Performance

Gary Tischler • December 20, 2012

This is the fourth in a series of articles and feature stories about actors, singers and performers playing iconic roles—or simply being an icon—in plays and productions in the D.C. area during the holiday season. We’ve featured Washington actor Ed Gero—an institution himself if not an icon—playing Scrooge for the fourth year in “A Christmas Carol” at Ford’s Theater; Adam Green, who’s playing everyone’s favorite master of the revels Puck in the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, and Genevieve Leclerc, who’s just arrived in the U.S. national tour of the 25th anniversary production of “Les Miserables,” playing the doomed Fantine at a time when the country’s abuzz about the movie version of the show featuring Hugh Jackman as Jean Valjean and Ann Hathaway as Fantine. Our fourth performer is E. Faye Butler, who not only embodies any number of icons at Arena Stage in “Pullman Porter Blues” but manages to be one herself.

When E. Faye Butler makes her entry as Sister Juba, a big-voiced, sashaying, diva-does-it woman who’s the leader of a jazz-blues band riding the train out of Chicago down to the bitter South during the Depression she just totally sweeps everything before her. She launches herself into a chair in a way that seems like an act of sexual aggression which you can’t help paying mind to if you’re at least half alive. Her laugh, when it comes, is infectious, it’s one of those defiant laughs that dares you to say something. If flesh and body were music, Butler was singing its full-throated anthem.

Right off the bat, she reminded you of Bessie Smith and Ma Raney—check them out on YouTube—and if you had any doubts, they were erased a few moments later when she launched, full-voiced, growly, into a blues-bawdy number that insists that “Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues,” which surely is one of the lies wild women tell themselves.

“Exactly right,” Butler said. “She was meant to embody Bessie, and Ma Rainey and all those women who sang defiant, heart-breaking blues. And, not to put too fine a point on it, she showed women that you don’t have to be thin to be beautiful and that curves are sexy and attractive.”

“One of the nice things about being on stage, where you can’t hide even if you wanted, is that people get to see that,” she said. “I had one woman come up to me after a performance and she thanked me. She said, ‘I don’t feel like I have to shut the light off when I get into bed.’ ”

“Pullman Porter Blues” has its flaws, but a lack of authentic characters in this play about a trio of men—grandfather, father and son—all riding the train working as porters—is not one of them. Most authentic is Butler who knows her way around a song, a stage, a microphone, a stool to sit on next to a piano in a cabaret, and she knows something about the people and the subject which attracted her to Cheryl West’s play. She opened the show in Seattle where it originated before coming to Washington.

“I know lots of people with parents or grandparents who worked on the trains as porters or maids—the play shows how hard that was but also how it led to African Americans finding a way into the middle class, to get ahead,” she said. “Chicago is full of Pullman people.”

Chicago is Butler’s home, but if you lived in Washington, you’d think she’s practically a native. She’s married to Washington native Bernard Johnson, a hair stylist. “This town is full of my in-laws,” she says. Recently, she sang “the Star-Spangled Banner” at a Nationals Park, a place somewhat sinful for somebody from a town full of Cubs and White Sox.

Mostly, she’s familiar because she’s omnipresent on stage, or so it seems, especially at Arena Stage where she’s scored some major triumph. She made a raw, powerful impression back a ways when she did “Dinah Was,” a searing and heart rending evocation of the late Dinah Washington, one of the greatest jazz, pop and blues singers ever, going to the 1950s and 1960s when she reigned supreme. She also appeared in “Crowns,” “Polk County” and was Aunt Eller to Julie in “Oklahoma,” the triumphant production that launched Arena’s spectacular new space. She was a jazz singer in the Washington Ballet’s “The Great Gatsby” and seems always to popping up singing somewhere.

Butler was also in a show about Ella Fitzgerald and is a bona fide cabaret singer. “Ella, she was unique, nobody like her,” she said. “But you know, it was heart-breaking for her in some ways. She struggled with her weight and her looks, and the fact that some people didn’t think she was pretty.”

Pretty is too dainty a word to describe Butler. She is powerfully attractive and compelling, and when she takes up the blues stance, she is commanding, the singing blinds you as all great singing does.

She was influenced, perhaps not surprisingly, by gospel music—“My mom, Elizabeth Butler (that’s where the E. in E. Faye comes from) worked like an agent for Mahalia Jackson. So, I heard a lot of gospel growing up. But you’ll never guess who really influenced me as a performer.”

