“Oklahoma!” Rings in a New Era for Arena Stage
• July 26, 2011

Arena Stage Artistic Director Molly Smith has accomplished quite a bold and remarkable thing here, picking and staging the great, groundbreaking and revolutionary American musical “Oklahoma!” to inaugurate its first season at the Mead Center for American Theater in the Fichandler Stage.

The choice of “Oklahoma!” in the Fichandler is loaded with historical implications, and she’s managed to make something out of everyone of them. Here is “Oklahoma,” the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, which, when it made its wartime America 1940s debut, not only signaled a spectacular career for its creators, but changed American musicals forever.

Here is Smith’s production, which preserves every word, lyric, song and piece of music, probably two-step from the original, and with intelligent use of non-traditional casting and an intimacy of space and place, makes it seem brand new, fresh, authentic and of our time. This is a production that honors this musical’s historic place in theater history while at the same time offering memories of the future.

Here is the rarely revived “Oklahoma!” staged in the Fichandler, the theater-in-the-round. Resurrected almost exactly in its original form, but surrounded by a space that makes it part of a spectacular, glass/wood/pillar encased three-theater, education and community center enterprise, as opposed to being its centerpiece. It is the historic Arena Stage intact, but also transformed in the here-and-now and the future, a more intimate theater space which seems both smaller and more vivid. But, as the fella said, the play’s the thing.

So what about this “Oklahoma!?”

Well, as the fella sings, you’re doing fine, Oklahoma, and more than okay. Likely, there are few people around today who actually saw the original production, although it’s a fair bet that there any number of people who may think they know a thing or two because of the Gordon MacRae/Shirley Jones movie, because of the sheer ingratiating quality of the music and songs which are out there in the muzak ozone.

It’s nice to come to something with no junk in your head about it. I’d never seen it and now I have, and I still feel buzzed about it. This production is such a smart operation, such an emotional bottom-well, such a high-energy all-get-out kind of thing that you’d think the whole building would levitate and turn into an active version of the spaceship it resembles.

What you’ve got, peering at close range, is Oklahoma, the territory about to become a state circa the turn of the previous century. There are cowboys, cattlemen, squatters, and a bunch of people that could resemble Adams Morgan if it were relocated into the flat, hard-won dirt and land of windy Oklahoma. There’s Curly, the cowboy smitten with the high-spirited, hard-to-get Laurey, who scrapes a living on the land she and Aunt Eller (the earthy F. Faye Butler) work along with the sinister hired hand Judd. There’s the kissable Addo Annie, torn between a cowboy and a peddler, and going back and forth between them like a ping-pong ball. And there’s Oklahoma itself, perched to become a state, awash in dry land and oil. Change is coming like a runaway train or the next election.

Here’s what else happens: the moment Curly, in the person of Nicholas Rodriguez, announces himself and the show with a burst of musical optimism in the song “Oh What a Beautiful Morning,” you’re pretty much a goner. This is theater in its most transporting, transforming guise. “Oklahoma!” swept away decades of song-strong, chorus-girl rich whimsy and pratfalls caused by gin musicals which had nothing to do with life as it was lived—not to diss Cole Porter, Gershwin and a host of other great composers and lyricists.

“Oklahoma!” is dark, especially when the sweaty, dangerous Judd is on stage, casting a murky spell of unrequited, strong desires that resembles those of modern-day stalkers and violent predators. Smith further deepens the musical and dishes on outsider themes by casting: Rodriguez as Curly is Hispanic, Butler and Eleasha Gamble (Laurey) are African American and Ali Hakim is clearly a peddler of Middle Easter origin as played here with long-suffering humor by Nehal Joshi. You might add in that the women in this story are strong enough and stronger and of a mind to do what they want, emotionally or sexually.

The dancing—those cowboys in high-booted and high-stepping array, the dream ballet—is of a part with the story and the tale they’re telling, which is nothing less than an epic of change and growth, writ both large and intimately. Those songs don’t just lay there waiting to be a YouTube offering or a the next big billboard hit. They weave into our imaginations and stories, and tell the story on stage, from the spritely “Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” to the woeful “Poor Judd is Dead,” to “I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No,” the anthem-like tale of Addo Annie, played with remarkable vivaciousness by the hugely gifted and appealing June Schreiner (a junior at Madeira School, no less).

This production, so reflecting of our lives and its surroundings, is dead solid perfect entertainment, where you leave the theater like a gourmet leaving a meal that proved to be just so. I guarantee you that days later you will hum a melody, sing a fragment, remember Judd’s fierce face, Curley’s rangy voice, the bullet-sound of boots on the ground in the service of music and be glad, really glad for having been there.
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Fragments of Genius: Peter Brooks on the Duality of Samuel Beckett
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If you love the theater and its deeply felt surprises, then Samuel Beckett and Peter Brook are names that resonate. It’s not every day that two geniuses come so close together, the one resurrecting the work of the other, making emotionally visible.

Impressions and memories surface: Samuel Beckett, the first, best and last great avant garde playwright, the penman of Godot, created lingering fragments in the memory of our theater consciousness, dead since 1989.

Then there’s Brook, the iconic stage and film director. He shook the old tree that was the Royal Shakespeare Theater with “Marat/Sade,” a crazed, energetic “Midsummer,” and then went to Paris to stage a huge theatrical version of the great Indian epic poem the “Mahabharata.” He is past 80 and as keenly coherent, stimulating, daring, brave and hopeful as he ever was. His life and career amount to a roaring sea of achievement in books, films, plays. He has produced epics that no one else would have dared to event think about, let alone execute.

And now, we have Beckett and Brook together at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater with a production called “Fragments,” based on the text of five short works by Beckett, co-directed by Brook with Marie-Helen Estienne, with whom he worked on “Tierno Bokar,” a play about the life of the great Malian Sufi leader. “Fragments” originated with the Bouffes du Nort Theatre in Paris, which Brook had made the base for the International Centre for Theatre Research, which he founded in the 1970s. And of course, Brook knew Beckett.

“I knew Beckett, certainly,” Brook said in a telephone interview this week. “He was a friend, and he is very much with us now. He’s very important now in this time, but perhaps not in the way many people are used to thinking of him.” There’s something jaunty about his voice. It’s inviting, conversational, friendly, accessible.It’s as if you were chatting him up at a bar in Paris or Dublin, and you just naturally jumped in on Sartre, Genet, the avant garde, Sufism and Laurel and Hardy, among other things.

