12. Right in the middle of the run on May 10 is the nation-wide opening of Luhrmann’s “Gatsby” with Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby, Carey Mulligan as Daisy, and Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway, the narrator. It’s coming with all the attendant boom boom a Luhrman-DiCaprio entry might engender. Critics who have seen it are already buzzing and bumblebeeing about it: some love it, others probably not so much. The thing to remember is that Luhrmann is not the first to go after Gatsby. There have been several versions, including a silent version, a 1940s version starring Alan (“Shane”) Ladd and a 1974 big, expensive lavish version starring Robert Redford as Gatsby, Mia Farrow as Daisy and Sam Wasterson, (not yet a DA) as Nick, Bruce Dern as Tom Buchanan as well as Lois Chiles and Scott Wilson. Jack Clayton directed this version, which made a lot of money inspired 1920s’ clothing booms and styles, perfumes and maybe even F. Scott’s, the Georgetown restaurant.

Something similar may happen with the current version. And it’s got Luhrmann’s way with against-the-grain music with a stone-cold crazy soundtrack which is very now and the next thing, but 1920s, not quite. Thus, there’s buzz about the hot single from Gatsby being “Young and Beautiful,” the evocative beyond-genre moody song penned and sung by singer-songwriter Lana Del Rey. Only Taylor Swift is missing from contempo pop music makers on the sound track: Jay-Z, Beyonce, Jack White of the White Stripes, Emeli Sande and the Bryan Ferry Orchestra, Will.i.am, Fergie with Q Tip and Goonrock, Gotye, Coco O of Quadron, Kanye West and Jay-Z with Fran Ocean and the Dream, the inimitable Florence and the Machine and the XX.

Hemingway’s books have also been popular with movie makers, who never get it right, according to Ernie. He liked Ava Gardner as a Hemingway heroine in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Sun Also Rises.” There have been three versions of “To Have and Have Not,” the most famous being the one in which Lauren Bacall asks Bogie if he knows how to whistle, two of “A Farewell to Arms”, at least one of “For Whom The Bell Tolls,” and two of the short story, “The Killers,” the last version seeing Ronald Reagan’s last acting job as a mobster.

In the race for the Great American Novel, both “The Sun” and “The Great” stood in the top five along with “Moby Dick” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Hemingway won a Nobel Prize for literature but ended his life by suicide. Fitzgerald married the ravenously talented and wild Zelda and died young at 41 in Hollywood of a heart attack.

At the rehearsal, you could spot her right away. Dressed in thin black, an intensely, beautiful face, often, as dancers must, staring into a mirror, like a fighter shadowboxes. This was Sona Kharatian. This was Lady Brett Ashley if she wore ballet slippers.
“It is a challenge to be Lady Brett,” said Kharatian, who hails Armenia and has been with the company for 14 years. “You have to let people see her frustration, her passion. She wants attention. She loves Jake and wants to be with him, but she goes to other men. She’s kind of a tragic figure. ou have to be able to speak with body language, not just dance, but how you carry yourself, your persona coming through your body.”

“It’s very different from what I’ve done,” she said. Kharatian was the Red Queen in “Alice,” Juliet in ‘Romeo and Juliet” and was Myrtle—the mistress of Tom Buchanan in “Gatsby,” “That’s a different kind of role,” she said.

“The last lines of the books tell you everything about the differences between Hemingway and Fitzgerald as a writer,” Webre said, as he quoted first “The Great Gatsby” and then “The Sun Also Rises.” “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past.” “Oh Jake, we could have had such a damned good time together,” Lady Brett. “Yes,” Jake replies. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” The End.

In a movie, Gatsby and Daisy are young and beautiful forever. On the stage at the Kennedy Center the can-can dancers, Lady Brett, the soldiers, the bullfighters, bear us swirling, ceaselessly into the past, like passengers on the Kilimanjaro machine which writer Ray Bradbury imagined to take Hemingway to a better ending.
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Gary Tischler •

When was the last time you had a conversation about Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller?

Or about a fellow by the name of Albrecht von Wallenstein, the most famous general—on both sides—to emerge from the ruinous Thirty Years’ War in Europe? It raged between 1618 and 1648 and consumed large parts of Europe in bloody religious and national conflicts, with armies marching and pillaging across the states and kingdoms that comprised what is now modern Germany.

Actually, quite a few people have had occasion to talk about both historic figures, courtesy of Shakespeare Theatre Company director Michael Kahn, who is directing Schiller’s “Wallenstein” as part of that theater’s hero-traitor duo of plays—the other is Shakespeare’s Romanesque “Coriolianus,” directed by David Muse, about a hero-general who refused to court the Roman plebians in order to become the First Man in Rome.