I guessed wrong a couple of times and gave up.

“Danny Kaye.”

“You know why. Because he could do anything, and there was nobody like him. He was a great singer, a dancer, an actor, a clown, anything at all,” she said. “I loved his movies, remember when he played two people—and yes, “The Five Pennies” and he played the pied piper, I think, and that clown in “The Court Jester. That’s what I wanted to do: everything.”

Short of everything, Butler has done a lot already. As Sister Juba, she does everything—she moves and is moving, she sings out her soul, she embodies a character that you know damn well was real and alive somewhere, sometime, and she breaks your heart.

That’s everything.

Nico Dodd •

When I told my co-workers I was going to see Wanda Jackson at the Hamilton this Tuesday night, none of them could put a finger on who the singer was. Even those with a professed love of classic rock couldn’t remember what she was known for. The truth is that Jackson is a real genuine article of rock and roll, a living legend among the likes of Chuck Berry, who’s played with greats from Elvis Presley to modern stalwarts like Jack White. A brush up on her hits include “Let’s Have A Party,” “Fujiyama Mama” and “Stupid Cupid”.

At 75-years-old, Jackson is charming and unassuming. Country group Jonny Fritz and the In-Laws, who opened the show, sat in as Jackson’s band. Jackson doted on them like they were her own grandchildren. The Oklahoma native even sang a few lines of “Boomer Sooner,” OU’s fight song and demonstrated her prowess as an air guitarist.

The night was like a music history lecture or, in her words, a “musical journey.” Jackson’s entrée into rock and roll was largely due to her relationship with Elvis Presley, whom she dated and toured with. “I never saw a man with yellow before,” Jackson said, before performing the Elvis classic “Heartbreak Hotel.” After all her years of performing, her pipes are, for the most part, intact. Her gutty, playful squeal is one-of-a-kind, and she can still yodel with the best of them on her country songs like “Betcha My Heart I Love You.”

In 2011, Jackson’s career had resurgence with her album The Party Ain’t Over, on which she collaborated with Jack White, who has a penchant for working with classic female vocalists. In 2004, he also breathed new energy into Loretta Lynn’s career with their album Van Lear Rose. Jackson recounted her work with him. “I would liken him to a velvet-covered brick.” She blazed through two of the songs she recorded with him, “Shakin All Over” and her cover of Amy Winehouse’s “You Know I’m No Good.”

After decades of performing, it was interesting to see that such an experienced performer could still have green moments. During some songs, Jackson might take a break, or forget a few of her lyrics. Despite these small road bumps, she could shrug it off with aplomb. “I’ll have to work that out in rehearsal,” she told the In-Laws. Much like a grandmother cooking without a recipe, Jackson served up a great performance even with the road bumps. Her fans ate it up. She brought the room to their feet with her final two songs, “Let’s Have A Party” and “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On.”

Gary Tischler • December 19, 2012

It seems even the cast members of the U.S. national tour of the 25th Anniversary production of “Les Miserables” which opens Thursday, December 13, at the National Theatre here are caught up in the buzz surrounding the all-star movie version which opens later this month.

As it turns, even Fantine is interested in Fantine.

We spoke with Canadian actress and singer Genevieve Leclerc, who has taken over the role of Fantine in the production, in a “Les Miserables” tour stop Kansas City in a phone interview.

“Everyone’s very excited about the film, certainly,” she said. “We’re all trying to see the latest trailers, the latest news and reading everything about it.”

The movie buzz—including Oscar buzz for Hugh Jackman as Jean Valjean and Ann Hathaway as Fantine—has been building steadily, along with trailer talk, and the stories about Hathaway shedding pounds and cutting off her dark tresses to play the role of Fantine.

“I’m a big fan of hers,” Leclerc said. “But no, I didn’t cut off my hair or do any that. I’d have to do it every day.”

But there is a long line of women who have played Fantine on stage, beginning with a silent movie version in 1913 (starring Marie Ventura) and moving on to 1980 when the French version starring Rose Laurens as Fantine appeared. But it was the 1985 Cameron MacIntosh-produced version, with music by Claude-Michel Schonberg and a book by Alain Boublil, which set the show—big, epic, spectacular and moving—on its way to record-breaking success in London, at the Kennedy Center where it opened in the United States and on Broadway.

