Arts & Society

Mary Bird • July 16, 2015

The current exhibition at Hillwood estate, Museum & Gardens, featuring 70 years of fashion from the collection of Marjorie Merriweather Post, launched June 2 with a celebration of cocktails, exhibition preview and dinner on the Lunar Lawn. Post’s granddaughter and Hillwood’s president emerita ellen Macneille charles, current president nancy Appleby, and executive director Kate Markert spoke. Watching her grandmother dress was “better than any movie,” charles said. This stunner runs through the end of the year and was curated by Howard Vincent Kurtz.
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Gary Tischler •

It’s 10th anniversary time for the Capital Fringe Festival, the annual summer performing arts festival that keeps on moving and keeps on staying.

Ever since the Capital Fringe Festival—which runs from July 9 to August 2 — appeared in and around Washington ten years ago as one of the many offsprings of the Edinburgh, Scotland, Fringe Festival, it has made yearly strides to become something more than a fringe thing.   It has become, by now, an imbedded, always fresh, always surprising enterprise, part of the Washington performing arts community, and was so rewarded with a Helen Hayes Award not so long ago.

Every year, sometimes by the skin of its teeth, the Fringe presents its gaudy package of theater and performing arts baubles, the work of a large, eclectic group of theater and performing arts artists and groups from Washington and all over the country.  Here are the classics reworked, new one-man and one-woman shows about everything under the sun, bawdy comedy,  clowns, new plays with new views done in new styles, music, dance, burlesque and vaudeville. 

Surprise is always the key element, but there is a certain spirit involved, too—an almost breath-taking inviting tolerance of the different, the new, the never-heard-of before.  In the past, the venues have spread all over the place, downtown, in Southwest, in bars, churches, art spaces, adding another eclectic layer to the proceedings.  

Under the leadership of co-founder  and president and chief executive officer Julianne Brienza, the festival has moved to at first survive, then branch out, preserve, and moves forward, and the festival has managed to do so with aplomb.  This year, it seems almost permanent after the festival purchased a former gallery space as its headquarters in Northeast Washington at 1358 Florida Ave., NE, which serves as the Logan Fringe Art Space, and one of the venues (actually two, since there are two theaters in the space) for the festival.

With that move, the festival—game and big as ever with 129 productions spread out across three areas plus additional venues—has became a part of the locus of where a good chunk of D.C. change is taking place, which might seem perfect for the possible audience of the festival, a younger-skewing audience in search of the irreverent, the informal, the brand new, the amusing and serious, which might speak to the times we lives in and the upcoming weeks as well.

Essentially, the Fringe Festival will be centered around three neighborhoods—Trinidad, Brookland and H Street NE or the H Street Corridor. These are all burgeoning, rapidly changing and culture and restaurant-bustling neighborhoods, in fairly close proximity to each other.  Trinidad will haves the Fringe Festival headquarters, including Trinidad Theatre. Other venues include the Tree House Lounge at 1006 Florida Ave., NE, Jenks & Son at 910 Bladensburg Road NE, the Gilbert C. Eastman Studio Theatre at Gallaudet University, 800 Florida Ave. NE and the Playground also at Gallaudet University.

Brookland venues will include the Morris & Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation Theater at the Dance Place, at 3225 8th St. NE, the Hyman M. Perlo Studio at Dance Place, the Brookland Artspace Lofts Studio at 3305 8th St NE, banished? ARTillery (that’s how it is written), at 716 Monroe St. NE and Ward Hall at Catholic University.

H Street NE, where the trolley car is still not operating in a hot neighborhood, Fringe Festival are centered around the Atlas Performing Arts Center at 1333 H St. NE, sites of many Fringe performances last year, and at the Argonaut at 1433 H St. NE and Gallery O on H, at 1354 H St. NE.

Other venues around the District include the D.C. Columbia Arts Center in Adams Morgan, the Mead Theatre Lab downtown at Flashpoint, the Japanese American Memorial at New Jersey Avenue, Louisiana Ave and D St. NW, the Anacostia Arts Center at 1231 Good Hope Road SE and the Pinch at 3548 14th St. NW.

