Arts & Society

Gary Tischler • January 11, 2016

By now, it’s probably not a surprise that rising theater star and associate artistic director at Signature Theater Matthew Gardiner would be the obvious choice to direct the Arlington theater’s production of “West Side Story,” which runs through Jan. 24.

Gardiner was nominated, after all, for two Helen Hayes awards for best director this year—for “Sunday in the Park with George” (winner) and “Cabaret.” And he’s been a go-to director for both more or less mainstream musicals (“Xanadu”) and more off-the-beaten-path straight plays like “Tender Napalm,” “Art” and “Really, Really.”

“Actually, ‘West Side Story’ is my all-time-ever favorite musical,” said Gardiner, who was picked for the associate artistic spot in 2011. “It’s perfect. I think it’s the best structured musical drama ever written. For me, it’s practically perfect.” 

“My first contact with it was the film version, pretty much like most people and I fell in love with it. That opening scene of the gangs coming at you in the screen, that was really memorable,” he said. “I also saw the touring pre-Broadway production several years ago, and I actually liked it a lot, although some critics had problems with it.”

That version had dialogue and lyrics spoken and sung by the Puerto Rican in Spanish.  “I thought that made sense, I think it was very strong. But we’re not doing that.”

Gardner grew up with his twin brother James in College Park, Maryland.  He started out wanting to be a dancer, and as such had roles in productions of the Christmas venerables, “The Nutcracker” at Washington Ballet and “A Christmas Carol” at Ford’s Theatre.

“It’s remarkable, I know, that we’ve never actually done ‘West Side Story’ before,” Gardiner said. “The lyrics, after all, are by Stephen Sondheim, and we certainly are known for doing Sondheim.  It’s no small undertaking, that’s for sure.”

There are two factors at work for Gardiner in approaching what is such a classic, familiar work.

“You always think in big, expansive terms with this show, it has all this dancing,” he said. “You’re looking at it in a panorama way. The theater here is set up differently, and so we can emphasize the intimacy of the show as well as its larger component.  You’re going to be ten, 20 or more feet away from the stage up close and personal, and I think this way, you’ll get involved with the characters in ways that aren’t possible in the move or a normal stage.”

“To me, the lyrics and the music are so moving, and experiencing things this way brings something touching for the audience,” he said.

The other critical component of “West Side Story” is that it will feel brand new or, as in the expression “ripped from the headlines.”

Richard Selden •

The Freer Gallery of Art, the oldest of the Smithsonian Institution’s art museums, will be closed for renovations from Jan. 4 through the spring or summer of 2017. The Sackler Gallery, to which it is linked underground — forming a bicameral museum of Asian art — will remain open.

Along with its extraordinary Asian holdings, the Freer is the home of a major collection of works by American expatriate artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler, of “Whistler’s Mother” fame (that painting, formally known as “Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1,” is owned by Paris’s Musée d’Orsay), including his stunning Peacock Room.

On the third Thursday of the month at noon, the Peacock Room shutters are opened, allowing its flamboyantly colored and decorated walls and ceramics-packed shelves to be bathed in natural light. The last opportunity to experience this for a year and a half is this Thursday, Dec. 17.

Jan. 2-3 is “Say Goodbye to the Freer” weekend, with many family-friendly activities from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.

Julian Raby, director of the Freer-Sackler since 2002, was the speaker at Georgetown Media Group’s Nov. 5 Cultural Leadership Breakfast at the George Town Club. In his remarks, Raby brought to life the beginnings of the Freer Gallery of Art, dedicated in 1923 and spawned by the ideals of its founder, Charles Lang Freer, a full-cloth American self-made man.

“There was no silver spoon in the mouth of Charles Lang Freer,” he said, noting his beginnings as a maker and developer of railroad cars, which made him nearly a billionaire and allowed him to retire at age 47. He also had the good fortune, spurred by an interest in art collecting, to meet and be associated with Whistler, from whom he at first bought just a modest etching.

