Performance

Gary Tischler • August 20, 2014

“Sometimes, it’s hard to believe it all,” said Eric Schaeffer, the Artistic Director of Signature Theatre, which has begun its 25th anniversary with a characteristic production—in terms of the theatre’s history—of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park with George,” now running through Sept. 21.

This anniversary season will be full of what you might call Signature’s signature, its outlook, viewpoint, production history, interests, mission and style, and yes, there will be some emphasis, to paraphrase the late Robin Williams’s riff from “The Birdcage,” on “Sondheim, Sondheim, Sondheim” throughout the year.

Sondheim provided the theatre and Schaeffer with its breakout hit back at the start of the 1991-92 season, when it mounted an electric, critically acclaimed production of “Sweeney Todd,” Sondheim’s dark and exciting take on the murderous barber of Fleet Street. “It was just our second season, and that, for sure, jumped us right out into the public eye. It’s still a little startling when you think about it.” The show won a slew of Helen Hayes awards, which was a big deal for a theatre that was only in its second season, operating out of a renovated garage in an iffy neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia.

“You’ve got to remember a little of what theater in Washington was like twenty-five years ago,” Schaeffer said. “Outside of Woolly Mammoth, which was always edgy, and reveling in plays by new playwrights, it was pretty much a large-venue scene,” Schaeffer said. “In terms of musicals, certainly, and straight plays, we were doing something different, and we still are.”

Schaeffer clearly has an affinity for Sondheim, whose often dark, daring works don’t necessarily travel well into the hinterlands. “I think he’s unique in the history of American musical theater—certainly what he did was a departure from what came before. You never know what he’s going to do next. I mean, who else would write a musical about a serial killer in Victorian England, about presidential assassins, a very dark version of Grimm’s fairy tales, and the life and loves of the French Iimpressionist scene.”

The theatre was started 25 years ago by Schaeffer and Donna Magliaccio and has consistently pioneered all kinds of theater efforts. It’s stated mission was “to produce contemporary musicals and plays, reinvent classic musicals, develop new work, and reach its community through engaging educational and outreach opportunities.”

It’s fair to say that Signature has done just that, mounting plays by new authors, serving up Sondheim (and Sondheim-like) musicals, and workshopped and fully formed new musicals (“Giant,” a musical version of the George Stevens film class and Edna Ferber move comes to mind), as well as providing new playwrights, many of them local, a venue to explore their work.

There’s more. In 2007, Signature moved to new digs in Shirlington Village, a spiffy space with a main stage and two black box theaters. The relocation caused a certain amount of economic revival in the area, much as Arena and Studio, and Woolly and the Shakespeare Theatre have done in their respective neighborhoods. It attracts about 70,000 theatergoers a year.

Schaeffer been a true theatrical pioneer. He directed key productions in the hugely successful and celebrated Sondheim festival at the Kennedy Center a number of years ago. He’s been a champion of collaboration. Recently Signature’s co-production of “Hello Dolly” with Paul Tetreault’s Fords Theater shared a Helen Hayes Award for best resident musical. The rewards have been many—320 Helen Hayes Award nominations and 82 Hayes Awards.

“I think the collaboration, working with others, and with authors, encouraging new scripts, keeps everything exciting,” Schaeffer, who’s now working on a production of “Gigi” for the Kennedy Center’s theater season, said.

In December, the curtain goes up on the world premiere musical version of the hit movie, “Diner,” by pop-rock star Sheryl Crow and film director Barry Levinson. A revival of the musical “Elmer Gantry” and “Sex With Strangers,” a new play by Laura Eason directed by Aaron Posner hit the boards in October.

And in 2015, there will be “Simply Sondheim” in April. It’s an original tribute and revue created by Schaeffer featuring six Signature performers and a 16-piece orchestra celebrating the gifted American genius and in many ways, Signature’s inspirational soul. Signature has done 23 productions of Sondheim works over the years, including this second go-around with “Sunday in the Park with George.”

The George in question is impressionist painter Georges Seurat, famous for his “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” which is the focus of the musical. The musical, by Sondheim and James Lapine, won a Pulitzer Prize for drama, one of the few musicals to ever win that award.

“Sondheim’s creations were different from anyone else,” Schaeffer said. “That’s also what we’re trying to do—new and original shows, new ways of approaching old shows.”

Gary Tischler • August 7, 2014

“Carrie: The Musical,” now at the Studio Theater’s 2nd Stage, carries a lot of baggage.

Everyone remembers the source material. “Carrie” was one of horror novelist’s Stephen King’s first big successes in 1974, with its story of a high school girl who is an outcast, lives with a scary ultra-religious mother and has tele-kinetic powers. The 1976 movie version, directed by Brian de Palma and starring Cissy Spacek in the title role with Amy Irving and Piper Laurie, became a huge hit, resonant with teens and adults alike, and scary as all get out. There’s also a fairly recent but not so successful movie remake.

On top of that, there’s “Carrie: The Musical,” legendary in a not so good way, a production staged on Broadway in 1988 to the tune of around seven to eight million dollars in production costs, with a three-day run after some scathing reviews, making it the one of Broadway’s biggest flops ever.

But wait: Things aren’t so bad on 14th Street in D.C. after all. “Carrie: The Musical” isn’t “Carrie,” the movie, by any means, but it’s hardly flop-worthy in its Studio incarnation, directed by Keith Alan Baker and Jacob Janssen, and featuring a big-voiced, moving star turn by newcomer Emily Zickler as Carrie White.