“I think to this day people think of him as this bleak, terrifying writer, this tragic Rasputin, full of pessimism and hopelessness and despair, a realist who showed us what was really going on in an age of optimism,” Brook said. “I think of it as Beckett 1 and Beckett 2. It’s the same Beckett, the plays and words, but they sound different. I knew him as a warm man, funny, witty. He was wonderful company, a good friend, he loved music, and he had a big sense of humor. He loved all these old Hollywood clowns, the mimes, the pratfall comics…Oliver and Hardy, he loved them.”

Listening to Brook, you think naturally enough of Vladimir and Estragon, lost protagonist tramps of “Waiting for Godot,” forever waiting for a Godlike character to appear to somehow change their live, save them from their misery and terror and keep them from killing themselves. Among many character traits, their plight may be bleak, but their talk is often funny. They move like hapless, helpless clowns, a ragged married couple caught in a horrible, repetitive vaudeville act. More often than not, they are like Laurel and Hardy faced with another fine mess.

“When ‘Godot’ and his plays and writings first had an impact, it was [around] the Post-World War II optimism spurred mainly by the United States,” Brook said. “There was all this prosperity and wealth, there was a noticeable and naïve optimism. There was also Jean Genet and Sartre and existentialism, which showed the stark mirror to the naïve optimism. And there was Beckett. His plays, his writings showed the other side, the despair, the sheer terror of modern life; it was a drastic, bleak contrast. But it was not the whole of Beckett.”

“Look around today,” Brook said. “Everything you see, everywhere you look, there is nothing but horrible news, terrifying news, and that optimism is plainly absent. So now we have Beckett II, if you will. Look at his characters: the woman in “Rockaby” (One of the plays in “Fragments,” and an unforgettable work that invades your subconscious like a squatter that never leaves), Winnie in “Happy Days,” up to her neck and immobile.

“Listen to her,” Brook says. “She can’t move, but she says ‘I want to be like a bird.’”

“They have persistence, in spite of everything. But more than that, there’s this enormous affirmation, and that affirmation is what’s important about Beckett now.”

Brook is 86 now, still going strong, having worked on a new version of “The Magic Flute” and the journeying “Fragments” production. He is known as a big thinker, a master of the grand idea put on stage, and absolutely fearless.

He is loaded down with honors, with the work, with this huge reputation—so much so that I hesitated before picking up the phone and dialing the number. In theater, Brook has some aspects that are sage-prophet-deity, which the Brook voice belies. The things he says to you he has said many times to many people, but because they remain radical, new, modern, it is not a familiar kiss.

He has written books on the theater—most famously “The Empty Space” and his autobiography. He has heated opinions, which are always sure to ruffle establishment feathers, and he has a history of battling with actors, critics, institutions and organizations. He is known for his work ethic, his pursuit of perfectionism. But in the midst of world revolution he seems to seek the route where toleration can thrive. The Sufis, for instance, are a branch of Islam that preaches toleration of other faiths.

“Fragments” seems such a wispy word for Beckett’s plays. Even the full-length plays—“Krapp’s Last Tape,” “Waiting for Godot,” “Happy Days”—seem to lack the complicated physical requirements of theater. You could stage them in utter darkness and still be devastated.

Every repetition, every word in Beckett’s plays seem to have the potential to explode, to expose feelings we’ve always kept covered. The “Fragments,” including one that’s a poem, are big things, dense with echoes. His shadow is big in odd ways, even in daily life and pop culture: I know a lawyer who named his pug-like dog after Beckett, and I remember graffiti in a DC Space bathroom that read: “I’ll be back.” It was signed “Godot.”

“Rockaby” is perhaps the best known works among the “Fragments,” which also include “Act Without Words II,” featuring two men in sacks and their adventures with a long pole. In “Rough For Theater I,” a blind man and a disabled man team up to form a functioning person. “Come and Go” features three women seated side by side on a narrow bench, and “Neither” is an 87-word poem that deals with the word “neither.”

“I can tell you that we’ve done interesting things with it,” he said of this staging of “Rockaby.” “But you’re going to see it, so I can’t tell you the specifics. You’ll have to wait and see.”

It struck me that this emphasis on what he sees as the complete Beckett, the affirmative prophet, may also be part of his own journey from head-on, even revolutionary and often shocking theater, to this notion of affirmation. He is known—like Beckett—to be a perfectionist and, as he wrote: “one can live by a passionate and absolute identification with a point of view.”

However, he writes, “There is an inner voice that murmurs, Don’t take it too seriously. Hold on tightly, let go lightly.”

“Fragments” is being performed at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theatre through April 17. Performances are April 14, 15 and 16 at 7:30 p.m. and April 16 and 17 at 1:30 p.m. For more information, visit [The Kennedy Center online.](http://www.kennedy-center.org/calendar/?fuseaction=showEvent&event=TLTSG)

Holiday Performance Preview
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You know the drill. It’s time to celebrate the holidays. Not Thanksgiving. That’s practically yesterday. We’re talking about THE HOLIDAYS, when families reunite, and the grandparents will inevitably come bearing sweaters for everybody.

THE HOLIDAYS are a period of non-stop entertainments, and nothing is a better example of the schizophrenic nature of THE HOLIDAYS than the world of performance entertainment. It is a time of ongoing recitals in concert halls, cathedrals, small and large churches, and theaters — the music being pop and popular, secular and spiritual.

We promise nothing as expansive as a complete listing. For those left out, we apologize, and instead offer the most Christmas of blessings: “God bless you, everyone!” courtesy of Tiny Tim. And a happy HOLIDAYS to you.

The Kennedy Center and Strathmore

The Kennedy Center is practically a Christmas Mecca. Not only is the Nutcracker Ballet coming to town Nov. 24 and 26-28, but a version of Handel’s “Messiah.” The National Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Rinaldo Alessandrini, will perform Handel’s classic with soloists Klara Ek, Alisa Kolosva, Michele Angelin, Joan Martin Royo, and the University of Maryland Concert Choir on December 16. In addition, on December 23 the Concert Hall will host the free “Messiah” Sing-Along, a Kennedy Center tradition featuring guest conductor Barry Hemphill leading the KC Opera House Orchestra, a 200-voice choir, and audience members all performing Handel’s masterpiece.

Check out National Public Radio’s “A Jazz Piano Christmas”, on December 11 at the Terrace Theater, the NSO Pops “Happy Holidays” with Marvin Hamlisch and special guests, on December 9 at the Concert Hall, and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band performing a Creole Christmas, at the Terrace Theater on December 17.

What’s more, you can always come to the Millennium Stage where everything is free daily. Samples include “An Irish Christmas” December 14, a Merry Tuba Christmas December 8, the DC Youth Orchestra December 12, Holiday Vaudeville December 26, and the All-Star Christmas Day Jazz Jam.

