Performance

Gary Tischler • January 16, 2015

On so many levels, there’s just no other word for it: the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s production of Oscar Wilde’s most popular play, “The Importance of Being Earnest,” is delicious.

It sounds delicious. It looks delicious. Sometimes, you swear you think you’re sniffing flowers from a Victorian English garden, and that’s delicious, too.

This is a production for theatergoers who remember the importance of being Oscar Wilde and why we still pay attention to his writing, works and life. It’s Wilde at his most accessible.

Watching this production—with Keith Baxter, who knows his way around Wildean manners and manors—you get an odd, conflicting set of feelings. It’s a production that seems almost exotically removed from the way we live today, while at the same time it feels familiar as songs you danced to when you were young.

Sometimes, listening and watching the characters at home in their perfectly dressed and outfitted comfort zone of Victorian sunset, is almost like watching an authentic resurrection of an ancient civilization—sort of like the Mayans or Aztecs, minus the human sacrifice. At other times, the Wilde epigrams flow like a rippling stream of smart, wise daggers and darts aimed at the cash-anemic, land-and-title wealthy aristocrats, so consumed by the outward flash of manners, dress codes, pedigree and ritual. They’re like a crescendo of bon mots of vanity .

Many of the epigrams act as dialogue: “work is the curse of the drinking class” and “we should treat all the trivial things of life very seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality” are instantly familiar when spoken, and pertinent today.

We’re in good hands here with the direction by Baxter, who has directed dazzling productions of Wilde’s “An Ideal Husband” and “Lady Windemere’s Fan.” He has staged it in such a way—with the great help of costume designer Robert Perdziola and set designer Simon Higlett—that it feels like a fine-tuned three-act epic, even though it has two sets and a cast of only 11 actors.

But it has words, complete-sentence conversations and battles, spoken in ways that feel like another form of English entirely—and that would cover British English and American English. Surely not even in England do aristocrats speak quite in such a mannered, musical way in which the vowels wage a successful war on consonants and with each other, the o’s swamping the a’s in every skirmish, elongating like Plastic Man.

The story—the kind of story that allowed Wilde to be the bad boy of English high society-is the gilded stuff of farce where closet and bedroom doors are forever slamming, except that there are no closets and bedrooms. There is only a drawing room in London and a rose-rich garden in the countryside. So, instead of slamming doors, you have almost magical and quite unexpected appearances of characters causing havoc and silent screams.

We have two high-minded, extremely well-dressed friends, John or Jack Worthing and the impeccably named Algernon Moncrieff. Algernon is the scion of an aristocratic family, dominated by Lady Bracknell, one of Wilde’s greatest creations, played here with magnificent, steely, nose-up determination by Sian Phillips. Worthing, who lives in the country where he is the guardian of the fetching Cecily Cardew, passes himself off as a non-existent brother named Earnest (thus, the importance of). He can’t drop his disguise because the object of his affections, Gwendolen Fairfax, loves the sound of the name, much more than she might love, say John or Jack. She is also Lady Bracknell’s daughter, a hitch for Worthing, since she disapproves of him.

Meanwhile, Algernon also pretends to be Earnest and heads to the country where he encounters Cecily and the two become immediately smitten with each other. Whereupon, Worthing, then Gwendolyen, followed not much later by Lady Bracknell, arrive in the country. Throw in a pastor, a butler, and a governess, and you have a most delightful, farcical battle of the sexes and classes.

There is a reason of course why this play—as opposed to “Ideal” or the salacious and ground-breaking “Salome”—is Wilde’s most popular play. For one thing, it’s just about perfect in dealing with serious things in a frivolous way—there is no scene more delicious than when Gwendolyn and Cecily, straight-backed and steely, sit down to tea and cakes and muffins and size each other up. It’s a battle of powerful insincerities stated sweetly and with a touch of both sugar and bitters. It’s much the same as when Lady Bracknell measures Cecily as a lovely girl, and bashes her hair, her dress and so forth in devastating and perfunctory fashion. In those days, a woman couldn’t simply say I’m wearing Ralph Lauren, but was immediately spotted for being not quite up to stuff.

