Performance

Gary Tischler • April 18, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeff Malet • April 15, 2013

Bowen McCauley Dance played to a packed house at the Terrace Theater at the Kennedy Center April 5 and 6 with a program that included choreographer Lucy Bowen McCauley’s version of “Le Sacre du Printemps” (The Rite of Spring) on the ballet’s 100th anniversary. The dance is a dramatic portrayal of ritualistic human sacrifice, set to the music Russian composer Igor Stravinsky.
The program also included two premieres, “Fire and Air,” based on the moment Cleopatra poisons herself and joins lover Mark Antony in the afterlife, and “Tableaux de Provence.” The fourth piece, “Before the Fall,” based on the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme, was capably performed by the Maryland Youth Ballet.

The company will reprise “Le Sacre du Printemps” in a special performance with the Alexandria Symphony at the National Gallery of Art, East Building Atrium on Fourth and Constitution Ave., NW, at 6:30 PM on May 19.

View our photos of Bowen McCauley Dance at the Kennedy Center by clicking on the photo icons below. [gallery ids="101238,145670,145663,145657,145651,145645,145637,145631,145624,145677,145683,145736,145729,145723,145716,145710,145703,145697,145691,145617,145611,145537,145749,145531,145754,145523,145760,145517,145766,145545,145551,145605,145597,145589,145583,145577,145570,145563,145557,145743" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler • April 10, 2013

The Studio Theatre production of “4000 Miles,” the play by gifted and buzzed-about playwright Amy Herzog opens suddenly, like a revelation in the middle of the night.

We see Vera, the 91-year-old, card-carrying Communist and self-described lefty Vera open the door to her Greenwich Village apartment to encounter her grandson Leo, holding his bike, almost buried in packs of all sorts. “Hi, grandma,” he says, and she holds her hand over her mouth, mumbles incoherently, then rushes into the bathroom to put in her false teeth.

The moment is startling, sudden, discomfiting, funny, revealing, and most of all, immersive. We are in the play as quickly as a fish thrown into water, and we are in for it. Director Joy Zinoman, the founder of the Studio Theatre in her first directorial stint here since retiring in 2010, keeps things moving and punchy, but also often patient in scene after scene, bringing to light the play’s situation and secrets almost organically and without an ounce of sentiment. You laugh often—because often the play is very funny—but you never come close to that instant gratification of a budding lump in the throat. Here’s the thing, though: you won’t forget Vera and Leo, not for a long time.

“4000 Miles” could have been a lot of things—a battle-of-the-not-understanding generations or a comedy built around the same thing, a painful pastoral about growing and being old, a wise and touching play about basic, truthful communication in the age of instant communication. It’s all of these, to some extent, but also something entirely different.

The situation—and it is a situation that comes to a head but not an explosion—is fairly straightforward: Leo has arrived at his aging grandma’s place in New York after bicycling across the country from Portland, Oregon, a journey marked by a tragedy that eventually reveals itself. He is of an age—and as Grant Harrison plays him—a young “hippie sort” with tousled black hair and charm and charisma which he throws around almost carelessly but also as a potent defense mechanism. He’s plunked himself and his worldly belongings on grandma’s floor and ends up staying awhile. Vera a widower, lives by herself, insistently independent in her ways, but also aware that she’s losing her powers. She is forgetful and says, “There’s this trouble with words, I can’t find them.” She’s also gruff, unsentimental, hurtfully direct, a widow who knows how to hold a grudge in reserve. She has a friend across the hall with whom she rotates “check-to-see-you-haven’t died” phone calls but never sees.

This could be cute, even cloying, but it never gets close to that. Leo may be a charmer but you can see his painful self absorption, and for lack of a better word, careless cruelty at times. Tana Hicken’s portrait of Vera is hardly sweet—it’s sweet and sour, and that mixture makes her difficult, fascinating, and most important, sometimes brutally honest. “You stink,” she says to Leo when first appears. Then, with great affection folds his clothes that she’s washed for him while he’s asleep. They shares an affinity for Karl Marx and leftist dogma—her apartment is a veritable used bookstore in full flower, and you recognize a thick biography of “MAO” on one of the shelves.

