Performance

Gary Tischler • March 10, 2016

On Thursday afternoon at the Kennedy Center, you could see them milling around in the Hall of Nations, taking selfies, young Chinese men and women, with Chinese media types in tow.  It was a small moment of a hint that this weekend—Feb. 5 to 8—will be all about Chinese New Year and the arts in China at the nation’s performing arts center on the Potomac.

The young people were part of a musical group that would be performing during the course of the Kennedy Center’s  Celebration of the Chinese New Year. The four-day celebration marks the first of what will be an annual festival at the center. For the first time, the Kennedy Center will be celebrating the Chinese Lunar New Year with a big, four-day festival filled with live performances of all sorts, most of them free including a family day on Saturday.

While the New Year’s initiative is a first-time celebration, it’s not the first time that the Kennedy Center has celebrated Chinese culture.  For Alicia Adams, the vice president for International Programming and Dance at the Kennedy Center, the festival will bring back good memories from the center’s first major celebration of Chinese culture and performing arts in 2005, a festival that featured four weeks of performances and exhibitions from some 900 artists.

Adams remembers making 13 trips to China in preparation for and in the coordination of the unprecedented 2005 festival. 

“We discovered the tremendous variety inherent in the performing arts there—not only its own traditions and styles in dance and music and visual arts but in its embrace of Western arts, especially classical and pop music,” she said. “Some of the top classical musicians in the world are Chinese.  A case can be made that it’s the Chinese who are helping to keep interest in classical music alive on all levels—performing, education and audience appreciation.”

Adams has curated and organized numerous acclaimed international festivals at the Kennedy Center, including “Iberian Suite, global arts remix” (2015), “Nordic Cool” (2013), “maximumINDIA” (2011) and “Arabesque: Arts of the Arab World” (2009). She is spearheading this year’s “Ireland 100: Celebrating a Century of Irish Arts and Culture.”

The Chinese New Year’s Celebration won’t be quite so elaborate, but it offers a significant number of examples of Chinese contemporary performance art practitioners.

Adams cited the  center’s history of presenting Chinese artists on Washington stages. “The Lunar New Year celebration is a little like our holiday seasons. The festival gives us a chance to present some of China’s most established artists and its younger performers.”

“It’s amazing to me how the Chinese have taken to Western traditions in addition to their own,” she said. A principal example of an internationally renowned group is the Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra, under conductor Muhai Tang. “Shenzhen is known as ‘piano city,’ ” Adams said. “It’s known as an incubator of young musical talent and is known to have 8.5 pianos for every 100 families. It also hosts the China International Piano Concerto Competition every three years.”

The Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra will perform in a ticketed event at the Concert Hall which is the actual Chinese New Year Day, Feb. 8 (This year, it’s the year of the monkey). Guests soloists include pianist Haochen Zhang and violinist Dan Zhu. The program will include Chinese folk music the Kunqu Opera, and classical masterpieces by Puccini and Waxman, composers who are favorites in China.

Most the performances and events throughout the festival are free. They include free performances at the Millennium Stage, including a pop music show that highlights popular Chinese acts on Feb. 5. Also on tap is a recital by the world-class all-girls choir from Shenzhen on Feb. 7 as well as a multi-disciplinary production by an arts troupe from Henan, showcasing opera artists, acrobats and traditional Chinese music.

Saturday, Feb. 6, is a family day, celebrating the Year of the Monkey, with Monkey King mask demonstrations, Chinese paper cutting and paper lamp lessons and other activities in the Kennedy Center atrium.

Gary Tischler •

Theater Alliance  brings the #BlackLivesMatter slogan vividly alive at the Anacostia Playhouse with productions of the American theater classic, “for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf,” by Ntozake Shange. It, in turn, inspired Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s “Word Becomes Flesh”.

The two productions will be performed in repertory Feb. 25 to March 26.

There are some resonant names involved in the two productions, not excluding Shange herself, who began life as Paulette Williams but changed her name to the Zulu words “Ntozake” — she who comes with her own things — and “Shange” — she who walks like a lion. 

Shange re-invented not only herself in terms of the resounding name change but also a new form — “colored girls” exists in the form of what she called a “choreopoem,” which integrates poetry, movement, music and dance.  Call it and her what you want, the play exists as a classic, inspiring several generations of African American and white audiences, and continues to do so. It’s a favorite in the American theater repertoire.

The production is directed by veteran Deidra Starnes, who directed “The Word” at the recent Hip Hop Festival and Mary Stone Hanley’s “Street Life” for the D.C. Theatre Festival. She also acted in a production of “colored girls” directed by Ntozake Shange herself.

The play will contain the same cast size as the original, which is seven, but will be using a version of the text that Shange updated in 2010, with references to HIV and Desert Storm. Sharisse Taylor, who starred in “Dontrell, Who Kissed the Sea” for Theater Alliance, heads a cast that includes Christa Bennett, Kashayna Johnson, Naomi LaVette, Allina Collins Maldonado, Lolita Marie and Natalie Graves Tucker.

“Colored girls …” will be in repertoire with “Word Becomes Flesh” by Marc Bamuthi Joseph. “Word” is directed by Psalmayene 24, an apt pairing with Joseph, both being hip hop pioneers.

Producing director Colin Hovde said, “These pieces are such a natural pairing. Bamuthi drew inspiration from Ntozake when first creating ‘Word Becomes Flesh,’ and the poetic form and ensemble-driven storytelling really complement one another.”