There’s also the problem of Worthing not really knowing who he is—as a baby, he was left in a train station in a handbag. The secret behind this little bit of problem is one of maneuvers which Shakespeare often used himself. It’s the kind of things where love is dropped in a box neatly tied with a bow, just waiting to be discovered and resolved.

The cast is letter-perfect, especially Anthony Roach as Algernon, who looks and acts like a refined sort of wastrel, whose stock in trade is a kind of nearly insufferable charm. The two young ladies—Vanessa Morosco as Gwendolen and Katie Fabel as Cecil make great high-spirited foils and sisters to each other. It’s also great to see Floyd King back in the WSTC company as the pastor, revealing once again how to turn a double take and reaction into an Olympian quadruple take.

“Earnest” was Oscar Wilde’s breakthrough play, his first that made the upper classes squirm and like it because they were being amused, even as they were being verbally assaulted. He became a high society darling, achieved fame, wealth and if not acceptance, a certain delicious, acceptable notoriety which lasted only until he was brought down by a relationship he had with Lord Alfred Douglas, which would ensue in suits and Wilde being sent to prison for “gross indecency.” He never again returned to his adopted homeland, to be a proper, aristocratic Englishman. He died in 1900 in Paris.

“The Importance of Being Earnest” is Wilde before all that—at the top of his game. He could say with no modesty, but great accuracy, that “I have nothing to declare but my genius.” And in “Earnest,” it’s a delicious and true declaration.

“The Importance of Being Earnest,” a Shakespeare Theatre Company production, is at the Lansburgh Theatre through March 2.
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Gary Tischler •

When you look at the length of “The Tallest Tree in the Forest”, the remarkable resurrection play, written and performed by Daniel Beaty in the Kreeger Theatre at Arena Stage—which runs two hours—you think two things at once.

It’s too long. It’s too short.

Beaty—singer, actor, playwright, author, educator—has taken on the task of presenting the remarkable and turbulent character, personality, life and times of Paul Robeson—as singer, actor, athlete, teacher, activist, political figure, and civil rights leader in a biographical piece of theater, densely populated by some 40 characters, all of them played by Beaty.

It’s an exhausting, sometimes steamrollering, experience for an audience, no matter what your level of experiential or personal attachment to the subject at hand. As such, it has the effect of feeling too long.

Yet, it’s also an exhilarating experience. It works as drama and works as a kind of wish that you knew more and want to know more. As a result, it also feels too short.

It’s a daunting task Beaty—who has connected with Arena before as performer and playwright—has set for himself because not only is he playing all the parts, somewhat like an actor doing a one-man “Hamlet”—but he is also portraying a redoubtable, giant figure in American cultural, political and civil rights history. Robeson and his amazing rise, all gifts blazing gloriously, his commitments to social justice for African Americans all in and all the way, require almost equal performance gifts on the part of the actor on stage. He has to have the range to play young Robeson, the great singer Robeson, the philandering Robeson, the roused, courageous and stubborn Robeson and old and dying Robeson.

That life of Robeson’s resonates on the stage during the commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday and the impending celebration of Black History Month. Before there was King and the March on Washington and the heroic, massive changes of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, there was Robeson. He himself called himself “the most famous African American in the world.” He was in the vanguard, a huge contradiction of a man, speaking out, singing out and speaking truth to power before there was ever such an imposing voice and man doing so.

Beaty, working with director Moises Kaufman (“The Laramie Project” “The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde”, and “33 Variations” among others) and his edgy Tectonic Theater Company Project, gives us the man in full, if not the total man.

Robeson, one should remember, grew up the son of a minister who was a former slave, was a high school star athlete and student-performer, got a scholarship to Rutgers University and was a football All-American there, became famous for his singing early on during the Harlem Renaissance, starred in two plays by Eugene O’Neill, including “The Emperor Jones,” was the first Jim singing “Old Man River”, took up the cause of civil right, confronted President Harry Truman on anti-lynching laws face to face, fell into the clutches of the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era, and ran afoul of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover for his stubborn embrace of Soviet Union policies.

That doesn’t even include Robeson’s troubled but long marriage to Eslanda “Essie” Goode, whom he married in 1921—she was confidante, manager, lover, wife. The relationship was often quarrelous and wounding. Robeson was a habitual philanderer and had many affairs notably with his Desdemona Uta Hagen in “Othello,” but the couple stayed together.