Hicken shows off Vera’s frailty as if she were not afraid to be naked. It leaves her uncertain about what’s happening. Did she lock the top lock? Did she lose her checkbook or hearing aid? She still has her intellectual smarts, her ability to observe, and give love—grudgingly at times, but you know there’s more where that came from. Vera is another full-bodied portrait of vivid older women that include Miss Helen in Athol Fugard’s “Road to Mecca” (at Studio with Zimmerman directing) and grandma in “Lost in Yonkers” at Theater J.

Herzog as a playwright shares some qualities with another current “hot” playwright (and Studio favorite) Annie Baker. Her approach to characters and story-telling and narrative is often deflective, like a game of pong: secrets will out but they often do it by way of a side trip to the alley and a back-door entrance. So we learn Leo’s secrets: he’s not close to his mother, too close to his adopted sister and on the cross-country trip his best friend Mica was killed in a horrific accident. But the secrets come out in accidental silence.

The small cast—it includes Heather Haney in an insistently honest portrayal of Leo’s girlfriend Bec and Annie Chang as Amanda, on a disastrous pickup date interrupted by guess who—is altogether excellent, made more vivid by the lived-in, book-rich set and intimate theater setting. In the end, we and Leo and Vera, are left, not with the overused commodity of hope, but with a soothing appraisal of sad laughter.
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Nico Dodd •

Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell have enough fans between them to support their own tours, but the two singers brought their pipes and picking to Strathmore Music Center last Friday, March 29. The theater was filled by the drugstore cowboys of yesteryear. After the two stars traded a few songs, they settled into their collaborative album, “Old Yellow Sun,” released this February. The Georgetowner last caught up with Harris before her performance at Wolf Trap in August.

Harris’s roots in the area lead to an inexplicable amount of remembrances. “Remember country music?” “Cassette tapes? Remember those?” “I remember the 80s…” She was all about remembering things.

Being that the performance was on Good Friday, there seemed to be an added note of somberness to the performance. One of Harris’s guitar straps had the image of the Virgin Mary on it. “Spanish Dancer” and “Back When We Were Beautiful” were excellent but heart-wrenching. More upbeat songs like “Hanging Up My Heart” and “Black Caffeine” did not manage to level the mood. I guess that’s what they call the blues.

The contrast between the two singers was interesting: Harris being more timid, Crowell more seasoned towards country music. Crowell aptly described Harris as having the “soul of a poet, the voice of an angel and the heart of a cowgirl.”

For this reviewer, the highlight of their performance was Jedd Hughes, their lead guitarist. I admit it: I’m a sucker for guitar. Hughes knocked my socks off as he played on telecasters most of the night and switched to an acoustic for “Spanish Dancer.” Richard Thompson joined the group for one number.

Richard Thompson Electric Trio

Opening the evening was the Richard Thompson Electric Trio, which brought down the house as an opening act. Richard Thompson, one of the original members of the British rock group Fairport Convention, is touring for his newest album, “Electric,” which was released this February.

As with most virtuosic guitarists who are also vocalists, Thompson’s vocals and lyrics fill the space just fine, but the musicianship was the backbone of the group’s performance. The dense sound it produced as a trio is a tribute to the musicians’ ability and uncynical approach to it. Nearly every song received a standing ovation from the audience.

The trio showcased its abilities on Fender instruments. Thompson is a fan of Fender Stratocasters, and bassist Taras Prodaniuk played on a Precision Bass and used Fender amplifiers. Along with Strathmore’s exceptional micing, it made for a crispy sound which wouldn’t sound out of place in a Guitar Center.

Thompson’s Britishness came across with his subdued, cheeky humor and hints of New Wave. An audience commenting on Thompson’s Converse sneakers got a reply of, “You realize we’re in the middle of a concert?” “Good Things Happen To Bad People,”, a track from the “Electric” album, has rootsy, three-part harmonies. Hints of folk ballads are everywhere. Prodaniuk pulling out a fretless bass underlined a proggy, druidic feeling that turned Strathmore into Stonehenge.

