Performance

Gary Tischler • September 21, 2012

The guy in the really spiffy and expensive looking dark suit practically bounded onto the stage of the Kennedy Center’s Concert Hall while close to two thousand people cheered.

The man offered up that his name was Jerry Seinfeld and that he was 58 years old.

Seriously? Jerry Seinfeld? Fifty-eight years old?

Wow. This guy looked like he had more energy than Kramer busting through Jerry’s apartment door.

It was a funny—funny ha ha, very much, and funny strange, too—experience watching Jerry Seinfeld doing standup at the Kennedy Center. One of the neat things about it was that Seinfeld was cooly aware of it without beating his audience over the head with it. It’s fair to say that there were lots of people who watch Seinfeld re-runs—ka-ching for Jerry. Whenever we stumble across them, as we did recently with catching the infamously funny episode about being “master of your domain” and laughed helplessly once again as Kramer was the first to throw his money down.

We laughed helplessly again, as Seinfeld expertly speared contemporary pop culture, the smallest and therefore biggest human foibles we all share, with a somehow garrulous, almost hysterical approach. One of Seinfeld’s more obviously charming attributes is his ability to notice the obvious and point it out, as in taking on erectile dysfunction ads which have run rampant on the airwaves like bats flying out of a cave. Seinfeld took on one such ad, in which a couple is shown luxuriating in separate, stand-alone bathtubs in anticipation or remembrance of sex. It’s hard to tell which. “Who has two bathtubs?”, he screamed. “Do you know any couple that has two bathtubs and takes them to the beach with them? If they wanted to get turned on, wouldn’t it be better if they were in one bathtub?”

You’d think, but only Seinfeld managed to see the obvious flaw in the ad. And we laughed and laughed.

Seinfeld is famous for periodically returning to the stage to do stand up comedy, and going to clubs after he refused millions to take up the series he and Larry David created once more after the last one in 1998. No question, he’s a standup genius, talking about things we immediately recognize, us regular folks out there—teaching our kids to bust piñatas, playing the marriage Jeopardy Game and losing, noting how marriage instantly causes you to lose all your single friends, and vice versa.

We got our money’s worth, but even as we watched—and noticed that men are more restrained in their laughter than women, who snort and giggle with high-pitched abandon while poking the guys in the ribs, a fact Jerry might be able to use in a routine—the old Seinfeld shows slip in under your chin where the laughter starts.

If you check out a title list of old episodes sometimes, they’re not so much about “nothing,” but about the pre-ordained failure of the characters trying to make something out of “nothing.” They scheme big with little things—Kramer’s famous coffee table book with legs, for instance—and fail spectacularly, making the embarrassment hall of fame every time out.

Seinfeld himself has gone way beyond that, of course, but keeps up too, a fish in rarefied waters, still polishing his game, like Michael Phelps diving into the neighborhood pool unannounced. It’s a joy, really, to watch him and to recognize Seinfeld from “Seinfeld”.

Seinfeld was and remains a master wordsmith, knowing all the magic and power of words when you start bouncing them around like competing yo-yos, as in his start-up routine using the word “great” and bouncing it off “sucks” as in “you say life is really great”, but you know “life sucks,” which leads him right to the invention of pop tarts, which of course, changed everything. Seinfeld, in the show and maybe in the here and now, was always the gleeful ironist, the competitive nice guy, for whom irony can be used like a knife. He hasn’t lost his edge. He’s kind of intensely manic, in fact. As if these things, these small things make you roil, makes things matter, as opposed to the big things.

“Who are you voting for?” somebody from the audience shouted.

Much to the chagrin of the ghost of Mort Sahl, who would have spent two hours answering that question, Jerry shrugged it off with a wave.

“Who cares,” he says, and moved on to the next small-big thing we remember.

Gary Tischler •

There is always one sure sign of summer in Washington. Besides the four horsemen of the weather apocalypse we are experiencing: 100-degree heat, falling trees, power outages and sopping humidity.

That would be whatever contemporary sounding outrageous theatrics coming out of the Studio Theater 2nd Stage summer production—usually a musical—make. In years past, it’s taken the form of high-and-very-low opera about Jerry Springer, the rhythm of beat poetry, Droogs singing in the rain, the squeals of “Reefer Madness,” and the boys and girls from “Hair.”

And now—in a mad election summer no less—we have a rock musical about Andrew Jackson, our seventh president, the populist leader who created Democrats, invited the people to the White House en mass, fought duels, led the expulsion westward of Native American tribes, national bank, and had, for all his populist bent, a thoroughly autocratic way about him.

All of the stories and qualities of Andrew Jackson are on display in “Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson,” the off-Broadway rock and emo-rooted musical which poses Jackson in the role of loud, angry and very sexy rock star. And let’s not forget: it is a 2nd Stage show.

“It fits right in with our summer criteria,” said Keith Alan Baker, the Studio Theater’s managing director and 2nd Stage artistic director. “For our summer shows, we usually try to have a production that was a successful show Off-Broadway the season before or so, often a musical. At 2nd Stage, we have given ourselves the latitude and mission of putting on plays and shows that are different, unusual, and attractive to all sorts of theater audiences. I’d say ‘Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson’ fits the bill.”

The bill at 2nd Stage has hardly been uniform—the summer musicals and usually a fare of three other plays including “new plays by new, young and up and coming American or English playwrights,” and “some things that would appear to have no category which this year included the Japanese-comics sourced “Astro Boy and the God of Comics” as well as “The Big Meal.”