The musical—described often somewhat mistakenly as a rock musical—remains the work of composer Michael Gore with lyrics by Dean Pitchford and a book by Lawrence D. Cohen, which hews fairly closely to the book, with some differences.

As a musical, “Carrie” is more of a pop-rock opera: there are 25 musical numbers performed by a fierce, high-energy cast, a mix of soaring, sometimes searing and soft ballads, jump up and down guitar-driven power numbers. The songs and the music aren’t necessarily memorable—there’s no “Wicked”-like “Gravity” number, for instance, but taken as a whole, they make their impression, carry the story along with energy and fit the material emotionally.

And it’s the whole that counts here, not so much individual incidents, although individual cast members Zickler, Barbara Walsh as her crazed, God-sick mom, Maria Rizzo as Sue, a sympathetic class mate, Robert Mueller as Tommy Ross, the likeable star jock who wants to be a writer, and Eben K. Loan as the hating, hateful high school mean queen Chris do stand out.

It’s still the same old story—Carrie, a 17-year-old misfit in high school and ignorant of sex and the world, discovers the onset of menstruation in a shower with her classmates, for which she is mercilessly bullied. She lives with her mother, who keeps her away from boys by locking her up in a closet and forces her to pray constantly.

Sue Snell, the school nice girl who’s dating Tommy, the star jock, takes pity on Carrie, and makes her try to fit in by making Tommy ask her to the prom. The result is all too familiar to most of us, even if the original novel is 40 years old.

It is the staging as much as anything that pulls you in here. It’s the intimate setting of the smallish fourth floor theater at the Studio, with the results that you’re always fairly close to the actions and the actors, who emote, dance group and re-group, and sing their hearts out within sometimes inches, and feet of the audience. And the directors and designer make do mostly with imagination—this is not a million-dollar set, but a door opening here, closing there, lights shifting the scenes and acting as a kind of malleable, moving set. There’s nothing fancy here, except the choreography of shifting the groups around the stage, until all of them become familiar. What’s special isn’t the blood and guts but the young characters on stage.

There are some effective, kinetic (no pun intended) moments here—“A Night We’ll Never Forget,” which opens the second act, is resonant of the cast preparing for the dance in “West Side Story,” Zickler displaying vocal and emotional range in Carrie’s plaintive “Why Not Me?,” the lovely “Unsuspecting Hearts” and “Once You See,” Walsh singing powerfully her own youthful memories in “I Remember How Those Boys Are.”

Because Zickler has made Carrie so appealing with her uncertainty, her yearning to be normal, her painfully shy stance with Billy, the story moving at a train-wreck speed, makes you afraid for her, it fills you with dread, but also expectations. How will they stage her ragingly destructive power, how will the ultimate bad trick of the bucket of blood work out?

Well, it’s not the movie, but it still has the power to shock. Wisely, I think, the production lays off high-tech spectacle. Carrie’s power may be horrific and weird, but it’s the deed that counts.

The musical-opera has a lot of punch, surprisingly so, given the reputation of the original production. There’s a lot of talent on display here, fresh, volatile. It’s a full-throttle reminder that life can still be like high school. It’s not rock and roll, but I like it.

Gary Tischler •

That’s some bird, that stupid f—–g bird.

That would be “Stupid F——g Bird,” the play by director-playwright Aaron Posner, now getting resurrected in zingy, audience-pleasing style for a late-summer run at the Woolly Mammoth Theater. It will be directed by Woolly’s stalwart ‘s artistic director and founder Howard Shalwitz.

You might remember that “SFB,” Posner’s deft, irreverent riff on Anton Chekov’s “The Seagull” in a very contemporary and near-interactive mode debuted last summer as a play commissioned by Woolly as part of its “Free the Beast” program, an ambitious ten-year project that supports new plays (some 25 new works) through workshops, commissioning and research.

And look what happened.

It’s not every day that a regional theater gives birth to a play that is so defiantly theatrical that it succeeds beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. The play won two Helen Hayes awards for Best New Play and Best Resident Play for the 2013-2014 season. Not only that the play moved on to very successful- productions in Boston and Los Angeles.

“We thought it would be great to look at it again, from the audience standpoint and from the artist’s—the actors, myself, Aaron and the designers,” Shalwitz said. “And you know, this whole thing has just been amazing. It’s a kind of phenomena, yeah, sure. I mean, you remember the thing where Con asks the audience to give him advice on how to win back Nina’s affections, right? Well, the preview audiences were ready for it. This time, I think we saw a lot of repeat attendees from last year’s productions.”

“I just think Aaron came up with something new, but it was a trick thing, you know,” Shalwitz said. “I think he (and the whole production team) accomplished something very difficult to bring off. You can read this and not necessarily get the whole sense of it. It wasn’t a rip-off of Chekhov, or some sendup that totally disrespected the original, because that play was full of pathos, but was also, in its own quieter way, funny and nearly tragic. We always know what play we’re in. And so do the actors. We’re here now, so to speak.”

Which is why an actor comes on the stage and says, “Start the f—–g” play.

The “SFB” in question is a seagull who, in both the original and Posner’s version meets an unhappy end by the hand of Con, the angst-ridden, mother-issues semi-hero of this saga, a would-be-poet-artist-playwright who wants to discover new forms, a new kind of art and new life in the utmost serious way. He’s also in love—grandly, operatically, hopelessly, and close to suicide —with Nina, a feverish, beautiful young would-be actress with whom he’s staging a new-form play for the benefit of his mother Emma, who is a famous star of stage, screen and everything else, as well as for her new lover, a famous writer.

