Arts & Society

Mary Bird • January 16, 2015

The Humane Law Enforcement Officers, Animal Care and Control Officers and Humane Education team members of the Washington Humane Society (WHS) were honored at this year’s Sugar & Champagne Affair hosted by Chef Todd Gray and Ellen Kassoff Gray at the Ronald Reagan Building on Feb. 5. Canine guests enjoyed a Bark Bar as they accompanied their beaming humans to the general reception with sweets from DC’s top pastry chefs. The privileged ones came early to enjoy the exclusive VIP chef’s tasting room. Tommy McFly of 94.7 Fresh FM Radio emceed the festivities which directly benefit the animals and programs of the WHS. [gallery ids="101638,146004,145999,146019,146016,146013,146007" nav="thumbs"]

Mary Bird •

The Dana Tai Soon Burgess Dance Company, now in its 22nd anniversary season, presented Modern Dance Concert: Four By Burgess to an enthusiastic audience at Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater Feb. 7 – 8. The program included Homage, which Burgess created as choreographer-in-residence at the National Portrait Gallery in conjunction with the Dancing the Dream exhibition, and Relevant Elegy, commissioned by the National Gallery of Art as part of Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. Following the opening performance, Ambassador of Gabon Michael Moussa-Adamo hosted a reception where he extolled his country as “the last Eden” and said he will work with the State Department to bring the troupe to Gabon. [gallery ids="101640,145990,145985,145981,145977,145971,145968,145963,145959,145992" nav="thumbs"]

Mary Bird •

The Washington Ballet’s fourth annual benefit party, Noche de Pasión 2014 Colombia Tropical, rocked the Dupont Circle residence of Colombian Ambassador Luis Carlos Villegas and Mrs. Carmela de Villegas on Feb. 8. The evening supported Latino ballet dancers, scholarship students and The Washington Ballet Latino Dance Fund. The VIP reception featured a special dance performance with excerpts from the company’s recent Jazz/Blues Project. After an exotic Latin buffet, guests enjoyed the live music of Colombia’s Gregorio Uribe Big Band and Latin Grammy award nominee Adriana Lucia as they danced into the wee hours. [gallery ids="117063,117016,117023,117031,117037,117045,117069,117052,117057" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

When you watch actor Drew Cortese stalk the stage or stand and scan the audience for approval as the murderous Plantagenet King Richard III at the Folger Elizabethan Theatre, you’re almost for a moment tempted to avoid his eyes, lest he gives you that look that says, “You’re next.”

You could, of course, do like one audience member at the Robert Richmond-directed production of William Shakespeare’s “Richard III”: just bow down before the king or cheer him like any member of the groundlings. This is because you’re cajoled, invited, and encouraged to react and interact. It’s the most intimate, interactive “Richard III” that you’ll ever encounter in a lifetime, short of becoming one of his victims in real time. When the Duke of Buckingham, who’s been Richard’s greatest enablers in procuring the royal crown, asks him for his reward and Richard replies by saying “I am not in a giving mood,” you want to yell, “Run, Buckingham, run.”

If the folks at Synetic Theatre offer you silent Shakespeare, Richmond gives you tumultuous, up close and personal Shakespeare, a bang the drums loudly in your face, “Richard III.” Richmond basically had the genteel, front-and-center proscenium with two big pillars façade of the Elizabethan Theatre at the Folger Library renovated into a theater-in-the-round space, complete with spaces that open to receive the remains of murder victims as they are sent on their way, tumbling, struggling, defeated and breathless into a pit. The audience is quite literally on top of everyone. It is in the balcony and rings the square stage. A white stalking ground only occasionally populated by scenery, table or chair, as dark spaces open up to receive the corpses and victims.

This brings a quality to the play which it doesn’t always have. There’s a relentless, time-compressed pace here, compressing the action of what is historically at least five or more years into what seems like several days, and on stage, a couple of hours plus. Time doesn’t so much pass as race by as Richard seems in the end to finally run out of people to kill, murder, seduce, charm, manipulate or ground into bones.