Theater Alliance first presented “Word Becomes Flesh” in 2013, in a touring production modified from an original solo production to a cast of five performers.  The production is choreographed by Tony Thomas, and includes Louis E. Davis and Justin Weaks, as well as Chris Lane, Clayton Pelham, Jr., and Gary L. Perkins III.  Nick tha 1da created original music for the piece.

“They’re such powerful pieces on their own, and we believe will be more powerful together,” Hovde said. “Though the shows present the experience of one gender, the other gender is always present and alluded to. Our hope is that presenting these pieces together will help to open up a conversation in the community about traditional gendered behavior and provide opportunities for audiences to really listen to the stories being told and find unexpected connections to the stories, and to one another.”

Gary Tischler •

People love opera — madly, passionately, unreasonably, joyfully.

People hate opera — disdainfully, passionately, unreasonably, deeply.

Count me among the swains.

I don’t say this lightly. My connections to opera have been tangential, furtive, through film and snippets of famous music (both Mozart and Muzak) and by the fact that my son’s mother was a trained mezzo-soprano.

These things come slowly, at least to me. I do not have much of a baptismal or sudden conversionary nature. Things accumulate.

I remember seeing a film version of “La traviata” in which an impassioned Placido Domingo exchanges words and greetings in song with the sad, doomed courtesan Violetta. The music and the singing were soaring, aiming for heaven by way of heartbreak (or so it felt ), until I saw the titles, which merely noted, “Good morning, darling” or “Fine day, isn’t it?” After all that engulfing vocalizing, this was a deflating discovery.

Only later did I realize that in opera every word counts because it is sung. Every word is an attempt to express a precise feeling. The words may not be literature. Librettos are the Achilles’ heel of opera. You read them at peril of boredom. Yet, the music somehow invests the words with powerful, ultimate emotion. Libretto and music are usually unequal partners. When they are equal, well, bravissimo to you, Wolfang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte. And you, too, Herr Richard Wagner.

Which brings us to the Ring … or the Ring Cycle … or “The Ring of the Nibelung” … or, as they say, casually, among the Germanic tribes: “Der Ring des Nibelungen.”

Basically, it’s THE RING: Wagner’s cycle of four operas (he thought of them as a new genre) — “The Rhinegold,” “The Valkyrie,” “Siegfried” and “Twilight of the Gods” — inspired by the Norse sagas and the late 12th-century German epic poem about a medieval royal family, “The Song of the Nibelungs.” After 25 years of writing and composing, give or take, the cycle premiered at the first Bayreuth Festival in August of 1876.

And now it’s here, at Washington National Opera, from April 30 to May 22: Three cycles, 12 performances altogether, each running around four hours.

Those 16 hours (times three) are packed with gods. There are gods and demi-gods and semi-gods, to the point where you could exclaim, “Who Let the Gods Out?” They have names like Fafner, Fasolt, Woglinde, Wellgunde, Flosshilde, Fricka and the God of Gods, Wotan. There’s Alberich, the evil dwarf and maker of the ring. There’s Erda the earth goddess and the indomitable Brunnhilde and Siegmund and Sieglinde (who unfortunately fall in love) and Schwertleite and Mime and the Wanderer and the Forest Bird and the Norns. And there’s Siegfried, hero of heroes.

Mostly, there is Wagner, the most difficult of men and human beings, the most difficult of composers and the most difficult of geniuses. He trails behind him a century and more of reputation, some of it marred by misguided admirers who made aspects of his sometimes bizarre philosophy into Teutonic ideals.

He wrote other operas, of course: “The Flying Dutchman,” “Tannhauser,” “Loehengrin” and the spectacular “Tristan and Isolde,” staged here in 2013. But the cycle achieves something that Wagner talked about a lot (and largely achieved): total theater, the art of fusing music, drama, literature and the visual arts into one.

WNO Artistic Director Francesca Zambello brings her gift for meeting challenges and flair for the fresh to this project. She’s done it before, at San Francisco Opera, and has conductor Philippe Auguin beside her, along with Michael Yeargan’s sets, Catherine Zuber’s costumes and Denni Sayers’s choreography.

The cast includes such stars as Elizabeth Bishop as Fricka, Alan Held as Wotan, Soloman Howard as Fafner, David Cangelosi as Mime, Lindsay Ammann as Erda, Christopher Ventris as Siegmund, Nina Stemme and Catherine Foster as Brünnhilde and Daniel Brenna as Siegfried.

In the WNO brochure, the descriptions are very Wagnerian, like a cinematic trailer:

• “A mythical ring stolen. A powerful curse unleashed.” (“The Rhinegold”)

• “A forbidden love ignited. A defiant warrior avenged.” (“The Valkyrie”)

• “A fearless hero empowered. A dangerous quest begun.” (“Siegfried”)

• “A doomed love transcended. A fractured world restored.” (“Twilight of the Gods”).

Wagner was a gifted librettist; his books for his operas read like free-flowing utterances, like a very Germanic Whitman, all exclamation, pure heart, pain, glory and the deepest sort of love. His music and his words speak to all the feelings and stories we never think of ourselves as living, but imagine nevertheless. He aspires to the total, and if he’s not Wotan, he probably comes close.

As Zambello urges us: “On to Valhalla!”