We’re in familiar territory here. These are Americans who could be found in People Magazine, theatricals of the celebrity world. Here’s Posner, making it here and now as in “here we are,” the oft-repeated phrase that Nina uses in Con’s little play.

“Aaron found new forms, too, for contemporary theater,” Shalwitz said. “The actors talk to the audience. They’re self-aware of being in a play. They want involvement. They don’t want to be alone with their problems, and so it is a new form. That pathos in the original is here, too. I think it’s changed a little from where we started. With that, audience connections, it changes a little every time out. “

The language—pungent (life sucks, or the f-word like a loud intruder at a party) also manages to be poetic, a delicate balancing act for actors. There are times when the play seems almost too smart and hip by half, too inside-theaterish. But when you have a cast like this one—the same one that appeared in the original—such a complaint can be reduced to a quibble.

“It’s been some time for the actors and the designers, too, so they don’t have the habit of doing the roles for some time,” Shalwitz said. “They’ve done other parts, and will move on to other parts—Kimberly Gilbert, who plays Masha, is going to play the lead in ‘Marie Antoinette,’ our season opener.”

Gilbert, a Washington treasure, in fact, is one of the acting standouts in this production, playing Mash, the cryptic, depressed young woman, who’s smitten with Conrad—Con to us—but settles for Dev, a practical guy who thinks he has little to recommend him, but ends up with Mash. Mash is a jewel, albeit with some ash on her—she introduces the acts playing the ukulele, dressed in punk black and singing sad songs (“Life is disappointing”) in a kind of bright-eyed, knowing way that contradict the content. Gilbert has a gift for understated emoting and emotion, which is perfect for Mash.

While Kate Eastwood Norris, in the part of Emma, the slightly aging diva actress, Cody Nickell as the facile super-writer Doyle, Darius Pierce as Dev, and Brad Koed as Con and Katie Debuys as Nina are all fine in inventive ways. It’s Rick Foucheux who grounds the play and straddles the line between Chekhov and Posner, then and now, nuanced and way cool, with aplomb as Sorn, the good doctor. He’s the observer, and he’s us in a way—astounded at the keen and keening emotions of the various lovers and would-be lovers. He’s like an audience to a feast, bemused, and moved, and by being his own expansive self, he explains it all to us.

What Shalwitz, Posner and company have accomplished is indeed to present something new. A new form, it respects and then invites the audience and knows that it’s always a complicit partner in a play being performed. As I’ve said more than once, there’s no app for that.

*”Stupid Fuc—g Bird” runs at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre through Aug. 17.*

Gary Tischler • July 17, 2014

If you were alive and young in the 1950s and early 1960s, Elvis may have been king of rock and roll, but the Everly Brothers—Don and Phil—and their music and songs went straight to the top of the charts right along with him.

The duo had hits like “Wake Up Little Suzy,” “Cathy’s Clown,” “All I Have To Is Dream,” “Bye Bye, Love,” “Bird Dog” and a host of others which every teenager worth his name memorized. They had a look—part country, part rock and roll and part pop, two young guys from the south, a little pre-Conway Twitty, pompadoured hair, guitars, the whole package.

And they’re back, in a fashion, on June 28 in Georgetown.

Newmyer Tribute Productions will present a Tribute to the Everly Brothers at Gypsy Sally’s on K Street in Georgetown Saturday with doors opening at 5 p.m. It’s a tribute, featuring some of the area’s top award-winning groups and musicians, including David and Ginger Kitchen, Jelly Roll Mortals, Dede Wyland and Bill Williams, Ruthie Logsdon, Greg Hardin and Bill Starks (of Ruthie and the Wranglers), Buck Stone and Michelle Murray, Willie Barry, the Hummingbirds, Louie Newmyer, Andy Rutherford, Jimi Lethbridge, Amy Sullivan, Bill Baker, Derek Brock and the Lofgren Brothers (Tom, Mike and Mark).

Ron Newmyer, the producer from BandHouse Gigs, is known for producing an array of tribute concerts over the years at a variety of venues, including Strathmore, the Hamilton, the Fillmore and the Barns at Wolf Trap, including tributes to the music of Woodstock, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Simon and Garfunkel and the English Invasion.

“The Everly Brothers had an enormous influence on other groups that followed,” Newmyer said. “The Beatles, for one, really were impressed by their harmonies, and that’s what the Everly Brothers were about. They weren’t exactly rockers. They were part rock, part country and pop. They had enormous success with their songs, and that’s saying something since they recorded when Elvis was king.”

“It’s especially fitting now that we had a tribute to them, since Phil Everly died in January,” Newmyer said. “People are going to get a chance to hear all the popular songs like ‘Suzy’ and ‘Dream,’ but they’re also going to hear songs that they’ve probably never heard before.”

One of the top performers in the tribute concert will be Ruthie Logsdon along with her fellow players from Ruthie and the Wranglers, Greg Hardin and Bill Starks. If you haven’t heard or seen Logsdon at some point during the last 25 years, you don’t’ get out much. “We’ve played everywhere we can play,” she said. “Festivals, county fairs, clubs, and all kinds of venues in the area.” It’s paid off, too—Ruth and her fellow musicians—who now write most of their own songs, have won dozens of Wammies—from the Washington Area Music Association, and are considered by many to be one of the top examples of fast-paced, rock-a-billy, twangy, infectious music makers.