There’s even a piquant in-the-news intimacy, provided by the fact that Richard’s body was found recently in the foundation of a parking lot in Leicester, England, bringing a double whammy of “He’s baaack” to the proceedings on stage.

He’s never been gone, really. The subject of Richard the evil king (or not) has always been up for grabs in historical debates—in novels (“We Speak No Treason”) and most recently in a rather lurid mini-series on Starz cable network, called “The White Queen,” which focuses on many of the women in the Wars of the Roses saga, a fight to the death for the crown of England between the York and Lancaster factions of the Plantagenets.

Shakespeare himself was not a disinterested party in this manner. It is his portrait of the murderous, evil Richard that many people think of as true, and he wrote during the reign of the Tudor Queen Elizabeth I, whose grandfather Henry VII (with a somewhat questionable claim to the throne) killed Richard III at Bosworth Field in 1485.

This Richard—as portrayed by Cortese (he was intense and watchable in the Studio Theatre’s production of “The M-F with the Hat”)—is a charmer, ruthless, even sociopathetic, like some royal serial killer who sweeps away everyone of his path to the throne. He doesn’t have horns, or a hump, or any serious deformity except a limp. All the unnatural stuff is in his voice and eyes. He can be hurt—in the end, he’s killed—but watch how easily he is wounded when one of the princes mocks him by imitating his limp. Most of the time he gets others to do his dirty work. With low-life assassins close to the throne and with orders on paper, hints and lies, the play—one by one—becomes de-peopled.

He’s capable of charm and has the power to bring people to his side—where power sits waiting, and he knows love. “Why Richard loves Richard,” he says at one point.

Mostly, he acts with a kind of self-appreciation and delight that is frightening. Here’s Anne, wife and daughter of enemies he’s killed, and he seduces her into becoming his wife. Here’s his brother Clarence, murdered on false orders. Here’s the nephews, declared illegitimate and murdered. Here’s Stanley and Hastings and Rivers. Sometimes, it almost seems as if proximity can do you in as easily as being a real or perceived threat.

One of the more interesting and powerful aspects of this play is the presence of the women. This is still relatively early Shakespeare before “Hamlet,” “The Tempest” or “Macbeth.” You can see the beginnings of the witches from “Macbeth,” when a quartet of the women gather together in a furious incantation of their sorrows. Julia Motyka as Elizabeth, Nanna Ingvarsson as the Duchess of York, Richard’s mother, Alyssa Wilmoth Keegan as Lady Anne and Naomi Jacobson as Lady Margaret make for a curse-like chorus. Jacobson especially rages like a witchy, ancestral queen who makes a grief-swollen necklace of loss out of every word she spouts.

This production is an engaging one—in the sense that it meets you head on. There’s no ignoring it or any danger of nodding off. Who knows but that Richard might be standing right next to you in the aisle with a death warrant?

— “Richard III” runs through March 9 at the Folger Elizabethan Theatre, 201 East Capitol St., SE.

View photos of the production by clicking on the photo icons below. (photos by Jeff Malet).
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Gary Tischler •

On so many levels, there’s just no other word for it: the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s production of Oscar Wilde’s most popular play, “The Importance of Being Earnest,” is delicious.

It sounds delicious. It looks delicious. Sometimes, you swear you think you’re sniffing flowers from a Victorian English garden, and that’s delicious, too.

This is a production for theatergoers who remember the importance of being Oscar Wilde and why we still pay attention to his writing, works and life. It’s Wilde at his most accessible.

Watching this production—with Keith Baxter, who knows his way around Wildean manners and manors—you get an odd, conflicting set of feelings. It’s a production that seems almost exotically removed from the way we live today, while at the same time it feels familiar as songs you danced to when you were young.

Sometimes, listening and watching the characters at home in their perfectly dressed and outfitted comfort zone of Victorian sunset, is almost like watching an authentic resurrection of an ancient civilization—sort of like the Mayans or Aztecs, minus the human sacrifice. At other times, the Wilde epigrams flow like a rippling stream of smart, wise daggers and darts aimed at the cash-anemic, land-and-title wealthy aristocrats, so consumed by the outward flash of manners, dress codes, pedigree and ritual. They’re like a crescendo of bon mots of vanity .

