Sharpenicity

Beautiful—the Carole King Musical !  It might have taken four guys from Belleville, NJ, to  make Jersey Boys but only one woman from Brooklyn for Beautiful—the Carole King Musical !  Sarah Bockel as Carole King opens the show (where it will also end) sitting at the piano for her debut concert at Carnegie  Hall.   The story skips back and forth between her home in Brooklyn to her job in Manhattan to her dream house in the suburbs to a recording studio in Los Angeles, with   a fine cast of characters from Dylan S. Wallach who plays her first husband Gerry Goffin, to their best and most competative song writing friends —Alison Whitehurst as Cynthia Weil and Jacob Heimer as Barry Mann.   All this under the watchful eyes of James Clow as Don Kirshner and Suzanne Grodner as Carole’s   mother Genie Klein.    This  jukebox musical/broadway hits all the right nostalgic spots. Against eye-popping lights, the  multi-talented co...

KING JOHN Folger Theatre There is little doubt that King John was the worst king of England, bad in every way.  So bad that the response was his being confronted to sign the Magna Carta.  Leaving that historic fact of the story out, Shakespeare’s play King John shows him for a true rotter. The Folger Theatre’s production could not be better. For starters, there is a pre opening scene, where the twelve  actors explain who they are and their relationships to the  others in history. Women stand out as have key power roles:   Kate Goehring as Eleanor of Aquitaine, mother of John, and Holly Twyford as Constance, mother of Arthur, the son of John’s dead brother Geoffrey.  Both demonstrate strong wills in powerful passionate speeches that are standouts in the play. The question is simple, who has the right to the throne, the  son of the elder brother, or the next brother in line.   Eleanor  stands for her son John, and Constance for...

SILENT NIGHT AT  Washington National Opera On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th year of the 20th century, a hundred years ago, the World War I Armistice was signed.  It had been over four years after the Great War had begun.   Washington National Opera’s production of  Kevin Puts’s and Mark Campbell’s Pulitzer Prize-winning opera Silent Night, takes us back  to the first Christmas at the beginning of the conflict in 1914, to a battlefield near Belgium, where soldiers in French, German, and Scottish trenches begin recalling songs of home. The story is true not only in recreating an actual event but in the emotions that it evokes of shared humanity, bitterness, conflict of duty,   loss of loved ones and just plain missing the family at home.   As an opera, it has   everything:   grand universal themes, love duets, choral pieces, and musical interludes with a libretto using multiple languages as appropriate (English, French, ...

Samson and Delilah - Live at the Met In Act II of  Saint-Saëns’s Samson and Delilah,  Delilah seduces not only Samson with her aria "Mon cœur s'ouvre à ta voix”  (or “my heart at the sound of your voice”)  but everyone who hears that melody.  While Delilah and Samson  join in a duet, opera goers might be tempted to start humming along. In the Met’s production, Elina Garanca plays Delilah,  the willful wily woman motived by hatred for the Israelites and their god. Even with her  vowing to bring down Samson, there is lurking  in her performance a hint of possibility that she might really have affection for him.  In another time and place,  could they have had a  chance to be a happy couple.   Robert Alagna is powerful, with a voice that befits his role as the strongman Samson.  His physical strength  alone will not resolve the strong conflicts within him to serve his god and people while being in love with...

John Waters: Indecent Exposure at Baltimore Museum of Art In October 2018,  the Baltimore Museum opened an exhibit John Waters: Indecent Exposure, the first major retrospective of the artist’s visual art in his hometown of Baltimore featuring 160 works that span 30 years. The same month, the art world news repeated many stories of the Banksy painting “Girl with Balloon” that went for $1.4 million and then went up in self-destruction.   What Water’s exhibit has is a painting that does something else.  You stand too close to the picture of the flower on the wall to see it better  and it squirts water in your face.   Titled appropriately “Hardy Har.”  Rather than groaning at the story of a painting that seems like a waste of money the moment it is sold, Waters’ watery flower keeps giving people something to laugh at. This is a show that is playful with objects that re-cast our sacred icons and symbols, one that will make people laugh, squirm,...

Figaro in Four Quartets - InSeries Opera Despite the age difference of centuries,   Mozart’s opera Marriage of Figaro   and T. S. Eliot’s poem Quartets   have a happy marriage in this InSeries production Brian J. Shaw plays the role of  the poet who comments through the four stages of life as depicted by four couples at different ages and during changing seasons: teenage love/spring, early marriage/summer, older age/autumn, and old age/winter.  They are really one and the same couple but at different stages of life and love.  Artistic Director Timothy Nelson has conceived  this innovative and inspiring work in which the story line of Mozart’s opera has been re-formated and texts changed, to fit with the poem. Thus this convergence of the arts of music and poetry is most delightful (and not to forget the scenic artistic background of the change of the seasons!). The company of eight singers are: Elizabeth Mondragon as Marcellina,  Bryan...