At Strathmore in Bethesda, there’s “O Come Let Us Adore Him” with the Mormon Orchestra and Choir of Washington, DC November 27, a major concert event. On December 1, the King’s Singers present their holiday event “Joy to the World.” The group will perform traditional and popular Christmas carols and songs and readings in a genuine seasonal performance.

On December 2 comes the 2010 Kenny G Holiday show, a popular pop-flavored performance. On December 7, the National Philharmonic and DC Concert Ministries will present “It’s a Wonderful Christmas”, with Michael W. Smith, a bestselling singer/songwriter of contemporary Christian music.

Not to be missed is the December 10 concert “Bowfire: Holiday Heart Strings.” “Bowfire” is an increasingly popular group specializing in string instrumentals and led by Lenny Solomon. Prepare to be happily strung out by a virtuoso group.

On December 11 and 12, there’s the National Philharmonic performing “Handel’s Messiah”, under the direction of founder and creator Piotr Gajewski.

Musicals this Season

In the 1940s, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein changed the American musical landscape altogether by injecting a dose of theatrical seriousness into a string of drama-infused musicals, beginning with “Oklahoma!”

You won’t find such a hit streak as enjoyed by this partnership: “Oklahoma!”, “Carousel”, “South Pacific”, and “The King and I.” Washingtonians can see what all the fuss was about with two dead-perfect revivals.

“Oklahoma!” re-imagined and recreated for our times by Arena Stage Artistic Director Molly Smith, was the perfect launching pad for the new and stunning Mead Center for American Theater. Smartly cast, hugely entertaining, and fresh as a land-rush morning, this production is even rumored to be a possible candidate for a Broadway bid. The production repeats the rush of excitement and satisfaction generated by the original. See it if you can. It runs at the Fichandler through December 26.

Meanwhile, the Kennedy Center’s Opera House has the road company of the Lincoln Center’s award-winning revival of “South Pacific,” which held the longest-running title for a long time. Great songs like “Some Enchanted Evening” ripple through the World War II Pacific settings, where mismatched lovers try to find their way to each other’s hearts.

Speaking of a different kind of musical, “Candide” is landing at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in a new co-production with the Goodman Theater in Chicago. Music by Leonard Bernstein and additional lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, based on the novel by 18th century French philosopher Voltaire.

“Candide” is about an aristocratic, cockeyed optimist, who is disabused of some of his naiveté by bouts of life experience. Based on past productions, the musical is a creation that manages to be challenging, sumptuous, engaging, cerebral, and witty. “Candide” starts November 26.

The Christmas offering at the Olney Theater Center in Olney, Maryland is something for the whole family. You can’t get more optimistic than “Annie”, a huge hit musical when it first surfaced on Broadway in the 1970s and perfect feel-good stuff for the season. Directed by Mark Waldrop, “Annie” runs now through January 7.

Nuts & Scrooges

When it comes to holiday performance offerings, there are two things you can count on: Nutcrackers and Scrooges.

There is no escaping “The Nutcracker,” Tchaikovsky’s omnipresent vision of a kind of Victorian Christmas with a sinister figure bearing gifts and a dream landscape where toy soldiers are deployed to battle the king of the rats. On top of which, “The Nutcracker” contains some of the most beautiful music in the world.

Here in Washington, there are no doubt dozens of “Nutcrackers” in the area. Closer to home, there’s the yearly presentation by the splendid Washington Ballet and Artistic Director Septime Webre’s version, which features George Washington as the heroic nutcracker and George III as the rat king. It’s also a thickly-populated production, using more than 300 dancers over the course of its four-week run at the Warner Theater.

There will be special guests taking part in the production on December 10: the Washington Nationals’ Racing Presidents. This “Nutcracker” will run at the Warner Theater from December 2 to the 26, as well as THEARC Theater on November 27 and 28.

Meanwhile, the world-renowned Joffrey Ballet returns to the Kennedy Center’s Opera House for its version of “The Nutcracker,” designed by company founder Robert Joffrey, November 24 through the 28.

On a smaller scale, but trailing just as much magic, is the annual “Nutcracker” put on by the Puppet Company at Glenn Echo Park, November 26-December 31. The show has been an enduringly popular production from the Puppet Company founded in 1983, using hand puppets, rod puppets, marionettes, and shadow puppets to stage full productions of popular and landmark tales for children. The company is the work of Allan Stevens, Christopher and Mayfield Piper, and Eric Brooks.

Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” which Dickens performed in music halls and theaters throughout England and America, is said to have been the spark that became Christmas as we know it today. The story works like a well-oiled machine and is on the holiday calendar of hundreds of American theater companies.

The long-standing yearly production at the Ford’s Theater is always one of the best offerings, especially now that Ed Gero, one of Washington’s very best actors, has taken up the part of Scrooge again for this year’s run, November 20-January 2.

At Olney on December 16, actor Paul Morella takes up Scrooge in a one-man show, using only the words of Dickens’ novel to tell and make the audience feel the story.

In a less reverent version, but one that promises to be great fun, there’s “A Broadway Christmas Carol,” November 18-December 19, at Metro Stage in Alexandria. This comedic version, mixed with parodies of Broadway show tunes, is a creation of Cathy Feiniger, directed by Larry Kaye, and featuring Peter Boyer as Scrooge.

Let’s give a shout-out to the Adventure Theater staging of “The Happy Elf” by Harry Connick Jr., a fully-produced workshop production at Montgomery College’s Robert E. Parilla Performing Arts Center in Rockville, through November 28.

Foldger Consort Teams Up With the Tallis Scholars for a Renaissance Christmas at Georgetown University

Robert Eisenstein is a musical scholar and teacher of considerable renown, so you listen when he tells you that music composed in the 18th and 19th centuries is modern. “I don’t like the term ‘classical music’,” Eisenstein says. “It’s not entirely accurate, and it’s limiting, too.”

Eisenstein is a founding member of the Folger Consort, considered to be a model national chamber music ensemble with a worldwide reputation. When he talks about classical music as a fairly recent development, you have to take it in the context of what kind of music the Consort performs. “We play what’s called early music,” he said. “That means it ranges from music composed from around the 12th century through the 18th Century.”

It’s music like that which will be played by the Folger Consort and guest singers, The Tallis Scholars, in “A Renaissance Christmas” at Georgetown University’s Gaston Hall, December 10-12. “When we’re talking Renaissance here, we don’t mean Italian Renaissance,” Eisenstein said. “We’re talking essentially English Renaissance and English compositions.”

