Performance

Nicole Cusick • January 16, 2015

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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Gary Tischler •

When you look at the length of “The Tallest Tree in the Forest”, the remarkable resurrection play, written and performed by Daniel Beaty in the Kreeger Theatre at Arena Stage—which runs two hours—you think two things at once.

It’s too long. It’s too short.

Beaty—singer, actor, playwright, author, educator—has taken on the task of presenting the remarkable and turbulent character, personality, life and times of Paul Robeson—as singer, actor, athlete, teacher, activist, political figure, and civil rights leader in a biographical piece of theater, densely populated by some 40 characters, all of them played by Beaty.

It’s an exhausting, sometimes steamrollering, experience for an audience, no matter what your level of experiential or personal attachment to the subject at hand. As such, it has the effect of feeling too long.

Yet, it’s also an exhilarating experience. It works as drama and works as a kind of wish that you knew more and want to know more. As a result, it also feels too short.

It’s a daunting task Beaty—who has connected with Arena before as performer and playwright—has set for himself because not only is he playing all the parts, somewhat like an actor doing a one-man “Hamlet”—but he is also portraying a redoubtable, giant figure in American cultural, political and civil rights history. Robeson and his amazing rise, all gifts blazing gloriously, his commitments to social justice for African Americans all in and all the way, require almost equal performance gifts on the part of the actor on stage. He has to have the range to play young Robeson, the great singer Robeson, the philandering Robeson, the roused, courageous and stubborn Robeson and old and dying Robeson.

That life of Robeson’s resonates on the stage during the commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday and the impending celebration of Black History Month. Before there was King and the March on Washington and the heroic, massive changes of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, there was Robeson. He himself called himself “the most famous African American in the world.” He was in the vanguard, a huge contradiction of a man, speaking out, singing out and speaking truth to power before there was ever such an imposing voice and man doing so.

Beaty, working with director Moises Kaufman (“The Laramie Project” “The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde”, and “33 Variations” among others) and his edgy Tectonic Theater Company Project, gives us the man in full, if not the total man.

Robeson, one should remember, grew up the son of a minister who was a former slave, was a high school star athlete and student-performer, got a scholarship to Rutgers University and was a football All-American there, became famous for his singing early on during the Harlem Renaissance, starred in two plays by Eugene O’Neill, including “The Emperor Jones,” was the first Jim singing “Old Man River”, took up the cause of civil right, confronted President Harry Truman on anti-lynching laws face to face, fell into the clutches of the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era, and ran afoul of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover for his stubborn embrace of Soviet Union policies.

That doesn’t even include Robeson’s troubled but long marriage to Eslanda “Essie” Goode, whom he married in 1921—she was confidante, manager, lover, wife. The relationship was often quarrelous and wounding. Robeson was a habitual philanderer and had many affairs notably with his Desdemona Uta Hagen in “Othello,” but the couple stayed together.

Somehow, Beaty manages to pull together—if not always in focus—the many strands of Robeson’s overpowering personality and gifts, especially when singing a number of songs that range from “Get on Board Lil’ Chillun’,” “Go Down Moses,” “Great Day,” “Go Down, Moses” and many others. The voice is not necessarily Robeson’s (check out Robeson’s “Ol Man River” on the Web), but it’s supple, more rangy and affective in its own way, striving for the grandeur of Robeson. Nevertheless, it’s in his characterizations that Beaty really shines—we get Truman, civil rights leader Mary Bethune McLeod, who dubbed him “The Greatest Tree in the Forest”—Robeson’s father and others. So effective is in a blistering argument between Robeson and Essie that you feel for her, literally, before you remember that you’re listening to a voice, not seeing a woman.

Robeson—who believed with all his gifts and heart that the artist should be an activist, a fighter against slavery and for freedom and justice —seemed sometimes willfully inclined towards tragedy. His support of Stalin’s Soviet Union even after he discovered that Stalin was murdering and imprisoning Jewish intellectuals goes beyond stubbornness, it’s a clinging to a good principle in defense of evil, a kind of forgiveness he did not apply to his own country. Robeson suffered for his principles as well as mistakes. HIs passport was taken away, thus robbing him of his livelihood singing worldwide. There was a deliberate effort to erase him from history on the part of Hoover and the government.

There are harrowing scenes in this play. His confrontation with Truman on the issue of rising instances of lynching in the South is conducted against a stage background of increasing shadows of men hanging from trees and his interview with a noted Jewish poet in the Soviet Union is a kind of dance of tragic tension.

You walk away with several feelings. You feel the freshness of the material, remember references and music, and wonder from which context members of the audience at any given time are experiencing this resurrection of Paul Robeson. And you walk out feeling, as if you’ve been at a fragmented feast, daunting, but also richer than expected. And you walk away hungry for more.

