Arts & Entertainment
Collaborating on Cole
Legendary gay composer celebrated with In Series production
Steven Mazzola and Greg Stevens, the creative team behind ‘The Cole Porter Project.’ (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)
‘The Cole Porter Project: It’s All Right With Me’
Through March 9Source
1835 14th St. N.W.
$20-38
202-204-7763
When the In Series first asked director Steven Scott Mazzola to create a show about Cole Porter for its 2014 season, he was certain what he didn’t want: four singers seated on stools singing the legendary Broadway composer’s best known works, setting up each song with a bit of surfacey chitchat. And though unsure of exactly what direction to take, he was determined to celebrate the staggering breadth of Porter’s music and explore his many facets without getting bogged down in too much biography.
Mazzola tapped Greg Stevens as co-writer/director. The pair (both gay) had met working on Mozart’s “La Clemenza di Tito” (Mazzola directed, Stevens designed) for the In Series last season, and hit it off. After setting to work on six months of rewrites and workshops, the pair’s efforts resulted in “The Cole Porter Project: It’s All Right With Me,” a Washington-set tale about a delegation from Peru, Ind., (Porter’s hometown) who lobby Congress to honor their musical native son with his own national holiday.
While “The Porter Project” is mostly an entertaining romp, it also comments on Porter’s complexity, Stevens says. Invariably, Porter whose songbook includes sophisticated favorites like ”Night and Day,” ”What Is This Thing Called Love?” and ”I Get a Kick Out of You,” is pegged as urbanity incarnate, but there’s more to him than that. He was a classically trained musician who wrote popular music crammed with topical references. He loved both lowbrow humor and sleek sophistication, and his songs overflow with witty innuendo and double meaning. Porter, who died in 1964 at 73, and his older wife Linda, were a well-loved couple on the café society scene, yet he was gay and had romantic relationships with other men (an open secret among their set). It’s all there.
“I think D.C. is the perfect setting,” Mazzola says. “Like Porter, the city demonstrates a duality, particularly with politicians and government. Here it’s not unusual for the mirror to have faces.”
In preparing the project, Mazzola and Stevens combed through 1,000 songs before narrowing it down to three dozen ranging from familiar hits like “It Was Just One of Those Things,” “Love For Sale” and “Miss Otis Regrets” to the lesser known tunes “In the Morning, No” and “Experiment.”
“We’d identified some favorites that we wanted to use,” says Stevens, who first encountered Porter’s music in high school when he heard a disco version of “Begin the Beguine” by Tuxedo Junction. “But part of the process included thinking about how Cole Porter was among the very first musical theater composers whose scores propelled the story along. That was revolutionary in the 1930s. We wanted to do the same, so we ended up repurposing songs from a dozen musicals from the ‘20s through the ‘50s, all very different stylistically, to tell our story. And like Porter who wrote songs for performers like Ethel Merman (his favorite) and friend Fred Astaire, we wanted to select songs that fit our singers and characters.”
The nine-person cast features In Series vets Randa Rouweyha, Joe Haughton and Tammy Roberts. “The parts,” explains Mazzola, “are ‘gender open.’ The five principles have purposely been named Nick, Sam, Chris, Pat and Courtney and can be played by anyone.”
A long-time Washington company, the In Series works with local artists to create innovative theatrical programming around a musical core of opera, cabaret, poetry and song. Its productions strive to embrace fresh approaches to the classics, blend the performing arts in unconventional ways, and include Latino programs each season. “The Cole Porter Project” falls most closely to the cabaret category.
Primarily a set designer, Stevens (who heads the professional development program at the American Alliance of Museums by day) considers “The Cole Porter Project” his first formal effort in directing. “I’m looking to Steven as much as a mentor as a colleague. He knows more about the craft of directing whereas I’m going on instinct a lot of the time.”
A longtime director, Mazzola first came to Washington to assist Michael Kahn at the Shakespeare Theatre Company. (Today, in addition to directing, he’s a grants manager at the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities.) Yet, despite his ample staging experience, this is his first time co-directing. “It takes lot of negotiation. There are moments of frustration, but they don’t last. It’s interesting and you learn a lot watching how your co-director works.”
They like what they’ve come up with. But ultimately, Mazzola and Stevens agree: In the end, people will come to hear the music. It’s Cole Porter’s crowd-pleasing, enduring songs that are the draw, just as they have been for decades.
Theater
José Zayas brings ‘The House of Bernarda Alba’ to GALA Hispanic Theatre
Gay Spanish playwright Federico García Lorca wrote masterpiece before 1936 execution
‘The House of Bernarda Alba’
Through March 1
GALA Hispanic Theatre
3333 14th St., N.W.