“We don’t do too many slow sings,” Logdon said. “We’re naturally upbeat.”

“I used to be the girl that hung out with musicians, and I’d say, yeah, I’d like to sing, sure, hey, guys, I can sing, kind of thing, I was kind of shy,” she said. But she’s gone far beyond that. Listen to the Wranglers, her natural way with both a twangy, slow ballad, or upbeat, authentic countrified hillbilly music, you can see why the group makes for a popular show.

“When we play, all of us, there’s just such joy and energy in doing it,” she said. “It never gets old. We’re always writing. We’re always playing. It takes a lot of work. You’re always touring. You’re going from radio station to radio station.”

While Logdon is also a graphic artist, most of her friends are musicians. “That’s the world I live in,” she said.

“The thing about the Everly Brothers is that it’s the harmonies,” she said. “They’re just unforgettable. They’re so beautiful.” For the tribute Saturday, Lodson said, “We’re going to do some songs people may not be familiar with, duets and the like. We’ll be doing ‘Gone, Gone Gone,’ ‘Long Time Gone’ and ‘Over So Many Years.’ ”

Ruthie and the Wranglers celebrated 25 years of Wrangler Twang a week before at Gypsy Sally’s.

Gary Tischler •

One of the great joys of the Capital Fringe Festival is that a theatergoer—avid, serious or just tasting—is sure to encounter an experience of the kind that they won’t get anywhere else. Given the volume of theater groups, shows and performers, this is not a guarantee or promise of quality or excellence, which is something that reveals itself in the performance, but it is a promise of things different and new.

Something similar has always been at work in any production put out there by Scena Theater for over two decades under its artistic director and founder Robert McNamara at venues throughout the D.C. area, operating as a kind of one-theater, mini-fringe outfit over time. Eastern European plays, the classics back to Greece, explorations of dada, Fassbinder, modern Irish playwrights, short plays by the avant garde giants like Beckett, Genet and Ionesco, there was always something that was new and refreshing, and often never seen before on Washington stages.

I cannot be entirely sure about this, but one thing you rarely saw in any of McNamara’s and Scena’s productions was McNamara himself, even though he is a veteran and experience actor. By way of the Fringe Festival, now we get a chance to see McNamara the actor in a production that seems to be the very essence of what McNamara and Scena, and by extension, the Fringe is all about.

In “Report to the Academy,” McNamara portrays Red Peter, an ape who has seemingly buried his ape self in order to survive in the human world, and who’s now reporting on his life as a quasi-human to an audience of academics, and ourselves. It’s based on a story by Franz Kafka—the great novelist and short story writer from Prague who write terrifying stories in German about issues of identity in modern society. Gabriele Jakobi, who directed Brecht’s “Mother Courage and her Children” at Scena,” directs “Report to the Academy,” which is being performed at the edgy Caos on F gallery.

Red Peter may be an ape, but don’t confuse “Report to the Academy” with the serendipitous arrival of “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” in your local cineplexes. Red Peter is no Caesar. He’s a being trapped between two worlds, trying to understand himself and the world he lives in. McNamara arrives on stage almost in a limping dance, carrying a tightly-wound cane, he looks on first sight like a slightly tipsy, shaggy vaudeville trouper, or perhaps one of the tramps in “Waiting for Godot,” canvassing the audience with eyes that appear at turns curious, sly, contemplative, challenging.

What follows isn’t so much a report as a story, a contemplation of a journey, of becoming—almost—human, the process of transformation with losses and gains, gains and losses.

It’s a bravura performance by McNamara on a stage that has nothing but a table and a chair, a little lighting and a little day music. Red Peter isn’t bitter. He has obviously thought long and hard about his predicament, about human beings, himself as an ape, himself as a human. He recounts his capture and being shot: “I was hit twice, grazed on the cheek for which I bear a scar, and in the body, a more serious injury.” His dilemma became simple to him—he was being held in a cage, in which he could not sit, stand or lie down. “I had to find a way out , there was no way out, you could only squat,” he says, in dreamy words that seem part lecture, part a discussion of pain.

In order to be free, he understood that he had to abandon his apeness. “They plied with me liquor, “ he says. But he also got to interact with his captors, simple, sometimes brutal sailors by acting like them—drinking, shaking hands, and all that act entailed. “Humans seek freedom, total freedom, which is not natural, as experienced in nature,” he said. Whimsically, he recalls seeing trapeze artist flying true and through the air, being caught, flinging themselves into air. “It was an illusion of freedom.”

The ape, in the end, learns to speak—and in a very nuanced way, like a pedagogue who is also a poet. He launches on a career on the vaudeville stage, a successful one at that. In the process, he gives himself up, a kind of imposed cruelty. “It was either the stage or the zoo,” he explains.

As he tells his stories, you see a kind of self-awareness that is shockingly sad as well as funny. He cannot recall himself in the mirror. And McNamara gives himself little bits, like an actor, a vaudevillian, a song and dance man. His limp often changes, his gait has a foot dangling at times, at other times dancing, he slouches, stands tall, and occasionally, spurts of ape yips and laughter, desire and joy come out of him, as if escaping by memorized accident.

Many writers and observers see the story as a fable and parable about assimilation, which could certainly be true, given Kafka’s own issues about his identity (see also “Metamorphosis”). These days, with a heightened societal awareness of cruelty towards animals, that issue also pops up per force.

McNamara—in his studied, layered ways, his ticks and tricks, his intensity and his unstill ways—makes Red Peter someone, somebody, neither ape nor a man, but a living, thinking, speculative being with a searing soul.

