Performance

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.

Gary Tischler • January 19, 2016

Washington National Opera Artistic Director Francesca Zambello has said she wants to bring young audiences to WNO by staging productions during the holidays specifically geared toward them.

A second WNO go at composer Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Hansel and Gretel,” based on the popular Grimm Brothers fairy-folk tale, ought to be just the ticket. It runs through Dec. 20 at the Kennedy Center Opera House.

Fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm still attract young children in droves to movie theaters, Broadway and theme parks (just ask the Disney corporate world), and “Hansel and Gretel,” which opened WNO’s holiday series four years ago, seems ideally suited to bring in adults with children in tow.

“Hansel and Gretel” has something that regular opera fans really appreciate. Gorgeous music throughout, it’s a listenable opera with the kind of score — complicated, often lush, diverse — that satisfies adult operagoers. As for the kids, well, just watch them. Beside the title characters, loving but sometimes battling siblings who go into the dark forest in search of food (not always plentiful in their household), there are the struggling parents, Peter and Gertrude; the Sandman; the Dew Fairy; a non-speaking but quite fearsome owl; and of course the Witch.

The witch is played in let-it-all-hang-out fashion by American soprano Kerriann Otaño, who hits the high notes in reckless, cackling fashion. Apparently as starved, nearly, as her prey, she moves around the stage as if powered by an Eveready Energizer, dolled up like one of the evil sisters from “Cinderella.” She is, as required, equal parts scary and funny, and as colorful as human fireworks.

There is a reason, of course, that fairy tales remain fodder for operas, ballets and dances, novels, plays and children’s theater. The stories themselves never get too old or old-fashioned and are pliable to reworking and making contemporary. There are today two network television series drawing on the Grimm name and the brothers’ stories and characters.

“Hansel and Gretel” is fairly simple: the siblings get lost in the woods, their parents search for them, they are captured by the witch who intends to bake them into gingerbread and the children — quite a bit more clever than they seem at first — outsmart the wicked witch and push her into the oven. Children and parents are reunited, the gingerbread children become children again and all’s well that ends well.

This sort of thing, when done and staged as well as this production is, is catnip for kids. Directed at a speed mindful of its potential audience, the two-hour affair moves along in spritely fashion, all the while never stinting the musical quality of the opera — and it is a full-length opera. The sets by Robin Vest and the costumes by Timm Burrow are a visual delight.

Mezzo-soprano Aleksandra Romano as Hansel was strong-voiced while soprano Ariana Wehr not only sang Gretel to perfection but played her with a winsome, coquettish, bright-eyed charm. Most impressive vocally was Russian American tenor Aleksey Bogdanov, who sang joyfully and with great authority.

The audience — and it’s fair to say that around half the audience was made up of children — was a great barometer of the steadfast appeal of the opera. We watched two sisters, eight or nine years old, sitting intently interested on the edge of their seats throughout the proceedings, sharing a set of small opera glasses
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Gary Tischler • January 11, 2016

By now, it’s probably not a surprise that rising theater star and associate artistic director at Signature Theater Matthew Gardiner would be the obvious choice to direct the Arlington theater’s production of “West Side Story,” which runs through Jan. 24.

Gardiner was nominated, after all, for two Helen Hayes awards for best director this year—for “Sunday in the Park with George” (winner) and “Cabaret.” And he’s been a go-to director for both more or less mainstream musicals (“Xanadu”) and more off-the-beaten-path straight plays like “Tender Napalm,” “Art” and “Really, Really.”

“Actually, ‘West Side Story’ is my all-time-ever favorite musical,” said Gardiner, who was picked for the associate artistic spot in 2011. “It’s perfect. I think it’s the best structured musical drama ever written. For me, it’s practically perfect.” 

“My first contact with it was the film version, pretty much like most people and I fell in love with it. That opening scene of the gangs coming at you in the screen, that was really memorable,” he said. “I also saw the touring pre-Broadway production several years ago, and I actually liked it a lot, although some critics had problems with it.”

That version had dialogue and lyrics spoken and sung by the Puerto Rican in Spanish.  “I thought that made sense, I think it was very strong. But we’re not doing that.”

Gardner grew up with his twin brother James in College Park, Maryland.  He started out wanting to be a dancer, and as such had roles in productions of the Christmas venerables, “The Nutcracker” at Washington Ballet and “A Christmas Carol” at Ford’s Theatre.