The Thirty Years’ War—a continental civil and religious war of God and territorial gain along with the great Swedish king and general Gustavus Adolphus, the leading figure opposite Wallenstein, the star general for the Holy Roman Empire forces—isn’t much written about any more. Only Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage,” set amid the suffering of the collaterally damaged peasants, used the war as a setting. Ironically, the Shakespeare Theatre staged that play –with Pat Carroll in the title role—a number of years ago, and now it’s a part of the 2013-14 season at Arena Stage with Kathleen Turner in the lead.

“Wallenstein” was originally a trilogy written by Schiller, a German playwright and contemporary of Goethe. Best known to the common folk for his “Ode to Joy,” now the anthem of Europe, Schiller had Shakespearean ambitions in his history plays. The play has been compressed into a highly focused look at the rise and fall and tragedy of the great man, who in the course of the play is both hero and traitor when he seems to switch sides.

“I don’t see it a play that’s just about the Thirty Years’ War, I mean we’re talking about it now, but not many people do,” Kahn said in an interview. “I wanted to do it because it was a play by Friedrich Schiller, and because Schiller was very much like Shakespeare, he thought in big, epic, meaningful terms, he embraced history and turned it into poetic, intense drama.”

If ever there was such a thing as a mini-boom in performing Schiller outside of Europe or his native land, Kahn managed it right here in Washington. He has staged “Mary Stuart,” “Don Carlos” and now “Wallenstein,” which is in part about the uses, and misuses of power, a subject which rings like a bell in Washington .

“I think this is going to be my last Schiller, period,” Kahn said. “There’s not much left to do, in any case. I can’t see doing “William Tell,” for instance or anything else.”

“The original play is nine hours, a trilogy in eleven acts,” Kahn said. “It’s never been done in the United States as far as I know. Hopefully, it won’t be the last time.”

Kahn has a reputation for doing well for condensation—he pulled together all of Sophocles’ “Oedipus” trilogy into one consuming and powerful play, “Henry IV Parts One and Two” into one play and “Henry VI”, all four parts, into one single night of riveting theater, not however, cutting the famous “First of all, let’s kill all the lawyers,” which is embedded in one of the plays which features a city plebian rebellion.

“We’re doing this in repertoire with “Coriolanus,” which is to say that the same actors are in both plays something which hasn’t been done in a while,” Kahn said. “Both David (Muse) and I felt there were themes about leadership, war, politics and disagreements about military strategy that prove tragic in both plays. It’s been suggested that Coriolanus, who saves Rome, then betrays it after he ignores what he considers to be the rabble, is very much like some contemporary politicians, in his unwillingness to display a common touch.”

“Wallenstein” is further enhanced by as translation by America’s former poet laureate Robert Pinsky. “I think the play echoes for us,” Kahn said. “The disagreements—the war and among the leaders of the conflict—result in a standoff. I think we know something about political standoffs today.”

“What I’ve always loved about Schiller is that he has that same gift for dealing with complex issues and events through drama that Shakespeare did,” Kahn said. “He is the Shakespeare of Europe in that sense. His characters are great men and historical figures, but they’re characters, complex and human.”

Thanks to Kahn, Schiller is very much alive in Washington and the United States.

“Coriolanus” and “Wallenstein” by the Shakespeare Theatre Company run through June 2 at Sidney Harman Hall.

Gary Tischler •

New Washington National Opera Artistic Director Francesca Zambello has said that, in addition to classic opera works, the WNO would be emphasizing American themes, works and artists.

You cannot get much more American than the final spring season production of “Show Boat,” the Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein III quasi-opera and quasi-prototype of American musical which contains within it all the great American themes of race, show business, the more melodramatic sufferings surrounding of love and family, as well as almost every form genre of popular American entertainment, theater, and music performed and created here up to 1927, when it premiere at the National Theatre, no less.

As presented and molded by Zambello, originally at the Chicago Lyric Opera, much of this “Show Boat” seems almost old-fashioned—so much so that it seems both authentic and daring. It’s authentic in the sense that you would imagine with little effort that this is just how the show might have seen the light of night when it was first staged—there are touches of melodramatic acting in the style of the time, large-gestured (and big-hearted) emoting that seem not so much flowery as genuine, ballroom music, a touch of rag, a big hunk of sad, some vaudeville funny and gorgeous music of all sorts.

Visually, “Show Boat” is a wowser of a spectacle with a big stage piece representing the showboat the Cotton Blossom, moored in Natchez, Mississippi, that is of a size and vivid color that you think it just might keep right on rolling onto the stage like old man river. And there is that cast of 100—not only the main characters, but African Americans who live and work on the boat and keep it floating with back-breaking toil, but townspeople, gamblers, dock workers, girls and boys, kids and old folks back home.

