Muriel Bowser, from a D.C. Neighborhood, Running to Become Mayor of D.C.
• November 6, 2014

Sitting at Qualia Coffee, a smallish and relatively new coffee shop on Georgia Avenue in the D.C., neighborhood of Petworth, you realize just how much Washington, D.C., has changed and is continuing to change. In some ways, this is the eye of the change storm or at least an emblematic illustration of what was going on the city, with the election of a new mayor only days away.

Muriel E. Bowser, who remains the favorite in a three-way race for mayor, the Ward 4 councilmember, who won the Democratic Primary going away, has changed quite a bit, too, since she was first elected to the District Council when Adrian Fenty was elected Mayor of Washington, D.C., in 2008.  

“Washington’s changed have changed a lot, and the change has been swift,” she said as we sat on a soft couch in the crowded coffee shop in Petworth, which is experiencing an influx of new, younger residents,  part of the millennial generation explosion that’s going on in D.C. neighborhoods.

She declined an offer of coffee from an assistant. “I’ve had too much already today,” she said.   She has become during the course of a hectic, combative primary campaign and a drawn out general election campaign, a confident, strong campaigner and politician, who — when push came to shove — managed to hold her own in the four debates that were held and in the much more frequent primary candidate forum encounters.

In the end, she emerged victorious over incumbent Mayor Vincent Gray, Councilmembers Jack Evans, Tommy Wells and Vincent Orange as well as Busboys and Poets owner Andy Shallal. She will have run the table if she wins Nov. 4 in the general election.  Polls to date have shown her initially with a double-digit lead over Independent David Catania, who had to give up his at-large Council seat to run, while Carol Schwartz, also an independent trailed in third.  That lead, according to other polls dwindled early in October, while a more recent poll saw her on the rise again.

The atmosphere remains unsettled, with voters not entirely happy with the choices, as the electorate changes with changing times. 

We offered that this was the first time that the general election gives the appearance of being competitive—an assertion to which she offered some skepticism,  when asked, and replied, “Is it?”

 “It’s certainly been long,” Bowser said. “That’s one of the things that’s different.  But we’re doing extremely well, I think. We’re strong across the city, and it’s been certainly an interesting process. That can be a challenge.”

“But you know what the upside to all this is?” she asked. “You get to talk to the people face to face, who live here, not just in my ward, but all over the city. You see that everyone has the same worries and concerns all over the city, but in different ways, with different priorities.  Everyone is concerned about jobs, about housing, job training, our schools.  There has been considerable anxiety across the wards about the fast pace of growth. We’ve got to make sure that people who want to stay here, can afford to stay here, and that means more affordable house, more planning with affordable housing as a component.”

Bowser has followed the Fenty approach to electioneering—she knocked on every door in her Ward 4 election, and she’s followed a similar face-to-face contact pattern in the general and primary elections.   She stays in touch with Fenty and presumably has learned from him.  “We still talk by phone regularly,” she said.

These days, she brings confidence into any room—you could see it during the primary forums, when she’s greeting people on the move, or in the recent debates.   You could see it sitting next to her at the coffee shop.  “I have what you might call an extrovert-introvert personality, depending on the situation,” she said. “The extrovert part has a lot of energy.”

“When I was elected to the City Council, I felt that I came from one of the most diverse ward in the city,” she continued. “That’s given me the experience of being able to deal with all kinds of people. We had everything—black, white, men and women, young and old, gay and straight.  I think I’m the best candidate to deal with all of the people in the city.”

Bowser grew up in a big family—five and she was the youngest—went to Catholic school, worked for an insurance company and later got her master’s degree in public policy at American University. She became active in her ward and served on the advisory neighborhood commission.  Fenty hand-picked her to run for his council spot.  She ended up wanting to be  in public service,  said said, “not to be a back-slappping politician, but to help people, to facilitate change. I thought politics and government is where you could accomplish the most.”  She came naturally to politics. Her father Joe, a Democrat and activist, was an neighborhood commissioner, a community watchdog and is now 79.

She is a neighborhood person, in the sense that she’s kept her ties, her friends and family, close to her and stirred by the lives of people in neighborhoods.   “I still have the same friends from high school,” she said. “When you’re running for office that’s a good thing to have.”

“When you’re talking about ‘One City’ [Mayor Gray’s motto for uniting D.C.], that’s not a simple concept,” Bowser said. “This is a city of neighborhoods. They have an identity, and it’s not just about color or party. It’s about jobs, safety, the services, schools, where and how you live.  ‘One City’ means everybody has a chance to have the same services from government, and that’s good government.”

David Catania Would Make History If Elected D.C. Mayor
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We saw and talked with Independent candidate for mayor David Catania almost a month ago in his campaign headquarters conference room on Connecticut Avenue. 

He had a cold.

But he was also upbeat.  Polls then were showing a tightening in the mayoral campaign, some shift in direction.   

The cold didn’t stop him from talking, sometimes in great detail on issues, policy, on the city he loves, about his mother, and about why he decided to run.

We sat at a long table, framed by a chalkboard behind on which were scribbled, in thick intense writing phrases like: “In It To Win It”; “Good News”; “Next 34 days”; “Backing the Winner”  and “Let’s Make History.”

