Theater Review: Adventure Theatre's A Snowy Day

There are few things more delightful than an afternoon spent surrounded by a gaggle of giggling five and six year-olds. And there was plenty of opportunity for that at a showing of Adventure Theatre's new musical production, The Snowy Day. Based on Ezra Jack Keats' Caldecott Medal winning children's book of the same name, the antics of the four main characters in the play provide plenty of action, adventure and food for thought for audiences young and and not-so-young.

Keats' The Snowy Day is the tale of a young boy, Peter, who wakes up one day to find snow blanketing his neighborhood. As young children are wont to do, he puts on his snow suit and dashes outside to make snowmen and snow angels and snow balls. The plot line is endearing in its simplicity and in the way it evokes the familiar pleasures of staying home from school to have fun in the snow, to stomp through it, to draw lines in it and knock snow off of trees to make your own instant, on-demand snowfall. The book is a stand-out for two reasons - for its art, and for the fact that it was the first children's book in which the main character was black.

In Adventure Theatre's production, Playwright David Emerson Toney and Musician & Lyricist Darius Smith have adapted Keats' book and expanded each occurrence in it to include more characters and sub-plots. We meet Harold the snowman, Roberta the crow, Peter's mother, two neighbors, a fairy, a pirate and a hawker who sells snow flakes in a very warm and sunny place.

Peter has never seen snow before, and he is full of wonder at this white, crunchy stuff that has covered everything as far as he can see. The snowy day is packed with promise as he heads out in his bright red snow suit. There are hills to climb, slopes to slide down and snow pirates to vanquish. He marvels at the possibilities and pretends he's Peter the Great. Peter's mother has nourished his body and soul and Peter has no problem letting his imagination run wild. He wants someone to play with and in Harold and Roberta, he finds playmates but they also need his help to get where they need to go.

Without giving away too much of the plot, suffice to say that the music and lyrics had the children swaying, and the dialogue had them nodding in complete understanding of the boundaries imposed by mothers everywhere.

As a parent, the most revealing aspect of the production was the fact that the children in the audience absorbed the story within the context of a play. The sets, the props, the fact that there was no actual snow on the ground or that Peter's role was portrayed by someone obviously much older than a six year-old - none of these seemed to matter to the little ones. The children seemed to respond to the characters, to their fears and their joys, much as they would in a realistic movie or in a real-life situation.

Adventure Theatre's production of The Snowy Day brings to life a popular children's book (it's a staple in elementary school libraries) and is a marvelous introduction to musical theater for young kids. I have it on good authority: my five year-old declared it was "the best play" she had ever seen.

Children younger than three might find the proximity of the action a bit overwhelming. The stage is intimate and the action is up close (which is fantastic for the older pre-schoolers and the younger elementary school-age children).
~~~~~~

The Snowy Day is playing at the Adventure Theatre in Glen Echo, Maryland from January 20, 2012 through February 12, 2012. Tickets may be purchased at Adventure Theatre's website. More information about the play is available here and about the cast and production crew, here.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Updated January 26, 2102 to include a note from Adventure Theatre:

Due to the demand for Snowy Day tickets, Adventure Theatre has added the following performances:

Sunday, January 29th at 4:30pm
Friday, February 3rd at 7:00pm
Sunday, February 5th at 4:30pm
Friday, February 10th at 7:00pm
Sunday, February 12th at 4:30pm

Children's Summer Theater Workshop in the Washington, D.C. Area

From my inbox:

Adventure Theatre Announces the Summer Musical Theatre Workshop Productions Adventure Theatre, the longest-running children’s theatre in the Washington, D.C., area is kicking-off its 31st Annual Summer Musical Theatre Workshop for children ages 6-15 with an exciting line-up of children’s productions including Disney’s Aladdin Jr., Disney’s 101 Dalmatians Kids, The Magical Land of Oz and Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum*, each facilitated by professionally trained Directors, Choreographers, and Musical Directors.