“It’s remarkable, I know, that we’ve never actually done ‘West Side Story’ before,” Gardiner said. “The lyrics, after all, are by Stephen Sondheim, and we certainly are known for doing Sondheim.  It’s no small undertaking, that’s for sure.”

There are two factors at work for Gardiner in approaching what is such a classic, familiar work.

“You always think in big, expansive terms with this show, it has all this dancing,” he said. “You’re looking at it in a panorama way. The theater here is set up differently, and so we can emphasize the intimacy of the show as well as its larger component.  You’re going to be ten, 20 or more feet away from the stage up close and personal, and I think this way, you’ll get involved with the characters in ways that aren’t possible in the move or a normal stage.”

“To me, the lyrics and the music are so moving, and experiencing things this way brings something touching for the audience,” he said.

The other critical component of “West Side Story” is that it will feel brand new or, as in the expression “ripped from the headlines.”

Gary Tischler •

When it comes to the holidays for Washington theater-goers, Christmas isn’t over yet.

There’s still plenty of theatrical goodies available, for latecomers, or late gifting, going even past the new year, with regular runs finishing up, and some shows being extended.

It’s not just Yuletude shows—but those oddities, funny and serious, appealing and different that this season has to offer.

Yes, there’s still a chance to see “A Christmas Carol” at Ford’s Theatre with Edward Gero through Dec. 31. Indeed, there’s still a chance to see another kind of Scrooge—also through the end of 2015—at the Keegan Theatre on Church Street in Dupont Circle with “An Irish Carol,” which is about the travails and  troubles of a wealthy Irish pub owner who gets to take a deep look at his troubled life.

Elsewhere, there’s lots of music, music and musicals, a number of shows extending their runs and others completing theirs, a list that has something for everyone.

At the Kennedy Center, there’s something from Broadway, and something that’s hopefully going to Broadway.

There’s  the road company of “Matilda the Musical,” a smash Broadway hit that manages to be both heart-warming and dark, in the inimitable fashion of author Roald Dahl, who created the title character of a much put upon and long-suffering girl named Matilda, who has some special powers, lots of courage and energy, with which she combats her criminally-minded parents and a dire and monstrous school director named Mrs. Trunchbull played with grand relish (and mustard) by Bryce Ryness.  This may be the first big and splashy musical about abuse and bullying, but the production, directed by Matthew Warchus and choreographed spectacularly by Peter Darling, with music and lyrics by Tim Minchin and a book by Dennis Kelly, brings it off. It’s fast moving—with terrific sets and a cast headed by several Maltidas over the course of the run.  It’s good to go at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House until Jan. 10.

Also at the Kennedy Center at the Eisenhower Theater is the pre-Broadway run for the  Americana-Folkish new musical “Bright Star” with music and book by Steve Martin and music and lyrics by Edie Brickell.  A charmer that imagines a South full of rustic folks and would-be novelists, it’s fueled by banjo, guitar and fiddle music. It contains a great centerpiece performance by Carmen Cusack, who stars as a woman who published a literary magazine in North Carolina after World War II and has a big, and romance-fueled secret.  Through Jan. 10.

Three big musicals are having their runs extended, especially the Signature Theater’s production of “West Side Story,” directed by James Gardiner. It was already scheduled to run through Jan. 24 and has already garnered another extension through Jan. 31, because it’s become a truly hot ticket.  The Stephen  Sondheim-Jerome Robbins-Leonard Bernstein musical about rival gangs in New York comes to modern times again a la Romeo and Juliet, yes it does, with songs like  “Maria” and “Tonight” fueling the proceedings.

Out at Olnery, Jerry Whiddon is directing the Olney Theatre production of the swell musical about wise guys—all right, Broadway gamblers—showgirls and a salvation army lady—called “Guys and Dolls.” It gets a second extension, through Jan. 10.  “Luck Be a Lady,” indeed.

“Kiss Me Kate” features not only Petrucchio, Shakespeare, Kate, swell theater and broadway guys and dolls, but music and songs by Cole Porter, and direction by Alan Paul, who has brought his gifts to a series of musicals at the Shakespeare Theatre Company.  “Kiss Me Kate” has been extended through Jan. 10  at Sidney Harman Hall.

