More Theater Odds & Ends

 

[Here’s another compilation of short pieces from various outlets—this time, two Washington Posts and a New York Times—all about some aspect of theater.  Some of these—most of them, really—I filed away some years ago (these are all from the 2010s), and I’ve enjoyed rediscovering them.  I hope you find them interesting.] 

“THE LEAD HAS A BROKEN ANKLE?

GET THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR!”

by Rebecca Ritzel 

[The following article was originally published in the “Style” section of the Washington Post on 12 February 2014.  It was previously posted on the WaPo website as “Backstage: For Theater J, breaking a leg for real leads to 'Yellow Face' recasting scramble” on 11 February.]

“Call the understudy, I can’t go on tonight,” is the closing theme from the cult television comedy “Slings and Arrows.” The show about backstage drama at a theater company debuted in Canada in 2003, but in the ensuing decade, the refrain has become a bit dated.

[Slings & Arrows was a darkly comic TV Series, aired on Canada’s Movie Central cable channel and The Movie Network streaming service in 2003-06, and in the United States on the Sundance Channel, 2005-07.]

These days, it’s not “call the understudy,” it’s “text the assistant stage manager.” And post-recession, there may well not be an understudy to call.

Jessica Soriano, an assistant stage manager at Theater J, got the dreaded text message [Tuesday,] Feb. 4. The actor sending it was Al Twanmo, one of the leads in the play “Yellow Face.” He was at the hospital, being treated for a broken ankle after falling on black ice. Soriano then e-mailed (still no phone call involved) the production team with the bad news.

[Yellow Face, a 2007 play by David Henry Hwang, played at Theater J in Washington, D.C., from 29 January to 23 February 2014.  It was directed by Natsu Onoda Power; at the time, Ari Roth was the artistic director of the company. (Roth was fired in December by the theater’s parent organization, the Washington DC Jewish Community Center, for protesting the DCJCC’s cancelation of a series of controversial plays about the Middle East (some of which were critical of Israel). See my post on Rick On Theater “The First Amendment & The Arts, Redux,” 13 February 2015.]

With little deliberation, Wednesday night’s show was canceled (ticket holders received refunds), but the actors were called to the theater. Director Natsu Onoda Power had an idea to make sure the show would go on sooner rather than later.

First, she re-blocked the entire play, allocating many of Twanmo’s lines to the four other actors in the ensemble who play multiple roles. But replacing Twanmo’s main character was going to be tricky. David Henry Hwang’s “Yellow Face” is a satirical comedy about racial stereotypes. The lead character is Chinese American, as is his father, who Twanmo was playing. The only Asian actor Theater J found who could read for the role on short notice was, in the words of artistic director Ari Roth, “30 years too young.”

Undeterred, Power turned to Roth.

“There was just one person who knew the part, who is not Asian, and who the audience would accept in this role, and that’s Ari,” she said late Thursday night after Roth, a 50-something Jewish playwright, made his professional stage debut playing an elderly Chinese American banker.

Roth maintains that he wasn’t actually acting, “I did this as a reading, everyone else was up there acting,” he protested, adding that he was “doing Al” and did his best to match Twanmo’s cadence.

The part of the father is written in broken English, with lots of stubborn humor, given Twanmo’s character is an immigrant who worked his way up from a laundry worker to the chief executive of Far East National Bank. Before his fall, Twanmo had received praise for his work in “Yellow Face”; Post critic Peter Marks called his performance “beguiling” in his review of the show. Roth will not be nominated for a Helen Hayes Award [the Capital area’s local award for excellence in theater; Helen Hayes (1900-93), the “First Lady of the American Stage,” was a native Washingtonian] for his one-night stint as a substitute, but what he will take away is a bouquet of yellow roses, and some insight into life outside an artistic director’s office.

“I have never spent so much on my personal grooming,” Roth said, “At 5 p.m., I stopped doing my computer work and started preparing for the show.” Those preparations included both streaking his hair with gray and spending some time in front of the mirror trimming nose hairs. He came away not only with more respect for his actors but also for the stage managers and others working behind the scenes at Theater J.

“I have been running this theater for 17½ years,” Roth said, “and I’ve never been backstage watching for an entire show.”

When Roth did come out onstage, it was in a wheelchair, a change Power kept when Twanmo returned to the stage Saturday. In Act II, the script calls for an ensemble member to play the father’s doctor. In Power’s revision, the doctor (played by Mark Hairston) will always wheel Twanmo out. But there’s still a major challenge that they’ll have to deal with until the show closes Feb. 23: a massive set of file cabinets surrounds the stage, and only one entrance is wide enough for the chair.

“The scenery is not wheelchair-accessible,” Power said.

Casting a wider net

Theater J learned its lesson in staging accessible theater the hard way, but several other theaters in the Washington area are deliberately seeking to be more inclusive in their casting, and are succeeding artistically as a result. At Studio Theatre, Nina Raine’s play “Tribes,” about a deaf son in a dysfunctional family, has been extended through March 2. Out in Herndon [Virginia], NextStop Theatre Company is mounting a well-reviewed production of Shakespeare’s “Richard III” with a deaf actor, Ethan Sinnot [sic; Sinott], starring as the murderous monarch.

Also worth noting: Deaf actor Hector Reynoso is a company member at Synetic [a physical theater company located in Crystal City in Arlington County, Virginia], and next month’s World Stages international theater festival at the Kennedy Center will include Israel’s ­Nalaga’at Theater for deaf and blind actors.

Locally, the two leads in “Tribes” and “Richard III” share an interesting connection: Sinott is chairman of the theater program at Gallaudet University [prestigious university in Washington, D.C., for the deaf and hard of hearing], and James Caverly, who plays the lead in “Tribes,” is one of his most successful graduates. Yet until he drove out to Herndon recently for a dress rehearsal, Caverly had never seen his former professor act. Caverly loved the concept – and the performance.

“It was brilliant!” Caverly wrote in an e-mail message. “For so long, I’ve thought of Richard III as it was written in the text: a hunchback, hobbled, and writhed villain who’s sole ambition was to destroy those who had more power over him. I never perceived him to be deaf. And it does make sense when you correspond it to a real-life scenario. Most of the royal court chose to seclude him because of his deafness, which eerily echoes with the daily basis of deaf people everywhere. . . . This is a big step for the DC theater scene, and [I’m] proud to be part of something bigger.”

[Rebecca Ritzel is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in more than 20 publications in the United States, Canada, and the U.K.  Ritzel regularly contributes arts and entertainment articles to the Washington Post, the Washington, D.C., City Paper, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Raleigh, North Carolina, News & Observer.  Washington’s Theater J, founded in 1990, produces plays “that are part of the Jewish cultural legacy.” 

[I have posted performance reports on three plays by David Henry Hwang (“Golden Child,” 9 December 2013; The “Dance and the Railroad,” 17 March 2013; “Kung Fu,” 8 March 2014) and a performance by the Nalagaat Deaf-Blind Theater Ensemble of Tel Aviv (Not by Bread Alone, 12 February 2013) on ROT.  Earlier, my friend, the late Helen Kaye (1934-2020), who reviewed theater for the Jerusalem Post, sent me her own review of Not by Bread Alone, which I posted in “Dispatches from Israel 1,” 23 January 2013.

[Coincidentally, Ari Roth’s experience filling in at the last minute in a stage role happened to me once, years ago.  I happened to think of it just the other day.  I was in college—May 1967, the second semester of my sophomore year.  I was taking a directing class, the final exam for which was to direct a one-act play.  I had finished my final rehearsal for the presentations the next day and one of my classmates, who’s rehearsal was scheduled to follow mine in the university theater, approached me.

[One of his cast members had been taken ill and wasn’t going to be able to do the show the next evening, and my classmate asked if I’d fill in.  Well, I couldn’t let him down for his final grade, so I agreed to learn the part—it was relatively small, even for a one-act play—but he and his cast would have to help me out.