The Consort, which does about four concerts a year from various periods and on various themes, is usually in the company of guest artists, and in The Tallis Scholars they have what critics call “rock stars of early music.” They have performed in China, the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, and celebrated their 25th anniversary at London’s National Gallery.

Said Eisenstein, “The music…is on the surface exquisitely beautiful but also conveys the meaning of the season with great depth.”

Expect a moving performance.

Other Holiday Musical Highlights

THE EMBASSY SERIES will host a concert called “Songs from Call Me Madam”, referencing the legendary Irving Berlin musical based on the life of another legend, the late and great Washington hostess Pearl Mesta (dubbed the “Hostess with the Mostest“). The concert will be held at the Embassy of Luxembourg on December 4. Performers include Klea Blackhurst, a singer and actress best known for her award-winning tribute show to Ethel Merman, singer Angela Marchese, singer David Blalock, performer and actor Lawrence Redmond, who dazzled audiences in “Jerry Springer: The Opera” at the Studio Theater, and pianist George Peachey

THE NATIONAL CATHEDRAL will be the site of a presentation of “Handel’s Messiah” December 3 and 4, with Michael McCarthy conducting the National Cathedral’s men and youth choirs, backed by a Baroque orchestra.

On December 11-12, it’s “The Joy of Christmas” at the Cathedral, a generous concert of Christmas music that has become a Washington favorite. Performers include the Heritage Signature Chorale. There will be a special family matinee at noon on the 12.
The Children’s Christmas Pageant will be held at the cathedral December 19 at 2 p.m.

THE UNITED STATES ARMY BAND, PERSHING’S OWN, will celebrate the holidays with its annual “A Holiday Festival” at the Daughters of the American Revolution Hall, December 10-12.

THE WASHINGTON REVELS’ annual celebration of the Christmas solstice will be held, once again, at Liner Auditorium at George Washington University, December 4-5 and December 10-12.

THE CHORAL ARTS SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON will perform its “Christmas Music – A Treasured Holiday Tradition” concert at the Kennedy Center’s Concert Hall December 13, 21, and 24 and its family Christmas Concert at the Terrace Theater December 18.

A CELTIC CHRISTMAS, an annual Georgetown and Washington Christmas treasure will be performed at the historic Dumbarton Methodist Church, as part of the Dumbarton Concerts series, with the Barnes & Hampton Celtic Consort. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Celtic Christmas concert, which will run December 4, 5, 11, and 12.
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“Oklahoma,” “Candide” Clean up at 27th Annual Helen Hayes Awards
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Almost every year, someone complains about the Helen Hayes Award’s complicated and layered judging system, and someone expresses shock that such-and-such actor won, or that such-and-such show should not have won. This year, at the 27th annual Helen Hayes Awards, the most prestigious award ceremony for DC theater, there was additional grousing about the many ties, most of them occurring in the musical categories in which “Oklahoma” (Arena Stage) and “Candide” (Shakespeare Theater Company) were competing.

If you ask me, this sort of thing is beside the point. For this writer, the awards ceremonies have always been about celebrating the unique spirit of the Washington area theater community. It’s about the recording and building of a theater history and legacy. Things change and grow over a period of a little over a quarter of a century, but they also remain the same.

Being called outstanding in any category is a validation of the work as a whole—the time and effort, the imagination spent. It solidifies your proper presence and worth among your peers, without once negating the fact that the production and creation of a play is a truly collaborative effort.

What makes the Helen Hayes Awards unique is its celebration of this city’s theater community. It has blossomed into a kind of tribe and built a national reputation that is no longer a secret. For my money, we are right up there with Chicago, New York and San Francisco.

There’s always something boisterous about these proceedings. Each theater seems to have brought its entire employee roster to the show, resulting in gleeful and Glee-like atmospherics that you probably won’t hear at the Oscars or the Tonys. Each year, they show up—the new, young actors, dressing up theatrically, wanting to razzle and dazzle. It’s an infectious spirit the newcomers bring, jazzed about being part of a really cool thing. Its part rock and roll, part “we happy few, we band of brothers.”

“Oklahoma” and “Candide” cleaned up, coming twice to a tie, for the awards for lead actor and resident musical. Indeed, it is almost too tough to choose between the two shows in a season of outstanding musicals that included “Sunset Boulevard,” “Sophisticated Ladies” and “The Light in the Piazza,” to name just a few.

Mary Zimmerman took the gold for outstanding director of a resident musical for “Candide,” so when “Candide” and “Oklahoma” tied for resident musical, it gave director Molly Smith her share of the credit. And its credit she deserves. Imagine if “Oklahoma,” opening a new $100 million theater center, had been a flop.

Geoff Packard, who starred in the title role of “Candide,” and Nicholas Rodriguez for “Oklahoma,” tied for the top actor awards. Packard, the highlight of the new musical “Liberty Smith” at Ford’s Theater, remained true to his character. Referencing his love interest in the musical, he accepted his award saying, “I want to thank my very own Cunegonde, my fiancée Chelsea Crombach.” Packard told us they will be marrying in August.

Some other winning highlights: Adventure Theater’s artistic director Michael Bobbitt accepted the award for outstanding production in the Theater for Young Audiences category for “If You Give a Pig a Pancake.”

There is almost a tradition at the Helen Hayes awards that companies and individual artists have to wait their turn—unless of course you’re Signature Theater and Synetic Theater, which made big splashes right from the start and never looked back. Take the case of Howard Shalwitz, the founder and longtime artistic director of the still-cutting-edge Woolly Mammoth Theater.

Shalwitz just won the outstanding director award for a resident play for “Clybourne Park,” the Pulitzer Prize winning play by Bruce Norris (returning this summer). This was Shalwitz’s first win, long since overdue. He founded the Woolly in 1980, and along with directing a slew of outstanding productions throughout the decades, helped change the face of Washington theater. In another example, Joy Zinoman, who retired in 2009 as Studio Theater’s artistic director after 35 years (and who also co-founded the theater, which helped revitalized the 14th St. corridor), did exceptional work for years before eventually winning for “Indian Ink” in 2000.

History, patrons, inspirations are honored at these affairs. It is, after all, named after Helen Hayes, America’s granddame of theater, who performed here often. Every year, they tell stories about Hayes. They celebrated this year’s introduction of a commemorative Helen Hayes postage stamp by singing “That’s Why the Lady Is a Stamp.”

But this year was also a melancholy occasion. Hayes’ son, actor James MacArthur, who for years was a guiding force and a presence at these awards, passed away this year.