The Summer Musical Theatre Workshop is a daytime workshop in which children audition for one of four age-appropriate productions, and will then participate in two full weeks of show rehearsals, music and dancing which culminate in a full-scale production of each show on the Adventure Theatre stage. Students will also attend Adventure Theatre’s main stage performance If You Give a Pig a Pancake, ride Glen Echo Park’s carousel, participate in a talent show, receive a commemorative t-shirt and enjoy a cast party.

[...]

Adventure Theatre’s Summer Musical Theatre Workshops run Monday-Friday from 9am-4pm, June 14th to August 27th. Before and aftercare options are available.

Session 1 (mini session)- June 14 – 18
Session 2 – June 21 - July 2
Session 3 – July 5- July 16
Session 4 – July 19 - July 30
Session 5 – August 2 - August 13
Session 6 - August 16 - August 27

For more information or to inquire about tuition prices, please contact Adventure Theatre’s Summer Musical Theatre Workshop Program Coordinator Selena Anguiano at 301-634-2275 or sanguiano@adventuretheatre.org. Also, visit www.adventuretheatre.org for more information on the Summer Musical Theatre Workshop and other educational programs at Adventure Theatre.

It's time to plan for summer already!

Ice Skating Meets Bollywood

Left me with a silly grin on my face. Enjoy!

Morning Prayer and Maine's Bounty

We finally figured out how to record music onto the computer! It was such a struggle to get the music from C's digital piano to the computer in any usable format (MIDI was not converting to WAV). Today I downloaded Audacity and recorded directly as C was playing - from the piano to the music editing program. We used the piece, Tchaikovsky's Morning Prayer, as background music for a movie of our Maine pictures and voilà! A video of some pictures from Maine with C playing Morning Prayer.

Michael Jackson and The Yearning for Normal

When I was in middle school and high school back in India, Sundays were welcomed with great anticipation for a couple of different reasons. It was the one day of the week there was no school (Saturdays were half-days); Sundays meant family get-togethers; Sundays meant free-wheeling, no-destination-in-mind trips with my dad; Sundays also meant half an hour of 'Western Music' programs on TV. Other than the annual Grammy telecasts - days late and always in the dead of the night on a Saturday - Sunday mornings were our only window into what was happening in the music world in the US and the UK.

And so we saw and heard ABBA, BoneyM, Michael Jackson, the Bee Gees, the Beatles. We had cassette tapes of these artists that we listened to on a single-speaker 'Two-in-One,' but being able to watch them on our small television screen was quite something else. When the Grammys rolled around, we were familiar with a mere one or two of the nominated artists, but who cared?

Of all the Michael Jackson songs, I only knew three of them back then - Billie Jean, Beat It!, and Thriller. I could not for the life of me figure out Thriller. I did not know why they were in a graveyard, I did not know why the man laughed that maniacal laugh in the end. I did not know all of the words to Beat It! or Billie Jean. I don't think I know them even now. But I loved the beat, the energy, the confidence, and the absolute certainty of Jackson's dance steps and actions. He knew what he was doing and it was thrilling to watch him do it so well. When I finished listening to the songs, I felt pumped up, inspired, I was amazed that someone not too much older than me was so successful.

Little did I know that the success came at a price so huge as to be incalculable. I had no clue about the backstory.

It was only when I moved to the US that I realized he had siblings, that there was something called the Jackson 5. I pieced together the story from TV specials and magazine articles. Over and over, one concept popped up repeatedly in the media coverage of Neverland, the child molestation charges, the dangling of the child through the window - his yearning for a normal childhood. Although I noticed it at the time, it did not resonate with me at all. Why would anyone want a normal childhood if he was so obviously talented and could be so successful? A normal childhood was boring. It was infinitely more exciting to be able to travel the world, to have millions of fans hanging on to your every step, to be so rich.

That was many years ago. Now, with children of my own, I have an understanding of normal and not-normal childhoods. Being a wife and mother, having lived away from my parents for a number of years and having had the opportunity to see a lot of lives up close has put my own childhood in perspective.