This race has been a long campaign to decide who will head the local government of the nation’s capital. Things shift all the time and change, against a backdrop of a shifting, changing skyline and demographics in the city.  Cranes are up, and business in some way is booming and neighborhoods are changing dramatically right in front of people’s eyes.

“Issues,” Catania said, “aren’t simple, not to us as people running for office, not to the people who have to decide whom to vote for, who are trying to understand the issues.”

“There was a time I wasn’t even  sure I wanted to stay on the council—I was so depressed about what was happening—the scandals, the pay-for-play, Thomas, Brown and Brown, and the Gray’s campaign being under a cloud, the evident corruption. But then, a friend said, you’d be perfect for heading the education committee, and that’s what got me motivated again, and we accomplished a lot.” 

He can make history should he win and outdistance Democratic Primary winner Muriel Bowser. Catania would become the city’s first white mayor, first openly gay mayor and first mayor not to be a Democrat.

But, of course, that’s exactly why his race is such an uphill battle—because he’s not a Democrat,  to an extent because he’s not black, although being gay these days may not be much of a handicap anymore.  “That’s true, but there’s still  a residual thing among older voters, I think,  but it is amazing how much things have changed.” One of his singular achievements, and there have been many, is to push for passage of D.C. gay marriage equality law.

Catania was first elected to a District Council at-large seat in 1997, and has been there ever since winning re-elections handily.  In order to run for mayor, however, he had to give up what was a very effective base of power.   He had probably anticipated that incumbent Mayor Vincent Gray might be his opponent, but that didn’t materialize and made it a very different race.

He isn’t sanguine about the future or full of happy talk.  “The growth, sure, that’s great, but you have to manage it and make sure that everybody shares in it,” Catania said. “But that’s not it.  There’s potential trouble, because we’re actually in a recession here because of the federal government job cuts which will affect tax revenue and reverberate.”

“Issues aren’t simple,” he repeated.  “Let’s look for instance at education resources.  Theoretically, all our schools receive the same amount of money from the government.  But there’s an inherent inequality here, because the better schools also have additional resources from active PTAs, from involved parents, and that creates a gap which we have to take into account.”

Catania’s education initiatives have been numerous, and includes, notably, passing legislation to approve $80 million for schools serving at-risk students, an example of talk and policy moved into action.

He is something of a wonk, an intense one at that.  If you want to know more about the issues and you want to know more about David Catania, check out his little campaign book—“David Catania’s Vision to Secure Our City’s Future”—a slick, costly booklet. It not only details all of his approaches to the issues of running this city but is also filled with color photographs with endorsements from regular citizens.  It’s an impressive piece of work, and it reflects how he talks and thinks.

Well, almost.

He has a reputation.  There has always been this talk about him: he’s a hot head, he’s arrogant, he holds grudges.  “Does not play well with others” could be in there, too. One opponent went so far as to suggest that he’s never gone to a Nationals game because he opposed the ballpark funding.

“I know, I know,” Catania said.  “I admit I have a temper. But some of that, well, I’ll admit I’m not very patient. But I like to think that most of it is honest passion and concern.”

That day, he was passionate about two things—talking about his mother Audrey Catania—”she spent her days and nights, working on a small family business. She raised me as a single mother and made sure I got an education.  She had street smarts. She was strong and smart.”

Audrey Catania died of cancer in 1990.

“What I’m really glad about is the contact with people, the voters, the residents and citizens of this city,” he said. “You’re out all the time, door to door, and it’s been an amazing experience. This is about transactions. This is where you find out about what concerns people in the city. There’s both optimism, for instance, about the school system, and what hasn’t been done.  People want to hear you. They open their doors. They invite you in. They feed you.  At this level, it’s about trust.  And I don’t think that the people of this city want to go back to business as usual. They want to see things change.”

We saw Catania again on a recent Sunday, at the Dupont Circle market,  surrounded by campaign workers with blue t-shirts and signs.  He stood talking with a woman intently. It looked like a Catania conversation, focused, and he could go on forever.  
       

‘La Boheme’: Puccini’s Passion for All
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Giacomo Puccini’s 1896 opera “La Boheme” is — like “Carmen” or “Madame Butterfly” — one of the opera world’s old reliables, often performed, popular, somewhat like “Romeo and Juliet” or “Twelfth Night” in a Shakespeare repertoire. It’s the opera for people who don’t like opera, but perhaps more important, for people who do like opera, especially familiar ones.

It’s a stirringly romantic work, with familiar duets, arias, set pieces, with orchestral music that invites swooning and a plot that invites sniffling. Truth be told, no matter how much some might long for darker, edgier, more difficult work, “La Boheme” reaches across the aisles of a varied audience — young to old patrons — because it works.

That was the case for the Washington National Opera’s production, which had a stellar, young cast, whose members found their voices as the proceedings went along, with WNO music director Philippe Auguin conducting. It remains the same old story—although pushed forward into post-World War I Paris, so beloved by the Lost Generation and Woody Allen both. World War I seems to be in fashion these days—the brown helmets of the trenches were afoot in the Folger’s production of “Julius Caesar,” also.