The tour will be making its next stop today in Atlanta at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre.

Gary Tischler •

Joy Zinoman, looking very cool in various shades of black and gray, was sitting on a couch on the second floor of the Studio Theater recently near a window that overlooked a bustling flow of traffic on 14th Street, a bank, numerous shops that hadn’t been there back in the day, all the signs of neighborhood transformation that she and the Studio Theatre had helped shape.

She didn’t dwell on it. She just took it in. Zinoman, who founded of the Studio Theatre in 1978 and was its artistic director until she announced her retirement in 2010, was back. She never really left, of course, since she still teaches here in the Studio Acting Conservatory, but now she is back to direct.

In an interview with the Metro Weekly after her retirement, she was asked if she would direct in the future at the Studio. “If the play is right, and they offer me enough money,” she said.

It looks as if the play is right. “4000 Miles”, by rising young playwright Amy Herzog, who was the subject of a feature profile in Time Magazine’s Culture section recently, is the thing, for sure. “David [artistic director David Muse] asked me if I wanted to direct this play, so I read it, and I was just drawn to it. It’s perfect for me and the Studio. It’s powerful, intimate, and completely unsentimental. It’s a generational play because the main characters are a young man who visits, then stays with his 91-year-old grandmother in Greenwich Village. Amy drew the character from her own grandmother. Then there’s Tana, getting a chance to work with Tana Hicken.”

Hicken, of course, is one of Washington theater’s most consummate, unfailingly excellent actresses, a company member at Arena Stage when it sported arguably the country’s outstanding repertoire company, as well as gracing Washington stages in major and memorable parts for decades.

Zinoman and Hicken last worked together when Zinoman and Studio mounted Athol Fugard’s moving “The Road to Mecca” with Holly Twyford. In the intimate spaces of the Mead Theatre, that production measured up to and perhaps surpassed the original production seen at the Eisenhower Theater many years ago with Fugard himself and Kathy Bates.

“Tana is a joy to work with, it’s like coming home,” Zinoman said. Indeed, talking with Zinoman and watching her as Muse came by to say hello, as well as a costume designer and members of the staff here, there was an air of homecoming. Zinoman had been rehearsing for days already, so it was not like a “look who’s here” kind of thing. Rather, there was a feeling of professional and personal pride that a founder might have, that the place was solid and on sure footing.

“It’s not like you stop in theater. You don’t just retreat,” Zinoman said. “When I announced my retirement, it was with the idea of not so much leaving, but retiring when you’re still doing your best. And I didn’t want to hang around—there’s a great temptation there, you know, to do that, and I didn’t want to do that. So we traveled, a lot. We lived in Italy for a while, and that was getting away from it. You couldn’t accidentally stop by.” She has, of course, a rich family life—she travels with her husband Murray, a retired state department official, they have three grown children with lives of their own, and careers of their own, and she is a very proud grandmother of four grandchildren.

“You cannot imagine how wonderful that is, being a grandmother, I love it,” she said. Mind you, she’s not being gushy here, although she’s entitled, she’s just stating a fact not so matter-of-factly.

“Herzog is phenomenal, it’s a great play for me to be doing,” she said. “I also love teaching here, there’s a continuity to all that.”
Plus, she did “Sounding Beckett”, an unusual production of three short plays by Samuel Beckett with musical composition and performance by the Cygnus Ensemble at the Classic Stage Company in New York. “It was a terrific experience, it was a challenge, and we had Ted, Philip and Holly.” That would be Ted van Griethuysen, Philip Goodwin and Holly Twyford and Zinoman’s informality speaks to her reputation as an actor’s director—and perhaps also a designer’s and theater people’s director.