“The relationship was an extraordinary match,” Raby said. “Whistler was choleric, quixotic, and Freer was an extremely thoughtful man. It was a match that would lead to the acquisition of 1,300 works which formed the foundation of the collection and started a passion in Freer, and even obsession, with Asian art and culture, prints and screens and with China.”

“Imagine,” Raby said, “a relationship somewhat like what Velázquez might have had with the hidalgos” (a phrase you won’t hear every day). The complex history of the Peacock Room, created for British shipping magnate Frederick Richards Leyland and setting off a bitter feud between patron and artist, is currently the subject of a special Sackler Gallery exhibition, “Peacock Room REMIX.” The show’s centerpiece is “Filthy Lucre,” a recreation of the room in ruins by painter Darren Waterston.
Regarding the original Peacock Room, says Raby, “when we open the windows and let the light in, it’s still spectacular.”

Robert Devaney •

A Yuletide gathering of friends and colleagues by the D.C. Council’s Elizabeth Webster along with her co-hosts Kimberly Skyrm and Yuriy Zubabev celebrated the Washington debut of “Beverly Hills Christmas,” just in time for the big day, at Paper Moon Restaurant in Georgetown Dec. 22.

The movie, starring Dean Cain, Vincent De Paul, Donna Spangler and Ravin Spangler, is a sweet Christmastime story of life and death and of mother and daughter — and illustrates the power of redemption and unconditional love, revealing the true meaning of Christmas.

“Beverly Hills Christmas” premiered Dec. 6 on UPtv. [gallery ids="102207,131429,131431" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler • January 4, 2016

If “Old Lang Syne” is the song of New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Eve celebration with music, dancing (in the streets or elsewhere) and a smack on the lips at the last second of the old year, then the Blue Danube Waltz is probably the music of the first days of the new year.

That will be the case at the Music Center at Strathmore’s 15th annual New Year’s Concert, 3 p.m., Sunday, Jan. 3, with the annual return and presentation of the Salute to Vienna New Year’s Concert. It will be nothing less than a champagne-feel-good music-and-dance resurrection of an empire from long ago across the ocean, the world of fin-de-sicle Austria and the Austro-Hungarian Empire of Emperor Franz Joseph and the musical world of composers like Johann Strauss, the waltz king, among others.

It’s a world of tuxedoed, elegant and handsome swains dancing with their beloved, in gossamer, eye-popping gowns, and the signature piece of music to this afternoon is “The Blue Danube Waltz” by Strauss. It is a piece of music that is almost miraculous in its ability to engender feelings of joy, happiness and wanting to move around a ballroom without your feet seeming to touch the ground.  If, after a long Saturday night and morning, start your Sunday by playing “The Blue Danube,” let it swirl over you like warm light, have a cup of Viennese-roasted coffee and start your day smiling.  It will cure hangovers, the sour taste of early morning television political discussions, and any sort of angst. As music, it is its own happy dance.

“I think that it’s probably the biggest selling work of music ever,” said Marion Glatz, who, with her husband, the Hungarian pianist Attila  J. Glatz, runs the concert production company that produces “Salute to Vienna” among numerous other musical productions which tour worldwide.  

Marion Glatz—aside from her work with “Salute to Vienna”—is ideally suited to be what she is, an articulate cheerleader for the music that is emblematic of the show.  She’s the daughter of a Viennese father and a Polish mother, received a master’s degree in business in Nuremberg, Germany, lived for a number of years in Munich, a Bavarian city which has a close affinity to Vienna in temperament, culture and music. Today, she lives in Toronto with her husband.  The couple have made “Salute to Vienna” the largest simultaneously produced concert in North America.

“We are celebrating our 20th anniversary this time around,” Marion Glatz said in a telephone interview. “It is meant to make people think of a delightful, sophisticated, sparkling world,  somewhat like the annual Vienna New Year’s concert with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.  You are transported to a different world, where the idea is to make people feel good,  with a certain kind of style. It’s a form of total entertainment. The waltzes endure—they always have—and so does the music. There is, I think, especially today, when there seems to be so much trouble in the world, a special need for what this concert offers.”