But the characters are still the same young Bohemians, a group of four would-be writers, philosophers, composers, poets, starving to the point where Rodolfo, the young hero of the piece, throws his manuscript into a stove just to keep warm. It’s mad, and sad, and every now and then, they run off gladly, gaily to the Latin Quarter and to take in the festive atmosphere of outdoor dining in gay, or not so gay, Paree.

The romance(s) are always the key to the opera, but it’s also a kind of soaring, gorgeously composed opera about the Bohemians as a group—when they fall in love and out of love, the rest feel the resultant hurts, confusions and emotional earthquakes.

It takes its sweet time getting going, as Rodolfo (Albanian tenor Saimir Pirgu) meets the fragile, sweet Mimi (American soprano Corinne Winters), searching for a candlelight after the four Bohemian compadres have managed, however badly, to heat the high-ceilinged garret and win yet another battle with the landlord. Mimi is suffering from consumption and hasn’t very much life left in her, but Rodolfo warms her with his ardent courtship. Meanwhile, Marcello (American baritone John Chest) is in frustrating pursuit of the high-flying Musetta (American soprano Alyson Cambridge), who attracts rich suitors like a magnet.

The lovers—but not the friends—come together, split up, the two swains singing achingly of their predicaments. Eventually, as the winter snow falls beautifully on stage, they all gather together with Rodolfo, stricken with love and impending loss as he sees Mimi fading away. In that elongated scene leading to her passing — not as long as the “La Traviata” death scene — the group comes together, with Musetta showing her mettle, John Bloom, as Colline, coming forth with a full-throated and surprising solo, and both Pirgu and Winters finding their voices and their emotions in tandem. In their singing, their placement on the stage, the Bohemians become a group, gathering around the dying Mimi, offering gifts, succor, food and shared grief, not to mention beautiful music.

Most of the singers are new to the WNO—they sang with great clarity and strength after a slow start—and by the time Mimi’s hand dropped lifelessly, you could hear sniffling begin here and there, to the right of me, to the left of me and behind me.

It’s almost useless to argue with an opera like this. It has Puccini’s natural emotional and musical will rolling over everything, Italian temperament warming up the cold rooms, and freezing hands and grieving hearts.

“La Boheme” is double cast. Check the Kennedy Center and WNO website for casts and times. It runs through Nov. 15.

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With ‘Little Dancer,’ a Sculpture Comes to Life
• November 3, 2014

Lynn Ahrens is getting excited.

After literally years of working to bring the story of the girl who posed for Edgar Degas’s classic sculpture “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen” to the stage as a major musical, it’s about to happen.

“Little Dancer,” the Kennedy Center musical, will premiere Oct. 25 and run through Nov. 30 at the Eisenhower Theater. But there’s more. The National Gallery of Art will hold a focus exhibition at which the actual sculpture—which is in the NGA collection—will be the star. It will be surrounded by ten additional works, including the gorgeous pastel “Ballet Scene,” several monotypes and smaller original statuettes related to the original work beginning Oct. 5 through Jan.11.

The girl was Marie van Goethem, a 14-year-old member of the Paris Opera Ballet, who posed for Degas and became, after the fact, one of the most famous ballerinas in the world.

A number of years ago, Arhens, who wrote the libretto and book, while her partner Stephen Flaherty composed the music for “The Little Dancer,” saw the sculpture and wondered “who was that girl, what kind of life did she lead, what did Degas see in her. I was struck by the pose, everything about her. It just affected me, and I imagine that’s when I started thinking about a play, a musical, that would be about her, and Degas—I think they were like father and daughter, more than anything—and the whole world of the Paris Opera and Ballet, the painters and artists. The young dancers usually lived in poverty and helped support their families. They were called the little rats.”

“It was kind of a Dickensian world in Paris,” she said. “But it’s obvious that Degas was transported by her, enchanted, he was immersed in that world.”

This is what Ahrens and Flaherty do. They make great musicals and shows out of unlikely materials.
Ahrens and Flaherty are a rarity in Broadway and show business today. They are a composer and song and book writing duo who hugely successful and who’ve been working together for years. They’ve got the Broadway Triple Crown under their belt, winning the Tony Award, the Drama Desk Award and the Outer Circle Award for “Ragtime,” their theatrical version of E.L. Doctorow’s towering novel of America’s coming of age, which was also a successful film and play at the Kennedy Center twice in different incarnations.

They also created “Once on This Island,” a show which recently surfaced at Olney Theater and is a staple of regional theaters. There’s also been “Lucky Stiff” and “My Favorite Year” Most recently, they wrote the score for “Rocky” which arrived on Broadway with a big splash but never quite turned into a hit, although a version in Germany is drawing big crowds.
“Stephen and I are the best of friends, the best of partners, we work well together, always have. There’s no formula—sometimes he starts out with some bits of music and I’ll start writing lyrics, sometimes I start with the words, and he follows with the music,” she said.

It took a while to get “Little Dancer” done. “It took six years altogether that we worked on it, workshopped it, had labs and readings. We invited Michael Kaiser to take a look at a portion of what we were doing. He was absolutely taken with it and was behind it from the get go.”

“This is about art and life. We have one song called “In Between” which illustrates this, in between youth and growing up for the” little rat,” where art and life come together and touch.”

