Performance

Gary Tischler • January 29, 2015

If you know about and love the loosely bordered Great American Songbook, you probably know about her.

If you like women who are smart, witty, and talk your ears off in a good way, you should know her.

If you miss the lost art of scat singing, you’ve heard her.

If you’ve ever watched “The Nanny” originally or in reruns, and can’t get that theme song out of your head, you know a tiny sliver of her work.

If you like jazz, even if you call it blues, if you remember running across an old Nina Simone song on a jukebox that’s never there any more, or remember Ella Fitzgerald racing like a piano player on a keyboard through a Cole Porter tune, you need to know about her.

We’re talking about Ann Hampton Callaway — chestnut hair, Chicago dynamo, versatility-plus, singer, songwriter, living the hectic life of both a performing singer and a recording star, traveling this way and that way, from San Diego to Moscow to Spain to D.C., not to mention her heart-felt home in New York.

Callaway, who did indeed write the theme song of “The Nanny,” will be at the Warner Theater May 15, in a great jazz double bill with legendary jazz pianist Ramsey Lewis.
It’s a good time to find out about her if you haven’t.

We talked to Callaway on the phone recently while she was riding in a car driven by her sister Liz, herself a Broadway star and singer in San Diego, where they were doing a concert.

“It’s hectic being on the road, the different kinds of venues, the traveling,” says Callaway, whose latest album “At Last” includes the Etta James classic as its title track. “But I’ve settled too. New York is where I live, where my life is.”

But she’s also a Chicago lady, a singer from the town of blues. For the best introduction to Callaway, check out her album “Blues in the Night.” “It’s about the blues, not necessarily blues songs,” she said. That’s why it’s hard to categorize her, to label her as a kind of singer although she’s richly known for her interpretation of the Great American Songbook, those songs that come from Porter by way of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Gershwin and so forth. She’s also in the world of cabaret, jazz and pop.

“I don’t like labels,” she says. “I know I’m a jazz singer, but I have no problem singing pop. “She gets a kick out of the Nanny theme thing. “We were in Berlin during a concert,” she says. “I called out to see if anybody knew the Nanny song. And you wouldn’t believe it. Everybody did, they hollered in unison.”

The singers you remember, of course, are the originals. Never mind for a moment her monumental output of songwriting — some 250 or so. Callaway seems to know, having made her way from Chicago, to college wanting initially to be an actress and discovering her true self and packing up for New York, that no two good, let alone great, singers are alike. And she appreciates the long list of originals.

She wrote as fine an appreciation of one singer by another this year in a jazz magazine, a tribute to Blossom Dearie, the whispery-voiced break-your-heart jazz singer who passed away this year. “There was nobody like her, nobody at all,” she said.

The bet is that there’s nobody like Callaway either. Just check out her scat-fueled numbers on “Blues in the Night,” the lively, anthem-like, breezy “I’m-Too-White-To-Sing-the-Blues Blues”, or “It’s All Right With Me.”
She’s a Tony Award winner, songwriter and been-around-a-while force of musical nature. Check her out.

—

Zinoman’s Successor
David Muse, the young gifted director who has also been associate director of Washington’s Shakespeare Theater Company since 2005, has been chosen to succeed founder Joy Zinoman at the Studio Theatre beginning with the 2010-2011 season. He’ll direct the season opener, Annie Baker’s off-Broadway hit “Circle Mirror Transformation.”

Zinoman, who is directing David Mamet’s “American Buffalo” at the Studio with Ed Gero, said that “David’s story is the classic American story of a smart, talented kid from a small town who finds his passion, pursues it with dedication and intensity and manages to win friends and admirers by virtue of his charm, sensitivity and intelligence.”

Muse called his new job “the dream of a lifetime.” He’s no stranger to the Studio either, having started his directing career here in 2005, and directing a successful production of Neil LaBute’s “Reasons to Be Pretty” here most recently, as well as David Harrower’s “Blackbird,” which won the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Production in 2008. At Shakespeare Theatre, he directed the recent highly acclaimed production of “Henry V.”

—

The International 2010 VSA Festival
Very Special Arts, the international organization on arts and disability, will host the 2010 International VSA Festival, featuring more than 600 artists, performers and educators from all over the world June 6 through 12.

The festival will feature theater, literary readings, film screenings, sculptures and paintings, all by eminent and emerging artists with disabilities, as well as educators who will shares innovative instruction strategies.

Venues will include the Kennedy Center, the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center, the Atlas Performing Arts Center , Busboys and Poets, DC Improv, GWU’s Lisner Auditorium, Union Station, Smithsonian’s International Gallery and Discovery Theater, The Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Harman Hall and Lansburgh Theatre, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the H Street Playhouse.