Based on the great French novelist Victor Hugo’s novel about Jean Valjean, the heroic figure imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread and his nemesis, the policemen Javert who hunts him down and finds him again in the middle of a revolution in Paris in the early 1800s, “Les Miserables,” the musical opened with Patti Lupone in the role of Fantine, the working class girl who’s forced into prostitution to provide for the safety of her daughter Cosette. Valjean becomes her and her daughter’s protector and so it goes. The 25th anniversary production features new staging, and scenery inspired by the paintings of Victor Hugo himself.

Leclerc takes over for Betsy Morgan on this U.S. 25th anniversary national tour. She is the latest in a long line of Fantines—and Jean Valjeans and Javerts and Thenardiers (husband wife), Enjolrases (the heroic rebel leader of the barricades)m, Cosettes, Eponines, Mariuses and Gavroches.

“It’s such a wonderful opportunity and its very challenging,” Leclerc said. “I had never seen the show, except for a French version I saw in Canada a long time ago. That’s one of the things you learn to do. You can’t actually let the French creep in, even though the characters are all French.”

“I’m very much aware of all the women who have played this part, and I know that every one puts their own gift, their talent and ideas on the part and so will I,” she said. “You have really one major solo song that sets you apart and you have to put everything in that song, all the emotions, everything that’s happened to her.”

Among the many songs in “Les Miserables” which have become standards as epic ballads, none is quite so wrenching as Fantine’s “I Dreamed a Dream,”, a lament on the life of Fantine, who is sinks so low as to sell her hair in order for her daughter to be taken care of. The song requires a big voice and big emotions. If you look for Leclerc on YouTube, you’ll find her singing from the production of “Torch—A Cycle of Love Songs” in which she was a lead vocalist at the Laurie Beechman Theatre in New York. The voice is big and emotionally big-bodied.

Leclerc graduated from the Ecole Superieure de Theatre Musical in Montreal where she performed in productions of “Les Enfants de Donquichote,” “Devant Les Maitress,” “Bliss” and “Les Deesses.”

Throughout her professional life, which included stints at sea performing as a guest singer for both the Princess and Royal Carribbean Cruise lines, Leclerc immersed herself in Broadway musical standards in Canada where she appeared in “A Chorus Line” and “Side Show.” Before joining the national tour, she was in “Guys and Dolls,” a favorite of hers. She also performed with Theodore Bikel and Patsy Gallant in a musical adaptation of “Lies My Father Told Me.”

“You could say I have traveled on the high seas, but this, this is so different,” Leclerc said. She had a candid way and enthusiasm about her, recalling seeing the glaciers on a cruise to Alaska, the thunderous noises of ice falling and the love she has for musicals. “This is amazing to me—this journey.”

This production marks her first national tour, and she’s drinking it all in. “This is the American heartland, here in Kansas. I’ve never been here. On a tour like this, you see America, a lot of it.”

(“Les Miserables” — which features Peter Lockyer as Jean Valjean, Andrew Varela as Javert, Timothy Gulan as Thenardier, Shawna M. Hamic as Madame Thenardier, Jason Forbach as Enjolras, Briana Carlson-Goodman as Eponine, Devin Ilaw as Marius and Lauren Wiley as Cosette — runs at the National Theatre through Dec. 30.)

Gary Tischler • December 7, 2012

I think it’s getting into my DNA,” said Ed Gero, as we talked on the phone.

Gero, who’s been a vivid presence as an actor, teacher, performer and good theater citizen on the Washington scene since 1981, was talking about his fourth gig playing Ebenezer Scrooge at Ford’s Theater, the theater’s yearly contribution to Washington holiday traditions.

“Sure, it’s familiar, and it gets easier,” Gero said. “That doesn’t mean that you can sort of ease your way through it, that it doesn’t remain fresh. My family knows I’m one of the people that works during the Christmas holidays.”

“You know, we’re talking six days a week plus matinees, and the people always come from all over the country,” Gero said.

We were talking about Scrooges, references to Greek tragedy, Lear, and Joseph Campbell and the idea of the hero in humanity drift in natu- rally. Gero is one of these guys—doesn’t mat- ter whether the subject is, be it Mark Rothko, American art, the classics, Shakespeare, teaching theater—who’s a great talker and a good listener. Interviews, no matter what the length, end up being conversations.