“We have a terrific group of people who came together on this, including, of course Susan Stroman” Ahrens said. “Stroman is the director of “The Producers,” and the beautifully original “Contact,” which was essentially a dance piece, as well as most recently “Big Fish” and “Bullets Over Broadway.” “She is perfect for this because she’s worked with ballet companies. She knows dance better than anybody.”

Playing the adult Marie is Rebecca Luker (of “Mary Poppins” fame) while New York City Ballet principal dancer Tiler Peck plays the young ballerina, the haunting young girl torn between trying to survive in a harsh world and expressing her gifts as a dancer.

“I think this is a show that everyone—including families—can relate to. It’s about family, survival, fathers, daughters, patrons and art.

“There’s a beautiful little original story ballet—about ten minutes long—which basically shows what the whole thing is about. It’s like recreating that world, that story, those people and what they did and loved.” [gallery ids="101847,138497" nav="thumbs"]

Catan’s “Florencia:” A Magical Quest for Love
• October 28, 2014

For being the work of a contemporary composer, Daniel Catan’s “Florencia of the Amazon”, which opened the 2014-2015 Washington National Opera season under the direction of Francesca Zambello, throbs with the often gorgeous, surging tones of 19th-century romanticism.

For sounding like a traditional opera, “Florencia” nevertheless appears often like a literary work, with a libretto by Marela Fuentes-Berain that tries and often succeeds to embrace and ech the tone and feel of its source material, the works of the famed Columbia master of magical realism Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

For the WNO, it’s also a first production, although not for Zambello, who directed and staged the original production at the Houston Grand Opera in 1996. Given that the source is Marques—principally, it appears, his great novel “Love in the Time Of Cholera”—there’s a stream-of-consciousness about the proceedings, an air of cultural surrealism, as if the characters and the audience are outward bound on more than one kind of trip.

These particular characters are setting out toward the fabled city of Maunus, where the legendary opera diva, Florencia Grimaldi, is supposed to give a transforming performance. On board are a disparate and desperate group of characters: a constantly quarreling married couple forever searching for love; the sturdy captain in love with the sea; his struggling nephew Arcadio; Rosalba, a lovely young journalist hoping to finish her life’s work biography of Florencia; and Riolobo, who is the guide for the audience and the characters on this Amazonian journey as part crew member and part a member of the realm of the river god. Florencia also comes aboard at the last minute, although no one, except perhaps for the captain, recognizes her. Given that this is a journey of experience, bad things happen including death, wind, flood, and a terrible storm. And given that we’re in the realm of magical realism, things unhappen too.

Florencia, sung with powerful virtuosity by rising star and classic soprano Christine Goerke, is on the journey with the hope of finding a long-lost lover, a butterfly hunter named Cristobal who disappeared into the jungle. She does and she doesn’t find him.

Along the way, we’re treated to the appearance of a group of native sprites, led by the terrific dancer Alison Mixon. They act sometimes like river sprites, sometimes as saviors, sometimes as malicious and haunting presences.

The atmosphere, with a backdrop of projections and scrim that evoke a kind of lost world of flying creatures, ravishing sunsets, onrushing mists and sky, moves in somewhat helter-skelter and static fashion as the ship, the “El Dorado,” passes by. The boat is problematic at first—in an atmosphere of magical realism, it seems to be entirely too realistic and unimpressive. The captain may love his ship, but it’s hardly deserving of adoration. But then, this isn’t “Showboat” either. There are rough waters ahead.

Like many of the new devises of story telling in the production, you get used to the boat, because it does serve a purpose; it serves up the characters and set pieces like a wheel of fortune. Here is a card game where the couple squabbles; here is Florencia in a powerful aria about her love and desire to be reunited with her lover; here are Rosalba (beautifully sung by Andrea Carroll) and Arcadio (a dashing Patrick O’Halloran) discovering their mutual attraction in full-voiced duets, at turns suspicious, afraid, spirited and romantic.

The orchestral pace is ably led by young conductor Carolyn Kuan. It’s surprisingly full of urgent, powerful notes of brass. The cast, on the whole, is full of terrific singers – notably Goerke, but also O’Halloran, Carroll, Nancy Fabiola Herrera as Paula and Michael Todd Simpson as Alvaro. Norman Garrett is less effective in his singing but he presents a charismatic force as Riolobo nonetheless.

In the end, in spite of or because of the troubles on the Amazon, love is still the answer, requited and reunited, even for Florencia, who is both renewed and transformed in a spectacular and beautiful image that won’t soon leave your mind.

Goerke will sing the role of Alvaro Sept. 20, 22, 26 and 28 while Melody Moore will take the stage Sept. 24.

Fresh, Energetic, Seductive ‘Evita’ at Kennedy Center
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“Evita,” the Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice mega musical from about the rise of the up-from-nothing wife of Argentine dictator Juan Peron, is back at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House in an electric, energetic, tango-flavored production that feels remarkably fresh.

To paraphrase the seductive song Eva purrs to Peron in suggesting a romantic-physical and political partnership, the show, directed by Michael Grandage from a West End production of several years back, was “surprisingly good for audiences.”