For more details and information, go to www.vsartsfestival.org.

—

Ashley Does Shaw
Noted actress Elizabeth Ashley returns to the Shakespeare Theatre Company to star in the company’s final play of the season, George Bernard Shaw’s “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” beginning June 8.

Ashley, who performed to acclaim in “August: Osage County” on Broadway, is joined by Amanda Quaid, Ted Van Griethuysen and David Sabin, under the direction of Keith Baxter.

—

Knuffle Bunny
“Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Musical,” is now at the Kennedy Center’s Family Theater, with Tony Award nominee Stephanie D’Abruzzo and music by composer Michael Silversher. The production is based on the prize winning children’s book “Knuffle Bunny,” adapted by author Mo Williams.

“Knuffle Bunny” is about a toddler named Trixie who misplaces her beloved stuffed bunny, and goes on a journey to find him.

The musical runs through May 23.

Peter Murray • January 28, 2015

With Ellis Ludwig-Leone at the helm, San Fermin melds classical music with rock ’n’ roll to create lush, manic and irresistible chamber pop soundscapes. The Brooklyn-based band came together around Ludwig-Leone’s vision, constructed during a nine-week retreat in Banff, Canada, where the Yale graduate developed the concept and aesthetic of the band’s music.

“I hadn’t really written songs before. I had done composition stuff, but I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do and who I wanted to be,” Ludwig-Leone reflects. “I had this idea that you needed to be totally secluded and in your own mindspace to do what you wanted to do.”

When he came back to New York with a composition for a debut album in hand, Ludwig-Leone got to work pulling together a band to record the effort. Childhood friend Allen Tate was the obvious choice for the album’s male voice, but the female voice, just as essential in Ludwig-Leone’s composition, was more difficult to nail down.

Ludwig-Leone’s recruited guitarist Tyler McDiarmid knew Holly Laessig and Jess Wolfe of budding indie pop band Lucius, so Ludwig-Leone approached them. “I actually cold-called them,” Ludwig-Leone says, and the duo agreed to be a part of the project. (Their contribution shines brightest on the soaring, ecstatic “Sonsick.”)

Ultimately, 22 musicians – from trombonists to drummers to upright bassists – lent their talents to San Fermin’s debut, which arrived in September 2013 on Downtown Records.

Touring required that the band be whittled down to eight members, and the Lucius girls were out of the equation due to their band’s schedule. Rae Cassidy stepped in on female vocals, but ended up quitting the band to pursue a solo career in April 2014. Ludwig-Leone says there is bound to be “changeover” in a band with so many members. But he also notes, “We think of it now as a real band in the sense that everyone is invested and involved.”

The band’s onstage chemistry, honed over two years of nonstop touring, is proof. Ludwig-Leone talks of the band’s eight members finding “their moment” during their rowdy live shows, which direct the audience toward what’s happening onstage.

As for behind-the-scenes, Ludwig-Leone says he’s “really happy” with how the group interacts. He paints a clearer picture, saying, “I run the rehearsal and talk with people about the parts if I have comments. John [Brandon] and Tyler tour-manage, so they’re in charge of that stuff. Everyone finds a place where they’re in charge. On the music part, it’s super cool because now that all the musicians know the aesthetic of the band, they can add things that are almost always great.”

Ludwig-Leone returned to seclusion to write San Fermin’s sophomore record, “Jackrabbit.” This time, he stayed in New Hampshire, and only for three weeks. But when he got back to New York, he realized – with the help of the band, his manager and his mentor, composer Nico Muhly – his new work was missing something, “an upbeat heart of the record.”

Around the time of his return, Charlene Kaye joined San Fermin’s roster on female vocals. Ludwig-Leone went to work on the last three or four songs on the record (which he says are his favorites) with her in mind, saying that it’s important for a song to “fit” the person singing it.

The album’s title track “is totally high energy,” Ludwig-Leone says, which is no surprise given that the song was recorded with the eight-member live band. With Kaye’s ethereal vocals at the forefront, the song is a proper sequel to the band’s biggest hit to date, “Sonsick.” The rest of the second album, though, continues the dialogue and questioning that Ludwig-Leone started in the first, but with “three-dimensional characters.” He explains, “There aren’t any answers, it just keeps spinning out of control.”

San Fermin plays the Barns at Wolf Trap on Jan. 30. “Jackrabbit” arrives in stores April 21.

Gary Tischler • January 26, 2015

The Washington National Opera’s American Opera Initiative continues to bear fruit and create a climate for new operas.

The 2014-2015 WNO season continues with another offering with the world premiere of the one-hour opera, “Penny,” by composer Douglas Pew and librettist Dara Weinberg Friday and Saturday, Jan. 23 to 24 in the Terrace Theater at the Kennedy Center.

