Follies

Second in a week-long series profiling the Kennedy Center's Sondheim stars The tears show up uninvited, slipping along her eyelids, pooling up over hazel irises, until they are swiftly beaten back by Elaine Paige's flustered, mascaraed lashes. "Oh," Paige shudders, her silvery voice breaking as she blinks away the past. "A bit sad — the reflection, the memory of it all. " She pictures, in front of her, the expectant emptiness of London's Shaftes­bury Theatre before audiences arrived for the 1968 production of the...

I was considering giving up my gun a while back. Hadn't been to the shooting range in months. Target shooting, not self- defense, was why I bought the thing. But it was serving no purpose locked in a case, unloaded and hidden away. Then President Obama began coming up with the oddest ideas about keeping guns from "falling into the wrong hands. " Dangerous hands, irresponsible hands, he says. But the national gun control legislation set for debate in Congress would rely on a bureaucratic dragnet of " background checks " so extensive...

For the nostalgic ex-showgirls of the Kennedy Center's " Follies ," there are more Broadway memories to be made. The center revealed Wednesday that its $7.3 million production will move this summer to a Broadway theater in the heart of Times Square. The dates have not been firmed up, but Michael M. Kaiser, the Kennedy Center's president, said that the Marquis Theatre, on Broadway between West 45th and West 46th streets, has been secured for the limited engagement, beginning midsummer and, depending on the strength of...

NBC News appears to have won election night, ratings-wise. But ABC News was tops on Twitter. More than 12.1 million viewers watched NBC in prime time, though broadcast numbers would be adjusted Thursday, Nielsen said late Wednesday. That puts NBC ahead of Fox News Channel, which averaged 11.5 million — its biggest prime-time audience ever. ABC finished third, snaring 10.5 million. That makes the 9.3 million logged by CNN look pretty good — beating the 7.9 million for CBS, as well as the just less than 5 million...

Although the Kennedy Center's highly regarded revival of "Follies" closes on Broadway on Jan. 22 after a 4 ½-month run, the production isn't going into retirement just yet. Los Angeles's Center Theatre Group, the nonprofit organization that runs the Ahmanson Theatre, announced Tuesday that the Broadway production will be re-mounted there from May 3 to June 9. The revival of the revival is unusual, in that the normal life cycle of a Broadway show...

Third in a week-long series profiling the Kennedy Center's Sondheim stars Every day now, Jan Maxwell and her newfound circle of buddies wake up, put on their work togs and dance. And dance. Drilled by their "Follies" choreographer, Warren Carlyle, they power through the steps of one of the most exuberant numbers in Stephen Sondheim's memory-lane-driven score: "Who's That Woman?," a period song for a bevy of older actresses. "We're tapping two hours every morning and laughing our butts off," Maxwell says,...

This is the last in a week-long series profiling the Kennedy Center's Sondheim stars Perched ramrod straight on a chair in the Kennedy Center's Chinese Lounge, the eminent mezzo-soprano Rosalind Elias tosses off memories of opera greats. She recalls being wall-oped on the back by Gian Carlo Menotti , when the composer and librettist was making an emphatic point in a rehearsal. She alludes to sharing a stage with Placido Domingo, and she recounts how she accepted, from composer...

In another sign of Washington's growing influence as a theater town, the Kennedy Center's highly regarded revival of "Follies" garnered an impressive eight Tony Award nominations Tuesday, making it potentially one of the most highly decorated shows of the 2011-12 Broadway season. Only four other shows earned more nods, including the day's biggest ­winner, the new musical "Once," with 11. And " Follies " was by no means the only Washington-built or -tested work whose artistry was...

Broadway baby? You bet. Linda Lavin's first Tony Award nomination came in 1970 for Neil Simon's "Last of the Red Hot Lovers," and she was in the running again last year — for the fifth time — as the star of Donald Margulies's acclaimed drama "Collected Stories. " The best actress trophy was hers in 1987 for Simon's "Broadway Bound. " So it's fitting for Lavin to be singing the showbiz anthem "Broadway Baby" in the Kennedy Center's highly anticipated revival of Stephen Sondheim's "Follies"...