$27-$52
Galatheatre.org
In Federico García Lorca’s “The House of Bernarda Alba,” now at GALA Hispanic Theatre in Columbia Heights, an impossibly oppressive domestic situation serves, in short, as an allegory for the repressive, patriarchal, and fascist atmosphere of 1930s Spain
The gay playwright completed his final and arguably best work in 1936, just months before he was executed by a right-wing firing squad. “Bernarda Alba” is set in the same year, sometime during a hot summer in rural Andalusia, the heart of “España profunda” (the deep Spain), where traditions are deeply rooted and mores seldom challenged.
At Bernarda’s house, the atmosphere, already stifling, is about to get worse.
On the day of her second husband’s funeral, Bernarda Alba (superbly played by Luz Nicolás), a sixtyish woman accustomed to calling the shots, gathers her five unmarried daughters (ages ranging from 20 to 39) and matter-of-factly explain what’s to happen next.
She says, “Through the eight years of mourning not a breeze shall enter this house. Consider the doors and windows as sealed with bricks. That’s how it was in my father’s house and my grandfather’s. Meanwhile, you can embroider your trousseaux.”
It’s not an altogether sunny plan. While Angustias (María del Mar Rodríguez), Bernarda’s daughter from her first marriage and heiress to a fortune, is betrothed to a much younger catch, Pepe el Romano, who never appears on stage, the remaining four stand little chance of finding suitable matches. Not only are they dowry-less, but no men, eligible or otherwise, are admitted into their mother’s house.
Lorca is a literary hero known for his mastery of both lyrical poetry and visceral drama; still, “Bernarda Alba’s” plotline might suit a telenovela. Despotic mother heads a house of adult daughters. Said daughters are churning with passions and jealousies. When sneaky Martirio (Giselle Gonzáles) steals the photo of Angustias’s fiancé all heck kicks off. Lots of infighting and high drama ensue. There’s even a batty grandmother (Alicia Kaplan) in the wings for bleak comic relief.
At GALA, the modern classic is lovingly staged by José Zayas. The New York-based out director has assembled a committed cast and creative team who’ve manifested an extraordinarily timely 90-minute production performed in Spanish with English subtitles easily ready seen on multiple screens.
In Lorca’s stage directions, he describes the set as an inner room in Bernarda’s house; it’s bright white with thick walls. At GALA, scenic designer Grisele Gonzáles continues the one-color theme with bright red walls and floor and closed doors. There are no props.
In the airless room, women sit on straight back chairs sewing. They think of men, still. Two are fixated on their oldest siter’s hunky betrothed. Only Magdelena (Anna Malavé), the one sister who truly mourns their dead father, has given up on marriage entirely.
The severity of the place is alleviated by men’s distant voices, Koki Lortkipanidze’s original music, movement (stir crazy sisters scratching walls), and even a precisely executed beatdown choreographed by Lorraine Ressegger-Slone.
In a short yet telling scene, Bernarda’s youngest daughter Adela (María Coral) proves she will serve as the rebellion to Bernarda’s dictatorship. Reluctant to mourn, Adela admires her reflection. She has traded her black togs for a seafoam green party dress. It’s a dreamily lit moment (compliments of lighting designer Hailey Laroe.)
But there’s no mistaking who’s in charge. Dressed in unflattering widow weeds, her face locked in a disapproving sneer, Bernarda rules with an iron fist; and despite ramrod posture, she uses a cane (though mostly as a weapon during one of her frequent rages.)
Bernarda’s countenance softens only when sharing a bit of gossip with Poncia, her longtime servant convincingly played by Evelyn Rosario Vega.
Nicolás has appeared in “Bernarda Alba” before, first as daughter Martirio in Madrid, and recently as the mother in an English language production at Carnegie Melon University in Pittsburgh. And now in D.C. where her Bernarda is dictatorial, prone to violence, and scarily pro-patriarchy.
Words and phrases echo throughout Lorca’s play, all likely to signal a tightening oppression: “mourning,” “my house,” “honor,” and finally “silence.”
As a queer artist sympathetic to left wing causes, Lorca knew of what he wrote. He understood the provinces, the dangers of tyranny, and the dimming of democracy. Early in Spain’s Civil War, Lorca was dragged to the the woods and murdered by Franco’s thugs. Presumably buried in a mass grave, his remains have never been found.
Cupid’s Undie Run, an annual fundraiser for neurofibromatosis (NF) research, was held at Union Stage and at The Wharf DC on Saturday, Feb. 21.
(Washington Blade photos by Michael Key)
Sweat DC is officially expanding to Shaw, opening a new location at 1818 7th St., N.W., on Saturday, March 28 — and they’re kicking things off with a high-energy, community-first launch event.
To celebrate, Sweat DC is hosting Sweat Fest, a free community workout and social on Saturday, March 14, at 10 a.m. at the historic Howard Theatre. The event features a group fitness class, live DJ, local food and wellness partners, and a mission-driven partnership with the Open Goal Project, which works to expand access to youth soccer for players from marginalized communities.
For more details, visit Sweat DC’s website and reserve a spot on Eventbrite.
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