Gary Tischler • May 11, 2015

This year’s Washington Performing Arts Gala & Auction—Saturday, May 2, at the Marriott Marquis—will have an international theme as Washington Performing Arts focuses on the 40th anniversary  of its Embassy Adoption Program and its planned expansion.
           
The Embassy Adoption Program is a partnership between Washington Performing Arts and the District of Columbia Public Schools, which pairs 50 embassies with 50 fifth and sixth grade classes for a year’s worth of cross-cultural learning, projects, and enrichment activities.

“There is no city, no place in the country which has a program like this,” said Jenny Bilfield, Washington Performing Arts President and CEO. “We are fortunate to have this and be able to do this.”
           
This year, DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson will receive Washington Performing Art’s first Leadership in Arts Education Award at the gala. Henderson is receiving the award as the representative of DCPS, which is partnering on the Embassy Adoption Program, along with taking part in  and collaborating with Washington Performing Arts on a host of programs, including Concerts in  Schools, Capital Dance, Capital Jazz, Capital Strings and Capital Voices.  
           
According to Washington Performing Arts, the award has no fixed timing: it will be given based on arts-education merit alone, and not time-elapsed criteria.
           
“The Embassy Adoption Program has benefited thousands of students over the years,” Bilfield said. “Our students in this city live in a world that’s not always recognized by others—they are surrounded by a hotbed of international culture.  To be able to connect in such a programmatic way with the international community here is one of our proudest achievements.”
           
The focus of gala comes on a day which also kicks off the annual Passport D.C. festivities, a month-long  explosion of international culture in which the city’s embassies open their doors to the public for a variety of activities, exhibitions, and events.
           
This year’s gala is chaired by Reginald Van Lee. The Embassy Adoption Program is chaired by Jake Jones, Daimler.  EAP committee co-chairs are David Marventano, Fluor; Rachel Pearson, Pearson & Associates; Ambassador Arturo Sarukhan, former Mexican Ambassador to the United States and Veronica Valencia-Sarukhan. 
           
The gala kicks off at 6 p.m. with a Kentucky Derby Watch Party.  Cocktails and Silent auction begin at 6:30 p.m. with dinner and program at 8 p.m.
           
Performers will include the Washington Performing Arts Children of the Gospel Choir and the New York-based hot jazz ensemble, The Hot Sardines, who are—did we say?—hot.
           
The Embassy Adoption Program is described as an arts-integrated  academic program in which fifth and sixth grade teachers apply to participate.  Each class is paired with a single embassy, and together they embark on a school year-long journey, exploring the adopted country’s history, culture, government, arts, food and geography. 
           
Some 50,000 students have been able to participate in the program over the years, from all eight wards of the city, partnering with some 100 embassies.
           
The program culminates in a presentation about the countries which the classes have partnered with and a mini-United Nations event in May.
           
The gala comes at a time when Bilfield is completing her second year at the helm of Washington Performing Arts and her first season which bears her programming mark, including new programs, such as “The Art of the Orchestra,” “Mapping Our Silk Road: Creative Intersections” and “Wynton Marsalis x 3: a 30-year Friendship Deepens.”
           
The gala also comes days after Washington Performing Arts’ 2015-2016 season announcement, the first of two seasons in anticipation of 2016’s 50th anniversary  celebrating.
   

Gary Tischler •

Every year, eventually, spring comes to Washington.

The long-awaited season is an outward-bound explosion, an effusion of nature, basking in our admiration and seemingly pleased with itself for making it all look so easy.

Spring is bulbs, petals, digging shears and gardening shovels, blossoming trees, snaking vines, perennials and tulips and the fluttering, scooting, climbing critters that gad about in this profusion of natural wealth.

Here in Georgetown, spring is again the season of the Georgetown Garden Tour – the 87th annual – presented by the Georgetown Garden Club, an affiliate of the Garden Club of America, on Saturday, May 9, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. A tea with light refreshments will be served by garden club members from 2 to 4 p.m. at Christ Church, 3116 O St. NW.

Every garden tour is an opportunity to engage with one of the aspects of Georgetown that make it special, and so attractive to visitors. The tour offers ticket holders the chance to see – and take in with deep breaths – eight gardens, four each on Georgetown’s west and east sides.