[I said I could learn the lines and the blocking for the next day after the one rehearsal that night, but the rest of the cast would have to keep to the lines as written, especially the cues, and the blocking as rehearsed—no ad libs or improvisations when I was on stage.  I wouldn’t be able to handle deviations.

[I don’t remember who the director was, or the play, and I don’t know what grade he got on the project—but we made it through and, as far as I could tell, no one knew what we’d had to do.  I do remember being totally keyed up for the whole scene in which I appeared, which was only a few minutes but seemed like at least a half hour to me. 

[I’m sure I collapsed as soon as the curtain came down—and I probably found a drink somewhere as soon as I could get to it.  (In Virginia, where I went to school, you couldn’t buy a drink in a bar or restaurant at that time.  You had to by a bottle in a state package store and keep the booze at home.)]

*  *  *  *

“WITH TRAINED NARRATORS,

BLIND THEATERGOERS FIND A SIGHTLINE”

by Caitlin Gibson 

[Caitlin Gibson’s report ran in the Washington Post on 5 May 2016 (sec. C [“Style”]) and was posted on the paper’s website on 4 May as “'He's picking his nose': How volunteers help the blind 'see' a theater performance.”]

‘Describers’ bring onstage action to life

On the brightly lit theater stage, the first scene of Robert Schenkkan’s Tony award-winning play “All the Way” is in full swing: President Lyndon B. Johnson [1908-73; 36th President of the United States: 1963-69] is pontificating behind a podium. A large desk is wheeled into the spotlight. An agitated secretary darts into view.

[All the Way is a 2012 play by Robert Schenkkan about President Lyndon B. Johnson's efforts to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It was commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where it premièred 25 July-3 November 2012. The play was produced in 13 September-12 October 2013, at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the production premièred at Broadway’s Neil Simon Theatre from 6 March 2014 to 29 June 2014 (27 previews and 131 regular performances). It won the 2014 Tony for Best Play and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play.

[The Arena Stage production of All the Way in Washington, D.C., ran from 1 April to 8 May 2016 on the Fichandler Stage (the arena theater). Jack Willis played LBJ; he was nominated for a 2017 Helen Hayes Award as Outstanding Lead Actor in a Play.]

Steps from the bustling action in the Fichandler Stage at Arena Stage, about 20 audience members are not actually watching the drama unfold. They sit silently, some with their heads bowed, others with their eyes closed. They are all blind or visually impaired; they either can’t see the stage at all, or it appears as little more than a haze of light and shadow.

But these theatergoers aren’t missing the action: Through the headphones clamped over their ears, a woman’s voice is explaining everything happening onstage, in detail, in real time.

The voice belongs to Rita Tehan, a veteran theater describer for the Metropolitan Washington Ear, a nonprofit organization that provides audio services to the blind and visually impaired in the Washington region. Tehan sits behind the crowd in a dark, elevated sound booth as the fast-paced plot — depicting the efforts of Johnson and civil rights leaders to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — unspools below.

Tehan speaks crisply into a plastic audio mask linked to a large radio transmitter, explaining what’s happening on the set as vividly and efficiently as possible.

“He waves her away, and pats her on the rear end,” she says when Johnson abruptly dismisses his frazzled secretary.

“LBJ is picking his nose — really deep,” she says during one of the show’s comic moments, raising her voice slightly to be heard over the audience’s laughter. “Hoover is watching.” [That’s J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972), the first, and longest serving Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (1935-72).]

Tehan points out when Johnson turns from one character to another mid-sentence: “He’s talking to the tailor now,” she quickly interjects. She makes sure that her listeners don’t miss the joke when Johnson, frustrated by his strict diet, swipes a bite of Sen. Richard Russell’s [1897-1971; Democrat of Georgia (1933-71)] dinner. (“LBJ stabs a pork chop on Russell’s plate and pops it in his mouth,” she says. “Russell’s eyes widen.”)

She continues for well over an hour, until the stage lights dim and Act One comes to an end.

“This is intermission,” she says. “It will be about 15 minutes.”

Then she lowers the mask and exhales.

An art in itself

Tehan’s preparation for “All the Way” began weeks before the May 1 matinee, one of more than 50 annual performances with description services provided by the Ear. Describers typically see a performance at least once or twice before they narrate it live, to familiarize themselves with the script and note important visual cues.

The Ear’s roughly two dozen volunteer describers serve more than 250 blind or visually impaired people at seven local theaters every year. They take special requests, too — a couple of years ago, a describer accompanied a blind fan to a Lady Gaga concert at Verizon Center.

“It takes a very special person to be a describer, someone who can think fast on their feet,” says Neely Oplinger, the Ear’s executive director. The people who sign up — and pass a rigorous audition — tend to stick around; many have been volunteering for 10 years or longer.

Tehan joined the organization in 1992, but she had practice long before that: Her father went blind from diabetes when she was a teen, and she used to describe his favorite television shows to him.

“They are so dedicated, and most of them really know theater,” Oplinger says of the group’s volunteers. “But it takes a lot more than knowing theater.”

They also have to know the rules: When describing a performance, you have to slip all the description into the gaps between dialogue. You shouldn’t make judgments; instead of concluding that a character looks “disappointed,” you note simply that he frowns and his shoulders droop. You must capture any movement that’s essential to the plot. And — as with any live performance — if you make a mistake, you have to keep going.

These guidelines were created by Margaret Pfanstiehl, who founded the Metropolitan Washington Ear in 1974 to improve the lives of the blind and visually impaired. Pfanstiehl, a Virginia native, suffered from a degenerative disease called retinitis pigmentosa, which eventually left her almost entirely blind.

At first, the Ear was a radio reading service — still a core part of its identity. The Silver Spring, Md.-based nonprofit has nearly 400 volunteers who read newspaper and magazine articles over closed-circuit radio, and the organization offers a dial-in service for listeners to hear recordings of articles from major publications, including The Washington Post, the New York Times and many others. About 5,000 people in the Washington area use the service.

But Pfanstiehl, who died in 2009, was also a devoted opera fan and theatergoer who longed to find a way for blind audience members to enjoy live performances.

“I always wanted a little voice to tell me whether it was a gunshot or a slamming door onstage, if the villain was walking across the stage with a dagger, and whether or not the lovers were facing each other,” she once told Reuters.

In 1981, Arena Stage approached the Ear about making live performances accessible to the blind. Pfanstiehl — then Margaret Rockwell, a divorcee — recruited longtime Metro spokesman and radio pro Cody Pfanstiehl as the first volunteer describer.

They watched dozens of movies together, says Oplinger, and he described the scenes unfolding onscreen. “Together, they devised what they called ‘the art and technique of audio description,’” says Oplinger. “And in the process, they fell in love.”

The couple, who married in 1983, went on to develop a comprehensive training system, teaching hundreds of volunteers to capture live performances for the blind.

Of course, the human mind is not a camera, so the description process is perhaps more like translation — an art in itself: The word choices matter, as do the pacing of the narration, the tone of voice and the clarity of enunciation. A secretary doesn’t just run into view, she gallops. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. doesn’t touch his wife, he gently strokes her arms. The describer has to engage in a sort of verbal dance with the actors, gracefully avoiding overlap or interruption.

And like any art, it’s imperfect. Sometimes details are missed, or a describer talks over a character, or the audio sounds muffled. But even with minor hiccups, the effort makes all the difference to a blind member of the audience, says Freddie Peaco, president of the Ear’s board of directors.

“You can hear the voices, but you don’t know the setting of the stage. The audience gives a great gasp, and you don’t know why they’re gasping,” she says. “With the describer, all of that comes to life, and I can’t tell you how meaningful that is.”

The show goes on

For a describer, Tehan says, “the moment the curtain rises, you’re on your toes” — and so she is as the second act of “All the Way” begins. She stands in the dark booth, her eyes trained on the stage.

“House lights are fading to black,” she says.

After the show, her listeners will praise her performance —“You did a great job, a great job!” one man will gush, grasping her hand — but Tehan won’t be entirely convinced. Even now, halfway through, she’s frustrated by details she couldn’t capture, by how little time she has to speak between the actors’ lines. An artist is never satisfied.