“The Tallest Tree in the Forest” runs at the Kreeger Theater at Arena Stage through Feb. 16.

Gary Tischler •

There’ll be over a 150 plays and shows to choose from. Here’s a look at a few we thought might be interesting. Making choices at the Fringe is not always a rational process of course, but here goes. Sometimes the titles and descriptions are worth the ride.

DATELINE: MACBETH (Quattro Gatti Theatre Company) and MACBETH; THE INSTRUMENTS OF DARKNESS (The Rude Mechanicals). Two very different takes on the Scottish play. “Dateline” takes place in a tropical setting, with this hook: “As funny as it is macabre, it goes TV mysteries one better.”

ANTIGONE (The Wandering Theatre Company) and BITCH: A PLAY ABOUT ANTIGONE (Naked Theatre Company). When’s the last time you had a chance to see not one but two plays about Sophocles’ ancient Greece heroine who defies her father and pays for it. Not ever, except at the Fringe.

THE FEVER (Patrick O’Brien, director). O’Brien’s “Underneath the Lintel” was a big hit at last year’s Fringe, and now the director brings Wallace Shawn’s horrific and provoking play to the Fringe.

WISTARIA (The Wistaria Project). “A traveling meeting that questions our historical past and present through a hallucinatory amalgam of U.S. texts, traditional song and actions mysterious and banal.” We like it because we have no idea what this meant but it sounds interesting.

THE OLD MAN NEVER LET IT GO (Hector J. Reynoso). A visual adaptation of “The Old Man and the Sea,” with music and dance, starring Reynoso. Hemingway lives!

CABARET XXX: EVERYBODY FCKING DIES (Pinky Swear Producitos). The life and death of Femme Fatales and other matters. Great title.

REPORT TO AN ACADEMY (Scena Theatre). An ape named Red Peter presents a thesis on his life in captivity to a scientific academy. From Robert McNamara’s Scena Theatre.

DISTRICTLAND (Bucharest Inside the Beltway). For the Millennial in your life, a satire and play about starting your career in the District. “Spoiler: You are Not Your LinkedIn Profile”

CONTRAFACT OF FREEDOM (Hunger and Thirst Theatre Collective). We are always interested in anything to do with Francis Scott Key. The Star-Spangled Banner: American history’s most unlikely origin story. By Alex Pappas.

DRACULA: A LOVE STORY (Wry Press). Written by DC Theatre Scene critic Tim Treanor, an intensely romantic take on the all-knowing, ever present vampire of our times. Directed by Christopher Henley with Lee Ordeman.

CHESAPEAKE (The Edge of the University Players 2). This magical realist fable is by Lee Blessing, one of America’s best and most evocative playwrights. A tale about a New York performance artist, a firebrand conservative Southern politician and a Chesapeake Bay Labrador retriever.

MEDEA’S GOT SOME ISSUES (No Rules Theatre Company and Spain arts & culture). Classy Babe turned ancient Greek temptress tells all. Featuring Lisa Hodsoll.

FEISTY OLD JEW (Charlie Varon). A one-man show about Bernie, 83, who hates yoga studios, S6 coffee, young tech millionaires and what they’re doing to San Francisco.

THE MONSTER SONGS (Dr. Dour & Peach) Dr. Dour sings and plays 10-string guitar. Peach plays cello and banjo and they sing and tell the personal stories of lovesick mummies, giant lizards and bargain-hunting zombies. Featuring Toby Mulford (composer) and Rachel Spicknall Mulford.

It’s back.

The theater festival that anticipates changing times and has become a hot bed for everything new in performance art, the Capital Fringe Festival, returns for 18 days of “uninhibited and creative performances” at over 15 venues round the city, July 10-27.

Tickets are already on sale at the Fort Fringe Box Office at 607 New York Ave., near the Washington Convention Center.
This festival will mark the last year Capital Fringe will be headquartered at this location. The good news is that it will move into a new space at 1358 Florida Avenue currently occupied by the Connersmith Gallery.

This year’s venues include a variety of locations in the continually changing downtown world. Performances will be held at several spaces at the Atlas Performing Arts Center, located in the new and hot H Street Corridor area; Caos on F; the Bedroom at Fort Fringe; the Baldacchino Tent Bar; the Dupont Circle Q Street Exit; DC Reynolds Bar; The Shop at Fort Fringe; Gearbox on 7th Street; the Gallery and Main Stage at the Goethe Institut; Hillyer Art Space; Jet Hair Designs; the Martin Luther King Library; Mountain at Mount Vernon United Methodist Church; Plush Beauty Box; the Fridge; The Source Theater; Union Stylus; the Warehouse; and the Capitol Reflecting Pool.