Somehow, Beaty manages to pull together—if not always in focus—the many strands of Robeson’s overpowering personality and gifts, especially when singing a number of songs that range from “Get on Board Lil’ Chillun’,” “Go Down Moses,” “Great Day,” “Go Down, Moses” and many others. The voice is not necessarily Robeson’s (check out Robeson’s “Ol Man River” on the Web), but it’s supple, more rangy and affective in its own way, striving for the grandeur of Robeson. Nevertheless, it’s in his characterizations that Beaty really shines—we get Truman, civil rights leader Mary Bethune McLeod, who dubbed him “The Greatest Tree in the Forest”—Robeson’s father and others. So effective is in a blistering argument between Robeson and Essie that you feel for her, literally, before you remember that you’re listening to a voice, not seeing a woman.

Robeson—who believed with all his gifts and heart that the artist should be an activist, a fighter against slavery and for freedom and justice —seemed sometimes willfully inclined towards tragedy. His support of Stalin’s Soviet Union even after he discovered that Stalin was murdering and imprisoning Jewish intellectuals goes beyond stubbornness, it’s a clinging to a good principle in defense of evil, a kind of forgiveness he did not apply to his own country. Robeson suffered for his principles as well as mistakes. HIs passport was taken away, thus robbing him of his livelihood singing worldwide. There was a deliberate effort to erase him from history on the part of Hoover and the government.

There are harrowing scenes in this play. His confrontation with Truman on the issue of rising instances of lynching in the South is conducted against a stage background of increasing shadows of men hanging from trees and his interview with a noted Jewish poet in the Soviet Union is a kind of dance of tragic tension.

You walk away with several feelings. You feel the freshness of the material, remember references and music, and wonder from which context members of the audience at any given time are experiencing this resurrection of Paul Robeson. And you walk out feeling, as if you’ve been at a fragmented feast, daunting, but also richer than expected. And you walk away hungry for more.

“The Tallest Tree in the Forest” runs at the Kreeger Theater at Arena Stage through Feb. 16.

Gary Tischler •

There’ll be over a 150 plays and shows to choose from. Here’s a look at a few we thought might be interesting. Making choices at the Fringe is not always a rational process of course, but here goes. Sometimes the titles and descriptions are worth the ride.

DATELINE: MACBETH (Quattro Gatti Theatre Company) and MACBETH; THE INSTRUMENTS OF DARKNESS (The Rude Mechanicals). Two very different takes on the Scottish play. “Dateline” takes place in a tropical setting, with this hook: “As funny as it is macabre, it goes TV mysteries one better.”

ANTIGONE (The Wandering Theatre Company) and BITCH: A PLAY ABOUT ANTIGONE (Naked Theatre Company). When’s the last time you had a chance to see not one but two plays about Sophocles’ ancient Greece heroine who defies her father and pays for it. Not ever, except at the Fringe.

THE FEVER (Patrick O’Brien, director). O’Brien’s “Underneath the Lintel” was a big hit at last year’s Fringe, and now the director brings Wallace Shawn’s horrific and provoking play to the Fringe.

WISTARIA (The Wistaria Project). “A traveling meeting that questions our historical past and present through a hallucinatory amalgam of U.S. texts, traditional song and actions mysterious and banal.” We like it because we have no idea what this meant but it sounds interesting.

THE OLD MAN NEVER LET IT GO (Hector J. Reynoso). A visual adaptation of “The Old Man and the Sea,” with music and dance, starring Reynoso. Hemingway lives!

CABARET XXX: EVERYBODY FCKING DIES (Pinky Swear Producitos). The life and death of Femme Fatales and other matters. Great title.

REPORT TO AN ACADEMY (Scena Theatre). An ape named Red Peter presents a thesis on his life in captivity to a scientific academy. From Robert McNamara’s Scena Theatre.

DISTRICTLAND (Bucharest Inside the Beltway). For the Millennial in your life, a satire and play about starting your career in the District. “Spoiler: You are Not Your LinkedIn Profile”

CONTRAFACT OF FREEDOM (Hunger and Thirst Theatre Collective). We are always interested in anything to do with Francis Scott Key. The Star-Spangled Banner: American history’s most unlikely origin story. By Alex Pappas.