Washington is a pretty fine opera area. It lets you reach out to opera in all of its manifestations, some of them as familiar as your password, some of them hardly ever seen live (and therefore also precious). There are companies big, small and medium-size, from Washington National Opera and Wolf Trap to the Washington Savoyards — our Gilbert and Sullivan specialists — and Opera Camerata.

Washington Concert Opera, founded in 1986, is dedicated, especially under Artistic Director and Conductor Antony Walker, to presenting star-level international singers with a professional orchestra and chorus in concert versions of rarely performed works by renowned composers.

This spring’s offering is from Gaetano Donizetti, one of the leading composers of bel canto (Italian for beautiful singing) operas, including “Lucia di Lammermoor,” famous for its mad scene. Washington Concert Opera will be presenting the French version of Donizetti’s “La favorite” on March 4 at Lisner Auditorium. Written at the height of his career, it is one of the few operas, we’re told, that features a mezzo-soprano in the title role.

The title role in question is that of Léonor, the King of Castille’s mistress, who falls in love with a monk, who falls in love with her. All this — including forbidden love, of which there is a copious amount in 19th-century operas — is set during the Moorish invasion of Spain, so that you have painful but passionate love, war, big arias, impassioned orchestral writing and a spectacular chorus. Kate Lindsey appears as Léonor, Randall Bills as the monk Fernand, John Relyea as Father Balthazar, Rolando Sanz as Don Gaspar, Joélle Harvey as Inès and Javier Arrey as the King of Castile.

Opera Lafayette, founded in 1995 by Conductor and Artistic Director Ryan Brown, has a specialty also. It is a period-instrument ensemble focused on the French 18th-century opera repertoire and its precursors, influences and artistic legacy. Performing in major theaters in Washington, New York and abroad (including France) and recording on the Naxos label, the company is known for presenting rediscovered masterpieces and creating a recorded legacy.

This year’s productions have included the baroque opera “Catone in Utica” (which was also performed in the summer at the Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, New York) and the 19th-century opera “Une Éducation Manquée.” Coming up April 9 at Lisner will be “Opera and the French Revolution,” including scenes from “Sapho,” “Médée” and Œdipe à Colone.”
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Georgetowner • March 8, 2016

It didn’t take long for the Washington Ballet to find its new artistic director after Septime Webre, who had guided the company for 17 years, announced last month that he would be leaving in June.

They picked superstar ballerina Julie Kent, 46, a much-beloved principal dancer for American Ballet Theatre. After a nearly 30-year performing career, Kent retired last summer in a spectacular last performance in “Romeo and Juliet,” taking her final bows in an avalanche of petals, cheers and some tears.

Known for an intense grace and a magical ability to create and embody characters, Kent didn’t initially jump at the chance. “My first reaction was to think, thank you, I’m flattered for the opportunity, but no thank you,” she said in a phone interview with The Georgetowner.

She and her husband, Victor Barbee, who was also a principal dancer at ABT, were living contentedly in New York, “which we will always call home,” with their two children, William, 11, and Josephine, 6. Kent was still working with the ABT as artistic director of the company’s five-week summer intensive program for young dancers (she will continue in that role through this summer, though her official starting date in D.C. is July 1).

But several things changed her mind. “I talked with friends and confidantes. There was an aspect of returning home. I grew up in the area, in Potomac, went to school here and I began my dance life here at the Academy of the Maryland Youth Ballet in Bethesda. My mother lives here, my sister lives here, so that there is this familial aspect already here,” she said. “And there is a chance to do something important here, to help move Washington Ballet to the next level.”

In this endeavor she will be working with Barbee, who was named associate artistic director.

“We want to enlarge the company [to 40 dancers, at some point] so we can enlarge the repertoire, so that in the near future we will be able to do bigger ballets with bigger resources,” she said. “I want this to become one of the crown jewels among Washington’s cultural and performance institutions. There is no reason that can’t happen. We want to build on the high achievements of Septime Webre. We want to have lofty goals.”

Kent wants to emphasize education and training. As an organization, the Washington Ballet already links its performance season to a training component, community outreach and engagement and a satellite program in Anacostia.

The 2016-2017 season has not been announced, although that “will happen soon. It will be a very quick process, to be sure, and of course, the ‘Nutcracker’ will still be performed at the Warner Theatre.”

Change (and this seems like a major one, both for Kent and for the company) rarely goes as choreographed, but Kent has discovered that “the forward-moving process of life is a comfort as well as a challenge.”

She sees the position as an opportunity where “you can nurture, apply your own vision of dance as an art form that inspires people who encounter it, and make it appealing for the whole community. We want to continue to grow the audience and reach all parts of the Washington community, a process that is ongoing.”

Kent remembers being a 9-year-old supernumerary in a production of “Coppelia” at the Kennedy Center with Mikhail Baryshnikov, who would choose her for the company after seeing her later as a teenager.

She danced over 100 roles in her time at the ABT, almost all of the legendary, classical roles — both the white and black swans, Juliet, Giselle, all to great acclaim — and with the major companies, including the Mariinsky, as a guest artist.

“I think the most difficult thing for a dancer, any dancer, is to come to that point where it is time to stop to think about not performing. Dance is and always has been forever young, and that’s not just the physical aspect, but also the emotional aspect. And when that time comes, when you accept certain things about yourself no matter what you’re able to do, let me tell you this: it is a heartbreak. I don’t mean that in a negative sense. It’s about facing it, embracing it. It’s about love. But it is a heartbreak.