Historically, “Evita” marked the beginnings of the ascendancy of hefty, blockbuster English musicals like “Phantom of the Opera”, “Cats”, “Starlight Express” (“Cats” on roller skates), “Miss Saigon” and the omni-present “Les Miserables”, which dominated Broadway for a couple of decades. They were not really musicals, but pop (and sometimes rock) operas, fueled by high drama, big, splashy staging (the chandelier in “Phantom”, the barricades in “Les Miz”, the helicopter in “Miss Saigon”).

There have been few if any shows to match the success of the Rice, MacIntosh and Webber days. So, it’s probably good to see “Evita” resurrected. If you’ve seen the show back in the day, in various incarnations, or the Madonna film version, you’ll wonder how it holds up. If you haven’t seen it all, or know little about Evita Peron, the show should be an eye-opener.

Does it hold up? Yes, it does, and the reason is a highly effective cast, headed by young star Caroline Bowman in the title role, and the choreography of Rob Ashford, who gives the proceedings on stage a highly stylized energy.
It’s got fizz and buzz, moving to the sharp-and-high stepping rhythms of the tango, the dance and music that has always defined the national personality of Argentina.

Bowman does a transformation here—starting out as an ambitious Eva, eager to get out of her small town, using men dispassionately along the way as she hooks up with a pop singer to make her way to Buenos Aires, where politicians, usually wearing a uniform, abound. She becomes a singer, a radio star and eventually, man by man, a sexpot in the position to say: “Hello, Colonel Peron.”

The partnership is surprisingly successful—at Peron’s side Eva presents herself as a woman of the people. She’s one of them, which works very effectively because its true, all dazzling clothes and blonde hair. Her charm is not fully appreciated by the upper crust—every country has one—as she and her husband rise to the top. Her magnetism—“just a little star quality” – becomes so real that Eva herself starts to believe in the story, that she’s the country’s mother and sex figure all rolled into one. The people start to call her “Santa Evita”.

This remains a dazzling political story about the power and pull of celebrity on a national scale, and the music drives the story home. There’s small songs—“Another Suitcase, In Another Hall” for a dropped mistress, the amusing “Good Night and God Bless,” describing the musical chairs game of who’s in charge, the beautiful “High Flying Adored” and, of course, the overpowering “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina”.

This was a song you could hear in any piano bar when “Evita” was in town. It’s so familiar that it starts to get a hold of you once again. But it’s also Eva Peron’s transformative moment, and Bowman brings it off as if she had heard it just yesterday. The woman (Bowman is in her twenties) who moves bathed in a huge light in a dazzling white dress, has become Evita. Her latest and most permanent lover is the people. It’s a seduction, at turns a pleading and loving anthem.

As before, Eva is dogged by a Che Guevera—another Latin American who became a legend in his own time and probably mind, too—figure. Sung with perfect pitch by Max Quinlan, he’s witness, commentator, critic, reflective and charismatic. Sean MacLaughlin cuts a fine, sometimes oily and mostly cynical, figure as Peron.

It seemed to me that this production was on the move constantly — sometimes filling the stage, were people moving to the tango with sharp, edgy moves, that languid sexuality, sometimes high-stepping, sometimes lurching. It gave the production a flavor, a feeling that was intimately epic, along with renewed energy.

It’s remarkable, in the end, how a big musical-opera production about a woman who became a kind of legend and saint in Argentina and died young a long time ago, and was mourned by an entire nation, can still fascinate.

“Evita” runs through Oct. 19 at the Kennedy Center.

James Garner: One All-American Actor Everyone Loved
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James Garner was a purely American actor.

You would never think to call him a thespian, or imagine him playing Hamlet — or, getting old, King Lear.

Garner was a movie star, a television star, and in both venues, he often and famously and most memorably played the hero as anti-hero, or the anti-hero as hero. He was also a natural—his most famous anti-hero heroics were done in such a way that he hardly seemed to be acting at all. He inhabited the leads in “Maverick” (for three seasons) and, later in his life, the hero of “The Rockford Files” with a combination of elan and ease that it made him look almost lazy. In his starring movie roles, he ranged quite a bit further, but that casual comic style stayed with him through several romantic comedies with Doris Day—taking over where Rock Hudson had left off.

Garner died July 19 at the end of a long career and a full life, during which he carried his movie and television personas with him, not like baggage, but like a coat you could dig into to find reminders of his screen life.

He led a life, and it took him a while to become who he was, which was, originally, a fella by the name James Scott Bumgarner, born in Norman, Oklahoma, the home of the University of Oklahoma and “sooner boomer” football mania, a place you could stare across the flat landscape and feel the breath of next door neighbors Missouri and Texas. He did not initially dream of becoming an actor and instead went from job to job, got into the Merchant Marine and fought in Korea, and awarded two purple hearts.

A friend encouraged him to get into theater, from which he started getting small parts in films like “Sayanora” and a bigger part in “Darby’s Rangers,” a World War II, small-scale epic, in a part turned down by Charlton Heston.

But it was the “Maverick” series which made a star out of Garner—although he stayed only for three years—and in a way branded him. The series—which debuted in a time when the so-called adult westerns were king on network television—featured Garner (and later a brother played by Jack Kelly), as a slick, fancy-shirt, black hat, black jacket, gambler, who avoided conflict at all cost, not to mention heroics. Bret Maverick was catnip for ladies, often got in trouble, even when he would admit he was a coward, but somehow, kicking and screaming and very reluctantly was often the hero. He was the opposite of James Arness’s Matt Dillon on “Gunsmoke.” Imagine the husky, slow-moving Arness playing Bret Maverick.