“Report to an Academy” is at Caos on F July 15, 19, 25 and 27. Go to the Fringe Festival website for details at capitalfringe.org

Richard Selden • June 30, 2014

“We’re radical subversives,” asserts Joe Horowitz, former New York Times music critic and author of eight books, including a 2005 history of classical music in America that the Economist named one of the best books of the year.

Horowitz is executive director of Post-Classical Ensemble, a D.C.-based “experimental orchestral laboratory” that has completed ten seasons of thematic, cross-disciplinary programming and educational collaboration, with another on the way.

On June 12, the Austrian Cultural Forum hosted an event announcing the ensemble’s 2014-15 season, which will include two of its signature immersion experiences: “Iberian Mystics: The Confluence of Faiths,” part of the Kennedy Center’s Iberian Festival in March, and “A Mahler Portrait.”

The event was also a launch party for Post-Classical’s new Naxos CD, “Dvorák and America,” featuring the “Hiawatha Melodrama,” a work for narrator and orchestra created by Horowitz and Dvorák scholar Michael Beckerman using excerpts from the “New World Symphony” and Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha.”

The culminating event of next season’s Mahler programming will take place on April 28 at the Austrian Cultural Forum, when baritone Christoferen Nomura will sing “Songs of a Wayfarer” and the “Abschied” from “The Song of the Earth” with the ensemble. In between, the audience will watch a playlet about the marriage of Gustav and Alma.

Among the related events is a Nov. 23 performance at Georgetown University of Mahler’s “Symphony No. 4” and “Kindertotenlieder” by the Georgetown University Orchestra conducted by Angel Gil-Ordóñez.

Madrid-born Gil-Ordóñez is music director of both Post-Classical Ensemble – which he cofounded with Horowitz in 2003 – and the Georgetown University Orchestra. Former associate conductor of Spain’s National Symphony Orchestra, he studied with Pierre Boulez and Iannis Xenakis in France and worked closely with legendary conductor Sergiu Celibidache in Germany.

Gil-Ordóñez, who met Post-Classical’s cofounder through a mutual friend in 1997, says that Horowitz “opened my eyes about the future of orchestras.” Horowitz immediate adds: “If there is to be a future.”

The two have created a unique model in which, first, a small orchestra of excellent musicians plays works that are in one way or another outside the standard classical repertoire; and, second, these works are put in context through film and other visual media, drama, dance and commentary. Post-Classical’s tenth season, for example, concluded with a bilingual multimedia presentation, songs of the Mexican Revolution and a screening of the 1936 film “Redes” accompanied by a live performance of the score, composed by Silvestre Revueltas.

Next season is also Post-Classical’s second as ensemble in residence for Dumbarton Concerts at Georgetown’s Dumbarton Church. The ensemble performs in the center of the church, and Gil-Ordóñez praises the acoustics, especially in the lower range: “This octave between cello and bass is extraordinary.”

*Post-Classical will present a program called “Bach and the Divine” at Dumbarton Church on Nov. 15, when bass-baritone Kevin Deas will sing the solo cantata “Ich habe genug” with the ensemble. Another work, “Nun ist das Heill,” will be performed with audience members singing along. Georgetowner readers who like to sing are encouraged to sign up for the optional rehearsals by emailing info@postclassical.com.*

Gary Tischler •

It’s hard to think of two shows more different from each other than “Sideshow” and “The Lion King,” now settled in for longish runs at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theatre and Opera House, respectively.

One is a resurrection and renovated redo of a legendary 1997 Broadway show about outcasts and outsiders, in particular two sisters joined at the hip who rise from sideshow, carny attractions to vaudeville stars. The other is the enduring Broadway musical version of the popular Disney cartoon, in which brilliant director Julie Taymor not only resurrects the story — along with Elton John and Tim Rice’s music — but offers an entire dream of Africa at its most optimistic. The one show is attempting to rise out of its early critically approved but audience-sparse past. The other remains an unstoppable entertainment phenomena.

But the two shows share something: both are embraced passionately by their audiences, although the audience for the two shows are probably very different, too. But each show had more than its share of electricity coming not only from center stage outward but out from the audience, which were often noisy with spontaneous applause and whistles in the first case, and vocal delight by the youngsters—and their adult companions—in the second.

These kinds of occurrences in the theater—call them happy disturbances in the theatrical field—are always there, of course, but in these two instances, the infectious passions generated by the shows, setting, stories and music became impossible to ignore, unless you arrived minus curiosity, empathy, heart, brain and soul. It’s what makes live theater so precious when it becomes rich in a series of moments that you want to take home with you as a keepsake.

This is especially true in the best sense for “Sideshow,” which has new songs, a new more literal and dramatic concept—thanks in large part to new director Bill Condon, the Oscar-winning director of the film version of “Dreamgirls.”

“Sideshow” tells the wrenching, but also oddly romantic tale of the Hilton Sisters, Violet (Erin Davie) and Daisy (Emily Padgett), the alluring co-joined twins and carnival attractions when we first meet them. That’s when the sinister, twisted side-show master named Sir invites us, at the top of things, to “Meet the Freaks”—the bearded lady, the three-legged man, reptile man, tattoo girl, half-man, half-woman, fortune teller, dog boy, Venus di Milo, the world’s tinest cossack woman and man, the pin cushion and Jake, the cannibal king.