“Doing this is using everything you know, it’s a platform for ideas. It lets you use your artistic voice. And Victor and I have worked together, we are artists together and he knows how dancers achieve clarity of character.”

Even on the telephone in an interview, she seems to have a gift for that clarity of subject, choosing words and sentences carefully but emphatically. Listening, you can almost see her dance

Gary Tischler • March 7, 2016

In somewhat of a surprise announcement,  Septime Webre, the Washington Ballet’s dynamic artistic director for the past 17 years, said he will be leaving the company in June to focus on creating new works and directing.

Webre has turned the Washington Ballet into an electric and eclectic company that both forged new paths and drew large audiences at the Kennedy Center and at the Warner Theater, where his “revolutionary” “The Nutcracker” was performed for many years. This Nutcracker featured George Washington and others as characters in the ballet.

Webre, 54, said in a statement, “I have loved every minute of my years at the Washington Ballet — I feel honored and humbled to have had the opportunity of working with such amazing artists and to share their work with audiences in D.C. and throughout the world.  I am extraordinarily proud of our collective accomplishments and the spectacular growth of The Washington Ballet, and it is now time to focus my efforts on new creative endeavors. I’m looking forward to creating new ballets and to staging on other companies the many original works I have created for the Washington Ballet. I am delighted that The Washington Ballet is a committed partner in this new venture. I know I leave the Ballet in fine form, with a thrilling future ahead.”

Among many of the new works Webre created included two that impressed not only fans and aficionados of the ballet but literary types and theatergoers as well.  That would be Webre’s spectacular and moving dance evocation of F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s classic American novel, “The Great Gatsby,” and an even more unlikely but spirited dance version of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises.”

“Septime’s enormous contribution to the Washington Ballet came at an important time of Washington’s cultural growth,” said Sylvia de Leon, the ballet’s board chair. “Each of us on our board has deeply admired his boundless energy, creativity and infectious joy of the art of ballet. We will be forever grateful for his years of tireless work and dedication.”

Webre took over the Washington Ballet in 1999 from founder Mary Day, who was then running a company that had an $2.8 million budget, which Webre grew to $12 million during his tenure. One of Webre’s singular achievements was the creation of WBT@THEARC, which brought dance education and performance (including part of “The Nutcracker” schedule) to Anacostia.

A brilliant choreographer, Webre also brought a keen marketing  skill to his task at the ballet company, which grew in all of its aspects during his tenure. Enrollment of Washington Ballet students has grown from 325 to 1,400.  Webre brought in new works and filled the canon with performances of works by the country’s and world’s finest choreographers, including William Forsythe, Jiri Kylian, Hans van Manen, Mark Morris, Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp, Christopher Wheeldon  and others.

Gary Tischler • February 22, 2016

It’s tempting to define the Washington National Opera production of Kurt Weill’s stoically hopeful work “Lost in the Stars” by what it isn’t, not by what it is,  by what it doesn’t do instead of what it, in the end, so powerfully accomplishes.

Let’s begin by saying that while it may be in the season slate of the WNO, it is not strictly or even loosely speaking an opera, although it has its operatic moments. It is not “Carmen,” nor is it, God knows, connected in any way to the “The Ring Cycle,” two canonical  works of opera with a capital “O” — and part of a season that also included the not-so-easy-to-categorize “Appomattox”.

Nor is it a musical disguised as an opera, the mane of confusion that sometimes is associated with “Porgy and Bess” and “Showboat.”  If the need to categorize exists, and Lord knows these days it does just so people can check to see if they’re sitting in their comfort zone seats, then let’s call “Lost in the Stars,” a play with more music than usual.

It is also a political play fueled by a large dose of imagination and empathy as well as a heart and a conscience.

The last work by Weill, who’s usually associated  with the more rowdy, anti-capitalist works with collaborator Bertold Brecht (“Three-Penny Opera” and “Happy End”), but who in this case attached himself to a project that displayed the human tragedy of the solidified apartheid policy of South Africa as it affected both the white power holders and the afflicted blacks.

The music — some of it transferred deftly and effectively from other projects — is Weill’s, empathic, soaring, powerful and searing, a varied score of genres that speaks with different voices to the fate of its characters.  The book is by Maxwell Anderson, a playwright whose works are not much performed any more, but who was much in vogue during the 1930s and 1940s for his poetic sensibility (Someone should resurrect his “Winterset.”)

“Lost in the Stars” sneaks up on you like a persistent whisper. It has its irritating moments of familiarity and expectations denied and is sometimes stingy with its music, pursuing narrative with long stretched of spoken dialogue.

by the white — and anti-apartheid — South African author Alan Paton, “Lost in the Stars” concerns Stephen Kumalo, a black village pastor who goes to Johannesburg to find his son, the not too subtly named Absalom, who, it turns out, is on trial for the murder of a white man.  Absalom admits the killing — “I will not lie any more” — which occurred during the course of a robbery with two other men. He is convicted and sentenced to hang.  Kumalo — performed, acted, and sung with stirring power by star bass baritone Eric Owens (“The Flying Dutchman” at WNO) — tries to plead for the life of his son to the murdered man, a staunch Afrikaaner, to no avail.