Let’s not forget the Chicago Neo Futurists, the heroes of Chicago’s underground theatre community, who’ve landed again at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre with their distinct style of audience-friendly-and-involving comedy (be prepared to be a part of the show), which touches on a set of topics (changing every night) with a complete skit.  In their production, “Too  Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind,” the troupe races the clock to perform 30 miniature plays in 60 minutes, giving new meaning to fast and furious as it applies to the theater.  Funny, topical, frantic, full of surprises, it’s a new year kind of show which may look exactly like a futurist show.  Through Jan. 3, known as Sunday.

Gary Tischler • January 4, 2016

If “Old Lang Syne” is the song of New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Eve celebration with music, dancing (in the streets or elsewhere) and a smack on the lips at the last second of the old year, then the Blue Danube Waltz is probably the music of the first days of the new year.

That will be the case at the Music Center at Strathmore’s 15th annual New Year’s Concert, 3 p.m., Sunday, Jan. 3, with the annual return and presentation of the Salute to Vienna New Year’s Concert. It will be nothing less than a champagne-feel-good music-and-dance resurrection of an empire from long ago across the ocean, the world of fin-de-sicle Austria and the Austro-Hungarian Empire of Emperor Franz Joseph and the musical world of composers like Johann Strauss, the waltz king, among others.

It’s a world of tuxedoed, elegant and handsome swains dancing with their beloved, in gossamer, eye-popping gowns, and the signature piece of music to this afternoon is “The Blue Danube Waltz” by Strauss. It is a piece of music that is almost miraculous in its ability to engender feelings of joy, happiness and wanting to move around a ballroom without your feet seeming to touch the ground.  If, after a long Saturday night and morning, start your Sunday by playing “The Blue Danube,” let it swirl over you like warm light, have a cup of Viennese-roasted coffee and start your day smiling.  It will cure hangovers, the sour taste of early morning television political discussions, and any sort of angst. As music, it is its own happy dance.

“I think that it’s probably the biggest selling work of music ever,” said Marion Glatz, who, with her husband, the Hungarian pianist Attila  J. Glatz, runs the concert production company that produces “Salute to Vienna” among numerous other musical productions which tour worldwide.  

Marion Glatz—aside from her work with “Salute to Vienna”—is ideally suited to be what she is, an articulate cheerleader for the music that is emblematic of the show.  She’s the daughter of a Viennese father and a Polish mother, received a master’s degree in business in Nuremberg, Germany, lived for a number of years in Munich, a Bavarian city which has a close affinity to Vienna in temperament, culture and music. Today, she lives in Toronto with her husband.  The couple have made “Salute to Vienna” the largest simultaneously produced concert in North America.

“We are celebrating our 20th anniversary this time around,” Marion Glatz said in a telephone interview. “It is meant to make people think of a delightful, sophisticated, sparkling world,  somewhat like the annual Vienna New Year’s concert with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.  You are transported to a different world, where the idea is to make people feel good,  with a certain kind of style. It’s a form of total entertainment. The waltzes endure—they always have—and so does the music. There is, I think, especially today, when there seems to be so much trouble in the world, a special need for what this concert offers.”

The Glatz duo began with a single concert in Toronto in 1995, and the production spread like wild fire. “We were at the Kennedy Center before,” she said. “Now are [at the Strathmore] with this beautiful hall and music center. . . . Obviously, there’s a hunger for this kind of music and show.” 

The Strathmore “Salute to Vienna” will feature the Strauss Symphony of America, with Matthias Fletzberger conducting, and also features Viennese soprano Natalia Usdhakova, American tenor Brian Cheney and dancers from the Europaballett St. Polten & International Champion Ballroom Dances.  There will be vignettes from operas and operettas like “The Merry Widow,” “Das Fledermaus” and  other works, along with polkas and dances.

The couple is engaged with other productions, including “Bravissimo! Opera’s Greatest Hits,” “The Godfather Live,” the North American Tour of the Vienna Mozart Orchestra and others.

“In his time, Strauss was the biggest musician. Bigger than Elvis—and maybe the Beatles,” said Glatz, who is making sure that the music continues to create—if not eras—perfect afternoons and moments of good feeling.

Gary Tischler •

There’s going to be some folks that are going to cry foul when it comes to “Bright Star,” the folksy, new and pre-Broadway stage musical by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell. Sentiment—honest or otherwise—isn’t too popular with contemporary critics armed with sugar repellent these days.