The Glatz duo began with a single concert in Toronto in 1995, and the production spread like wild fire. “We were at the Kennedy Center before,” she said. “Now are [at the Strathmore] with this beautiful hall and music center. . . . Obviously, there’s a hunger for this kind of music and show.” 

The Strathmore “Salute to Vienna” will feature the Strauss Symphony of America, with Matthias Fletzberger conducting, and also features Viennese soprano Natalia Usdhakova, American tenor Brian Cheney and dancers from the Europaballett St. Polten & International Champion Ballroom Dances.  There will be vignettes from operas and operettas like “The Merry Widow,” “Das Fledermaus” and  other works, along with polkas and dances.

The couple is engaged with other productions, including “Bravissimo! Opera’s Greatest Hits,” “The Godfather Live,” the North American Tour of the Vienna Mozart Orchestra and others.

“In his time, Strauss was the biggest musician. Bigger than Elvis—and maybe the Beatles,” said Glatz, who is making sure that the music continues to create—if not eras—perfect afternoons and moments of good feeling.

Gary Tischler •

There’s going to be some folks that are going to cry foul when it comes to “Bright Star,” the folksy, new and pre-Broadway stage musical by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell. Sentiment—honest or otherwise—isn’t too popular with contemporary critics armed with sugar repellent these days.

When it comes to “Bright Star,” I’m not in that camp. If this be sugar, then give me some sugar.

“Bright Star,” which does indeed traffic in honest sentiment, fable-like story-telling, improbabilities, foundlings, homespun Americana-style music fueled by banjos, guitars and fiddles, attractive heroes and heroines, down-home small-town Southern types and a blissful embrace of a satisfying end to a nostalgia-doused story, seems in the old-fashioned telling and the sparkling playing and singing to be that rare bird with plumages so familiar that it seems brand new.

Now playing at the Eisenhower Theatre at the Kennedy Center through Jan. 10 before a planned Broadway run, “Bright Star” has a lot going for it, notably a notable star with a big Broadway star voice and demeanor in Carmen Cusack. (She was Nellie Forbush in a road production of “South Pacific” a few years back as well as the green witch in “Wicked.”)

Cusack stars as Alice Murphy, whom we first see as a tough-minded editor of a North Carolina literary magazine, appraising the works of a young writer just returned to his hometown from the war—World War II at that.  She finds his work has possibilities and admires his chutzpah for presenting a letter recommendation from Thomas Wolfe, the outsized North Carolina representative in the Great American Novelist Derby who had been dead for several years at the time.

The writer is Billy Cane who comes to find his mother has passed away.  He yearns to be a writer, uses dictionary and thesaurus words and writes with feeling and a poetic sensibility.  But this isn’t just Billy’s story—it’s also Alice’s who has a secret past that includes a teenage love affair with the son of a prominent banker in her home town.  There is a certain amount of predictability in this truth and consequences scenario, but its spun out with such panache, such energy, spurred on by songs and music by both Martin (an acclaimed banjo player as well as movie star and comic) and Brickell, a noted singer and song writer who’s also the wife of Paul Simon. 

The action takes place in North Carolina over the 1920s, 1930s and post-war America in a South that’s a kind of fable—no white sheets here or Jim Crow here, just small town folks trying to find themselves, live their lives, do what they’re meant to do, fall in love and find a measure of it somewhere, sometime, even if it takes some coincidental doing, and a long time. 

I say it’s a fable—because who could believe this story and who couldn’t want to believe it at the same time—but it’s an odd sort of fable nonetheless.  A band of musicians play the songs from inside a small house, which doubles as a store, home, almost anything at all, transporting music and musicians as if they were in a dance, which they sometimes are.  The songs drive the story, assess it, give it bounced and hope, and meaning, reveal character—“A Man’s Gotta Do” by the ostensible villain of the piece. The beat is bluegrass, folk, by reeling in memories of Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, the Seldom Scene, and the like. It’s music played and sung with great skill, especially by Cusack who sings the stirring and sweet “Sun’s Gonna Shine” and others.  A.J. Snively as Billy Cane and Paul Alexander Nolan make spirited and heroic figures.

