Performance

Gary Tischler • June 27, 2014

Once upon a time, say, Oct. 16, 1997, a musical opened at the Richard Rodgers Theatre on Broadway.

This is not news today, nor was it then. Musicals open on Broadway all the time, some to move on to glory and musical memories everlasting, and some to exit street left, never to be heard from again.

The musical in question was called “Side Show,” with a book and lyrics by Bill Russell and music by Henry Krieger of “Dreamgirls” fame. It was a show about the life and times of Violet and Daisy Hilton, conjoined (“Siamese”) twins who were sideshow (“carny”) attractions and even bigger vaudeville stars.

Directed by Robert Longbottom, it featured Alice Ripley and Emily Skinner as the sisters and received Tony Award nominations for best musical, best book, best music and best acting in a musical (Ripley and Skinner for one role).

But 91 days after it opened, “Side Show” was gone. Over the years, it became something of a legend, a theatrical rumor about remembered magical moments.

“I don’t know exactly what happened,” said Bill Russell when we sat down and talked with him. “It was a lot of things, I suppose. I think a lot of people thought the show would sell itself, and just about everybody we ever talked to who actually saw it loved it. Maybe it wasn’t marketed enough, maybe the whole idea of a musical about people who were very, very different from everybody else – and especially the twins and their attempts to find love – rubbed some people wrong.”

“Side Show,” of course, is back, bigger than ever with new characters and ten new songs added, directed by Bill Condon, the Oscar-winning director of the movie version of “Dreamgirls.” It’s a Kennedy Center production – part of the Michael Kaiser legacy of rescuing critically acclaimed shows with passionate followers such as “Ragtime” and “Follies” – in association with the La Jolla Playhouse in California, where it had a successful run.

“One thing I know, and one thing I saw, was that young people seemed to really get into this show,” Russell said. “And I’m not surprised. Thinking in terms of the characters in the show, people that were considered freaks, outsiders, and here they’re the main people in a musical and you see their yearnings and strivings to be like other people, to love and shine.

“The sisters were real people. They even played themselves in that 1930s movie ‘Freaks’ by Todd Browning. But they were never alone from each other, people always looked at them, they were different from each other.”

The production at the Kennedy Center, more of a musical drama than a musical, is by all accounts elaborate. And while it may appear larger and richer, and thick with memorable music and songs (not to mention memorable costumes and makeup) – “Here are the Freaks” still opens the show in rousing fashion – it aims straight at the hearts and emotions of the audience.

This is a show that includes not only promoters and ballyhoo folks, but the bearded lady, little people, the three-legged man, the living Venus de Milo, reptile man and, of course, the girls. Emily Padgett, a veteran of several national tours (“Rock of Ages,” “Cats” and “Legally Blonde), plays Daisy and Erin Davis (“A Little Night Music,” “Grey Gardens”) plays Violet.

Russell’s list of credits includes the long-running Off-Broadway show “Pageant,” which won two Olivier nominations for its West End production, as well as “Elegies for Angels,” “Punks and Raging Queens” and “Family Style.” But it’s probably fair to say that “Side Show” is something special for him, and not just because of the Tony nominations and the Broadway run.

“I know a little something about being an outsider,” he said. “Think about this: I was born in Deadwood and raised in a town called Spearfish in the Black Hills of South Dakota. “My father was a popular guy whom everybody called Cowboy. He was a cowboy, and here I am, coming out to him and the town newspaper as gay. He was not happy with me. He worked in rodeo, he herded cattle. Eventually we reconciled, and he got to see some of my work and I think he appreciated what I did and who I was. But it wasn’t easy.”

Fathers stay in the heart. Russell wrote poems about his father including one called “Cowboy.”

As for “Side Show,” which is in the Kennedy Center Opera House through July 13, what happens next? Broadway?

“Hard to say,” Russell said. “Sure would be great, wouldn’t it?” [gallery ids="116368,116357,116364" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

Jay Leno — who retired four months ago as host of the Tonight Show for 22 years with one dramatic, controversial hiccup in the run — has been tapped to receive the Kennedy Center’s coveted 2014 Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.

That means a parade of Leno friends, peers, guests—no sure if the intern will show up or, for that matter, Conan O’Brien—at the really big show Oct. 19. Leno is the 17th recipient of the prize, the latest in a list that includes Richard Pryor, who inaugurated the event by being the first recipient on a somewhat anarchic and profane night as friends and peers like Chris Rock and Robin Williams saluted the ailing comedian in an irreverent style that had rarely been seen at the Kennedy Center.