When it comes to “Bright Star,” I’m not in that camp. If this be sugar, then give me some sugar.

“Bright Star,” which does indeed traffic in honest sentiment, fable-like story-telling, improbabilities, foundlings, homespun Americana-style music fueled by banjos, guitars and fiddles, attractive heroes and heroines, down-home small-town Southern types and a blissful embrace of a satisfying end to a nostalgia-doused story, seems in the old-fashioned telling and the sparkling playing and singing to be that rare bird with plumages so familiar that it seems brand new.

Now playing at the Eisenhower Theatre at the Kennedy Center through Jan. 10 before a planned Broadway run, “Bright Star” has a lot going for it, notably a notable star with a big Broadway star voice and demeanor in Carmen Cusack. (She was Nellie Forbush in a road production of “South Pacific” a few years back as well as the green witch in “Wicked.”)

Cusack stars as Alice Murphy, whom we first see as a tough-minded editor of a North Carolina literary magazine, appraising the works of a young writer just returned to his hometown from the war—World War II at that.  She finds his work has possibilities and admires his chutzpah for presenting a letter recommendation from Thomas Wolfe, the outsized North Carolina representative in the Great American Novelist Derby who had been dead for several years at the time.

The writer is Billy Cane who comes to find his mother has passed away.  He yearns to be a writer, uses dictionary and thesaurus words and writes with feeling and a poetic sensibility.  But this isn’t just Billy’s story—it’s also Alice’s who has a secret past that includes a teenage love affair with the son of a prominent banker in her home town.  There is a certain amount of predictability in this truth and consequences scenario, but its spun out with such panache, such energy, spurred on by songs and music by both Martin (an acclaimed banjo player as well as movie star and comic) and Brickell, a noted singer and song writer who’s also the wife of Paul Simon. 

The action takes place in North Carolina over the 1920s, 1930s and post-war America in a South that’s a kind of fable—no white sheets here or Jim Crow here, just small town folks trying to find themselves, live their lives, do what they’re meant to do, fall in love and find a measure of it somewhere, sometime, even if it takes some coincidental doing, and a long time. 

I say it’s a fable—because who could believe this story and who couldn’t want to believe it at the same time—but it’s an odd sort of fable nonetheless.  A band of musicians play the songs from inside a small house, which doubles as a store, home, almost anything at all, transporting music and musicians as if they were in a dance, which they sometimes are.  The songs drive the story, assess it, give it bounced and hope, and meaning, reveal character—“A Man’s Gotta Do” by the ostensible villain of the piece. The beat is bluegrass, folk, by reeling in memories of Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, the Seldom Scene, and the like. It’s music played and sung with great skill, especially by Cusack who sings the stirring and sweet “Sun’s Gonna Shine” and others.  A.J. Snively as Billy Cane and Paul Alexander Nolan make spirited and heroic figures.

“Bright Star” is especially striking and not a little startling because its heroes and heroines are literary types. Alice is a knowing, skillful editor of the type that existed in Southern literary magazines of the period as well as in New York, and Billy could pass for any number of Southern writer wannabes, including Thomas Wolfe himself.  Its subject—find yourself and  your identity—is played against the background of a South both rustic and literary at a time when the idea of Southern literature was no small thing—think of William Styron, Wolfe Allan Tate, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers to name a few. It’s not every day these writers are the table talk and story contents of a Broadway musical.

Georgetowner • December 21, 2015

Thinking about the life of Chaka Khan so far is like trying to read a really thick, epic novel in an hour. It’s some life, that life.

“More like two lives,” said the woman once dubbed the Queen of Funk in a recent phone interview. “Probably more than two.”

Khan will share some of the musical highlights of that life when the 10-time Grammy award-winning singer makes her solo debut in the Kennedy Center’s Concert Hall on Dec. 31, kicking off the center’s New Year’s Eve celebration.

When you’re in the middle of thinking thoughts about the past, present and future, you could do worse than letting Khan’s songs wash over you. She and the songs, especially those from her rise to big-time stardom with the group Rufus — “I’m Every Woman,” “I Feel For You,” “Do You Love What You Feel,” “Tell Me Something Good” — are instantly recognizable. They filled the disco air at Mike O’Harro’s legendary Tramps in Georgetown, and everywhere else in the land of America, for nights on end.