According to the festival website, there are 129 performing arts group schedule to do their thing, many of them are from Washington, D.C., Virginia and Maryland, but not exclusively. Surprise is probably the order of the day, but the name of the groups and some of their offerings might give you a hint of things to come—plus there are musical offerings at Fringe with late night cabaret and a music in the library program.

Here’s a dash of what’s up thoroughly at random:

“Belle and the Beasties” from the Actors Repertory Theatre; “Vanek Unleashed,” Alliance for New Theatre.org; “Sonata: The Naked Project” from Annexus; “Augustus the Sissy” from Dana Galloway; “It’s a Circus Out There,” the Federal Theatre Project;  “District of Cara” from Local Yogurt Productions; “Neighborhood 3:  Requisition of Doom” from the new Molotov Theatre Company; a Shakespeare sendup called “To Err is Falstaff” from Falstaff production and “The Winter’s Tale” from We Happy Few Productions; “The Second Coming of Joan of Arc” from Theatre Prometheus; “The Giant Turnip” from Beech Tree Puppets; “From Seven Layers to a Bikini Top in Less Than Five Hours” from Andrea Schell from California; “Bond, An Unauthorized Parody” from Tasty Monster Productions; “Dancing Ophelia” from Trajectory Dance Project; “Wombat Drool” from Uncle Funsy Productions; “The Last Burlesque” from Pinky Swear Productions of Virginia;  “The Life of King John: The Reprisal” from the Rude Mechanicals of Virginia. 

That’s just a few from a list of 129.  The rest you should be able to find by visiting the Capital Fringe Festival, along with ticket prices—reasonable, more than, times, locations, information about the shows, principals, and so on. And on.
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Gary Tischler • July 2, 2015

Robert Kellett van Leer, most recently managing director of the heralded European arts consulting firm Wonderbird, will fill the newly created position of senior vice president of artistic planning at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Following other recent hirings, van Leer, who has dual American and Dutch citizenship, will complete Kennedy Center President Deborah F. Rutter’s senior management team. He begins work July 6.

“Robert brings a wealth of multidisciplinary arts experience and creative leadership to the table, and I am excited to partner with him and our creative curatorial team of administrators and artistic leaders to shape the artistic vision for the center in the years to come,” said Rutter. “His commitment and innovative approach to the artistic endeavor will build and expand on our mission to provide innovative programming that reflects the core of John F. Kennedy’s legacy.”

At Wonderbird, based in London, van Leer did strategic cultural consulting with preeminent performing-arts and visual-arts organizations and philanthropic corporate clients. Previously, he was managing director of Nederlands Dans Theater, one of the world’s leading dance companies, where he increased revenues threefold, managed a budget of $15 million and supervised a staff of 110.

Earlier, he was head of music at London’s Barbican Centre, transforming its concert hall into a creative center for the commission, curation and presentation of global music in a multi-arts context. He also held positions with Wigmore Hall in London and Lincoln Center in New York.

“To work with the extraordinary artists and experienced, talented programming professionals at the Center across such a wide spectrum of the performing arts is a particular delight for me,” said van Leer. “Working together alongside our colleagues in education, as well as partners old and new, will provide the creative opportunities to manifest the voice of the Center for a new era while respecting the original vision.”

Mary Bird •

Founded in 2009, the charity, We Will Survive Cancer, involves a group of concerned family, friends and colleagues who have experienced the devastation cancer inflicts on the families of its victims. WWSC cares for basic needs such as grocery shopping, transportation to medical appointments, babysitting services and more. On Aug. 19, Morso’s Pablo Henrich and Peter Stepanek, photographer and owner of Skyhighart Photography, held a fundraiser at Morso. An attractive crowd enjoyed the new Georgetown venue’s great appetizers and networked for a deserving cause. [gallery ids="99290,99291,99292,99293,99294,99295" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler • July 1, 2015

The singer-songwriter-memoirist-performer-author-rocker Storm Large is a sort of gaudy cruise ship that has sailed exotic, dangerous and, naturally, stormy musical (and probably personal) waters for a number of years. Large — her given name is Susan Storm Large — is a star to anybody who’s encountered her, and a legend in places like San Francisco and Portland,
Oregon, where she lives and performs.