But the show goes on. Tehan cranes forward to follow the actors, her glasses reflecting the glow of the stage lights. She raises the mask to her face. In the seats just beyond the booth windows, all ears are on her.

[Caitlin Gibson is a feature writer focused on families, parenting, and children.  She joined the Washington Post in 2005.] 

*  *  *  *

“INVESTING IN THE THEATER

CAN GET A CHILD’S FOOT IN THE STAGE DOOR”

by Liz Moyer 

[Liz Moyer’s report appeared in the New York Times on 27 May 2017 (sec. B [“Business Day”)].  It was posted on the Times website on 26 May as “To Invest in Your Child’s Theater Dreams, First Invest in the Theater.”]

Dean Roth, the owner and president of a New Jersey company that makes parts for the tool-and-die industry [William T. Hutchinson Co. in Union, New Jersey, a third-generation family business], admits he has utterly failed to talk his teenage daughter out of pursuing a career in musical theater.

Instead of watching helplessly as she bounded down an uncertain career path, he became a Broadway investor to get an inside track: He said his initial $1,000 outlay [equivalent to $1,400 today], in the 2011 revival of “Godspell,” was “tuition for me to find out what the business was like.”

[The Broadway revival of Godspell, conceived by John-Michael Tebelak, who wrote the book based on the Gospel of Matthew, with music and new lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, ran at the Circle in the Square Theatre from 7 November 2011-24 June 2012 (30 previews and 264 regular performances).

[The production was directed by Daniel Goldstein and choreographed by Christopher Gattelli, with scenic design by David Korins, costume design by Miranda Hoffman, lighting design by David Weiner, sound design by Andrew Keister, and projection design by Daniel Brodie.]

Since then, he has invested in 22 other shows, with six returning profits so far. And he and his daughter, Kim, now a musical theater student at Syracuse University [see my note following the article], have come to an understanding about where to draw the line between meddling parent and struggling artist.

Like so many parents juggling feelings of pride and concern as their children step into adulthood, Mr. Roth said he wanted his daughter to understand the risks — as well as the rewards — associated with a career in the arts, and the only way he could see doing that was for both of them to get closer to the business.

“I wanted her to go into this with open eyes and know what she was getting into,” Mr. Roth said.

As with practically everything in New York, especially the insular world of Broadway, connections mean everything. Being a child of an investor in a show doesn’t secure a part or even an audition, but it can create opportunities that open doors.

“Getting to know a director and having the opportunity to observe a rehearsal or a script reading to get a deeper understanding of the business, that is a definite advantage,” said Pippin Parker [b. 1969], a playwright and the dean of the drama school at the New School in New York City.

Ken Davenport, a Broadway producer [the current Gypsy with Audra McDonald and the upcoming Othello with Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal; he’s produced two Tony-winners] and blogger who raises money for shows and has worked with Mr. Roth [the 2011 Godspell] and other investors, said he has seen more parents invest in shows to encourage a passion they share with one of their children or to bolster the child’s career prospects.

“The parents don’t have the friends or relationships, so they do it the old-fashioned way by writing a check,” he said. “All that check does is get you in the door. It’s up to the kids to prove themselves.”

Of course there’s no substitute for talent, Mr. Parker and others said.

“Investing is a wonderful and glorious activity, but unless you know what you are doing as an investor, the best you can hope for is a glass of Champagne with Bette Midler,” said Peter Cooke, the head of the drama school at [Pittsburgh’s] Carnegie Mellon University, which sends many graduates on to Broadway careers.

The only career path he can see, he said, “is being well trained.”

There are different ways productions raise money, but for many shows, affluent individuals play a key role. Typically, these are people with at least $1 million of investable assets — what the finance industry calls an accredited investor, who is presumably able to swallow the considerable risks associated with this type of investing.

Producers raise the money by putting together pools of investors, who tend to give an average of $25,000 to finance a production in a Broadway theater. Sometimes there are different investing tiers, and those who give more can get perks like having their names printed above the show’s title on posters and Playbills, or getting an invitation to a dress rehearsal.

The investor pools are usually organized as a limited partnership, like a private equity investment fund. Very often these investors are people who know the show’s insiders, including the actors, writers, directors and others bringing it to the stage.

Tim Speiss, a former board chairman of the Abingdon Theatre Company, a Broadway production group, said he once auctioned an item for a production in which the winning bidder could get his or her child a small speaking part in one performance. “There are some very clever ways to raise money,” said Mr. Speiss, who is a wealth adviser at EisnerAmper, an accounting and advisory firm based in New York.

Once a show gets up and running, the investors might get their money back, proportionate to what they put in, plus any profit after the show’s expenses are covered.

Many shows are money losers: Just one in five will end up being profitable, and even fewer are runaway successes. But Mr. Davenport points out that those odds aren’t much different than those of any other alternative investment in which a high-net-worth investor might dabble. As far as privately held start-ups — a favorite of private equity investors — some 50 percent of new companies fail after the first four years, according to labor statistics.

Linda Huber, an executive at a financial services company in New York, began investing in Broadway a few years ago when her daughter, now a high school senior, showed an interest. Her daughter, Claudia Lopez-Balboa, gives her advice on which shows to bankroll. So far she has invested in four, including “On Your Feet,” a musical about the lives of Gloria and Emilio Estefan [Marquis Theatre, 5 November 2015-20 August 2017], a story that resonated with her daughter’s part-Cuban heritage.

“For art that’s worth making, it’s the responsible thing to support these endeavors — it’s a thing to do together,” Ms. Huber said.

Her daughter is about to graduate from St. Paul’s School, a New Hampshire boarding school, and plans to go to the University of Michigan in the fall to major in finance and minor in arts management.

Ms. Lopez-Balboa said that Broadway had captured her imagination since she saw the show, “Bring It On” [St. James Theatre, 1 August-30 December 2012], as a middle-school student — she recalled skipping all the way home afterward.

“I wanted to produce a show that would make you leap in the air,” she said.

She reached out to Daryl Roth, a 10-time Tony-winning producer (and no relation to Mr. Roth, the tool-and-die executive) to seek out an informational meeting about the business.

Ms. Roth recalled that initial meeting and said she was impressed by Ms. Lopez-Balboa’s energy and interest — enough to hire her as an intern for two summers.

Ms. Roth, the lead producer of the show “Kinky Boots” [Al Hirschfeld Theatre, 4 April 2013-7 April 2019], said she understood where Ms. Lopez-Balboa was coming from because her son Jordan had also dived into the theater world. “I wanted to help Claudia learn and be excited about working in theater,” Ms. Roth said.

For Dean Roth, the industrial company executive from New Jersey, the first $1,000 investment got him and his daughter invited to a cocktail party at Sardi’s, where they mingled with other investors and met the show’s director, Danny Goldstein.

Some of those contacts advised Kim Roth on whether she should pick college or an acting conservatory (she chose college), gave her tips for getting started in the business, and helped answer other novice-level questions.

Ms. Roth, who interned for Ken Davenport one summer, has one year of study left at Syracuse before setting out for what she hopes will be a career as an actress, singer and dancer on Broadway. [She got her BFA in 2018; see below.]

“Living so close to the city just getting to make those networking connections is definitely helpful,” Ms. Roth said. [Westfield, New Jersey, where the Roths lived at this time, is 23 miles from New York City—a 35-minute drive or an 85-minute train ride.] “Knowing someone doesn’t necessarily help, but it doesn’t hurt.”

[Kim Roth (b. 1996), originally from Westfield, Union County, New Jersey, completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in musical theater from New York’s Syracuse University in 2018, and is now living in Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey.  She’s had additional training at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, on whose stage she’s performed (The Merchant of Venice, 2016).  Acting, singing, and dancing are her passions.  Roth is a member of Actors’ Equity Association.