DRACULA: A LOVE STORY (Wry Press). Written by DC Theatre Scene critic Tim Treanor, an intensely romantic take on the all-knowing, ever present vampire of our times. Directed by Christopher Henley with Lee Ordeman.

CHESAPEAKE (The Edge of the University Players 2). This magical realist fable is by Lee Blessing, one of America’s best and most evocative playwrights. A tale about a New York performance artist, a firebrand conservative Southern politician and a Chesapeake Bay Labrador retriever.

MEDEA’S GOT SOME ISSUES (No Rules Theatre Company and Spain arts & culture). Classy Babe turned ancient Greek temptress tells all. Featuring Lisa Hodsoll.

FEISTY OLD JEW (Charlie Varon). A one-man show about Bernie, 83, who hates yoga studios, S6 coffee, young tech millionaires and what they’re doing to San Francisco.

THE MONSTER SONGS (Dr. Dour & Peach) Dr. Dour sings and plays 10-string guitar. Peach plays cello and banjo and they sing and tell the personal stories of lovesick mummies, giant lizards and bargain-hunting zombies. Featuring Toby Mulford (composer) and Rachel Spicknall Mulford.

It’s back.

The theater festival that anticipates changing times and has become a hot bed for everything new in performance art, the Capital Fringe Festival, returns for 18 days of “uninhibited and creative performances” at over 15 venues round the city, July 10-27.

Tickets are already on sale at the Fort Fringe Box Office at 607 New York Ave., near the Washington Convention Center.
This festival will mark the last year Capital Fringe will be headquartered at this location. The good news is that it will move into a new space at 1358 Florida Avenue currently occupied by the Connersmith Gallery.

This year’s venues include a variety of locations in the continually changing downtown world. Performances will be held at several spaces at the Atlas Performing Arts Center, located in the new and hot H Street Corridor area; Caos on F; the Bedroom at Fort Fringe; the Baldacchino Tent Bar; the Dupont Circle Q Street Exit; DC Reynolds Bar; The Shop at Fort Fringe; Gearbox on 7th Street; the Gallery and Main Stage at the Goethe Institut; Hillyer Art Space; Jet Hair Designs; the Martin Luther King Library; Mountain at Mount Vernon United Methodist Church; Plush Beauty Box; the Fridge; The Source Theater; Union Stylus; the Warehouse; and the Capitol Reflecting Pool.

Fringe, under the leadership of founder, president and chief executive Julieanne Brienza, has continually expanded the boundaries of theater and performing arts. The Capital Fringe Festival is one of many around the world, a tradition of cutting edge theater that began in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Today, you’re likely to run across a mixture of drama and dance, classical plays and vaudeville acts, stand up comedians, puppets, opera and drama, shows that include Twitter and Facebook, straight forward dramas and not so straight forward plays, musical acts, site-specific plays, one-man and one-woman shows and much more. This is a festival for every generation.

Gary Tischler •

From a distance, you could mistake them for tourists checking out the sights at the Kennedy Center—mom, older brother, young sister.

That wasn’t the case, though. They’d been here before.

The boy, with a slightly brighter shade of blonde hair, was 12-year-old Henry Wager, with his mom, Nancy Tarr, and his young sister Naomi, 10.

Wager had just gotten his hair dyed so that he could look a little more like The Prince, or the title role in the Washington National Opera Company’s family holiday production of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s “The Little Prince,” composed by Rachel Portman, and originally staged by WNO Artistic Director Francesca Zambello at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater Friday through Sunday, Dec. 19 to 21.

Wager—and his sister Naomi, who will be in the WNO’s Children Chorus in the production—is a familiar presence by now at the Kennedy Center and the WNO. Last year, Wager portrayed the part of the Angel in Jeanine Tesori’s world-premiere (and very popular) “The Lion, the Unicorn and Me.”

“Francesca asked me earlier this year if I wanted to play the prince, and I said sure, I was very honored,” Wager said. “It’s a lot different from anything I’ve done. It’s complicated, you know. He’s a prince, and he lives on this little planet by himself, and his prized possession, a rose. He’s kind of obsessive about it. And he meets this downed pilot in the desert.”

