C2 Roxanne Roberts and Amy Argetsinger


EZ SU


KLMNO THE RELIABLE SOURCE


said, “looked magical”; mother and daughter stood in the receiving line for an individual picture with President Obama and the first lady (“We wished them a ‘Merry Christmas’ ”) and took photos of everything else, then e-mailed the “virtual experience” to Bachmann’s younger daughter Sophie back in Minnesota. But—per WhiteHouse request


—no Facebook updates, tweets or blogs from the off-the-record event. And no shop talk: “This was an evening for celebration,” Bachmann said. “It was a great joy, very collegial.” And so it goes for the next


COURTESY OF REP. MICHELE BACHMANN


Rep.Michele Bachmann and her daughter Elisa pose in front of the Christmas tree at the reception for Congress onMonday. Bachmann said the WhiteHouse “looked magical.”


At the White House, a pause to make merry


’T day. Monday’s WhiteHouse reception


for Congress came after a grueling battle over tax cuts. All members of Congress were invited for the bipartisan festivities and most of them showed—includingHouse Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Reps. Charlie Rangel and Michele Bachmann. “We were thrilled to be there,”


Bachmann told us Tuesday. The Republican firebrand was accompanied by her 20-year-old daughter, Elisa, who flewin from college to attend; they wore their election night dresses for the occasion. The WhiteHouse, Bachmann


is the season for political infighting and holiday parties, both on the same


couple of weeks. The celebrations kicked off Dec. 1 with a party to celebrate volunteers and, on the following night,Hanukkah. The WhiteHouse will host a total of 20 holiday parties and receptions for WhiteHouse staff, Secret Service and reporters who cover the administration, as well as seven events for non-Washington insiders, such as military families, reports our colleague Perry Bacon. Some guests (but not at every


party) will get the chance for the coveted brag-wall-photo with the Obamas. “Be patient in the line,” the president joked with guests at the Hanukkah gathering. “And I just want to let everybody know that yes, they will be able to Photoshop my lip for the picture.” Others will only get a chance to


mingle with the couple. Which brings us to the tweet/blog ban. Everyone was snapping pictures


of the president and first lady. And the president’s remarks at the Hanukkah party were covered by reporters, photographers . . . and everyone in the room with a cellphone or BlackBerry. Off the record?Not for the guests, their friends, or anyone who can finagle a peek.


But that holiday glow only lasts a JASON REED/REUTERS


President Obama, with the first lady and Vice President Biden, are photo-ready during aHanukkah gathering.


fewhours. Just after the party, it was back to work for Bachmann: “Obama didn’t want to stop tax hikes on all, but #GOP stood firm. Resulting compromise is 2-year timetable,” she tweeted at 9 p.m. Monday night.


Grammer and Walsh at the Kennedy Center.


LOVE,ETC. l Engaged: Kelsey Grammer, 55, and Kayte Walsh, 29, his rep confirmed to reporters after she showed up inD.C. this week with a diamond on her finger. The “Frasier” star (now on Broadway in “La Cage aux Folles”) and the British flight attendant announced this fall that she had suffered a miscarriage. It will be a fourth marriage for Grammer, still in the process of divorcing Camille Donatacci; their breakup is now unfolding on her Bravo reality series “The Real Housewives of BeverlyHills.” Asked on the Kennedy CenterHonors red carpet by 94.7 Fresh FM’s Tommy McFly if he’s watching the show, Grammer gave a clenched smile and hurried away.


G O T A T I P ? E - M A I L U S A T R E L I A B L E S O U R C E@WA S H P O S T . C O M . F O R T H E L A T E S T S C O O P S , V I S I T WA S H I N G T O N P O S T . C O M / R E L I A B L E S O U R C E NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/GETTY IMAGES


Roger Clemens


HEY,ISN’TTHAT. . . ? l Roger Clemens bearhugging his lawyer at the WillardHotel on Tuesday. The baseball great (white baseball hat with brim pulled down, khaki pants, brown leather jacket, sneakers) embraced his lawyer Rusty Hardin in the lobby, then headed to the elevator. In town for an appearance in federal court. l Paul McCartney passing through a dance performance at the Corcoran on Sunday afternoon. Just hours before the Kennedy CenterHonors, he


and his entourage dropped by the Spencer Finch exhibition, where the Dana Tai Soon Burgess company was performing a site-specific piece in the rotunda.McCartney was very polite, but his handler sawa staffer snapping pictures on her phone—then took it and erased the pictures.