In some ways, this production is a little beyond category. While it’s not strictly speaking an opera (it has dialogue, with overhead subtitles), most of it is sung, and there is always music running through the story unobtrusive but telling like, well, a river, or rivulet, repeated themes and bits of song and melody. It also seems to be the first true American musical comedy with the kind of seriousness of story and theme that wouldn’t again be achieved until “Oklahoma” emerged in the 1940s. (“Porgy and Bess,” while it contained similar story and thematic material and a mixture of musical genre, was an opera, nevertheless, a decidedly American opera, which Zambello has directed here in the past).

“Show Boat” is about the people on the boat and the times they live in and through, with all the travails of daily life, and the trauma of melodrama, of the kind of theater the boat presents, along with bits of song and dance, on the river. There’s the genial and long suffering Captain Andy, who runs the show, can do a soft shoe in a pinch and is as tolerant of others as possible in the times. There’s the work-weary Joe. There’s young Magnolia and the star-crossed Julie. There is the riverboat gambler with the resonant (of soaring tenors and smooth-voiced, no-accounts) name of Gaylord Ravenal.

“Show Boat” is based on a nervy novel of the 1920s by Edna Ferber who also penned “Giant” and has nothing but troubles for its characters. Magnolia falls for Ravenal, marries him, has a child by him and is dumped by him after one last losing streak. Julie is a product of a mixed black and white marriage and is married to a white man, a situation which was illegal in the segregated South.

There are songs (and there is music) which are achingly familiar and come through the filters of various styles—“Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” and “My Man (Bill)”—are two of the finest ballads on the theme of helpless love ever written. Soprano Alyson Cambridge kills them with a great trembling power and juice as Julie. “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” becomes at various times transformative, when Queenie (a part whose Mammie-like qualities are sabotaged by Angela Renee Simpson with earthy power and humor) joins Magnolia and Julie in a fast-paced dance and a ragtime number when sung by Magnolia years later at the Tracadero. Simpson also fuels the great prophecy-like “Misery’s Coming” with raw foreboding.

Most of the cast members are not household names by any means, but fairly soon they ought to be. You have to single out Morris Robinson who takes on a song sung by legendary performers like Paul Robeson, but who makes it his own with a range that steadily finds its most direct way to the heart. Movie versions and record versions, to my experience, never hold a candle to the real thing, which is a song marching out to you.

Michael Todd Simpson does a curious thing with the part of Ravenal, attractive, smooth, smitten but also keenly aware of his weakness, of who he is and will be. It’s a tricky business to play a melodramatic part. Simpson uses a melodramatic style in such a winning way that you can see why the clear-eyed Magnolia is swept clear off her feet. They bring the house down in their love-at-first-sight “It’s Only Make Believe” rendition, doing a song that comes straight out of the operetta songbook but manages to sweep everything before it.

But it’s Canadian soprano Andriana Chuchman who is the heart and soul of the show—her portrayal of Magnolia—who suffers greatly, but endures without sentimentality, and rises to become a Ziegfeld star—is so spot on, so likeable without being treacly, that she embodies the spirit of the production which is to fill every bit of music, drama, every ache and feeling and hitch and rag dance move with so much gusto that it feels authentic.

This “Show Boat” is not only make-believe but is also the real thing—a true American entertainment.

The Washington National Opera production of “Show Boat” runs through May 26 at the Opera House of the Kennedy Center.

Robert Devaney •

Walk into the contemporary Prospect Street home of Jack Davies, and you are struck by a impressive bachelor pad which has a lofty view of the Potomac River and Washington landmarks. But Davies has not been a bachelor for many years and has put his shiny, super-cool, fun perch in Georgetown on the market–likely because he wed Kay Kendall last June 15.
“We’re oldlyweds,” Davies quipped. At the end of a seven-year courtship, he popped the question to Kendall in April last year atop the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. “I really was surprised,” she said. “I was not expecting it.” Davies said, “I got bonus points for the location.”

Both married before, Davies and Kendall tied the knot in the living room. They have been moving between their homes since and decided it was time for a new place of their own together.
Each an A-lister philanthropist after years of careers and raising children, Davies and Kendall represent one of Washington’s unique species: the power empty-nesters who appear to be working and playing as hard as ever and use their business savvy and money to foster non-profit goals. Theirs is a love story decades in the making. They met in 2000 through Katherine Bradley and were surprised by their complementary and common interests as well as mutual friends, some regularly seen at major charity galas.

Kendall is known around the city as the former board president of the Washington Ballet. She now works with CityDance, which has programs in D.C., Maryland and Virginia, and THEARC (Town Hall Education Arts Recreation Campus, run by Building Bridges Across the River) in Anacostia. “I love CityDance and THEARC,” she said. “Both are involved in transforming people’s lives and have great leadership.”

