The last time I blogged from LA…

…I sat shiva with DAVID AND SHADOW AND LIGHT librettist (and friend), Yehuda Hyman for his mom and then blogged about the bittersweet sense of it all from my friend Greg Germann’s dining room. I’m heading there again in a few minutes. A year and a half ago, with that wonderfully ambitious, risky musical we were joyful about a run of an additional hundred tickets sold over the weekend (or something like that) as we licked our wounds over the critical divide that sealed DAVID’S disappointing (for now) fate and knew that, despite the little weekend spike in sales, the show would leave blood—and broken hearts—on the floor. And yet it was sunshine in LA, theater far behind, the vicissitudes of life lapping up against the shore as we strolled the Venice beach boardwalk, Greg and I, after paddle-tennis and yapping about middle-age, intersections, art, family…

It’s nice to be back and to hear and see the box office reports that Lost in Yonkers is SOLD OUT ALL WEEKEND! That’s right, another wonderful week of audiences, last night’s, apparently, laughing from the word go (or actually the word “hot” and in “I’m so hot!”) and leaping to their feet at the end. While Simon’s fate on Broadway has been indeed loudly lamented and might have even cut into our advance ticket sales—yes, it’s no longer the record breaking clip of early November—a sold out weekend is a sold out weekend and there’ll be only two more weeks to go.

We’re rolling out our first online ads with the Washington Post for Thanksgiving Week which promises to close out our run with a wonderful bang. So as we look at the surf, and commune with friends, and think about the times gone by and family and work and all that human stuff, it’s nice to remember that artists are hard at work back in DC, laying it all on the line emotionally every night, engendering real warmth and deep feeling every night.

Soon I’ll be posting some of my students’ reactions to YONKERS. They’re truly amazing and insightful. And we’ll have much more chance to hear from a special group of audience members this Wednesday with our Washington Hebrew Congregation member friends who’ll all have seen the play as we gather at a warm home to discuss the depths and the heights of the work with Rabbi Bruce Lustig, other Theater J Council members and myself as part of their L’Chaim series. So thrilled that 50 wonderful (and mostly brand new) friends of our theater will be sharing their impressions and getting to know us better.

And now, it’s off to tackle the freeways!

Believe It Or Not (2008) – It Was a Very Good Year (Our Best)

If we had time today to reflect instead of crazy prep for two shows tonight — the 7:30 sold out performance of SHOLOM ALEICHEM: LAUGHTER THROUGH TEARS (our 12th sold out show out of 13 performances thus far), followed by the 10 PM New Years Eve concert of Serendipity 4 (Theo Bikel’s quartet comprised of the equally estimable Tamara Brooks, Merima Kljuco, and Shura Lipovsky) –we’d be perusing through this year’s blog entries–not to mention box office night end reports–to recount Theater J’s most popular and financially successful season ever. Sounds strange, doesn’t it? In the midst of this economic turmoil and all our nation’s–not to mention Jewish community’s–financial instability, Theater J offerings were never more boisterously attended, nor more remunerative. Dare we review?

SHLEMIEL THE FIRST: A musical derided by Mr. Marks as “Jewish Hee-Haw” eclipsed projections, built an enthusiastic following, divided our regulars, and made us smile every single night as audiences lingered for the klezmir jam session between the fabulous trio of top-flight musicians.

JUDY GOLD in 25 QUESTIONS… Swore like a sailor. At all of us in the office. All the time. And occasionally on stage. And we loved her all the same. And she brought box office gold too. And tons of mothers and daughters and grand daughters. She’s got a new show that just opened in Boston. She says I’m an anti-Semite if I don’t book her tomorrow. I might have too.

THE PRICE: The Proskys broke all box office records during their historic run–until Sandra Bernhard broke those (in her differently historic run). Until Bikel smashed hers. It’s been that kind of season. But Bob Prosky was irreplaceable. And his performance as Solomon, unforgettable.

Following Up on Recent Comment Response re: Re: “STOP!” Don’t Go See New Work!