Baker, who just celebrated his 50th birthday, hardly looks or acts his age. He carries a genial curiosity about him like some loosely-worn, very cool t-shirt. Looking back, it seems more like the distance, the journey, the volume of work and plays, being part of the rise, and rise of the Studio Theatre, under founder Joy Zinoman and now artistic director David Muse still has the power to amaze him.

Like 2nd Stage itself, Baker seems like a good mix of the expression of the Studio Theatre history and image, a combination of straight ahead determination, intellectual curiosity and eclecticism, a streak of veering off often into the road least traveled and ending up with the shining and successful theatrical enterprise that exists today.

Baker, who hails from east Texas—a good place to be from without living there, he says—combines a solid work ethic with a bit of a bad boy attitude, trying out material that’s not necessarily safe. In this he had the cooperation of Zinoman who “basically left us alone.” Baker and Kathi Lee Redmond, wife of actor Larry Redmond, started 2nd Stage up in the 1988-1989 season with two plays—“Hard Times” and “Love Suicide at Schofield Barracks”, then hit a mother lode with the irascible playwright Christopher Durang’s “Laughing Wild”. “It was a big hit, and money wise, one of the big successes in Studio history.

Since 1986, Baker has been a presence at Studio Theatre in one form or another in almost every aspect of the workings of the theater, including the journey from a small space on Church Street to the new complex on 14th and P Street, which became one of the major engines for the revitalization of the neighborhood. “I did everything here,” Baker said. “Tickets, box office, house manager (one of the guys with walkie talkies), fund raising, which was an enlightening experience.” We were talking at a window seat at the theater where you could look out at the bustling street and see the condos now occupying the theater’s old site. “You probably remember what it was like around here way back in the 1980s,” Baker said, thinking about it. “If you came to see a play here, you made a commitment, the neighborhood was still dangerous, undeveloped. Look at it now.”

“Laughing Wild” was followed in later years by other 2nd Stage successes, most notably in terms of the theater community, a production of “Hair” that was electric, intimate, and perfectly captured the iconic heart of the 1960s paean to the rock and roll counter culture. It also won the Helen Hayes award for best resident musical which Baker gleefully, giddily and profanely accepted.

When 2nd Stage hit its strides and marks, it could be memorable: “Kerouac,” for instance, managed to inhale and embrace the world of the beat artists and poets with perfection. “We had a little help there,” Baker said. “There was a bar in Georgetown which had closed and had a sale of its stuff and we carted most of it over and used it for a set.”

Other highlights: “Jerry Springer: The Opera,” a disturbing set-to-music event where audiences where often became swept up in the crazed talk show host’s world; “Reefer Madness,” a wild musical version of a 1930s cautionary film about the dangers of, well, reefers, and most recently, in 2010, the passing strange, evocative “Passing Strange.”

There is an iconoclastic quality to the plays that are part of the 2nd Stage history, obviously shared by Baker. It is about surprises and doing surprising things, entertaining the next thing before they happen. “2nd Stage has always been about the process, not the space,” Baker said.

“Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson,” already a hit, has been extended through Aug. 19 — www.studiotheatre.org. ? [gallery ids="102468,120691" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

It’s July, it’s summer, it’s Washington, D.C., and we’re right where we belong again.

On the Fringe.

It’s time once again to rock and roll, to visit what is a giant performance arts buffet, orgy, festival, conglomeration, explosion — the Capital Fringe Festival — set to take off Thursday, July 12 and run through July 29 with some 140 productions, more than 300 performances of plays, operas, one-person shows, dance productions and stuff that, as always, defies category, convention and expectations — all performed at venues fairly close together, with some exceptions.

Headquarters is Fort Fringe at 607 New York Ave., NW, out of which the Fringe Festival operates year-round, but which becomes a regular beehive of activity during the festival, starting with the recently held mind-boggling preview event held in the Baldaccino Gypsy Tent.

It’s also where you have a good opportunity to catch Julianne Brienza, the festival’s executive director and founding member, who sometimes still feels a little amazed that the festival is now in its seventh year. She can get the credit for the festival’s status as a kind of free-flowing, ongoing Washington cultural instutition, a sometimes incongruous state of affairs, given the nature of the festival.

“By its nature, this kind of festival, which is a process and a journey going from year to year, with no real permanent place that says this is what it is, isn’t exactly an institution, but we’ve become one,” Brienza said. “The festival has always been about exploration and adventure, here and from its beginnings elsewhere and in all of its forms across the country. A lot of people in this community sometimes think of it in theater terms, but it’s much more than that. It’s performance art. So, you can find dancers, burlesque, opera, cabaret, as well as plays. It’s comedy. It’s supposed to be and is on the fringe.“

Historically, the festival tends to split between local performers and groups and those from outside D.C., including Maryland and Virginia, but also folks from New York, San Francisco and all across the country as well as farther afield.

“I can’t point out highlights for you or what to expect, or give you a tip on what to see,” Brienza said. “I try to see as many performances as I can because you get a real good sense of the kind of people who come to the shows.”

Washington itself, as well as the festival, has changed over the last seven years, she noted. “There’s a very grounded and large theater audience,” Brienza said. “There’s also a lot of people — artists, and people who are in the cultural community here — who might come to the festival but can’t either afford to come to the regular theater and musical offerings, or want something different.”

“I think the festival fills a need — even a kind of gap in the community,” she said. “And Fringe isn’t just the festival itself. Like a lot of things that begin here, there’s a need to make this a full-time institution where you work year-round through educational projects and training, and you become a presence.”

But Fringe has always had a kind of wild and woolly complexity to it — the actual quality varies from year to year, from production to production. You can sort of get a flavor and pick some likely suspects just breezing through the titles and group and artists names.