Helen Hayes Awards night is a crowded affair. Not only are the nominees and others who make up the Washington theater community in attendance, but all of them bring the memories of past performances, plays and moments. They bring the promise of future such times as yet unimagined. We remember those not here and their achievements. They are the much beloved and vividly remembered ghosts in attendance. [gallery ids="99661,105651,105644,105648" nav="thumbs"]

Twisting Corridors of a Deranged Suburbia, in Woolly Mammoth’s “House of Gold”
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-“House of Gold” has closed its doors, shutters, and weird basement entrance down at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre, but I will say this: it lingers.

The new play by Gregory S. Moss—which got a world premiere production at Woolly—is not a terrific play. It surely is not a classic, well-made play, and it doesn’t even make any kind of narrative sense. But it pushes your buttons, and they’re the buttons you don’t usually wear out in public.

Director Sarah Benson and a production design that seemed to have been made by a nervous student on some unidentifiable drugs—and that’s a compliment—plus a cast with some gifted actors, put the show together as if they were all throwing a big bag of goo on the wall to see what sticks. A lot of it did, or I wouldn’t be thinking about it still.

“House of Gold” is ostensibly about the infamous, shameful and still unsolved—and therefore still haunting—Jonbenet Ramsey murder case, in which a six-year Colorado beauty queen contestant was found strangled in the basement of her home. The case—incomprehensibly sad, icky, sensational—touched all kinds of nerves in the country, and created a tsunami of celebrity publicity that washed over the whole country and left everybody feeling a little dirty.

Suspicions fell on the parents under a cloud because they had entered their little blonde girl in the wheezy world of children’s beauty contests, in which little girls are dressed up like grown up Barbie dolls, with a full arsenal of lipstick, teased hair and makeup. The mother first called it a kidnapping complete with a ransom note, a grand jury investigation was launched, and the parents Patsy and John Bennett Ramsey, were eventually cleared. Nearly ten years later, Patsy died of cancer. Months after that, a school teacher named John Mark Karr confessed to the murder, but DNA evidence nixed his claim.

Through it all, the paparazzi, the media, the scandal bees, show biz shows and Billy Bush wannabes had a carnivorous carnival feast. The case had all the hot buttons, the underbelly-of-America nightmares and daymares you could want: the queasy child beauty contests, the constant rumors, gossip and television appearance by cops, the parents, investigators and, for all I remember, seers and Sesame Street fans, psychics, psychologists, celebrity mag “reporters,” and thousands of people pretending to be insiders inside of the looking glass.

“House of Gold” touches on all of that, sometimes like a mosquito, sometimes like a fully engaged bloodsucker, sometimes in ways not imagined. Not only is the case front and center, but so is the picture of a middle class enthralled by cop and CSI shows with all the bones, guts and blood.

It’s hinky, it’s kinky, and it’s downright disturbing. The best thing in “House of Gold” was the performance by Kaaron Briscoe, a smallish, youthful-looking African American actress as “the girl,” aka Jonbenet, decked out in a distressing blonde Goldilocks wig, but also with a keen awareness of the disastrous vibes emanating from her own impending tragedy. I wouldn’t have said it upon first look, but the casting and performances sticks with you like a sad song at a piano bar.

There are scenes that ought to all but make you throw up, no more so then when a detective pulls out the child’s innards at an autopsy. There’s a lot of shock-schlock here. There’s the bullying, hopeless, overweight, wannabe friend Jasper, tormented at the hands of the Apollonian Boys, the worst the suburbs offer up. There’s the parents going at each other, not like the Cleavers, but with verbal cleavers. There is one Joseph M. Lonely, who entices Jonbenet into the basement by way of his van.

We never quite see the room—we see her peering out sometimes—as it is designed with glimpsing angles, like the set from “The Cabinet of Caligari,” the German expressionist silent movie. The rest is video, which is as it should be.

I think “House of Gold” is probably one of those plays that won’t endure as literature; you have to have seen it to disbelieve it. But the play itself threw some light, some hint of the event’s enduring power to fascinate, and hints at the stuff we’ve been fed ever since.

This is cutting-edge theater all right. The kind of cuts made with a knife dripping drool and blood and the remains of compassion.

“Return to Haifa” at Theater J
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When is a theater company more than a theater company? When does a play become something more than a play?

The answer to the first question is Theater J. Under Artistic Director Ari Roth and working out of the Jewish Community Center on 16th Street, Theater J has become something much more than a theater company, presenting plays that are both universal and specific to the Jewish community.

Roth—in cooperation with many other artists and patrons—has taken this specific mission and enlarged it by using the theater to reach out and become involved in the great Middle Eastern issues of conflict, specifically the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which resonates as a critical and unresolved problem.

Roth has done this in a number of ways, including the creation of the Peace Café with Iraqi-born restaurateur and arts patron Andy Shalala. The Peace Café is a gathering occasion for Jews, Arabs, Palestinians and others to meet and discuss ongoing Middle Eastern issues peacefully.

The answer to the second question is a play called “Return to Haifa,” adapted by Israeli playwright Boaz Gaon from the novella by Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani. The show is now being performed by the renowned visiting Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv at the Aaron & Cecile Goldman Theater and Morris Cafritz Center for the Arts at the JCC.

More generally, “Return to Haifa” is the the weightiest matter and main attraction in Theater J’s Fourth Annual Voices from a Changing Middle East Festival, which includes a series of nine one-night events, readings and performances from and about the Middle East (running through February 17). “Return to Haifa,” a remarkable, brave, emotionally stirring play, runs through January 30.

All of these combined efforts on the part of Roth and his theatrical conspirators are to take part in peaceful happenings that try to famliarize the “others” by bringing them together through art, culture and lively discussion.

In “Haifa” and in the festival there is an arena where this sort of thing happens—and not necessarily painlessly. The modern conflict between Palestinians and Israelis has its roots in ancient history, in the debate about the ownership of land, culture and history.

All of those issues come into play in “Return to Haifa.” It is based on a work by a Palestinian writer named Ghassan Kanafani, who once wrote a moving fictional story about a Holocaust survivor in the wake of the 1967 Six-Day War. The war ended in a remarkable Israeli military victory bearing strategic but poisoned fruit: the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, the Sinai and the Golan Heights. The result turned Kanafani into something of a militant and spokesperson for the PLO. He was killed with his young niece in 1972, allegedly by the Mossad.

Those bits of history, which you can find in the program for “Haifa” alone, ought to give audiences an idea of just how startling the presence of this play is at a Jewish Community Center.

Performed by a splendid Israeli theater company, there is dialogue spoken in Hebrew and Arabic with subtitles. It touches nerves like a live wire. It is discomforting, painful and difficult. It has the potential for healing and opening hearts, but the process is pain-inducing, depending on where you sit.