Many of the epigrams act as dialogue: “work is the curse of the drinking class” and “we should treat all the trivial things of life very seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality” are instantly familiar when spoken, and pertinent today.

We’re in good hands here with the direction by Baxter, who has directed dazzling productions of Wilde’s “An Ideal Husband” and “Lady Windemere’s Fan.” He has staged it in such a way—with the great help of costume designer Robert Perdziola and set designer Simon Higlett—that it feels like a fine-tuned three-act epic, even though it has two sets and a cast of only 11 actors.

But it has words, complete-sentence conversations and battles, spoken in ways that feel like another form of English entirely—and that would cover British English and American English. Surely not even in England do aristocrats speak quite in such a mannered, musical way in which the vowels wage a successful war on consonants and with each other, the o’s swamping the a’s in every skirmish, elongating like Plastic Man.

The story—the kind of story that allowed Wilde to be the bad boy of English high society-is the gilded stuff of farce where closet and bedroom doors are forever slamming, except that there are no closets and bedrooms. There is only a drawing room in London and a rose-rich garden in the countryside. So, instead of slamming doors, you have almost magical and quite unexpected appearances of characters causing havoc and silent screams.

We have two high-minded, extremely well-dressed friends, John or Jack Worthing and the impeccably named Algernon Moncrieff. Algernon is the scion of an aristocratic family, dominated by Lady Bracknell, one of Wilde’s greatest creations, played here with magnificent, steely, nose-up determination by Sian Phillips. Worthing, who lives in the country where he is the guardian of the fetching Cecily Cardew, passes himself off as a non-existent brother named Earnest (thus, the importance of). He can’t drop his disguise because the object of his affections, Gwendolen Fairfax, loves the sound of the name, much more than she might love, say John or Jack. She is also Lady Bracknell’s daughter, a hitch for Worthing, since she disapproves of him.

Meanwhile, Algernon also pretends to be Earnest and heads to the country where he encounters Cecily and the two become immediately smitten with each other. Whereupon, Worthing, then Gwendolyen, followed not much later by Lady Bracknell, arrive in the country. Throw in a pastor, a butler, and a governess, and you have a most delightful, farcical battle of the sexes and classes.

There is a reason of course why this play—as opposed to “Ideal” or the salacious and ground-breaking “Salome”—is Wilde’s most popular play. For one thing, it’s just about perfect in dealing with serious things in a frivolous way—there is no scene more delicious than when Gwendolyn and Cecily, straight-backed and steely, sit down to tea and cakes and muffins and size each other up. It’s a battle of powerful insincerities stated sweetly and with a touch of both sugar and bitters. It’s much the same as when Lady Bracknell measures Cecily as a lovely girl, and bashes her hair, her dress and so forth in devastating and perfunctory fashion. In those days, a woman couldn’t simply say I’m wearing Ralph Lauren, but was immediately spotted for being not quite up to stuff.

There’s also the problem of Worthing not really knowing who he is—as a baby, he was left in a train station in a handbag. The secret behind this little bit of problem is one of maneuvers which Shakespeare often used himself. It’s the kind of things where love is dropped in a box neatly tied with a bow, just waiting to be discovered and resolved.

The cast is letter-perfect, especially Anthony Roach as Algernon, who looks and acts like a refined sort of wastrel, whose stock in trade is a kind of nearly insufferable charm. The two young ladies—Vanessa Morosco as Gwendolen and Katie Fabel as Cecil make great high-spirited foils and sisters to each other. It’s also great to see Floyd King back in the WSTC company as the pastor, revealing once again how to turn a double take and reaction into an Olympian quadruple take.

“Earnest” was Oscar Wilde’s breakthrough play, his first that made the upper classes squirm and like it because they were being amused, even as they were being verbally assaulted. He became a high society darling, achieved fame, wealth and if not acceptance, a certain delicious, acceptable notoriety which lasted only until he was brought down by a relationship he had with Lord Alfred Douglas, which would ensue in suits and Wilde being sent to prison for “gross indecency.” He never again returned to his adopted homeland, to be a proper, aristocratic Englishman. He died in 1900 in Paris.