Davies is best known as the founder of AOL International as well as that guy who puts the inflatable hockey player or Santa Claus on his rooftop, easily seen from Canal Road and Key Bridge. Well, he is a co-owner of the Washington Capitals — now hot into the playoffs — by being a partner with Monumental Sports & Entertainment, which owns and operates the Capitals, Wizards and Mystics as well as the Verizon Center and Patriot Center. “The Stanley Cup playoffs involves white-knuckle stuff,” Davies said. “There is a whole new generation of kids who have embraced hockey. And it’s every sports fan’s dream to own a team — and they’re my friends.”

“I love how graceful hockey can be,” Kendall said. And you know Davies has gone to more than his share of ballets.

Our story may seem as simple as the dancer who met the sports fan in a mirror image embrace that goes beyond synchronicity. Yet, there’s more to it — more than the fact that both spent summers at Martha’s Vineyard for decades, before ever meeting each other.

Their friends and acquaintances, sometimes co-workers, and fellow fundraisers include names like Bradley, Cafritz, Case, Casey, Fernandez, Johnson, Kogod, Leonsis, Lerner, Mars, Ourisman, Pollin, Rubenstein or Snyder (sorry to leave out some names; the list would be too long). These Washington heavy lifters and givers bring their lifelong passions to the public arena, most of whom focus on education to lift all boats. Along with those who simply volunteer, they represent the lifeblood of philanthropy in America.

Such pro-social motivators make for a naturally happy couple. Kendall said of her husband: “We play every day. I love his sense of humor. He is someone I trust. I feel very safe with Jack.

If there’s a problem, he’ll fix it. I admire him. He is startlingly nice.” Davies said of his wife: “She’s beautiful, of course, but it is beauty from the inside. She is game to try anything. We laugh a lot. She enjoys life. I love her joie de vivre.”

Like many Washingtonians, the couple arrived from elsewhere: she from Chattanooga, Tenn., by way of Memphis with a son and daugh- ter and a husband who worked for President Jimmy Carter. Kendall’s father owned an oil and gas company in the Southeast and named it for her — Kayo Oil Company.

“Like everyone, I stayed,” Kendall said. “When the Carter Administration was over, I wanted to connect to older Washington — not the political part.”

A literature major at Hollins University and dancer in her early years, she stayed with dance, and it led to her years with the Washington Ballet. “I have been an American mother for foreign dancers,” said Kendall, who has also been involved with the Maret School. Now, it’s CityDance and THEARC, “a great state-of-the- art faculty. I’m so proud of what they’re doing in that part of town.”

At her 65th birthday party, Washington Ballet Artistic Director Septime Webre told the Washington Post: “She’s fabulous. She combines a Michelle Pfeiffer elegance with a Jennifer Lopez party-girl sensibility.”

“Kay Kendall embodies Septime’s vision of ballet,” said Mary Bird, who covers the social scene for the Georgetowner and also gives of her time and resources to charities. “Her support of THEARC and other outreach efforts to bring dance into everyone’s life is admirable and to be applauded on toe shoes or simply by artistic support.”

Davies hails from Meadville, Pa., and is proud of his Midwestern roots. Meadville is home to Allegheny College, where there are Davies family scholarship programs, and is the hometown of actress Sharon Stone.

A University of Rochester marketing grad, Davies worked for General Electric, Citicorp in London and then RCA Europe. It was America Online that brought him to Washington. He interviewed with AOL co-founders Steve Case and and Jim Kimsey in 1993. He went on to found AOL International, “going from nothing to operating AOL in nine countries and over $1 billion in revenues worldwide in less than five years,” Davies said. “I spent a lot of time in an airplane.” He retired four days before the Time- Warner merger with AOL in 2000. “Timing is everything,” he smiled.

Soon enough, he turned to philanthropy, working with non-profit visionary Mario Morino and Venture Philanthropy Partners. Davies has worked there as board member and executive committee member: “Since 2000, VPP has raised over $80 million from over 70 families to invest in growth plans for high-performing non-profits in the national capital region.”

Davies said he felt guilty being so busy with work and family: “I hadn’t done enough to give back to the community.” Such prin- ciples came from his parents. His father — John
Llewellyn Davies, Jr. — owned a car dealership in Meadville, Pa., and then got into commercial real estate and set up programs for Allegheny College, which his mother Ellie Davies still oversees. His first job at 14 was washing cars for his dad’s business.

Along with Teach for America and CharityWorks, Davies is involved with the See Forever Foundation and the Maya Angelou Charter School, where a John L. Davies Media Center will be built.

“If I could wave a magic wand, I would want every child — and especially those from low-income families — to receive an excellent education from high-performing schools, staffed by outstanding teachers,” Davies said. “I believe that education is the only way we can break the cycle of poverty in our society.”

And it looks like this couple — along with lots of help and other work from their Washington friends — are indeed starting to fracture that cycle. And the key to the best non-profits? “Great leadership,” Davies and Kendall said together.