[Liz Moyer is a journalist with experience reporting and writing about finance, markets, public policy and consumers.  She was most recently a reporter at Barron’s; she was previously an editor at the New York Times and a reporter at the Wall Street Journal.  Moyer has a Master of Science in journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (1991).

[My friend, and a generous contributor to this blog, was, with his late wife, a small investor in a Broadway musical (Memphis, Shubert Theatre, 19 October 2009-5 August 2012).  It won several awards, including the 2010 Best Musical Tony! Read about his take on being a “Broadway Angel” (by Kirk Woodward, 7 September 2010).]

Little Dancer, Inspired by Degas Sculpture, Premieres at Kennedy Center, 2

[I recently posted a collection of three Washington Post articles on the Kennedy Center première of a new musical, Little Dancer, inspired by the famous wax sculpture by Edgar Degas.  The Post’s extensive coverage of this new musical provides an inside glimpse at how a new musical is mounted, what goes into the production, and how it’s promoted and scheduled for viewing.  I’ve chosen a half dozen pieces from the paper to present on ROT because I think the blog’s readers would be interested in this phenomenon.  The first three articles—an examination of star Boyd Gaines’s efforts to develop the character of artist Degas, the review of the art exhibit built around the original statue planned to coincide with the opening, and the review of the musical’s presentation—were posted a few days ago.  (I urge readers to go back and read the first installment, before or after reading the selections here.)  Below are three other articles discussing the preview-performance practice, the treatment of the female characters in the play, and how set designer Beowulf Boritt was inspired by Degas paintings.]

“BACKSTAGE:

‘LITTLE DANCER’ FINALLY SET TO OPEN AFTER MONTH OF PREVIEWS”

by Rebecca Ritzel

[This article was first published in the “Style” section of the Washington Post on 19 November.]

There’s a splashy party planned in the Kennedy Center’s upstairs atrium Thursday to celebrate opening night for “Little Dancer.” That news may come as a surprise to anyone who has already seen a performance of the musical’s world premiere, noticed advertisements or read glowing endorsements of the show on social media.

There have been no formal reviews of the musical about artist Edgar Degas and his ballerina muse because the production is still not officially “open.”

Since Oct. 25, the cast has been performing nightly in the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater. But technically, the show is in “previews” – an extended period during which the creative team continues to make changes and the press is not allowed to attend. (Post theater critic Peter Marks’s review will appear Thursday night online and Friday in print.) The musical will close on Nov. 30 after just 10 days of official performances to allow the Kennedy Center plenty of time to prepare for holiday programming.

Ticket prices for “Little Dancer” range from $65 to $120.

While a month of previews is typical before a show opens in New York, the lag time between “Little Dancer’s” first performance and its opening is a record in Washington for an “out-of-town tryout,” a commercial production of a show with Broadway aspirations.

Max Woodward, the Kennedy Center’s longtime vice president for theater programming, said director and choreographer Susan Stroman and her creative team told him upfront that they were starting from scratch, and they made their decision to come to Washington only after he agreed to an extended preview period.

“This is the longest we’ve ever had,” Woodward said. “I don’t think it’s a trend.”

And yet, long preview periods could become the new normal as unions continue to differentiate between pre- and post-opening rehearsals and producers keep Washington on the list of just five cities in North America that can support a pre-Broadway run.

The other four, according to a panel of producers who spoke at a recent American Theatre Critics Association conference, are Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Toronto. Each city has its pluses and minuses: Chicago offers a tax break, Toronto offers slots on a subscription series and D.C. offers willing partners at the Kennedy Center and the National Theatre, which has comparable dimensions to a Broadway house.

Kristin Caskey, president of Fox Theatricals, a co-producer on the D.C.-launched musical “If/Then,” blames rehearsal logistics for the extended previews. With two shows on most Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays and an off-day on Monday, creative teams have just three weekdays to tweak the show and implement changes in rehearsals. Three or four sets of changes are reasonable for a new musical, said Caskey. “So, basically, that puts you at 3¹/₂ weeks right there.”

The rehearsal rules are set by Actors’ Equity Association, the union that negotiates Broadway contracts for the Kennedy Center and shows like “If/Then” at the National. According to Equity, the actors can initially rehearse for 8¹/₂ hours a day, counting breaks.

The week before the first public performance, known as tech week, that work period extends to 12 hours, with up to 10 spent rehearsing. After the first public performances, the total working hours for performances and rehearsals is capped at 10. But once the show is finally open, actors can only rehearse for a total of eight hours per week.

As recently as Friday, the “Little Dancer” cast was called for five hours before its evening show. Cast members have needed the extra rehearsal time, Woodward said. More music has been added, and some dance numbers have been cut.

It is possible, however, to get a new musical off the ground in fewer previews than the Kennedy Center has allowed. “If/Then,” began previews on Nov. 4 of last year and opened on Nov. 19. In Chicago this year, Sting’s musical ran in previews for 13 days. (“The Last Ship” has since opened on Broadway.)

The only recent new musical that appears to rival “Little Dancer” when it comes to lengthy out-of-town previews is “Aladdin,” which ran for 17 days last year before opening in Toronto.

On Dec. 9, previews begin in Arlington for another regional theater musical with Broadway aspirations: singer Sheryl Crow’s adaptation of the Barry Levinson film “Diner.” Actors will be paid less because they are not working on a Broadway contract, and the Signature Theatre’s agreement with Equity allows for 50-hour workweeks once performances begin, making no distinction between before and after the Dec. 27 press opening.

What the runs of “Diner” and “Little Dancer” have in common – besides the hope of good things to come – is a dilemma that puts them at odds with a Helen Hayes Award regulation requiring voters to see a show during the first half of its run. In Toronto, Broadway tryout producers feel strongly that such advanced viewing for award voters is not appropriate.

“We want them to see a show that is set and finished, like the press,” said John Karastamatis, a spokesman for Mirvish Productions. Signature Theatre concurs and will also not allow Helen Hayes voters to see previews.

But the Kennedy Center appears to have forgone a polished production in favor of buzz from the theater community, and that wager may have worked.

“Word of mouth has been very, very good for us,” Woodward said.

Regardless of whether Signature successfully launches “Diner” to Broadway, the theater has other springtime plans about which to be excited. On March 30, celebrated director James E. Lapine will come to town to accept the theater’s sixth annual Sondheim Award at a black-tie gala to be held at the Italian Embassy. Lapine has been at the helm of the original productions of “Into the Woods,” “Sunday in the Park with George” and many other musicals. He is also the screenwriter of the forthcoming “Into the Woods” film.

“James has been my good friend and collaborator over the course of 32 years, and it’s about time I thanked him ostentatiously,” Sondheim said in a statement.

In the District, the Shakespeare Theatre Company – with its rush ticket promotions and $35-and-under cheap seats – has long been one of the most accessible venues in the District. Monday, the theater announced it will open its doors even further by offering 1,000 no-cost “Free Will” tickets to every show. Although some tickets will be distributed to specific “community partners,” an average allotment of 150 to 200 seats will be available every Monday at noon and distributed in person, online and over the phone.

[Ritzel is a freelance writer.]

*  *  *  *

WOMEN IN ‘LITTLE DANCER’S’ GAZE

by Sarah Kaufman

[The following piece appeared in the “Style” section of the Washington Post on 24 November.]

For all its glamour and luxury, the Belle Époque had an ugly side. The decorative arts and haute cuisine were flourishing in Paris in the late 19th century, but the era’s booming opportunities did not extend to its slums – nor to the majority of Frenchwomen.

The narrowness of women’s lives at that time gets expansive treatment in Susan Stroman’s new ballet musical, “Little Dancer.” In unraveling the back story of the once-scandalous sculpture by Edgar Degas, titled “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen,” director-choreographer Stroman, collaborating with writer-lyricist Lynn Ahrens, fills this production with strong-willed and outspoken women of all ages.

These are sharply drawn characters, witty and wisecracking and sometimes utter messes. They evoke the little-known wretchedness of an age celebrated for its beauty. But in the optimistic and ultimately uplifting view of this show, they are survivors.

