The press is finally getting around to covering the Russert Death Coverage just as the ruminations/tributes are starting to slow. But I have to admit I am still mildly obsessed with Russert as dead-media-cult-figure. I can’t stop watching/reading about Russert.

I watched his show every Sunday but I admit I sometimes dreaded it or clicked away. Any time Biden was on. Any time Russert let a Republican and Democrat play policy ping-pong. I was changing channels. Still. The memorial service was good enough to watch twice. But can the media folk stop making a big deal about drinking Rolling Rock?

On Friday I went to see Vladimir Ashkenazy conduct the National Symphony Orchestra through Sibelius’ Symphony No.1, Oceanides, and Symphony No. 7. The music was beautiful, and Ashkenazy was adorable. To top the night off, a woman sat behind me and taught me a lot about how to behave at the symphony. Here’s what I learned:

• Know What You’re Seeing. When you first sit down and ask your husband, “Now what are we seeing tonight?” it makes you sound like a snob. This isn’t an Edith Wharton novel. You don’t need to go to the symphony just to be seen. Go because you like music.
• Don’t Call People Stupid. When people clap at inappropriate moments, don’t cry out, “Stupid people! What stupid people! Stupid! Stupid!”
• Plan Ahead. Need your glasses? Need a tissue? Need another tissue? Decide you don’t need your glasses? It’s really best just to dump your purse out on your lap before the performance begins. Don’t zip, unzip, zip, unzip, zip your purse. It’s really just a waste of time.
• Request an Aisle Seat. This way you don’t have to loudly declare at intermission, “These seats are horrible! I will never sit here again! Really, with how often we come it’s ridiculous they don’t give us aisle seats! Ridiculous!” Bonus: You can put your feet in the aisle so you don’t kick the seat in front of you every couple minutes.
• Use Lotion. If you keep your skin moist, you don’t have to spend long periods of time scratching your knuckles.
• Don’t Take Your Boredom Out on the Program. It’s there to help you. Don’t rip through the pages like there’s money hidden in them. Be gentle. Some say it’s even possible to turn a page soundlessly.

Thank you, fellow audience member. You have taught me well.

Today, the Kennedy Center announced its list of honorees which include the worthy (Brian Wilson and Martin Scorsese), the sorta-worthy (Diana Ross), and the ubiquitous “classy” pick (pianist Leon Fleisher). But there’s one honoree I think the Kennedy Center should reconsider: “Comedian” Steve Martin.

Martin hasn’t been “wild and crazy” for years, decades even. His SNL schtick doesn’t even hold up as either still-funny or period kitsch. While he has attempted to evolve into a “serious writer,” contributing to the New Yorker, he still makes really lousy films. I would know. I sneaked into Cheaper By The Dozen 2. I caught a solid 15-20 minutes of that crap vehicle and I have two words for Mr. Martin: no laughs.

I sneaked in expecting some old fashioned entertainment—hilarious ball-in-groin shots, water-ski-based pratfalls, and can’t-miss skunks-really-smell jokes. I’m pretty sure I caught some of these gags. And still no laughs.

If Martin can’t deliver some good yuks during a 20-minute sneak-in, what good is he? That’s more than enough time for a 2007 Kennedy Center honoree to deliver!

One more point. Martin seems to have made a career making this face. Not exactly genius!

In November 2005, I had the opportunity to interview Congolese thumb piano group Konono No. 1 following their performance on the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage. Konono No. 1 founder and patriarch Mingiedi was very friendly and enthusiastic about the interview but the process proved a little complex—mainly because of the double language barrier in between us. Mingiedi (pictured) spoke only Bantu. While on tour he communicated with Konono’s sound man via a translator who spoke only Bantu and French. Konono’s sound man spoke French and a little bit of English. Ignorant American that I am, I speak only English.

As the interview began these three men sat down across from me in a row and translated my questions from English to French to Bantu. The answers were then passed back through the same confusing process in a multilingual game of telephone.

Remarkably, this worked—or at least it worked 75 percent of the time—and we were all able to have a pretty nice, if clumsy conversation about the band’s history, their homemade likembé sound system, and Dutch punk group The Ex. Then out of sheer laziness I never published it—until now. Check Konono No. 1 out tonight when they perform at the Black Cat at 9 p.m.