We are basing this on titles alone: Dog & Pony D.C. is presenting “Beertown” which was a nominee for best play in 2011, for instance. Here are some other likely suspects and possibilities:

The Third Annual “Fool For All: Tales of Marriage and Mozzarella” from the Helen Hayes award-winning Faction of Fools Theatre Company, which specializes in Commedia del Arte, which has become very popular of late.

There’s “He Loved the Soft Porn of the City,” a musical trio piece with a gentleman by the name of Dr. Allan Von Schenkel, blending 80s New Wave, Fusion Jazz and World Beat.

As always, there’s the Dizzy Miss Lizzy’s Finn McCool, there’s Scena Theatre’s production of “Mein Kampf,” which tries to imagine Hitler’s life as a shiftless artist in Vienna. There’s a musical show about Tupac, there’s a solo piece, called “Do Not Kill Me, Killer Robots,” there’s a play about the 1968 D.C. Riots in the wake of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and there’s a play about the occupiers, D.C. and elsewhere.

“We have political shows, we have avant-garde shows — we have everything,” Brienza said. “There’s always surprises. It’s always an adventure. I think that’s the idea. “

And it’s proven to be successful: people flock to these events. In six years, 80,000 have shown up, generating $1.2 million in revenue for participating artists. The D.C. version has become the second-largest unjuried Fringe Festival in the United States.

Seventy percent of Fringe attendees are female, 70 percent are in the 25 to 55 years-of-age group. “I don’t know why the gender thing is like that,” Brienza said. “It’s interesting.”

Venues for this years festival include Fort Fringe and the Baldaccino Gypsy Tent, the Bedroom at Fort Fringe, Redrum at Fort Fringe, as well as the H Street Playhouse, the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop, the D.C. Arts Center in Adams Morgan, the Warehouse, the Gala Hispanic Theatre, the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Gear Box and Mountain, at 8103 at Mt. Vernon United Methodist Church, the First Congressional United Church of Christ, Caos on F, Mead Theatre Lab at Flashpoint, Goethe Institut, the Studio Theatre and the Source Theatre.

For complete information on tickets (they’re $17 individually), box office, schedules, times, dates and venues and individual plays, artists and groups, visit the Fringe Festival website — CapFringe.org. ?

Gary Tischler •

In Washington, D.C., people talk about HIV-AIDS frequently, given the city’s notoriously high rate of infections — one higher than many African nations.

For the rest of this month, they’ll be talking about it a lot more. There’s a keen focus in Washington this month on HIV/AIDS, the devastating disease which has claimed millions worldwide since surfacing in the early 1980s. It struck America’s gay comminity first, lethally and dramatically — although it quickly became known as a disease exclusive to no group, gender, race or age.

Most prominently, the XIX International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2012) will be held at the Washington Convention Center, July 22 to 27, under the theme of “Turning the Tide Together,” featuring keynote speaker and former President Bill Clinton, pop star and humanitarian Elton John and philanthropist Bill Gates among expected 25,000 attendees. It is the first time in 22 years the conference will be held in the U.S.

On the occasion of its 25th anniversary, the AIDS Quilt has made a vivid re-appearance in Washington, including on the National Mall where it was a part of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in “Creativity in Crisis: Unfolding the AIDS Memorial Quilt,” under the auspices of the Names Project Foundation. Under scorching sunlight, accompanied by quilting bees, discussions and exhibitions, a large portion of the AIDS Quilt once again decorated the lawns of the National Mall with a colorful field of remembrance while visitors recited the names of those lost to the disease, as in days gone by.

Portions of the AIDS Quilt are also on display at the Kennedy Center where seven arts-related panels from the quilt will be on view in the center’s south gallery — including panels paying tribute to Alvin Ailey, Rudolf Nureyev, Howard Ashman, Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS and others, symbolic of the many AIDS-related losses suffered by the nation’s and the world’s arts communities.

At the Torpedo Factory Art Center, the 25th anniversary of the AIDS Quilt (and the 30th anniversary of AIDS itself) is also being marked with a display of the quilt with panels on exhibit in the main hall of the Art Center and outside on the Alexandria dock, July 21 to 25. The Alexandria Commission on HIV/AIDS will host a closing reception July 25 with Mayor William Euille serving as the honorary chair.

But to find and experience the emotional, the burning and hugely affecting human core of the universal history of the AIDS epidemic, you have to go to Arena Stage at the Mead Center in Southwest Washington, where Larry Kramer, the unrelenting AIDS prophet, town crier and activist, is seeing the first Washington production of his 1985 play “The Normal Heart” after a successful and Tony Award-winning revival on Broadway last year.

Around the production buzzes a beehive of AIDS activities at Arena through the course of the play’s run at the Kreeger Theater through July 29. Not only are more panels from the AIDS quilt hanging on the walls outside the Kreeger, adding poignancy to the drama on stage, but there are images from the HIV and AIDS related collections of the Archives Center at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. D.C. clinics and HIV testing providers have HIV-testing vans parked outside on select weekends, and there are panel discussions after selected matinee performances. On July 23, there’s a performance to benefit the Washington AIDS Partnership.

Before and after performances, there will be further opportunities to hear the alarm-sounding, passionate voice of Kramer, in the form of a one-sheet letter which begins by saying that “Please know that everything in ‘The Normal Heart’ is real. These were and are real people who lived and spoke and died and are presented here as best as I could.”

