MUSIC
Old School
Peabody Renaissance Ensemble Holiday Concert, Dec 11 and 12


Rockin’ the sackbut: The Peabody Renaissance Ensemble in action | Photo by Wil Kir, courtesy of the Peabody

For those tired of umpteen choruses of Handel’s Messiah, the Peabody Renaissance Ensemble offers a more novel take on the holiday concert. Under the energetic direction of Peabody faculty and Baltimore Consort member, Mark Cudek, the twenty-one-year-old ensemble made up of Peabody students, Hopkins staff, and alumni will present Puer Natus in Bethlehem: A German Christmas at Peabody’s Griswold Hall. Honoring the 400th anniversary of the first German communities in the New World, the concert features the music of German composer Michael Praetorius (1571–1621) and some of his contemporaries, performed by a chorale of eighteen singers, a lute band, and a recorder consort, among others.

Eight members of the ensemble are early music majors, and, along with experiencing the pure vocals of soloists such as Elizabeth Hungerford (who played Dido in Peabody’s production of Dido and Aeneas last year), one of the thrills of this concert is seeing and hearing unfamiliar period-reproduction instruments such as the theorbo (described by Cudek as “a lute on steroids”) and the memorably named proto-trombone called the sackbut. The program includes several suites of dances from Praetorius’s Terpsichore, and Cudek also promises recognizable Christmas carols such as “Es ist ein Ros entsprungen” (“Lo, how a Rose E’er Blooming”) and “Joseph, lieber Joseph mein” (“Joseph dearest, Joseph mine”). Frohe Weihnachten!

—Mary K. Zajac


For tickets, call 410-659-8100 ext. 2 or e-mail boxoffice@jhmi.edu.





THEATER
Singular Sensations
A Chorus Line at the Hippodrome, Dec 2–14
Trixie and Monkey’s Fourth Annual Holiday Spectac-u-thon at Creative Alliance, Dec 20


That ’70s show: The Hippodrome revives A Chorus Line. | Photo by Paul Kolnik


When A Chorus Line opened at the then-edgy (and deeply broke) Public Theater in 1975, it was a phenomenon. The stories of seventeen wannabe Broadway stars, developed in a series of workshops with real-life “gypsies” (as chorus members are called), remains as close to documentary as the American musical has ever come. Eight of the original cast members played versions of themselves: There was the girl whose passion for ballet replaced her father’s love, a boy who had taken his sister’s place at dance class, the girl whose figure—or lack thereof—precluded her from jobs.

The production itself was a hit and quickly moved to the Shubert to become one of the longest-running shows in Broadway history. It closed in 1990 but returned in 2006, and the national tour of the revival will stop at the Hippodrome December 2–14. Baayork Lee, who played Connie Wong (the 4-foot-10 dancer) in the original, restaged the choreography for this production.
 
Preparing for the play, says current cast member Julie Kotarides, wasn’t so different from the way she envisions the original was developed. “We’d sit around and talk about our experiences so we could relate to the show,” says Kotarides, who grew up in Perry Hall and attended Baltimore School for the Arts and the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. She plays one of the dancers cut in the first scene. “I have to be bad,” she says. However, as an understudy, Kotarides had to prepare for the possibility of playing four other, substantial parts. During the Baltimore run, on December 11, 12, and 13, Kotarides will play Diana—who sings “What I Did for Love” and “Nothing”—for a few days while a cast member is on vacation. A Chorus Line, she says, “definitely takes place in the ’70s, but all the same issues, passions, and worries ring true today.”

If you’re nostalgic for old-time burlesque, look no further than Trixie Little, who, along with partner Evil Hate Monkey, will bring the fourth annual Trixie and Monkey’s Fourth Annual Holiday Spectac-u-thon to the Creative Alliance on December 20. The production will include a naughty variation on The Nutcracker, a visit from New-York-based burlesque star Miss Astrid, and Dr. Lukki, who, Trixie reports, “dresses as a Christmas tree. And then strips.” The hirsute Monkey will dance to Fiddler on the Roof en pointe and don his Santa suit at intermission to pose for pictures with audience members.

—Martha Thomas


For tickets to A Chorus Line, call 410-547-SEAT or go to www.broadwayacrossamerica.com.

For tickets to the Holiday Spectac-u-thon, call 410-276-1651 or go to www.creativealliance.org.





BOOKS
A Life in Books
by Susan McCallum-Smith


Next stop, Wonderland | Original illustration from Alice


The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition, introduction and notes by Martin Gardner (Norton, 2000)

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967), graphic novel by Andrzej Klimowski and Danusia Schejbal (Self Made Hero, 2008)

State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey (Ecco, 2008)

The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed (Norton, 2008)

When I was 4 years old, my mother took me to apply for my first library card, and every other weekend we returned to the library to swap our books, because reading, Mum said, was how we engage with the world.

Regardless of such bounty, though, it was Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass that dominated my early reading. I wanted to be Alice—specifically, the Alice visualized by her original illustrator, John Tenniel. After tying on my granny’s apron, I’d clamber on top of her antique dressing table, squish my cheek against its tarnished mirror, and peer into the topsy-turvy world on the other side.

