David Friscic - Page 2

Golf is a metaphor for “the haves and have nots” in playwright August Wilson’s masterful final play Radio Golf. This challenging play now being presented at Bethesda’s Round House Theatre is directed by Reginald L. Douglas with a finely tuned ear for the cadence of speech and the robust, all-encompassing writing style of August Wilson. 

Growing up with the New York City Ballet (NYCB)nearby during my high school and college years (as they had their summer residency at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Saratoga Springs), I was thrilled to turn around many years later to see the Kennedy Center present an evening of some of the New York City Ballet’s most beloved ballets.

A solid, well-crafted, and thought-provoking play---Good Bones is about four individuals coping in various ways with issues of onrushing gentrification, loss of community, and reconnection. Playwright James Ijames has written an all too relevant story about what happens when a community and sense of place fragments, shifts and splinters off into new paradigms. Now being presented at the Studio Theatre in the intimate Milton Theater space, this absorbing play uncoiled with the mix of familiarity, drama and humor that is the stuff of everyday life –but, also, was replete with the many small, insightful details of writing that show a very perceptive playwright at work.

The glorious music of Puccini remains the principal reason to see the Washington National Opera’s (WNO)current production of the beloved classic opera La bohème. This oft-referenced opera that has influenced everything from the famous film Moonstruck to the hit Broadway musical Rent, must be a fairly faithful revival of the original opera that the WNO presented at the Kennedy Center in 2014 –the original director Peter Kazaras is one again at the helm.  Additionally, the original costumes by Jennifer Moeller (which are appropriate to the updated period), the original choreography by Ben Wright and the original set design by Lee Savage have all been retained. From referencing the program, however, it seems that lighting design by A. J. Guban has been brought in for this production.

The musical revival of My Fair Lady, that came to the National Theatre this past holiday weekend, proves that this classic musical with lyrics and book by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe is an indestructible warhorse of a show that never grows stale. Director Bartlett Sher (with tour direction by Samantha Saltzman) has reinvigorated this masterpiece of superior integration of music, lyrics and book with some salient deconstruction-- but no amount of deconstruction can take away from the emotional pull of this material.

It was a like coming home with Chita Rivera full circle and approaching a kind of comfortable closure when I attended the Signature Theatre’s Sondheim Award Gala 2023 honoring the Broadway legend Chita Rivera at the Italian Embassy in Washington. DC.  The iconic legend of theatrical music and dance (What a dancer she is!) was feted with the prestigious award from Signature Theatre and a warm response from a very “Chita-friendly” roster of performers and an audience of patrons, fans and supporters. (Rivera has also won about every award in the book including two Tony Awards, a special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Kennedy Center Honor).

A seismic theatrical jolt shot through the theatre world this past Thursday evening when a startling, radically deconstructed production of Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches opened at the Arena Stage; this interpretation grabs you like a “fever-dream” of the mind.  As soon as I walked in to see this interpretation of this classic play of the American canon, a distinctly European sensibility took hold, and I noticed the chandeliers were all covers in heavy tarp/sheeting and the Angel was raking the theatre-in -the -round stage while moving gradations of sand around an inner circle.  This Angel appears with some frequency in this interpretation and we are reminded that there “are” angels in America ---perhaps we do not need be ruled by the crazed politics that divide us.  We can choose to fight our biases and preconceptions.

Acclaimed Tenor Lawrence Brownlee treated his audience, at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater, with an afternoon of engaging, sensitive vocal interpretations of some of the world’s most talented African American composers.  This invigorating program, entitled Rising, increased in vocal nuance, and beautifully intonated clarity as it ran the gamut of spiritual, romantic, jazzy, contemplative, and socially conscious original compositions by this illustrious and very talented roster of creative composers.

The clash of cultures –between West and East—is portrayed with poetic and musical flourish in Signature Theatre’s production of Stephen Sondheim’s rarefied and insightful Pacific Overtures. This very specialized of musicals should now appeal to a larger audience thanks to the savvy, relevant and comprehensive direction by Ethan Heard.