Developed from an original story by Weinberg, “Penny” tells the story of a woman with autism who discovers that she has a gift for music. Conflict ensues within her family, as the woman tries to become more and more independent.

“Penny” coincides with the presence of the world-premiere production of “Mockingbird,” a play that also deals with autism, in the Kennedy Center Family Theatre through February 1. The play, commissioned by the Kennedy Center and the Very Special Arts program, is about an 11-year-old girl on the autism spectrum, who loses her closest friend, her brother, and learns to adjust to new help and a new world, with the discovery of her talent as an artist.

“Mockingbird” is based on the National Book Award-winning novel by Kathryn Erskine and is directed by Tracy Callahn.

Pew and Weinberg, the composer and librettist of “Penny,” are alumni of the WNO’s American Opera Initiative. Their first collaboration, “A Game of Hearts,” was part of the first season of the initiative.

Michael Heaton, director of the American Opera Initiative, said, “I am proud that our program is achieving its mission—to continue to foster new American talent and to provide a forum for contemporary American stories and music.”

The cast of “Penny” features a number of current members of the Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist Program, including mezzo-soprano Deborah Nansteel, soprano Kerriann Otano, bass Wei Wu and tenor Patrick O’Halloran.
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Gary Tischler • January 16, 2015

As I settled into my top of the back seat at the Keegan Theatre, looking at the gathered members of the tribe as they lolled on a couch, did practice runs on a rope, hugged or high-fived in vests and bluejeans and with various tropes of hair—Afros big and small, long-to-the midriff female, long to the midriff male—I got a sinking feeling.

Maybe this was truly and finally the beginning of the end of the Age of Aquarius. After all, it’s a long way—way more than 40 years from the Age of the Hippies to the Age of the Millennials and all the generations in between. Watching the opening moments of the Keegan Theatre’s high-energy production of “Hair” seemed at the beginning to be a little oppressive, as if my peace-and-love generation genes had curdled like month-old milk.

I suspect that how an audience member reacts to this production—or any production—of “Hair” depends more and more as time goes by to the time gone by. I saw my first production of “Hair” in 1972 in San Francisco, which is ground zero for the play’s setting at the height of the anti-war, free love and peace explosion. I saw it again years later at the Studio’s intimate 2nd Stage setting where I remember a middle-aged man explaining things to his daughter at intermission. I saw it again more recently, when a revival’s national tour, zippy as all get-out with kilo-watt charisma stars hit the Kennedy Center.

I suspect this production looks different to today’s young people who may think they’ve seen and done everything, at least on their phones. This generation, which seems less addled by issues of racial differences and totally not shocked by anything to do with drugs, sex or rock-and-roll, might wonder what all the fuss was about.

I wondered a little as well, until the show and its performers hit their stride. This was and remains a rowdy, one-of-a-kinder and with the rank of first semi-rock-and-roll musical that calmly, sweetly proposes ideas that there are no boundaries in matters of sex in such songs as “Hashish,” “Sodomy” and the spunky “Black Boys (White Boys) Are Delicious,” the celebratory “Hair” and “Ain’t Go No (Grass).” True, there’s nudity, and it looks like a modest lineup of good-looking young men and women briefly spied or seen with no harm and some good done.

This play—it’s a long haul at two-and-a-half hours—is meant to work like a be-in, a celebration, but its heart is in the bitter cloud of the Viet Nam War and the adrenalin-rush discovery of drug, sex and rock-and-roll. Thus: Berger, a charismatic, defiant rogue who still operates at an ironic distance, the hapless, hopeful and hopeless Claude, the passionate Sheila in a triangle, where no one quite connects.

Keegan has taken some risks with this and enlarged its ambition, too, with 30 or more performers on stage in an example of “Occupy Keegan,” and it doesn’t stint in energy and ability. What’s evident in this production is that this tribe lives its beliefs as best as it can. It’s a gutsy explosion into an all-out embrace of not just tolerating the other, but of moving in with him or her at an intimate level.

This “Hair” is also often choreographed with great precision to within an inch of its life—the kind of movement theater that barely resembles the sloppiness and disorganization of a hippie gathering.

Hats off here to: Christian Montgomery as the sweet-natured Woof; Paul Kanlan as the struggling Claude, stuck between the world he knows and the world he loves and unable to avoid making a tough decision; the high-end charisma of Josh Sticklin as Berger and Caroline Wolfson as a sexy, appealing real-life woman as opposed to type.