And yesterday, when my husband first told me that Michael Jackson was in a coma and moments later I saw on the news that he was dead, and this morning as I've been reading website after website covering his life and death and music, my mind raced back - longingly - to those days so far away in my past when my brother and I danced our crazy steps to his music, when we wondered who Billie Jean was, when we would race to lower the volume on the TV or on the music player when we heard our dad clearing his throat disapprovingly and tried to explain but failed hopelessly when our parents asked what this kind of music was all about.

As one of the commenters to this Coates essay put it, I, and a lot of others, are homesick.

Do you see the irony in this? On hearing of the death of a music icon who did not have the sort of upbringing that would have inspired feelings of homesickness in him - whose lack of a normal childhood gave millions of us the music that colored our growing years - my first thoughts were of my own childhood homes, of the various living rooms and bedrooms in which we played his music, of my parents and of my brother, of my cousins and uncles who indulged us by buying us music.

Thank you for the music and the memories, Michael. R.I.P.

Footloose Friday - VIII

When I dabbled as a disc jockey for a radio station in India, the quest to make the shows interesting was never-ending. For two hours each week I anchored shows that played an hour of English songs and an hour of Hindi songs. The third hour was devoted to listener requests, so the radio jockeys had no control over what songs would be played. I would try to mold the English and Hindi play lists around a theme - Rafi songs, or songs of the 60s, Oscar-nominated songs; or compile trivia about the songs that went on air; or make up quizzes about the songs that the audience would call in or message the answers to.

One evening as I was trying to arrive at a play list for the next day, I came across a CD in the radio station's library. Almost lost in the tightly-packed rows on the shelves was a compilation of the title songs from the James Bond movies. I had played some of those songs from the CDs of the artists that had sung them (Golden Eye from a Tina Turner CD, for example) and I had wondered why no one had ever thought of collecting all the James Bond movie songs in one place. Phew! That one CD made my prep work easy that day.

Golden Eye is hands down my favorite Bond song, followed closely by McCartney's Live and Let Die.






And then there is Carly Simon's Nobody Does It Better from The Spy Who Loved Me.



I've always enjoyed this song whenever I've listened to it and the other Carly Simon song I am familiar with, You're So Vain.

These days I just listen to her with a new ear, a new understanding and a new respect for her art.

In this heartbreaking but beautifully written personal essay in The Daily Beast titled How I Found My Voice, Simon traces the history of her struggle with stuttering. Who knew!

Here Simon describes the frist time the words got stuck in her throat:

As I tried to speak this line, a snake that had been hibernating near my oesophagus, grabbed at and strangled the beginning of each word. As the word “fair” struggled to live, the serpent constricted its passage and as if deprived of air, I balked two or three times at the ‘F’ before the word emerged ravaged and in need of oxygen.

This was the unhappy and astonishing birth of my stammer or at least my first gripping self-conscious awareness of it. My sisters and cousins, if they noticed this—and I can’t imagine they didn’t—must have been puzzled by the strange new guttural utterances. They likely imagined they were temporary and didn’t even consider to do or say anything about it. This would fade and disappear—like scratches, bruises, and babysitters.

[...]

For at least the grammar school and high-school years, there was merciless teasing, graduating by about eighth grade to a less beastly imitation and “behind the back of me” fun. In the early years, I was beaten into states of self-hatred and begging to go “home.” Home plate. Please let me go home. To my mother. I was assaulted, bruised, battered, and broken. I knew the answers in class and couldn’t raise my hand. I had to learn that the first devastating lesson was to learn to have the courage to face life.

My mother and I had the closest of times a child and mother can have. I would sit on her lap and we would practise the words. Any word. She would rock me and relax me. Sometimes a word would roll off my tongue, perfectly, passing the throat guards undetected and my mother would say: “See darling, you can do it!”

It's an amazing and humbling story of how she still struggles with speaking, but found along the way that she could sing. And so beautifully at that!

If you'd like to read the article, please do (click on the 'How I Found My Voice' link above), but come back and tell me which of the Bond songs you like best.

Related Post: My Day as a Radio Jockey.

This is the eighth post in the Footloose Friday series. The rest are here.

