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"I have been and always shall be your... twin sibling." Alex Mills as Sebastian and Irina Tsikurishvili as Viola in Twelfth Night. (Koko Lanham)
My reviews of Synetic Theatre's silent, early-cinema-and-Jazz Age-inflected Twelfth Night and Anu Yadav's solo show Meena's Dream are in today's Washington City Paper.
The Adoration of the Shepherds, now attributed to the Renaissance master Giorgione, hangs in the National Gallery of Art.
The authorship of this painting is the ostensible subject of The Old Masters, one of Simon Gray's final plays. My review of Washington Stage Guild's production is in today's Washington City Paper.
Three weeks later, my souvenir pint glasses remain fully intact.
I have a little unplanned cameo at the end of the episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour that posted today, the second of a two-parter recorded at the PCHH live show at NPR HQ on Dec. 10, 2013. That was the day my Slate story about the paucity of new songs in the yuletide canon posted, and the show was only a few hours after I'd been down the street at CNN taping a segment about that piece for The Lead with Jake Tapper. Someone in the audience asked for recommendations of new Christmas songs, and host Linda Holmes was kind enough to invite me up to suggest a few.
As I had been at the first PCHH live show a year earlier, at the old NPR bulding that's since been torn down, I was fighting a cold on this evening. I hope I didn't pass it on to you if we happened to shake hands. I did warn everyone who so much as made eye contact with me to wash their hands immediately. It's how I convey warmth and sincerity, you guys.
You can hear the episode here. Happy New Year.
Some kind of technical problem prevented a chunk of this week's Washington City Paper from being posted online. My review of Darrah Cloud's play Our Suburb at Theater J was among that chunk, so I'm posting the full text of the review here.
Writer Darrah Cloud’s Internet Movie Database page indicates she was once a prolific imagineer of made-for-TV movies: A Christmas Romance, A Holiday for Love, A Holiday Romance, The Sons of Mistletoe, and -- shades of intrigue! -- Undercover Christmas. I haven’t seen those films, but the titles imply the sort of cornball mawkishness that some people -- specifically, people who are very wrong -- associate with Thornton Wilder’s oft-revived, Pulitzer-winning 1938 play, Our Town.
Our Suburb is Cloud’s riff on Wilder’s classic in the way that Aaron Posner’s Stupid Fucking Bird was a reworking of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, only she isn’t debating her source material the way Posner’s thrilling play did. She’s moved the action -- well, “action;” she’s kept Wilder’s sense of life as a sequence of mostly prosaic moments that we are tragically incapable of appreciating -- from the fictitious hamlet of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire in the early years of the 20th century to her native Chicago suburb of Skokie, Illinois, about 75 years later. There we follow three households, alike in rigorously striving dignity: The white Majors, and black Minors, and the Jewish Edelmans.
Read MoreBess, Porgy. Porgy, Bess. Alicia Hall Moran and Nathaniel Stampley.
Yes, it's clearly an insult to DuBose Heyward, who wrote the novel Porgy, and to his wife Dorothy Heyward, with whom he collaborated on the script for a play derived from the novel, that the latest (2011) Broadway version is called The Gershwins' Porgy & Bess, as if the Heywards had nothing to do with the creation of an American classic. But I was still moved past the point of articulate expression by the show when its touring version stopped in Washington Christmas week, as my tongue-tied Washington City Paper review demonstrates.
Because I decided the most honest way to approach the piece -- which was assigned late, for a short run of a show opening on Christmas night, leaving me no time to prepare -- was to cop to the fact I'd never seen Porgy & Bess before, I left myself vulnerable to the accusation I lack the appropriate credentials to review it. That's a question I'll be addressing at length later this month.
My face betrays the intense concentration required to form sentences in real time.
I'm not allowed to post the video of my Dec. 10 appearance on CNN's The Lead with Jake Tapper, (here's its blog accompaniment) and I don't have a photo from my appearance on Marketplace yesterday. So here's a screen cap from the CNN bit and a link to the Marketplace segment, wherein host Kai Ryssdal asks me a question for which I am completely unprepared.
Is there hope for a new classic Christmas song? | Marketplace.org.
I'll be wrapping up my talking-about-Christmas-songs tour with a segment on KPCC's AirTalk this afternoon at 3:30 Eastern. I heard that show a lot when I lived in Southern California circa 2000-2005, so I'm excited for that. UPDATE: Hear that segment here.
And of course, if you haven't grabbed my latest yulemix, Children, Go Where I Send Thee!, that awaits your loving attention here.
Merry Christmas!
Drew Cortese and Quentin Maré in Studio's The Motherfucker with the Hat. (Teddy Wolff)
We're wrapping up a highly rewarding and admirably trend-resistant year on DC's stages, as I aver in this week's Washington City Paper.
Thanks to Virgina Prescott and Word of Mouth for having me back on yesterday to talk about the dearth of new Christmas songs and make a few recommendations of less-familiar old ones. They were awfully nice about it when the battery in the borrowed phone I was using died mid-interview.
You can listen to the segment here.