“The Importance of Being Earnest” is Wilde before all that—at the top of his game. He could say with no modesty, but great accuracy, that “I have nothing to declare but my genius.” And in “Earnest,” it’s a delicious and true declaration.

“The Importance of Being Earnest,” a Shakespeare Theatre Company production, is at the Lansburgh Theatre through March 2.
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Gary Tischler •

When you look at the length of “The Tallest Tree in the Forest”, the remarkable resurrection play, written and performed by Daniel Beaty in the Kreeger Theatre at Arena Stage—which runs two hours—you think two things at once.

It’s too long. It’s too short.

Beaty—singer, actor, playwright, author, educator—has taken on the task of presenting the remarkable and turbulent character, personality, life and times of Paul Robeson—as singer, actor, athlete, teacher, activist, political figure, and civil rights leader in a biographical piece of theater, densely populated by some 40 characters, all of them played by Beaty.

It’s an exhausting, sometimes steamrollering, experience for an audience, no matter what your level of experiential or personal attachment to the subject at hand. As such, it has the effect of feeling too long.

Yet, it’s also an exhilarating experience. It works as drama and works as a kind of wish that you knew more and want to know more. As a result, it also feels too short.

It’s a daunting task Beaty—who has connected with Arena before as performer and playwright—has set for himself because not only is he playing all the parts, somewhat like an actor doing a one-man “Hamlet”—but he is also portraying a redoubtable, giant figure in American cultural, political and civil rights history. Robeson and his amazing rise, all gifts blazing gloriously, his commitments to social justice for African Americans all in and all the way, require almost equal performance gifts on the part of the actor on stage. He has to have the range to play young Robeson, the great singer Robeson, the philandering Robeson, the roused, courageous and stubborn Robeson and old and dying Robeson.

That life of Robeson’s resonates on the stage during the commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday and the impending celebration of Black History Month. Before there was King and the March on Washington and the heroic, massive changes of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, there was Robeson. He himself called himself “the most famous African American in the world.” He was in the vanguard, a huge contradiction of a man, speaking out, singing out and speaking truth to power before there was ever such an imposing voice and man doing so.

Beaty, working with director Moises Kaufman (“The Laramie Project” “The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde”, and “33 Variations” among others) and his edgy Tectonic Theater Company Project, gives us the man in full, if not the total man.

Robeson, one should remember, grew up the son of a minister who was a former slave, was a high school star athlete and student-performer, got a scholarship to Rutgers University and was a football All-American there, became famous for his singing early on during the Harlem Renaissance, starred in two plays by Eugene O’Neill, including “The Emperor Jones,” was the first Jim singing “Old Man River”, took up the cause of civil right, confronted President Harry Truman on anti-lynching laws face to face, fell into the clutches of the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era, and ran afoul of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover for his stubborn embrace of Soviet Union policies.

That doesn’t even include Robeson’s troubled but long marriage to Eslanda “Essie” Goode, whom he married in 1921—she was confidante, manager, lover, wife. The relationship was often quarrelous and wounding. Robeson was a habitual philanderer and had many affairs notably with his Desdemona Uta Hagen in “Othello,” but the couple stayed together.

Somehow, Beaty manages to pull together—if not always in focus—the many strands of Robeson’s overpowering personality and gifts, especially when singing a number of songs that range from “Get on Board Lil’ Chillun’,” “Go Down Moses,” “Great Day,” “Go Down, Moses” and many others. The voice is not necessarily Robeson’s (check out Robeson’s “Ol Man River” on the Web), but it’s supple, more rangy and affective in its own way, striving for the grandeur of Robeson. Nevertheless, it’s in his characterizations that Beaty really shines—we get Truman, civil rights leader Mary Bethune McLeod, who dubbed him “The Greatest Tree in the Forest”—Robeson’s father and others. So effective is in a blistering argument between Robeson and Essie that you feel for her, literally, before you remember that you’re listening to a voice, not seeing a woman.