This aversion to violence made Maverick a convincing anti-hero, even when he resorted to violence. It was a kind of style you would often find in other Garner roles—“Support Your Local Sheriff,” a comedy western which was great fun, with the wonderful Jack Elam as his sidekick and, most convincingly, “The Americanization of Emily,” a World War II story, cynical and slick, in which he played an American officer who did not want to be sent to the combat zone. The parts seemed to suit Garner or he suited them. He played men who appeared strong but could dance around conflict—and commitment in the romantic comedy version—with ruggedness and verve.

Every now and then, the hidden fire and flame underneath came out as a form of obsession, a quality he shared with another well-liked star, James Stewart. He could play the all-American hero, influenced by obsession, Wyatt Earp on a killing spree in “Hour of the Gun,” the anti-hero of “Duel at Diablo” or “Mister Buddwing”.

“The Rockford Files,” another long-running series (six years), brought Garner back to television and another huge success, although he was injured in the course of playing a private eye several times and suffered mental stress in a law suit over net profits.

Although he could wear a suit and tie almost as well as Cary Grant, he was at heart a heartland kind of guy. He would continue to work in his later years—“Space Cowboys”, a popular quasi-comic story about aging astronauts with Clint Eastwood and Tommy Lee Jones, and “Murphy’s Romance,” playing a widower opposite Sally Field, a role for which he got an Oscar nomination, and the title of greatest kisser by his co-star.

James Garner, American actor, lived in Brentwood, Calif., and was 86.

‘Our War’ Brings Big Names, Historical Themes to Arena Stage
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Almost 30 esteemed playwrights, commissioned to write monologues and vignettes. An ensemble of six local actors, joined by nearly 30 notable political, community and cultural leaders to present the results.

For director Anita Maynard-Losh, Arena Stage’s Director of Community Engagement, that’s quite a challenge.

It’s all about “Our War”, which is Arena Stage’s part in the multi-year, multi-city National Civil War Project. The show consists of series of brief plays commissioned as part of the 200th anniversary of the Civil War commemoration. “Our War” will be staged Oct. 21 to Nov. 4.

“Our War” is part of the National Civil War Project for Creating Original Theatrical Productions and Innovative Academic Programs. This nationwide cooperative effort among theaters, universities and other organizations was inspired by D.C. choreographer Liz Lerman, whose “Healing Wars” production was staged at Arena Stage this summer.

“There are a lot of moving parts, and it’s a little different every time out,” Maynard-Losh said. “We have an ensemble of actors, we have this small vignettes or monologues on the theme of the Civil War, and in addition, we have guest appearances each night by city and area notables.”

“I have to say, though, that to be able to direct works by twenty six great playwrights, that’s a gift and a treat, as well as a challenge,” she said.

“These are commissioned works on the Civil War,” she said. “They don’t take place during the war, necessarily, and they touch on themes about the civil war, and the effect it continues to have on Americans, on African Americans, on women. It’s about the effect of the war, more than specific figures from the war, or incidents, or battles. Some pieces are set there, to be sure, but mostly it’s how we’ve engaged with the war, it’s history and aftermath, how it’s become a part of how we live today. We have some historic figures—John Wilkes Booth, for instance, or Walt Whitman, who haunts this city.”

“We got very different works, very different responses,” she said. “There are stories about immigration, about the idea of citizenship and its responsibilities. It’s more of a contemporary take on the war, the playwrights give the war context in terms of our daily lives, of contemporary life.”

The playwrights include Maria Agui Carter, Lydia Diamond, Amy Freed, Diane Glancy Joy Harjo, Samuel D. Hunter, Naomi Lizuka, Aditi Kapil, Dan LeFranc, David Lindsay-Abaire, Ken Ludwig, Taylor Mac, Ken Narasaki, Lynn Notage, Robert O’Hara, Heathear Raffo, Charles Randolph-Wright, Tanya Saracho, Betty Shamieh, John Strand, Tazewell Thompson, William S. Yellow Robe Jr., Karen Zacarias, as well as two students.

The play features actors John Lescault, Ricardo Frederick Evans, Tuyet Thi Pham, Lynette Rathnam and Sara Waisanen.

Guest performers for “Our War” include council members Jack Evans, Yvette Alexander, David Grosso; Chris Matthews of “Hardball” fame; NPR correspondents Deborah Amos and Diane Rehm; Georgetown University President John J. DeGioia; Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg; and many more.

Among the monologues are “The Truth”, by John Strand; “Being Wright,” by Charles Randolph Wright; “A Union Soldier Writes a Letter to the Mother of a Boy He Used to Know,” by Naomi Isuka; “A Case for Laughter,” by Ken Ludwig; “La Adelita,” by Karen Zacharias”; “This is How We Do,” by Tazewell Thompson, and “The Grey Rooster” by Lynn Nottage.

According to Arena Stage, due to the wealth of content created by the 25 playwrights, the production has been separated into two selections of 18 monologues under “Stars” and “Stripes.”