Subsequent festivities—all televised, all big-star red carpet events—were not quite so footloose and featured salutes to a varied parade of talents, including, among others, the beyond-category Jonathan Winters, the great banjo player and comedian Steve Martin, the irrepressible Lily Tomlin, Bill Cosby, who turned the award down twice because of the profanity-full first award show, a parade of Saturday Night Livers like Lorne Michaels, Tina Fey and Will Ferrell, playwright Neil Simon and the funky George Carlin. Fey was the youngest performer (40 at the time) to receive the award. Three of the last awardees have been women—Fey, last year’s winner Carol Burnett and Ellen DeGeneres.

There is a certain amount of belated irony in the choice of Leno. The successor to the incomparably cool Johnny Carson, Leno’s undeniably the last king of late night television—having trounced David Letterman, the popular choice of the cool and the hip, and the first late night host to win the award. Leno is a survivor, often decidedly middle brow, a worker bee of the highest order, who works almost as obsessively on a monologue as Van Gogh might have on a painting. He survived a very public dispute-wrangle-and-dance with NBC, whom he regularly skewered on his show, when NBC made Conan O’Brien his successor, letting Leno implode on an hour-long prime time show. while O’Brien regularly gasped for air and ratings in his Tonight Show incarnation.

Leno came back and worked the audience like the pro that he has always been, having done his bit for 22 years, being an equal opportunity host in his targets, having presidents on his show as well as up and coming comedians, the usual movie stars and pop queens, kids, political candidates, and contest winners and animal trainers. He was recognizably one of a kind with his malleable face, the buffet of hair that turned white, the news bits, the man on the street bits, otherwise known as jaywalking.

Let’s hear it for Jay Leno. The Mark Twain Award for American Humor is the best kind of applause.

Gary Tischler • June 9, 2014

They called it “Blue Note at 75 — The Concert.” In truth, it was exactly what record producer Don Was said it was: “What you’ve got here with Blue Note is the history of jazz in America.”

The concert itself was made up of some historic figures from the Blue Note canon. The newer staples and mainstay star artists contained that history, too, as performers, including host Jason Moran, the Kennedy Center Artistic Advisor for Jazz, and a Blue Note Records artist himself.

In the process, they showed off the rich terrain of American jazz: its diverse personae and personalities and styles, its ageless qualities and that part of the music that continues to refresh itself in bubbling, sometimes on-fire like a musical baptismal font and stream of improvisation.

Jazz lovers, fans and friends, knowledgeable cool men and women bathed in the familiar sounds and music, were always jolted by something new. After all, you can’t have jazz without something new. Moran, a standout and individualistic pianist, played in his tennis shoes.

Blue Note, the iconoclastic jazz recording company, was founded by two German immigrants. Maintained by a tireless engineer, it continues to be a producing company and label like no other.

“Everybody knew and recognized Blue Note, by its music, its artists its energy, but also by its album covers. Those photograph, those stylized images, they were jazz,” said Moran, while hosting the concert that put a cap to the Blue Note 75th Anniversary Celebration.

For the folks who played that night and for jazz buffs, it was like being in some kind of boogie-blues-riff-and-rolls and solo heaven.

Moran himself, joined by pianist Robert Glasper, tripped the fantastic light of boogie woogie — “one of the cornerstones of jazz”, Moran said. Like some kind of wizard, he got notes out of the piano that came out like some really cool staccato, rain falling like music.

Youth was served here — Lionel Louke on guitar, Kendrick Scott on drums, the brilliant pianist Fabian Almazan, Derrick Hodge on bass, John Patitucci on bass and Brian Blade on drums.

You want star singers? There were two, opposite stars shining on opposite sides of the jazz firmament. The dazzling Dianne Reeves, who joined blockbuster trumpeter Terence Blanchard on “Dreams” and made “Stormy Weather” very much her own and more like a hurricane followed by hearts breaking and reviving.

Norah Jones —who burst on the national jazz and music scene with a slew of Grammys for her first album like a quiet surprise —came to the concert that way, too. The spotlight found her black-outfit elfin self on the piano, about to launch into the standard “The Nearness of You” with her distinctive smoke-and-butter voice.

If you want veterans, take the presence of pianist McCoy Tyner, soft voiced in his talk, and Bobby Hutcherson on vibes, who seemed to be forever pulling secrets out of the music and his instrument, playing it like a thinker and a shaman. Meanwhile, Tyner played like a train, pulling out the blues of the keys.

The sax virtuoso Wayne Shorter ended it all by reminding us that there is no end to moments or notes, held and thrown away. They are retrieved and come back renewed and charmed. The new survives in the playing as much as the old.