“You always find new things in Scrooge,” Gero continued. “I mean Dickens is like Shake- speare in that sense. He creates enduring characters, and Scrooge is always present in our minds no matter how you do it.”

As for the character in question, Gero said: “He’s a man who’s lost his way. He’s losing his humanity. He’s incredibly lonely and a loner and so that’s how this journey—with the ghosts, in time—begins. It’s a journey of renewal, self-discovery. He’s come to this state entirely of his own mak- ing: he is the pitiless, all alone and bit- ter man he is because of the decisions he’s made. What’s true for Lear is true for Scrooge — and Oedipus Rex for that matter.”

Gero has played the Scrooge role four times. “I look forward to it each time,” he said

Here is an actor, who some- what later in his career has suddenly launched himself into the big roles, and Scrooge, no matter what you might say of its popularity, is a big, demanding piece of work.

At Arena last season, Gero commanded the stage in “Red,” a two-character play about the giant American Expressionist artist Mark Rothko, which he first performed at the Goodman Theater in Chicago before it was brought to Arena. Before that, Gero was an astonishing Gloucester in a Goodman production of “King Lear” (Stacey Keach was Lear) at the Shakespeare Theatre Company.

He’s done Richard Nixon, Solieri in “Amadeus,” Chekhov, Bolingbroke twice in “Richard II” at the Shakespeare Theatre Company. He was a haphazard and addled member of a group of drunken Irishmen in Martin McDonagh’s “The Seafarer.”

“You can’t get lazy just because you’ve done a part for a long time,” Gero said. “For one thing, we always haves children in the cast, and each year, they’re a different group. Sometimes, there’s a new Tiny Tim, as well as new actors. To them, it’s completely fresh. You can take some cures from that, plus it has the effect of making it new for you. There’s the added fact that there’s always a new audiences, a new group, new visi- tors, more kids and families. You’re keenly aware they’re out there and that to many of them, it’s a first time.”

Gero’s career in the D.C. area began in 1981 at the Barter Theater at George Mason University where he now teaches classical theater.

He has been a stalwart performer at the Shakespeare Theatre Company but also has been a regular at the Studio Theatre, where his work was more in the contemporary vein (“Skylight”, for which he won a Helen Hayes Award, “Shining City” and “American Buffalo, among many) and Round House Theatre.

His stage work has grounded him here where he’s raised a family and lives in Maryland with his wife Marijke, a special education teacher.

The Ford connection for Gero is getting deeper. He will take on the role of Horace Van- dergelder opposite Tony Nominee Nancy Opel as Dolly in the Ford’s Theatre production—co-produced with Signature Theatre—of “Hello Dolly” in March.

“It’s not a departure for me, and I’m really looking forward to it,” Gero said. “I’ve done ‘Sweeney Todd.’ So, I’m comfortable in a musical. Actually, I played the same part in a version of the Thornton Wilder play, “The Matchmaker.”

It’s another addition to what has by now be- come a hefty gallery of roles, getting larger, later.

We didn’t ask about Macbeth or Lear, which he has not done yet.

Nor did we ask whether he would do Scrooge again next year. It’s gotten so that it’s hard to imagine a Scrooge without Gero

Gary Tischler • December 6, 2012

I was talking with a friend of mine today about Larry Hagman, who died Nov. 23 at the age of 81.

“Ah, Major Nelson,” he said.

True, true, but that may not be the first name that comes to mind when you think of the life and career of Hagman.

When you think of Hagman, you think first, foremost and forever of “J.R.,” the unredeemably scheming, double-crossing, philandering, more Texan than Texas tycoon J.R. Ewing for 13 years on “Dallas,” the prime time soap opera where oil wells weren’t the only gushers. Hagman, with those about-to-take-off big eyebrows, a gleaming, predatory smile and the requisite larger-than-they-should-be cowboy boots and hats, was the patriarch and anaconda-in-chief for millions of viewers.

When at the end of one season, J.R. was shot in the shower by persons unknown and his fate still unknown until the start of next season—your old basic prolonged cliff hanger—record millions watched and more kvetched about J.R.’s fate and the name of his assassin all summer. Talk about the reality of unreality shows.

