The Theater J Blog

A reminder that a memorial service for DC/Baltimore actor and radio personality Bill Hamlin will be held on Monday, June 16, 2008 at 7:30 pm. Organized by friends of Bill from the Washington Stage Guild, Theater J and his radio career, the service will be held in the Aaron and Cecile Goldman Theater at the DC Jewish Community Center, 1529 16th Street NW (at the corner of Q & 16th Streets).  A reception with refreshments will follow.

Mr. Hamlin, an award-winning actor and radio personality in the greater-DC area for many years, passed away on February 21 of this year from lung cancer at the age of 64.

It is not too late to send personal and professional reminiscences to hamlin.memorial@comcast.net, to be displayed in the theater lobby for the service.

Persons interested in making a memorial donation in Bill’s name may do so through:

The American Cancer Society - www.cancer.org/donate

Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS - www.broadwaycares.org/donations

The Washington Stage Guild Capital Campaign - www.stageguild.org 

Please forward this to any and all friends and colleagues of Bill.

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
Keep reading →

We run for six more performances and then bring our six-week run to a close. Will anybody rue the onset of summer vacation? Do we all need one? Deserve one? Are we happy? I think we are.

We’ll be welcoming back our playwright, Yehuda Hyman, who’ll take in the final weekend. Just as we welcome Israeli director Sinai Peter, who’s flying in from Tel Aviv to conduct auditions for next season’s Israeli scorcher, THE ACCIDENT, by Hillel Mitelpunkt. Sinai was here a year ago, you’ll remember, for the staging of PANGS OF THE MESSIAH, the show that put this blog on the map! It’s our third round of auditions for the new season, as a month ago we cast the Serbian-Bosnian drama, HONEY BROWN EYES by Stefanie Zadravec, directed by Jessica Lefkow, and we were able to hire an amazing cast. Just last week we concluded auditions for our new comedy, THE RISE AND FALL OF ANNIE HALL, by Sam Forman, directed by Shirley Serotsky. Another great company on board for that. We got nothing but in this theater, thanks to the work of our star casting director, Naomi Robin. Where would we be without her? (Stuck on the phone forever, that’s where — and in far flung theaters, seeing everything and everyone, as Naomi so nobly does). So yes, we’re not only turning toward summer vacation; we’re turning toward next season.

But this weekend was spent with DAVID… On Saturday night, because we shared our stage with the Washington Jewish Music Festival, we took our performers out of the city and held a cultivation/celebration reception for our cast and producing angels at the weekend/summer home of Council Co-Chair Irene Wurtzel and her husband Alan. The Wurtzel compound is called the GrassRoots Farm and it’s a full 70 miles outside the city in Delaplane, VA. It rained for about 20 minute but otherwise was a beautiful, though blistering hot late afternoon into evening. After dinner, 45 of us gathered in the spacious living room to raise a toast to the team and then hear selections from the score of DAVID introduced and played by composer Daniel Hoffman, accompanied by bassist Joshua Schwartzman. Five of our cast members shared numbers. It was so beautiful. Daniel played a traditional Romanian doyna (or un-metered wedding tune cadenza) followed by the Doyna he wrote for David to play King Saul to sleep. A pretty masterful performance. The countryside setting, so evocative and lyrical. Why so special? Well, it was downright Chekhovian. And those associations were with me since the night before, I had driven up to Princeton, New Jersey and the McCarter Theatre where (TJ Resident Director) John Vreeke and I took in one of the final weekend performances of Emily Mann’s freely adapted A SEAGULL IN THE HAMPTONS. How was it? Keep reading →

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. Keep reading →

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.  Keep reading →

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. Keep reading →

Productive time!  Banging out letters–not nearly enough of them yet–to all manner of important folk; funders–yes, that’s important–but also Embassy officials and other artists and producers.  My sleeping pattern’s wrecked since coming back from LA.  I was in Cleveland all Wednesday meeting with the Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv, in the States presenting their brilliant HAMLET — they’ll be at Theater J next March with their even more revealing and relevant PLONTER (TANGLE) and we’re working out details about a Manhattan tour stop first, where Theater J may very well provide the set and props before the show comes to DC.  Setting up a giant tour like that, as we prepare to audition Sam Forman’s hysterical comedy THE RISE AND FALL OF ANNIE HALL… As we get ready to work with Israeli playwright Hillel Mitellpunkt on refining the translation of his important play, THE ACCIDENT, which we’ll be auditioning for in mid June. And then I go with my girls to Israel for my nephew’s bar-mitzvah. I leave before the close of the june 30 fiscal year and so am trying to get our ducks in order now.  DAVID’s box office is wreaking some minor havoc with our end of season projections.  So it’s a time for scrambling.  It’s a time for enlisting friends.  And, it turns out, it’s a time to be up at, well, now it’s 3:53 in the morning.  And ANOTHER trip on a plane this week — to Chicago for 36 hours for ANOTHER bar-mitzvah of ANOTHER dear nephew.  We’re back on Sunday, June 1 for the Israel@60 festivities on the Mall and the two shows of DAVID on Sunday.

I will sleep in some other life.  Or on the plane.  Or in some other theater’s production of something (that’s a joke!).  But all this nocturnal madness reminds me of the great pleasure I’ve had in writing the ten minute play that was mentioned in Jane H’s Backstage column yesterday in the Post.  I’m really kinda happy with the play, even though I won’t be in town to see it.  Want some info about it?

Keep reading →

From the Washington Post Express

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

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.

Keep reading →