Ovechkin, cleaning up his act Does this make sense? The exquisitely scruffy Alexander Ovechkin


has just signed an endorsement deal with Gillette. The men’s grooming-products company announced yesterday it had tapped the Caps superstar to join the likes of Derek Jeter andMexican soccer star Rafael Marquez as the brand’s “global ambassadors.” Our colleague Dan Steinberg reports that Ovie has agreed to remain “well-groomed” as part of the deal; totally doable, insisted a company rep.


“If you see Alex in some of his recent commercials,


he’s had kind of a cleanshaven look,” spokesman Mike Norton told Steinberg. “With Gillette, we really want guys to look their best.Andsome guys like to be fully cleanshaven, some guys like goatees or well- trimmed beards.” What about the time-honored NHL practice of


Alex Ovechkin


growing a beard for the playoffs? “Gillette and Alex both understand and respect the traditions of the game,” an Ovechkin rep told our colleague. “Alex isn’t superstitious by nature, and he hasn’t even thought about it.”


WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 8, 2010


An acclaimed director leaps into themusical world with ‘Candide’ BY CELIAWREN CautionandMaryZimmerman


do not go hand in hand. The acclaimed Chicago-based direc- tor and adaptor is known for daring undertakings: dramatiza- tions of epics and mythology; a lyrical, gymnastic play based on Leonardo da Vinci’s musings; a site-specific riff on Proust. As if such material weren’t risky enough, she writes her scripts at the last minute, during the re- hearsal process. A 1998 winner of a MacArthur Fellowship, she nabbed a 2002 Tony Award for “Metamorphoses,” which con- jured Ovid’s tales around an on- stage pool. Recently she has re- imagined scores for New York’s Metropolitan Opera. But until this year, Zimmer-


man — whose magic-storybook “Pericles” and shipboard-set “Ar- gonautika” landed at the Shake- speare Theatre Company in 2004 and 2008, respectively—had not attempted musicals. “I kind of resisted musicals


forever, because everyone loves musicals, you know what I mean?” she says, with a laugh, as she sits in a quiet lounge off the Shakespeare Theatre’s Sidney Harman Hall. “And I love the underdog, and the obscure text!” As if to underscore at least the caninemetaphor, her pet Beary— a husky-esque mutt rescued from a shelter, now her rehearsal com- panion—nestles at her feet. But showtunes have finally


caught up with Zimmerman:Her production of Leonard Bern- stein’s “Candide” has waltzed into Harman Hall, where it runs through Jan. 9. A co-production withChicago’sGoodmanTheatre,


BILL O'LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST


REIMAGINED: LaurenMolina is Cunegonde in Leonard Bernstein’s operetta “Candide” at the Shakespeare Theatre.


which presented it earlier this fall, the musical features a book newly adapted—by Zimmerman —fromVoltaire’s 1759 philosophi- cal novella. It’s one of two Zimmerman


shows to hit the District this season. Starting Jan. 14, Arena Stage ushers in her Persian- carpet-bedecked “The Arabian Nights”—an older piece that the director is, for the first time, retooling for an in-the-round pre- sentation. In the recent interview, wear-


ing a gray dress and turquoise scarf, her hair in a ponytail, Zim- merman admitted to being “thrilled” but “scared” by the prospect of spatially reconfigur- ing “Arabian Nights.” By contrast, she spoke calmly of “Candide,”