The life is a Chicago girl’s. Born Yvette Marie Stevens in Hyde Park, she was influenced by a grandmother who loved jazz. “I heard lots of Ella around the house,” she said. She formed an all-girl singing group, the Crystallettes, in the neighborhood at age 11. By the early 1970s, she was working with Chicago groups like Baby Huey and the Babysitters, then was spotted by a member of the rising funk band Rufus.

The rest, you could say, is history. But, really, it’s just the beginning. Throw in two marriages, three children, acknowledged bouts with addiction, a kind of diva status that rivaled the other queens of the times (Aretha, Patti LaBelle, Whitney Houston), stints of living in Germany and England and enough awards to blind even the most modest eyes.

On paper, it sounds ritzy and glitzy, and probably justifiably dramatic. At its center, though, is always the music — all kinds of music, almost every kind that’s out there (except perhaps polka), including country, funk, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, Motown, jazz, folk and, yes, “I have too done classical music.”

Divas are, of course, notoriously difficult to deal with, yet Khan has managed to collaborate with countless top musicians in a variety of genres: Robert Palmer, Joni Mitchell, Stevie Wonder (that’s him playing the harmonica on “I Feel For You”), Ry Cooder and a host of others. She swims in every musical ocean.

The woman on the phone doesn’t sound regal. She has all the attributes of someone deliciously contradictory: accessible, articulate, warm, funny (with a little salty sailor talk in her), down to earth. Asked to define “funk,” she laughed and said, “I have no idea,” but then expressed the all-embracing notion that funk is wide as a wing of wonder, about motion and moving, rhythm and a certain flamboyant style.

If you go on that magical musical time machine called YouTube, she’s represented at all phases of her career, a fabulous presence — her famous blossoming crowns of hair, those freckles on a beautiful face, the stylings, all sorts of songs. There’s the spectacular “I’m Every Woman” duet with Whitney Houston, for instance. “That whole thing, she and her daughter, such a tragedy. I know how that happens, what it can do to you, believe me,” said Khan.

“You know, you start out, and all of that being young, and the songs. And I’ve always wanted just to do the music justice, even if, well, like that song ‘I’m Every Woman.’ And I thought, ‘I’m every woman? What the hell do I know? But if you give it everything you have, that’s what I tried to do.”

Her songs, for me, have always been there, on the radio, on the jukeboxes, but I never thought of her broad range until recently. One time, my neighbor in Lanier Heights, Mickey Collins, and I were talking about the song “My Funny Valentine.” While we both agreed that the song was one of the greatest jazz-fueled love songs ever, we disagreed about its best interpreter. I proffered the usual suspects: Billie Holiday, Nina Simone and others. “Naw,” Mickey said. “It’ll come to me.” A few days later, he came out of his door and said, “Two words: Chaka Khan.”

I have to agree after hearing and seeing her version. I shared the story with her.

Truth is, jazz is something special for and to her. You can hear it like a sneaky foray into scatting on some of her hits, and especially on the amazing video of her singing Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” with the Funk Brothers from the movie “Standing in the Shadows of Motown,” bridging the road between jazz and funk.

“Jazz is my heart. Nobody scats much any more. It’s pure, it’s hard to do and it’s free and disciplined at the same time.”

On New Year’s Eve, you’ll be able to hear part of her musical life — and parts of ours. Who knows, maybe she’ll do “My Funny Valentine.”

Gary Tischler • December 14, 2015

If there’s ever a help wanted ad out there that reads, “Urgent, Pied Piper wanted,” they might want to have Francesca Zambello answer it.

Zambello, the Washington National Opera’s artistic director, showed up at The Georgetowner’s Cultural Leadership Breakfast at the George Town Club Dec. 3 and acted very much like the pied piper, not just for the WNO and its season, but for opera itself. 

She took turns in the roles of carny barker,  and  an enthusiast and story-teller, all of it backed up by a lifetime of acclaimed work as a director, including film, and musical theater (“The Little Mermaid” on Broadway), a reputation for fearlessness, like an intrepid explorer going into unexplored territories, regaling the gathering with how a season at the WNO is put together and what issues are addressed.

She has done this before many times, of course, most recently as the artistic advisor to the San Francisco Opera, where she directed Wagner’s Ring Cycle, and also currently as Artistic and General Director of the Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, New York, where she competes with nothing less than the Baseball Hall of Fame during the summer.

As always, her approach was down to earth, straightforward and stirring all at the same time.