“I believe that the garden tour and the garden club have had a tremendous effect on Georgetown. It’s very important to the community,” said Barbara Downs, a member and former president of the Georgetown Garden Club. “The proceeds alone have gone a long way to help preserve the natural quality of Georgetown, not just gardens, but foliage, trees, parks, places where we gather.”

Over the years, the Georgetown Garden Club, with proceeds of the tour and other fundraising efforts, has contributed to what it describes as “the greening of Georgetown, the tree-lined streets and the public parks.” Beneficiaries include Book Hill Park, the Georgetown Public Library, Montrose Park, Volta Park, Rose Park, Tudor Place Historic House and Garden, Trees for Georgetown, Dumbarton Oaks Park Conservancy and the Student Conservation Association.

This is about natural beauty, aided and abetted by particular people’s penchants for digging, growing, designing and beautifying, sometimes with the help of professional designers. Right here on earth, gardens mingle soil, trees, flowers, vegetation, pathways and works of sculptural art into an infinite variety of singular places.

This is not for just for show, but for civilized comfort, a way of living and looking. Here is where you can sit in an artful patio, to read, to commune, to dine, to enjoy a glass of wine in a space of one’s own.

Downs’s own garden has “a Japanese, Asian feel,” she said, and includes a bubbly fountain for birds, dogwoods and spring flowers, including irises and tulips.

To some extent, the annual garden tour always carries with it elements of mystery and serendipity. The yearly trek to homes and gardens in Georgetown reveals more than one secret of Georgetown living, not only the gardens themselves but the actual size and depth of the residences. This is revealed in the house tour, too, but the experience of patios and gardens adds to it.

From the view of a passerby, Georgetown’s homes always hide themselves a little. It’s hard to apprehend the actual size, the spaces, the depth and length of a house, not to mention its close proximity to others. (This does not include most mansions, which are very bold and rarely hidden.)

Tour sites range across Georgetown: 1248 30th St., 2824 O St., 1642 29th St., 3025 P St., 3413 P St., 3417 P St., 3314 O St. and 3327 N St.

On the east side, you’ll find a garden with pavement patterns in brick and limestone and columns of small bamboo. In another garden (a wrap-around) are fig trees, crepe myrtles, oakleaf hydrangeas, Italian pots. Yet another has a contemporary design, with grass steps, crepe myrtles in tubs and modern sculpture. In a large, historic garden in the center of the village, by a sweeping lawn with a pool, stand a large wall clock from a church tower in Provence and a marker showing Georgetown’s old boundary line.

On the west side, you’ll find a curvilinear, multilevel garden, with niches, an armillary sphere and a fishpond with aquatic plants. Nearby is a brick-paved garden with a French touch, including an aerial hedge, water features, hornbeams and espaliered camellias, all framed by a lattice fence. Elsewhere, a former carriage house offers an arched entrance with a wooden gate (once for horses), a tap pool and a hot tub. Another home features walks, gravel and a terrace. The owner’s love of plants is evident in three beds showcasing perennials, ferns and knockout yellow roses, as well as in the mature trees.

This year, the Georgetown Garden Club has published a book that not only serves as a companion to the tour but stands on its own. “Gardens of Georgetown: Exploring Urban Treasures” was written with great, understated grace by Georgetown author Edith Nalle Schafer.

Schafer, a genuine Georgetown citizen and treasure herself, has been a chronicler of Georgetown life for many years, through books, stories and essays. She has a gift for getting to the heart of what makes the village special. Her egalitarian style celebrates the village’s permanent things: buildings, churches and art, sidewalks and steeples, temperature and weather and the way all those things endure amid changes great and small.

Last week, the Georgetown Garden Club held a reception and book signing at the home of Jerry and June Libin on P Street. The evening, the place and the people there were a kind of reflection in miniature of what house and garden tours are about. After a slight drizzle during the evening, Libin, a noted tax attorney, stood in his own garden of trees, foliage, space and a covered pool and said, “I always love it out here after the rain. Everything feels fresh and new.”

“Gardens of Georgetown,” with spectacular, detailed photographs by Jenny Gorman, is a broadly painted but sharply detailed view of Georgetown as reflected in its gardens. In the book, Schafer defines our need for gardens, their purposefulness.