“I think in terms of the actors, that’s true but I’ve worked with so many really gifted actors—and that’s why working with Tana is so important to me in this production,” she said. This is about the time that a conversation with Zinoman turns into a memory play, a parade of actors, designers, partners in time like Russell Metheny, playwrights and plays because, barring kinescope and videos, that’s what we have of plays, their remembered affects and effects. When “The Slab Boy Trilogy”, a set of three plays rich with British working class characters which she brought to Studio a number of years ago came up in our talk, she smiled. “Oh, Slab Boys, they were wonderful plays,” she said, sounding then like someone remembering the brilliant and fully-formed antics of a favored child.

Actors have a special place here—you can practically recite the parade from memory—Jon Tindle, van Griethuysen, Goodwin, Twyford, Nancy Robinette, Sarah Marshall, June Hansen, Floyd King, just to name a few, and, of course, Tana Hicken.

Hicken sounds surprised at being considered a star in the firmament of Washington actors, although she understands it. “My husband Donald and I have lived in Baltimore for years, and that’s what we consider home.” He heads the Baltimore School for the Arts and is a prominent director and directed his wife in the one-person play “The Belle of Amherst” about Emily Dickinson.
Yet, it’s also true that Washingtonians have been blessed with an accumulated avalance of fine performances from Hicken, working at Arena as part of the repertoire company until it was disbanded, at the Shakespeare Theatre Company, at Theater J, at Everyman Theatre, and at Studio.

“It’s always rewarding to be working with Joy,” she said. “And what I love about this play, is that, well, it’s really very funny. I don’t mean to say it’s a comedy, it has serious themes, beautiful writing, but it is also very funny, in spite of its seriousness. I just did a prevue and luckily the audience seems to get it, they laugh. But I’m surrounded by young actors, which makes the play resonate strongly.”

If your mind contained vivid memories of performances in the Washington theater, you’d be surprised to find how often Hicken pops up—in Shakespeare, in Chekhov, as the flinty grandmother (again with Twyford in “Lost in Yonkers”, in a searing, lost performance in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and one recalls for some reason, as the person who sums up and ties together all the improbable, frayed loose threads at the end of The Shakespeare Theatre Company’s production of “The Comedy of Errors”. Very funny indeed.

“4000 Miles” is currently playing at the Studio’s Mead Theatre.

Gary Tischler • March 18, 2013

“Nordic Cool,”, the vast, exciting, diverse, and indeed cool international festival of theater, dance, music, visual arts, literature, design, cuisine and film with participation of more than 750 artists celebrating the arts of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Greenland, the Faroe Islands and the Aland Islands will finish its dazzling run on Sunday night, March 17.

The festival was held at the Kennedy Center which was itself transformed by the festival from Feb. 19 onward. The visuals and art which arrived with the festival literally changed the look of the Kennedy Center day and night, what with a blue northern lights show at night, to begin with.

But I’m going to miss the ship of shirts.

I will miss Trondur Pattursson’s painted glass birds which gave of the romance, the sadness, the danger, the freedom of flight all over the center. The birds—seagulls, the widespread, sometimes orange, blue and red wingspreads of what might have the albatrosses and teals that accompanied sailors to the sea—have flown away again.

I will miss the elks roaming the grass outside the Kennedy Center—not real elk, but wooden sculptures called “Elk Towers”, assayed by Juha Pykalainen from the Aland Island, the elk fitting in nicely with the triumphant outdoor sculpture of “Don Quixote.” The elk will be gone along with the sound of rushing water.

That would be the paneling that accompanies a photographic exhibition centered on waterfalls and the disappearance and shrinking of water resources in the world by the internationally famous artist-environmental activist Ruri from Iceland. “The world’s water supply is shrinking at an alarming rate,” she told us. “It’s not just in my country but everywhere.” She then took us to a series of panels which, when you pulled them out, allowed you to hear the roar of waterfalls and rivers and stream, each with a distinctly different sound, which will be more different still, say, five years from now, and not as loud, until decades from now, the sound might be that of a rivulet.

All over the Kennedy Center, upstairs and downstairs, exhibitions hallmarked the state of contemporary Nordic design—especially the furniture, including a chair with a bears head prominently featured, but also a chair one would take great care to sit on. This is the land of Ikea, after all, as well as Ibsen and Bergman.