There’s some 40 songs: numbers or even short-lived snippets that burst out or erupt in this show. Most of them aim directly for the heart, others a lot lower, and some of them at the area of persona that’s ticked off about the way things are, where they’re heading or for that matter where they’ve been. Like a lot of idealistic, half-formed and not fully realized dreams, the tribe bleeds and grieves—but always jumps and fondles and sings and cries out.

The show itself could do with a little trimming, most especially the long historical-political little play-acting on American history themes. It is and comes off as too obvious, too polemic and a potential show stopper.

But, yeah, let the sun shine in—by all means necessary.

The remaining performances of HAIR are SOLD OUT.

If you would like to waitlist for tickets, please email boxoffice@keegantheatre.com

Gary Tischler •

Directors of Shakespeare plays try to find something new in their approach to plays that have after all been staged many times over time.

Robert Richmond, who’s done his share of kings at the Folger Theatre (“Henry V” and “Henry VIII”), but the murderous “Richard III” presented a whole new set of challenges for this director. Some of the results are immediate. For that reason, if you haven’t yet, you should head on over to the Elizabethan Theatre at the Folger while you have the chance. The production—powerful, exciting, thrilling and not a little scary—runs through March 16.

The first thing you’ll notice is that the Elizabethan Theatre isn’t the Elizabethan Theatre any more. Normally, a raised stage with two imposing pillars, the traditional stage has been reconfigured pretty much totally so that “Richard III” can be staged in the round (although it’s actually a square circle), with the audience surrounding the stage on all sides or encircling it.

“I just had this idea,” Richmond said, “that doing it this way offers up so many different sorts of opportunities for me, for the design, for the character and certainly for the audience. Somehow, we managed to do this physically, and it makes for a very different sort of play. I’ve always felt that a lot was going on the play—underneath, if you will, or off stage, that the audience heard about or didn’t even know about.”

The result is that the audience is almost part of the play. It’s a kind of trap in which the audience is hurtled into close proximity with the characters—King Richard himself, along with the thugs and assassins he uses to eliminate the opposition or people he has no further use for. Depending on where you’re sitting, you might suddenly have Richard himself standing or sitting next to you, musing in his sly, sinister way.

“It’s very up close and personal,” Richmond said. “I think we have to look at him from our time as well as his. And the fact that his body was more or less recently discovered and dug up after all this time only lends more immediacy to the production.”

For all of its length and complications, “Richard III” is one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays. It’s been done many times in films (Lawrence Olivier, Al Pacino and Ian McKellen), as well as on stage. “I think he’s a complicated, modern, ambitious man who carries a lot of pain, rage and anger within him. But he’s also very smart, very charming, sexy. Obviously, he’s a villain, but it’s when he’s most self-aware that you like him the most. You don’t altogether know what makes him behave the way he does—perhaps all the women in his life, including his bitter mother.”

What Richmond has produced—with a fury-filled, compelling performance by Drew Cortese in the title role who was in the Studio Theatre production of “The M-F in the Hat”—is a kind of vision of a clean, smooth, hell, which opens up periodically to receive one of Richard victims, from his brother, to the princes, to Buckingham and Lady Anne. And when it does, as bodies tumble or slide in, you see a living world down below. Which is downright scary.

The in-the-round stage is not permanent. But the memory will stay with you for a long time. So is this “Richard III.” Go while you can.

Gary Tischler •

**“Richard III”** at the Folger Shakespeare Theatre is a never before re-configuration of the Elizabethan Theatre, murder most foul all around, tense direction by Robert Richmond and a frightening and sly Drew Cortese as the murderous king, through March 16.

**“We are Proud to Present….,”** like nothing you’ll ever see on stage, as six actors take on the subject of race and genocide. A new play by Jackie Sibblies Drury at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre through March 9.

**“Moby-Dick”**— by the Washington National Opera Company in the Kennedy Center’s Opera House. Even if you don’t like opera, this is the one that will get you into the game. Spectacular, beautifully sung with grand music by Jake Higgie. Through March 8.

**Coming Up:**

**“World Stages: International Theater Festival 2014,”**on Kennedy Center Stages March 10-30. A feast at multiple venues of the best theater from elsewhere. Check out “The Suit,” from the Theatre des Bouffes du Nord, legendary director Peter Brooks adaptation of a South African short story; “Savannah Bay,” starring Emmanuelle Riva, from the Theatre de ‘Ateleir; and “Rupert,” about, you guessed it, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, making its U.S. premiere, by the Melbourne Theater Company. Go to [kennedy-center.org/worldstages](http://www.kennedy-center.org/programs/festivals/13-14/world/index.cfm) for more information.

**“Water by the Spoonful,”** a Pulitzer Prize winner by Quiara Alegria Hudes. is at the Studio Theater, March 5-April 23.