Speaking of somewhat older—there was “Sweet Poppa Lou” Donaldson, at 87, as he noted, the oldest guy on the label and perhaps in the house, but close to the youngest, too. Because he played the sax, with the formidable Dr. Lonnie Smith on the piano, like it was a baby, spanking out notes, teasing, soothing, then playing hard without a sweat, and giving us what it is.

“We play straight ahead jazz and blues,” Donaldson said. “No fusion, no confusion, no P. Diddy, no nothing else.” He and the rest launched into “Alligator Boogaloo.” You looked, listened, heard and felt some kind of slight scuffed magic, which is what jazz is. It’s shaman stuff, story music. The made-up stuff comes straight for you, and you don’t ever want to get out of the way.

Gary Tischler •

When you hear a couple of guys, great actors both, talk about William Shakespeare, you immediately start thinking about: Shakespeare.

In the case of listening to the conversation that swirled around actors Ed Gero and Stacey Keach and moderator John Andrews, the president of the Shakespeare Guild at the Woman’s National Democratic Club recently, you particularly started thinking about the great “Seven Ages of Man” speech in the Bard’s “As You Like It,” which begins thusly:

“All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages . . .”

Shakespeare being a man of the stage often referenced the stage—the play within a play in “Hamlet” and Hamlet’s instructions to the players, Prospero’s farewell speech in “The Tempest.” The “Seven Ages of Man” speech is direct and precise, and it’s about theater as well as life its own self.

This resonated when you heard Gero and Keach — who could and probably have given master classes on acting — started talking about the roles they were playing at Harman Hall in the two parts of “Henry IV.” Gero played the king of the title role, and Keach took on Falstaff, the boisterous boon companion to Prince Hal, the future Henry V.

The professional lives and trajectories of Gero and Keach have been different. Keach, although he is one of our finest Shakespearean actors, has taken a few detours into movies and television, not always choosing wisely, as he has acknowledged, Nevertheless, he has played his characters memorably. Gero has spent a lot of time on the stage in Washington (and elsewhere), assaying 60 Shakespearean parts along the way. Whatever stage of man they may be in now, rich in family life, children and so on, the roles they have played brought them together on stage—notably in a Chicago-Goodman-Theatre-based production of “King Lear,” in which Gero was Gloucester to Keach’s Lear—but the roles themselves have criss-crossed and bumped into each other.

“I played Falstaff once when I was in my twenties,” Keach said. “I had to gain some weight and wisdom I think to play him then. I didn’t have to do that this time around. I need to lose some weight now.”

Gero’s experience with the history plays and the paths of the Henry’s in particular seems like an alternative life lived inside the theatre. He played the lead in “Henry V” at the Folger, when he too was much younger. Then, he performed in “Richard II” as the rebellious Bolingbroke who usurps the crown of Richard II, not once but twice, opposite Philip Goodwin and Richard Thomas. Bolingbroke would become a troubled and often guilt-ridden Henry IV, fending off rebellions and uprising, trying to separate his son Henry from Falstaff.

“Things can get circular, but I think all of that helps you bring the virtue of experience to the parts,” Gero said. “I’m the father, I was the son, I was the usurper and now the king. Henry IV has become a master politician. He knows how to manipulate people, hold and exercise power, like a modern politician. He’s a modern man and that resonates today.”

“I’ve tried not to play Falstaff like a buffoon, which is often done,” Keach said. “There is a huge amount of comedy in the part, but he sees himself as a serious man. You not only have to get the laughs, you have to get the audience not just to like Falstaff but to respect him. His biggest audience is Prince Hal, and when he becomes king in the second play, the comedy stops. Things become more like an elegy. You should take into account that now Hal has to be Henry. He has to act like a king, and he can’t embrace Falstaff, who has some hopes. You can see that again in “Henry V”, when he has to approve of the execution of one of his old companions for desertion.”

Keach is associated with many screen roles, big and little, and is therefore better known. For anybody who goes to the theater a lot in Washington, he has performed brilliantly here as “Richard III.” For this writer’s money, he played the best Richard III ever: dangerous, mocking, self-aware and funny. He also played Lear and Macbeth. But then, there’s a woman who comes up to him after the talk and says ,“You’re my favorite Jesse James.” It was a reference that means a lot to Keach obviously but very little to anyone who hasn’t seen Walter Hill’s “The Long Riders,” a wondrous, stylized, banjo and guitar-driven Western about the outlaws Jesse and Frank James and the Younger boys, robbing banks, one step ahead of a fatal bullet. If you watched television and the “Mike Hammer” private eye series, where Keach was tough and slick with a mustache and a cocked hat, well, there you are. You remember.