Martin Gardner’s marvelous The Annotated Alice affirms the genius of Carroll, né Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, and the tales he wrote to entertain his child friend Alice Liddell. Carroll was convinced that children are smart, delight in nonsense, and have an elastic capacity for fear and the absurd. His inventions are as fresh and controversial as ever—the stoned caterpillar; the sneezing, abused pig-baby; the casual violence of the Queen of Hearts. Gardner unravels the chess game embedded in Through the Looking-Glass and lovingly dissects every pun, limerick, and allusion in his leisurely, rambling annotations. The familiarity of Tenniel’s drawings has not diminished their power, and the less-replicated surprise anew—the delicate Bread-and-butterfly, Alice’s attempt to pull the White Knight feet-first from a ditch, and the lady-sheep knitting behind the counter of her wool shop.

It wasn’t until my late teens that another book so captured my imagination—Mikhail Bulgakov’s Stalin-era masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, which has been re-issued in a graphic adaptation by Andrzej Klimowski and Danusia Schejbal. Bulgakov’s absurdist comedy of a mysterious magician’s visit to 1930s Moscow is combined with a re-imagining of Christ’s crucifixion in a manner that guaranteed its censorship in the Communist USSR and condemnation by religious groups worldwide. While Klimowski’s black-and-white illustrations have a certain sly power, Schejbal’s clumsy pastel interpretation of the Pontius Pilate subplot is amateurish and scrappy. By all means appreciate this version’s eye-candy cover, but read the novel instead. Bulgakov’s vaudeville romp masks a metaphysical debate about the interdependent relationship between good and evil, which is not best served by this graphic quickie. The parallels he draws between the struggle of conscience endured by a Moscow novelist nicknamed the “Master” and that endured by Pontius Pilate are not easily shaded by crayon alone. By characterizing the devilish magician as not the enemy of the Christ figure but rather his ally and instrument, Bulgakov suggests that omnipotent beings, or governments, are as responsible for darkness as they are light.

Such magical realism wasn’t Mum’s thing. She loved history and family sagas, and her selections were meaty; thickness held no fears for her. She had a fascination with the United States that began long before her youngest daughter settled here, stirred by crazy Aunt Susan (yep, that’s the one I’m named after), who stole ashtrays in Vegas, and Uncle James, who drove Henry Ford’s Rolls Royce. Alistair Cooke’s America and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, or such James A. Michener doorstoppers as Chesapeake and Centennial, often appeared on her bedside table, bookmarked with neatly folded candy wrappers. After I emigrated, she traversed the historical sites of the Eastern seaboard blabbing like a tour guide while I trailed behind, 4 years old again.

I’ve been trying to imagine her response to State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America, edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey—an engaging, if spotty, collection of fifty essays written by contemporary American writers. She would’ve appreciated the more factual contributions, such as Dave Eggers’ recitation of the glories of Illinois, rather than Myla Goldberg’s reflective thoughts on Maryland’s complex relationship to civil rights, because she wasn’t that keen on writers who, to paraphrase E.M. Forster, ran up and down ladders in their own insides. As a teenager I was often told that I could sulk about the meaning of life after I’d tidied my room.

Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello would have been more her thing, because it really does have a whopping story inside it once you dig it out, although Gordon-Reed seemed determined to bury it under a hectoring tone. If she reminds us once that slavery was an abomination, she reminds us a million times, in a manner that implies she not only thinks readers are dim but also that we lack human empathy. She needn’t have worried. The story of America’s third president and first biracial First Family illustrates two current concerns—our nation’s schizophrenic relationship to race and our love affair with credit—with eerily prescient acuity.

Several facts sting like a slap. In order for slavery to work, English property laws had to be changed to a more accommodating American version, so that inheritance no longer transferred from father to child, but from mother to child, thereby ensuring that any children of slave-owners and their slaves had no property rights and could be sold. Because “Dusky Sally” was the daughter of the slave Elizabeth Hemings (who had also had children by Jefferson’s father-in-law), Jefferson’s wife, Martha, and his mistress, Sally, were actually half sisters. Martha found herself in the insidious but not uncommon predicament of owning her own siblings.

Gordon-Reed also explores a belief widely held by Jefferson and his contemporaries, which may still make some Americans squirm today: that mixing blacks with whites “improved black people,” somehow making them more acceptable and less threatening. Finally, Gordon-Reed tackles the great Jefferson enigma—how could someone articulate so exquisitely the rights of man while continuing to own slaves himself? Jefferson was being, she argues, a typical Virginian, a typical American, “for whom indebtedness was a way of life.” Not only did Jefferson not want to free his slaves for personal reasons of affection and loneliness, but he also couldn’t afford to. “It is there,” Gordon-Reed concludes of Monticello, “that we can find the absolute best, and the absolute worst, that we have been as Americans.”

I have a photograph of my mother striding across the gardens of Monticello, holding on to the crown of her sun hat, like Scarlett. This is how I like to remember her—vigorous, curious, opinionated—and not as implied by the books I recently found lying untouched on her bedside table, naked of candy wrappers. I had missed the first hint a few weeks ago that a soul was disengaging from the world when she said, “You know, I’m so tired, I can’t even be bothered to read.”



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