Upstairs, a large section was roped off for the use of children, who create anything they wanted with an abundance of Legos. Houses of the future—environmentally cool and practical, it appeared, if sometimes strange to navigate—were on display, near where a wintry fashion show was.

In the Hall of Nations, an installation called “Are We Still Afloat” was immediately dubbed the ship of shirts in that it was created entirely by the use of thousands of donated shirts from the locals—including Kennedy Center staffers—by Kaarina Kaikkonen, a Finnish artist who’s known for her use of found material in her sculptures and installations. The sculpture—which filled the Hall of Nations and created a stir as visitors stopped and searched the decks, so to speak, or had their pictures taken. “The ship is broken,” Kaikkonen told us. “Parts of it are lost.” She then asked me where I might put my shirts, front and outside, or inside. It was an interesting question—there’s no really satisfying answer.

We happened upon Trondur Patursson, the Faroe Islands painter and sculptor who with a large and quite kinetic beard looked like a relative of the ancient mariner—and he turned out to be a veteran seafarer. “They remind me of the seas and my travels and my homeland,” Patursson said of his stained glass birds, many of which seemed, in certain lights and times, to be flying, looking perhaps for him.

Go to the Kennedy Center this weekend—last chance to hear the flapping of colored birds, the rush of water, the billowing of sails made of shirts, elks trudging on grass in a blue light. Last chance to see “Nordic Cool,” which is way cool.

Gary Tischler • March 14, 2013

Around ten years ago, singer Helen Reddy says she just got tired of performing and needed to move on to other things.

“I was just plain tired,” she said. “Of touring and everything that went with it. I’d done it most of my life from a kid on.” And then, recently, something happened. Reddy realized she missed performing.

“I sang at a birthday thing with my sister,” she said. “And I realized that I missed singing. I missed the audience, and so I thought I wanted to come back.”

Not without some trepidation. At first, Reddy did gigs in California, which had been the base and home for the Australian-born musical superstar of the 1970s and 1980s, the period when she had some of her biggest hits.

Now, she’s coming to Washington, to the Barns at Wolf Trap specifically for two concerts, Thursday and Friday, March 7 and 8, at 8 p.m.

“You know what I really like?” she asked. “It’s that contact with the audience, that back and forth, the emotional tug. It’s not just about nostalgia, or a greatest hits’ kind-of-thing. I have some of my old band mates, and I’ll be doing some of my hits, sure, but also standards, and songs of mine that perhaps aren’t so familiar, but that I love.” “No, no backup singers,” she said, laughing.

In a way, her presence in the states and in Washington has a little bit of serendipity to it—the city is and the country is in the midst of celebrating March as National Women’s History Month. Where would Women’s History Month be without a mention, the very presence of a kind of women’s history anthem, still defiant, still particular and pertinent?

Where would any mention of women’s history be without “I Am Woman”? Reddy’s hard-fought signature and anthem song, released in May 1972, had an up and down journey on the charts before finally making its way to the top of the Billboard charts in December of that year.

Not only did she first record and sing the song, but Reddy is its listed co-writer with songwriter Ray Burton. What happened after all that is something else again: the song resonated with women and the women’s liberation movement to the point that it became a musical flag for the women’s rights and remains so. There are millions of women—and no doubt quite a few men—who know the song by heart and will sing it without being asked. History keeps right on moving and the song moves with it. There are still firsts for women. Witness that the song was heard in the background after Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win an Academy Award for Best Director.

Reddy’s presence in the nation’s capital, when all kinds of historical and commemorative exhibitions, symposiums and marches on women’s rights are being held, seems appropriate. You can bet that the song will be part of her show at the Barns, although not quite in the form you’re used to hearing it. “Yes, I will perform it,” she said. “Of course. It’s a strange thing, that song. I’m so proud of it, but it’s also one of those things, an achievement that’s kind of hard to top. I mean I’m a part of history now. So, that song has a huge importance to me and to others.”