Yet — amid staged crowd scenes at a rail station, in court and in the village which accentuate and dramatically and musically illustrated the separation of the races — the production builds brick by emotional brick, operatically at times, dramatically at others, and most effectively, quietly.  There are showy, show-stopper songs to be sure — none more than Owens’s rendition of the title song, which makes the plight of the characters universal.  There are the sweetly and emotionally powerful songs sung by soprano Lauren Michelle as Absalom’s bereft girlfriend Irina, like “Trouble Man” and “Stay Well,” “The Hill of Ixopo,” led by Sean Pannikar and an affecting chorus, the scene-stealing “Big Mole,” performed with high spirits by young Caleb McLaughlin.

The long narrative or exposition sections of “Lost in the Stars” can sometimes make an audience restless.  But director Tazewell Thompson — who is well remembered here for his stint at Arena Stage as well as more recent work with the WNO — steers the production with both hands on the wheel deftly toward an ending that seems to demand silence.  It may seem an ending which is more hopeful than helpless in its result: The fathers both realize the monumental losses they have suffered as fathers but also as human beings and join together as part of one community.  It’s the kind of result that in today’s inflammatory political atmosphere seems to inspire sneers and snark, but also has a historical context.

People like Paton risked much in making public art — novels, in his case — that exposed the injustices of apartheid.  As a white artist, he was not alone—he paved the  way for the universally successful plays of Athol Fugard (“The Road to Mecca,” “The Blood Knot” and “Master Harold and the Boys”) which also stood in stark opposition to apartheid).

It is easy to be a little dismissive of a work that defies genre and is not easily digested and aspires to an embrace of hopefulness as a noble failure.  I think if you go—and you should—you might find that your fellow audience members think a little more of it  than that.

“Lost in the Stars” can be seen at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater Feb. 17, 18, 19  as well as Feb. 20, which includes a matinee performance.

Gary Tischler • February 18, 2016

“It is so extraordinary out there,” actress Madeleine Potter said Saturday morning after walking her dog, an English springer spaniel, in the downtown area around the Lansburgh. The apartment building is her home-away-from-home while starring as Amanda Wingfield in the Ford’s Theatre production of Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie,” running through Feb. 21. “You can’t even see the monuments. What an amazing experience!”

Along with making our city even whiter, the blizzard of 2016 caused the cancellation of last weekend’s preview performances, and perhaps others. “We shall see,” Potter said. “Everything’s in flux.”

Potter’s appearance in “The Glass Menagerie” is her first in Washington in a long time. It’s also her first embrace of a major Tennessee Williams role in a career that has notably included four appearances in films directed by James Ivory, the partner of producer Ismail Merchant in Merchant Ivory Productions, famed for lush and literary period pieces.

“It’s a challenge to be doing this, but it’s also exciting. It’s new to me,” Potter said. “To me, Tennessee Williams is one of the giants among the world’s playwrights. He writes especially haunting and strong women characters — strong in the sense that they survive the assaults of the world. I think Amanda is one of those women.” She continued: “I gather Amanda bears some close resemblance to his [Williams’s] mother, but also to him. She is after all a single mother in a time when this was rare and unusual and took even more courage to do. What’s really fascinating to me is her … insane fortitude.”

Listening to the slightly English-accented Potter — the daughter of an American diplomat and OSS officer named Philip B.K. Potter and his wife, the former Madeleine Mulqueen Daly — talk about theater, literature, her family and her life in the theater, you get the sense of a woman with a strong affinity for WiIliams’s women.

“You have a feeling for these women — Amanda, Blanche DuBois, the actress Alexandra Del Lago in ‘Sweet Bird of Youth,’ Alma from ‘Summer and Smoke,’” she said. “This is my first, but I certainly want to do more.”

Of Potter’s four Ivory films, two were based on Henry James novels: “The Bostonians” with Vanessa Redgrave, in which she played Verena Tarrant, and “The Golden Bowl.” The others were the remarkably electric and contemporary “Slaves of New York” and, in 2005, the opulent “The White Countess.” “Ivory’s work was so detailed, so rich, and working on this last film was a beautiful experience for me, because I had a chance to work with my daughter, who played my niece.”

“You may have noticed,” she paused to note, “all the women in my family are named Madeleine going way back.” This includes her daughter, Madeleine Daly.

On stage, Potter has performed both contemporary and classical roles, especially in plays by Ibsen and Shakespeare. “You approach things this way: all classical plays should be treated as if they were brand-new and all new plays should be treated as if they were classics.”

“I did work here once at the Folger,” she recalled, “a production of ‘Hamlet’ directed by Lindsay Anderson.” Suddenly it came back to me. She was Ophelia, a part often underdone or overdone, but, in her case, very affecting. A tough Post critic of the time (1985) said her Ophelia “was mad, but poignantly so.”

“It was such a pleasure to work with Lindsay, he was a genius,” she said. Anderson, who died in 1994, directed Malcolm McDowell in the highly regarded film “if….” (part of a trilogy), wrote a well-received book on John Ford and appeared in “Chariots of Fire.” His “Hamlet” worked like a house on fire by starting the play at its end, on a stage littered with bodies.

She knows that her performance in “The Glass Menagerie” will receive attention. In the world of Tennessee Williams, there haves been many Amandas, many Maggies, many Blanches. The playwright — whose birthday is March 26 and whose death will be commemorated on Feb. 25 — is enjoying a mini-vogue this spring. In addition to “The Glass Menagerie,” there’s are upcoming productions of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” at Round House Theatre in Bethesda (March 30 to April 24) and “A Streetcar Named Desire” at Everyman Theatre in Baltimore (April 6 to June 12).