Fringe, under the leadership of founder, president and chief executive Julieanne Brienza, has continually expanded the boundaries of theater and performing arts. The Capital Fringe Festival is one of many around the world, a tradition of cutting edge theater that began in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Today, you’re likely to run across a mixture of drama and dance, classical plays and vaudeville acts, stand up comedians, puppets, opera and drama, shows that include Twitter and Facebook, straight forward dramas and not so straight forward plays, musical acts, site-specific plays, one-man and one-woman shows and much more. This is a festival for every generation.

Gary Tischler •

In a telephone interview, the singer-actress Megan Hilty will sometimes tell you that she felt “terrified” on certain occasions in her career: when she took over the role Glinda in the Broadway smash “Wicked”, for instance, or when she performed in her first solo concert.

Yet, if you’ve seen her on stage or on television, solo or with a big cast, you notice something about Hilty. She’s a big voiced but rangy song stylist with a blonde and curvy, glittery presence. She is the epitome of people born to the stage, to the “gotta sing, gotta dance (and gotta emote and act)” world of the Great White Way. She’s a Broadway baby in the best and whole sense of the phrase.

The “Wicked” star and star of the Broadway musical version of “Nine to Five” is probably best known nationally for her turn as, well, a kind of Broadway baby in the television series “Smash,” which lasted two seasons and centered around the rivalries and tempestuous relationships and maneuverings involved in the making of a Broadway musical. For theater buffs, it was more than just a guilty pleasure, it was a high-dudgeon melodrama with love affairs, betrayals, scheming and battling for big roles on stage and behind the scenes, not to mention lots of singing and dancing production numbers. Hilty was paired with former “American Idol” star Katharine McPhee, competing for the female lead in a show being put together by the likes of Anjelica Huston and Debra Messing.

Hilty was a natural in it—the perfect fit for a dancer and singer—and comedienne– who was hungry for a starring role.

“That was a great experience,” she said. “It gave me a chance to really act, to use all of the gifts you have.”

The Washington state-born star started out wanting to be an opera singer, but “you know, you have to really start early, it’s like you’re just like an Olympic athlete. So, I turned to theater.” She’s a 2004 graduate of the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama and a recipient of the National Society of Arts and Letters Award for Excellence in Musical Theater.

Straight out of Carnegie Mellon, she auditioned for a part in “Wicked” and got a part as a standby for Glinda, in 2004. She took over the part in 2005 and ended her run in 2006 before reprising the role again when she originated the role in the Los Angeles production in 207.

“I was terrified, originally,” she said. “Kristin Chenowith is kind of the standard for that role.”

Hilty has done guest appearances on television—a memorable role in an episode of “Crime Scene Investigation”—”CSI”— with the resonant title of “Deep Fried and Minty Fresh” as the manager of a fast food restaurant called Choozy’s Chicken. “That,” she said, “was fun.”

But her favorite role was performing as Lorelei Lee, the gold-digging ambitious blonde of “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” a role made famous by two American entertainment originals, Carol Channing on stage and Marilyn Monroe in the movie version.

“I absolute love her [Monroe]. She was such a smart, funny and talented woman,” Hilty said. “It was a Encore production, a concert staging in 2012, but I felt so thrilled to be doing that. I’ve seen most of her movies.”

She wowed New York critic Ben Brantley, who wrote that Hilty performed with “a finely graded style that layers filigree comic flourishes over the raw will and stamina of a top flight athlete.” “Ms. Hilty,” Brantley wrote, “sets the tone for a production that locates the athletic, all-American verve in ‘Gentlemen.’ ”

“If I had a dream,” Hilty said. “I would love to do the role in a fully, big-time Broadway production.”

It might happen. Meanwhile, she’s in town to do her second Christmas stint at the Kennedy Center, this time at the Terrace Theater, singing standards, perhaps a song or two from her 2013 solo album “It Happens All the Time”, and Christmas carols, including “Jingle Bells.”

Life moves on. She married musician Brian Gallagher. In September, she gave birth to their daughter Viola Philomena.

“That’s her in the background,” she said during a telephone interview. And indeed, there was the sound of a baby complaining a little, making her presence known.

For Hilty, the song of Viola Philomena sounds like her very own Christmas carol.

Megan Hilty’s “A Kennedy Center Christmas” is at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater, Saturday, Dec. 13.

Gary Tischler •

George Stevens, Jr., has ended his long reign as producer of the Kennedy Center Honors, the annual star-studded, president-in-residence bash, honoring the nation’s cultural and performance art elites, and the television show that goes with it.

By now, this isn’t news, but many Washington cultural and media remain startled by the way the news was delivered.

Stevens, introduced by Kennedy Center board chairman David Rubenstein and flanked by his son Michael, came out on stage at the beginning of the second act of the Kennedy Center Honors production and said that he would not be returning as producer next year, nor would his son. He said that the chairman had told him he wanted a new producer.