“Dallas” buzzed its way through the 1980s and the Reagan era, where corporate greed was as big a trend word as it is today, accompanied by junk bonds and oil wells. “Dynasty” soon followed, featuring a female version played by the rhymes-with-witchy Joan Collins. But it was always Hagman’s J.R. who was the man you loved to hated or, in women’s case, hated to love. There was something iconic and big in the part, an American character made up of equal parts of bad breath and expensive after shave.

J.R. was not all Hagman was—in fact, except perhaps for a too-long-a-time penchant for living big and giving in to his appetities, mainly alcohol, Hagman was known by reputation as one of the good guys, a gentleman, warm and funny, an actor’s actor with whom his fellow actors loved to work. Linda Gray, who played his “Dallas” wife on the show called him her best friend of 30 years. She returned for a recent TNT reprise of the show and was at his side along with his family last week when Hagman passed away from complications of his long bouts with cancer. He also had at one point chirrosis of the liver, which resulted in a liver transplant. Asked how the transplant changed his life, Hagman quipped, “I didn’t die.” In addition, he created a foundation benefitting organ transplants and became a champion of the cause

Hagman really did play other parts than J.R.—including the part of Major Tony Nelson, an American astronaut who finds himself keeping company with a fetching genie, played by Barbara Eden, in a hit sitcom, “I Dream of Jeannie,” that preceded “Dallas.” He also acted on Broadway. He had the genes for it—his mother was Mary Martin, the legendary Broadway star of “South Pacific”—in which Hagman performed with her once in London– and “The Sound of Music” not to mention being “Peter Pan” on television. Martin headed for California when she was still a teenager, and both of them understood a little something about enduring fame.

Hagman had small but significant roles in a number of films before and after he hit it big in television series, notably as the interpreter for Henry Fonda’s U.S. president in the nuclear crisis film, “Failsafe,” a blustering general in “The Eagle Has Landed” and a truly fine part of a politician who cannot quite let go of ambition in the thinly-veiled Clinton campaign movie “Primary Colors,” which starred John Travolta and Emma Thompson.

Hagman always insisted he played J.R. as a kind of cartoon, a composite of numerous Texans he had known all of his life. He also admitted that he fairly floated through the length of the show, on doses of daily champagne. He said he liked working while being a “little loaded.”

Other than for his excesses, Hagman was nothing like J.R.—he was noted for his charitable work, he was married to his wife Maj Axellson for 59 years.

He accurately noted the craziness surrounding the shooting of J.R. episodes. “We were in the middle of a hostage crisis and there was an election campaign but all everybody wanted to know was ‘Who shot J.R.?’ ”

For the record, it was Kristin, J.R.’s scheming sister-in-law and mistress, played by Mary Crosby, who shot him. Take that.

Gary Tischler • December 3, 2012

When actor Ted Van Griethuysen, as Quince, the leader of the rude mechanicals gathered in the forest for a rehearsal of “Pyramus and Thisbe,” makes his entrance, he appears quietly, almost furtively, and he starts to sing, slyly, but happily, not loudly:

“There’s no business like show business. There’s no business I know …”

It’s a little thing, a kind of reminder that this play is—among the many things it is—a paean to theater and, yes, to show business, a theme that Shakespeare being a man of the theater in his times and the man of theater in ours, addresses many times in his plays. It doesn’t stop there either: as the mechanicals torture their way through their rehearsals and encounter many a problem, Quince reassures himself with selections from “The King and I” and “The Sound of Music.”

The show tunes are one of many conceits with which director Ethan McSweeny flavors this production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”—that the theater, with its traditions and magic, is one of the characters in the production. It’s a place where imagination comes to believable life in the form of fanciful fairies—albeit some dressed in the school of fashion accompanied by bustiers and garter belts—grand entrances, tragic-comedies told by heartfelt fools, rulers just a step removed from fable and legend, and a quartet of lovers pixilated to the point of total humiliation by an otherworldly being named Puck.

This production, which appears to be set in either somewhere north of the 1930s and south of the 1950s, in England or America or both, but always in Athens and a magical forest, is full of entrances meant to signify. Oberon, the king of the Fairies, makes his first appearance like a rock star in a cape, like Roger Daltrey in front of a white screen. Theseus and his bride-to-be Hyppolyta, the Queen of the Amazons, he in military head of state form, she as formal-dressed stunner, appear before gathered paparazzi, the fairies make their first appearances slowly, preceded by points of light from openings on the stage as if by: magic. Those same openings later become traps to fall in, trampolines to appear flying as if part of an abbreviated tumbling act.