You can see some of the affinity on a personal level for Potter. The play is about a mother-daughter relationship, to be sure, but it’s also about the love between a brother and a sister. “I had three brothers in my family,” she said. “Phil, Paul and Alan. Paul was an actor and a brilliant designer, and he worked here for a time in the 1970s.” It’s plain from the tone of her voice that she and Paul were close. “He was a remarkably gifted artist and a wonderful brother and friend.” Paul Gerard Daly Potter passed away last year. He worked at New Playwrights and at the late Bart Whiteman’s Source Theatre on a gritty 14th Street in the 1970s.

“The thing about Tennessee Williams,” Potter said, “was he imbued every play, everything he did, with poetry. His writing was lyrical and poetic, and my hope is that we never lose this kind of poetic language, our poetry.”

And so, a snowy morning in a shut-down city becomes filled with talk about the Irish and their qualities, about dogs and occasions, scenes from a long ago “Hamlet,” hey, nanny, nanny, about family and friends and performances done, seen and held in the heart’s eye and memory. A fine morning of theater, you might say.
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Georgetowner •

Now in preview performances at Arena Stage, “The City of Conversation” — Anthony Giardina’s play about a powerful Georgetown hostess and her friends, allies and family members at three critical moments in American politics — will no doubt spark conversations among audience members, especially Georgetown residents.

But it’s not like Washington and its politics and politicians haven’t been hot-button subjects for any number of books, biographies, memoirs, novels, movies, television series (hello, Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and such. Writers are forever taking the pulse of Washington, its palaces of politics and the neighborhoods that thrive in its spotlight.

Only recently, an episode of “Madame Secretary,” which stars the gifted Téa Leoni in the title role of Secretary of State Elizabeth McCord, saw her professor and intelligence-agent husband battling his Georgetown neighbors over the exhaust fumes from the idling cars of her Secret Service details.

Gore Vidal’s historical novels about Washington (the city, not the Founding Father) resonate mightily, as do other less literary efforts, television shows such as “The First Family” and “Veep” and the increasingly show-buzz-like political debates in this Trumped-up age.

Movies abound: “Advice and Consent,” “The Best Man,” “Fail Safe,” “The Contender.” The stage is no stranger, either; it was a play, “First Monday in October,” after all, which gave us the first female justice of the Supreme Court, Judge Ruth Loomis, played by Jane Alexander. Also starring Henry Fonda, the show previewed at the Kennedy Center in 1977 (a few years before Sandra Day O’Connor got the nod).

Or take a look at New York recently: Bryan Cranston as LBJ and the hip-hop hit musical “Hamilton,” which portrays the man killed by the main character in Vidal’s first big historical novel, “Burr.”

Playwright Giardina remembers being inspired after reading “The Ruins of Georgetown,” a elegiac 1996 New Yorker essay by high-profile Washington player (and key advisor to the Clintons) Sidney Blumenthal. “It was about the Kennedys, and the dinner parties hosted by influential journalist Joe Alsop and his brother Stewart, or by the Grahams. It seemed like a magical time, where history was being made over table talk and in drawing rooms. And I thought, when I read it, that there had to be a play in there somewhere.”

The voluble and personable Giardina, Massachusetts-raised with an abiding interest in American politics, is one of those people who talk in sentences and paragraphs. “There was always the drama of politics, even its kind of heroic aspects — the battles between the liberal Republicans and Nelson Rockefeller against Barry Goldwater, LBJ and the Kennedys, Vietnam. There was always conflict, but I don’t think it was the kind of conflict that exists now, which seems so irreconcilable. People talked to each other before — and in this play, I wanted to show that world, but also where the roots of how the divide began to appear in a serious and personal way.”

We chatted in a conference room at Arena Stage when the company first began rehearsals for “The City of Conversations.” For Giardina, this was “kind of old-home week.” Arena produced one of his early plays in the Old Vat Room as part of its In the Process series. “I also did a commissioned adaptation of ‘An American Tragedy’ and ‘The Child.’ It was wonderful to work here then — the great Zelda [Fichandler] was so inspiring to work with. It was an electric, innovative atmosphere.”

The play actually came together after Giardina — known for writing plays based on his own experiences and a well-regarded novelist — decided to take on something at a little more distance. “Doug Hughes suggested I try something a little more out of my comfort zone, something that required me to imagine people I had no personal experience of.

“The City of Conversation” had its world premiere in 2014 at Lincoln Center Theater in New York, where it turned out to be a much-talked-about hit — not only with the locals but with visitors from Washington.

“Ralph Neas, who was the head of the Leadership Conference for Civil Rights during the Bork fight came. [The Bork nomination battle is a key element in the play.] So did Congresswoman Pat Schroeder and her husband. Washingtonians did take an interest. Ironically, Sidney Blumenthal wrote to tell me he couldn’t get in — the play was sold out.”

The play also impressed Arena Stage Artistic Director Molly Smith. “Over the past 18 years, I have searched fiercely for D.C.’s voice in theater, and I’ve become convinced that our unique voice is political,” she said. “We are the city that loves to talk politics from the first moment of waking up to when our heads hit the pillow. I saw the play in New York, and the moment the play was over I contacted Anthony. I knew his play needed to be produced at Arena. This spring is the optimal time to highlight a political work, as we are all abuzz with the primaries, politicians and sound bites.”