The family lived in Bethesda, but now live in Cooperstown, N.Y., home to the annual summer Glimmerglass Opera Festival, where Zambello is artistic director. For Glimmerglass, Wager performed the role of Winthrop in “The Music Man” and with the children’s chorus sang in Tobias Picker’s “American Tragedy.” So, Wager is already a fairly experienced performer in the opera world.

He’s thoughtful about “The Little Prince.” “The music isn’t like traditional opera, it doesn’t exactly sound like that, it’s modern, you now, like some American operas.”

Watching him and listening to him and his sister, you see something interesting. The young Wagers — Henry and Naomi — are very articulate about music and performing, and yet, there is no sense of self-importance, of being different from other kids. They compete, they talk each other up, they’re proud of each other.

“I want to be in a lead role someday, like Henry,” Naomi offered. “I want to travel to a foreign country.” The production of “The Music Man” traveled to Oman. “You know, the prince is really a kid, he doesn’t understand anything about adults, and he has that thing for the rose.”

“I don’t have any object like that,” Henry said. “We have the cats,” Naomi said. “They’re twins. Maple and Hennepin.”

“You know how he’s different,” Henry said of the prince, “he sees the world in numbers, that’s how he processes information.”

“They were both in the chorus,” Nancy Tarr said. “They work hard.”

“Music is a lot of lessons. I mean lots.And lots of practice.” Henry said.

“They have a normal childhood,” Tarr said. “That’s what I wanted for them. They play sports, they listen to music, they do what kids do. And they do this.”

Henry plays baseball, second base, and he lives in a town, which houses the Baseball Hall of Fame. “It’s cool to live there,” he said. His favorite baseball player Denard Span of the Washington Nationals.

“I listen to all kinds of music,” Henry said. “But I really like listening to movie scores. I love John Williams.”

Naomi currently likes singer Meghan Traynor. “That’s this week she likes her,” Henry said, skeptical. She, of course, likes Taylor Swift. “I liked “Shake It Off” and “Blank Spaces.”

They sound and look just like—still—kids. And they’re wise to it.

Naomi summed it up: “Henry’s got one year left. I’ve got three.”

What’s that? we ask. “Childhood. Henry has one year. I’ve got three.”

Gary Tischler •

In a telephone interview, the singer-actress Megan Hilty will sometimes tell you that she felt “terrified” on certain occasions in her career: when she took over the role Glinda in the Broadway smash “Wicked”, for instance, or when she performed in her first solo concert.

Yet, if you’ve seen her on stage or on television, solo or with a big cast, you notice something about Hilty. She’s a big voiced but rangy song stylist with a blonde and curvy, glittery presence. She is the epitome of people born to the stage, to the “gotta sing, gotta dance (and gotta emote and act)” world of the Great White Way. She’s a Broadway baby in the best and whole sense of the phrase.

The “Wicked” star and star of the Broadway musical version of “Nine to Five” is probably best known nationally for her turn as, well, a kind of Broadway baby in the television series “Smash,” which lasted two seasons and centered around the rivalries and tempestuous relationships and maneuverings involved in the making of a Broadway musical. For theater buffs, it was more than just a guilty pleasure, it was a high-dudgeon melodrama with love affairs, betrayals, scheming and battling for big roles on stage and behind the scenes, not to mention lots of singing and dancing production numbers. Hilty was paired with former “American Idol” star Katharine McPhee, competing for the female lead in a show being put together by the likes of Anjelica Huston and Debra Messing.

Hilty was a natural in it—the perfect fit for a dancer and singer—and comedienne– who was hungry for a starring role.

“That was a great experience,” she said. “It gave me a chance to really act, to use all of the gifts you have.”

The Washington state-born star started out wanting to be an opera singer, but “you know, you have to really start early, it’s like you’re just like an Olympic athlete. So, I turned to theater.” She’s a 2004 graduate of the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama and a recipient of the National Society of Arts and Letters Award for Excellence in Musical Theater.