If you doubt the Force is with them, consider the 1952 film “Curtain Up,” starring English actress Kay Kendall, which included a screen- writer by the name of Jack Davies. Spooky.

As for spooky movies, it should be noted that “Exorcist” author William Peter Blatty once owned and lived in Davies’s house. The home itself is about three doors from the famed Exorcist steps at 36th and Prospect. Neither Davies nor Kendall have seen the 1973 film. Webre did give Davies a copy of the movie script for the home.

Nevertheless, that great four-level man roost at 3618 Prospect Street will get another owner. Davies’s son Derek will miss his cool music- themed bedroom in D.C. The 25-year-old Davies has his own record label based in New York. “It’s a joint venture with Columbia Records,” Davies the father said. “His mother and I are very proud of him.” When Davies worked for RCA Europe, he dealt with the Eurythmics.

Kendall also has a son in the music business, Syd Butler, bassist for art rock group Les Savy Fav, and whose wife Amy Carlson is an actress on the CBS drama “Blue Bloods.” Kendall’s daughter Katherine is a dancer (trained with TWB), actress and photographer.

By the end of the year, the children will have to visit mom or dad in Kalorama, where Davies and Kendall bought a house together on Tracy Place.

Meanwhile, Prospect Street neighbors are asking: but who will inflate Santa Claus or the hockey player or Jack the Bulldog on the roof? Hey, they’re asking $4 million. It could be you with that great view, hot tub and inflatable. Give Davies’s friend and real agent Mark McFadden of Washington Fine Properties a call. Luke Russert just bought Matt Donohue’s old place next door.

“What I love about the neighborhood is its energy,” said Davies, whose place is across from 1789 Restaurant and, yes, almost next to Georgetown University.The couple can handle it. The night before their interview and photo shoot with the Georgetowner they saw Rihanna at the Verizon Center. Not bad for a guy, 63, and a gal, 68.

“We’re very blessed,” Davies and Kendall agreed.
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Robert Devaney • May 2, 2013

A unique dance theater premieres “Once Wild: Isadora in Russia” at Georgetown University May 3. Its multi-disciplinary outlook seems infectious as different kinds of people have come together to make the debut a success, as if moved by the spirit of Isadora Duncan.

To celebrate the opening, raise some funds and get the word out, an April 20 benefit was held at the home of Colman and Richard Riddell with neighborhood boosters along with members of the performing and visual arts communities. It was unique in itself with Word Dance Theater founder Cynthia Word performing for the guests and sculptor Claire McArdle offering her art for auction to assist the group.

The innovative performing arts company Word Dance Theater joins forces with Georgetown University’s Davis Performing Arts Center and award-­winning stage director Derek Goldman to produce the multi-­disciplinary theatrical collaboration, “Once Wild: Isadora in Russia.” Written by Helen Hayes Award-­winning playwright Norman Allen with original music by renowned composer Dominik Maican, and choreography by Cynthia Word (“Preludes: Duncan, Sand and Chopin”), “Once Wild” steps across creative boundaries to offer a bold, new vision of seminal artist Isadora Duncan, her work and her years in Bolshevik Russia.

The storyline: At the invitation of the Bolshevik government, Isadora Duncan and her adopted daughter Irma arrive in Russia determined to ignite its children’s minds and bodies through a new school of dance. Immersed in the revolutionary spirit, Duncan created some of her most groundbreaking work and faced some of her greatest personal challenges. Seen through Irma’s eyes, “Once Wild” explores Duncan’s Russian years, her romance with poet Sergei Esenin and her lasting legacy.

The central role of Irma Duncan, Isadora’s adopted daughter, will be shared by actress Kimberly Schraf and dancer Ingrid Zimmer. Philip Fletcher, known for his work with Synetic Theater, portrays volatile Russian poet Sergei Esenin, and Cynthia Word dances the lead role of Isadora.

“Isadora Duncan changed forever the way we think about dance and, thus, the way we think about theater,” playwright Allen said. “She broke the rules. It’s exciting to be immersed in a creative process that attempt to do the same.

“Cross-­discipline work breaks through the isolation of individual art-­forms. It challenges even the most collaborative of artists to work with unfamiliar tools, and to communicate with new artistic vocabularies,” choreographer Word said. “Because of the challenges inherent in the process, cross-­discipline work is also extraordinarily rich in possibility. It reflects a broader shift of consciousness toward global thinking, conflict resolution and problem solving that we feel throughout the culture. Perhaps most important, the work models our own belief in the capacity of the human spirit to be continuously reborn through hacks of creation.”

“The piece we are creating speaks to the connection between individual artistic vision and global politics,” said director Goldman. “By introducing us to Irma Duncan, one of Isadora’s disciples and adopted daughters, the piece engages questions about teaching, memory and revolution — and about how personal and artistic legacies are passed on from generation to generation, particularly in the ephemeral art form of performance.”