When people come to see the play something rare in theater performance happens, and in various ways, it’s been documented by many people who have seen the production. A kind of risible, visible emotional power builds during the course of the play, and the affects become obvious in the audience with periods of sustained silence where people seem to have stopped breathing, with the sound of long, audible sighs, and sometimes sharp intakes of breath and, in the end, often sobs. This is not because the proceedings, although dramatic, are melodramatic, it is not because what is going on is maudlin or even sentimental. The reactions appear to stem from honest emotions, a response to shocking moments, a normal heart open to undeniable feelings.

It’s that way for members of the outstanding cast, too — for the audience it’s like a tuning fork in the dark.

“Oh yeah, you can tell how people are reacting,” said Nick Mennell, who plays the buttoned-down, but affably charismatic gay investment banker Bruce Niles, a key character. “It gets really quiet, it gets completely silent during that scene where Bruce is talking about taking the body of his lover home to Arizona.”

“It’s always a little different,” said John Procaccino, who plays Ben Weeks, the straight attorney brother of the manic, and sometimes maniacal, gay leader and activist Ned Weeks, who’s basically a stand-in for Kramer himself.

“It depends on the audience,” he added. “At matinees people, they’re older and a little uncomfortable at first, they’re slower to respond, they don’t know what to do. But soon enough — especially in the second act — they start to respond — you can hear them.”

People come out of the play as if they’ve just finished an impossibly long, and dangerous, theme park ride. They look and feel exhausted, there’s a mixture of both buzz and stunned silence.

“The Normal Heart” first appeared in 1985 when the AIDS crisis was taking shape vividly in American cities, in New York, in San Francisco and in Washington. Most see it as history: It’s been embodied by the death of movie star Rock Hudson, others in the cultural community, President Ronald Reagan’s stubborn unwillingness to acknowledge AIDS at its outset, the renaissance of plays about the disease (“Angels in America,” the Falsetto plays, “The Baltimore Waltz”, works by Harry Kondeleon and Robert Chesley and the pioneering book “And the Band Played On”) and the first appearance of the AIDS Quilt in Washington.

“The Normal Heart” takes you back to the beginning of the AIDS crisis when it didn’t have a name, and deaths were few. But Ned Weeks has noticed some of his friends get sick and die in rapid order, and we see him with a friend at the offices of Doctor Emma Brookner, one of the play’s heroes, whose attempts to mobilize and get the aid of medical institutions and government officials proves agonizingly futile.

Ned, one of those people who have no verbal filters, starts a group to sound the alarm, to help victims, identify the disease, and spread the word in the gay community, which was experiencing what some are calling a golden age of sexual freedom and license and which Ned warns can be suicidal and dangerous. Difficult to deal with as a friend, or in conversation, Ned is a prickly, almost emotionally self-destructive radical when it comes to the subject of the disease, of love and relationships and of being gay. He enlists his skeptical, reluctant brother, he battles over leadership with the less flamboyant Bruce, a banker and former Green Beret who wears his three-piece suit like armor against coming out.

No one listens. The government (the Koch Administration in New York City, the Reagan Administration here) turned a deaf ear early on. Gay men began to die in ever larger numbers. A strange, almost awesome thing begins to happen. “The Normal Heart” can easily, and it has often been, be called a “gay” play, in terms of its concerns, in terms of the struggle, the characters and AIDS as a subject. But so vividly are the characters drawn, so close to them is the audience, that the frustrations, the guilt, the fear, the immense sense of loss, becomes ours. The play is one of those game changers — chances are that coming out you won’t be exactly the same as going in because what you’ve seen, felt and heard will stay with you.

It’s that way for the actors, too, only more so.

“It’s been an education and, I feel, an honor for me. I think it’s affected all of us,” Procaccino said. He and Mennell are sitting for our interview at the Mead Center, dressed casually, loose shirts, jeans, backpack and so on. Procaccino, 58, has performed all over the country, most recently for the Seattle Repertory Company, as well as a member of Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago and in films and television. Mennell, 35, has divided his time between stage, including most recently on Broadway in “A Free Man of Color,” for director George C. Wolfe, who also directed this production of “The Normal Heart” and films, including a “Friday the 13th” remake.

Upclose around a table, the two are a study in contrasts — Mennell is 20 years-plus younger than Procaccino, of Italian-Hispanic heritage, dark-haired and casually handsome but almost intensely articulate, with a young daughter. Procaccino sports the speckled, spotty salt and pepper beard he grew for the part —“I kinda like it, I think I’m going to keep it,” he said. On stage, the two look oddly pillar-of-the-community alike in clothes and attitude. Procaccino, as Ned’s attorney brother, often sports New York attorney suits and Mennell, his hair Wall Street-slick, and his suit often fitted perfectly and escape-proof, looks defiantly not gay as suits worn by his character Bruce, who doesn’t want to come out to the world at large.

Ironies abound in this kind of setting. “You know what’s strange?” Procaccino says. “Back in the 1980s, and this made me think of it, I was offered a part in ‘The Normal Heart’, a gay character, and I turned it down because I had just played a gay man in another play. I was afraid of being typecast or seen that way. So, yeah, I can admit that as a young man that I was homophobic then. And being in this play, let me tell you, it makes you look at yourself.”

“I was just a kid in the ’80s,” Mennell says. “So, I didn’t really know anything, you know. But I remember I was playing one-on-one basketball outside once with some guy, and he told me he was HIV-positive, as a kind of warning, like some basketball players did back then, and I didn’t know what that was, or what it meant exactly.”