But Storm Large and Frank Sinatra? The combination hardly seems likely for someone who quite successfully fronted a rockish-punkish-and-beyond band called The Balls (as well as other bands including “Storm and Her Dirty Mouth”), who was a contestant on “Rock Star Supernova,” who blogs on her website in blunt and honest terms and has written and performed her harrowing, affecting memoir “Crazy Enough.” She is an American original.

But then, so was Sinatra. Large will be part of “Let’s Be Frank: The Songs of Frank Sinatra,” organized by NSO Pops director Steve Reineke. The tribute will feature Reineke and piano man Tony DeSare conducting — and what Reineke terms his own “rat pack” of swell singers, including Ryan Silverman and Frankie Moreno, in addition to Large. The show will be presented in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall June 5 and 6 at 8 p.m.

“I always liked the whole idea of the Rat Pack and Frank Sinatra, all those kinds of very cool atmospherics,” Large said in a telephone interview. “I have an enormous amount of respect for him as a singer. I think he was the kind of guy who was always prepared. He trusted the lyrics, he made sure that he got the emotional truth of the songs. That way, his approach was blue-collar, which is where he came from.”

It’s not the first time Large has been at the Kennedy Center, a huge venue when compared to places like the popular Joe’s Pub in New York and clubs in Portland and San Francisco. She was here in 2012 with the eclectic pop group Pink Martini and the NSO Pops, performing to sold-out audiences.

“She was remarkable on that occasion, and she’s a remarkably talented singer,” Reineke said of Large. “Back then, she had to appear, on very short notice, for the group’s lead singer China Forbes who was ill.”

“She’s a fantastically gifted singer, and she’s grown so much—from rock to jazz to cabaret,” Reineke added. “She’s brave and tough and very sweet.”

She’ll be singing duets, songs like “Come Rain or Come Shine,” as well as solo numbers, notably “My Way” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”

“I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” by Cole Porter song is about obsessive love. “I don’t do it like most people. It’s usually upbeat, confident, buoyant. Mine is a little different — it’s more like you have this big love that you can’t get rid of. It’s like you can’t stop thinking about it. It’s like a woman who sits in her car in the rain watching her lover. She’s a little like a stalker.”

“I’ve Got You Under My Skin” is also part of “Le Bonheur,” a remarkable album which she produced last year with Robert Taylor and musicians James Beaton, Scott Weddle, Greg Eklund and Matt Brown. It’s almost a natural flow from her rocker days to Pink Martini to this album, which astonishes with its selection of songs, from Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart tunes to “Unchained Melody,” a longing song which the Righteous Brothers turned into a megahit, “Saving All My Love for You” by the iconoclastic Tom Waits and the charming, puffy-go-lightly “Satellite of Love” by Lou Reed.

There are also two songs written by Large herself, “Stand Up For Me,” a straight-up inspirational anthem, and the moving “A Woman’s Heart,” somewhere between a love song and a rueful lament.

Songwriting is yet another aspect of this queen of creative multitasking. She’s a great storyteller, intelligent and cogent in her opinions, awfully funny and often profane.

Large comes from Southborough, Massachusetts, attended a famous private school, where her father Henry was a history teacher and football coach, and went to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. “I think sometimes my parents weren’t sure when I went out the door where I was going — to school or running away with the circus.”

You can track her career and persona erratically on the Internet. On YouTube, watch her in a club in Mill Valley doing not just the song but the lead-up to “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” a 1983 super-hit which shows off Large’s playful, rocker side, as she tells the story of a song written on a napkin. She’s a natural-born clown; she loves making faces. And she’s hard to ignore as a presence, a dazzling, six-foot, hard-striding blond woman whose voice is as big as her shadow.

“I think you grow up a little as you go along, the things you can do, what you want to explore,” she said. “You go deeper into the music. You live your life more. I’m 46 now. You can’t do 300 shows a year all of the time.”

Listening to her talk, reading hair-raising parts of her memoir, seeing her on YouTube and listening to that voice, you get how she relates to and is at home in the deepest part of Frank Sinatra’s songs.