Me: I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about some of the history of the group? Just as far as how long you’ve been playing? When you started using the amplified equipment?

Soundman Translating for Mingiedi: He learned the music at home when he was young because his father was playing music for the king. The King used a lot of music when he wanted to talk to the population but he prefers the rhythm of “Masikulu.” Masikulu is a kind of rhythm—an old rhythm—music from Congo. Before about 1700 when they play Masikulu it’s not with the likembé; they played it with horns. He started to play Masikulu music with the likembé. That’s the story of his music.

Read the rest of this entry »

Nick Curran e-mailed to alert us to an attempt to take down the never-ending theatrical juggernaut that is the Kennedy Center’s Shear Madness. That so-called “out-of-touch” play will be replaced by a work better reflecting the real Washington, D.C., according to an open letter to Stephen Schwarzman and the KenCen Board of Trustees posted to the Web from “the Irish Felons.”

This ground-breaking new play would be Hot Tubbin’ I: Bringin’ It.

On the group’s Web site, the play’s creators admit to an uphill battle, but express confidence that once the board reviews the manuscript, “the cast and crew of Shear Madness will be notified of their dismissal immediately so that the baton may be passed to the future of Washington theater, Hot Tubbin’ I: Bringin’ It.

The group’s confidence may also be measured by the Roman numeral in the title. The follow-up is already planned: HT 2: His Majesty’s Hot Tub, “which will continue examining the dilemmas of political life through the prism of the U.S.-Saudi Arabian relationship and the awesomeness of the Doobie Brothers.”

Unlike Madness, the authors say, the appeal of Hot Tubbin’ lies in how the work “vividly portrays Washington and the agonies of modern political life.” Further, audiences “will closely identify with a muscle-bound kung-fu expert/cowboy/hot-tub engineer who looks like Lou Diamond Phillips.”

In dismissing Shear Madness, the site asks, “Where is the Washington I know? Where are the mountains of cocaine, the monster trucks, and the ferocious cowboy vs. gorilla-congressman kung-fu battles? Where the heck is the groundless conjecture about the super-secret network of pervert-coddling homosexuals that apparently is nested within the upper echelons of the Republican Party?”

Furthermore, the Felons state, Hot Tubbin’ I is “firmly rooted in the cherished traditions of American Theater,” adding, “in addition to paying considerable tribute to Eugene O’Neill, Hot Tubbin’ I has several characters who are gays.”

Interested parties may read the manuscript in four acts here.

“There needs to be a sense of gargoyles …”

Rorschach Theatre put up a reading of Jennifer Maisel’s “urban fairy tale” (wait, didn’t Rorschach just do one of those?) at 2 o’clock today. I lasted through the longish first act, then fled.

Not because I didn’t want to find out whether Maisel’s stockbroker Prince Charming (James Denvil) would survive the downward spiral he seemed to be starting.

And not because I didn’t wanna know whether the show’s Cinderella-with-a-past (Lindsay Haynes) would successfully transform the strangely knowing homeless guy (Jason Linkins) from frog-stinky to Wall Street-worthy.

Mostly I left because I was freezing my ass off in the Kennedy Center Family Theater. (And I have to say, Maisel was taking her sweet time with the rising action.)

And because out on the Millennium Stage, Synetic Theater (you remember, the Georgian lot with the movement thing) had started an open rehearsal of its upcoming Frankenstein adaptation. (It launches Synetic’s season later this month, upstairs at the Terrace Theater. Which reminds me that Rorschach’s doing a Frankenstein adaptation this fall, too–Neal Bell’s Monster, which opens at Halloween.)

So I parachuted into the Synetic thing just as the cast was doing vocal warm-ups: Theophilus Thistle, the famous thistle-sifter, thrust three thousand thistles through the thick of his thumb. Or words to that effect. And so on, before a quick run through an opening ballroom-dance sequence and the through-the-icebergs passage.

Director Paata Tsikurishvili sat with a script at on onstage table while production manager Anna Lane filled the near-capacity crowd in on Synetic’s mime-and-dance-infused style, and described some of the sets (a stage-wide wire curtain) and props they weren’t seeing–not least the electric chair Victor will be using to bring the monster to life.