Both men, though, are theater people, they’re playing parts — and they know that. Procaccino’s girlfriend is the director Pam MacKinnon. At some point in this play — they both note how draining and exhausting it is — something sticks, the people become larger than the issue. “It becomes very real, and the audiences play a big part in that,” Procaccino says. “I like to think that what we’re doing here, and how we do it is important to something larger,” he says. “The suffering in this play, the loss is a human loss, not just gay suffering and loss.”

With Mennell’s ethnic background, there’s not universal approval for being in this play from some of his relatives. “Some of them think what I’m doing is a sin,” he said. “I don’t understand that attitude,” he said. “But you know, because you don’t live in a void, I have to think about being an actor, what value it is for society in terms of society.”

“In so many ways, what we’re doing, I like to think, elevates humanity, makes us see outside ourselves,” Mennell said. “With this play, I see it every night or matinee. It makes you question the existing paradigm. Every night I listen to the play and hear things as if for the first time, and they resonate so deeply for me on a human level.”

AIDS is now — and has been for some time — a global epidemic affecting not just gays, but everyone, including women and children. The numbers of cases and deaths continue to climb, in Africa, and in our cities. But the talk in the nation is not so much about AIDS, but about the political battleground issue of gay marriage, which is referenced prophetically, if briefly, in “The Normal Heart.”

You come out of the play, and there’s Kramer’s letter.

It is, like the man and his play, passionate: “Please know that AIDS is a worldwide plague”.

It’s full of some hard facts, too.

“Please know that, as I write this, the world has suffered at the very least some 75 million infections and 35 million deaths. When the action of this play that you have attended begins, there were 41.”?
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Gary Tischler •

There are actually several audiences for “First You Dream: the Music of Kander and Ebb,” a musical revue of the song and show book of John Kander and Fred Ebb, now at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater through July 1, and all of them are going to be peachy-pleased with the results.

There’s the group which saw the original production, created and mounted at Signature and co-conceived there by David Loud and Signature artistic director Eric Schaeffer: it will be delighted to find four of the original cast members performing with newscomers and a 29-member orchestra in a much less intimate, but much boldly brassier, setting.

There is a potentially large number of persons who know about Kander and Ebb. The lyricist of the pair, Ebb, passed away in 2004. Their unique, rich and prolific partnership spawned such huge hits as “Cabaret” (stage and screen) , “Chicago” (stage and screen), “The Rink,” “Liza with a Z,” “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” “Woman of the Year,” “The Act,” “Zorba” and “The Happy Time.”

And there is still a larger group which has at least lip-synched to the title song of “Cabaret.” Some of them have sung aloud, either in the shower or at a karaoke bar, the line, “What good is sitting alone in your room?” That would be most of the rest of us, old chum.

And no question—beyond an interest in Kander and Ebb, if not a passion—there is a group which appreciates terrific songs, beautiful songs, dazzling songs that are sung with great style and emotion by a group of six terrifically talented actor-singers or singers, born to sign on Broadway or formed there in performance. That part of the audience will be richly rewarded, whether they are singing “Cabaret” and “Chicago.”

Taken together, those audiences ought to do well by this thoughtful, passionately performed and staged whammy of a musical revue. But it is so much more.

Several degrees of separation are in order here. I can make no comparison with the Signature original, one way or the other, but I’ve seen numerous versions of “Cabaret” on Washington area stages, including one at Signature. I’ve always been puzzled by the lack of breakout success of “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” an astonishingly original musical. I’ve talked with George Hearns, who did “The Visit” with Chita Rivera at Signature, although the show never quite made the Broadway leap. I also talked with the late Harry Guardino about his experience with “Woman of the Year,” who told vivid stories about working with Lauren Bacall. I’ve seen Liza Minelli on stage at the Kennedy Center, and it should be noted that she was a Kander and Ebb favorite, who could “ring them bells” for sure as well as just kill you with “Maybe This Time.”

Mostly, what you marvel at in “First You Dream”—the song (from 1997’s “Steel Pier”) snakes its way through the show like a seductive, but not pushy, hurdy gurdy man—is the sheer variety and diversity that’s in the body of work in terms of theme, substance and style. The creators have thankfully chosen many songs that are less familiar to a general audience, which gives the show the quality of one of those happy, bottomless swag bags from which emerge a constant parade of happy gifts for the audience. I’m thinking here of songs like the ridiculously giddy “Boom Ditty Boom,” the combination of “Walking Among My Yesterdays” and “Go Back Home” (a touching, beautiful turn by the three male singers, who also do the jaunty “Military Man”), the beautiful and tough love-for-life song, “My Own Space” and “Love and Love Alone,” paired with “Life Is.”

While the gifted collaborators roam all over the thematic, stylistic landscape, there is still a constant. At the core, there is: show biz, shows, showmen, stage rats and royalty, the urgent need to bare your heart in songs and music, the gotta-sing-gotta-dance, the glitz and rags of it all that informs Broadway, musicals, broken hearts that break under a spotlight. You can see why they liked writing for Minelli. You can see why Bob Fosse was drawn to “Cabaret” and submerged himself in “Chicago.” Here are music and songs which often manage to be both lurid and lovely. Hear how they string together “Only in the Movies,” “Happy Endings” and “At the Rialto.” Behold the sleazy soft-shoe sale of “Razzle Dazzle”and the wonderful finale of “Show People.” Feel the pairing (beautifully segued by Matthew Scott) of “Cabaret” and “I Miss the Music.” It is why we go to shows, remember the songs and rub old wounds in the dark like that.