Her voice — like her walk and talk — is rangy, and in its push to put emotional truth out there is marked by her persona, her experience of the sex, drugs and rock-and-roll life, as well as the highs and lows of vocalizing. Her voice really gets up there, but it’s hard to say whether it can break a wine glass. For sure, when Susan Storm Large sings, she can break your heart.

Jeff Malet • June 30, 2015

EagleBank and Georgetown Media Group presented the 2nd Annual Georgetowner Holiday Benefit and Bazaar at the historic George Town Club Nov. 17, 2011. Attendees were able to enjoy an array of cocktails by Beam Global Spirits, a marvelous menu compliments of The George Town Club & a fabulous gift bag, while browsing for holiday gifts at unique vendors’ booths, featuring local Georgetown businesses. [gallery ids="100392,112435,112307,112426,112317,112327,112337,112347,112357,112367,112377,112387,112397,112407,112297,112444,112227,112498,112237,112489,112247,112480,112257,112471,112267,112462,112277,112453,112287,112417" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler • June 24, 2015

When directors and designers come face to face with the daunting task of staging a piece of classical theatre—a “Hamlet,” or a “Lear,” the world of Falstaff or the Spanish classics, or a Moliere—the temptation, even the urge to contemporize, to make relevant a work from the past is often irresistible.

That’s certainly almost an imperative at work in the production of “Tartuffe,” Moliere’s most famous, and perhaps most difficult, play now at the Shakespeare Theater Company.

Ostensibly in the lists as a comedy—as are all of the 17th century playwrights works—“Tartuffe,” more than most has its dark sides, it’s frustrating, “good” people behaving idiotically. And it’s “bad” people behaving far worse than you might image. If Tartuffe, the most nearly savage of Moliere’s villains in his avarice, his heartless manipulations and will to power, is a monster, then Orgon, the good and disturbingly pious man is almost his equal as Tartuffe’s enabler. He’s a monster of thick-headedness pinned to his own sense of wisdom and authority that is tyrannical to a fault.

“Tartuffe” has been done often at the regional theater level, but never by the Washington Shakespeare company, and strictly speaking this is a co-production with South Coast Repertory and the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, directed and designed by Dominique Serrand, who is co-artistic director of “The Moving Company.”

This production has already been staged elsewhere in California at Berkeley Rep, for one, where it received a lot of critical acclaim. Contemporary relevance is the goal here, but what often happens in high concept productions of the classics is a kind of tug-of-war between style over substance. This “Tartuffe,” it seems to me, is a kind of a draw, wherein the style of the play, a barrage of contradictory intentions, is trying to become the substance of the play.

“Tartuffe” is about a lecherous, primal and almost gifted grafter, who sets his sights on the wealthy Orgon, the very proud and pious head of a family that includes servants, a marriageable daughter, his younger (and smarter) and beautiful wife, a brother, and sundry others. Tartuffe pretends to be the most pious of pious men, even more than Orgon himself, pretending to want nothing while trying to take everything. Orgon, smitten hopelessly with Tartuffe, promises him his daughter, his money, his house, all except his wife Elmire, whom Tartuffe pursues relentless and with oily passion.

Proceedings proceed to the brink of disaster as Orgon is on the verge of losing his daughter, his house and his wealth.

Serrand has approached this material as a kind of horror story, focusing on religious fanaticism, social tyranny and hypocrisy, where people are always on the move, posing or re-arranging themselves or disappearing upstairs or downstage. There is a lot to like in his approach—the slapstick set pieces in the first act are loud little mini-silent movies in their comedic effects.

But often, this production seems to trying to have its cake and save it for a rainy day. It starts out in rhyming intonations, then drops into more modern speech with occasional bouts of rhyming. There seems to be no particularly good reason to do this.

It’s difficult to escape Moliere’s world of 1643, except of course for the fact that Moliere deals in archetypes—his plays are about and satirize quack doctors, misers, meddling heads of families, misanthropes, frauds, tyrants and religious zealots. They are with us always, and are quite easily recognized. Moliere’s particular gift was one of dexterity in the absolutist world of Louis XIV—he could attack religious zealotry, but not the church, he could satirize social tyranny, but not the king.