The play is acted at an emotional level that manages to overcome the difficulty of following the languages and translations. The acting is direct, subtle and all-consuming, creating an atmosphere that resembles emotively the power and function of music in an opera.

“Haifa” is about memory, and the ownership of memories and place. It concerns a Palestinian couple named Sa’id and Saffiyeh, who are coming to Haifa from Ramallah to revisit the home they abandoned in the wake of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, which displaced thousands of Palestinians. They also left behind an infant they had named Khaldun. Miriam, who was granted the house by the Jewish authorities with her husband Ephraim, is now in residence, along with a son named Dov, who is in the Israeli army.

Dov is the son left behind by the Palestinian couple, raised as a Jew. The father has passed away, but Miriam is here to confront Sa’id and Saffiyeh.

This might sound like classic melodrama, and ways it is: lost birth rights, lost children, lost homes, confrontations with the past. Nevertheless, it comes with the power of an earthquake to raise timeless issues still causing bloodshed today. A similar thing occurred in Germany when “Holocaust,” an American-made mini-series starring Meryl Streep, was broadcast. The series was melodramatic, and therefore had the power not only to resurrect the ghosts of the past, but to make Germans confront the human issues, the cost, and the suffering by way of in an individual story, not just impossible statistics.

“Haifa” is a lot less simple than pure melodrama because it deals with the morality of justice and the inconsistent nature of memory. At the time of the 1948 war, for instance, with space scarce, and only incoming Jews from Europe with a child could own a house. The baby left behind gave Miriam ownership of the house. Miriam had also lost a child in the Holocaust.

And there is the eternal conflict, with so many unresolved grievances on both sides that it beggars description. Yet “Haifa” attempts to do just that; it describes what is lost, what seems irreconcilable, what is hopeful and what is not. When Dov, going to sleep, insists there will be no more wars, he is wrong and naïve, but he embraces the right impulse.

Every conflict—from the original 1948 War, to through the Suez War, the 1967 War, the Yom Kippur War, the PLO Wars, the Lebanese Wars, the Intifadah—provides another cache of grief and grievances for future generations.

“Haifa” looks inside that cache and finds humanity, and that’s thanks to the actors. It’s not always easy to follow the back and forth; concentrate on the subtitles and you lose some of the emotional force of the acting, and vice versa. You can lose strings and strands of what is at stake by missing the meaning.

But the cast, notably Rozina Kambos and Raida Adon (as Miriam and Saffiyeh, respectively) override such consideration. They sweep you away by letting you feel the emotions as well as their details. That is a remarkable achievement of theater.

Readings for the “Voices from a Changing Middle East: Portraits of Home” include:
“The Promise”, by Ben Brown, January 31
“To Pay the Price”, by Peter-Adrian Cohen, February 5
“I’m Speaking to You Chinese” by Savyon Liebrecht, February 7
“Wresting Jerusalem:” by Aaron Davidman, February 12
“Hour of Feeling” and “Urge for Going”, by Mona Mansour, February 14
“The Admission” by Motti Lerner, February 27
The 10th Anniversary of the Peace Café will be celebrated with a one-time production and reprise of “Via Dolorosa” by David Hare, which launched the discussion program ten years ago.

“Candide” at the Harman Center
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Washington’s theater season ended in an embarrassment of riches, especially for anyone who loves full-bodied productions of musicals.

We had not one but two productions of classic Rodgers and Hammerstein fare—Molly Smith’s wondrous staging of “Oklahoma”, which managed to honor the original in spirit with a freshness that made it a perfect launch for Arena’s impressive new, $100 million plus digs at the Mead Center for Theater Arts, and the touring company of “South Pacific” still present at the Kennedy Center, a rousing production both entertaining and emotionally strong.

If that wasn’t enough there was Andrew Lloyd Weber’s dark musical of “Sunset Boulevard” at Signature Theater and a warmly received and popular staging of “Annie” at Olney Theater.

In the middle of this bag of musical goodies, the Goodman Theater-Shakespeare Theater Company co-production of Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide” stood out because it seemed almost to be a brand new show, and a kind of climax to the burst of musical theater, an extra goodie that went well beyond the standard of what we might expect out of musical theater.

“Candide” has its own pedigree, it’s mythology and history in Broadway lore, although not necessarily of the splendid kind. It had all kinds of big names attached to it, the most important of which was the music, composed by Leonard Bernstein. There was Voltaire, the author of the slim, cautionary 18th-century Enlightenment novel about a naïf whose life becomes one long illustration of Murphy’s Law after another. It had all kinds of additional literary heavyweights attached to it—Lillian Hellman, the playwright noted for “The Little Foxes” and acid wit chief among them, but also poet Richard Wilbur and a not-so-well-known lyricist named Stephen Sondheim, who would join up with Bernstein on “West Side Story”. “Candide” opened on Broadway in 1956 to little in-the-seats action, and lasted only for two months.

But “Candide” had legs—first as a best-selling cast album, then repeated revivals that kept the show in the public eye and mind of another generation of directors and talents. Now we have a new “Candide”, and this one clearly is the work of one chef—that is besides the glorious music and vision of Bernstein—and that would be director Mary Zimmerman, who knows a little something about epic theater.

Because “Candide” in spite being based on a slight—page-wise—volume, is an epic, it’s a great, rueful, adventure, a tale of journey’s embarked upon in the search of such verities as true love, and “the best of all possible worlds” in a world that , to any reasonable eyes and hearts, is no fit place for such notions.

Candide is a young man of dubious lineage who lives in a privileged world, is in love Cunegonde, the daughter of the lord of the manor somewhere in France. To these two, it seems they were born to be each other’s true love. This naiveté is aided and abetted by their tutor, who teaches them that they live in the best of all possible worlds, as they all sing happily.

Instead, because of his love for the spritely, slightly dizzy Cunegonde, Candide is kicked penniless out of the castle, drafted by an invading army, helped by a kindly Protestant type, and is re-united with Cunegonde whom he believed to be dead, and worse, raped. She’s gone up or sideways in the world, being the mistress of two men including a high-ranking cleric in the local inquisition. He ends up killing both men almost by accident, and off they go into the even crueler world, accompanied by the re-found tutor, and an older woman wise to the world, a kind of funny, lusty Mother Courage type. Their journeys take them to South America, where Candide manages to find El Dorado, gain and lose a fortune; lose Cunegonde again, before ending up once again in Europe, where he finds his true love older, defeated, and a slave to the Turks, along with his tutor and her brother. Freeing them takes the last of the gold he found in El Dorado, and so they end up becoming urban farmers, much, much sadder, and wiser.