Gero, too, has had his share of parts—on the stage—where he’s delivered memorable performance and been rewarded with Helen Hayes Awards. He’s been Scrooge at Ford’s Theater and the artist Mark Rothko. Now, he’s taking on the part of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scalia for Arena Stage next season.

“Interesting, fascinating,” Gero said of his preparation for the man and the role.

The world remains the same: a stage for a man to play many parts.

— “Henry IV” parts one and two will be playing at the Harman Theatre through this weekend. Check the Washington Shakespeare Company for tickets, dates and times.

Nicole Cusick •

“The Admission” lives on at the Mead Theatre at the Studio Theatre after its run as a workshop at Theater J. This controversial piece by Motti Lerner, an Israeli, addresses the often difficult conversations that can go on between Arabs and Jews across the world.

Andy Shallal, former mayoral candidate, restaurateur and owner of Bus Boys and Poets, is producing this second run of this show. Lerner’s inspiration for “The Admission” comes from the story of Giora, a wounded veteran of a military action in Lebanon. Giora tried to retrospectively understand the motives behind the murder of a group of Palestinian civilians by a unit under the command of his father – an Israeli soldier — some 40 years earlier during the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict.

The talented Danny Gavigan plays Giora, the wounded veteran who is physically reminded every day of the constant conflict of his country, as he can only get around on crutches. Michael Tolaydo plays Avigdor, his father, a man who is cares very much about his family and their future, as he carries the weight of his actions of the past with him. Both actors beautifully portray the conflict we all have with letting go of the guilt and memory of our past actions to prevent us from moving forward and embracing the present.

Kimberly Schraf (Yona) commits whole-heartedly for the two-hour run of the show as the wife and mother to these two and tries to keep the family together as well as her husband’s construction business going. Yona is also dealing with the loss of one son as the result of the conflict and mourns his loss with grace, while trying to keep her husband and son from doing something they will regret.

Where it seems Lerner took some creative liberties is in the relationships in Giora’s personal life. He is engaged to a lovely Jewish girl, Neta, played by Elizabeth Anne Jernigan. Jernigan’s performance is a tender display of the struggle many wives of veterans would sympathize with. Giora is also involved with a young and feisty Arab woman, Samya, played by Nora Achrati. He works with her at the university in Haifa, and they have an ongoing affair that his family and finance are aware of, but their relationship is not accepted due to their religious differences. This aspect of the play seems a little like a soap opera. There is no real way to reinvent the plot line of boy and girl should get married, but boy gets distracted by a more unique girl he can’t ever really be with because of societal or religious pressures.

In the same vein, the play also struggles structurally at points in that the show is broken down into more than a dozen short scenes. This left the piece feeling choppy and ending abruptly at times, lots of small two- or three-person scenes, when the full cast is only seven characters. The structure almost felt like the piece would play better as a movie script.

Design-wise, the production was very clean and simple. This could be due to the relocation of the production, or just to allow the audience to follow the actors through the half a dozen locations the play takes place. Klyph Shoham designed the projections, which were displayed on a screen that when not in use matched the design on the deck of the stage in a simple grid pattern. When in use, the screen displayed dull images on green landscapes, construction in the city and some images of historic ruins. The projections were only used in the beginning and very end of the show. I was left wanting them used more consistently throughout the production. It might have helped bring the audience be more easily aware of the multiple locations.
One choice that I appreciated in the design of the show was that when actors “exited” the stage they were simply seated off the stage but still intentionally in sight of the audience. They sat in silence at well-lit café tables awaiting their next scene intently watching what was happening on stage. This speaks to one of the overarching metaphors of the piece that the actions of our loved ones truly affect us whether we see their choices play out or not.

Lerner’s work takes a hard look at the issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It presents difficult conversations between family members and different families trying to live and work freely in the same community. Each performance is followed by a discussion, led by a Theatre J staffer and a few of the actors. They hope to continue the dialogue the production inspires.
“The Admission” will run at the Mead Theatre at the Studio Theatre through May 18. For tickets, visit the Bus Boys and Poets [website](http://theadmission.bpt.me/).

Gary Tischler • May 23, 2014

One of the finest—and most original—music albums of any sort came out late last year,  further enlarging the artist’s reputation and resurrecting a ghost of a jazz legend at the same time.
       

That would be the provocatively entitled “I Wanna Be Evil” by the surging and one-of-a-kind jazz singer Rene Marie, who with a ten-song work on the Motema label has managed to bring alive the high-spirited one-of-a-kind life and music of Eartha Kitt.

       
The album—subtitled “With Love to Eartha Kitt”—came out late in 2013 and proved to be a wonder.  It’s rich in the trademark songs of Kitt, who was one of those singer-performers who was way beyond category with big hits like “C’est Si Bon” and the hugely popular “Santa Baby” back in the 1950s, when she was one of the singular “New Faces,” right through 2008 when she passed away.
       