As promised in my response to Niraj two days ago, here’s part of the correspondence between our office and the Washington Post Weekend section editor and some other colleagues in the theater community. Know that there is already strong behind-the-scenes following up occurring with theater community leaders and the Washington Post about the At a Glance listing as well as the future of Jane Horwitz’s Backstage article. In short, things are in flux, changing not always for the good, and voices are being raised, and heard.

“I was very happy to read the forthright correspondence between Theater J’s marketing director, Rebecca Ende, and Tracy Grant, Editor of the Weekend section, concerning the May 23 AT A GLANCE listing which told Post Weekend Readers to STOP and not go see Theater J’s production of DAVID IN SHADOW AND LIGHT. We accept that reviewers should write whatever they think and feel about a show and the Weekend section does due diligence to reprint capsule reviews that help amplify the critic’s opinion throughout the course of the run of a show. We’ve never, however, been on the receiving end of a “STOP! DON’T GO!” command from the Weekend section. The impact of a poor review is one thing. A theater soldiers on, as does the theater-going public, using the review for what it is — one man’s informed opinion — and the ticket buyers frequently make up their own mind. After the May 20 review, we were still able to sell tickets to our show. In fact we sold $4,000 over a 4 day span. Since the Weekend Sections’ “STOP! DON’T GO!” listing for DAVID, your readership has heeded the command — ticket sales have flat-lined… Completely….

Was that the intention of Peter Marks’ review? To destroy a show and a theater’s season? I don’t think so. Does the chief critic approve of the reductive shorthand that boils down a longish review to the dictate: “STOP! DON’T GO.”

It’s worth bringing this up with a few informed friends in the theater community because I know other artistic directors, like Mark Rhea from the Keegan Theatre, have been very concerned about the appearance of this new exhortation to the Post’s theatergoing readership that they actively stay away from a show that didn’t fare well in a review.

We know Peter Marks to be a critic who would like to see theaters continue to take on risky and new work. Theaters have a right to come up short artistically without being pulverized and the subject of a limited campaign to keep audiences away.

The Weekend’s section listing is performing a very different function than a theatrical review. It is capable of inflicting much damage without shedding much light. I needn’t repeat the brutal facts — our show, as you can see on our website and blog, received mixed reviews and passionate, enthusiastic, but also mixed response from audience members. It’s a huge new musical with much to contemplate artistically. The impact of the Weekend Post’s listing served to pulverize the fortunes of the show.

Does this happen frequently with other shows that receive less than strong reviews?

Will the Post continue to actively tell audience members to stay away from shows all season long. It seems a shame; it seems wrong; it seems injurious. And I hope a decision can be made to save our community from further damage like this.

Criticism can be rough and tough enough. We needn’t engage in overkill.

Thanks for your re-consideration of this practice.

Best,

Ari Roth
Artistic Director

—–Original Message—–
From: Tracy Grant [mailto:grantt@washpost.com]
Sent: Friday, May 23, 2008 12:37 PM
To: Ende, Rebecca
Subject: Re: Weekend Slam on Theater J

A Regal Silhouette (read this review and learn something)

David in Shadow and Light

By Menachem Wecker

The Jewish Press: “America’s Largest Independent Jewish Weekly”

Date Posted: June 4, 2008

Libretto by Yehuda Hyman

Music by Daniel Hoffman

Light and shadow typically assume moral implications in literature, where light is often divine and dark symbolizes the unknown and the scary. In Greek mythology, the dead who could afford it, bribed Charon to take them across the River Styx to Hades, while those who could not, hovered around the river for eternity as “shades”. Plato saw this imperfect world as silhouettes projected on the walls of a dark cave. Film noirs build drama in scenes that are dark and perpetually rainy, while “The Lion King” turned to a dark, shadowy elephant graveyard as the place of supreme chaos and evil.

“David in Shadow and Light”, the current play at Theater J at the Washington DC JCC, builds upon the charged metaphors of light and dark with a new twist. In the play, the gaps between film frames serve as a metaphor for the life of King David. If the information about David’s life in the Bible is the series of film frames, the space between frames “contain” the many details the Bible could have provided but did not – the set of emotions, thoughts, and other actions that the play improvises upon.