Politics and Washington and even Georgetown have often figured strongly in the theater, but there probably hasn’t been a play quite as intimately and piercingly located in Georgetown. In “The City of Conversation,” the set — over three acts and 30 years — remains the same throughout.

“Lights come up on a living room in Georgetown. The room is well appointed, not extravagant. There should be very small signs of eccentric taste. On a credenza, an array of small framed photographs. Large windows open onto the top of a garden. Doors stage right open onto a kitchen (unseen); there is an entrance to the dining room at lower stage right. Stairs lead to a bedroom upstairs.”

That’s the description of the set in the opening scene of “The City of Conversation.” It prepares you to enter into a small place that will become a microcosm, as places like this at certain times do.

Hughes has directed a number of plays by Giardina, “Scenes from La Vie de Boheme” and “Black Forest” among them. The two have known each other for 30 years or so. “I’d say we are close friends, and we understand each other’s work as artists and friends,” said Giardina.

“You know, some people have called this a play of ideas,” Hughes told us, prior to gathering the company. “That’s a nice description, but it’s a little abstract, to think of it that way only. To me it’s a play about a family, with a very charismatic woman, the Georgetown hostess Hester Ferris, who is the center of the play, a strong woman who doesn’t just host dinners, but is part of it all, taking part. A very political person. And it takes places at critical times: on the eve of Jimmy Carter’s malaise speech, during the heated battles over the Robert Bork nomination, during which we find the family splintered, with her son’s wife a rising Republican operative taking on her mother-in-law, and then the final act, the day of the inauguration of Barack Obama.

“It’s not so much a play of ideas, as it is a play about a clash of ideas. I think that it will really resonate here, of course, but it’s a moving play, a play perhaps about who wins and loses, but also the personal cost of these kinds of conflicts.”

“The City of Conversation” is also the kind of play that reads like a novel, in the sense that it’s a page-turner; the dialogue is sharp, funny, smart, witty and knowing. You don’t have to be a wonk — or, God forbid, the new “in” job title of campaign strategist — to get what’s happening on stage. Punches are given and taken, hearts are cracked, moves are calculated in a small room in the town where the locals often think of themselves as living in the light at the center of the world, a locus that engenders mixed feelings — like living inside a global chat room with your nearest and dearest.

“Is Hester based on a particular woman in Georgetown?” Giardina pondered. “I suppose it’s more of an amalgam. There are a number of influential women, and men, who took on those roles: Katharine Graham certainly, Sally Quinn, Pamela Harriman, Evangeline Bruce. But it’s not just about Hester. I like to think it’s about us,” he said.

“The larger thing, for me, is to ask the question: how important are these things to us? Do we assume that the social change we want to see happen is only going to happen through the sacrifices of other people?”

We’ll find out. “The City of Conversation” runs through March 6. The production stars Margaret Colin (who was Eleanor Waldorf in “Gossip Girl” and portrayed Katharine Graham in the docudrama “Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers”) and features Michael Simpson, who plays both Colin and Ethan Ferris.
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Neshan Naltchayan • February 16, 2016

Disney characters visited the Georgetown Public Library on R Street Feb. 9 to join the Toddler Art & Stories reading program for children. Children and their families listened to Disney classic stories, sing songs and worked on an art project. Special guests from “Disney On Ice presents Treasure Trove,” shared “laughs, excitement and reminded the children that love is the greatest magic of all,” they said, just in time for Valentine’s Day.

“Disney On Ice presents Treasure Trove” is a lineup of beloved cartoon characters

“Get tangled up in Disney’s 50th animated feature with Rapunzel and Flynn and enter the worlds of your other favorite Disney princesses — Tiana, Cinderella, Jasmine, Ariel, Aurora, Belle, Mulan and, of course, the one who started it all, Snow White,” announces “Disney On Ice presents Treasure Trove,” presented by Stonyfield YoKids Organic Yogurt and produced by Feld Entertainment. The joyful list on skates seems endless. There are Peter Pan, Tinker Bell and Captain Hook and his pirates; Simba, Nala, Pumbaa and Timon; Alice and the
Mad Hatter with the Queen of Hearts’ Army of Cards; Woody and Buzz Lightyear.

The skating and “Live Celebration of Disney’s Animated Gems” continues at the Verizon Center through Feb. 15 — DisneyOnIce.com.
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Gary Tischler • February 1, 2016

There’s comedy, and then there’s comedy. These days, there’s plenty of it to be had in Washington and not just in politics.

At the Shakespeare Theatre Company, there’s a rewardingly gut-busting or side-splitting double bill of short plays—“The Critics,” written by the playwright with the imposing name of Richard Brinsley Sheridan,  and “The Real Inspector Hound,” written by the brilliant playwright with a less imposing name of Tom Stoppard.  The plays are separated in time by 189 years—Sheridan’s play was written in 1779 (for Americans, three years after the writing and presentation to the world of the Declaration of Independence) and Stoppard’s play was written in 1968, a year of monumental events in the U.S. and the world, none of which are mentioned in the play.