“Bright Star” is especially striking and not a little startling because its heroes and heroines are literary types. Alice is a knowing, skillful editor of the type that existed in Southern literary magazines of the period as well as in New York, and Billy could pass for any number of Southern writer wannabes, including Thomas Wolfe himself.  Its subject—find yourself and  your identity—is played against the background of a South both rustic and literary at a time when the idea of Southern literature was no small thing—think of William Styron, Wolfe Allan Tate, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers to name a few. It’s not every day these writers are the table talk and story contents of a Broadway musical.

Robert Devaney • December 23, 2015

The Trees for Georgetown’s Sept. 24 Fall Fling was hosted by Tom Anderson and Marc Schappell at their updated and historic home at P Street, also known as the Bodisco House. Headed by Betsy Emes, Trees for Georgetown is celebrating its 26th years as a committee of the Citizens Association of Georgetown. The group provides maintenance services for trees in the oldest neighborhood in Washington, D.C., and it has planted more than 2,500 trees. [gallery ids="102204,131486,131469,131474,131445,131453,131461,131479" nav="thumbs"]

Robert Devaney •

Author Kitty Kelley celebrated the 100th anniversary of the birth of America’s greatest crooner by signing copies of her reissused 1986 book, “His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra,” with hundreds of her friends Dec. 9 at Ristorante i Ricchi on 19th Street NW.

“Who would’ve thought that we’d be here tonight celebrating the 100th birthday of Frank Sinatra?” said Kelley, who added that she was sued by the singer before she’d written a word. “The day he hit me with his $2 million lawsuit was the day I fully understood what the First Amendment was all about.” Writers’ and journalists’ groups stepped up to support her.

“For me, the best part of tonight is that the life story of a man with only 47 days of education before he dropped out of high school in Hoboken, New Jersey, will benefit Reading is Fundamental,” said Kelley, raising her champagne glass to toast both Ol’ Eyes and the First Amendment.

Chef Christianne Ricchi chose Italian immigrant food as light fare, ranging from sausages, mozzarella sticks to meatballs in spaghetti nests. And, yes, Sinatra dropped that lawsuit.
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Mary Bird • December 22, 2015

This year’s featured film was a special screening of Ron Howard’s “In the Heart of the Sea,” relating the true story of the whaler Essex which inspired Herman Melville to write “Moby Dick.” The evening began with an Asian buffet at Spices Dec. 9 before guests strolled across Connecticut Avenue to the Uptown Theater, where PBS Newshour’s Judy Woodruff emceed a program honoring Vicky Marchand, former president of Woodley House, and Kana Enomoto, Acting Administrator of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Since 1958, Woodley House has been a leader in innovative mental health care, helping more than 15,000 men and women on a pathway to recovery from crisis care to eventual supported independence in shared apartments.
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Georgetowner •

The 35th Annual Choral Arts Holiday Concert & Gala filled the Kennedy Center with song Dec. 14. Under the honorary patronage of Singapore Ambassador Ashok Mirpuri and Mrs. Gouri Mirpuri, the evening celebrated the 50th anniversary of Choral Arts and the 50th anniversary of the independence of the Republic of Singapore. The concert featured Singapore Youth Choir singers from Singapore in special arrangement with the embassy. Founded in 1965 by its artistic director emeritus Norman Scribner and led by artistic director Scott Tucker, the Choral Arts Society of Washington connects choral music to all Americans and partners with worldwide organizations to develop inspiring programs.
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Georgetowner •

The newly formed Washington Opera Society celebrated the holidays Dec. 11 at the Q St. Fine Art Gallery. The group’s executive director Michael J. Reilly spoke of the mission of programming older show music, operetta and lesser known opera as well as bringing students the magic of classical music. Between hors d’oeuvres and dinner Scott Beard conducted a program of holiday music and operatic favorites sung by Nicole Butler, Jesús Daniel Hernández, Kwangkyu Lee, Narda Munoz and Dariusz Ocetek. The 2016 season will showcase Gounod’s “Romeo et Juliette” and an evening of opera and Latin dancing under the stars.
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