Zimmerman tells this story—which tracks across a number of years and two continents—with a vast, shining set, puppets, and miniatures, tools which she used to great, magical effect in her production o f “The Argonauts” here. The style always steals up to the border of being awkwardly silly, but it never falls into the obvious trap. Instead, the story, based more firmly in Voltaire’s novel than in Hellman’s contemporary politics, moves along like a grand tale, a memory of a story told around a campfire, it’s told with great, almost cinematic zest.

The music is Bernstein’s elevated Broadway fare, with a tinge of his operatic work, sweeping, difficult to sing at times and always to the point and engaging. The music has a big wing-span that embraces the naivety of “The Best of All Possible Worlds”, to the slap-in-the-face irony of “A Fine Day for an Auto-Da-Fe”, to the Brechtian “I am Easily Assimilated” to the heartbreaking “Make Our Gardens Grow”, which is a kind of majestic solace of a song.

It’s a wonderful show to look at (love those red lambs) and it’s driven by two beguiling young performers, Geoff Packard as the breathless hero Candide and Lauren Molina as Cunegonde. Both of them are high-energy, youthful players and gifted singers, especially Molina, who tackles the rousing and rangy “Glitter and Be Gay”, a song which has a life of its own as a kind of testing game for sopranos. Molina passes with flying colors.

For musicals at least, it’s been the best of all possible worlds in Washington.
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Septime Webre’s “Nutcracker”
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-In a November 14 New York Times Arts and Leisure article by Alastair Macaulay, entitled “The Sugarplum Diet,” it was discovered that “The Nutcracker” had become an American holiday institution. Tchaikovsky’s snowflaked Russian masterpiece from the 19th century has become a staple and an icon of Christmas, USA, right alongside that most British of creations, “A Christmas Carol.” Here in Washington, you won’t find a more American “Nutcracker” than the one created by Septime Webre, the Artistic Director of the Washington Ballet, which has become a DC institution when it was first introduced in 2004.

“No question about it,” Webre said in a phone interview. “‘The Nutcracker’ has become an American Christmas tradition. It’s not being done in Europe as a Christmas thing. It’s a very American occasion—very much a part of the holidays. And yes, it’s a very traditionally popular program on our schedule, and I think every ballet and dance company in the country. It’s a big part of the business of ballet.”

Webre has taken Tchaikovsky’s classic ballet to his bosom and made it an American ballet. “I believe in community,” he said. “Washington is our community, and we try to reflect that in the production.”

“The Nutcracker” is a children’s fantasy that adults, parents, couples, and grandparents can and usually do enjoy. It revives their memories of childhood. “We’ve turned it into something of an American story,” Webre said. “The nutcracker hero has become George Washington, and the rat king has become George III so that the battle against the mice is kind of a Revolutionary War battle, with the mice being English soldiers.

“We’ve set the production at a Georgetown mansion very much like Dumbarton Oaks, and the second half of the ballet is set around the time of the cherry blossom blooming. And yes, there will be little cherry blossoms as well as sugar plum fairies. Some of the iconography of the original has been changed to become more American. There are Indians, for instance, and the kids receive toys like wooden horses and Indian headgear. It’s something we can all recognize.”

Plus, there will be some 300 children, all of them from the Washington Ballet’s education program, who will at one point or another be a part of the show. “That’s where the community comes in,” Webre said. “Certainly we have our interests, but this company, this institution that Mary Day created, we now reach out into all our schools through a special education program, and during the course of ‘The Nutcracker’ we can see the results of that.”

Webre, a gifted choreographer whose parents came to the United States from Cuba, remembers doing several roles in a performance at a beach in the Bahamas when he was a child. “We all remember ‘The Nutcracker,’” he said. “To me, it’s always about the children, about our own childhoods. Many children learn about etiquette of the theater going to see ‘The Nutcracker’. For many of us, it will be the first theater performance we’ve ever attended.”

Webre pointed out that the production will once again have “guest” performers present, which have included Ward 2 City Councilman Jack Evans, soprano Denyce Graves, and others.

“Having been artistic director now since 1999, one of the things I love to see, and you can do this with ‘The Nutcracker,’ is watching kids mature from being mice, or sugarplum fairies to taking on lead roles such as Clara. You get a parental pride out of that, and the other thing is, of course, that this is a coming of age story; it’s about Clara and her experiences and how she grows up.

“I believe the audience to some degree has to recognize themselves in theater,” Webre said. “You can see yourself in ‘The Nutcracker.’ Children do. We remember ourselves. There’s the great and familiar music, of course. There’s the beautiful costumes and sets. But it’s a story. You see a family celebrating the holiday—that warm atmosphere of giving and playing.”

That’s as American as apple pie.

This year’s production of “The Nutcracker,” at the Warner Theatre, runs December 2-26. Call 202-397-7382 for tickets.

“Black Watch” Brings War to the Stage with Grit, Style, and Wonder
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War plays are tough, and not just because war is hell.

With perhaps the exception of Shakespeare’s “Henry V,” there aren’t many plays that take place IN a war, in its atmosphere of tension and danger, portraying soldiers as they live and die. Certainly, there are few if any that deal with the immediacy of ongoing conflicts like Iraq or Afghanistan.

But the absolutely amazing new play, “Black Watch,” from the National Theatre of Scotland, breaks new ground in ways that will open your eyes like a splash of cold water. At turns tough and tender, gritty and realistic in its language, and powerfully theatrical in its style, “Black Watch” focuses on a unit of the legendary Scottish regiment while it served in the darker days of Iraq combat. The soldiers are distinctly Scottish in sound, uniform and history, but they open up a bright light that could easily fit the experience of American soldiers in Iraq or in Afghanistan.

War and combat aren’t easily accommodated on stage—they’re too big, too loud, too bloody, too incomprehensible, and too dangerous to deal with realistically. But the talented director John Tiffany has gotten around that problem by fusing movement, music and sounds. Mortars and explosions go off against the profane language of soldiers and the vague precision of military talk, coming up with a kind of theater that you’re not likely to have seen before.

Because the actors playing the soldiers are so good, natural and physical, the experience of the play—and the experience of the soldiers—gets a grip on your heart. It sweeps you away at times, bringing out both tender and angry feelings, and sharpening whatever ideas we might have about what has happened to American troops who fought in Iraq, as well as those still battling in the weathered, bleak outposts in Afghanistan.

Writer Gregory Burke interviewed Scottish veterans who served in the Iraq war and got some pungent, moving stories. Depending on where you’re sitting, you get a visceral feel for barracks life—the dirty talk, the razzing, the tension, the bitching about daily boredom broken up by patrols in armored cars, the occasional explosions, the frustrating combat and forays that result in casualties and no discernible triumphs.