“There wasn’t anybody like her,” Rene Marie said of Kitt. “It’s why I wanted to do this. She inspired me more than anybody. I always wanted to sing, but I got kind of a late start.”
       

We had occasion to talk on the phone with Rene Marie a while back when she appeared in Bethesda.  She’s one of the most personable, straight-ahead people you ever want to meet.  On Saturday, May 24, Washington fans of both Kitt—and of Rene Marie, born Rene Marie Stevens, in nearby Warrenton, Va.—get a chance to hear her doing songs from the album as part of the two-day 19th Annual Mary Lou Williams Jazz festival at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater. Other performers on May 24 include Trio 3 performing a Mary Lou Williams repertoire and rising star Anat Cohen and her quartet.
       

Rene Marie isn’t exactly like Kitt, although both have appeared in Washington, D.C.—we talked with Kitt a number of years ago when she appeared at the now gone Charley’s Supper Club on K Street.  Kitt had a style that was damn tough to imitate and reproduce, and she had attitude to spare, but she also more often than not flat out made you listen and watch if you had the good fortune to catch her in person. 

In 1999, the year her career started to take off, Rene Marie performed at Blues Alley, also in Georgetown. Rene Marie has an attitude too, but it’s the of the kind that’s looking to share music and help others. On line, you can see her singing for homeless people, in shelters or impromptu occasions.
       

She always entertained the thought of singing—her voice has a clarity that’s hard to subdue, but she was as she has said in “an abusive marriage” for years.  Rene Marie continued to try to sing and perform until her husband said, she told us, “Choose, me or your music.”  Encouraged by her  grown children, she chose music. “At that point, well, it was an easy choice,” she said.
       

So, Rene Marie was off at the age of 42 to start a singing career. It wasn’t easy, but she’s at what amounts to a personal zenith now, but never forgets that songs—like “Strange Fruit”—are about people, history and times, as well as the joy of making music. She’s written much of her own materials and songs as well as hewing to her own unique style of singing standards. 
       

When you listen to Rene Marie’s voice, her singing on the Kitt album, you hear strains of other voices—influences like Betty Carter, Ella, Dinah, Nancy Wilson and Sarah Vaughan, and, of course, Kitt. Mostly, however, it’s a voice you’ve also never heard before. 
       

The tribute to Kitt is different from Kitt. It’s a musical praise for Kitt’s courage as much as her unique talent. But Kitt always had something growly, a hot touch, unbeatable but not necessarily classical. 
       

Rene Marie is the real thing. She makes all the songs on the album her own, and therefore emotionally stronger, clearer and better.  She has a rangy, beautiful voice. “Santa Baby” becomes more than a playful tune, as does “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.” She has that throaty optimism that makes “I’d Rather Be Burned As a Witch” a lights-out effort.

Georgetowner •

When Ford’s Theatre’s co-production with Signature Theatre of “Hello Dolly!” won the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Resident Musical (a tie with Olney’s “A Chorus Line”), it was a sweet moment of validation for Ford’s Director Paul Tetreault.

“Actually, this was the first award Ford’s had received as an organization, and that was a really amazing moment for us,” said Tetreault, who is in the midst of his 10th anniversary as director of the historic theater. “Imagine that. We’d gotten individual awards for acting and such, but never a production award in the history of Ford’s.”
The award was significant because it showed that Tetreault had not only kept Ford’s status as a popular (and money-making) theater with a historic mission, but elevated it to the status of a theater respected for its productions and unique vision.

Signature Theatre’s artistic director Eric Shaeffer shared in the award for the remounting of Jerry Herman’s hugely popular musical, which originally starred Carol Channing. The “Hello Dolly!” co-production also featured a cast filled with local actors, including Ed Gero, who for the last several seasons has played Scrooge in Ford’s annual holiday show, “A Christmas Carol.”

“That was gratifying. Everything about the production and the result was certainly an achievement for both organizations,” Tetreault said. “Eric and I had worked together before with the ground-up production of the musical of ‘Meet John Doe,’ so it seemed natural for us to do so again. And I think this kind of cooperative effort is beneficial to Washington theater.”

Still, the award had its bittersweet aspects. Tetreault had high hopes for the season-opening production of “The Laramie Project,” the emotionally charged, realistic and inventive play about America’s reaction to the 1998 murder of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard and its aftermath.

“The Laramie Project,” by Moisés Kaufman and the Teutonic Theater Company, was scheduled to open during the infamous government shutdown. Because Ford’s Theatre is a National Historic Site, the theater was also shut down, and with it the opening production.