 

The cast of David in Shadow and Light. Photo by Stan Barouh, courtesy of Theater J.

In an adaptation of the famous “RENT” song, “Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes. How do you measure, measure a year?” the characters of “David in Shadow and Light” lay out this methodology early on in a song: “Twenty-four frames per second of life/ An even division of shadow and light/ A vision projected on canvas of white/ In 24 frames per second of life.” In between frames, so the song continues, “is the moment between/ Where the vision goes dark to reveal the unseen/ Where the heart has to choose how to play out the scene/ In the moment between every moment between.”

The frames come from a projector upon which Archangel Metatron (Donna Migliaccio) shows the 930-year-old, wheelchair-ridden and dejected Adam (Norman Aronovic) how the future will unfold. Metatron shows Noah, Sarah, Ishmael, Isaac, Joseph, Moses, Miriam, Samson, Shakespeare, Napoleon, Einstein, Martin Luther King, and Kennedy. But as she tries to fast forward past the young David, who is only destined to live a matter of hours, Adam insists that Metatron stop the reel.  

To keep reading, click here.

DAVID To Close One Week Early – Seeing It In Print

From Today’s Washington Post:

Theater J will close “David in Shadow and Light” on June 15, a week earlier than scheduled, due to slow ticket sales, publicist Rebecca Ende said. The original musical about the Old Testament king was an expensive ($250,000), long-gestating investment for the theater. Those who have tickets for the canceled shows will be rescheduled to earlier performances.

We informed our cast last week and then began calling the 160 ticket holders for that final week of scheduled performances that would be cancelled. We’ve never done that before. Of course, we’ve never had a show scheduled to run for 7 weeks before either. At 6 weeks and 28 performances, DAVID is still getting a long and respectable run. It would have been a shame to stagger to the finish line with an average of 30 patrons in the house per night for that 7th week. So we bit the bullet. We have healthy house sizes for the duration of our run–now through June 15–and we’ll go out in strong style. Despite the huge investment made in the project, we were well capitalized and we won’t end the season with a gaping hole deficit. In fact, because a half dozen true believers have stepped forward since the posting of our closing notice, and we’re hoping that another half dozen or will do the same before month’s close end, we’re on track to balance our budget and conclude Theater J’s most successful season ever. And so the ironies abound: Our most expensive show to ever take it on the chin concludes our most popular season. One of the most artistically daring premieres to come out of our shop meets up with a wave of surly criticism and passionate advocacy, resulting in the busiest blog traffic and most website hits we’ve ever had! And at the same time, ticket sales trickle in at an achingly slow, low volume. Aching, but not embarrassing, let it be noted.

Receiving and Responding to New Plays: From Our Audience

Ari –

We saw the production last evening and I was sad to see by email that you will be closing the run early. Since those of us who love theatre know that its lifeblood is new work, I believe that the artistic directors of Washington area theaters should combine their efforts to educate the public about new work.

The message needs to be something like:

“When you see a World Premiere it should be seen as a work in progress even though it may have had many readings and other production-like performances earlier.  The audiences for a World Premiere should be educated that they are privileged to be seeing something new that’s not necessarily finished and polished.  But in order for it to be refined, it needs the audience reaction to make it real.  Part of the necessary collaboration that makes theatre so very special is the relationship with the audience, and without learning how audiences will react, directors and actors can’t polish the piece.”

In last night’s production, there were many moments of beauty and elegance. 

from a friend…

Bonnie Berger, our wonderful house manager for many years at Theater J, forwarded this beautiful take on the show from a new friend of our theater.

“My Italian immigrant grandmother, whose girth, wit, and wisdom grew as I did, always advised me in heavily accented lilt to “hava yoo own a mind”… translation: have your own mind, don’t follow the pack, think for yourself, make decisions and choices outside the collective consciousness. Her mantra was meant to protect me from the ‘bad influence’ of the city thugs that lie just outside of our Bronx borough. The delight of living so close to Manhattan lie in my mostly weekly visits and trips to the theater there… through my many Broadway and off Broadway experiences, I became fairly discerning in what worked onstage and what didn’t.