“Once Wild: Isadora in Russia,” co-­produced by Word Dance Theater and Georgetown University’s Davis Performing Arts Center Performance (Gonda Theatre), Friday and Saturday, May 3 and 4 at 8 p.m., Sunday, May 5 at 2 p.m. 37th & O Streets, NW. Tickets: $25, general; $18. faculty, staff, alumni, senior; $10, student. For tickets, visit performingarts.georgetown.edu — or call 202-687-­ARTS-2787. (Post-­performance reception on May 3 and discussion with artists on May 4.) [gallery ids="101273,148510,148481,148505,148487,148498,148494" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler • April 29, 2013

All of the many people who sometimes in an addled, wishful moment really believe we were part of the crowd at Woodstock got sent right back there with the news that Richie Havens, the great, folk and beyond folk singer, had passed away.

If there was a singular and recuringly memorable moment at Woodstock—and God and rock ‘n roll knows there were many—it belonged to Havens, until then, while a veteran protest and folk singer, was not under the same charisma and glamour shedding sky of, say, Joplin, Sly, even Arlo. But that sky opened up for him that day, just the way he opened up Woodstock itself as the opening act who sang for three hours while the gathered tribe of Hair, Hippies and Hedonist rockers—show me that chest and peace sign and the long blonde hair—were gathering to become 500,000 strong.

Most of the acts scheduled for the opening day hadn’t arrived so Havens, his beard dark and crusty, his fingers nimble, his orange dashiki, began to play. “We played every song I knew for it seemed like hours,” he said. “And they asked me to play one more, and I didn’t know another song so this word freedom kept going through my mind,” he said in a long-ago interview.

Sometimes, it seems like “Freedom” opened the festival and nothing else—he also sang “Strawberry Fields Forever.” But “Freedom” was the song that made it into the hugely successful documentary about the peace and love generation at musical and legendary apex. It was part repetition, part gospel song, part heart and in Haven’s wonderfully elastic growly voice that sounds like God’s angel walking on a dusty road, it became something else.

“Sometimes,” he sang, “I feel like a motherless child, gone a long time from my home.”

The image and the song never leaves your mind. He has lit up YouTube this week with “Freedom” and all of the songs he covered, making them, not better, but cleaner, more like a story, song as our stories and poems. He did well with and by the Beatles—there are people who clearly think George Harrison’s “Here Comes the Sun” is Havens’s song sung in heavenly fashion.

He was 72, part of that generation of musicians, legends, pickers, signers and prophets do. At the time of his death, his last pictures back in the recent day suggest that he had morphed into a prophet—the head hair was gone, leaving a shining dome, but the beard had some grown larger.

He had become a teacher, educating young people about ecology, but he always played and strummed, and he was at Pete Seeger’s 90th birthday fundraising concert in 2009 when he also played at the Mountain Jam Festival and the Woodstock Tribute Festivals.

Havens’s music is a haven. Listen to the songs—“Lady Madonna” and “All Along the Watchtower,” respectively, a Beatles covers and Dylan cover. In his hands, and in that insistent, but gently authoritative voice, the songs become clearer as twice-told, often-told tales.

Online comments, sometimes a stormy area were anonymous dark souls carry on, were peaceful with the regret of his passing and notable for eloquence. “Sing us in our dreams,” one suggested, and that he does.

As the song goes, Mr. Havens, spread your arms, here comes the sun.

Gary Tischler • April 24, 2013

Francesca Zambello, on the phone, at a table, in print, from a distance, and just from reading her resume, feels and sounds like a force of nature, a woman who isn’t daunted easily if at all.

She is in town now in her new role as Artistic Director of the Washington National Opera, directing the upcoming production of “Showboat”, which she created and directed at the Chicago Lyric Opera. As Artistic Director of the WNO, she succeeds Placido Domingo and still remains Artistic and General Director at the Glimmerglass Festival in upstate New York.

You could tell there was a fresh wind blowing just by dint of her personality, which is outgoing, forthright and direct. Earlier this year, she bounded onto the stage at the Kennedy Center Theater For Young Audiendces during the center’s annual season announcement for the media. With Zambello, it was as if she was opening up a rather large bag of Christmas presents: expanded roles for children’s theater, “The Magic Flute” in English, new commissioned American operas—there’s one in June—a never- in-Washington production of “Moby Dick”, an expanded role for the Domingo-Cafritz Young Artists program, and the list went on consider- ably and still does.

Perhaps more significantly, during an opening night of one of the two earlier spring operas, you could see a woman greeting people as they came in past the ropes at the Opera House, an unusual sight at what is often considered the last bastion of tradition and decorum in American performing arts. It was Zambello acting very much like an enthusiastic greeter for the opera, there were hearty handshakes, hellos and even hugs amid introductions.