“Woolly Mammoth offered us a space, and we staged a production for the media, without the usual theatrical bells and whistles of lights, sets and so on. The sparseness was emotionally powerful, as were the productions we did free to the public at a church.”

The shutdown ended soon after.

It’s fair to say that Tetreault’s tenure so far has had its challenges – not forgetting the shutdown, but also remembering the conditions that prevailed when he first came here and took over the reins. Those reins had been held for 35 years by the legendary Frankie Hewitt, who had succumbed to cancer.

Tetreault arrived after an administrative career that included stints at Madison Square Garden and the Circle Repertory Company in New York and the Berkeley Repertory in California. He was managing director of the famed Alley Theatre in Houston, where he and artistic director Gregory Boyd produced over 100 plays and won the Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre.

Tetreault didn’t lack for a resume or a vision, but the Ford’s job was still somewhat daunting.

“Frankie, you have to give her all the credit in the world, she was the mainstay of the theater and gave it energy and life. She was a legend, a major Washington figure, and that sort of thing is a challenge for anybody coming in,” he said, adding: “I like to think like an outsider in some ways, to see myself that way.”

In Washington and beyond, Ford’s Theatre has a unique niche. As the place where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, it’s a shrine to Lincoln and his ideas and ideals, complete with the presidential box where he watched “Our American Cousin.”

“It’s an American theater, a certain kind of place that exists not only as theater but in the public imagination,” he said. “So, there’s some things you can’t do.”
What Tetreault has done is to create a kind of theater of Americana, not in the cliché sense, but with productions that strike the themes of American inclusion: race, opportunity, outsiders and their dreams. And he kept the theater in the public eye when it lost a little more than a season during major renovations.

The Lincoln plays that have been done – and a commissioned work about Mary Todd Lincoln that’s on the agenda for 2014-2015 – have been remarkably good theater, from the musical “The Civil War” to “The Heavens Are Hung in Black” and “The Rivalry.”

Standout productions have included the powerful musical “Parade” about the lynching of Leo Frank, a controversial production of “Our Town” and “Black Pearl Sings,” as well as “Meet John Doe,” the musical based on populist director Frank Capra’s common-man hit.

“I’d still like to see that show again, to keep it alive,” said Tetreault.

Gary Tischler • May 15, 2014

Arena Stage Artistic Director Molly Smith called the songs of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller the soundtrack of a generation, the songbook of our lives.

Listening to and watching—and moving to and being moved by—the Randy Johnson-directed production of “Smokey Joe’s Café,” which features some 40 songs by the dynamic songwriting and rock-n-roll pioneering duo of Leiber and Stoller, you got the sense that this music could connect generations.

Often with early rock-n-roll songs, you get that karaoke itch. They’re the song still being done on public television nostalgia shows by surviving members of the groups that had hot hits with them quite some time ago. When you’re talking soundtrack and songbook of a generation, you have to ask just a little which lives, what generation, which songs.

There’s no question that this music might not get to everybody —for every bobbing bald and white haired head in the audience, there were at least a few folks like the two thirty-something men next to me who just barely seemed to manage a heartbeat.

This version of “Smokey Joe’s Café” avoids the karaoke pitfall thanks to Johnson’s heartfelt if narrative-free concept and direction. It lets the very gifted, high-energy and individualistic performers tell the story of the music, and in the process shakes off the dust of over-familiarity from the songs, some of which got tens way back on American Bandstand.

The production wasn’t trouble-free. It had to contend with the over-heated expectations and energy of an official opening night (Stoller was in attendance; Leiber died in 2011.) Some technical glitches like a dead mike and projections that did little to clarify matters. Such things no doubt will be dealt with for the show—which runs through June 8.

It’s really a salute to a time and place and the gifts of two young guys in tune with the coming times who were also deeply saturated in the blues. Their songs were recorded by just about everyone worth talking about, all kinds of singers—Peggy Lee, Elvis, the Coasters, Ben E. King and the Drifters, Fats Domino, the Everly Brothers, Aretha Franklin, Little Richard, Muddy Waters and, yes, even Edith Piaf.

Johnson’s direction and the choreography by Parker Esse provide a kind of welcome mat—along with the band in the center of the stage, the balcony and staircase, the jukebox, along with cool duds from the period, old stuff which has often been worn anew and again.

This isn’t just kid stuff—although Leiber songs like “Hound Dog” and “Jailhouse Rock” helped send Elvis into the teen stratosphere of the 1950s—because the blues, jazzy torch songs and the fast-paced patter-chatter songs of the Coasters make their way in here as well as less familiar songs.