“The thing about opera audiences is that they’re about people who want different things,” she said. “There’s the people who love the classics, who want to see ‘Carmen’ on the schedule just about every year.  This is about the ABC’s of opera, you know, ‘Aida,’ ‘La Boheme’ and ‘Carmen.’ Truthfully, there’s only about ten operas in the repertoire that will be that popular, maybe even less.”

“Then, there’s the people who absolutely can’t abide seeing another ‘Carmen’ and want  and need more modern pieces—like ‘Appomattox’ or the series of one-act operas we’ve done, just this week, for instance, in the Terrace Theater,” she continued. “There’s also the middle ground of not so popular, operas which haven’t been done that much or aren’t that familiar which are a harder sell. Then there’s the young audience, kids who look at a young people’s opera like ‘Hansel and Gretel’ and say I want to do that or I want to see that. We began with that opera as part of a program that includes a holiday opera every year.” 

“My interests have always been in a combination of classical, contemporary, and American operas and music, and with that, also in using and giving opportunities to our emerging artists—we have 12 singers and two pianists,” she said. How has that worked out?  Well, there’s Solomon Howard, who starred as both Martin Luther King Jr and Frederick Douglass in “Appomattox”, has prominent roles in the upcoming behemoth “Ring Cycle”, starred in a WNO short opera “Approaching  Ali”, and worked in “The Magic Flute” and “Macbeth” at Glimmerglass this year. “He’s a true local success story,” she said. “Now, mind you, he’s very imposing, six foot six and much taller than Martin Luther King, Jr. But we’re not doing Ken Burns documentaries here. We’re asking people to imagine, to respond.

“I thought ‘Appomattox’ was risky, I really did.  Sure, Philip Glass is probably the best known contemporary music composer in the world. But it was a radically different kind of opera, and, personally, I thought we were very successful with it. So, that’s sort of a personal pat on the back for me by me.”

“Everybody says you have to cultivate a young audience, and that’s true,” she said “Like everyone else in the performing arts, we’re competing for an audience who gets much of its entertainment for free from a pad or a phone, a screen.  I understand reduced prices and discounts, because that works.  But I remember people would show up for a dress rehearsal, and it’s free, and then they’d come up and complain about this and that. And I thought, ‘Go drop off the end of the world, why don’t you?’ ” 

In full booster mode, Zambello talked about the upcoming one-act production of “Better Gods” about the last queen of Hawaii (directed by Ethan McSweeny) and  about the upcoming production of  Kurt Weill’s “Lost in the Stars” at the Eisenhower Theater,  “first time in a long, time.”

And she talked about the Wagner’s “Ring Cycle,” four operas, 16 hours—“It’s like a drug, it’s like binge watching on television, it’s about life, it’s about the earth, gods and global warming. It’s about everything. It’s a little bit of a monumental undertaking, and I’ll tell you, it’s something you’ll probably never experience again in your lifetime.  We’re starting rehearsals in February.”

Zambello will have experience going for her, having directed the cycle at San Francisco Opera. The Ring Cycle, aka “Der Ring des Nibelungen” by Richard Wagner, is comprised of “Das Rheingold,” “Die Walkurie,” “Sigfried” and “Gotterdammerung.”  When it comes to talk of contemporary or classic, Wagner and the cycle are in a category all their own—there’s nothing to which the operas and their composers can be compared, except maybe eras of history itself.  

Somebody—in fact, many people—have described Zambello as fearless for the projects she takes on, for her straight forward approach, for having a vision that she thinks she can fulfill every time out.  It’s courage combined with honesty, but also a kind of reveling in the world where she’s now a leading national and international role player.   She’s a gifted artist, for sure, but also more than a hand presser, a marketer for her work and for the WNO.

She embraces opera and all of its parts, its big tent that needs to bring in new works, but also respect its total body of works. It needs its “Carmen” and “A View from the Bridge.” It needs its altars to Verdi and Mozart and maybe a separate Bavarian castle for Wagner. Also, it needs its new voices, its new composers and writers—and an audience that’s rich in diversity.

For all of that, and much much more, Francesca Zambello is no less than opera’s pied piper.
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Gary Tischler • December 8, 2015

’Tis the season. Especially for young people.

This is all the more true in the world of theater and performing arts. As usual, Tiny Tims, Scrooges, Sugarplum Fairies and princesses abound. But kids (and adults) might want to check out something beyond the usual holiday fare for delightful stories and inventive stagecraft.