There is philosophy in this book. Sights are described directly with an economy of words that never lack impact. This goes for narrative text and for the photo captions that Schafer has helped along with quotes from philosophers and literary types (from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Virginia Woolf and the always astute “Unknown”).

Yet amid the pages, Schafer is her own best philosopher. She doesn’t need much help to describe what the photographs reveal. Her writing manages the difficult feat of being both pragmatic and entirely, hauntingly lovely.

Gardens are like that, too – having the all-at-once qualities of the necessary and the truly priceless. In digging up dirt, planting and contemplating the results, we manage to make art and gain a satisfaction properly enjoyed under trees, by a fountain, at night with the air fresh from rain and memory.
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Gary Tischler • May 7, 2015

You never forget the songs of your youth—that time in life somewhere between sixth grade and the junior prom and the end of football season—when everything in the air fills you with longing, sadness and a kind of simmering something.

For the baby boomers that time ranged from the 1950s through the harrowing and sublime sixties—which went from Elvis through the Beatles and every song was a kind of earthquake of revelation.  The music was the background and foreground in a time in which young people went from being emotionally and sexually ignorant to learning way too much way too quickly and soon.  And the music punctuated that dizzy journey. 

You forget most of the songs—what did “The Purple People Eater” ever do for anybody anyway? If I never hear “Candy Man” again it will be too soon.

But Ben E. King and the Drifters. They had some songs you never forgot, not then, not now, not ever.   This is where white kids from the Midwest met the safer aspects of black pop rock music which would eventually lead some of us to the blues and beyond.  This was the time of Fats Domino, Sam Cooke, the Platters, even Jimmy Reed and Little Richard and Chuck Berry.   Wild stuff and soaring sweet stuff.

King and his Drifters, and later by his lonesome—had a voice that was clear and soaring,  he sang inspirational song and  breaking up songs—“There Goes My Baby—moving on down the line.” That word “on” connoted that she was moving miles down the road, and she wasn’t coming back—“I wonder why she left me,” he sang, punctuated by violins before Freddy Mercury and Queen put the strings into anthem rock.

King’s songs and the songs of the Drifters—all were the same white jackets, snapping their fingers like streetcorner singers were the songs of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and they were great songs—part of rock’s great American songbook, like “Spanish Harlem,” “Up on the Roof,” “This Magic Moment,” “I Count the Tears” and “Save the Last Dance For Me.”

Then, there was “Stand By Me,” surely one of the greatest inspirational anthems ever sung or written—it ran through the same-titled Rob Reiner-directed movie in in 1986.   It’s one of those pop songs—“Sweet Caroline” comes to mind”—that you might want to karaoke even with only two beers under your belt, because you loved it so.: “When the night has come/and the land is dark/and the moon is the only light we’ll see/No, I won’t be afraid/Oh, I won’t be afraid/just as long as you stand, stand by me.”

King was working at his father’s luncheonette, where he would often sing to himself.  A fellow by the name of Lover Patterson heard him and got him to sing in a group called “The Crowns.” They played at the Apollo. So did a group called the Drifters, led by Clyde McPhatter who joined the army. Patterson reformed the Drifters with King as a lead singer, and Stoller and Leiber writing songs. The rest is history.

With all the hits, King kept on singing, and sometimes touring—the past is hard to shake, but he also lived a life.  He was married, had two daughters, a son, four sisters, three brothers and six grandchildren.

King died at the age of 76 in Hackensack, New Jersey, at a hospital not far from Teaneck, where he lived.

Gary Tischler • April 30, 2015

Score one for team Bowser. You’ll have to wait on number two.

That’s what happened in the District of Columbia yesterday’s special elections held to fill vacant city council seats in Ward 4  and Ward 8, where candidates endorsed and backed by Mayor Muriel Bowser were running for both seats.

In Ward 4, it was good news for Brandon Todd, and good news for her supporter, Mayor Bowser.  Todd, who was a campaign fund raiser for Bowser and worked as her constituent-services  director won easily in a big field,  taking 42 percent of the vote with 4,310 votes to runner up Renee L. Bowser (no relation to the mayor), who had 21 percent of the vote at 1,192, followed by Leon T. Andrews  at 15 percent and Dwayne M. Toliver at 12 percent .