The ostensible out-of-town star of this show, Levi Kreis, who won a Tony for his piano-banging Jerry Lee Lewis stint in “Million Dollar Quartet,” takes on “Jailhouse Rock.” While not trying to be Elvis, he makes it his own—without ever losing any of its jolting flavor. But it’s E. Faye Butler, as dangerous as ever, full of the blues that they all but spill out of her with emotion, who ends the first act with the God-loves-you Gospel rouser “Saved.” She adds her own often rowdy, always accessible soul and blues flavored style to the proceedings as she has done before in “Crowns,” “Dinah Was” and “Oklahoma.” She’s one of ours, even if she still lives in Chicago.

There’s a gaggle of Coasters-flavored fun songs—“Young Blood,” “Yakety Yak” and “Charlie Brown”—the kind that made rock and roll rock and also did yeoman duty in fueling the culture-bridging blowback of pop music.

Watch great dancer Ashley Blair Fitzgerald show Austin Colby just what to do in “Can You Show Me How To Shimmy?” Listen to Colby’s deep yearning when he sings “Spanish Harlem” and Butler make an anthem out of “Fools Fall in Love.” Nova Payton and Stephawn Stephens break hearts in the “Love Me” and “Don’t,” a combo of searing ballads.

Often, it’s the unfamiliar that surprises you here: “Don Juan,” “Shopping for Clothes,” “D.W. Washburn,” “Pearl’s a Singer” and “Some Cats know.” They’re practically a showcase for the song-writing range of Leiber and Stoller.

The duo is also the reason for the huge success of Ben E. King—still performing—and the Drifters in the early 1960s, from “Broadway” to the evocative “Dance With Me” and “There Goes My Baby,” ending up with “Love Potion No. 9” that eventually just caused the audience to sway and levitate a little. And, then, the best for last: “Stand By Me,” a personal keepsake for this writer and many in the audience from the look and sound of things.

What this high octane company—and Johnson—manages to do was to give the Leiber and Stoller songs a way to jump up and live again, fresh as the first time anybody heard them. In this way, we repeat ourselves, come full circle to the place where everything old is really new again.

Gary Tischler • May 12, 2014

“Blue Note at 75,” the week-long diamond anniversary celebration of the iconic jazz recording label climaxes this weekend with a series of performances, exhibitions, and, on Sunday, with “Blue Note at 75, The Concert,” with an all-assembly of vocalists and top jazz musicians at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater.

Rarely has a recording label been such an iconic, emblematic presence for a genre of music—except perhaps for Deutschegrammaphone in the classical arena—as Blue Note has been for jazz, which sprang out of America to become the world-wide sound that it is today.

Blue Note was founded by two German immigrants and childhood friends, Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, who settled in New York in the 1930s. Together with recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder and commercial designer Reid Miles, they put Blue Note and with it jazz into the stratosphere, recording the music and its stars as it moved through hot jazz, Boogie Woogie and Swing, through Bepop, Hard Bop and Post Bop, to Soul Jazz, Avant Garde and fusion and beyond.

Most of the major performers, musicians, bands, vocalists and stars of jazz were on the label—from Cannonball Adderely to Miles Davis, to Dianne Reeves to Wynton Marsalis, from Donald Byrd to Bud Powell, to Thelonious Monk, a list that includes some surprises like Norah Jones and Willie Nelson.

Jones will be on hand for the all-star concert Sunday, which will also feature singer Dianne Reeves, saxophonist Joe Lovano, Blue Note recording artist and Kennedy Center artist advisor for jazz Jason Moran, saxophonist Wayne Shorter, pianist McCoy Tyner, drummer Brian Blade and organist Lonnie Smith, among others.

The week-longer celebration has been held all over the Kennedy Center, as well as venues throughout the city. The center’s Millennium Stage was a venue for many of the performances and will feature bassist and composer Dereck Hodge on Saturday, Brian Blade and the Fellowship Band on Sunday and an all-star Washington D.C.-based group of musicians that will salute Blue Note on Friday. Featured D.C. musicians include Elijah Jamal Balbed, tenor/soprano sax and musical director, Lyle Link, alto sax and flute, Kenny Rittenhouse, trumpet, Raynel Frazier, trombone, Tim Whalen, piano, Eliot Seppa, bass and Dave McDonald, drums, playing compositions from various Blue Note recordings.

Multi-Grammy Award-winning trumpeter Terence Blanchard will perform with his group at the Terrace Theater Friday. In the center’s Atrium, the Grammy-winning hip-hop jazz pianist Robert Glasper brings an up-beat note to the Blue Note proceedings with his cutting style, in “The Crossroads Club: Robert Glasper Experiment.”