Robeson—who believed with all his gifts and heart that the artist should be an activist, a fighter against slavery and for freedom and justice —seemed sometimes willfully inclined towards tragedy. His support of Stalin’s Soviet Union even after he discovered that Stalin was murdering and imprisoning Jewish intellectuals goes beyond stubbornness, it’s a clinging to a good principle in defense of evil, a kind of forgiveness he did not apply to his own country. Robeson suffered for his principles as well as mistakes. HIs passport was taken away, thus robbing him of his livelihood singing worldwide. There was a deliberate effort to erase him from history on the part of Hoover and the government.

There are harrowing scenes in this play. His confrontation with Truman on the issue of rising instances of lynching in the South is conducted against a stage background of increasing shadows of men hanging from trees and his interview with a noted Jewish poet in the Soviet Union is a kind of dance of tragic tension.

You walk away with several feelings. You feel the freshness of the material, remember references and music, and wonder from which context members of the audience at any given time are experiencing this resurrection of Paul Robeson. And you walk out feeling, as if you’ve been at a fragmented feast, daunting, but also richer than expected. And you walk away hungry for more.

“The Tallest Tree in the Forest” runs at the Kreeger Theater at Arena Stage through Feb. 16.

Gary Tischler •

There’ll be over a 150 plays and shows to choose from. Here’s a look at a few we thought might be interesting. Making choices at the Fringe is not always a rational process of course, but here goes. Sometimes the titles and descriptions are worth the ride.

DATELINE: MACBETH (Quattro Gatti Theatre Company) and MACBETH; THE INSTRUMENTS OF DARKNESS (The Rude Mechanicals). Two very different takes on the Scottish play. “Dateline” takes place in a tropical setting, with this hook: “As funny as it is macabre, it goes TV mysteries one better.”

ANTIGONE (The Wandering Theatre Company) and BITCH: A PLAY ABOUT ANTIGONE (Naked Theatre Company). When’s the last time you had a chance to see not one but two plays about Sophocles’ ancient Greece heroine who defies her father and pays for it. Not ever, except at the Fringe.

THE FEVER (Patrick O’Brien, director). O’Brien’s “Underneath the Lintel” was a big hit at last year’s Fringe, and now the director brings Wallace Shawn’s horrific and provoking play to the Fringe.

WISTARIA (The Wistaria Project). “A traveling meeting that questions our historical past and present through a hallucinatory amalgam of U.S. texts, traditional song and actions mysterious and banal.” We like it because we have no idea what this meant but it sounds interesting.

THE OLD MAN NEVER LET IT GO (Hector J. Reynoso). A visual adaptation of “The Old Man and the Sea,” with music and dance, starring Reynoso. Hemingway lives!

CABARET XXX: EVERYBODY FCKING DIES (Pinky Swear Producitos). The life and death of Femme Fatales and other matters. Great title.

REPORT TO AN ACADEMY (Scena Theatre). An ape named Red Peter presents a thesis on his life in captivity to a scientific academy. From Robert McNamara’s Scena Theatre.

DISTRICTLAND (Bucharest Inside the Beltway). For the Millennial in your life, a satire and play about starting your career in the District. “Spoiler: You are Not Your LinkedIn Profile”

CONTRAFACT OF FREEDOM (Hunger and Thirst Theatre Collective). We are always interested in anything to do with Francis Scott Key. The Star-Spangled Banner: American history’s most unlikely origin story. By Alex Pappas.

DRACULA: A LOVE STORY (Wry Press). Written by DC Theatre Scene critic Tim Treanor, an intensely romantic take on the all-knowing, ever present vampire of our times. Directed by Christopher Henley with Lee Ordeman.

CHESAPEAKE (The Edge of the University Players 2). This magical realist fable is by Lee Blessing, one of America’s best and most evocative playwrights. A tale about a New York performance artist, a firebrand conservative Southern politician and a Chesapeake Bay Labrador retriever.

MEDEA’S GOT SOME ISSUES (No Rules Theatre Company and Spain arts & culture). Classy Babe turned ancient Greek temptress tells all. Featuring Lisa Hodsoll.