**Schubert’s “Winterreise,”** a great song cycle for voice and piano, performed by bass-baritone Ryan McKinny and pianist Kim Pensinger comes to the Barns at Wolf Trap, March 7.

**“Hamlet, the rest is silence,”** Synetic Theatre’s, wordless rendering of Shakespeare’s tale of the Danish prince, March 13-April 6.

**“The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,”** a play that will sneak up on you like a friend you didn’t know you had. At Ford’s Theatre March 14-May 17.

**“Camp David,”** a new play, about Carter, Begin, Sadat and a peace treaty, directed by Molly Smith, at Arena Stage, Mar 21-May 4.

**Voices From a Changing Middle East Festival. Theater J presents its annual festival, featuring “The Admission,”** in collaboration with the Cameri Theatre and the Arab-Hebrew Theatre of Jaffa, by Motti Lerner, March 20-April 6 and “Golda’s Balcony”, April 10-27, with Tovah Feldshu portraying Golda Meir in a play by William Gibson (“The Miracle Worker”). Plus readings and other events.

**The British Invasion: The Beatles & The Rolling Stones**—The Washington Ballet presents two rock ballets, “Trey McIntire’s ‘A Day in the Life’” and Christopher Bruce’s “Rooster,” March 6-8 at the Kennedy Center

**Some Musical Highlights:**

**March1**

Kathy Mattea at Sixth and I Historic Synagogue, a Washington Performing Arts Society concert.

“Sweet Honey in the Rock” at Music Center at Strathmore.

**March7**

The Minetti Quartet at the Embassy of Austria, Embassy Series.

**March 29**

Johnny Clegg at Lisner Auditorium.

**April 11-12**

“The Romantics: Schubert and Goethe,” In Series at Heurich House Museum.

**April1 2**

“Of Thee We Sing: The Marian Anderson 75th Anniversary Celebration (Washington Performing Arts Society), with Jessye Norman and Soloman Howard at DAR Constitution Hall.

Hilary Hahn, Music Center at Strathmore (WPAS)

**May 4-11**

Blue Note at 75; jazz celebration concerts at the Kennedy Center.

Nicole Cusick •

The spring theater season is off to a strong start, with some venues pushing boundaries with their productions and others bringing mainstream favorites to town.

For it’s production of Richard III, running through March 16, the Folger Theatre reconfigured it’s Elizabethan Theatre into its first ever theatre in the round. Traditionally used as a proscenium space, the stage has been flipped, making the playing space a central square ring with seats on all sides creating a very tense environment that thrusts spectators into the action of the play. A promo video showing how the space was transformed is at www.folger.edu.

Keegan Theatre is bringing a very different feel-good musical to town: “Hair,” opening Mar. 15. Last winter, Keegan produced a very successful run of “Cabaret,” so “Hair” – with several of the same cast members – is likely to be an equally successful production.

The Washington Ballet will present a special limited engagement at the Kennedy Center, “British Invasion: The Beatles & The Rolling Stones,” Mar. 5-9. Marking the 50th anniversary of the Beatles coming to America, this thrilling and thought-provoking performance is set to classic tunes by the Beatles and the Stones. The featured choreographers include Trey McIntyre, Christopher Bruce and Christopher Wheeldon.

The Studio Theatre is bringing D.C. a show with a lot of buzz: “Water by the Spoonful,” the 2012 Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Quiara Alegría Hudes. The second play in her trilogy, the play is about Elliot, a combat veteran who lives in North Philadelphia. Elliot, who is taking care of his dying mother, relies on his cousin Yaz as he tries to adjust to civilian life. Other characters face the challenge of getting clean and sober as they struggle against adversity. Described by the New York Times as “a moving collage of lives in crisis,” the show opens Mar. 5.

Check out the spring performance guide to learn more about the productions on D.C.-area stages in the coming months.

Gary Tischler •

The voice on the phone is clear and friendly, not unlike the singing voice. It’s conversational, the voice of a woman who seems well rested and comfortable.

It’s the voice of Rosanne Cash, who’s coming to town this Friday for a concert at Lisner Auditorium, singing songs from her new album, “The River & The Thread.” It’s a group of songs which seem at once personal and intimate, but also generously sung as stories we all can share in, songs of experience, passed on down or rediscovered.

The idea for the songs came from various road trips Cash took through several southern states with her husband, John Leventhal, who is the producer, arranger and a guitarist on the album.

“It’s not an exercise in nostalgia,” she said. “I’m from there, I was born in Memphis, I worked there, my family is a part of all that—Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, but I had my growing up in California, and I’ve lived in New York for the last 20 years, so I’ve been in different places in different times. I’ve been here for twenty years now, so I guess you can say I’m a New Yorker.”