The stars of the midway, the Hilton Sisters, who sing in keening voices like sirens , and who will for two bucks let you see where they are joined at the hip

This is depression-era America, where two guys from the vaudeville circuit. Hustlers and salesman and agents and dancers named Buddy Foster and Terry Connor are enchanted and see them as potential stars of the vaudeville circuit. “We are very well connected, “ they tell the sisters. “So are we,” the sisters say.

So, the fairy tale comes true in huckster nation. They become stars, they fall in love, they go to Hollywood, except … that they’re not like everybody else … they’re exactly like everybody else.

The notion—cliché-like—that the sisters are us, as are their boon companions from the sideshow, just happens to be true. For instance, were the sisters not the joined sisters, this could pass for a classic story-boarded and story-book romantic musical, and musically, you haven’t heard impassioned ballads like “I Will Never Leave You,” “Who Will Love Me As I Am” and “You Should Be Loved” in many, many years.

Yet the first, sung in and out of tandem by the sisters, is loaded with irony and yearning, of the kind that is the hallmark of most romantic joy and friction—don’t leave me, leave me alone, I’m so alone, I want to be free, I love you, I hate you, that everyone can hear their own heart bludgeoned, flying, battered and bathed, in them.

“Who Will Love Me as I Am” is practically an anthem for the sisters and their friends on the midway, but separate from that, is also a grand musical expression of the hope we all carry around to our dying day. “You Should Be Loved” is sung by Jake, who accompanies the girls on their journey, and is a not-quite surprising declaration of love for Violet and Jake is a double-outsider, being an African American in Jim Crow America. Those songs are so affecting—with incisive, empathy-loaded lyrics by Bill Russell and music as an expression of the heart by composer Henry Krieger—that the audience all but levitates with feeling at their climax.

The show often dips in an almost nostalgic ways with bows to Kander and Ebb’s “Cabaret.” The hair-raising “Meet the Freaks” is a little bit of an echo of Joel Grey in “Come to the Cabaret,” as is the ménage-a-trois song, “1 + 1 = 3”.

Here’s a special bow to Emily Padgett as Daisy, and Erin Davie as Violet: it’s a triumphant pairing, together and apart, voices a little different, emotions very different. They’re the big stars of this show, but there’s room also for David St. Louis to shine as Jake and the total stellar cast. I would bet too that the audience in the end is an equal star in this show—there’s a definite feeling of the audience celebrating itself here. Come to the Sideshow, indeed.

“The Lion King” is Julie Taymor’s signal triumph, before she met a handsome but difficult stranger named Spiderman. Even if you’ve seen the show before, the entrance opening of the show with stately giraffes and animals sidling down the aisle, and all the puppetized creatures of the jungle, along with live actors take the breath away.

This isn’t about outsiders, but all the members of the lion kingdom, celebrating the circle of life, the traditions of their life, in spectacle and stunning costumes and lighting—this is Taymor—who dazzled in cinematic versions of Shakespeare—at her totemic best.

The story and characters—the noble lion king, his son, his vile, affected brother, plotting to dethrone his brother along with his followers, the scary, lurching, leering hyenas, the female pride—make for just the kind of coming of age story for children, not yet coming of age.

The actors embodying the roles have presence: L. Steven Taylor’s human swagger as Mustafa, Jelani Remy’s high-spirited Simba, Nia Holloway’s appealing Nala, Patrick Brown’s sneering, whiny Scar, the meercat and the warthog. They are vivid and lively, but so are the puppets making magic in the landscape.

Watch the children and youngsters in the audience. They give in to entrancement and enchantment almost immediately with the first bird-wielding puppeteer. We sat next to a young girl, whose heart seemed to stop as she watched Simba ascend the throne, her hand to her mouth, eyes wide.

She told her companion this: “The first thing we have to do, really, is come back and see this.”

I might add a note to self: “The first thing I have to do as soon as I can is come back and see “Sideshow”.

— “Sideshow” is at the Eisenhower Theater through July 13. “The Lion King” is at the Opera House through Aug. 17.

Gary Tischler • June 27, 2014

As you settle in for what is a brisk evening in the theater at Theater J’s production of Mark St. Germain’s “Freud’s Last Session,” it seems an odd place to be in these times, these days in the 21st century.

We’re in London, in a not-so-merry England, just as the nation and the world are about to embark on what will be World War II as Great Britain, its prime minister and king, will go on the radio air to announce a declaration of war on Nazi Germany after its invasion of Poland in 1939.

We’re in the study of Sigmund Freud, the great psychoanalyst who fled to London from Austria after the Nazi takeover. Freud was the man who ushered in the age of the couch, obsessions with dreams, buried memories and psycho-therapy with his revolutionary writings. He’s receiving an evening guest, the English writer C.S. Lewis, intellectual heavyweight and member of the Inklings, an Oxford literary group of the time that included J.R.R. Tolkien.

With war clouds—actually—overhead, Lewis and Freud embark upon what can be construed as a theological discussion: is there a God? It is that timeless question which even today is being constantly polled in terms of whether people believe in God or are a part of organized religion. To Freud, the profoundly atheistic professorial great man in history, the answer was always been a determined “no.” Lewis, who became an atheist or a disillusioned non-believer after the death from cancer of his first wife at an early age, has come full circle and is now a converted believer. He is in some ways a gentle fantasist whose belief in faith resounds nicely in his own literary works as in “The Chronicles of Narnia,” which enjoyed a recent comeback of popularity when his books were turned into movie box-office hits, beginning in 2005.