Finally, a few words about the performers. They deliver. They have killer voices. They reach out and touch someone. To be fair, I remember the remarkable Heidi Blickenstaff (Is that a great stage name or what?), who starred in a musical version of the vastly underrated “Meet John Doe” at Ford’s Theatre several years ago. I was happy to see her again, blasting out “Sing Happy” in a sequin dress and lead the way in the deliriously funny, iconic “Ring Them Bells” to cap the first act. Then, there was that moving pairing of James Clow and Patina Miller in “Blue Crystal” and “Marry Me.” Alan Greene dominates “Life Is” and surprises you with his authority and presence and emotional power. Leslie Kritzer knocks “I Don’t Care Much” out of the park.

As a group, after a lengthy first act, they accomplished a remarkable thing. They elevated their game in the second act. I already miss the music.

“First You Dream: the Music of Kander and Ebb” at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater through July 1; 800-444-1324 or 202-467-4600; Kennedy-Center.org. [gallery ids="100859,126832" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

Over the phone, Natasha Trethewey’s voice sounds warm. It’s a voice inviting you to talk, as opposed to maintaining the interrogatory stance of an interview.

Thursday, Sept. 13, the tone may change a little, become more authoritative and firm when the poet from Mississippi gives her inaugural reading as the 19th Poet Laureate Consultant—the United States Poet Laureate—at 7 p.m. in the Coolidge Auditorium in the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress.

It’s an auspicious, even historical occasion for Trethewey, as the reading marks the 75th anniversary of the library’s Poetry and Literature Center while establishing her as the nation’s most visible and official poet, another landmark in a somewhat meteoric career which has seen her garner and garlanded with achievements and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for “Native Guard” in 2006 and the Book Prize from the Mississippi Institute Arts and Letters. She is also the current Poet Laureate of Mississippi.

“I was a little bit shocked, truth be told,” she said of being named poet laureate. “It’s a great honor, of course, and I know I’m expected to do the reading and give a lecture at the end of the term. And it will be an opportunity, naturally, to advance the reading, the nurturing, the education and the writing of poetry. I will do everything I can to do that. And it gives me a chance to be here in Washington, where I used to roam the stacks some time ago and did research for my collection, ‘Native Guard.’ ”

In a time of information overload, Trethewey brings a unique gift as a poet of note. In her four collections so far, she has written about people who are often ignored by poetry, the shadowy people who have lived intense and forgotten lives in the midst of history, black soldiers who fought in the Civil War, the servants and nannies of the South, her own relatives, the victims of catastrophe, the ghosts that seem to linger in every tree branch and furrowed field in the South and in her own history.

The history of the South is a treacherous subject to navigate, and her own memories can be equally daunting. “I try to bring memories with me, to air them out, cleanly, vividly,” she said. She has been called “the poet of memory” by some. The Librarian of Congress James Billington chose her in part, he said, because “she intermixes her story with the historical story in a way that takes you deep into the human tragedy of it. It is her ability to weave the present and the past to engage the public and the personal and to give language to the unsaid that makes her poems of such lasting impact.”

Her story is specific: she is the daughter of a bi-racial marriage that was considered illegal, with a white father and an African-American mother, who lived in Mississippi. Her father, himself a poet and writer, and her mother divorced. Later, her mother was murdered by her second husband, who remains in prison. The horrific event led Tretheway to poetry. “It’s when I first thought of being a poet,” she said. “It was an effort to digest, to understand and deal with what happened, and that leads you eventually, to everything else, the atmosphere of Mississippi, the South, the Civil War, the lives of forgotten people.”

Her poetry is by no means stylistically consistent or even recognizable as hers except by its subjects. It has the strange quality of being powerful, deceptively and often simple in its use of words and language, diverse in the method and style. Her words are sometimes discursive, sometimes as haunting as a dream whose meaning is stark and elusive. There are also poems like “Elegy,” written for her father, Eric, to whom she remains devoted. It’s about an episode of fly fishing, daughter and father in boots in the water. It’s a poem that is at once full of atmosphere, and attention to details of her father with her, other things beckoning. “I rewrote quite a bit,” she said. “He says he liked it, and then he said, but it’s strange having an elegy written about you when you’re still alive.”

The past, she thinks, recedes from us, sometimes willfully, sometimes at our behest. “When we lose memory, we sometimes lose it forever. I try to retrieve it, tell stories about things that we don’t always want to think about it.”

Hurricane Katrina figures in her poetry but is also a subject of non-fiction book. “People forget,” she says. “Not Katrina but the havoc and destruction, the loss of living not just life, everywhere, it hit Mississippi with a violence that was different from what happened in New Orleans.”

Talking with her is kind of easy. In some ways, words have a way of taking on understood meanings and stories sound familiar, even universal, shared, especially the more specific they get. She still teaches at Emory University in Decatur, Ga., where her husband Brett Gadsden is a professor specializing in civil rights history. Georgia is also the place where her mother died, where she has made a home, the place of good and bad memories.

“I love teaching,” she says. “I love the fact that so many of the students can be electrified by poetry, want to understand it and do it.”

You might think she writes carefully, digging. “Actually, part of my process is walking my dog, a Boston Terrier named Maggie, and I get a lot of ideas doing that, being with her,” she said. “I think dogs, you look at them and you want to be the person they think you are. They give so much.”

As the new poet laureate, she’s in heady company—Robert Penn Warren, who influenced her work greatly, Philip Levine and others. They comprise a kind of poetic past.