I was seated in the opening night audience of David in Shadow and Light. I found the experience moving, fun, passionate and completely entertaining. The energy of the ‘house’ was riveted as librettist Yehuda’s storytelling unfolded, cracking open the ancient story of David. As it is with most midrash, the original story gets stretched against the confines of the concretized version of memory and tradition. As a graduate student at Yale, studying theology, I became versed in the exegetical framework of retelling and interpretation. Later as a Teaching Fellow there, we fleshed out the notions of liberation theology against postmodern thinking.

Certainly, what we see depends on where we stand in the room (and we have all heard versions of that concept before) but I plain ol’ wondered if the reviewers were actually in the same theater that I was that opening night.

Another Strong Notice

From the Washington Post Express

A Biblical Wild Ride: ‘David in Shadow and Light’

SEX, BETRAYAL, LOVE, HATE, MURDER, GREED, HOMOEROTICISM — the makings of any good Bible story. Theater J’s retelling of the story of King David has them all. ”David in Shadow and Light,” a musical by playwright Yehuda Hyman and composer/violinist Daniel Hoffman, is a mixed-bag narrative following the life of the Old Testament’s David from shepherd boy to epic ruler. Theater J does its best to make David’s story relevant and contemporary.

“Why do a show about King David now?” asks artistic director Ari Roth, echoing what many audience members might be wondering. “Because he was the biggest celebrity to ever walk the face of the Earth.”

The real celebrity of the play, though, is Hoffman, a world-renowned expert of the Yiddish violin style. The talented violinist gives a stunning performance with beautiful solos accompanying the ups and downs of David’s journey. From beginning to end, his unique composition — laden with distinctly Jewish and klezmer-derived sounds — successfully blends the traditional with the contemporary.

The highlight of this wild ride is a modern re-creation of the battle between David and Goliath. In Theater J’s version, Goliath looks like he stumbled out of a Marilyn Manson video — angry, yelling and covered in goth makeup — and into aWWE SmackDown ring. He screams into a microphone announcing his presence and his plans for poor little David. And the rest is biblical history.

There’s a whole lot going on in the show, so try not to blink. Bring your attention span and get ready for some crazy biblical fun.

» Theater J, 1529 16th St. NW; through June 22, $20-$55; 202-518-9400. (Dupont Circle)

Written by Express contributor Suemedha Sood

The Kind of Wonderful Reviews We Thought We’d Be Getting…

We’re seeing the biggest swings of reactions we’ve ever witnessed, the widest range of yeas and nays in the press, in our audience, in our circle of council members and friends.  Passion, Passion:  We’re all about that at Theater J, and it’s the leitmotif of DAVID as well.  So much darkness amid so much light!

So how fitting it is that this amazing Georgetowner review by longtime critic and features writer Gary Tischler should tap into the new/old, avant-garde/traditional dialectic that makes DAVID so big, so challenging, so confounding to some, so thrilling to others.  We received The Georgetowner notice, together with another rave in the DC Examiner by Barbara Mackay, on Wednesday.  We include them in full below:

“DAVID IN SHADOW AND LIGHT”

BY GARY TISCHLER

MAY 28, 2008

http://www.georgetowner.com/performance2.shtml

There are a lot of strains and strings being played and pulled in the often audacious, world premiere production of  “David in Shadow and Light”, a genre-defying  new musical play based on the story of the biblical giant-killer hero who became a powerful and tragic king of the Israelites.

For all the winking nods to today’s political and post-modern  climate, the striving to be cool, this genre-defying project is at its heart something very old-fashioned. It sucker-punches you in the heart, and in reaching for a big-sized theme in the end actually grabs it and shakes it like a bible story teller.

“David in Shadow and Light” is also the most ambitious project ever taken on by Theater J. Artistic Director Ari Roth sees David as a natural subject  for our contentious contemporary political world. “He was the biggest celebrity to ever walk the face of the earth. He had the greatest gifts, the highest charisma quotient he was wildly popular, wildly romantic, rapacious, God fearing, flesh loving,  a bollix of contradictions, how contemporary is that?” 