Straight out of Carnegie Mellon, she auditioned for a part in “Wicked” and got a part as a standby for Glinda, in 2004. She took over the part in 2005 and ended her run in 2006 before reprising the role again when she originated the role in the Los Angeles production in 207.

“I was terrified, originally,” she said. “Kristin Chenowith is kind of the standard for that role.”

Hilty has done guest appearances on television—a memorable role in an episode of “Crime Scene Investigation”—”CSI”— with the resonant title of “Deep Fried and Minty Fresh” as the manager of a fast food restaurant called Choozy’s Chicken. “That,” she said, “was fun.”

But her favorite role was performing as Lorelei Lee, the gold-digging ambitious blonde of “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” a role made famous by two American entertainment originals, Carol Channing on stage and Marilyn Monroe in the movie version.

“I absolute love her [Monroe]. She was such a smart, funny and talented woman,” Hilty said. “It was a Encore production, a concert staging in 2012, but I felt so thrilled to be doing that. I’ve seen most of her movies.”

She wowed New York critic Ben Brantley, who wrote that Hilty performed with “a finely graded style that layers filigree comic flourishes over the raw will and stamina of a top flight athlete.” “Ms. Hilty,” Brantley wrote, “sets the tone for a production that locates the athletic, all-American verve in ‘Gentlemen.’ ”

“If I had a dream,” Hilty said. “I would love to do the role in a fully, big-time Broadway production.”

It might happen. Meanwhile, she’s in town to do her second Christmas stint at the Kennedy Center, this time at the Terrace Theater, singing standards, perhaps a song or two from her 2013 solo album “It Happens All the Time”, and Christmas carols, including “Jingle Bells.”

Life moves on. She married musician Brian Gallagher. In September, she gave birth to their daughter Viola Philomena.

“That’s her in the background,” she said during a telephone interview. And indeed, there was the sound of a baby complaining a little, making her presence known.

For Hilty, the song of Viola Philomena sounds like her very own Christmas carol.

Megan Hilty’s “A Kennedy Center Christmas” is at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater, Saturday, Dec. 13.

Gary Tischler •

George Stevens, Jr., has ended his long reign as producer of the Kennedy Center Honors, the annual star-studded, president-in-residence bash, honoring the nation’s cultural and performance art elites, and the television show that goes with it.

By now, this isn’t news, but many Washington cultural and media remain startled by the way the news was delivered.

Stevens, introduced by Kennedy Center board chairman David Rubenstein and flanked by his son Michael, came out on stage at the beginning of the second act of the Kennedy Center Honors production and said that he would not be returning as producer next year, nor would his son. He said that the chairman had told him he wanted a new producer.

Stevens was entering the last year of a contract and was in negotiation with the board. From the podium, Stevens said, “We accept that this will be our last honors. This is our good night.”

This was the 37th Annual Kennedy Center Honors, at which singers Al Green and Sting, actress and comedienne Lily Tomlin, actor Tom Hanks and ballerina Patricia McBride were honored Dec. 7. Stevens’s announcement came as a shock to the audience, and later this week, to much of Washington.

A longtime Georgetown resident, Stevens is the son of legendary Hollywood director George Stevens, who helmed such classics as “Shane,” “A Place in the Sun,” “Giant” and “The Diary of Anne Frank” as well as “Gunga Din.”

Stevens is a much honored producer, director, playwright (“Thurgood”), and former head of the American Film Institute. Stevens won numerous Emmys for the televised production of the Honors.

Kennedy Center spokesman and communications director John Dow issued a statement from the Kennedy Center which said that “This was the last year on George Stevens, Jr.’s contract and George announced from the stage of the Honors performance on Sunday night that he would be stepping down as producer. the Kennedy Center is enormously grateful for the contributions George and his son Michael have made to the Honors over the years. The Kennedy Center Honors have grown in stature over the past 37 years to become the preeminent recognition of the performing arts in America. With Sunday night’s news, the Kennedy Center will begin a search for an Honors producer that will build upon this strong foundation in the years to come.”

Gary Tischler • January 5, 2015

Ari Roth may no longer be the artistic director of Theater J, but the reactions to his firing by the D.C. Jewish Community Center in mid-December continued all through Hanukkah and Christmastime.