As Broadway veterans, Stroman and Ahrens are a couple of survivors themselves, and in “Little Dancer” they betray a bit of a rebellious touch. They are unafraid to address a poetical and feminized subject – the ballet world – and make it appropriately woman-centered. In so doing, they give voice to many who have gone through history unnoticed and unsung. When was the last time laundresses, embittered alcoholic single moms and hard-working ballerinas got to belt out their dreams?

There are so many ways in which “Little Dancer,” finishing its world-premiere run at the Kennedy Center this week, is a corker. It features the ravishing Tiler Peck of New York City Ballet as Degas’s young model, Marie van Goethem, for one thing. The clear, open style of her dancing is a marvel, particularly the way she lingers at the height of her movements, conveying all the power and ease, authority and transcendence of a great star.

Then there’s the stagecraft, which, while relatively simple (no explosions, no outsize costuming, no flying effects), is transporting and magical. The songs, the music by Stephen Flaherty: I could go on. But one of the most striking elements of this show, and the least talked-about, is the wide lens it focuses on women’s existence in a society where they were easily swept into the gutter.

Paris of 1881, when “Little Dancer” takes place, was bracing itself against the onrush of modernity. Grim realities – poverty, child labor, girl sex slaves – were best ignored. Nothing epitomizes this better than the firestorm of ire Degas ignited when he exhibited his sculpture, daring to place a lowlife and potential strumpet on a pedestal.

In Degas’s day, as polite society fretted over the moral decay it saw in so many artists, ballet wasn’t seen as a high-minded pursuit. Degas stepped on a lot of toes in bestowing his snub-nosed adolescent with an insolent grandeur.

He wasn’t the only rebel, of course. That same year, a feminist named Hubertine Auclert published La Citoyenne, France’s first suffragist newspaper. Going beyond voting rights, La Citoyenne also looked at how women were treated in primitive cultures across the world and argued that Frenchwomen’s lives were not always better.

Auclert had a point. Rich wives may have had comforts, but they were essentially decorative property, without a voice. And poor women stayed poor, or got poorer.

In “Little Dancer,” the art of ballet becomes a cruel example of how civilization and oppression were entwined. A delight for the audience, it was often harsh behind the scenes. Ballet was a last resort for poor girls, who in some cases were a step away from streetwalking. If a dancer was not already a prostitute, she had a good chance of becoming one. Leering male patrons, such as the top-hatted gents in so many of Degas’s ballet paintings, haunted the Paris Opera Ballet’s hallways.

This hard lot was surely on Degas’s mind as he created his figure in wax, with her tough, muscular neck, strong spine and faraway gaze.

In fact, the real-life Marie van Goethem didn’t have much of a future. Her older sister was a prostitute. Her widowed mother was an alcoholic washwoman. Marie’s little sister eventually had a dance career, but as for Marie? She made it into the Paris Opera’s lowest rank, then vanished from history.

Stroman crafts a dream ballet to propose some possibilities about what happened to Marie. We can make our own guesses from the role models around her throughout the show. There is Marie’s older sister, whose fortunes rise and fall with the attentions of her johns. There are impoverished laundresses like her mother. There’s a ballet teacher with warmth but no power in the company’s male hierarchy; there’s a well-married and overbearing dance mom. Degas has an elderly, humpbacked, maltreated maid, and there are other young ballerinas, all but pushed by company officials into the arms of wealthy men. A grown-up version of Marie serves as a narrator, looking back on her youth, although we never discover what kind of life she grew into.

There is but one independent, self-supporting ray of hope: painter Mary Cassatt, who was Degas’s friend in real life. (She was also a noted clotheshorse, and a character ideally gift-wrapped for costume designer William Ivey Long, who dresses her as if she’s just unpacked the fashions of Paris’s top designers.)

At other key points in “Little Dancer,” Stroman makes the bold, brave choice to tell the story in dance terms. She lets movement speak what the characters – who are mostly unschooled and unsophisticated – do not have the words to express. Peck’s first solo tells us about the lighthearted joy and freedom that dancing brings to Marie; these notes only deepen and become more urgent as the story proceeds.

In the song “Laundry,” Marie’s mother and her laundress co-workers muse in the wash house about how they, too, once had dreams like Marie does, and they slip into a ballet-style reverie of roughened, weighted, wistful grace.

“C’est le ballet,” as the recurring song by that title makes clear with its quarrelsome, keening notes, takes on a sardonic meaning, along the lines of “business as usual.” The business of hustling for money, that is. This hasn’t changed much. Nowadays, donors/sponsors are a critical force in ballet companies. Some company Web sites and printed programs list who each dancer is “sponsored by,” turning an artist into a billboard for a benefactor’s name. Dancers are expected to turn up and schmooze at parties for funders; I’ve even heard of company members being required to serve tables at donor dinners. No matter how it’s framed, this is all in the name of easing money out of bulging wallets.

“Dancers are determined and never quit,” sing Marie and her younger sister, played by Sophia Anne Caruso with the magnetism of a future CEO tucked into a little girl’s body.

It’s all so ineffably poignant. Marie’s harshest treatment is dealt by the ballet company she loves – and by her own mother. Degas’s attentions, artistic and paternal, seem to do Marie little good in her own lifetime.

Yet through him, she left a mark for posterity. And in the musical about her life, others like her get to make a mark, too. They give us a lot to think about.

[Sarah Kaufman is the dance critic for the Washington Post.]

*  *  *  *

“FOR SET DESIGNER BEOWULF BORITT OF ‘LITTLE DANCER,’ WINDOWS INTO THE SOUL”

by Rebecca Ritzel

[This article was originally published in the “Backstage” column of the “Style” section of the Washington Post on 26 November.]

In Edgar Degas’s most famous paintings set in a dance studio, three two-story windows spill light into an otherwise gray room where ballerinas in white tulle stretch and strike balances before a ballet master. There’s often a violinist in a corner, or a worried stage mother preening on the sidelines. The French impressionist would continue to paint that scene for decades, even after that studio burned down and the Paris Opera relocated to the Palais Garnier. Like Degas, set designer Beowulf Boritt was deeply attached to those windows, and when he was charged by director Susan Stroman with creating the sets for the new musical “Little Dancer,” there was never even a discussion or a question.

They would replicate those windows onstage.

More than a dozen Degas paintings and sketches – from big-picture settings to scraps of background wallpaper – are mirrored in the musical. Nearly all are works Boritt saw in person during the more than two years he spent working on his designs for “Little Dancer.” (The show closes Sunday at the Kennedy Center; limited tickets are available.)

“Every scene in the play is a sketch that he could have done,” Boritt said. “I had taken a course on Impressionism in college, but I actually spent the first three or four months trying to learn more about him. I looked at what was shown in the paintings and what we wanted to copy.”

In every city where he worked, he would visit museums and take pictures of the Degas works, covertly if necessary. And Boritt, 44, has worked in many cities. The son of an opera singer and history professor who weren’t worried about burdening their child with a literary name, he’s away from his New York base working on high-profile shows about three months a year.

He designed the current touring productions “Annie,” “Rock of Ages” and “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” which opens at the Kennedy Center Dec. 16. Other recent projects include “Chaplin” in St. Petersburg, which allowed for a side trip to the Hermitage, and the West End production of “The Scottsboro Boys,” his first collaboration with Stroman, dating back to a 2010 off-Broadway production.

“He is a true artist with the heart of a storyteller,” Stroman said via e-mail this week. “I knew that was exactly who we needed to bring the world of Degas and ‘Little Dancer’ to life.”

A few of the many Degas works featured in the show include his paintings of laundresses washing and ironing, sketches of debonair men with dubious intentions lurking backstage at the ballet and “The Absinthe Drinker.” (Although historians know the despondent woman in this painting is actually an actress friend of the artist’s, in the musical she’s the Little Dancer’s alcoholic mother.)