First in a week-long series profiling the Kennedy Center's Sondheim stars As far as Bernadette Peters was concerned, all Stephen Sondheim had to do was ask. She'd had prestige-laden success on Broadway a couple of years earlier in his Pulitzer-winning "Sunday in the Park with George," in which she starred as Dot, the muse and lover of pointillist painter Georges Seurat. And now, Sondheim was two weeks away from rehearsals for his next musical, the fractured fairy tale "Into...

Regarding the Sept. 30 Metro article " Powering down ": Certainly most of Alexandria is pleased to have GenOn's Potomac River Generating Station closed. The opposition to it was significant. I have noticed over the years equally strong opposition to plans for additional power lines in the D.C. area. The lines reportedly are needed to accommodate ever-increasing demands for power. I offer this observation in combination with this statement in the article: "The plant, which provided energy mostly during times of peak...

Underneath the headlines of the presidential campaign, there are growing signs that we are moving toward another war in the Middle East. This week Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly scolded the United States for refusing to draw a " red line " on Iran's nuclear program that, if crossed, would commit Washington to military strikes. He added that he would not accept a "red light" placed in front of Israel. Unless something dramatic changes its course, Israel is on a path to strike Iran's nuclear facilities in the next six to nine...

Just in case you're not suff iciently horrified by Jay Leno 's " Jaywalking " segment, which reveals shocking levels of stupidity among random people on the street, you might want to check out the Transportation Security Administration's blog chronicling the truly dumb things people pull at airport security. With summer-vacation travel season in full swing, the blog's worth a look, if only to understand why those lines might be so long. It could be because that guy ahead of you plunked down a grenade (but, he insists, it's just...

We pay our presidents for judgment, and President Obama committed a colossal error of judgment in making health-care "reform" a centerpiece of his first term. Ahead of the Supreme Court's decision on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) — and regardless of how the court decides — it's clear that Obama overreached. His attempt to achieve universal health insurance coverage is a massive feat of social engineering that, by its sweeping nature, weakens the economic recovery and antagonizes millions of Americans.

NEW YORK — "Anne, they're ready for you," someone called out to Anne S. Kohn, the Shakespeare Theatre Company's associate director of administration. In her evening gown, she glanced across the bar, which overlooked all of Times Square, at a photographer who was snapping photos of guests posing with the evening's most dazzling attendee. Tony. Or rather, THE Tony, the one Shakespeare's founding artistic director, Michael Kahn , had collected earlier Sunday night at the 66th annual Tony Awards . His company...

Philip Falcone's street fighter instincts and penchant for ultra-risky investments helped catapult him into the gilded club of Wall Street's elite. But his winning streak ended in Washington, where the founder of Harbinger Capital Partners and former professional hockey player has been bodychecked by regulators . LightSquared, Harbinger's $3 billion investment, fell into bankruptcy last week after a dramatic inside-the-Beltway battle to create a wireless network that would compete with titans AT&T and Verizon Wireless.

Less than two years ago, the Kennedy Center moved its revival of the sprawling 1998 musical "Ragtime" to Broadway. It was a group tug: Crowded above the title were the names of almost 20 individuals and producing groups that had a hand in making the move happen. Now the Kennedy Center has moved its production of Stephen Sondheim's sprawling musical "Follies" to New York. This time the push north seems largely attributable to Kennedy Center President Michael M. Kaiser. And above the title, the...

I'm just back from the Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting in Omaha, where billionaire Warren Buffett and 25,000 of his closest personal friends gather each year to talk money. The 81-year-old Oracle of Omaha and his 88-year-old sidekick, Charlie Munger, are still going strong and still preaching the gospel of value investing. "We've been students of other people's folly, and it's served us well," Buffett observed, seemingly for the billionth time. (Multiple conflicts — Buffett is a former director of The Washington Post Co., and...

In another sign of Washington's growing influence as a theater town, the Kennedy Center's highly regarded revival of "Follies" garnered an impressive eight Tony Award nominations Tuesday, making it potentially one of the most highly decorated shows of the 2011-12 Broadway season. Only four other shows earned more nods, including the day's biggest ­winner, the new musical "Once," with 11. And " Follies " was by no means the only Washington-built or -tested work whose artistry was...