“Woman” is not the only hit song Reddy ever wrote, recorded and sang—she’s had a big and long career, being part of an Australian show biz family, and setting out on a singing career in the United States in the 1960s. Her breakthrough hit was “I Don’t Know How To Love Him,” the Mary Magdalene ballad from “Jesus Christ Superstar.” It was followed by “I am Woman” and a host of other hits, including “Angie Baby,” “Delta Dawn” (the Alex Harvey-penned song also recorded by a teenaged Tanya Tucker and others) and “That’s No Way to Treat a Lady” among many others. Reddy reportedly has sold more than 25 million records worldwide—which is to say that in the 1970s and 1980s, she was huge.

That kind of red-hot heat of fame rarely lasts, but Reddy was to the stage born and toured often and also made forays into the legitimate theater stage, where she appeared as “Shirley Valentine” and in “Anything Goes” and “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” in addition to appearances in movies and on television.

“I think there’s nothing like that connection between audience and singer,” she said during our interview. “I really love it. I look out there and see members of several generations, people my ages, old fans, to be sure, but also new ones, and women with their teenaged daughters. That’s very emotionally satisfying to me.”

This month, for sure, it will be good to see and hear Helen Reddy at the Barns at Wolf Trap. She is, after all, Helen Reddy, a star who has lived a life from there and back again. The song and its lyrics resonate for women everywhere, but surely for her, too: “Oh yes I am wise/But it’s wisdom born of pain/Yes I’ve paid the price/but look how much I gained/If I have to/I can face anything/I am strong/I am invincible/I am woman.”

Gary Tischler •

What was it with Puccini and his women?

We know all about Mimi in “La Boheme” and “Madame Butterfly.” It’s a wonder he didn’t create Violetta, given his affinity for ladies dependent on men, falling in love with the wrong man, or ending up in tragic circumstances.

Manon Lescaut, a very young courtesan-type, seems to have attracted the genius successor to Verdi from the get-go, so much so that he ignored the fact that two operas had already been assayed about Manon, the heroine of a popular 18th-century novel by Abbe Prevost. Giacomo Puccini is said to have called Manon “a heroine I believe in. She can love more than one man. So, there can be more than one opera.”

On the surface of it, you have to wonder: Manon likes glitz, glitter and stuff, the high life, she is young, not exactly a femme fatale or even a practiced courtesan, but what she has is more than enough for Geronte, a wealthy, powerful, and need we say it, much older aristocrat who apparently sees her as a shiny elixir and rejuvenator of the flesh, a damsel he can dress up and own for his pleasure. Manon, who’s pushed on Geronte by her brother Lescaut for his own advancement—has a go at real love with the dashing, sensitive and impassioned young Chevalier des Grieux before she’s spirited away into the wealthy arms and high life of the world of Geronte.

That’s the setup, and you ask what’s to like about Manon. The way she’s embodied by soprano Patricia Racette in the Washington National Opera’s spring-season opener, there’s a lot to like, and even love about “Manon Lescaut,” both the character and the opera. In terms of both propensity of plot and music, this is early Puccini (1893), but it has all the earmarks and tells of his later grand works of genius, which followed “Lescaut—“La Boheme,” “Tosca” and “Madame Butterfly.”

We’ve already seen Racette, a singer with a rich, rangy voice, and in her case just as important, a gift, even a will to embody theatrically the parts she performs, in “Tosca,” but Manon, which she portrays for the first time in her career, is an entirely different challenge. It’s a traditional kind of role in the sense that it leads to wonderful duets (with the very able Bulgarian tenor Kamen Chanev soaring with her in heroic fashion) and arias. Chanev, in “Donna, non vidi mai,” sings with such believable passion that you understand as clear as heartbreak why he’s so smitten, and Racette when she joins him and by herself, gives him something to be smitten about, in spite of Manon’s appetites for baubles and dresses.

Director John Pascoe has staged most of the production in traditional fashion, with sometimes dazzling period costumes and wigs that have of their own. His principal design conceit is giant leaves in which audiences can read pages from the novel—an indication that, if you haven’t read the book, that Abbe Prevost writes in a style perfect for the creation of operas—super-charged poetically and emotionally. It’s a conceit that grounds the production when it needs to be, except on one occasion when we see entirely too much of the book, and not enough of the characters.