Not all of Boritt’s projects require museum-quality replications. His big break came a decade ago, when “Putnam County Spelling Bee” became a surprise hit. Now on Broadway, Boritt’s work is featured in the revival of the Bernstein musical “On the Town,” with sets that are more simplistic than those in “Little Dancer” but much more vibrant. His central idea was to focus on the silhouettes of the Manhattan skyline and create images that remind theatergoers of how shiny and big New York must have looked to sailors docking on the East River.

“These guys were supposed to be a bunch of hayseeds who show up in New York for the first time,” Boritt said of the three sailors who look for love onshore in the musical. “It’s a sleek, magical place to them.”

The link between the two shows, besides the designer, is their ballerina stars: New York City Ballet principals Tiler Peck in “Little Dancer” and Megan Fairchild in “On the Town.” And therein lies a special challenge. The average Broadway or touring-show stage floor is a maze of grooves and tracks to aid in moving scenery. Going up on pointe with a toe stuck in the middle of a track would be disastrous at worst and less than pretty at best.

For “On the Town,” Fairchild ended up deciding to dance in rubberized pointe shoes, which limits her mobility slightly, but is safer, and also allowed for Boritt and his team to use a shinier, more reflective flooring.

For “Little Dancer,” though, Boritt challenged himself to use as few tracks as possible. The major set pieces are five giant rotating panels kept off to the sides, and the flooring is marley vinyl, buffed and treated daily with a coating called “Slip No More.” The major obstacle that Peck and the other ballerinas must avoid is the trap door at center stage, “We worked forever trying to make that as smooth as it could be,” Boritt said. “There are still slight cracks, but Tiler learned to dance around it.”

That trap door allows for a replica of the Little Dancer and a pedestal for Peck to stand on to be raised and lowered. The musical’s finale finds her at center stage, re-creating a scene you can see every day the National Gallery, where tourists admire Degas’s original statue. Marie van Goethem, Degas’s real life model, never became a star dancer, but she’s inspired many a museum-goer to hold her shoulders back just a little straighter.

“That statue is so stunningly beautiful,” Boritt said. “In all likelihood, [Marie] didn’t come to a very happy end. I’d like to think that maybe we are giving her a happier afterlife, because she’s become such a symbol.”

[This concludes my series of Washington Post reports on the new musical Little Dancer.  Should the Post run more informative coverage of the play and its production, I’ll be sure to bring it to the attention of ROTters.  I do have in reserve the New York Times’s review of the première, but I’m holding it in reserve against the possibility that Little Dancer makes it to a Broadway stage.  In that event, I’ll run some of the New York reviews of the new play and I’ll include the Times’s review of the Kennedy Center pre-Broadway presentation as part of that package.  I expect that’ll be an interesting comparison if it comes about.]

Little Dancer, Inspired by Degas Sculpture, Premieres at Kennedy Center, 1

[The world-première production of the new musical Little Dancer began performances 25 October at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’ Eisenhower Theater.  The opening was on 20 November and performances continued through 30 November. The play’s title refers to the famous Edgar Degas wax sculpture, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen (La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans, c. 1881).  Degas’s model was a teenaged ballerina from the Paris Opera Ballet dance school, a young Belgian named Marie van Goethem.  Degas created many wax copies and bronzes of Little Dancer after he sculpted the original, but that statue, purchased by Paul Mellon in 1956, was given to the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1985.

[“Part fact, part imagination, and set in the harsh backstage world of the Paris Opera Ballet,” KC press releases state of the ballet musical, “Little Dancer is inspired by the young ballerina who posed for Edgar Degas and became, inadvertently, the most famous dancer in the world.  Torn by her family’s poverty, her debt to the artist and the lure of wealthy men, Marie struggles to keep her place in the ballet corps—a girl on the verge of womanhood, caught between the conflicting demands of life and art.”

[Workshopped by the Lincoln Center Theatre Company in August 2014, Little Dancer features book and lyrics by Tony Award winner Lynn Ahrens and music by Tony Award winner Stephen Flaherty (both 1998 Best Original Musical Score, Ragtime); the Kennedy Center production was directed and choreographed by five-time Tony winner Susan Stroman (Best Choreography: 1992, Crazy for You; 1995, Show Boat; 2000, Contact; 2001, The Producers; Best Direction of a Musical: 2001, The Producers).  (Ahrens and Flaherty were also responsible for last year’s flop Rocky and Stroman staged both 2013’s Big Fish and last season’s Bullets Over Broadway which together totaled only 254 performances.)  The cast included four-time Tony Award winner Boyd Gaines (1989 Best Featured Actor in a Play, The Heidi Chronicles; 1994 Best Actor in a Musical, She Loves Me; 2000 Best Featured Actor in a Musical, Contact; 2008 Best Featured Actor in a Musical, Gypsy) as artist Edgar Degas, three-time Tony Award nominee Rebecca Luker (Best Actress in a Musical: 1995, Show Boat; 2000, The Music Man; 2007, Mary Poppins) as Adult Marie, and New York City Ballet principal dancer Tiler Peck as Young Marie.  The production also had set designs by Beowulf Boritt, costume designs by William Ivey Long, lighting design by Ken Billington, sound design by Kai Harada, and music supervision by David Loud; Shawn Gough conducted the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra.  Plans for a Broadway transfer are under consideration, but no announcement has been made.

[The Washington Post did comprehensive coverage of this pre-Broadway première, publishing articles on many aspects of the show and its production.  Because this provides a glimpse into the inner workings of a Broadway-level musical in production as well as the business of producing and promoting a major commercial show, I’ve collected a number of the articles and will post them on ROT as a sort of record of this work.  For the first installment of this examination, I’ve selected three pieces from the Post, starting with an article about star Boyd Gaines and his work as an actor to get into the role of the painter Edgar Degas, Rebecca Ritzel’s “Getting into Degas for ‘Little Dancer.’”  Then I’m presenting a side bar on the simultaneous art exhibit at the National Gallery of Art which was built around Degas’s original statue of Little Dancer, “As Disturbing As Enchanting” by Philip Kennicott, the Post’s review of the exhibit.  That art review is followed by Peter Marks’s “‘Little Dancer’ at The Kennedy Center, with the Accent on ‘Dancer,’” the Post’s review of the opening of Little Dancer, the musical, on 20 November.]

“GETTING INTO DEGAS FOR ‘LITTLE DANCER’”

by Rebecca Ritzel

[This article first appeared in the Weekend magazine of the Washington Post on 24 October 2014.]

Just as Edgar Degas began painting dancers after becoming fascinated by backstage life at the Paris Opera, actor Boyd Gaines became intrigued about the musical “Little Dancer” after spotting ballerinas roaming backstage at New York’s Lincoln Center. It was spring 2010, and the four-time Tony Award winner was starring in a play at the venerable performing arts complex. Gaines also came across director Susan Stroman, with whom he had worked on the Tony-winning show “Contact” in 2000.

“I saw all the ballerinas and Stro, and I would say hello,” Gaines recalls. “I was curious as to what she was doing, because it’s always something interesting.”

“Stro” – as she is known in the theater world – was at Lincoln Center workshopping “Little Dancer,” the original musical that begins previews Saturday at the Kennedy Center. Gaines says that, back then, he had no designs on the role of Degas but that he remembered the project. Then, months later, Stroman contacted him: There was to be another round of workshops. Would he like to play the famous impressionist?

Gaines wasted no time. He told Stroman yes and hurried to the Metropolitian Museum of Art to do some homework.

“The research that I started out doing initially was just going out and looking at as much as I could,” the 61-year-old actor says during a dinner break from rehearsals at the Kennedy Center. “Fortunately, there was much I could see in New York, but I did that not knowing what the future of the show would be.”

In 2011, while Gaines was working in London, he took in the Royal Academy exhibition “Degas and the Ballet,” which included 26 studies Degas made before sculpting “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen,” the subject of the new musical, and on a side trip to Paris, he visited the impressionist Musée d’Orsay. Then there were books – volumes of photographs, biographies and books of letters that Gaines can quote from off the top of his head.