Roth was, according to reports in the Washington Post, fired by Carole Zawatsky, CEO of the JCC, on Dec. 18, with the stated cause being “insubordination.”

Roth had been the artistic director of Theater J for 18 years, years in which he grew the theater—which is a part of the D.C. Jewish Community Center—into a formidable force among Washington theaters, but also nationally as a prominent company presenting Jewish theater.

Theater J and Roth received accolades for the many Jewish-themed and Jewish-authored plays—the Arthur Miller canon, including a dramatic production of “The Price,” starring the late Robert Prosky and two of his sons. The theater found a wide audience throughout the region. Roth encouraged new plays and playwrights, including an original, ground-up musical based on the life of King David, and foraged for plays that centered often on plays with political and issue-oriented themes.

No one questioned Roth’s artistic prowess and his abilities as an artistic leader—even Sawatsky, in the initial burst of information about Roth leaving, said that “Ari Roth has had an incredible 18-year tenure leading Theater J, and we know there will be great opportunities ahead for him. Ari leaves us with a vibrant theater that will continue to thrive.”

Roth, in a statement reported by Post drama critic Peter Marks, made it clear that he was “terminated abruptly.”

In building Theater J’s reputation as an outstanding theater, Roth was often the flashpoint for controversy, especially when dealing with plays that focused on Israel’s political history. One such play was “Return to Haifa,” a play by Israeli playwright Boaz Gaon focusing on the plight a Palestinian family which returned to their old home in Haifa abandoned in the wake of the 1948 War for Independence. The play was performed by the Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv, a company composed of Israeli and Palestinian actors. At an opening night production in 2011, some older members of the audience complained vocally about the play and its sympathetic treatment of the Palestinian characters.

Another Roth innovation, the Voices from a Changing Middle East festival was sometimes criticized for its political content and was not on the schedule this year. Another controversial play by another Israeli playwright Motti Lerner, “The Admission,” which was about an alleged massacre which occurred in a Palestinian village in 1948, was pared down to a staged reading.

When news came of Roth’s firing, the national artistic community responded quickly.

Playwright Tony Kushner of “Angels in America” fame, whose play “The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures” was Theater J’s second production this season, wrote that Roth “was fired because he refused to surrender to censorship.” In all, artistic directors of 60 national theater companies protested the firing in an open letter — including Robert Falls of the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Joe Dowling of the Guthrie Theater in Minnesota, and Howard Shalwitz of the Woolly Mammoth Theatre and Michael Kahn of the Washington Shakespeare Company in Washington.

Roth is reportedly organizing planning for a new theater company, which he will lead called the Mosaic, which may begin performing at the Atlas Performing Arts Center on H Street in the fall.

In a letter to the arts community, Zawatsky, in part, wrote, “I want to assure you that DCJCC will continue to support Theater J as a vibrant, creative and provocative outlet for great theater. Our commitment to Theater J is as strong as ever and we will resist efforts to politicize our output.

“Ari’s creative vision—which included significant works of a political nature—were always defended and supported by Theater J and DCJCC. Our commitment to that never wavered. But Ari’s failure to maintain basic professional conduct and standards made it impossible to continue his employee relationship of the DCJCC.”

Gary Tischler • December 29, 2014

“Pippin,” the revival of the 1972 Bob Fosse-shaped musical, which roared into town at the National Theatre, is part big, splashy Broadway musical, part Cirque de Soleil on steroids. It runs through Jan. 4.

Tony Award winner Diane Paulus (she revived “Hair” on Broadway) has injected the original, which featured some of Bob Fosse’s best signature work, and the music and lyrics of Roger O. Hirson and Stephen Schwartz, with the atmospherics and spectacle of a 21st-century circus full of buff acrobats flying through the air, doing impossible things, and a cast that follows them gleefully. Nobody is shot out of a cannon, but they sure have a buzz and energy that looks as if they have.

Yet the show has Fosse’s fingerprints all over it, because the production, which is a non-stop, galloping entertainment for the most part, is, beginning-to-end a show about show biz where Fosse, not Charlemagne, was king.