In this production, the stage, like everyone else—or as Quince tells Bottom after he appears with the head of an ass—is “translated,” as well as always transformed.

What the production really seems to remind you of is a circus, a carnival, a sideshow, and bits of the most excessive parts of operas that don’t involve music. It’s theater and show business in all of its guises. It is, too, a dream we can swim in.

“Midsummer,” of course, has several balls up in the air. There’s the wedding of the rulers, and their sometimes not settled love. There’s the two couples Lysander-Hermia and Demetrios-Helen. Hermia loves Lysander, but is all but betrothed to Demetrios and Helena is smitten beyond reason with Demetrios who loves her not. There is Oberon, his queen Titania (ill met by moonlight), battling like a divorced couple over custody of a changeling boy. There is Puck, the frisky spirit of the night and Oberon’s hench boy, who, with some sprinkling of exotic fairie dust wreaks havoc with the lovers, makes Titania fall in love with the head-of-an-ass Bottom.

Finally, there are the rude mechanicals who have fallen in love with theater and the play they are to perform. They are worth mentioning because they are the salt of the earth and members in good standing of the 47 percent, a carpenter, a weaver, a bellows-mender, a tinker, a joiner, a tailor. They are, each and every one of them, transformed into thespians doing “Pyramus and Thisbes,” a tragedy faintly echoing “Romeo and Juliet,” but pure sweet, ineffectual nonsense in the hands of these our players. None is more the thespian than Nick Bottom, played with such honest hyperbole—Bottom’s middle name—that the word ham only begins to tell the tale. He wants to and thinks he should play all the parts. He survives the shock of his vivid dream as the lover of a queen with refreshing malapropism that sound like the truth. Bruce Dow does what Nathan Lane might try to do with the part, if only he could. His squeals, sighs and wild dog eagerness are a comic delight in a show which has many.

In dealing with the lovers, McSweeny resorts to the kind of physical comedy in which the characters suffer gross indignity—from losing much of their clothes to slipping, falling and sliding on a slippery stage. The players all bring it off with superb timing: Robert Beitzel as a kind of garage rock Lysander, Amelia Pedlow as the self-assured Hermia, Chris Myers as the smug Demetrius, and best of all, Christiana Clark, who, after enduring yet another humiliation, brings the house down with a grandiosely exasperated “Oh, excellence!”

If Tim Campbell and Sara Topham are the dream catchers and creators as the rulers—both earthly and fairyland—it is Puck who is modern mischief incarnated. He is the joker in the deck, the prospect of chaos, the knowing fool moving faster than the speed of hummingbirds, but he’s also the caretaker of his dream world and our dreams.

Puck suggests to us that “we have but slumbered here, while these visions did appear.” Fat chance of that. This “Midsummer” may feel like a dream, but it’s a vivid dream we won’t soon forget.

Shakespeare Theatre Company’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” runs through Dec. 30 at Sidney Harman Hall, 610 F St., NW; 202-547-1122 — ShakespeareTheatre.org.

Gary Tischler • November 27, 2012

Jekyll & Hyde”, the pop-rock-musical version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous novel about a doctor who tries to separate good from evil and instead runs afoul of evil inside himself in the horrific person of Edward Hyde, may have been a grand guignol. It’s an entertaining novel, but it’s a strange sort of musical.

The show—now on a road trip before returning to Broadway from whence it came—has its own problem with schizophrenia or even multiple personalities in terms of being a musical. First of all, it’s been redone in terms of some new songs added, another repositioned and restaged, all of which may be fine, but we’re going to go with what we saw at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House having seen nothing else except an old Spencer Tracy movie version of the novel.

As contemporary musical entertainment, this production delivers to what appears to be a loyal fan base, conjuring up a good deal of spectacle and imaginative staging, plus the added attraction of a high-powered and top-drawer cast. The problem is not in the stars—which includes Constantine Meroulis (a runner-up on the fourth American Idol series) pop and r&b star Deborah Cox and the terrifically gifted Teal Wicks (Elphaba in “Wicked”). The problem is that the production, originally conceived as a concept album starring Colm Wilkes and Linda Eder, before going to Broadway where it ran for several years, even with the tinkering still seems derivative of other shows—there’s a whiff of “Les Miz”here and there, and stronger in terms of look and feel, “Phantom of the Opera”, and who knows, arena rock shows in some of its music and singing.