“Hopefully, [all the research] gives me a feel for the man who surfaces in the playing of the scenes,” he says. “He’s a fascinating person, very complicated, obsessed and incredibly passionate about art and the making of art itself.”

Gaines holds a sketchbook during much of the time he’s onstage in “Little Dancer,” and will be drawing scenes staged by Stroman and her design team to evoke famous works by Degas. (Don’t ask to see his sketches; he claims they’re terrible.) One, obviously, is the “Little Dancer” statue itself, of Marie van Goethem, Degas’ 14-year-old model from the Paris Opera (played by New York City Ballet principal dancer Tiler Peck). Another is “The Absinthe Drinker,” a portrait of a woman sitting dejectedly in a café, a glass of the alcohol in front of her. In the musical, that woman is Marie’s mother, and the rumpled man next to her, the van Goethems’ ne’er-do-well landlord. Those fictional characters are examples of the liberties that composer Stephen Flaherty and lyricist Lynn Ahrens took to craft a narrative inspired by static works of art. (In reality, both figures in the painting – an actress and an artist – were friends of Degas.) In the same way, Gaines says that in portraying Degas, he has cherry-picked from his knowledge of the artist.

“This is not a docudrama,” he says. “I have used art historians – stealing at will, and using what helps, and discarding what doesn’t – in order to make the text and lyrics come alive. The story that we are trying to tell is not historically accurate, but it has bits and pieces of the truth in it. Hopefully, the audience will find it truthful.”

Locally, there’s at least one art historian who’s not bothered by the changes: Alison Luchs, the curator of “Degas’s Little Dancer,” an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art that opened earlier this month to coincide with the musical. The West Building space – usually used to exhibit European paintings – houses the statue itself and about a dozen of Degas’ dance and opera works, including two recently acquired from the Corcoran Gallery.

When it comes to Degas and “Little Dancer,” Luchs says, “there is room for imagination,” because so little is known about Marie, other than that she was dismissed from the ballet company in 1882. “I believe someday we are going to find an answer, but I almost hope we don’t,” she adds.

The exhibition also includes an 1882 graphite drawing of Degas by French artist Paul Mathey. Degas is shown from an odd angle and appears to be peering at a framed painting. His top hat sits before him on a chair, and his one visible eye is heavy-lidded and sad. The drawing, Luchs says, reminds her of the pictures she has seen of Gaines in the show. “He certainly has the look down,” she says of the actor’s full beard, tailored costumes and pensive bearing.

Both Luchs and Gaines remain committed to learning more about the artist, and both are excited about a lecture Nov. 15 by leading Degas scholar Richard Kendall and his wife, dance historian Jill De Vonyar.

By that point, Gaines will be more than halfway through the musical’s run at the Kennedy Center. Many actors might consider that too late to keep investing in a character, even for a show that is likely headed to Broadway. Not Gaines.

“If Richard Kendall is giving a lecture, I’ll be there,” he says.

[Rebecca Ritzel is a freelance writer whose writing has appeared in more than 20 publications in the United States, Canada, and the U.K.  Ritzel regularly contributes arts and entertainment articles to the Washington Post, the Washington City Paper, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Raleigh, North Carolina, News & Observer.]

*  *  *  *

“REVIEW: AS DISTURBING AS ENCHANTING”

by Philip Kennicott

[Edgar Degas’s groundbreaking statuette of a young ballerina that caused a sensation at the 1881 impressionist exhibition takes center stage at the National Gallery of Art in an exploration of Degas’s fascination with ballet and his experimental, modern approach to his work.  Degas’s Little Dancer is presented in conjunction with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’ world-premiere musical Little Dancer, which ran from 25 October through 30 November 2014.  This review originally appeared in the “Arts & Style” section of the Washington Post on 19 October 2014.]

The best Degas exhibitions take you past the prettiness and straight to the heart of weirdness that makes his work, despite overexposure, always worth further effort. “Degas’ Little Dancer,” a one-room show at the National Gallery of Art, gets straight to the matter, looking under the waxen skin of the artist’s most famous and beloved sculpture and then at a cross section of his fascination with young ballerinas over time. And in almost every one of the 15 works on display, there is something troubling and odd.

In an oil painting made around 1879, “The Dance Lesson,” a young dancer sits in the foreground, apparently lost in thought, or merely exhausted, staring at the floor with her head resting on one hand. But she seems to be sitting on a string bass, which, even given her diminutive frame and the instrument’s substantial bulk, is a very bad idea. In a painting that once belonged to the Corcoran, the “The Dance Class,” a spiral staircase frames two views of the young women, some of them merely legs and skirts descending the circular stairs, another glimpsed through a gap in the metal or wooden form, in a more idealized attitude, as if on stage and fully enveloped in the theatrical fantasy of a performance.

And then there is the Little Dancer herself, which an X-radiograph reveals is made not just of wax, but also clay, rope, wire, padding, paintbrushes (for her arms), and wood and other organic materials. She is, in a sense, made of trash, or at least utilitarian stuff. Knowing this changes our sense of her, from a simple girl with her eyes closed, perhaps anticipating the next step she must take, or wishing she were someplace else, to a more complicated and perhaps pathetic figure. She isn’t pretty or ugly, but a classic example of what the French call “jolie-laide,” which not only combines attributes of both but also suggests a deeper sense of conflict between appearance and inner life.

Making figures out of wax had a long history before Degas made this sculpture – as a preparatory step toward casting something in metal and as a tool for the study of anatomy and the display of anthropological and zoological specimens. The tradition lives on today, in etiolated form, in commercial wax museums. Making sculpture from stone or metal idealized the figures represented; making them out of wax was more disturbingly naturalistic, forcing an encounter with something more organic and more organically connected to flesh and blood. White marble was the stuff of admiration, even worship; brown wax invited a different kind of objectification, something to be studied, dissected and penetrated.

The last of those should be taken with all its implications. The brochure accompanying the exhibition dances around the facts (“Most dancers made very little money and often looked elsewhere for support”), and it doesn’t use the word prostitution, which is unfortunate. Very likely, the girl who posed for Degas (we know her name and have a vague sense of her family and early career on the stage) exchanged sex for money. She certainly had no choice in the matter.

Ballet, at the time, was closely linked to prostitution; the impoverished girls drawn to the ballet were not only forced in many cases to seek income by selling sex, they worked in a system almost perfectly designed to exploit. They were at the mercy of men who made subjective judgments not just on their beauty but their skill, as well. And ballet, like other art forms, offered those men a fantasy of ideal femininity, which could also be pursued through patronizing courtesans, prostitutes and dancers.

In both dance and sexual exploitation, men experienced the great gulf between the fantasy and the means of realizing it. The ideal is never real, the voluptuous swan or handsome prince is in fact an athlete, sweating and straining, and at the behest of the choreographer’s whim. This is not to say that dance is prostitution or that sex workers are to be valued less than artists. But a man like Degas, with a visual fixation on young female dancers, and a deep love of the theater and the society around it, would probably have looked at the young women who were so beautiful, so available and so essential to both artistic and erotic fantasy, and wondered: What is inside them?

It seems likely that the strongly articulated dichotomies in this exhibition – between the whole and the part, the ideal and the real, practice and performance, means and ends – are symptoms of this desire to go from surface to depth, to possess or subjugate intellectually, emotionally and physically the young dancer. Women, for millennia, have been the locus of this frustrating sense that we can never get at the essence of what we most desire, and great violence has been done to them, particularly through religion, by making them embody irreconcilable opposites such as purity and degradation. So the young dancer who sits on the string bass isn’t just doing something odd and unlikely, she is connecting the ground, the bass, the well-springs of desire, to our most seemingly refined, articulated and elusive embodiment of the beautiful.