For the Christmas holidays, we give you: “A Lump of Coal for Christmas,” a world premiere by Norman Allen, after a book by Lemony Snicket (aka Daniel Handler), starring the gifted young actress Erin Weaver as a lump of coal. The show runs at Adventure Theatre MTC in Glen Echo Park through Dec. 31.

We give you: “A Year with Frog and Toad,” an Imagination Stage production of the hit Broadway and Tony-nominated musical about the adventures of the two best friends, running through Jan. 10.

We give you: “Elephant & Piggie’s We Are in a Play!” in the Kennedy Center’s Family Theater through Jan. 3.

You wouldn’t think that anything involving a lump of coal could be right in the wheelhouse of the spirit of Christmas, or that a work by Lemony Snicket, famous for his series of children’s books called “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” would warm seasonal hearts and cockles. And if you peruse the Snicket book titles, you might think you’re in for a dark ride. What could be happy about “The Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming,” “The Miserable Mill” or “The Vile Village”?

“A Lump of Coal for Christmas” may be off the well-worn holiday paths, but it has its own charms and inevitable rewards of joy. How can you go wrong with a lump of coal that wants to be an artist and helps turn “a child’s worst nightmare into a dream come true.” And that’s alive and pursuing its dreams with a series of adventures and encounters, including a very famous Christmas presence (if not present).

Norman Allen is the author, and Washington treasure and actress Holly Twyford is the director. Twyford has also performed at Adventure Theatre in “If You Give a Pig a Pancake.” Wayne Chadwick is the music director, Deborah Wheatley does the sets and Frank Labovitz is the costume designer. Also in the cast are Elliott Kashner, Eric Messner, Sammy Strent, Rachel Hynes, Judith Ingber and Kevin Grieco.

“A Year with Frog and Toad” started out as a series of children’s books written and illustrated by Arnold Lobel and became a musical written by brothers Robert and Willie Reale. In 2003, after workshops and brief runs, it opened on Broadway and won a Tony nomination.

The charm of the musical and the books centers around the small, often funny adventures of woodland creatures, the main characters being Frog and Toad. When Frog learns that his best friend Toad doesn’t receive mail, he has a snail deliver a letter. The journey of the letter sparks adventures in which the friends “go swimming, fly a kite, bake cookies, tell scary stories, and go sledding down a steep hill.” Songs also ensue, including “Get a Load of Toad” and “I’m Coming Out of My Shell.”

Director Colin Hovde, who is producing director at Theater Alliance, calls it “a celebration of kindness and playfulness and, frankly, that is something that we can all stand to be reminded of these days.”

Jobari Parker-Namdar (Lyle the Crocodile) returns to Imagination Stage as the laid-back Frog, while Stephen Edwards Horst makes his debut here as the serious-minded Toad. The choreography is by Rachel Leigh Dolan and the music direction is by Deborah Jacobson.

In another friendship of opposites, there’s Elephant Gerald — slow, formally attired and said to be prone to melancholy — and his friend Piggie, who is, well, piggie-like: perky, always smiling and full of fun.

In “Elephant & Piggie’s We Are in a Play!” Elephant and Piggie are the best of friends in a musical romp that features such issues as how two friends play with one toy, what to wear to a fancy pool costume party and sharing (or not) your ice cream.

The show is based on a best-selling series of children’s books by Mo Willems. Joe Mallon as Elephant Gerald and Shayna Blass as Piggie. The “nutty backup singers” are called The Squirrelles. Commissioned by the Kennedy Center, the play has a script and lyrics by Willems, music by Deborah Wicks La Puma and choreography by Jessica Hartman. Jerry Whiddon directs.
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Gary Tischler • December 7, 2015

It’s pretty plain by now that Alan Paul, the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Associate Artistic Director and resident musical genie. knows his way around a Broadway musical. More than that, he has a gift for getting to the heart of  a show and lets you see it beating and beating some more.

It’s a kind of knack that Paul’s got, and we’ve already seen it in his productions of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (2014 Helen Hayes Award for Best Director of a Musical) and “Man of La Mancha.” Now, he’s gotten his hands on “Kiss Me, Kate,” the Cole Porter musical from 1948, with a pedigree that’s equal parts high class poodle and back-stage mutt.