“Jekyll & Hyde”—conceived by Frank Wildhorn, with book and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse, music by Frank Wildhorn and direction by Jeff Calhoun—certainly knocks your eyes out in horror-movie fashion and with up-to-the-minute staging stuff—a scene in which Hyde and Jekyll occupy the stage at the same time makes use of video technology, as opposed to what used to involve the shaking of long hair.

It seems to me that the music is what passes for much too much Broadway composing these days—it’s made for voices who have learned to hold a note, complete with vibrato for a durable length of time that comes close to asphyxiation. This sort of music—the best of it can be heard in “Bring Him Home” from Les Mis and “The Phantom of the Opera”—is impressive when it contains operatic, pitch-felt emotions and brings audiences out of their chairs, but there are times here when its just an impressive feat not a moment of heartbreak. And the lyrics include feats of rhyming that are not in the least startling, but predictable.

All of that being said, as the emperor in “Gladiator” might put it, I was entertained, if not thrilled. Some of that had to do with the comfort zone of a familiar plot—a doctor playing god by eliminating evil from man’s makeup, gets too strong a dose of it, and ruins himself by bringing to life his inner psychotic,with murderous results.

Hyde, sung in growly, loud, raspy style by Meroulis, storms across the stage laying everything to waste, most notably the members of the board who run the hospital where Dr. Jekyll works. They’re a loud, vivid bunch of Victorian Age one percenters, a regular rich rogue’s gallery from a haughty grand dame, a lecherous, predatory bishop, a useless barrister, to a pompous model of a British major general, of the kind that Gilbert and Sullivan skewered regularly. Hyde does some skewering also.

Jekyll, going deeper into the muck, has to solve the problem of his women—one of them Lucy, a true lady of the night with a heart of gold and Ella, his delectable fiancé. The two are mightily dissimilar both in performance and voice—Cox plays Lucy with warm realism, her rangy pop voice hitting every song out of the park, including the appealing “Bring on the Men” and Teal has a chandelier-breaking voice and performing skill that brings a thankless part to life.

Meroulis throws himself into the task with such fervor—over the top in acting, on the money with his hold-on-to-your-seat rock arena voice—that you might want to ask for a recount on the American Idol vote.

This “Jekyll & Hyde”, which is taking another shot at Broadway, is as good as it can be,never more and never less than that, given the material. In the theater, that’s enough for a worthy night out.
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Robert Devaney • November 26, 2012

Last Wednesday, The S&R Foundation hosted the DC Jazz Festival Annual Trustee Reception at the Evermay Estate in Georgetown. The reception included a cocktail party, followed by a performance by 10-time Grammy winner Paquito D’Rivera performed with guitarist Yotam Silberstein and pianist Alex Brown.

Before the performance, Dr. Sachiko Kuno a founder gave opening remarks, as well as DC Jazz Fest founder and executive producer Charlie Fishman.

During his performance, D’Rivera switched between alto saxophone and guitar to play Jazz Meets the Latin Classics. The setlist included some original compositions, as well as playful takes on well-known classical music pieces.
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Gary Tischler • November 21, 2012

With the current production of “The Aliens” at the Studio Theatre, Washington theatergoers will have had an opportunity to take in the entire output of the very hot, young playwright Annie Baker-although she’s said to be working perhaps not surprisingly on a translation of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” and a new play is slated to debut in New York in January.

In photographs of her, the overall impression-while attractive-seems slight and wispy, and that also is the initial impression you might get of her plays—”Circle Mirror Transformation”, staged at the Studio several years ago, “Body Awareness”, staged as Theater J’s season opener this year, and now “The Aliens”. Insofar as Ms. Baker is concerned, that is probably a misleading impression. With her plays, it’s a wrong impression, although that’s not so obvious to the naked mind or heart. Certainly her track record-numerous awards including Obies and Outer Circle Critics Awards-and critical acclaim almost everywhere her plays have been staged-belies any sort of lack of depth and power.