At the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater, you can find the road company of “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love Murder,” a Tony Award-winning Broadway musical of a very particular kind which has pleasures of a different kind, from a different time and place.  The show is rooted in just about every cliché about Edwardian England and its aristocracy that you can think of, not to mention old whimsical and weird English film comedies of the 1940s and 1950s, most of them starring Alec Guinness.  This is not to say there is no audience for this: think “Downton Abbey: The Murder Mystery Musical.”

While there’s a definite British lineage, through history, time, authorship or setting to both projects, they are distinctly different in tone, look, feel and outlook.  However, it doesn’t follow that in order to like one, you have to be cool towards the other.  It depends a little on what you think is funny, whether you like yours originating in the belly or with a knowing smile.  Often, each show manages to provide both, actually.

Critics, of course, might have a special  affinity for a production of two short plays that are about them. More importantly, while “Gentleman” is certainly theatrical, with abundant imaginative stagecraft as much a part of its charm as talented actors, the Shakespeare Company double-bill is about, not just critics but the theater itself.  These two plays are as much about the spirit that fuels the old Mickey Rooney exclamation, “I know, let’s put on a show,” as it is about the hyper-egos of playwrights, actors, and yes, those fiends, the critics.

Sheridan—he wrote “School for Scandal” and “The Rivals”—is famous for giving his characters personality shorthand names, such as Mrs. Malaprop.  In “The Critic,” there are critics named Mr. Sneer, Mr. Dangle, and Mr. Puff, (much better, surely than Marks or Pressley or, dare I say it, Tischler) not to mention actresses named Mrs. Buxom, Signora Decollete and an actor named Sir Fretful Plagiary.

“The Critic” is a farce of the kind that the Shakespeare  Theatre Company has embraced with what can only be called all-out effort and energy,  under director Keith Baxter and in this production, STC Artistic Director Michael Kahn, who treats the material with full-bull bravado, a high-dudgeon approach to bewigged farce that is wonderfully shameless.  It centers, like its counterpart, around a play, in this case a rehearsal of a play about the Spanish Armada by no less a man than Mr. Puff,  played by Richard Stanton as a man who must have come out of the womb as hysteria personified, wearing a wig.  Two critics—Mr. Dangle and Mr. Sneer—promise to give him tips during a disastrous, side-splitting rehearsal, which might be viewed by Mr. Sheridan himself.  It says something for Sheridan that he is a character in the play, albeit an unseen one.

Mr. Puff is the play’s central conceit, and its heart and soul because while his peers Sneer and Dangle, played with masterful and pompous self-confidence, seem to at least give sneering lip service to art, Mr. Puff is a master of, well, puffery. “Did I see the play?” he asks, astounded.  “Good God, no.”

His attempts to actually direct a full cast represented by something less than a full stage and then stage the destruction of the Spanish Armada has to be seen to be laughed at (and with).  What fools these playwrights be.

Stoppard was and is no fool—“The Real Inspector Hound” features a performance of one of those old British manor murder mysteries like Agatha Christie’s still popular “The Mousetrap” looked over by two critics—one only a second stringer, fretting over his second-string status.  It’s interesting to note that both plays do the play-within-a-play bit, where the plays are particularly awful or seem to be.

Here the issue is where the life of the critics—Stanton again playing the nervous stringer and John Ahlin playing another wonderfully named critic named Birdboot—dissect with their profession.  Critics even today are an intrinsic, if not much beloved, part of the theater world, in it but not inside. While the play plays out on stage—the actors embracing their lot and parts with vigor and originality—the critics talk about their lives—the string wondering about his status, the married Birdboot wondering how to pursue one of the actresses on stage.  

Stoppard’s one of the smartest, wittiest and subtle playwright of modern times. Consider “The Real Thing,” “Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” “Jumpers” and my personal favorite, “Travesties.” He gives us laughs, lots of them, but he’s also, without beating you over the head with it, exploring what’s real, what’s not and how to make the reality on stage real and engaging.

“A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder” doesn’t reach that high (or low), but it delivers what it sets out to deliver—impeccable stagecraft, excellent performers, a whiz-bang first act in which an English nobody suddenly discovers that he is a member of an aristocratic  family with only eight people in front of him in line for the lordship.  Without too much thought, he hits upon a solution: Kill them all.

That’s the gist—plus a number of wonderful conceits—of the show: Will he do it, can he do it, how will he do it and can he keep both of the women he loves? The answer may or may not surprise you.

Here are some pluses: John Rapson, who plays all and sundry members of the tribe of d’Asquit with gleesome and seemingly impossible costume changes, and with distinct distinctiveness.  Kevin Massey, who has dash and charm and solid charisma as the upstart and murderous Monty Navarro.  Kristin Beth Williams as Sibella Hallward, the upwardly mobile blonde ambition type and Adrienne Eller as Phoebe, a much more demure cousin. Both ladies love and want Monty.

The mechanics of the deaths of the d’Asquit appeared to especially delight the opening night audiences.  For myself, in a farce I like some door slamming, which “Gentleman” delivers in an extended scene in which Monty tries to keep Sibella and Phoebe from encountering each other in the same apartment.  Too many instances of door-slamming to count, all of them funny.

The music and songs are pleasant and  are suited to the show and are staged and sung impeccably—but may not experience much of an afterlife without the show.

In these outrageous times, both productions are good for what might aid the ailing psyche, each in their own fashion.

The Shakespeare Theatre Company double bill is at the Lansburgh Theatre through Feb. 14. “Gentleman” is at the Eisenhower Theater through Jan. 30.