AIDA AT CONSTELLATION IS  DAZZLING What is there to say about  a musical when the voices, the dancing ensemble, the sets, the costumes, the lighting, the sound — all these come together so spectacularly?   Constellation Theatre’s production of Elton John and Tim Rices’ musical Aida is that dazzling combination of everything that makes a musical grand.  The musical  story starts earlier than the opera, when the Nubian princess Aida and the Egyptian military commander Radames, get off to a bad start when he captures her as a slave. Shayla S. Simmons is Aida,  Jobari Parker-Namdar is Radames and Chahani Wereley is Radames’ bethroyed/the daughter of the King of Egypt.  The three form the love triangle who through soaring arias and heartfelt duets unfold the complications of forbidden love. Dazzling costumes by Kenann M. Quander match their dazzling voices.   Greg Watkins as Radames’s father who is also the scheming C...

TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY -  MARK BRADFORD AT  THE BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART “ Above all, artists must not be only in art galleries or museums - they must be present in all possible activities. The artist must be the sponsor of thought in whatever endeavor people take on, at every level.”   That quote, attributed to Michelangelo Pistoletto, might  well sum up Mark Bradford’s work.   Both were at the    Venice Biennelle in 2017 and both have used any material  necessary to expose their beliefs in art.   Art is not something to view in museums as apart from what life is.   What the Baltimore Museum of Art does better than anyone  is present this concept of art as it encompasses all possible activity.   What a fitting place for Bradford’s works which encompass his own  autobiographical story in allegories that resonant the  shared human experience. Hephaestus at the entrance leads in to Spoiled Foot, a mixed media...

AIDA at Met Live in HD  Nothing but the best will do for Aida!   Soprano Anna Netrebko  takes on the role of the Ethiopian princess, the slave of the Egyptian princess Amneris, sung by mezzo-soprano Anita Rachvelishvili.  If Anna now owns the role, (following in the tradition of  Leontyne Price in her farewell Met performance in 1985), she can lay claim to owning many roles in her rise.  But the others are like money in the bank compared to her Aida which is like  gold in Fort Knox.  Anna and Anita— the two are a dream team for singing even as they  are fierce rivals for the love of the Egyptian general Radamès.   Such luxury to hear their voices, filled with the possibility emotions that desperate love elicits. Over the course of the opera, Amneris’ power will wane as Aida’s becomes stronger, something which these two express so movingly. Another star in this is baritone Quinn Kelsey as Amonasro.  As Aida’s fathe...

LA  TRAVIATA  Washington National Opera  La Traviata is the top of the hit parade of the most performed popular operas.  For many of us, this is the first opera we ever heard.  Now it is Washington National Opera’s opening production of the 2018-19 season. This production of La Traviata  plunges right into the final demise of Violetta as she lies dying in a hospital.  Behind the scrimp we watch the bedridden heroine as Renato Palumbo conducts the overture which carries musically all the ups and downs that will enfold in the course of the evening.  La Traviata is an opera of contrasts of finding and losing true love amid the pleasures of life and the pain of death. The opening gala ball with its glittery crowd of dancing and drinking is where Alfredo, sung by tenor Joshua Guerrero, will meet his Violetta, sung by lyric coloratura soprano Venera Gimadieva.   By the next act, the deeply enamored couple have moved to the country...

BORN YESTERDAY — a play for today The magic of Ford Theatre’s Born Yesterday is how the cast of actors turn cartoonish caricatures in to real life characters as Ed Gero and company do in this  post World War II classic tale. Gero is Brock, the kid who has done the American dream of rising from rags to riches knocking everyone else down as he climbs his ladder to success.  Now he is the supreme junk yard king from his war time profits and  has come to Washington  for the next step up, to buy some deals with the Senate, for all the scrap junk  left from the war. Kimberly Gilbert is  Billie Dawn, his chorus girl friend, who might have been a star for her five lines in Anything Goes .   How fitting a name of a musical to sing along as how these  deals that  with the right price for political favor,  where“anything goes” Or does it? Billie emerges as the heroine of this tale, transformed from the stereotype dumb blond go alo...

SUMMERLAND  AT WASHINGTON STAGE GUILD Washington Stage Guild’s fall season opener of Summerland   won’t answer all your questions about whether the dead come back to have their pictures taken with the living.  But  the DC premier of Arlitia Jones’ true life tale will please along the way as it teases with questions about the belief in spiritualism that found its match in the photography medium during the most tragic post Civil War era. Yury Lomakin plays William H. Mumler, a famous “spirit photographer” best remembered for his photograph of Mary Todd Lincoln with her husband Abe’s spirit appearing behind her.   Steven Carpenter is Inspector Joseph Tooker who will investigate and bring Mumler to trial, but not without some of his own secret past emerging through a photograph.   Rachel Felstein is Mrs. Mumbler, who reveals multiple characters from the wife receptionist, a medium and in her former life as a double agent in the Civil War.  She is...

GALA THEATRE PREMIERS      COMO AGUA PARA CHOCOLATE             LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE             L to R. Inés Domínguez del Corral (front) and Karen Morales (back)  Photo Daniel Martinez. GALA Theatre   serves up a feast for all senses with its season opener Como agua para chocolate/Like Water for Chocolate .   GALA’s cast and crew magically brings to life this classic  with a realistic Mexican home transformed in to a magical place during the time of the Mexican Revolution.   The   eye catching focus is on the ceramic counter to prepare food, complete with grills underneath, that is also used as a table for eating, sometimes as a bed.   This image combines all  the necessary nutrients for human life— food and love —in one. Mariana Fernández’s scenic design thus provides the perfect setting for where we first encounter Nacha, the family cook and Chenc...