DOONESBURY by Garry Trudeau


often viewed as a thorny theatri- cal problem. Adored for its score, the 1956


operettahasasketchyproduction track record. Conceived by Bern- stein and writer Lillian Hellman as a response to the era’s anti- communism, the musical bor- rows from Voltaire’s narrative, which flings a naive hero, Can- dide, across continents and into ghastly tragedies — wars, an earthquake, mass rape, an auto- da-fe — while he clings to his belief that he lives in “the best of all possible worlds.” The tale’s picaresque structure


and one-note satirical tone dis- gruntled audiences from the start: After premiering on Broad- way, the musical lasted a mere 73 performances. Subsequent reviv-


als added and discarded script sections and music, recalibrated the humor, recruited Stephen Sondheim for additional lyrics (Richard Wilbur had penned most of the previous ones), and added Voltaire as a character — among other desperate measures —leaving the propertysomething of a “jigsaw puzzle,” as Zimmer- man puts it. It’s arguably a puzzle she is equipped to tackle, given her af- finity for straggling, travelogue- peppered narratives from distant eras and her flair for integrating words, music, movement and lu- minous imagery into feats of self- aware storytelling. The hodge- podge elements of “Candide”may not spook a director who, accord- ing to her frequent set designer, Daniel Ostling, conceives of the- ater as “a tapestry,” with script, acting and sensory elements “wo- ven together so that they really can’t be separated.” Raised largely in Lincoln,Neb., Zimmerman caught the theater bug early.Her “primal scene,” she says, occurred during one of her professor parents’ European sab- baticals. Playing in a wood near London, the young Mary came across a troupe rehearsing “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” “The playfulness and collegial-


ity and fun of it was just so gripping to me,” she recalls. She majored in theater at


Northwestern University, and be- gan directing as a performance studies grad student at the same institution, where she now teach- es. She became (like Ostling) an ensemble member of Looking- glass, an adventurous Chicago company that mounted, among other productions, her “Eleven Rooms of Proust” and “The Odys-


sey.” Zimmerman built up name recognition after “Metamorpho- ses” opened atNewYork’s Second Stage Theatre in October 2001. For audiences shaken by the re- cent terrorist attacks, the play’s incantatory portraits of mutating souls, and lovers united and sepa- rated, resonated deeply. “There was so much in it that


allowed me to grieve for the first time,” recalls Arena Stage Artistic Director Molly Smith, who saw that off-Broadway production. Zimmerman’s haunting imagery, she says, “can take the audience places that language doesn’t touch.” Actor Erik Lochtefeld, a long-


time Zimmerman collaborator who performed in “Metamorpho- ses” (and appears in “Candide”), agrees. Zimmerman aims “to speak to the subconscious,” he says, adding that viewers are of- ten “struck emotionally by mo- ments they don’t quite even un- derstand.” “Metamorphoses” vaulted to Broadway. Back in the Windy City, Zimmerman became a resi- dent director atGoodman, whose executive director, Roche Schul- fer, and artistic director, Robert Falls, urged her to try musicals. “I had always thought that Mary’s imagination, and her under- standing and love of music, and her wit and visual imagination, were a perfect match” for the genre, Falls says. He was also anxious to keep his colleague around the Goodman more: Zimmerman had begun ac- cepting gigs (“Lucia di Lammer- moor,” “La Sonnambula,” “Armi- da”) at theMetropolitan Opera. “The gifts thatmake her a great theater director make her a great


CUL DE SAC by Richard Thompson


opera director,” observes the Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb, who says he pursued Zim- merman extensively for the Met, and boasts that a work like her controversial


“Sonnambula”


achieved some “real theatrical coups.” Zimmerman, who calls her


time at the Met “ecstatic — and extremely challenging,” is still fond of her “Sonnambula,” which she set backstage at a company staging “Sonnambula.” Some au- dience members booed. “I knewthemomentthat inspi-


ration came to me, there were going to be people who didn’t like it,” she says, before adding, “I don’t take it glibly! I want to be pleasing.” Working with music worship-


ers at the Met gave her a head start on “Candide” (where she has teamed with Music Director Doug Peck). She knew from the get-go that she wanted to create a book more or less from scratch, mining Voltaire, preserving the “melancholy edge” she sees in his novella, and not attempting to impose a conventional showbiz structure.As withworkslike “The Arabian Nights,” she says, “my impulse always is to really trust the quirkiness and unsettledness and oddness of the original text.” And while one Chicago critic


speculated that her production might be destined to become “the best of all possible ‘Candides,’ ” Zimmerman disclaims any such sweeping ambition. “It wasn’tmy goal to say, ‘I will


solve “Candide,’ ” she says mod- estly. “It’s just, like: This is my taste.”


style@washpost.com Wren is a freelance writer.


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