There are also films, exhibitions, panel discussions and concerts around town throughout the month, including an ongoing “Blue Note at 75 Grammy Museum Exhibit” in the Hall of States at the Kennedy Center through May 21.

For all information on times, venues and dates, go to the Kennedy Center website

Gary Tischler • May 9, 2014

“Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezín” is never just a concert, a performance, a presentation of a masterpiece. The multimedia concert-drama, which has been presented many times, most recently at the Music Center at Strathmore on May 1, has always been something more, larger and larger still.

But it is also something as troubling and always evocable and intimate as the remembrance of the heart and mind of a people straining with music to be free in the midst of constant death.

The concert, as well as a documentary film of the same name, has been performed all over the world, and will continue to be performed. It is at heart the resurrection of what was an obscure but heart-rending and powerful story from the annals of the Holocaust, which hardly lacks for unique and powerful stories.

For Murry Sidlin, the founder and creator of “Defiant Requiem,” the Baltimore-born conductor and music educator at Catholic University in Washington, the story, the music, the concert has become a life’s mission. This mission has resulted in the creation of the D.C.-based Defiant Requiem Foundation and the telling and retelling and resurrection of a story of great courage and the indomitable spirit of one man.

For Sildin, it began on a sunny day in the late 1990s, when he was a faculty member of the University of Minnesota’s school of music. He ran across a used bookstore, the kind that you always saw in cities and universities in America. “There was a bin, a cart outside,” he said. “I stuck my hand in and pulled out a book, an old book.”

The book was “Music in Terezín”, by Joza Karas, a Czech writer and composer who had collected the music of Jews imprisoned at Terezín, a Nazi camp in Czechoslavakia, where thousands were killed and from which thousands more were sent to Auschwitz.

“I had picked the book out of sheer luck,” Sidlin said. “I opened it up and there was a chapter on a man called Rafael Schächter.”

“He was a composer, he was an opera coach,” Sidlin said. A Czech Jew, he had been rounded up and sent to Terezín carrying a lone, shopworn copy of the music of Verdi’s Requiem inside his coat.

Terezín in popular accounts is known as the camp which the Nazis tried to pass off as a model camp, to show Red Cross members and other inspectors that Jews were being treated well.

“That’s not exactly right,” Sidlin said. “They did that once, when the Red Cross came and it was then that Schächter, with 200 members of the camp, put on a recital of the Requiem in front of the Red Cross and the Nazis.”

“For those in the chorus – they were accompanied by a three-legged piano – it was an act of defiance, an act of courage. Schächter had them rehearse after every day of hard labor and impossible conditions in the basements of the camp,” Sidlin said.

“But the camp already had a lively culture – here were writers, singers, artists, professors, directors, composers, musicians from all over Europe, and there were lectures, cabaret music and singing, plays, operas, put on after the day was done. And Schächter was at the heart of it. He held 14 performances with 150 singers at the camp for the other prisoners.”

“The book and the story moved me in ways that I can’t begin to describe,” he said. “I wanted that story to be told and sung, and to be remembered. That’s what I’m doing, that’s what everybody that’s involved is doing.”

The result, in the end, was a foundation, the Defiant Requiem Foundation, with Sidlin as its president and Stuart E. Eizenstat as its current chairman. In turn, the foundation sponsors the Rafael Schächter Institute for Arts & Humanities. Next month, for the first time, the Institute will be held in the U.S., at American University’s Katzen Arts Center.
At Strathmore, 50 survivors of the Holocaust attended, including Edgar Krasa and Marianka May, who were members of Schächter’s Terezín chorus. Soloists including Arianna Zukerman (the daughter of Pinchas Zukerman), mezzo-soprano Ann McMahon Quintero, tenor Issachah Savage and bass Nathan Stark. D.C.-area theater star Rick Foucheux appeared as Schächter, with Rheda Becker, who often performs speaking roles with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, as the Lecturer.

Interspersed there were clips from the “Defiant Requiem” film, as well as clips from a Nazi propaganda film.

Schächter himself was sent to Auschwitz, where he survived until the remaining prisoners were sent on a death march, in which he perished.
The Strathmore concert was performed in memory of Fran Eizenstat and Amy Antonelli.

There will be a screening of the “Defiant Requiem” documentary as part of the Schächter Institute, June 8 to 12 at the Katzen Arts Center, with a book signing by Richard Breitman for his book “FDR and the Jews,” Phillip and Noreen Silver performing works by Terezín composers on piano and cello, a one-woman show “The Tin Ring” and a panel discussion led by Eizenstat on “Anti-Semitism in Europe Today.”