In Ward 8, the race was still too close to call. Approximately 1,000 special ballots are yet to be counted, which could take a week.

Another Bowser-backed candidate, LaRuby May, who worked as a field director for her mayoral campaign was leading Trayong White, a protégé of the late former Mayor Marion Barry and political legend and Ward Eight councilman,  1,711 votes to 1,559 votes, or 26.94 percent for May and 24.55 percent for White.  This was a race to fill the seat left open in the wake of the passing of Barry. Significantly, Barry’s son Marion C. Barry, trailed badly in the voting with 7.24 percent of the vote.

While the result in Ward 4 was a personal victory for Todd, who joins a council now dominated by an infusion of new faces over the past few years, the mayor was a big winner, too, giving her more influence over the council itself. Should May end up winning, Bowser would have two members on the council who either worked for her or her campaigns, a point that became an issue in both campaigns.

Sad to say, the results could have been even more significant if more people had voted.  As is often the case with special elections—with local elections in general—the turnout was tepid.

Out of a possible 111,723 registered voters, only 16,512 actually voted in the two races. That would be 14.78 percent.

This belied the brave presence of 13 candidates in each race who received votes.  Maybe it means that there lots of people have political ambitions in this city, but few people want to take the time to find out who they are, or even less, to vote for them.

Gary Tischler • April 28, 2015

It’s been a big year for Lead Belly, the hugely influential blues and folk singer and musician who was born 125 years ago on Jan. 20 as Buddy William Ledbetter to Wesley Ledbetter and Sally Brown on the Jeter Plantation near Mooringsport, Louisiana.

In February, the Smithsonian Channel debuted a documentary about the legendary blues man, which included color footage of Lead Belly in a cotton field and tributes from contemporary artists like Judy Collins, Roger McGuinn, Robby Kreiger and Van Morrison.

Also in February, Folkways records released a five-disc boxed set in 140-page large format book,which amounted to a first full career retrospective.

On Saturday night, April 25, the Kennedy Center in collaboration with the Grammy Museum is producing and staging an all-star concert “Lead Belly at 125: A Tribute to an American Songster” in its Concert Hall at 8 p.m.

Headlining the musical tribute are a diverse crew of performers, songwriters, musicians and singers that cut across genres which is a good indication of the wide-ranging and long lasting influence of the blues giant.

On hand are Robert Plant (of Led Zeppelin) and folk and country star Alison Krauss (they collaborated on an album several years ago), Buddy Miller, Victor Krauss and Alvin Youngblood Hart, Bill Hector, Valerie June, Shannon McNally, Josh White, Jr., (son of folk legend Johns White), Dan Zane, and the bluesiest of female blues singers Lucinda Williams.

Lead Belly is one of the most stirring figures in American history—his time in prison, which included a stint at the sometimes infamous Angola, La., was often embellished in the tough times story-telling Depression. He wrote dozens of songs himself, played a 12-string guitar in masterful style, had a long-standing, often strained relationship with folklorists John Lomax and his son Alan.

Lead Belly wrote but also collected songs from memory that he heard in the South in his childhood and youth and put a distinct blues tinge on them—songs that became familiar to the entire country including “Midnight Special,” “Good Night, Irene”, “Take This Hammer,” a musical evocation of the hard life of men on the chain gang.

In 1949, Lead Belly passed away, but his influence was felt by the burgeoning rise of rock and roll, blues and folk singers, many of whom covered his songs—the list of songs and singers is like the biggest all-star rock and blues ever. The Beach Boys did “Cotton Fields.” Bryan Ferry and a host of others sang “Good Night Irene.” Creedence Clearwater Revival revived “Midnight Special” and “Cotton Fields,” and the list goes on and on from Elvis to Abba, to Pete Seeger, the Weavers, Harry Belafonte, Frank Sinatra, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Gene Autry, Odetta, Ron Sexsmith, Rod Stewart, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, the White Stripes (“Boll Weevil”), Old Crow Medicine Show, Meat Loaf, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Kurt Cobain, who made a hit yet again out of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night.”

Lead Belly himself had a raspy, rich voice that went from casual to heartbreak in a few licks on the guitar. Many rock stars from the 1950 through the first part of this century acknowledged the debt which you can hear in their musical styles, their voices and lyrics and the guitar playing.