Stevens was entering the last year of a contract and was in negotiation with the board. From the podium, Stevens said, “We accept that this will be our last honors. This is our good night.”

This was the 37th Annual Kennedy Center Honors, at which singers Al Green and Sting, actress and comedienne Lily Tomlin, actor Tom Hanks and ballerina Patricia McBride were honored Dec. 7. Stevens’s announcement came as a shock to the audience, and later this week, to much of Washington.

A longtime Georgetown resident, Stevens is the son of legendary Hollywood director George Stevens, who helmed such classics as “Shane,” “A Place in the Sun,” “Giant” and “The Diary of Anne Frank” as well as “Gunga Din.”

Stevens is a much honored producer, director, playwright (“Thurgood”), and former head of the American Film Institute. Stevens won numerous Emmys for the televised production of the Honors.

Kennedy Center spokesman and communications director John Dow issued a statement from the Kennedy Center which said that “This was the last year on George Stevens, Jr.’s contract and George announced from the stage of the Honors performance on Sunday night that he would be stepping down as producer. the Kennedy Center is enormously grateful for the contributions George and his son Michael have made to the Honors over the years. The Kennedy Center Honors have grown in stature over the past 37 years to become the preeminent recognition of the performing arts in America. With Sunday night’s news, the Kennedy Center will begin a search for an Honors producer that will build upon this strong foundation in the years to come.”

Gary Tischler •

From a distance, you could mistake them for tourists checking out the sights at the Kennedy Center—mom, older brother, young sister.

That wasn’t the case, though. They’d been here before.

The boy, with a slightly brighter shade of blonde hair, was 12-year-old Henry Wager, with his mom, Nancy Tarr, and his young sister Naomi, 10.

Wager had just gotten his hair dyed so that he could look a little more like The Prince, or the title role in the Washington National Opera Company’s family holiday production of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s “The Little Prince,” composed by Rachel Portman, and originally staged by WNO Artistic Director Francesca Zambello at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater Friday through Sunday, Dec. 19 to 21.

Wager—and his sister Naomi, who will be in the WNO’s Children Chorus in the production—is a familiar presence by now at the Kennedy Center and the WNO. Last year, Wager portrayed the part of the Angel in Jeanine Tesori’s world-premiere (and very popular) “The Lion, the Unicorn and Me.”

“Francesca asked me earlier this year if I wanted to play the prince, and I said sure, I was very honored,” Wager said. “It’s a lot different from anything I’ve done. It’s complicated, you know. He’s a prince, and he lives on this little planet by himself, and his prized possession, a rose. He’s kind of obsessive about it. And he meets this downed pilot in the desert.”

The family lived in Bethesda, but now live in Cooperstown, N.Y., home to the annual summer Glimmerglass Opera Festival, where Zambello is artistic director. For Glimmerglass, Wager performed the role of Winthrop in “The Music Man” and with the children’s chorus sang in Tobias Picker’s “American Tragedy.” So, Wager is already a fairly experienced performer in the opera world.

He’s thoughtful about “The Little Prince.” “The music isn’t like traditional opera, it doesn’t exactly sound like that, it’s modern, you now, like some American operas.”

Watching him and listening to him and his sister, you see something interesting. The young Wagers — Henry and Naomi — are very articulate about music and performing, and yet, there is no sense of self-importance, of being different from other kids. They compete, they talk each other up, they’re proud of each other.

“I want to be in a lead role someday, like Henry,” Naomi offered. “I want to travel to a foreign country.” The production of “The Music Man” traveled to Oman. “You know, the prince is really a kid, he doesn’t understand anything about adults, and he has that thing for the rose.”

“I don’t have any object like that,” Henry said. “We have the cats,” Naomi said. “They’re twins. Maple and Hennepin.”

“You know how he’s different,” Henry said of the prince, “he sees the world in numbers, that’s how he processes information.”

“They were both in the chorus,” Nancy Tarr said. “They work hard.”

“Music is a lot of lessons. I mean lots.And lots of practice.” Henry said.

“They have a normal childhood,” Tarr said. “That’s what I wanted for them. They play sports, they listen to music, they do what kids do. And they do this.”

Henry plays baseball, second base, and he lives in a town, which houses the Baseball Hall of Fame. “It’s cool to live there,” he said. His favorite baseball player Denard Span of the Washington Nationals.

“I listen to all kinds of music,” Henry said. “But I really like listening to movie scores. I love John Williams.”

Naomi currently likes singer Meghan Traynor. “That’s this week she likes her,” Henry said, skeptical. She, of course, likes Taylor Swift. “I liked “Shake It Off” and “Blank Spaces.”

They sound and look just like—still—kids. And they’re wise to it.

Naomi summed it up: “Henry’s got one year left. I’ve got three.”

What’s that? we ask. “Childhood. Henry has one year. I’ve got three.”