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 company of singer-dancers  move and grove as  the Drifters, T

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 her son Arthur. What complicates things i

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, German, Italian, and Latin.) Silent Night