Gary Tischler • April 23, 2015

These days, St. Patrick’s Day, the American national holiday saluting this country’s Irish heritage, which holds multitudes, sneaks up on you.

There was and will be a parade, and there will be green beer and Guinness, in all the establishments calling themselves worthily or not Irish, and there will be singing and beer on the floor and bragging and the telling of tales, perhaps. It’s the cliché of it all.

Someone somewhere, whole slew of somebodies are reading one by one out loud “Ulysses” and the lads will be hoping that there’ll be a lass, like Molly in that same book saying “yes, yes, yes.”

But there is something about the Irish worth celebrating, and it has less to do with froth on a glass, than it does the way the Irish have made their presence felt in the world, here, for certain, aye, but also elsewhere wherever they showed up in numbers.

Our histories—that sea of Americans different from one another and the same—are intertwined, beginning with early immigrants and landowners, going on to the flood of migrants in the wake of the mighty, blighted potato famine which brought a flood of the Irish to these shores, some of them just in time for the Civil War.

There is something about the Irish—they came from a country beautiful, but hard in giving out its natural wealth. They come from a country full of tillers and priests and nuns and publicans and teachers and politicians and rebels and thinkers, and the men and women of words, words, words, and actors, poets and playwrights and the mighty mothers of them all.

Getting older makes wretched excesses of Irishism less appealing, but the song on songs linger, and the words remain strongly spoken and go on being written. I remember the celebrants, too: once, I went to a St. Patrick’s Day bar in San Francisco accompanied by a young lady named Margie O’Clair, black of hair and smart of whip-like wit and beauty, too. She asked me why I wore an orange jacket to an Irish bar and proceeded to tell me why I shouldn’t have. And yet, I survived, because the Irish, I guess, can tolerate a German’s stupidity. [Editor’s note: orange is the color for Irish Protestants, who also have been called Orangemen.]

In years gone by, I knew the local places here—some still surviving—the Dubliner and Kelly’s Irish Times, cheek to cheek near Union Station, Danny Coleman and Hugh Kelly, proprietors, respectively, and I heard a gentleman from the Irish Embassy, at three in the wee morning sing “Danny Boy” in the kitchen of the Irish times., red faced and white haired and in fine voice as he was.

Here in Washington, we always tell the tales of the Kennedys, the brothers, John, Robert and Ted, the father Joe, and the mother Rose, and the not-so-holy ghosts of their stories. Boston, no matter who lives there will always be an urban shrine to the Irish.

Washington always had a lively Irish music scene, and in the 1980s, there was the Irish Tradition, the closest thing to local Irish rock stars, with accordionist Billy McComiskey, guitarist Andy O’Brien and champion Irish fiddler Brendan Mulvihill, singing “The Wild Rover” in the Dubliner and Times.

It’s the music and the poets that survive and count for so much. The Chieftains were just in time, and the plays and playwrights always are—George Bernard Shaw, the greatest and smartest wit that ever lived, Oscar Wilde, the most sophisticated man who came to such a sad end, Brendan Behan, Samuel Beckett and a whole new generation of Irish Playwrights. And let me just list: Joyce Himself and Flann O’Brien and Yeats and Seamus Heaney and the American Eugene O’Neill.

In the wiki wonderland, there is a category called “List of Irish People”. Not all, but it seems so. And the longest list are made up of writers, actors and musicians, not generals or Wall Streeters. To with: actors: Stephen Boyd, Kenneth Branagh,Pierce Brosnan, Gabriel Byrne, a number of Cusacks, including Sinead, wife to Peter O’Toole, Daniel Day Lewis, Colin Farrell, Barry Fitzgerald, whose horse knew the way in “The Quiet Man”, Fionnula Flanagan (ah, what a name), several Gleesons, including Brendan, Richard Harris, Micheal Mac Liammhoir (co-founder of the Gate Theatre), Colm Meaney, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Liam Neeson, Maureen O’Hara, Milo O’Shea, Niall Toibin, Fiona Shaw.