She has a pretty good handle on who she is now, who she was and what she’s a part of.

She is after all the daughter of Johnny Cash and his first wife Vivian, and stepdaughter of June Carter Cash.

She started out as a sharp voiced introspective singer. In her twenties, she married country-folk star Rodney Crowell.

There’s enough drama, history, threads and talent in her life to make for an epic musical series: two marriages, three daughters, and a son; the daughter of a weighty legend; bearing the weight of expectations that go with that; and a period of illness that began with brain surgery, after she announced that she had the rare brain disease, Chiari Malformation Type I.

We don’t talk about her dad, her step-mother or her mother—all of whom died within a fairly short time of each other. Maybe it’s because it’s a conversation she’s had so many times and the residue is in so much of her music, that there’s no doing justice to it in the brief time we have.

Instead, we talk about the South, about working with her husband—“he wrote 98% of the music, I wrote most of the words,” and “it was really good for our marriage”—about her recent residency at the Library of Congress with Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, and, of course about the album.

Those things are connected, especially in the music, which, because of her considerable gifts as a writer, seem to course out of the river that also contains poetry and the rich word lore of the South.

“I think the South is especially rich in writers and literature, it’s in the blood, in the history,” Cash said, who’s especially fond of Carson McCullers.

Although she had hit albums and records and was often consideredcby connection, if not necessarily by style—to be a part of the Memphis-Nashville musical community, Cash grew up favoring the California style music by the likes of the Eagles, and the musical intimacy of singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell. Some of her early efforts reflected that influence.

These days if you Google her name, in terms of genre or music, it crops up in the all-encompassing halo of “Americana” music, which has its own Grammy category.

“I don’t know, I suppose its about singer-songwriters, about folk-blues-and country,” Cash said. “Emmy Lou Harris has always said that she was Americana before there ever was such a thing.”

Crowell, with whom she had three daughters and with whom she remains friendly, recently won a Grammy with Emmy Lou Harris for best Americana album.

If there is an artist today that encompasses a kind of contemporary Americana, a voice with enough range and experience to speak to large parts of the country, it’s probably Cash. She is in her 50s now, and has dealt musically with her rich and sometimes troubling relationship with her father, in memorial concerts, in the great “Black Cadillac” album—which was highly personal, but also resonated with her father’s audiences—and with the “The List,” which features selections from “100 Essential Country Songs,” which her father compiled for her a long time ago.

But “The River & The Thread” is something different. It’s witchy, folky. It feels like someone traveling through her memories, but also keenly at home with herself. The songs are richly written—musically and word-wise. They have a way of making you want to rummage through them again, right away, and for sure later, like some fresh treasure trove found in the attic.

That’s especially true of “A Feather’s Not a Bird,” the first track, which is as simple as a modern incantation. Her voice is clear and mature in the way some of her early songs were not. Leventhal joins in from time to time, giving resonant timber to parts here and there, and his guitar-playing carries everything along like a boat on a river. The New York Daily News said her music translates “the passion and specificity of roots music into her own graceful language.”

Her voice is traveling here—but not staying—rummaging in her roots and her people. It’s looking into the mirror out on the road. And it’s affecting because while it’s about particular people, journeys and stories, like a Virginia Civil War soldier, for instance, she sings for all of us. We get it right away.

The refrain from “A Feather’s Not a Bird” seems like a riddle solved, but it’s also haunting: “A feather’s not a bird/the rain is not the sea/a stone is not a mountain/but a river runs through me.”

Rosanne Cash appears at Lisner Auditorium, Friday, Feb. 14, at 8 p.m.

Gary Tischler •

When you watch actor Drew Cortese stalk the stage or stand and scan the audience for approval as the murderous Plantagenet King Richard III at the Folger Elizabethan Theatre, you’re almost for a moment tempted to avoid his eyes, lest he gives you that look that says, “You’re next.”

You could, of course, do like one audience member at the Robert Richmond-directed production of William Shakespeare’s “Richard III”: just bow down before the king or cheer him like any member of the groundlings. This is because you’re cajoled, invited, and encouraged to react and interact. It’s the most intimate, interactive “Richard III” that you’ll ever encounter in a lifetime, short of becoming one of his victims in real time. When the Duke of Buckingham, who’s been Richard’s greatest enablers in procuring the royal crown, asks him for his reward and Richard replies by saying “I am not in a giving mood,” you want to yell, “Run, Buckingham, run.”