Footloose Friday - VII

My brother sent me this video of musicians from around the world singing Stand By Me. I've always loved the song and I've watched the video many times, but it never fails to produce goose bumps and a prickling behind my eyes. Music is truly the language of the heart. It needs no words.

"Stand by Me" performed by musicians around the world from SKAT on Vimeo.

Have a wonderful weekend with the people that stand by you!

This is the seventh in a series. For more Footloose Friday posts, please click here.

Prelude: Composer - Bach; Pianist - C

C just learned to play Bach's Prelude. It's a lovely song, but just looking at the three pages of notes gives me a massive headache. So I stay away from the piano and listen to it from a distance.

The reason for the photographs this time around in the video below, instead of C's fingers flying over the keys, is that this is a two-minute piece and he was not going to let me hover over him for that long. Plus he thinks that the small digital camera's primitive sound doesn't do justice to the song.

So C recorded the song and I tried to download it. The piano (Roland HP-207) records fine, I was able to download the song into a storage device and the song played fine on the computer, but it's not in a format that can be used in a video. I know way more than I want to about this stuff but the lowdown is this - the piano stores the music in MIDI format and it cannot be converted to a WAV or WMA format. So I sent the file to C's piano teacher who played it on his computer, hooked it up to an instrument, had that instrument play it and then saved the result in WAV format.

I used the file that he sent to make a movie using some pictures in my folder. Unfortunately neither the sound nor the pictures retained their original clarity. I wish they had come through better. I'm going to continue to try different ways to download C's performances in a usable format. In the meantime, here's C playing Bach's Prelude.



Updating to add links to related posts:

C playing Beach Buggy Boogie, Mazurka and The Entertainer.

Hey, Paul Krugman: A Song For Our Times

Heard this on NPR's Marketplace this evening.



Song #77 from artist Jonathan Mann who's posting a song a day on his website Rockcookiebottom.

Why I listen to La Complainte de la Butte

When I first obtained the Moulin Rouge CD I listened to this one song, La Complainte de la Butte, so much that I feared for the life of the CD.



While I caught and understood some phrases, the song as a whole remained foreign. But my heart raced ahead, deriving meanings my head could not. At times the song was a lullaby, sometimes a despairing dirge, at other times a lament for a love lost. I found myself drawn to the song when I as alone at home, moping round or when on a long ride with my son and he was close to falling asleep.

Sharanya's column, Songs in Another Language, instantly reminded me of my obsession with La Complainte and smoothed out the rough edges of my understanding.

Perhaps there is something to be said for innocent impressionism. When a song is heard as sound and not story, something special happens. Its semantic spaces broaden. Our understanding draws blanks, and our imaginations fill them in. The human voice becomes an instrument in its own right. The whisper of a throat racked with failure can turn seductive; the grieving crescendo of a mourning song may rouse instead.

The Silk Road Project

Image source: The Silk Road Project
The Silk Road.

Traders on camels, or on horseback maybe. Grimy and exhausted from weeks of riding on winding, mountainous, godforsaken roads. Dusty, crowded market streets. A crescendo of voices bargaining in quaint tongues. The aroma of exotic spices. The splashes of color. The rustle of silk. The play of strange textures and tastes on your tongue. Delight at a rare find, one that is sure to excite customers back home. Mounds and mounds of bags laden with goods strapped to beasts of burden. Then on to another country, another town, another market, in pursuit of the next great discovery.

The images are from so long ago that even in a memory the video plays out in grainy images, the screen crackling as it moves from one image to the next.

The pictures are only as detailed as a middle school history text book -splayed open on a wooden desk in a bright, airy classroom with 50 other girls - will allow, but embellished with abandon by a wild imagination. All I know, then, of the Silk Road is the faint memory of an imagined textbook narration.

Not any more. The Silk Road Project gives my understanding of the Silk Road a whole new dimension.

The brainchild of acclaimed cellist Yo Yo Ma, the Project's mission statement is as simple as it is profound:

Inspired by the cultural traditions of the historical Silk Road, the Silk Road Project is a catalyst, promoting innovation and learning through the arts.