Meanwhile at the other end of the KenCen’s long grand foyer, a lone aerialist with the hair of Boticelli’s Venus spun silently above the stage — warming up for Taffety Punk’s take on Shakespeare’s The Phoenix and Turtle, maybe? The velvet ropes were up, so I couldn’t find out for sure.

There’s more here tonight — Venus Theatre, Art Riot, Washington Improv, and the Bouncing Ball troops (that’s the bunch who brought you Lunch at Capital Fringe), among others.

But you’re on your own for those: We’re off to get a little food, and then I’ve gotta go review the world’s longest play about a whistle-blower. See ya tomorrow…

“It’s like pilot season for theater.” —Fiona Blackshaw

It is, kinda. The Kennedy Center’s Page to Stage new-play festival, which runs through Monday, partly serves up previews of stuff you’ll see on D.C.-area stages in the coming season. Signature Theatre, ferinstance, will be showcasing a new Underground Railroad musical by Nevermore composer Matt Conner.

But Page to Stage is also a kind of mini-Fringe, with local artists and companies trying out stuff that may never get another airing. It’s got a Fringe-y critical-mass vibe going on: Everywhere you look, there’s an actor or a director or a producer killing time, waiting to go on, or go in to watch a colleague’s staged reading, or go out for a bite with a friend who’s just finished a showcase.

And like Fringe, it’s the kind of place where things don’t always go as planned.

Forum Theatre and Dance, by way of example, scheduled a staged reading of a little comedy called The Adventures of Ali and Ali and the aXes of Evil. Then they discovered, once they got knee-deep into rehearsal, that a comedy written by a trio of smartasses named Yousseff and Chai and Verdecchia was a lot less funny when you put a couple of pale males in the leads. Less funny, in fact, than downright offensive.

So they scrapped Ali and Ali—at least until they can find the right actors. And Forum’s 2 p.m. slot on the Page to Stage schedule was occupied by? Animal Remains, by New York-based writer Justin Tolley, a member of the Neo-futurists playwrights collective who studied at JMU with Forum’s Michael Dove.  It’s a dark little story about three high-school friends still bound by the shared memory of a long-ago trauma. The actors got their first look at it yesterday—and played it to an audience of about 85 this gray, rainy afternoon.

In one of the four o’clock slots, a sprawling history play about a gang of Nazi saboteurs (and the never-mind-the-habeas-corpus treatment they got from FDR’s government) drew an SRO crowd of 100 or so in the South Atrium Lobby upstairs. SCENA Theatre’s Robert McNamara, who scripted the heavy-on-the-contemporary-parallels drama from a true story, wasn’t on hand—he’s apparently in Germany, whence he was e-mailing script updates as recently as yesterday. (From the beer garden, or so one cast member cracked afterward. Which might explain some of the circularity in some of those speeches.)

And another capacity bunch (hey, it’s all free, and the weather’s foul, but still: hooray for crowds) turned up for the 6 p.m. Millennium Stage showcase of a little item that’s already had a cabaret outing at Theater Alliance–and may turn up again in a full production at Metro Stage one season soon. D.C.-based actor/director/choreographer Michael Bobbitt has put together a revue of songs by Stephen Schwartz —the shameless populist behind Wicked, Pippin, and Godspell. Local musical-theater heavies including Erin Driscoll and Eleasha Gamble belted candy-corn songs like “Defying Gravity” and “When You Believe;” Priscilla Cuellar  put a torch to “Since I Gave My Heart Away,” from that excruciating Disney-ABC Geppetto starring Drew Carey. And everyone got a swat at cleverer stuff, including Working’s “It’s an Art” (done as a competitive duet) and a mashup of Pippin’s “Good Time Ladies Rag,” Godspell’s “All for the Best.”

Bobbitt and collaborator John L. Cornelius (who did the arrangements for the Schwartz project) also previewed a new musical they’re working on: The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings is based on William Brasher’s novel about a star Negro League pitcher who gives the finger to his team’s owner and tours with his own barnstorming band of baseballers.

Schwartz, whose presence made the crowd go Oooooh and clap a lot, isn’t the only celeb who’ll be on hand for Page to Stage.  If you’re going, keep your eyes peeled for Schindler’s List author Thomas Keneally, who’s workshopping a play (about an SS officer, go figure) with Theater J; it goes up Monday at 2 p.m.