If the folks at Synetic Theatre offer you silent Shakespeare, Richmond gives you tumultuous, up close and personal Shakespeare, a bang the drums loudly in your face, “Richard III.” Richmond basically had the genteel, front-and-center proscenium with two big pillars façade of the Elizabethan Theatre at the Folger Library renovated into a theater-in-the-round space, complete with spaces that open to receive the remains of murder victims as they are sent on their way, tumbling, struggling, defeated and breathless into a pit. The audience is quite literally on top of everyone. It is in the balcony and rings the square stage. A white stalking ground only occasionally populated by scenery, table or chair, as dark spaces open up to receive the corpses and victims.

This brings a quality to the play which it doesn’t always have. There’s a relentless, time-compressed pace here, compressing the action of what is historically at least five or more years into what seems like several days, and on stage, a couple of hours plus. Time doesn’t so much pass as race by as Richard seems in the end to finally run out of people to kill, murder, seduce, charm, manipulate or ground into bones.

There’s even a piquant in-the-news intimacy, provided by the fact that Richard’s body was found recently in the foundation of a parking lot in Leicester, England, bringing a double whammy of “He’s baaack” to the proceedings on stage.

He’s never been gone, really. The subject of Richard the evil king (or not) has always been up for grabs in historical debates—in novels (“We Speak No Treason”) and most recently in a rather lurid mini-series on Starz cable network, called “The White Queen,” which focuses on many of the women in the Wars of the Roses saga, a fight to the death for the crown of England between the York and Lancaster factions of the Plantagenets.

Shakespeare himself was not a disinterested party in this manner. It is his portrait of the murderous, evil Richard that many people think of as true, and he wrote during the reign of the Tudor Queen Elizabeth I, whose grandfather Henry VII (with a somewhat questionable claim to the throne) killed Richard III at Bosworth Field in 1485.

This Richard—as portrayed by Cortese (he was intense and watchable in the Studio Theatre’s production of “The M-F with the Hat”)—is a charmer, ruthless, even sociopathetic, like some royal serial killer who sweeps away everyone of his path to the throne. He doesn’t have horns, or a hump, or any serious deformity except a limp. All the unnatural stuff is in his voice and eyes. He can be hurt—in the end, he’s killed—but watch how easily he is wounded when one of the princes mocks him by imitating his limp. Most of the time he gets others to do his dirty work. With low-life assassins close to the throne and with orders on paper, hints and lies, the play—one by one—becomes de-peopled.

He’s capable of charm and has the power to bring people to his side—where power sits waiting, and he knows love. “Why Richard loves Richard,” he says at one point.

Mostly, he acts with a kind of self-appreciation and delight that is frightening. Here’s Anne, wife and daughter of enemies he’s killed, and he seduces her into becoming his wife. Here’s his brother Clarence, murdered on false orders. Here’s the nephews, declared illegitimate and murdered. Here’s Stanley and Hastings and Rivers. Sometimes, it almost seems as if proximity can do you in as easily as being a real or perceived threat.

One of the more interesting and powerful aspects of this play is the presence of the women. This is still relatively early Shakespeare before “Hamlet,” “The Tempest” or “Macbeth.” You can see the beginnings of the witches from “Macbeth,” when a quartet of the women gather together in a furious incantation of their sorrows. Julia Motyka as Elizabeth, Nanna Ingvarsson as the Duchess of York, Richard’s mother, Alyssa Wilmoth Keegan as Lady Anne and Naomi Jacobson as Lady Margaret make for a curse-like chorus. Jacobson especially rages like a witchy, ancestral queen who makes a grief-swollen necklace of loss out of every word she spouts.

This production is an engaging one—in the sense that it meets you head on. There’s no ignoring it or any danger of nodding off. Who knows but that Richard might be standing right next to you in the aisle with a death warrant?

— “Richard III” runs through March 9 at the Folger Elizabethan Theatre, 201 East Capitol St., SE.

View photos of the production by clicking on the photo icons below. (photos by Jeff Malet).
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Gary Tischler •

On so many levels, there’s just no other word for it: the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s production of Oscar Wilde’s most popular play, “The Importance of Being Earnest,” is delicious.

It sounds delicious. It looks delicious. Sometimes, you swear you think you’re sniffing flowers from a Victorian English garden, and that’s delicious, too.

This is a production for theatergoers who remember the importance of being Oscar Wilde and why we still pay attention to his writing, works and life. It’s Wilde at his most accessible.

Watching this production—with Keith Baxter, who knows his way around Wildean manners and manors—you get an odd, conflicting set of feelings. It’s a production that seems almost exotically removed from the way we live today, while at the same time it feels familiar as songs you danced to when you were young.

Sometimes, listening and watching the characters at home in their perfectly dressed and outfitted comfort zone of Victorian sunset, is almost like watching an authentic resurrection of an ancient civilization—sort of like the Mayans or Aztecs, minus the human sacrifice. At other times, the Wilde epigrams flow like a rippling stream of smart, wise daggers and darts aimed at the cash-anemic, land-and-title wealthy aristocrats, so consumed by the outward flash of manners, dress codes, pedigree and ritual. They’re like a crescendo of bon mots of vanity .