Our vision is to connect the world’s neighborhoods by bringing together artists and audiences around the globe.

In pursuit of this vision, Ma has assembled 60 musicians, composers and story tellers from 20 countries into the Silk Road Ensemble. "Each Ensemble member's career illustrates a unique response to what is one of the artistic challenges of our times: nourishing global connections while maintaining the integrity of art rooted in authentic tradition," says a brochure of the Project. Since the late 90s when the Project was first conceived, the Ensemble has performed on numerous occasions in Asia, Europe and North America, most recently at the Presidential Inauguration in Washington, D.C.

The one idea - that an ancient trade route could serve as a metaphor for exploring connections in this modern-day globalized world; that, paradoxically, you preserve tradition by throwing yourself open to the winds of innovation - is working itself out in many different ways. Groups of musicians have come together at various times and at various locations for residences at museums and universities, workshops, interactive sessions with children, and for performances that showcase the interplay of the diverse traditions in one musical composition.

The Project's website is a treasure trove of colors, designs and ideas. It contains audio clippings, photographs and videos of the Ensemble's performances and workshops, interviews with the members, maps of the Silk Route, and beautiful images from those various countries. I could just look at those photographs for ever. Simultaneously it is also a tangible testament to how starkly different we are. Our dresses, our instruments, our music, our religions, our languages, our food, our landscape, our histories, our traditions.


Sandeep Das, Tabla player and Member, The Silk Road Ensemble
Source: The Silk Road Project

It is so easy to see why a project of this nature should not work. No more difficult than just turning on the news channels or reading the newspapers. Every day brings news of a new religious conflict, of disasters made worse by apathy, of terrorism, and of social and economic oppression along the Silk Route. But this is what makes an idea like the Silk Road Project all the more precious. That someone could turn a blind eye to the debilitating nature of these fundamental differences and see them instead as a cause for celebration and coming together is a cause for celebration in itself.

Ma inspires great respect. His demeanor, his enthusiasm for his music, his joy in taking music to children and his obvious skill are uplifting. It is no surprise that he was named a UN Ambassador for Peace. But will this idea ever percolate down to everyday life? Or is it, like many ideas of potentially far-reaching import, for ever condemned to float in that rarefied atmosphere unattainable to the majority?

Which is why it is heartening that Ma is targeting his message to children in the various countries. I cannot think of a more powerful message of humanity and peace than a walking, talking, rag-tag group of people standing in front of you and making music and enjoying it. And what better way to ensure that it resonates wider for longer than delivering it to the coming generation of thinkers and doers?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Links:

The Silk Road Project Website

Silk Road Radio

Silk Road Maps

Educational Resources

Recommended Books for Children

Silk Road Project Videos on YouTube

Indira Mahajan, Soprano

C and I recently saw Indira Mahajan's solo performance at the Kennedy Center as she sang, among others, a few pieces from contralto Marian Anderson's repertoire. Mahajan is the 2008 recipient of the Kennedy Center's Marian Anderson Grant. I had bought tickets for the show soon after they went on sale and we ended up with seats right on the front row.

Mahajan is strikingly beautiful and has a commanding presence on stage. The songs spanned a range of emotions - from delight to nostalgia to love to rage to sadness. It was mesmerizing to watch Mahajan's visage express these emotions in succession as it was to listen to her voice rise and fall and stretch to accommodate the feeling in the songs. C was blown away by how powerful and delicate a voice could be and he loved watching the pianist who accompanied Mahajan. There was one song in particular, a negro spiritual titled Take My Mother Home, the song of a slave who does not mind remaining in slavery as long as everyone in her family gets to go home, that was heartrending and beautifully, tenderly sung.

Take my mother home; take my mother on home
I ain't free; never mind about me
Take my mother home.
Take my father home; let my father see his home
I ain't free; don't worry about me
Take my father home.

[...]

Take my baby home; take my baby home
I ain't free and I never will be
Take my pretty baby on home.
Home. Home.
I can stay here all alone if you
take my mother home.

The elderly lady next to me tried to massage away the goosebumps on her arms.