“I believe in putting yourself out there,” she said. “It’s not that unusual. We’re asking people to pay good money for what we’re putting on stage so we should make every effort to making that process a success, to be a part of this city and think about the audience for our work.”

There is in Zambello something of a populist streak, in the sense that while she’s worked on most of the great operas stages and companies which makes her a natural citizen of the world, she leans often toward American work, toward the unusual and cutting edge but also the accessible. She hasn’t always succeeded—there have been a few bumps in the road here and there— but her approach has always been an open armed stance, with which she hopes to capture larger and new audiences.

In that sense, “Showboat”, while familiar is in some way typical of that approach. “Some people will tell you its not really and opera, its some sort of hybrid, but it is an opera in the sense there’s continual music, and that music and the songs by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein III are world class. And, like many operas as we understand them have big themes, big subjects—race, gender, the role of women, even the business of show business, miscegenation and so on.”

When it suggested to her that opera has a culturally elitist reputation, she says, emphatically, “haven’t I made myself clear, that’s not what I’m about.” We were talking about perception, but even in a misunderstanding, we get a little closer to what she’s about. When it comes to the Washington National Opera, she’s interested in emphasizing all three words in that title.
“The WNO—and especially with being part of the Kennedy Center, is a national company and I want to emphasize that, because that makes it an American company, where American themes can breathe and resonate and we’re also a Washington company. To me that means we have to make a greater effort to be a part of the city, identify with the city, which is a city that’s about politics and great issues and history as well as all the people who live in it, ” she said.

Another word might be added, and that would be family. “I know many of us who love opera passionately first felt that way when we were taken to operas by our parents as children,” she said. “One of the things I intend to do is expand our family programs. We hope to make a tradition of a holiday opera for children and the whole family—we are doing “The Magic Flute” in English, next spring, we will also increase the use of and involvement our artists in the Domingo-Cafritz Young Artists program.”

Almost anybody who’s familiar with Zambello’s artistic and professional history knows change is coming with her arrival—is already here in fact. But there is method to her changes. “Opera isn’t immune to that,” she said. “For me, change is about the audience, finding out who your audience is and what it wants to see and hear,” she said. “I believe in new operas, in staging operas that haven’t been done often or not at all, without abandoning traditions, the classic and great staples of operas. But what’s surprising is how often you find echoes of our times in Verdi, in Puccini, in Wagner and Bizet and Strauss. I do not believe there is one way to do a particular opera.”

Zambello’s connection to family opera and her passion to expand the audience comes in part from her connection to the American musical theater—she’s directed “The Littlest Mermaid” on Broadway. “American musicals are a true and popular American art form, much as opera was the European popular art form in the 18th and 19th century,” she said.

In the 2013-14 season, there will be a Verdi and Wagner celebration right off with Zambello directing Verdi’s “The Forces of Destiny” (La Forza del Destino”)which comes to the Opera House for the first time in 25 years, while the great soprano Deborah Voigt” will star in Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde,” which kicks off the season. Zambello will also direct a world premiere production of “The Lion, The Unicorn and Me” in December, with a production of this family-friendly world premiere in the Terrace Theater.

The new American Opera Initiative begins with the promising “Approaching Ali”, a new opera by composer D.J. Sparr and librettists Mark Campbell and Davis Miller about a reporter’s meeting with boxing legend Muhammad Ali June 8 and 9, in the Terrace Theater, which is also an example of Zambello’s search for new American work and using all the available spaces in the Kennedy Center, not just the Opera House.

She’s already making her presence felt: young performers amid the stars and veterans, great operas rarely seen, the rise of a Washington company that’s a larger part of its setting—the Kennedy Center, the city, the country—than before and oh yes, lions and unicorns, and Tristan and Mozart, oh my. You could be forgiving for thinking that Francesca Zambello could be something of a forza del destino herself at least when it comes to the WNO.
“Showboat” runs May 4 to 26 at the Kennedy Center Opera House

John Blee • April 22, 2013

When Antonin Dvorak, Czech-born, came to America he had as his assistant the African American composer, Harry T. Burleigh. Burleigh would have an influence on Dvorak’s “New World Symphony,” composed in 1893, through introducing him to African American spirituals. A concert at Duke Ellington School of the Arts played by students from Ellington and Georgetown University will present music by Dvorak and Burleigh at Ellington conducted by Angel Gil-Ordóñez of the PostClassical Ensemble.

Speaking with Gil-Ordóñez, who also teaches at Georgetown University, about the upcoming concert I asked him about the collaboration and what he enjoyed the most about it. He replied, “the Duke Ellington students are younger than those of the Georgetown Orchestra students. You would think there would be less maturity in their approach to this music. Not the case. From the first rehearsal they had the same level of commitment and understanding than the Georgetown students. When I work with an orchestra I don’t make any difference between professionals, students or amateurs. There are only good or bad orchestras.”