Well, this David sounds like a phenom, who could resemble Barack Obama, but he sounds as if he has more Clintonian qualities, Bill that is, in his appetites.  This production, directed by Nick Olcott, has a libretto by Yehuda Hyman that veers from the text-messaging age to a truth-telling, raw biblical style, and  original music by Daniel Hoffman which verges wildly along atonal, risky contemporary styles, to primitive, passionate surges of near-melodic feeling. Perhaps even more critical is the choreography of Peter DiMuro and Shula Strassfeld of the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange. Dance figures strongly in this play, movement as a signifier of events, character and personality every bit as much as dialogue. And that’s not counting the conceit that David’s life is played out like a life film in front of an angel and Adam the father of us all.

That’s a lot of chefs and cooks  sharing responsibility, but then you need almost every bit of the ingredients, the music, the whirling dancing, the words both profound, funny, touching and  way cool, for a play that features David, the young shepherd boy as a magnetic natural. Everybody’s drawn to him: his sheep whom he treats as individuals, King Saul, who sees him standing in the light of God, and therefore a threat to his rule; his son Jonathan who loves him immediately and deeply; Saul’s daughter Michal, who swoons like a teenager in hopeless love. the prophet Samuel, who anoints him, even Goliath, the punked-out Philistine, who turns out to be David’s cousin. (It was a small world even then).

For all the claims of contemporariness made for this David, a ravaged, bone-weary Adam, played from a wheelchair in wise, funny, wounded style by the superb  Norman Aronovic, gets David right away and in a nutshell.  “Look at his heart,” he says when he and the angel Metatron (Helen Hayes Award winner Donna Migliaccio) discover David as a baby. “He has  the heart of the world.”. That’s the big idea in the play, and its smartly, sometimes heart-breakingly illustrated in the play with brilliant casting doubling.

Exciting DAVID News Over the Transom

Small, significant steps in the past few hours.  Phoning in for the DAVID box office night end from the outdoor lobby of the historic Pasadena Playhouse, I hear of an unexpected $900 spike in ticket sales on Saturday last minute purchases; walk-ups, Goldstar, Ticketplace, Rush Tix; who knows?  Can’t tell on the phone. But we gathered up an extra 20+ patrons last night and it made all the difference in the world!  Our stage manager, the diligent Maribeth Chaprnka, reports: “Responsive. Lots of laughs, particularly during the foreskin scene. Cheers during curtain call, and one patron stood.”

And now this from the incredibly devoted, intrepid playgoing group, FOOTLIGHTS; one member shares:

Subject: [footlightsdc] MUST SEE:David in Shadow & Light @ Theater J

I was absolutely blown away by Theater J’s premier Of David in Shadow and Light. From the first mesmerizing moment…with fabulous arresting use of light, shadows, brilliant choreography and staging… A delight to behold. Inventive. To the fabulous vocal and acting talent of the cast to the gorgeous costumes and use of technique, to the thrilling musical expertise. This is a MUST SEE! Tell your friends to come from out of town. It is THAT SPECIAL a production. This is the first show that I have seen in years that I really wanted to see again. Absolutely SUPERB! You can tell this was a labor of love, and that it evolved over the last 4 years. It was an awesome experience. Hats off to the cast, crew, directors. It just opened a week ago. The run has been extended through June 22.
This weekend they have a $10 off discount. RUSH to see this play and tell your friends. Brilliantly done. Be delighted.
Thanks, Theater J. And you can take your kids to see it! – Barbara Halpern

So the importance of people telling people that there is simply too much talent, too much story, too much motion and spectacle and song to allow this production to whither on the vine. And so Thursday night’s wonderful performance with its really moving talk-back with the cast immediately after (such a dedicated, BELIEVING bunch of actors who are in love with this score and are devoted to giving their all every night), and now this strong performance with the extra 20 patrons moves us slowly-slowly in the right positive direction. Will we make it to the finish line? What is the finish line?