This is not an anti-war play, nor is it a beat-your-chest patriotic piece about the war on terror. It’s a play about the life of a particular military unit, a proud, glory-rich unit in Scotland, and what that war was like for them.

The troops, uniformly speaking in rich, spit-full Scottish accents, comprise a cohesive group, almost a classic, clichéd combat squad. You have every type of soldier: experienced, naïve, short, tall, big and thin, blondes and brunettes, quiet and blustering. They come from the same places in Scotland, their points of references are the same, and to varying degrees, they’re proud of being in this regiment with its storied history.

You get the bull and tension of barracks, tents, day rooms, the fuzzy television, the lockers posted with porn, the sergeant who tries to be a leader to his men, the grizzled commander who stomps about like a square bowling ball. The lads are never anything less than real, but the environment is stylized: a pool table morphs into an armored vehicle, from which soldiers in full combat gear emerge, like the Marx Brothers tumbling out of a state room.

When the soldiers talk about home or recall their experiences to a reporter or rag each other mercilessly, the scenes are sharp, funny, crisp and dirty. Hearing them, listening to them, seeing them move around each other, you get a sense of them as individuals, like the two young looking, almost bratty duo of Kenzie and Fraz, thin, dark-haired bundles of energy, played by Scott Fletcher and Jamie Quinn, respectively. There’s Jack Lowden as the thoughtful, sometimes brooding Cammy, and Paul Higgins who plays both the sarge and a news reporter.

But Tiffany has added something, making the experience poignant and as new as a hungry baby. He has created movement, stylized and militaristic in the same breath; they are marches and forms of dance that hype the war with emotion, driven by powerful music. It can be a small thing—the boys passing a single letter from home around, for instance, and each man makes something of his own in how he touches, holds or reads the letter, before passing it on. There is a parade-style march that reaches a rhythmic tempo, which energizes the audience, and might make you want to enlist—at least on stage. Tiffany creates combat and battle this way too, and the effect is heart-breaking as they continue to march, some of them staggering, falling, picked up and caught like trapeze artists, always moving on and together.

The end effect is that when they suffer loss and losses, we, the audience, do too. That’s something new.

“Black Watch” is on a national tour here. It’s at the Shakespeare Theater Company’s Harman Hall through Sunday. Drop what you’re doing. Go see it while you can. Visit ShakespeareTheatre.org for more information.

A Not-So-Holiday Theater Roundup
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Just because it’s the Christmas season, not everyone wants to be entertained by all things Christmas.

That’s true for theatergoers, who have more than enough Scrooges, Nutcrackers, Santa Clauses and elves than they probably need.

But take heart and beware of what you wish for. There’s plenty of theater fare that isn’t in the spirit of the holiday season, and which sheds a light on how we live today or how we used to live. Here’s a sampling.

The Studio Theater has a play by Traci Letts, the Pulitzer Prize-winning super-charged new writer who gave us the generational and family drama “August: Osage County.” The scale is smaller this time but no less human and acerbically funny. In the wonderfully titled “Superior Donuts,” Letts focuses on the fortunes and friendship between a grouchy, cantankerous white shop owner and a very ambitious black teenager in a changing Chicago neighborhood. The new friends bond over literature, of all things, and American economic values. And there are secrets. Aren’t there always.

This show has already been extended through January 2.

Also at the Studio, in its Stage 4 space, is “Mojo,” by Jez Butterworth. It’s all about London criminals, underground rock and roll and, of course, music and revenge in 1958. It runs through December 26.

“A Wrinkle in Time” is at once a fantasy of wish fulfillment and a quest that goes as far as it can possibly go (another planet). This whimsical theatrical adaptation by John Glare comes to life at the Round House Theater.

And if you’re really not in the mood for Joyous Noel at all, you can welcome back Cherry Red Productions, once Washington’s most outrageous theater group which returns after a number of years with “Wife Swappers,” by Justin Tanner of “Coyote Woman” fame. Despite its subject and some (all right, plenty of) nudity, this comic play about the doings of conservative types trying to get some sexual variety, is surprisingly operatic (think soap) and even sympathetic to its self-justifying characters who talk dirty, but see themselves as otherwise clean.

It’s nice (or dangerous) to have Cherry Red, Ian Allen, Chris Griffin and the gang back. After all, they gave us such plays as “Dingleberries” and “Zombie Attack,” to name a few. In the very intimate space of the DC Arts Center on 18th Street in Adams Morgan, through December 18.

There’s more than “Oklahoma” at Arena Stage and the Mead Center for American Theater. Now through January 8, in the smaller Kogod Cradle Space—meant to nurture new American playwrights—there’s “Every Tongue Confesses,” in which writer Marcus Gardley mixes jukebox blues with church gospel blues and television news to tell a blazing story.

And speaking of news, opening in January at the Kreeger is “Let Me Down Easy,” which marks the return of one-woman dynamo Anna Deavere Smith. Smith wrote and will perform the play in which she lets varied voices speak out and “explores the power of the body, the price of health and the resilience of the spirit.” Beginning December 31 and running through February 13. At the Kreeger in the Mead Center.

Only a few more days left to see Synetic Theater’s dynamic, loud silent style at work in Washington, where a theater piece on the Russian classic “The Master and Margarita” is being performed through December 12 at the Lansburgh Theater.

If you like musicals, but still aren’t interested in the holidays, there’s “Candide,” the Leonard Bernstein cerebral, but very entertaining musical, directed by the magical Mary Zimmerman, based on a novel by Voltaire, with some of the words by Lillian Hellman, and some of the lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and poet Richard Wilbur. With Lauren Molina and Geoff Packard in the leads. At the Shakespeare Theatre Companyn through January 9.

If “Oklahoma” at Arena doesn’t satisfy your Rodgers and Hammerstein jones, there’s the road company of “South Pacific” at the Kennedy Center, which will run December 14 through January 16.

A well-received production of “Annie”, the most optimistic little redheaded girl in the world, with her friend Daddy Warbucks and her dog Sandy, has already been extended to January 7. At the Olney Theater in Maryland. Be prepared to have faith in “Tomorrow.”

A Theater Note

Actor James MacArthur, son of legendary American actress Helen Hayes and playwright Charles MacArthur, passed away recently at the age of 72.

Best known for his series role on the original “Hawaii Five O”, MacArthur is fondly remembered in Washington for carrying on the role played by his late mother, annually presiding over the Helen Hayes Theater Awards, named after her. [gallery ids="99577,104880,104876,104872,104868,104864" nav="thumbs"]