FEISTY OLD JEW (Charlie Varon). A one-man show about Bernie, 83, who hates yoga studios, S6 coffee, young tech millionaires and what they’re doing to San Francisco.

THE MONSTER SONGS (Dr. Dour & Peach) Dr. Dour sings and plays 10-string guitar. Peach plays cello and banjo and they sing and tell the personal stories of lovesick mummies, giant lizards and bargain-hunting zombies. Featuring Toby Mulford (composer) and Rachel Spicknall Mulford.

It’s back.

The theater festival that anticipates changing times and has become a hot bed for everything new in performance art, the Capital Fringe Festival, returns for 18 days of “uninhibited and creative performances” at over 15 venues round the city, July 10-27.

Tickets are already on sale at the Fort Fringe Box Office at 607 New York Ave., near the Washington Convention Center.
This festival will mark the last year Capital Fringe will be headquartered at this location. The good news is that it will move into a new space at 1358 Florida Avenue currently occupied by the Connersmith Gallery.

This year’s venues include a variety of locations in the continually changing downtown world. Performances will be held at several spaces at the Atlas Performing Arts Center, located in the new and hot H Street Corridor area; Caos on F; the Bedroom at Fort Fringe; the Baldacchino Tent Bar; the Dupont Circle Q Street Exit; DC Reynolds Bar; The Shop at Fort Fringe; Gearbox on 7th Street; the Gallery and Main Stage at the Goethe Institut; Hillyer Art Space; Jet Hair Designs; the Martin Luther King Library; Mountain at Mount Vernon United Methodist Church; Plush Beauty Box; the Fridge; The Source Theater; Union Stylus; the Warehouse; and the Capitol Reflecting Pool.

Fringe, under the leadership of founder, president and chief executive Julieanne Brienza, has continually expanded the boundaries of theater and performing arts. The Capital Fringe Festival is one of many around the world, a tradition of cutting edge theater that began in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Today, you’re likely to run across a mixture of drama and dance, classical plays and vaudeville acts, stand up comedians, puppets, opera and drama, shows that include Twitter and Facebook, straight forward dramas and not so straight forward plays, musical acts, site-specific plays, one-man and one-woman shows and much more. This is a festival for every generation.

Mary Bird •

“Southern Celebrations Traditions Handed
Down” was the theme of this year’s Washington
Winter Show at the Katzen Arts Center at American
University which began with a welcome to sponsors,
benefactors and designers followed by a
gala patrons and young collector reception on
Jan. 9. The next day was highlighted by a lecture
“Exploring the Charleston Kitchen” with awardwinning
authors Matt and Ted Lee and a tasty
Southern picnic lunch. On Saturday, Julia Reed
spoke of “Ham Biscuits, Hostess Gowns, and Other
Southern Specialties.” This year’s loan exhibit
was “Celebrations at Stratford Hall Family, Food,
and Festivities.” Forty-five premier American and
European dealers participated in the show that benefited
the Bishop John T. Walker School for Boys,
THEARC and the Founders Board of St. John’s
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Robert Devaney •

The District Council’s Elizabeth Webster — staffer for at-large council member Vincent Orange,
who is an advocate of small businesses in D.C. and film and TV production — was in Los Angeles
Jan. 12 for the Golden Globes and the many parties around town that included the W Magazine party
at Chateau Marmount, the “12 Years a Slave” party at the Mondrian, the BAFTA party at the Four
Seasons and post-award parties at the Beverly Hilton. Webster’s and Joyce Chow’s dresses were by
Sue Wong; their friend and actor Vincent De Paul wore a tuxedo, designed by Judah Estreicher at
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Robert Devaney •

The Fours Seasons Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue was especially full of Christmas cheer Dec. 16, as the seventh annual Georgetown Jingle — a benefit for Medstar Georgetown University Hospital’s pediatric oncology programs — expanded its festivities for two parties in Seasons restaurant. The hotel lobby already held Christmas trees, created by a designer for a special patient at the hospital.