I asked him as well about the Dvorak story in America. Gil-Ordóñez emphasized that it was “fascinating, Dvorak arrives in New York and feels immediately attached to the African American spirituals and to the dances and chants of the Native Americans. All this transpires in the ‘New World Symphony.’ Even without an explanation of this, when you play the work as an American you recognize yourself in it.”

The not-to-be missed performance of “Harry T. Burleigh meets Antonin Dvorak” including “Harry T. Burleigh and Plantation Song” will be presented at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, Friday, April 19, at 7:30 p.m. 3500 R St. NW, Tickets: $15 (Georgetown University and Ellington students will be admitted free with ID.)

Gary Tischler • April 18, 2013

The Eric Schaeffer-directed production of “Hello, Dolly!,” now at the Ford’s Theatre through May 18 is a kind of disguised version of the mega-hit, legendary Broadway musical which opened on Broadway in 1964.

I don’t mean to suggest that audiences aren’t getting their money’s worth with this production, a coproduction of Ford’s and Signature Theaters or that it’s a knock-down and knock-off version of the original and everything else that followed in revivals and road shows. In fact, you could argue that you’re getting more of two plays in one as opposed to the diva- and spectacle-driven original versions.

This production arrives like the latest, if not last, piece in a string of serendipity. “Hello, Dolly!” is derived from a drama by Thornton Wilder (whose “Our Town” already graced Ford’s Theatre this season), which he derived himself from his flopped play “The Merchant of Yonkers,” which was in turn derived from an 1835 English play, called “A Day Well Spent” by a gentleman named John Oxenford, which was adapted into a farce called “Einen Jux Will Er Sich Machen” by Johann Nestroy, from which Wilder got “The Merchant of Yonkers,” which became “The Matchmaker” (which was presented at Ford’s Theatre several years ago), which became “Hello, Dolly!” So, we can say today, “Hello, Dolly!”

Nonetheless, it’s still the same old story—and song and dance–about the adventures and misadventures and yearnings of a matchmaker-widow who still loves her late husband and can do just about everything except perhaps change a tire, a rich widower merchant in search of a compliant wife, his daughter who is in love with an artist, his two over-worked, under-paid clerks out in the wilds of upscale night life New York in search of adventure and, maybe, love and a dressmaker and shopkeeper with her high-energy assistant.

All these folks—prodded along by the wily machinations of the life-force that is Dolly Levi, once a legendary mover and shaker and connector in New York, where the waiters at the pricey Harmonia Gardens still remember her—bump into each other, do something brave and daring and life-changing. Dolly herself—all the while asking her late husband for forgiveness—is seeking to land the big whale, the merchant Horace Vandergelder by acting as a matchmaker for him.

What’s also there is Jerry Herman, his music, his songs, his lyrics. “Hello, Dolly!” is still there, still an anthem, but somehow, less of a national anthem, more of a local anthem, the locale being home plate disguised as the big heart of Dolly outbeating everyone else’s. We’ve got a polka, Horace’s anthem about the uses of a wife, “It Takes a Woman,” dressmaker Irene Molloy’s song to what she does “Ribbons Down My Back,” and the dancing waiters and a number called “Dancing.” In some ways, this has always been Herman at his warmest—he is the genius of creating music for divas and his biggest hits, “Dolly,” “Mame” and “La Cage Aux Folles” are diva-driven.

“Hello Dolly!” doesn’t come until a bit into the second act, but more characteristic of what Schaeffer is up to is the closing number of Act One, “Before the Parade Passes,” a piquant, clear-eyed song which Nancy Opel delivers with a knowing, straight-to-the-heart openness.

Her delivery, her way of moving in Dolly’s billowing wake seems to me not to echo so much the blot-out-the-sun star turns of the likes of Carol Channing (three times) or la Streisand who did not leave much room for anybody else in the film version. Rather, she echos Wilder’s original play which starred a younger Ruth Gordon. “The Matchmaker” didn’t need an exclamation point and neither does Opel. This is the chief virtue of this production—you get the expected goodies—even if scaled down—while the play opens up the give us a closer look at the other folks.

Which leaves Ed Gero with half-hearted bluster as Vandergelder, succumbing almost as if he knew he would, the sudden daring of clerk Cornelius played nimbly and in spirited fashion by Craig Meheu, the attractive solidity of Tracy Lynn Olivera as Irene Molloy.

Dolly lives in a world, a full and rich one richly staged here—and she knows every inch of it. Her deliverance unto and into the world of Vandergelder will no doubt transform it. Opel, in her way as Dolly, lets you see that this is still Wilder’s play as much as it is Herman’s show.