This is not a didactic debate. It is a clash, not warlike, but a clash, nevertheless—of different personalities, tastes, sensibilities and styles. Freud—as played brilliantly by the gifted Rick Foucheux—comes across as combative and impatient, stubborn and even arrogant, even as evidence of his battles with mouth cancer emerge, while Lewis, played with soft upper lip and erudition by Todd Scofield is seen as almost a classic Englishman of the period, intellectual, compassionate, a convert who never wavers.

The setting seems, in one sense, long ago. World War II seems ever more long ago, especially in an English setting, and a drawing room of books is less commonplace today in atmospheric terms. While the conversation is more in the nature of a debate, involving sentences that come almost in paragraph form, it is a rarity in today’s age of texting and twittering.

Yet, the talk is serious, it’s seen as a clash between sensibility and a kind of sensitivity and it also seems urgent. Freud, who is Jewish and dying, has an inkling of what is coming, and Lewis is sensitive to that, but neither really knows or can imagine the dimensions of the disaster that has been launched, the scope of the destruction and the breadth of death.

With all of that, the play is often funny, sometimes in sly fashion, sometimes in the telling of jokes, some of which fall flat, others which elicit genuine laughter in the audience. For instance, when Lewis arrives, he asks if should perhaps sit on the omni-present couch. Freud offers a chair instead.

This is a play about two human beings, creative as well as pragmatic men, talking about what it is to be human. Both in a way are experts—Freud through his ground-breaking examinations of the human psyche and human dreams, Lewis with his story-telling that shines not only with adventure but with a landscape full of roads and places, where moral decisions and issues of faith abound.

Periodically, aside from this debate, something happens. An air raid siren which sees Lewis armed with a gas mask and after-shocks from his World War I experience. Freud gruesomely and bloodily almost choking on his prosthetic for his cancerous mouth. News comes on the radio—the prime minister’s announcement of a declaration of war, the famous king’s speech. Lewis asks why Freud never listens to music for pleasure as a soothing salve for the grim world. Freud’s answer is that he cannot stand to listen to something that he does not understand, the hows and whys of creation.

These are not the sort of people, and the sort of conversation we hear today, almost anywhere except perhaps in a seminary or a literary book club. More’s the pity.

“Freud’s Last Session” runs through June 29.

Gary Tischler •

Sometimes the rapidly changing landscape of this city resembles an ongoing jazz improvisation, always moving, going here, going there, always changing, before it returns to its core melody, its home base.

So it feels right that, in addition to all the other changes, Washington, D.C., is becoming a new jazz city, much as it was many years ago when Duke Ellington first started out. Old-timers, fast disappearing but still talking, remember when the Howard Theatre, the Lincoln and other hot spots jazzed up the city in a Harlem Renaissance-type way.

Today there is a growing jazz scene in the very same area where Ellington used to live and play, down by 14th and U Streets, where you can find Bohemian Caverns – revived to its former glory – and places like Twins. Up in Adams Morgan, local players, trios and performers still play jazz in the evenings or on a summer’s afternoon with the windows open at Columbia Station.

The Howard Theater is reborn with a busy slate of jazz (and other kinds of music) and in Georgetown you can find the venerable jazz club Blues Alley, not far from the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, whose graduates are starting to make names for themselves on the jazz scene.

The young, exuberant jazz pianist Jason Moran has taken over the jazz reigns at the Kennedy Center, which just got through holding the Blue Note 75th Anniversary Festival and the Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival. At the museums, you can hear jazz in the summer, in the evenings and outdoors.

But it’s probably fair to say that what’s driving jazz all over the Washington area this month is the presence of the DC Jazz Festival, now celebrating its 10th year. And like the city itself, the festival, running June 24-29, is changing.

“It’s grown phenomenally,” Sunny Sumter, the DCJF’s longtime director said. “Think about it. When Charlie [Fishman, founder and artistic director for the festival] started this, that first year in 2005, there were 13 concerts. Now look at us, look at what the festival is doing and what it’s become.”

The short version: 125 performances in nearly 60 venues, considered to be the fastest-growing jazz festival in the country, with a year-round education and performance program.

Here’s what’s happening this year:

“Jazz at the Hamilton Live” (June 24-29)

“DC Jazz Festival and Events DC Present Jazz at the Riverfront” (June 27-29)

“Jazz in the ’Hoods Presented by Events DC” (June 24-29)

Also as part of the “Jazz in the ’Hoods” series, CapitolBop.com presents the DC Jazz Loft Series, now in its fourth year, with three nights of cutting-edge music, a piano “cutting contest” and an all-evening Block Party.

Who’s coming? A partial list:

The Roy Hargrove Quintet at the Hamilton, “urban harmonicist” Frederick Yonnet, Trombone Shorty headlining a New Orleans flavored evening, Yaslin Bey (also known as Mos Def), Cyrus Chestnut presenting a riff on and tribute to Dave Brubeck, Grammy-nominee Gregory Porter, Grammy-nominee Snarky Puppy, the Brass-A-Holics, Trio Caliente, Irma Thomas, the Tia Fuller Quintet and the Helen Sung Quintet in a salute to women in jazz, Marc Cary’s Rhodes Ahead, Butcher Brown and the Braxton Cook quartet.

“I think we’ve been part of recognizing how jazz itself has spread and changed, embracing or influencing other kinds of music,” Sumter said. “The Howard Theater is part of the festival this year with a Ginger Baker concert, and he’s known for being a drumming icon in the rock and roll world, but he’s also a jazz drummer. Paco D’Rivera has had a huge influence on jazz, spreading it into the Latin sounds, and he’s being a big part of the festival all along.”