Steven Epp as Tartuffe is a self-assured rat—he’s sexy, confident and sly—trying to seduce Ermine, he flips open a breast plate to bare his chest, much like an eager knight of old popping a cod piece. He’s the kind of religious tyrant who talks about blasphemy even while being casually blasphemous. In one of the more chilling lines, he says to Elmire while trying to straddle her: “I can consecrate any evil I do.” Sofias Jean Gomez, who was the sprite Ariel in “The Tempest” at STC last year, makes a temptation out of Elmire for almost any man, even in her deception, she never stoops to pretending to be stupid.

The Orgon house is a curious affair—bright and full of light, it resembles the abode of a Calvinist trying to be stylish.

Tartuffe always has at his side, or in corners or passageways two assistants, oily, creepy men who catch small birds and snuff them out just to show that they can. There is in this house always a threat, of spying, of being caught, of any horrible thing at all. This may echo our own age of no privacy whatsoever.

You can see just how carefully Moliere had to tread by the way he ends things. Orgon and his family are saved by the king, or his agent, who recognizes Tartuffe for what he is. I saw one production—years ago at Arena Stage— in which the king arrived by helicopter in all his Sun King glory to save.

Serrand adds his own touch by having Tartuffe marched off whipped and carrying a cross, perhaps smiling. Could it be that Tartuffe has been Tartuffed?

The play, in fact, ends in a confusion of panic. Too much has happened for the day (if not the play) to be saved.

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Carolyn Landes • June 22, 2015

The Capitol Hill Club hosted the Fourth Annual Memorial Day Kick-off and Veterans Tribute, honoring veterans and veterans in Congress and benefiting K9s for Warriors, a nonprofit dedicated to providing service canines to warriors suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury or trauma as a result of military service post 9/11.

Emceed by CBS News Chief White House Correspondent Major Garrett, the May 19 reception was attended by several Members of Congress, including Rep. Mike Coffman (R-Colo.), Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.) and Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.), all veterans, all of whom addressed the audience.

Zinke, a freshman congressman who served as a Navy SEAL, from 1985 to 2008, called today’s servicemembers “magnificent,” highlighting the “enormous sacrifice these men and women are making every day.”

Citing the hostile reception that many U.S. warriors received upon returning home from the Vietnam war, Coffman, who possesses 20 years of combined service to the Army, Army Reserve, Marines and Marine Reserve, urged the crowd of supporters and politicians to “make sure our veterans that are returning home today are never treated like those returning from Vietnam.”

Rangel, a recipient of a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for his service in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, prompted attendees when speaking to vets, “Instead of just saying thank you, say ‘Can I help you? How are they treating you?’ ”

The attention being paid to veterans’ mental health and wellbeing upon returning home from combat is relatively new, when compared to America’s lengthy wartime history. “When you leave the service,” Rangel said, “they teach you to be proud, but you can be lonely.”

Loneliness, depression, substance abuse and other problems of physical and mental health are all symptoms of PTSD that some veterans encounter upon returning home from military service. As greater recognition of the mental effects of war has come about in recent years, organizations like K9s for Warriors have come to the aid of afflicted servicemen and women.

Captain Jason Haag, a Purple Heart recipient who served three tours of combat duty leading Marine Corps troops across Iraq and Afghanistan, is a recipient of a K9s for Warriors dog named Axel. Haag gave a moving speech to the audience, crediting Axel with saving him from the despair he felt upon returning home after his third tour of duty. “Axel awakens me from my nightmares still today,” said Haag. He shared that he has lost nine friends to post-war suicide – a startling number, greater than those he has lost on the battlefield.

Haag shared that K9s for Warriors has a 100-percent success rate and in 2016 will save 200 veterans’ lives, as well as 200 dogs’ lives – 95 percent of the organization’s dogs are rescued from shelters. Axel was just two days away from being euthanized before being saved by the program.

Special guest, retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Steve Ritchie and the only fighter pilot ace of the Air Force since Korea, was honored. Ritchie received the Congressional Gold Medal the following day, an award bestowed by Congress and one of the highest civilian awards in the U.S.

After Ritchie’s speech, guests delighted over a performance of “O, America!” by Irish tenor Anthony Kearns and regaled while sipping spirits courtesy of the Beer Institute, the Wine Institute and Beam Suntory.
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