As our values have changed, as euphemisms like “protector” (i.e., older man who pays girls for the illusion that he is still desirable) have been unmasked, the question of what Degas was doing has become more urgent and painful. Did he capture this girl’s humanity, her defiance of the ugly and exploitative milieu into which she was thrust? Was there a morally redeeming aspect to his visual fixation on the young dancers of the ballet? Or is he working comfortably within the self-satisfied paradigm of misogyny? Those are exactly the questions that must be asked of the new musical, “Little Dancer,” which is inspired by Degas’ statue. It may seem like an obvious thing to do, even a noble one, to give voice to this young woman. But it is complicated, too, and as the work of Degas reminds us, the lines between representation and exploitation are porous. Degas’ dancer isn’t just a sweet girl lost in the moment; she is also Frankenstein and Pygmalion product, a male construction, and no matter how long you stare at her face, you will never know if she is saying no, or yes.

[Degas’s Little Dancer, which opened on 5 October, was on view in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art through 11 January 2015.  Philip Kennicott is the Pulitzer Prize-winning Art and Architecture Critic of the Washington Post.  He has been on staff at the Post since 1999, first as Classical Music Critic, then as Culture Critic.]

*  *  *  *

“‘LITTLE DANCER’ AT THE KENNEDY CENTER, WITH THE ACCENT ON ‘DANCER’”

by Peter Marks

[Peter Marks’s review of the Kennedy Center première of Little Dancer appeared in the “Style” section of the Washington Post on 21 November.]

Love of ballet flows from every pore and plie of “Little Dancer.” The new Kennedy Center musical showcases most rewardingly the technical gifts of Tiler Peck, a beguiling New York City Ballet star cast here as the gamine model for the celebrated Degas sculpture of the show’s title.

That ardor for the dance form and its classical rigor are filtered through the becoming choreography of director Susan Stroman, who, in the footsteps of Agnes de Mille and Jerome Robbins, has created as a finale for this musical – still, it seems, deeply in progress – a delightful dream ballet, with Peck at its center.

But musical theater doesn’t live by dance alone. In many of its other particulars – having to do with plotting, character development and expressing interior life through song – “Little Dancer” feels as if it has only scratched the surface of possibility of its story, about the hopes of a talented young dancer, both immortalized and dashed on an artist’s pedestal. So Stroman, composer Stephen Flaherty and book and lyrics writer Lynn Ahrens would seem to have more work to do if “Little Dancer” is to sweep out the cliches and present itself as more than just another pretty face.

The venture is an intriguing one-off for the Kennedy Center: an original musical produced entirely by the institution and conceived under its past president, Michael M. Kaiser. Having recruited a top-tier assortment of Broadway pros – other major roles are filled by Boyd Gaines, Karen Ziemba and Rebecca Luker, and the designers include William Ivey Long (costumes) and Beowulf Boritt (sets) – Kaiser put this project on a promising path, and on a scale of ambition commensurate with the center’s place in the arts ecosystem.

The results in the Eisenhower Theater – where, after a nearly four-week preview period, the show officially opened Thursday night – reveal a fairly pedestrian tale, buoyed at times by a romantic musicality redolent of Belle Époque Paris and a smart, eye-catching design. The towering, rotating panels of Boritt’s set resemble artists’ stretched canvases, on which projection designer Benjamin Pearcy splashes a changing pattern of vibrant, colliding colors, enhanced by Ken Billington’s lighting. (This is, after all, the age of impressionism.) Long, too, is entirely in his element here, dreaming up outfits for the women worthy of Toulouse-Lautrec’s vision of the Moulin Rouge, as well as tutus for the dancers that give them the air of soignée sprites.

As the show is inspired by an object, albeit a dazzling one – the expressive Edgar Degas sculpture whose original wax version is in the National Gallery of Art – the show’s creators had a formidable assignment: making a statue breathe. To do so, Stroman, Ahrens and Flaherty used the mysterious fate of Marie van Goethem, the Paris Opera Ballet student who posed for Degas, as the linchpin of their musical. The insufficiency of the exploration of Marie, however, is the show’s biggest weakness.

If another musical tale set in the impressionist era, James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park With George,” is about the relationship between an artist and his painting, “Little Dancer” is the story of an artist and his subject. Marie is such a vital character that she has been split in two here: At the beginning of the musical, an older, sadder Marie, portrayed (and sung lusciously) by Luker, visits Degas’s atelier just after he has died, in hopes of seeing the artwork. It’s this scene that triggers the musical’s warmest, most memorable melody, “C’est le Ballet,” but also triggers the question that dogs the entire evening: Why exactly does Adult Marie keep popping up?

We will, eventually, get an answer, but in the interim, Adult Marie feels less like a person than a narrative device, and why and what she’s remembering, and for whom, are lost in the onrush of subplots and pirouettes. The story of her younger, more carefree self, embodied by Peck, unfolds more concretely. The impoverished Marie is competing with richer girls for a featured role in the latest Paris Opera Ballet production and trying to provide for her little sister (Sophia Anne Caruso) and alcoholic mother (Ziemba, agile as always).

Peck’s Marie is a little sunnier than might be expected of a girl who has known hardship; there’s a beaming indefatigability about her that reminds you of Annie Warbucks or a Disney heroine. More oddly, though, among the show’s two dozen songs, none is a number that lets us inside Young Marie’s thoughts. Why does she so desperately want to dance? How does she feel about the handsome street singer (Kyle Harris) hanging around, forever seeming ready to burst into “On the Street Where You Live”? Why does she risk her ballet career by sneaking off to pose for Degas? An idea suggests itself: Maybe Luker is there to interpret Young Marie’s feelings in song and Peck, in dance. It proves an idle notion.

A lack of development also afflicts the bond between Marie and Degas, played by an impressively crusty and, owing to the artist’s failing eyesight, short-fused Gaines. Not until late in the second act and the song “A Box of Things” are they accorded a duet of any moment. The withholding inclination of this show unreasonably restricts our access to the characters, leaving us waiting in vain to discover more about them. At the same time, it bogs down an audience in unrewarding side stories, such as the travails of Marie’s older sister Antoinette (Jenny Powers), who escapes penury by attaching herself to a refined Parisian brute (Sean Martin Hingston).

The more finely wrought diversions of “Little Dancer” occur when Stroman and her corps of dancers remind us that this is indeed a musical about ballet. These dance sequences offer the most invigorating exposure in a musical to the beauty of the form since “Billy Elliot.” Stroman’s choreography here betokens the passion for dance she infused so exhilaratingly into “Contact,” her Tony-winning triptych of dance-theater pieces.

Whenever Peck is sent leaping and spinning, it’s as if the hindering tethers on “Little Dancer” come off, too. And the musical is set free.

[Little Dancer: Music by Stephen Flaherty, book and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens. Directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman. Sets, Beowulf Boritt; costumes, William Ivey Long; lighting, Ken Billington; sound, Kai Harada; projections, Benjamin Pearcy; music supervisor, David Loud; orchestrations, Doug Besterman and Larry Hochman; music director, Shawn Gough. With Janet Dickinson, Jolina Javier, Polly Baird, Lyrica Woodruff, Juliet Doherty and Michael McCormick. About 2 hours, 40 minutes. 

[Coming up in a subsequent post will be articles on the way the women of Degas’s era and the milieu of the Paris ballet are portrayed in the play, what inspired set designer Beowulf Boritt, and why this production played in preview until just ten days before it closed.  Other related articles on the Kennedy Center première of Little Dancer include “The Arts of Perseverance from an Iconic Ballerina,” a discussion of director-choreographer Susan Stroman’s work on the show by Sarah Kaufman; “Tiler Peck: A Dancer Takes Her Next Big Leap,” a profile of the New York City Ballet dancer who plays the young Marie, Degas’s model for the sculpture, by Peter Marks; “Making Art Sing Is Hardly a Walk in Park,” a consideration of how visual art may be “illustrated” by music by Anne Midgette; and “Flaherty and Ahrens: 30 Years in the Life,” a profile of the collaborators Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens by Nelson Pressley.  All four pieces appeared in the “Arts & Style” section of the Washington Post on 19 October 2014.]