The production and the opera centers squarely on Manon and des Grieux, since the brother, ably sung and portrayed by Giorgio Caoduro, isn’t so much an imposing player as an onlooker. Jake Gardner as Geronte is a threatening, shadowing physical presence but doesn’t impress vocally.

In Racette and Chanev, “Manon Lescaut” has a convincing, passionate pair of lovers, ill-matched initially, but hearts entwined desperately, and sadly in the end, when Manon and des Grieux, through a series of revenge-minded events engineered by Geronte, end up in French-held Louisiana, cast out and fled into what appears to be a great desert. From their first meeting, recognition of love to Manon’s tragic end in a strange land, these two rise vocally and emotionally to making you care about the two lovers.

Gary Tischler •

I’m guessing—I could be wrong here—that there’s no video game called “Druids and Romans” or “Gauls and Romans.” Ancient Britain of Gaul under the occupation of Ancient Rome is a tough task for movie makers as well as stage directors who have to cut through the thicket that is Shakespeare’s “Cymbeline.”

It’s tough for opera, too, but that’s exactly where we find ourselves in Vincenzo Bellini’s bell canto mountain of an opera, “Norma,” which has as its main characters the powerful druid high priestess Norma, her (secret) lover and father of her two children, the Roman general Pollione, the young novice priestess Adalgisa, with whom has fallen in love, and the druid Oroveso, who is also Norma’s father.

As a druid—the priest class of the ancient Celts—Norma is a high priestess of the land’s power and its magic. She interprets the will of the gods: Should the druids war against the Romans or sit back and wait? This is a paramount question during this opera, but the biggest question of all is what happens when Norma finds out that she’s essentially being dumped for a younger rival. Things do not end well, as is wont to happen in ancient Britain and in opera.

Perhaps none of that matters too much when you having the rising star soprano Angela Meade, performing and singing the role of Norma and knocking it out of the park, aided and abetted almost on an equal plane by mezzo soprano Dolora Zajick as her rival.

Meade has already done parts of the role and a concert version of “Norma,” the big rock candy mountain of bell canto singing for any star soprano worthy of the name. There have been some great Normas by all accounts, including the legendary Maria Callas. I’m guessing there’s another one that can be added to that list and her initials are A.M.

Meade is known for her technical virtuosity, something I can’t argue with. According to some critics, she isn’t yet the actress that she might be. For all the high notes—the riverboat gambling singing that is the musical equivalent of skipping a pebble on water and making it go forever—what Meade accomplishes in this role is to act with her singing. She loads her voice up not only with impossible amounts of breath and breadth and tone, but also with the most important part of the music—the singing—which is invested with the heart of Norma. This happens whether Meade is singing alone in the horrific scene where she almost “Medeas” her children (“Teneri, Teneri Figli”) or when she’s singing with Zajick in which forgiveness and sisterhood reign in a deliriously delicious duet (“Mira o Norma”, but it could be BFF).

Norma is torn—war against the Romans, revenge against Pollione—and she still has to tell her people that she is the mother of two, fathered by the Roman general.

This sort of thing is difficult to put together, because great music (yes!) or not, great singing (yes!), the action and the characters don’t exist in a vacuum. While the ladies make you care about the ladies, you have to be comfortable in the surroundings in which so much often preposterous things goes on. Director Ann Bogart and designer Neil Patel have opted for a bare-bones, bone-clean primitive look which seems somehow perpetually cold—an angled slab of stage, a wall propped up by what look like long wooden spears, an omni-present moon which the druids worship. It has just enough strangeness to make you realize just how strange that world must have been. The Romans, fixed in their legionnaire uniforms seem out of place in this environment—which seems right—while the locals range from robes to whatever the middle-class druids might wear, while vestal virgin types in shimmering white make patterns on the stage. In this group, Dmitry Belosselskiy as Oroveso resounds with authority. On the other hand, Rafael Davila has a little too much reckless petulance in his voice, but then he is playing a cad.