For complete schedules for specific productions, go to the Arena Stage website.

The Weekend That Was: Correspondents, Opera, the Derby and Much More
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Weeks and days, and seasons and news can be blue or incessant—we get floods and a street in Baltimore collapses onto a train track, and the buzz of war lingers over the Ukraine like lightning, and all people can talk about and write about is Donald Sterling, a rank racist and the contents of his conversation with his non-girlfriend, which spread like rancid mints over the internet and there are horrible mud slides and forest fires, and the plane is still missing and people are still shooting each other, it’s enough to make a body weep but out of sight of any iPhone lest we ourselves go viral.

Then comes along a weekend, and it’s not that it makes you forget everything—the net never sleeps—but that it makes you think of other things for a while, that there are stories out there with no speculative qualities, days and nights that run into each other with nothing but serendipity, full of the spirit of photographer Walker Evans, who told us to go out into the world with hungry eyes—and, we might add, ears and a spring in the step.

That’s why, even as we notice that the city is changing at a hard-to-believe pace, we also notice the rites of spring, the end of April, the improbable rise of a horse who made his own birthright, Washington residents and visitors bursting into the streets to visit embassies all over the city, and other Washingtonian pouring toward the Washington Hilton and sundry other party sites for the city’s annual rite of awkward fame and glitz. Others did other things and did not feel left out of the scheming of things, the rhythm of season and song. We blended our own daily comings and goings into the buzz around us, partook of the things we could, and read stories about the world and paid our bills, and picked up the dry cleaning and groceries and watched the beginning-last of the blossoms fall from our neighborhood trees, creating hundreds of white—but not red-carpets.

This is what happened on a month of Saturdays and Sundays—every bike rack in the city appeared empty, and everyone went out and about. En route from dry cleaning and laundry, and across Massachusetts Avenue to Whole Foods in Glover Park, we saw crowds stand in line for a very long time, mess up traffic patterns, and generally act like the inquisitive family of man, woman and child to visit the opening salvo of some 50 embassies in the city which had opened their doors for the annual rite of Passport D.C. This yearly event, which has grown from its small beginnings as an impromptu even by European Union embassies several years ago, now stretches across the whole merry month of May, and it has become a major attraction because: it is free, it has exhibitions, music, bags, and the opportunity to travel the whole world over or at least a good portion of it by way of visiting the embassies of countries not our own, and hear languages we do not speak, but wish sometimes we did.

As we drove up Mass. Ave., we the crowds around the embassies of Japan, Ghana, South Africa, where Nelson Mandela is still freshly ensconced, and lines form in our neighborhood for Mexico, and the Spanish Cultural Center, and in Dupont they formed up for Argentina and a host of others. Crowds were everywhere, the sun delivering the weather goods.

That night, the who’s whos, but not the Who, of This Town, which is Our Town, but not our town, gathered at the Washington Hilton for the annual rite called the Washington Correspondents’ Dinner, in which the media by now almost helplessly rounds up the usual celebrities and some new ones, to sit at tables and preen—who’s hot, who’s not, the best and worst dresses and addresses and so which cover four pages of the style section with roughly 36 photographs. The president and a comedian make jokes, Oscar winners and news folks dressed as movie stars arrive while movie stars do the same. The Style teaser headlines pretty much tell it all: Richard Marx and Rick Springfield? Whatcha got in that goodie bag? Um, I’m with the band, who was the biggest diva? Three-day blowout, and handing out the superlatives, the latter ranking the best lines, the awkward moments and more. Oh, look, the most interesting man in the world. You kid you not.

It is impossible, of course, not to feel a little envy for not being there, because this mash-mish-mash of celebrities, Hollywood, Hollywood on the Potomac, swag, parties, pre-and-post-and during just sort of comes through town like Moby Dick, swallowing everything, including a lot of champagne. If you’re not in there, you’re out there, like so many people we saw gawking as guests arrived. Two country music stars were there—Brad Paisley and Bob Schieffer. But, then again, if Willie Robertson of the “Duck Dynasty” is there, how exclusive can it be?

As it was, we were 20 minutes late getting to the Kennedy Center for the opening night of the Washington National Opera’s “The Magic Flute,” us and many children dressed to the nines, along with Newt Gingrich, and opera buff and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and not one single member of the Ducky Dynasty. This seems to happen yearly now: the WCAD and the WNO opening night. Do not know whether to laugh or to cry, but we were in awe of set and costume designer Jun Kaneko, on display on stage and in an exhibition. It was a magic “Magic Flute.”

Other things happened: the Adams Morgan BID kicked off its summer season of concerts at Columbia Road where bikers stopped to listen, and the new kids on the block—the babies and the pre-schoolers and the dogs and the parents stopped to listen. I talked about the way-down-the-road election in November, and stopped by Joseph’s House, the hospice for the homeless, where they were holding a yard sale, and I saw signs asking for news of Romeo, their house cat, which had disappeared months ago, but had apparently recently been sighted. In Georgetown, the Chanticleers were at St. John’s Episcopal Church.

Sights and sounds, and music and musings.