Young people steeped in rock and roll, hip-hop, rap, alt, punk, pop and Americana have rooms in their imagination for a resurgence of jazz. And in this international city, the growing international appeal of jazz draws ears from all over.

During the course of the 10th annual DC Jazz Festival, jazz will reveal itself again in all of its facets and changing styles. And it will reveal the city for what it’s becoming, too:
Jazz City. [gallery ids="101754,141548" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

Legendary jazz pianist Monty Alexander is in town Friday night at 8 p.m. for what’s billed as a 70th birthday celebration and concert at the renovated Howard Theatre.

Naturally, when we start to talk on the phone, I congratulate him on his birthday, which was officially June 6 and allow that I’m a little older than he is.

“Yeah?” he responds good naturedly. “How old are you? Ninety seven?”

Right away, after laughing a little, I get the sense that this might not be your everyday interview with a jazz legend. Indeed, it turns into a free-wheeling talk about this and that, Duke Ellington and Jamaica, starting out in New York at Jilly’s, which was owned by a guy named Jilly Rizzo, about playing at Blues Alley in Georgetown in the 1970s and today, about seeing Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole, when he was a teenager, about the connection between reggae and jazz, about B movie cowboy stars like Wild Bill Elliott and Tom Mix, about Errol Flynn and Clint Eastwood and what life experience means to playing jazz.

This and that, indeed.

What’s probably more important than the 70th birthday celebration aspect of Alexander’s concert is its other two titles: “Two Worlds, One Love” and “My Jamaica to Jazz,” all of which are expressions of two of his latest albums, “Harlem-Kingston Express,” volumes one and two. Also, there will be musicians playing with him that accentuate that connection and ride, such as Tony Rebel, Bob Andy, Duane Stephenson, Etienne Charles and Wayne Escoffery.

“It’ll be great, you wait and see,” Alexander said. “We’re doing the concert at B.B. King’s in New York the night before, and this is going to be even better.”

Alexander is a great believer in the idea of life experience informing art, about life as an improvisation of the jazz kind, and that jazz had in some ways a kind of glory time because of some incomparable stars, performers and musicians who came to the jazz life armed with the kind of often rough-and-tumble, even tragic life experience from which they drew their musical inspiration. We’re talking about anyone from Louis Armstrong—“Now there, there was a great musician,” Alexander exclaimed. “He was something”— to Duke Ellington, “Bird” (Charlie Parker), Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie. “All of these guys”, Alexander gestured. “Plus, they had charisma to burn.”

“I’m trying to make that connection to what I grew up with.” Alexander said. “I saw many great jazz artists when I was a kid in Jamaica, and when I came to Miami, starting out. Lot of them inspired me. My life inspired me.”

Some folks might be a little leery of the prospect of a 70th birthday. Alexander doesn’t sound like the type. He’s doing some of his liveliest, most interesting work these days, especially the Harlem-Kingston Express albums and tours. “You don’t stop,” he said. “You keep learning. You keep doing. You keep playing, you know. You get up there, and you embrace it.”

As Alexander’s biography indicates, his career spans five decades and is notable for collaborations, working with other high-flying jazz luminaries and dipping freely, joyously into other genres of music. One critic has pointed out that there’s hardly any music that Alexander doesn’t like. “It’s never one thing,” he said. “You can draw from so many different forms of music.” He helped Natalie Cole with her Grammy-Award-winning tribute album “with” her late father Nat King Cole, worked with Sinatra, provided the piano track for Clint Eastwood’s “Bird”, an astonishing film biography of Charlie Parker, is listed by Hal Leonard as one of the top five jazz pianists of all time (about which he demurs), and worked on 12 Bob Marley composed pieces and filled with rich jazz piano arrangements. One of his albums, “The Good Life,” is a collection of songs written and made popular by the ageless Tony Bennett.

The Harlem-Kingston Express albums have been on top of the jazz charts for two years now.

Viewing some videos of old and new efforts by Alexander is to get a good look at a way cool master, an embracer who makes things look both lively and effortless, intense and easy. Listen, really listen to his version of Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry”—it has the lightest, most tender feel to it, or catch him doing “Satin Doll” on the piano, lightly, very cool like champagne touched by deep love and a little whiskey, the man himself sporting a thick Afro. Look at him now, joining a whole band on stage, jumping on the stage, directing everybody. Here comes a trumpet solo. There he is on the piano, high energy, his hair a whiter shade now.

You can see and hear in that voice of his over the phone that he gets deep into anything that catches his fancy. For some reason, the subject of old B-movie cowboy stars came up, and you could just hear him getting caught up in it. “Tom Mix, Lash LaRue, Gene Autry, oh, man,” he said. “Wild Bill Elliott, man, don’t get me started. We’re going to be on the phone all day long.” He had a similar attitude about one of this writer’s childhood heroes: the swashbuckling movie star who died young and very old at the age of 50.

Just take a look at some of the tracks, just for the titles of the Harem-Kingston albums—“Freddie Freeloader,” “No Woman No Cry,” “Redemption Song,” “Strawberry Hill,” “The Harder They Fall,” “Day-O,” “Sweet Georgia Brown,” “King Tubby Meets the Rockers Uptown,” “High Heel Sneakers” and “Hurricane Come and Gone.” You can see him sifting, mixing, bringing onboard, sliding through and re-arranging all kinds of music, all kinds of people. Moving right along.