The conversation after a while is like a gift—dogs, the Civil War, fathers and daughters, words in the wind, inspiration in a stream, family, the past. She can handle the past in her writing, where poems become a memory’s gift, such as fishing with her father in “Elegy”:

“I think, by now, the river must be thick

with salmon. Late August, I imagine it

As it was that morning, drizzle needling

The surface, mist at the banks like a net
settling around us—everything damp

and shining. That morning, awkward

and heavy in our hip waders, we stalked

into the current and found our places —
you upstream a few yards, and out

far deeper. You must remember how

the river seeped in over your boots,

and you grew heavy with that defeat.

All day I kept turning to watch you, how

first you mimed our guide’s casting,

then cast your invisible line, slicing the sky

between us; and later, rod in hand, how

you tried — again and again — to find

that perfect arc, flight of an insect

skimming the river’s surface. …”
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Gary Tischler •

If Gaetano Donizetti’s 1830 work, “Anna Bolena,” makes him the virtuoso of bel canto opera, it also presages what comes next. In the dexterous, emotionally powerful soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, we might just have the perfect performer that connects the Verdi generation to bell canto.

At least, that’s what she demonstrated in her star turn in the title role of the Washington National Opera production of “Anna Bolena,” ably abetted by a strong cast, by the inventive direction of Stephen Lawless and by a story that is familiar to contemporary audiences through the outpouring of contemporary and older pop culture versions in books, literature, television mini-series and films.

In short, we know these people, we know Henry VIII, the impetuous and sexy object of his desire Anne Boleyn, her lost lover Percy, the woman who replaces her, Jane Seymour, even if they’re called Enrico VIII, Anna Bolena, Riccardo and Giovanna Seymouor, as is the Italian wont of Donizetti.

Now, we know them a little and a lot better, given the emotional and dramatic intensity of the production, the seething, soaring quality of Donizetti’s music and Radvanovsky’s voice and acting ability, which gives the lie to bel canto’s reputation as a venue and stage for pure technique and beautiful singing. We do hear beautiful singing, often of the kind that, as it should in this case, has the power to break hearts and make you hold your breath. Bel canto singing of the kind evidenced in “Anna Bolena” is a little like white water rafting, it’s treacherous, dangerous, full of runs that rush like waves on top of each other, where major and even mistakes can strip a performer naked.

On the evidence of “Anna Bolena” (and I don’t have any other for her), Radvanovsky is one fine white water rafter and heartbreaker as well. She’s said that Maria Callas—who brought bell canto opera back to popularity almost singlehandedly and you can just imagine how—is her inspiration, and she does her proud. The trick with opera is not just to lay back and pinprick the notes and technique. That won’t satisfy the less-than-aficianados. It’s the temperament of opera, the willingness to go all in—reality and plausibility be damned—that makes it so appealing, such an experience, and in “Anna Bolena” the experience is dramatically achieved by inspired singing. That’s what happens in the famous duet of dueling rivals between Anna and Jane Seymour, a duel of riveting, warring emotions that span jealousy, guilt, forgiveness, resentment, great passions, emotionally clarity achieved through singing. In this duel , Sonia Gonassy as Jane holds her own with Radvanovsky, it’s a kind of emotional and vocal duel which both of them win.

Director Stephen Lawless has chosen to stage this intensely focused story and production in a setting (by Benoit Dugardyn) that resembles Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, a kind of surrounding area of rich brown wood that can reform itself to bring a scene into excruciating focus to become a bedroom, a chamber a prison cell, while above the doors is something resembling a circular balcony where crowds of courtiers, men and women in red and black, various factions, appear to peer down on the scene, creating a claustrophobic atmosphere for the characters, a place where no one is ever truly alone. This accurately reflects a political atmosphere that existed among Renaissance royalty and rulers in Tudor England, the beginnings of the police state.

In the staging, Lawless focuses the heart, no more than in an early scene, when Anne, sensing she may be in serious trouble of the fatal kind, imagines herself on the block, and goes through the graceful motions—arms outstretched, head on the block—of supplication and surrender. It makes your hair stand on end every bit as any of Radvanovsky’s vocal achievements.

Not only is Radvanosky’s voice a powerful dramatic tool—in the duel with Seymour, in her final scenes, in her glowing maternal powers when a child-princess Elizabeth is on stage but also in taking on the very fine bass Oren Gradus as Henry VIII. More traditional was the tenor Shelva Mukeria as Percy, a performer who has an appealing and grand voice but doesn’t quite achieve the charisma such a compelling swain should have.

This seems to me, at the very least, also a telling story about women and how deal with love and power and the desire for both. Throw into the mix the wonderful Claudia Huckle as Smeton—a so-called “pants” part in that she plays a young boy, a court singer smitten with Anna who ends up betraying her—and you have a grand powerful production of an opera that is bound up by one of opera’s first themes: power and its uses and misuses.
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Gary Tischler •

Washington theater fans think they know Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Floyd King. This makes sense. After all, hundreds, maybe thousands, of Washington area theatergoers have spent plenty of time with him going back to the 1980s. It’s true that he’s had different faces in different roles, but we feel like we know him well enough. We’ve seen his Parolles, his Feste, his fool, all the people in “A Tale of Two Cities”, and the ale-loving delegate from Rhode Island in “1776”.

King greets his fans with a handshake in the lobby of the Lansburgh Theatre, where he and the rest of the Shakespeare Theatre Company is in rehearsal for a production of an adaptation of Gogol’s “The Government Inspector”, which runs through Oct. 28. King’s manner is casual, his face is recognizable and his voice is more so, modulated down to conversation.

King is pumped about the production, which is a true ensemble piece. It brings together a horde of actors with whom he’s worked with before. “That’s what I love about this, it’s like some sort of party, almost, or reunion, Nancy [Robinette], Ted [Sabin], Rich [Foucheoux], and all the others, including Hugh Nees, Derek Smith, Sarah [Marshall],” he says. “We’ve all been around a while and we all know each other.”