And the best story of the week popped out of the Kentucky Derby, where California Chrome, an odds-on favorite, oddly enough, rode to a smooth victory. Here’s the thing: this West Coast horse, head-held-high beautiful stallion, was brought to hallowed Churchill Downs from California, by way of parents who were bought with a grand total of around 5,000 bucks, by a couple of regular guys, had a trainer at age 74 in his first Kentucky Derby , leaving doubtful experts in the dust.

This is class triumphing over Class and breeding and big money, always a good story in these our times.

Here’s an idea: Whether he wins the triple crown or not, somebody who with a little class and imagination ought to invite California Chrome to next year’s White House Correspondents Dinner instead of Kim and Taylor, and Katie and the rest of faddists.

I might just kiss a Duck to get in there, just to sit next to California Chrome.

Monday Musings: Baseball, Africa Summit, Jim Brady
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In this town, which is our town, the world is always with you, right outside the morning-opened door, the Georgetown streets, in cushy hotels, in front of the White House which we pass every day, in the traffic jams, from which we glimpse visiting black limo dignitaries, amid the demonstrators who come here every year, always different but always the same.

In this town, which is our town, history is always with us, our monuments are concrete paeans and poems to our shared histories and memories. We’re always remembering, commemorating, celebrating the singular events of our events, which are imbedded in cement, in the grassy knolls of our memories and cemeteries, in books and street addresses.

No other city is quite like this in this quality—our local news are national and world news, our daily travels to offices, work and chores take us through a kind of daily theme park of history. Some things occur here, rest here and our part of our routine like a backpack, the clothes we wear, the messages we retrieve from our open pads while having coffee at a Starbucks.

Yet, we live in our blocks and villages and neighborhoods, and sleep under blue-dark skies, and wake up to retrieve the morning or pore over the magical contents of a baseball box score: IP 7 H 3 R 0 ER 0 BB 1 SO 10 MNP 99 ERA 3.39. That would be the beatifically splendid pitching line on the Washington Nationals’ Stephen Strasburg in a 4-0 win over the Phillies.

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, a large part of the other part of the world came to Washington as part of the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit, in which leaders from most of the nations in the continent of Africa arrived for discussions, workshops, gatherings, speeches and policy-making, headed by President Barack Obama.

They—political leaders and business leaders and perhaps social and cultural leaders— came from all over Africa, from Algeria, Angola, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia and a host of other countries. Black cars whizzed around town, stopping traffic around places like the Mandarin Hotel. There was a particular logjam around the Four Seasons Hotel across from the Georgetowner office on M Street. Still and all, the day proceeded on the avenue: a couple taking a self, sitting on the faux cow in front of Ben and Jerry’s, a father trying to tickle his baby boy into a laugh in front of a clothing store, and fashion-conscious girls prancing in twos and threes along the avenue as if it were spring still and all.

We breathe, we dance or come out of the Whole Foods Store, slightly less richer on a Saturday when the bloody struggle in Gaza came home to Lafayette Square in front of the White House in a protest rally by thousands of Palestinian supporters, condemning the rising death toll there, the Israeli incursion and invasion of the Gaza strip to stop rocket firing by Hamas. It is one of those horrible tragedies where we all have opinions, in our town, this town.

Earlier in the week, Latinos, some of them illegal immigrants also gathered to protest in front of the same White House, demanding an end to deportations sparked by the flow of illegal immigrants mostly young people at the Texas border, streaming up from Central American countries.

The world echoes loudly here, especially if, as some of us do, or have done, we mingle with the gathered crowds, and when we do that, we seem to tumble under the onrush of history.

Life, of course, doesn’t care about the town, any town, and it moves on, and provides us with its own lessons. One day, a 69-year-old woman named Patsy Stokes Burton of La Plata, Md., a mother of four, went to one of her four jobs in Upper Marlboro and was struck by a bus and died of her injuries. Her husband Mack Burton said, “When she left yesterday, she told me to have a good day and I told her to have a good day.” The words, so everyday, suddenly turned into last words. Burton said, “I have no vendetta against that driver. Like I said, she was just out doing her job. It happened, and not a thing in the world anybody can do about it.”

One day, history comes that way in our town, old history, refreshed in the passing of someone we felt we knew who made history. Today, the news came that James Brady, the former press secretary of President Ronald Reagan, who was among those who was shot in an assassination attempt on the president in 1981, died at the age of 73. He was paralyzed by his wounds. For a time his name was on gun control legislation—the Brady Bill—which was eventually allowed to expire as law.

In this town, our town, we make our own diversions, the daily life this city gives. On Saturday, we went to the National Zoo, in hopes of catching up with Bao Bao, which we did not. But we did see the two sets of lion cubs, three by three, and their lionesses, their mothers, lounge a little separate from each other, like worldly, sanguine young ladies and women. A distance away, father lion lounged, his tail swatting flies, looking like the laziest, most regal of lion kings, black mane darkly royal.

The young cubs posing on ledges, with their mothers, looked for all the world, like feline debutantes in a John Singer Sargent painting, languid, self conscious and aware of being beautiful and rare, and pure. A mom licked the ears of one of the cub. You could practically hear the cub whisper, “Oh, mom, not in front of everyone,” as if an ordinary teenager.

In this town, our town, the world is always with us, one way or another, within walking distance, within a shout or the murmurs of hearts and minds, our hearts and minds.