What’s evident is that Paul, as a director, is something of a swain when it comes to what appears to be a life-long passion for the  musical. He’ll bring out the best in the form by returning to its original charms and bring them out with gusto—like someone energetically and with love rubbing an old dusty bauble found on the road and returning it to its million-dollar diamond status to the point that it looks brand new, kissed for the very first time.               

“Kiss Me, Kate,” although it hasn’t been performed very often, is very familiar material from very familiar veins. It is, after all, based on Shakespeare’s “Taming of the Shrew,” an endlessly entertaining—if sometimes politically incorrect—battle of the sexes as implied by the title.  There is some of Cole Porter’s most dazzling works—witty and funny, to be sure, like Noel Coward set to music at times, but also passionate, fiery, even jazzy.  There is the classic MGM movie version of the show in which Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson starred, and in which some pretty terrific dancers named Ann Miller, Bobby Van and, yes, Bob Fosse tapped, legged and danced their hearts out.

Best of all is that in Paul’s hands, “Kiss Me, Kate” is a hands-down love letter to show biz, to the impulse in people to charge out of nowhere and holler, “Hey, I know, let’s put on a show.” Here are the usual and unusually talented suspects like a star with an ego, a diva with a temper, a leggy, blonde hoofer, a bunch of guy dancers who could jump through the ceiling and land softly, stage hands and dressers and guys with rolled up newspapers and sleeves, a couple of mobbed-up bill collectors  and even a pipe-smoking general with eyes on a blonde and the White House.

These are the ingredients, the materials of many a musical—“Guys and Dolls” comes immediately to mind—and Paul treats them as if they’re lucky charms, never seen by man or woman ever before. He lets us experience them anew. The effect is like being hit repeatedly in the head with a soft rubber duck. It knocks you around, but you jump up for more.

This is not musical theater in the vein of “Carousel” of Rodgers and Hammerstein, or Stephen Sondheim. This is theater as a party, a screwball comedy,  where everybody has an ace up his sleeve. It’s a show, within a show, about putting on a show.

Here we have Fred Graham and Lili Vanessi, once married but now divorced, joining edgy forces to put on a production of “The Taming of the Shrew” in an out-of-town opening in Baltimore, where, as we all know, it’s just too damn hot. They hate each other so much that you know it’s true love. There’s also Lois Lane, the jazzy blonde playing Bianca, involved with Graham and her boyfriend, a profligate gambler named Bill Calhoun (the terrific Clyde Alves),  who plays Lucentio.  There is also a General, who looks more than vaguely familiar and who’s engaged to Lili, and First Man and Second Man, two spiffy (who wears spats anymore?) guys looking to collect a debt.

And there’s music and dancing, dancing and singing and, gosh, that fellow Alan Paul is sure in love with this stuff—and so am I.   Paul is the delirious guiding hand to this, and Christine Sherrill and Douglas Sills carry the show with their comic timing, their terrific voices and uncommon stage presence, not to mention comedic timing.  They can even make a song like “Wunderbar,” which is straight out of the Nelson Eddy-Jeanette McDonald songbook, seem sweetly new, not to mention the almost uncharacteristic (for Porter) passion they bring out in “So In Love.”

But watch what happens: out comes Robyn Hurder, an epitome of what I like to think of as Broadway Babies, proof why gentlemen prefer blondes, singing the almost demure “Tom, Dick or Harry,” then in the second act,  blasting out “Always True to You in My Fashion,” an out-and-out vamp of a song, which Hurder as Bianca-Lois delivers with call-back oomph.  Earlier, the second act opened with a “Too Damn Hot,” full of dance solos, rhythm and some blues, a whole backstage cast number that builds and builds to the point where the hope persists that it may never end.

This is also true for the famous “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” in which Bob Ari and Raymond Jaramillo McLeod—they could both pass for Nicely Nicely Johnson—work their way through a soft shoe, while navigating their way through Porter’s blissful rhymes  (“Othello-good fellow”).  They come back again and again, until at last they don’t, which is oddly disappointing.

Shakespeare gets his due here—the scenes from the actual “Shrew” are done adroitly to much laughter and amazement, a result which we’re sure, was also achieved in London in days of old.

But then, in Paul’s hands, with Porter’s help, all this everything old is new again.

“Kiss Me, Kate” runs through Jan. 3 at the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Sidney Harman Hall at Sixth and F Streets NW.
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