Towith: musicians: Chloe Agnew, Big Tom Of big Tom and the Mainliners, Enya, Sinead O’Connor, Vivian Campbell of Def Leppard, Liam, , Paddy, Tom and Willie Clancy, The Corrs, The Edge, Seamus Ennis , Uilleann piper, Angela Feeny opera singer, Rory Gallagher, blues/rock guitarist, and I could go on, but here’s one that sums it up: Finbart Furey, singer/songwriter, uillean piper, 5 string banjo player and actor.

Towith: writers: John Banville, Brendan Behan, Maeve Binchy, Patrick Bronte, Brian Coffey, Roddy Doyle, several Delaneys, Thomas Flanagan, Brien Friel, F. Scott Fitzgerald (says so here), Oliver Goldsmith, Seamus Heaney, James Joyce, Patrick Kavanagh, Benedict Akiel (Saoi of Aosdana) C.S. Lewis, Malachi Martin, horror writer, Frank McCourt, poet Nuala Nik Dhomhnaill, the glorious O’s, Edna O’Brien, Sean O’Casey, Frank O’Connor, Mairtin O Direain, Sean O’Faolain, George Bernard Shaw, Laurence Sterne, Bram Stoker, horror writer, John Millington Synge, Twenty Major, blogger, Oscar Wilde. And so on.

So many words, so many characters, so many songs.

So, I would suggest what we can all do for St. Patrick’s day. Say a word or two, sing a song, act a part. And, of course, say a prayer.

Gary Tischler •

By almost any measure, the world premiere of “The Blood Quilt,” the new play by Katori Hall at Arena Stage’s Mead Center for American Theater, is a big deal, resonating strongly in Washington.

For Hall, an inaugural resident playwright of Arena’s American Voices New Play Institute, the production marks a triumphant return here, the promise of a big career fully confirmed. Memphis-born Hall, a performer as well as a writer, wrote “The Mountaintop,” which won the 2010 Olivier Award for Best New Play and ran on Broadway starring Angela Bassett and Samuel L. Jackson. Three of her plays are currently receiving world premieres around the country.

“The Blood Quilt,” which runs April 24 to June 7, reunites Hall not only with Arena Stage but with director and Howard University alumna Kamilah Forbes, artistic director of Hip-Hop Theatre Junction, who collaborated with Hall on “The Mountaintop.”

“The Blood Quilt” is a unique theatrical event in many ways. It features an all-female cast (along with its female director and playwright).

The play is an African American-focused story, a fierce family comedy-drama in which, in the wake of the death of their mother and family matriarch, four sisters converge on their childhood home on an island off the Georgia coast to make a family quilt in her honor. Drama ensues with the reading of a will as the four women, and one of their teenaged daughters, face their own troubled history.

Yet, after talking to Caroline Clay and Nikiya Mathis, the actresses who play two of the sisters – Gio, the bigger-than-life second-eldest sister, and Cassan, the third-eldest – you get the sense that this is a play that goes far beyond race, reaching out to the universal without ever leaving the particular.

This is a play about family, first and foremost, and the women of that family, in particular; men – fathers, elders, boyfriends and husbands – are not in evidence except as figures in stories told around the circle of patching and sewing.

In person, Clay and Mathis are very different, in much the same ways their characters are. Clay has found a connection to the earthy and boisterous Gio – “There’s no filter, there, she’s just one of those people when it comes to saying without thinking.” – and Mathis is more reserved, like the sister she plays.

Clay is a recognizable part of the tapestry of D.C. theater. She’s a native, she won a Helen Hayes Award for outstanding supporting actress in a non-resident play for “Doubt,” she’s a graduate of and teaches at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. “This play has been talked about a lot and it’s been on my radar for a while, and I auditioned like everyone else,” she said.
Mathis is a New York actress who workshopped a Hall play called “Pussy Valley.” “Yeah, right,” she said. “I played a stripper. She writes so directly, so powerfully, she has a major voice.”

“There’s a lot of personal ways to relate to my character. I’ve experienced some of the things she did, I’ve made my mistakes, so you understand her,” Mathis said. “You can see her. She was the one, among four sisters, who her mother never really saw. And that’s an issue on a larger scale, this being invisible.”

There is also Clementine, the eldest, who has called this gathering of the sisters, played by Tonye Patano, and the teenager, Zambia, played by Afi Bijou.