But as for Meade, certainly, and Zajick as well, I can only echo the gentleman behind me who voiced his pleasure at Meade’s solo and their duets with a resounding “Bravissima!”

The Washington National Opera’s “Norma” runs through March 24 at the Kennedy Center.

Gary Tischler • March 13, 2013

James Galway is a world traveler and a world citizen. He’s been all over and played and taught and talked about the flute in concert halls, schools, universities, and venues world-wide, but if you’re talking to him on the phone and if the name doesn’t give you a hint, you will recognize the lilt in the phone, that musical, growly accent, right away.

Galway is Irish, Belfast born, and he’s a talker, a knight, often referred to in just about anything you might find on him in the great wide internet world of communication and information as “the living legend of the flute.”

“Well, yeah, there’s that,” he says on the phone speaking from Dallas where he’s spending three days as part of his Legacy Tour, a musical tour and series of concerts, (often accompanied by his wife Lady Jeanne Galway, who is also a flautist of note), which mixes his vast repertoire of classical music with Celtic and Irish music, educational talk and master classes. He’s a knight, but he doesn’t stand or talk like he is. He doesn’t seem the kind of mind who needs a lot of patting on the back, or formalities.

To be sure, the tour is about his own legacy as a flautist, which is to say, he and Jean Claude Rampal before him, have done an enormous amount to spread the gospel of the flute, which is often relegated to the kind of instrument commonplace in Irish households and played on porches by just about anybody.

“It’s how I learned and came in contact with the flute, and fell in love with it, true,” he says, “but that’s not the whole story.”
It’s entirely appropriate and filled with a little touch of serendipity that Sir Galway is doing one of his Legacy Tour concerts (with his wife Lady Jeanne Galway and pianist Michael McHale) at the Kennedy Center’s Concert Hall presented by the Washington Performing Arts Society in the shank of the afternoon at 4 p.m. Right after the Washington St. Patrick’s Day parade.

“Yes, that’s kind of nice isn’t it,” he said. “We’ve included a section that’s going to be Celtic in nature with traditional Irish folk songs and music.”

Appropriate to the day are the folk tunes, but appropriate to the Sir Galway’s legacy will be the major part of the concert, which includes works by Doppler (“Rigoletto Fantasie for Two Flutes” with Lady Jane Galway); Mozart (Flute Quartet in D Major”), Bizet/Borne (“Carmen Fantasy” arranged by Galway), and Debussy’s famous and popular “Clair de Lune”

In addition, he’ll be conducting a master class on the flute with local flute students at the Sixth and I Historic Synagogue in downtown Washington on Monday, March 18.

“The master classes, to me, the talking, the teaching is almost as important as performing,” Galway said. “It’s how you open people up to the music, the instrument itself. “

“My dad, my family, they all played,” he said. “It’s true, the flute seems such a common place instruments that everyone will pick one up and play one, if they could.”

But Galway got lucky and was one of those people who carried his ability with and love for the instrument to studies in London and Paris before embarking on a professional career with Sadlers Wells & Royal Covent Garden Operas, the BBC, Royal Philharmonic and the London Symphony Orchestra, and became solo flautist with the Berlin Philharmonic which was conducted by Herbert Von Karajan.

When he broke out as a soloist, it was a breakthrough in a big way and the end result has been a legend indeed, a career that has been 30 million albums sold, and a recording list that seems to stretch beyond the horizon. “When you realize what you can do with the flute—beside just play it—in terms of all the kinds of music, when I knew that, I was on my way, that’s what I was going to do,” he said.

It’s a real passion. You can hear it in his voice. If Rampal popularized the music of the flute into areas not usually associated with it, Galway moves it further with his education effort with new compositions which he has done or commissioned other composers to do. So, there’s Bach and Mozart and Handel on the flute and jazz, and new music, bending genders and cross pollination, something that’s happening quite a bit in the contemporary classical music scene, where he is more than a knight, but a king.
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