In a world of fake news, alternate facts, social media frenzy and an increasingly opinionated and polarized public/audience, the issues raised in the intellectually challenging play The Lifespan of a Fact are more relevant than ever.  Now being presented at the Keegan Theatre, this play may be short in length, but it probingly explores the weighty issues of the passion of the essay writer/prose stylist versus the scrupulous and zealous fact-checking of the journalist/article writer.

Is learning a new language a hindrance to your heart’s love of your cultural heritage, is it purely functional, or is it a means of gaining enrichment and new understanding? Is precise pronunciation meant to trip lightly off the tongue in any language or is it best to take pride in your original accent?  Is Farsi one of the most poetic languages in the world? These are some of the questions raised in the alternately serious, disarming and somewhat indefinable play English now being presented at the Studio Theatre.

A searing indictment of prejudice and racism in all its permutations wrapped in a fascinating “whodunit” mystery ----the compelling Pulitzer-Prize winning play by Charles Fuller, A Soldier’s Play, is now a knockout of a production at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater. 

The holidays are upon us and that means the Gay Men's Chorus of Washington DC (GMCW) is presenting their much-anticipated annual holiday musical present---an engaging package of song and dance, The Holiday Show, for the LGBTQ+ community (and, hopefully, for the larger DMV community as well).

It is no secret why the musical Chicago, now playing at the National Theatre, is such a long-running hit lauded by the public and critics alike. It is the ultimate in cynical musicals and will be applauded as long as “the world goes round” with avarice, immorality, and greed.

People, Places and Things are a constant trigger for addiction and anxiety in the probing and intellectually thrilling production of People, Places & Things now playing at the Studio Theatre.  A highly evolved play of substance that really pushes the boundaries of the subject of addiction is a top-notch tour de force courtesy of a very trenchantly observed and written play by Duncan Macmillan, above par technical elements, and excellent acting. 

The Keegan Theatre is presenting a moving and sensitive production of composer William Finn’s Elegies: A Song Cycle.  This is a work of disarming autobiographical elements that underscore Finn’s alternately quirky and elegiac lyrics.  Finn’s music is shot through with a sense of longing and pain abetted with a sense of holding on to whatever one can grasp at in times of despair and loss.  

A dramatic and ruminative journey through the personal history of two famous figures, Albert Einstein, and his wife Mileva Marić, takes place in an afterlife limbo in Einstein’s Wife. This intriguing play will be welcome by anyone who is interested in the interpersonal battles of Einstein and his first wife, who was a brilliant scientist in her own right. 

The “awful grace of God” (from Aeschylus----prominently displayed on Robert F. Kennedy’s grave) has been a line I all too well understand as a Catholic---in the current and intellectually thrilling production of Heroes of the Fourth Turning, Aeschylus is more than apt.  These characters are given grace in circumstances that often resemble “The Dark Night of the Soul” (St. John of the Cross). The Studio Theatre is presenting a play that grabs hold of the mind and heart with a compelling dramatic throughline for all those who have thought about the role of the sacred in a secular society.

Past secrets and traditions are remembered, present feelings and resentments are exposed, and future plans collide when the death of a beloved matriarch (of a Jamaican -British family) shatters the strictures of daily life for the celebration of Nine Night (a celebration of family/friends, food, and music for the departed).

Revoltosa—The Troublemaker , now playing at GALA Hispanic Theatre ---is a compelling and lyrical “slice of life” with multiple layers of interest for just about any thinking and feeling human being who is willing to entertain the idea that life is full of mystery, contradictions and certain universal elemental truths about human nature.  This highly amusing (and often moving) yet insightful production (sub-titled as “Variations on the 1897 zarzuela for today”) is given a zesty and comically on-target interpretation by a committed ensemble under the Direction of José Luis Arellano.