After a while, as the conversation spread out like, well, a quilt – ranging from roles for African American actors to Roscoe Lee Browne, who died in 2007, from television’s “Empire” and “Outlander” to the American South – you could be excused if you thought you could hear the women of “The Blood Quilt” talking, remembering, making the quilt of their memories and lives.

Gary Tischler •

At the Helen Hayes Awards held at the venerable, history-drenched Lincoln Theatre on U Street April 7 with a party at the relatively nearby Howard Theater afterward, it was still the same old story, in the sense that the awards, named after the legendary stage actress, were meant to honor the outstanding achievements in the entire Washington theater community.

This process was always a little unwieldy and often, but not always, rewarded the more established members of the theater community.  This year, the folks in charge decided to level the playing field and broaden the reward field a little and a lot by coming up with two sets of awards—the Helens and the Hayes—with the Hayes awards designated for shows in which half of the performers and artists are members of the union Actor’s Equity, and the Helen awards going to shows which are not.

The result was a total of 47 categories to be decided in one evening, and   at least  five times that number of individuals nominated.  The Helen Hayes Awards, no matter where they were held, or who was nominated, always tended to be rich but lengthy evenings, what with special awards, musical numbers and sometimes longish speech.  The thought of the number of categories as doubled no doubt sent shivers through the spines of both the audience members, writers, nominees and other sundry folks, fantasizing an event that might run into midnight.

Surprise!   Folks needn’t have worried.  The show itself probably set a record for brevity, finishing around a quarter past nine at a clip that left everybody breathless and the bartenders out in the lobby busy.  Organizers enforced a strict 30-second time limit for acceptance speeches, which left us all with an often amusing spectacle of winners racing to the stage, women dropping or leaving high heels in the aisles or in the seats.  That left no time to thank everybody, or thoughtful if lengthy reflections on journeys from here to there and this moment, but left room for heart-felt emotions, many occasions of inventiveness, and no blame for leaving out thank yous. 

If the idea was to be more inclusive in spreading the wealth and joy, it worked—Theater Alliance, a small, but sterling, group working out of the Anacostia Playhouse, wound up with the most awards—seven—as a member of the Helen faction, for its wonderful revival of “Black Nativity,” which won outstanding musical (Helen) and the lesser known “The Wonderful World of Dissocia” which took best play (Helen).

The confusion and profusion of categories rarely abated—it was just too damn difficult to keep track of things—and that included the unlucky presenters who misplaced data every now and then. 

Certain things were still  decipherable—every year, it seems a theater has its moment of breakthrough—not just Alliance in the Helens but also Olney Theater, which burst through in the Hayes group with four awards for the highly original , edgy and one-of-a-kind straight play “Colossal,” which got playwright Andrew Hinderaker the Charles MacArthur Award for outstanding original play.  “Colossal,” which was about football but also movement and dance, was a critical smash and garnered three other awards.

Other more or less “big” winners were Signature’s “Sunday in the Park with George,”  which shared best musical (Hayes) honors with the Kennedy Center’s “Side Show,” which also won outstanding ensemble in a musical (Hayes). “George” got a best direction award for Jon Kalbfleisch, cementing his reputation as a major director via Signature.

Speaking of big wins and rising stars—Erin Weaver took two best supporting actress awards and was a part of the team that took the outstanding play or musical adaptation for “The Gift of Nothing” at the Kennedy Center.  She and her husband Aaron Posner wrote the adaptation.

The consistently original and gifted actress Kimberly Gilbert received the just rewards her character did not when she beat out Kathleen Turner (“Mother Courage” at Arena) for best actress in a play (Hayes) for her truly star turn as “Marie Antoinette” at Woolly Mammoth. 

“Little Dancer,” the ground-up and much praised Kennedy Center musical, had only one nomination but won it—a get for choreographer Susan Strohman.

And, as is sometimes the case with these awards, Studio Theatre, with no wins for the evening won the last award—best play (Hayes) for “Cock.”  Artistic director David Muse accepted the award with a funny, but perhaps predictable, observation.

So, what was different?  Well, change comes to everything as it must: no musical numbers, no long speeches, more and more rising artists, which is a good thing, loudly vocal and whistling and cheering and having a ball through the proceedings as more and more of their number ran up to the podium.  “Wow,” a Washington Post rep said, “I didn’t know actors were in such good shape.”