Hosted by Fours Seasons and Washington’s interior design community, Jingle rang out for the children first in the afternoon with “Winter Wonderland” and then for the adults with “Pamala Live!” after 7 p.m.

Children met the likes of Ironman and Captain America, enjoyed sweets from Georgetown Cupcake, Dolci Gelati and Paul Bakery. Of course, the star of the day was Santa Claus, who arrived courtesy of TTR Sotheby’s International Realty.

With tasting from such restaurants as Bourbon Steak, Rouge 24, Proof, Bibiana Osteria Enoteca, Taco Bamba, Banolero, Katsuya Fukishima, the Source and the Blue Moon, the evening’s fun was highlighted by chanteuse Pamala Stanley with her versions of disco and current pop hits — along with a wide-ranging silent auction that included jewelry, a wine collection, artwork and autographed football helmets.

Washington-area Toyota dealers, courtesy of Darcars Automotive Group, donated a Toyota Prius c as the grand prize for the raffle drawing.

Georgetown Jingle benefits the pediatric programs at Medstar Georgetown University Hospital. The funds raised by the 2011 Jingle have established a pediatric bone marrow transplant unit in collaboration with Duke University Hospital, funded unique patient rooms that inspire and support the healing process and funded the special initiatives for the Childhood Cancer Survivorship Program.

The funds raised by the 2012 Georgetown Jingle will continue to support the operational and training facilities for the Pediatric Bone Marrow Transplant Unit. This year, the event expands its support to include the growth of social worker and educator support in the pediatric palliative care program to provide the highest quality of life for children and families throughout the course of illness. The programs are directed by Aziza Shad, M.D., one of the region’s most respected oncologists.

Over the past six years, Georgetown Jingle has raised $1.5 million for these pediatric programs. The charitable event helps spotlight childhood cancer, the leading cause of death among American children between infancy and age 15. The 2012 event chair was Donna Shank, the mother of Daniel Shank-Rowe, a Medstar Georgetown University Hospital patient ambassador and cancer survivor.

Each year, Washington’s interior designers festoon a total of 17 holiday-themed trees and vignettes in the lobby of the Four Seasons. Arlington-based designer Michael Roberson was the 2012 design chair. Sandi Hoffman of Sandi R. Hoffman Special Events created the majestic centre tree in the Hotel lobby. The theme for her centre tree is “The Shaker Abecedarious” based on the 1880s children’s alphabet book, “A Peaceable Kingdom,” by Alice Provensen.

Walk through the Four Seasons’s lobby and delight to the work of the other 2012 participating designers with these themes:

1. Barry Dixon Interiors (Barry Dixon) — Holiday Punch, a Taste of the Holidays

2. Sandra Meyers Interior Design (Sandra Meyers) — Bells Will Be Ringing

3. Darlene Solutions (Diane Darling) — Martini Tree

4. JDS Designs (David Herchik and Richard Looman) — Santa’s Candy Land

5. Samantha Friedman Interior Design (Samantha Friedman) — Lego Tree

6. Chistopher Patric Interiors (Christopher Patrick & Kaitlyn Andrews-Rice) — Season’s First Snow

7. Alter Urban, LLC (John Coplen) — Winter Wonderland Dollhouse

8. Case Design (Allie Mann) — Suess-tacular

9. Patrick J. Baglino Jr. Interior Design (Patrick J. Baglino, Jr.) — Journey to Oz and Back

10. The Velvet Frog (Debbie Henry) — Believe

11. Dolci Gelati & JDS Designs, Inc. (Nick Beck Anastasia Kessler) — La Dolce Vida

12. Corcoran College of Art & Design ASID ( Kate Roberson and Whitney Osterhout) — Deconstructed Textile Tree

13. Barnes Vanze Architects (Miriam Dillon and Evelyn Smith) — Festival of Italian Torches

14. Darlene Molnar LLC & ETSK Design (Darlene Molnar and Sara Knowles) — Storybook Tree

15. The Queen Bee (Allison Priebe Brooks, Paul Baldwin and Don Patron) — 12 Days of Christmas

16. Housework Interiors (Dee Thornton) — Paint the Holidays
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