Baker’s work is tricky and sneaky. It has a cumulative effect, like a junk yard dog at the pound you don’t immediately think of rescuing, let alone loving. It’s an odd process, watching one of her plays—you get twitchy with impatience almost right from the start—until there comes a point where you’re nailed to your seat with angst and alarm, the glue being an odd sort of empathy.

It isn’t that Baker simply abandons traditional dramaturgy. Each of the three plays has a requisite number of secrets that emerge with varying degrees of power. The secrets, while effective and punchy dramatically, are almost beside the point. It’s the characters and language that count and one of Baker’s gifts is to be able to articulate, with realism, poetry and humor, the general inarticulateness of American personal communication and interaction. She has her thumb on what it’s like to be alive in today’s world.

She is also a writer who manages to work from a particular locale and region. William Inge’s Midwest comes to mind in her case. New England generally and suburban, small-town Vermont in particular and make the specific universal. The members of an amateur acting class in “Circle Mirror Transformation”, the lesbian couple living in a small university town, and now the two classic slackers hanging out barely in the back of a restaurant in “The Aliens” are specific to a place, but we already know them, and recognize them.

That’s important, because Baker-although she can be funny, and knows her way around emotional combat zones, doesn’t necessarily make it easy for audiences, if not critics. That’s especially true with “The Aliens”, while it has beautifully-and-smartly written dialogue, also has great big patches of silence in which no one says anything, in which you can hear and see the characters breathing. This can be a stretch for some audiences used to bang-bang writing, or evocative language, or yelling and screaming familial battles. Beckett comes to mind, but not so much Mamet or Shakespeare where the rest is silence not the beginning.

“The Aliens” is a three-character play, and we first see two of them, KJ and Jasper, in the back of a delapitated restaurant, amid garbage cans and a degraded old wooden table-bench-chair ensemble. KJ, looking a little like a ragged, undersized beached whale, is lying on top of the table, nearly out cold, sometimes humming, but otherwise not saying a word. Jasper, tall, thin, with a ragged beard like his chum, is pacing nervously, chain-smoking some odious cigarettes.

Nothing happens for quite a while. Jasper paces, KJ breathes in and out, with the hums. It seems almost that Baker is testing the boundary line where some people might walk out. Certainly people fidget. Anyone would. Silence may be golden but its not sacred.

But they do begin to talk about things: Jasper’s breakup with his girl, about Charles Bukowski the poet, about a friend of theirs that lives on a wind farm. These two you recognize as slackers who define the word, thirty somethings, lost and vaguely creative. They used to haves a rock band called-tadah-“The Aliens”-and Jasper is working on a novel quite seriously. He reads a lengthy, steamy sex scene from it to KJ who admits to getting aroused.

Along comes Evan, a high schooler who appears to be nervous about them being in the back. “It’s not allowed,” he says, but Evan too is something of a wayward spirit, fearful of a lot of things, he’s also part of a nearby music camp. Soon enough, Evan, wisely, sharply played with smart confusion by Brian Miskell, ends up under their spurious and quite scorched wings.

The first act can be trying, because it clearly sets up the second act, which is devastating. To varying degrees, this has been Baker’s process in her other two plays. Something happens–can’t say what–and life changes like it always does, and yet, things remain difficult to say, to express, but still: this time, in addition to long periods of silent breathing, you can hear hearts in pain, wanting to scream, dance or sing something perfectly. They can’t of course, but they try, they always try in Baker’s world.

In a play like this, the audience watches everything like a hawk for clues. Young women seem charmed by the guys. Thirty-something guys seem to retreat into themselves, whether they’re alone or not. It was a guy with a purple tie who jumped out of his seat at the end, clapping.

In the end, “The Aliens” is like a mystery play. It seems to be true to life. The characters in the play keep trying to fill in gaps in language. They reach for words that elude them, but you can see them reaching. The kid’s words—when others don’t come—are always “um…cool”, still the catch-all words of at least three generations.

Watching this play is like crawling through a minefield with a spoon. You’re afraid it, they and you, are going to blow up. Scott McKenzie as KJ and Peter O’Connor as Jasper convey their dusty, long friendship with such art that, led by director Lila Neugebauer, almost everyone finishes the journey safely, accompanied by the shedding of, not blood, but heartfelt emotions.

(“The Aliens” is now at the Milton Theatre at the Studio)
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