But it was also a sign that the theater community as a whole—divided into Helens and Hayes or not—was in good shape, in terms of diversity, in terms of interests, talent, and new works. The volume of noise and energy at the awards spoke, well, volumes to the health of the organizers, theatreWashington, of theater in Washington and of the Helen Hayes (or should we say, Helen-Hayes) Awards.    

For any and all details, winners, nominees and other information, visit the Theatre Washington website.

Gary Tischler •

Part of the job description for the S&R Foundation’s Artist-in-Residence is to be a multifaceted ambassador to the Washington cultural world, explaining, performing, presenting and representing the goals and results of the foundation.

Grounded in its purchases in Georgetown of Halcyon House and the Evermay estate, S&R “works with its partners to encourage social, scientific and artistic innovation, and to promote cultural and personal development.”

The young Canadian pianist Ryo Yanagitani is just about the best kind of ambassador any organization or institution could have. Affable, enthusiastic, articulate and brimming with enthusiasms and energy, Yanagitani is the foundation’s first resident artist, and he’s still here, teaching, playing, bringing his considerable gifts to the community at large.

“I thought at first it was supposed to be a one-year thing, which artist-in-residence stints often are,” he said. “Well, I’m now heading into my third residency, and it’s been an amazing experience.”

According to Kuno, the S&R Foundation’s Artist-in-Residence program “is meant to not only give selected emerging artists a home and place of inspiration, but also to provide a platform for collaboration among young musicians from around the world.”

Listening to Yanagitani, you get a sense of both his background and his heritage. He’s 36, looks at least a decade younger and combines an electric curiosity with a clean, friendly formality and charm. “I’m glad to be continuing the residency,” he said. “It gives me a chance to explore myself as an artist, a pianist, a professional and a human being,” he said.

His parents emigrated from Japan to Canada, specifically Vancouver, that far-west city that seems to a visitor a 21st-century, self-consciously livable city.

Yanagitini has a master of music degree from the Yale School of Music, where he studied under Boris Berman, and has completed the residency portion of his doctor of musical arts degree. He has recorded (an album of Chopin), he’s a member of the Music à la Mode new-music ensemble in New York and collaborates with cellist Jacques Lee Wood.

His collaborative and outreach work has included master classes for piano students at Duke Ellington School for the Arts.

Yanagitani is a key part of S&R Spring Overture Concert Series. On April 15, the concert series continues with S&R Washington Award grand-prize winner Tamaki Kawakubo, conductor and double bassist Nabil Shehata and the Evermay Chamber Orchestra presenting an evening of Tchaikovsky, Barrière and Vivaldi, including the classic “Four Seasons.”

Yanagitani will perform cabaret and musical-theater selections with mezzo-soprano Annie Rosen on April 24; works for flute and piano with flutist Lorna McGhee, who will play some of the Library of Congress’s rare instruments, on May 1; and works for violin and piano with violinist Sayaka Shoji on May 12. On May 16, he will close out the spring season with a solo recital of works by Rachmaninoff.

In addition, sister and brother Melissa Margulis, violin, and Jura Margulis, piano, will perform on April 21 and the Mark Meadows Jazz Quartet on May 8.

Since its inception, the series – staged in the intimate and graceful salon at Evermay –has become increasingly diverse and ambitious in its programming.

“Music is changing,” Yanagitani said. “It’s a complicated world, and you have to be aware of what you can do in making a career out of music, how to explore your gifts while making a living in performance. It’s a little like walking on eggshells.”

He loves being in Washington, and in Georgetown, although he lives with friends in Bethesda. “It’s such a diverse area, so many things going on, and I think there is an audience that’s out there that’s really appreciative. In the setting at Evermay, the connection to the music becomes both intimate and visceral. You can talk about the music a little. But you haves to spread your wings,” he said. “I’ve even explored a little tango music, and lately, I’ve discovered American musicals: ‘Wicked’ and ‘Miss Saigon,’ for instance.

“I happen to love the romantic and classic period of the 19th century,” Yanagitani will tell you. “But one of the things about making music your life is you have to, and should, broaden your interests. I’ve played piano since I was a child, practically, and to me, it’s always been an intimate, intense experience to play, to learn, to live that life.”