The next day I talked with Mahajan about her music and her background. A version of the essay below appears in The Hindu's Sunday Magazine today:

Indira Mahajan hangs on to the piano with her sinewy arm as if for dear life; as if, if she were to let go, the power of her voice emanating from deep within would carry her slight frame right off the stage and into ether. Her expressive face is, by turn, despondent, delighted, and filled with rage and agony as she sings of love and loss and wooden horses.

Mahajan, a soprano – and recipient of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts' 2008 Marian Anderson grant – is performing a few songs from the repertoire of humanitarian and American contralto, Marian Anderson, at the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater.

By all accounts a rising star in the rarefied galaxy of accomplished opera singers, the award is just the latest in a long list of accolades coming Mahajan's way, starting with the Dallas Opera's Maria Callas Award for outstanding debut artist (for her role of Musetta in La Bohème) and the New York City Opera Debut Artist Award. With performances at Carnegie Hall and the Lincoln Center (with the New York Philharmonic under Bobby McFerrin) already behind her, Mahajan has drawn consistently high praise for her solo and operatic performances and has carved a popular niche for herself in the role of Bess in Gershwin's Porgy and Bess.

Mahajan's journey into the world of the arts began with violin lessons at the age of five. "I cannot remember not wanting to perform and not wanting to be an artist," Mahajan says, as she remembers the early days of piano and ballet lessons, and voice training under her mother's tutelage. But affinity for music and achieving success as an opera singer are two completely different beasts. A singer must keep up with her changing voice, which does not really come into its own until her 30s; be studious and be able to learn lengthy parts in foreign languages; overcome the self-doubt that comes with trying to live up to expectations born out of early triumphs; audition for work but learn to face the inevitable rejections.

At this juncture in her career, the Marian Anderson grant – awarded every other year to "American singers of great promise who have already achieved some success in opera…" – is a ringing endorsement of her tenacity and talent.

Indira Mahajan and her role model, Marian Anderson, are also connected, if you will, by a not-so-visible thread.

In 1957, as the U.S. State Department's goodwill ambassador to India and the Far East, Anderson, a foot soldier in the war against racism in America, made it a point to visit Mahatma Gandhi's memorial in New Delhi to pay her respects.

Fifty years later, Mahajan is on an India quest of her own, albeit on a very personal level - she is on a mission to find a piece of her heritage.

Born to Bhushan Kumar Mahajan of Dalhousie, an engineer, and Barbara Mahajan of North Carolina, a Juilliard-trained opera singer and performer, Indira grew up in New York under the diverse cultural influences of her mixed parentage. Her father died when she was very young, and Mahajan credits her mother – and her close relationship with her father's extended family in the U.S. – for ensuring that the Indian part of her identity equation was nurtured.

Western Classical music and jazz on the family's music system shared space with Ravi Shankar; trips to the opera alternated with countless viewings of Bollywood movies ("Indian movies were like musicals … and that's what drew me," she recounts with obvious delight). Her mother, an excellent cook, Mahajan says, taught her the intricacies of Indian cuisine.

Mahajan unequivocally attributes her success to her family's support – not only encouraging her passion for a career in the arts when the norm for children in Indian families was to choose engineering or medicine or marriage at a certain age, but also bolstering her confidence through the long, difficult years of study rendered harder by the uncertainty of finding work at the end of the training.

In spite of this happy interplay of cultures growing up, there is still one thing Mahajan has been unable to do – visit her father's birthplace and meet her extended family in India. As a child she was afraid of flying and lost the few, short-lived opportunities to go home with her father, but "the older you get the more important it is to have that kind of connection … now that I am an adult, I'm just craving it," she says, excitedly describing her impending plans to finally visit India with her aunts. A decidedly grown-up sentiment framed in childlike wistfulness.

On the stage, Mahajan concludes her performance with a spiritual, He's Got the Whole World in His Hand. Her back is ramrod straight; her entire body seems intent on pumping enough oxygen into her lungs and abdomen so they can energize her formidable vocal chords. Her daily yoga practice is clearly paying off.

Artist's photo by Steve J. Sherman