Ostensibly, “Pippin” is still the same old story, in which the young prince Pippin (an appealing Kyle Dean Massey), the son of Charlemagne (the uneducated, powerful king who brought France out of the Dark Ages) tries to figure out what to do with his life. A studious kid with no flair for hacking and hewing, he feels destined to do something great, something meaningful, something important. Will he be a warrior? A man of the cloth? A regular guy? An artist? A philosopher king?

His father is played by a big-white-haired, irascible, kinetic and energetic John Rubinstein, who was the original Pippin in the 1972 Broadway version, thus getting to play his own father, and he makes the most of it.

Pippin’s guide through the process is a show biz type, in leather and black and straw hat, a person called the Leading Player (Ben Vereen was the original), this time performed by Sasha Allen in a knife-edgy, sexy way, who is all slick leg work, finger-spread in the classic show biz manner. She is a director, promoter, organizer and very cool dancer. In short, she’s a Fosse stand-in and stand out.

During the course of the show, through song, dance and acrobatics of the highest (way up high) order, Pippin, goes through home, glory, the flesh, revolution, politics, encouragement, and ordinary life, framed by the opening and the finale, just like the rest of us.

Here’s the twist, and it is pretty spectacular. Pippin doesn’t seem to realize that he’s joined the circus. If “The Lion King” is about the “Circle of Life,” well, Pippin is about the circus of life.

Stephen Schwartz, who gave us the sweet gospel of “Godspell,” gives us here some of the same musical stew—anthem: “Glory,” an up-with-life: “Spread a Little Sunshine” and assorted songs that give us hints about what life’s all about. Those include an inevitable love song, entitled “Love Song.”

Paulus’s “Pippin” isn’t so much about the music, which resonates in the moment, as it is about show time. It’s the circus and the circus guys and girls who flavor this show doing impossible acts of balance and imbalance, tumbling, curling, acts of magic and strength and twists and bends that are awe-inspiring. It’s all the work of Gypsy Snider of the Montreal circus company “Les 7 doigs de la main” or, simply put, “7 Fingers.”

They rob you blind—you can’t believe your eyes, and yet, there you are. All of the company, at some point or another, get involved in this including the glorious undefeatable Lucie Arnaz as Pippin’s hot grandmother Berthe, doing some truly death-defying things way up high. At this pace, it’s a wonder if the cast will survive its stay in Washington.

Circus and all, this is still Fosse’s show—it’s come straight out of the carny midway, the ragged burlesque show, the vaudeville bill, the song-and-dance and chorus line of the American musical, where Fosse made his bones, changing the genre in his image. Think “Cabaret.” Think “Chicago” and “Sweet Charity” and “All That Jazz” with a Miller Lite fizz to it. Every move by Allen, the girls, the leaps and jumps, the sexy “flesh” scenes, the hands, the moves, low to the ground or high in the air are like a love song to Fosse.

All of it is tremendously entertaining, involving at a level where sensation lies, but the heart can hardly keep up. In the end, Pippin meets his soulmate, a widow with an estate, a son with a duck and serfs. She’s lovely as played by Kristine Reese, insistent, golden-voiced, pushy and sweet.

If that’s not enough, there’s even—briefly—a dog, very cute, perfect for our pet-obsessed age.

And the grand finale. Oh, don’t you worry about that. It may even surprise you, and amaze you and leave you satisfied.

(By the way, it’s always hard to top Fosse—for his own grand finale, on the occasion of the revival of “Sweet Charity” right here in Washington at the National Theater, Fosse, accompanied by his first wife, Gwen Verdon, managed to have a fatal heart attack on the sidewalk on his way to the premiere in 1987 . . . That’s show biz.)

Peter Murray • December 19, 2014

Pop music’s biggest rising star Sam Smith just released a soothing, soulful version of the Christmas classic, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” backed only by a piano. This is Smith’s first endeavor into the Christmas canon, but he is no stranger to covers. Last year, Smith released renditions of songs by Whitney Houston, the Arctic Monkeys, Tracy Chapman and Bruno Mars. There’s no word on whether Smith plans on releasing any other Christmas tunes this season, but with pop rivals like Ariana Grande deep in the game, it wouldn’t be surprising if the British singer-songwriter released a full Christmas album sometime in the future. For now, we can enjoy this rendition as we get closer and closer to Christmas.