Michael Kahn is directing. About the only AWOL actor is Ted van Griethuysen, with whom King has worked many times. “We’re old friends,” King said of him. He was the fool to van Griethuysen’s Lear, and together they played the bumbling duo of Dogberry and Verges in “Much Ado About Nothing” like the two stumbling bums in “Waiting for Godot”, the absurdist play by Samuel Beckett.

Most theater folks will tell you that King is one of the area’s finest comic actors, especially in Shakespeare plays. Being a great comic actor is only an inch away from being a great tragedian, or as an actor once said, “Tragedy is easy, comedy is hard.”

King thinks recognizes that fine, wavering, trembling line. This is what King brings to the acting game. His voice alone can elicit laughter. He can also become becalmed, introspective, preen like a peacock on a dime.

After seeing King in so many plays, we often we feel as if we know him. Here are some things we don’t know.

Much of King’s career has been spent in Washington, but, surprisingly, he isn’t a Washingtonian. “I have a place in New York, and a house in the Poconos,” he said. “I go there for peace and quiet, and it’s easy to get to from New York.”

There’s one more thing we didn’t know about King.

“This is the last play I’ll be doing in Washington this season,” he said. “Yes, that’s it at least for this season. I haven’t contracted for any other roles. I haven’t taken any other offers.”

Shakespeare is King’s bread and butter, but he believes its time for a change of pace.

“I’ve done most of the parts I can suited for in Shakespeare,” said King. “I want to take stock. I want to relax a little. I want to go back to Minnesota, and San Francisco and other places. It’s not permanent. It’s just time for a change a little bit.”

This makes King’s appearance as a postmaster in “The Government Inspector” all the more special.
“I’m enjoying it,” he said.

You should too. In the meantime, we’ll all be “Waiting for Gogol,” for the return of the King. [gallery ids="100983,131801" nav="thumbs"]

Jeff Malet • September 17, 2012

“Hamlet” is one of Shakespeare’s best known and oft-quoted plays, involving political intrigue, tragic death and philisophical reflection. “Hamlet” comes to the Folger for a two-week run courtesy of London-based Shakespeare’s Globe. This production has already toured Britain extensively and begins its North American trip here in Washington, D.C.

It is a homecoming of sorts for Anglo-American actor Michael Benz in the role of Hamlet. Benz graduated in 2004 from Georgetown University with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and theology, followed by a degree from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

Dominic Dromgoole, artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, and Globe regular Bill Buckhurst co-directed. A fine cast features Carlyss Peer as Ophelia, Dickon Tyrrell as Claudius, and Miranda Foster as Gertrude.

Hamlet plays through Sept. 22 at Folger Theatre, at The Folger Shakespeare Library which is located at 201 East Capitol Street, SE, in Washington, DC. For tickets, call 202-544-7077, or order them online.

View our photos of Hamlet at the Folger by clicking on the photo icons below. [gallery ids="100972,131249,131257,131265,131273,131282,131291,131299,131307,131316,131324,131332,131241,131233,131366,131360,131171,131354,131181,131349,131191,131200,131208,131217,131225,131341" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

If you want to know something about American performing arts culture, look at the annual Kennedy Center Awards and who is honored. This year, it appears especially eclectic.

This is a trend for the Kennedy Center Honors that’s been moving apace ever since it embraced the arenas of pop music, including not only a Sinatra but giants of blues, rock and roll and country music.

This year, it is legendary bluesman George “Buddy” Guy and one of the loudest and best of the super rock groups (think the Rolling Stones, the Beatles and the Who), Led Zeppelin, and its surviving members, getting honored.

Also selected for a Kennedy Center Honors salute is late-night talk show host and comedian David Letterman (Johnny Carson being the forerunner in this sub-category), one of the finest classical ballerinas and dancers to grace the world of ballet and dance, Russian Natalia Makarova, and Dustin Hoffman, arguably one of the finest modern film actors in the last 50 years, to stand alongside the likes of Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino.

Makarova, who is 71, came to America in 1970 and assayed a memorable turn in “Giselle” for the American Ballet Theatre and built a memorable career.

Letterman is an icon, not perhaps in an artistic sense, but in the sense of his role as late night host, a more cerebral, ironic and even cool version than, say, the more put-upon Jay Leno.

Guy won six Grammy awards playing and making Blues music, a guitar player who oddly influenced a generation of British players (including members of Led Zeppelin) as well as Eric Clapton.

The Led Zeppelin rockers—Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and keyboardist John Paul Jones—have with this honor made it all the way up the “Stairway to Heaven.” Their rock and roll, often full of anthems, lengthy riffs and pure, powerful playing has lasted and so have they—still plying their trade as musicians and super-stars.

Hoffman we remember well in “The Graduate,” “Tootsie,” “Lenny,” “Rain Man,” “Midnight Cowboy,” “Kramer Vs. Kramer,” “All The Presidents Men” and so on and so on, still trucking, still working hard at 76, becoming a very funny man in the “Focker” movie, playing Ben Stiller’s father. He was also a memorable Willy Loman on stage in “Death of a Salesman.”

Georgetowner George Stevens, Jr., is once again producing the Kennedy Center Honors which will be held Dec. 2. Stevens himself is getting an honor this year. It’s been announced that the film director and founder of the American Film Institute will receive an honorary Oscar at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Board of Governors’ Dinner in Los Angeles Dec. 1—one day before the big show here in D.C.