Many of the epigrams act as dialogue: “work is the curse of the drinking class” and “we should treat all the trivial things of life very seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality” are instantly familiar when spoken, and pertinent today.

We’re in good hands here with the direction by Baxter, who has directed dazzling productions of Wilde’s “An Ideal Husband” and “Lady Windemere’s Fan.” He has staged it in such a way—with the great help of costume designer Robert Perdziola and set designer Simon Higlett—that it feels like a fine-tuned three-act epic, even though it has two sets and a cast of only 11 actors.

But it has words, complete-sentence conversations and battles, spoken in ways that feel like another form of English entirely—and that would cover British English and American English. Surely not even in England do aristocrats speak quite in such a mannered, musical way in which the vowels wage a successful war on consonants and with each other, the o’s swamping the a’s in every skirmish, elongating like Plastic Man.

The story—the kind of story that allowed Wilde to be the bad boy of English high society-is the gilded stuff of farce where closet and bedroom doors are forever slamming, except that there are no closets and bedrooms. There is only a drawing room in London and a rose-rich garden in the countryside. So, instead of slamming doors, you have almost magical and quite unexpected appearances of characters causing havoc and silent screams.

We have two high-minded, extremely well-dressed friends, John or Jack Worthing and the impeccably named Algernon Moncrieff. Algernon is the scion of an aristocratic family, dominated by Lady Bracknell, one of Wilde’s greatest creations, played here with magnificent, steely, nose-up determination by Sian Phillips. Worthing, who lives in the country where he is the guardian of the fetching Cecily Cardew, passes himself off as a non-existent brother named Earnest (thus, the importance of). He can’t drop his disguise because the object of his affections, Gwendolen Fairfax, loves the sound of the name, much more than she might love, say John or Jack. She is also Lady Bracknell’s daughter, a hitch for Worthing, since she disapproves of him.

Meanwhile, Algernon also pretends to be Earnest and heads to the country where he encounters Cecily and the two become immediately smitten with each other. Whereupon, Worthing, then Gwendolyen, followed not much later by Lady Bracknell, arrive in the country. Throw in a pastor, a butler, and a governess, and you have a most delightful, farcical battle of the sexes and classes.

There is a reason of course why this play—as opposed to “Ideal” or the salacious and ground-breaking “Salome”—is Wilde’s most popular play. For one thing, it’s just about perfect in dealing with serious things in a frivolous way—there is no scene more delicious than when Gwendolyn and Cecily, straight-backed and steely, sit down to tea and cakes and muffins and size each other up. It’s a battle of powerful insincerities stated sweetly and with a touch of both sugar and bitters. It’s much the same as when Lady Bracknell measures Cecily as a lovely girl, and bashes her hair, her dress and so forth in devastating and perfunctory fashion. In those days, a woman couldn’t simply say I’m wearing Ralph Lauren, but was immediately spotted for being not quite up to stuff.

There’s also the problem of Worthing not really knowing who he is—as a baby, he was left in a train station in a handbag. The secret behind this little bit of problem is one of maneuvers which Shakespeare often used himself. It’s the kind of things where love is dropped in a box neatly tied with a bow, just waiting to be discovered and resolved.

The cast is letter-perfect, especially Anthony Roach as Algernon, who looks and acts like a refined sort of wastrel, whose stock in trade is a kind of nearly insufferable charm. The two young ladies—Vanessa Morosco as Gwendolen and Katie Fabel as Cecil make great high-spirited foils and sisters to each other. It’s also great to see Floyd King back in the WSTC company as the pastor, revealing once again how to turn a double take and reaction into an Olympian quadruple take.

“Earnest” was Oscar Wilde’s breakthrough play, his first that made the upper classes squirm and like it because they were being amused, even as they were being verbally assaulted. He became a high society darling, achieved fame, wealth and if not acceptance, a certain delicious, acceptable notoriety which lasted only until he was brought down by a relationship he had with Lord Alfred Douglas, which would ensue in suits and Wilde being sent to prison for “gross indecency.” He never again returned to his adopted homeland, to be a proper, aristocratic Englishman. He died in 1900 in Paris.

“The Importance of Being Earnest” is Wilde before all that—at the top of his game. He could say with no modesty, but great accuracy, that “I have nothing to declare but my genius.” And in “Earnest,” it’s a delicious and true declaration.

“The Importance of Being Earnest,” a Shakespeare Theatre Company production, is at the Lansburgh Theatre through March 2.
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