Inauguration Night Party at Café Milano
• August 15, 2013

Gina Adams, Senior Vice President of Government Affairs for FedEx Corporation; Bob Johnson, Founder and Chairman of the RLF Companies, and Café Milano owner Franco Nuschese invited friends to celebrate the inauguration of President Barack Obama on Jan. 21. Franco recalled that the restaurant opened the night that Bill Clinton was elected to his first term. It is a premier gathering spot for leaders and personalities from many spheres and was privileged to be the site for Michelle Obama’s 49th birthday when the president and first lady recently dined with friends in the upstairs wine room. [gallery ids="102582,119792,119787,119775,119768,119745,119761,119753,119782,119798" nav="thumbs"]

Zach Appelman Stuns as Henry V at the Folger
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Zach Appelman is a lot of things.

He’s a native Californian, an actor, and a onetime student. He’s even got a black belt in karate.

On his website you see a group of photos as well as his official photo, reddish brown hair, intense, clear blue eyes. The other photos are roles he’s played, people he’s been, a man in an 18th-century wig, a World War I soldier (Sgt. Fine in the Broadway production of “War Horse”), a bare-chested, muscled guy in mid- scream it seems, a regular guy in a checkered shirt, a studious-looking man in a 19th-century coat, a tense man in uniform, a laughing man, mouth wide open.

In his younger years, he has played many parts, been many people—Biff, one of Willy Loman’s sons in “Death of a Salesman” at the Chautauqua Theatre, directed by Ethan McSweeny, a Shakespeare Theatre favorite here; a bit in the hugely popular series “Homeland” as the vice-president’s aide, a part in the independent film “Kill Your Darlings”, out this year, with Daniel Radcliffe.
He has been in the Shakespeare chronology, Francis Flute, Tybalt, Surrey and Salisbury, Silvius, Edmund, Dromio of Ephesus and Alcibiades in the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, the Chautauqua Company, the Yale Repertory Theatre, the Theatre Artists Group, and at Shakespeare Santa Cruz. At the Yale School of Drama, he’s been Ferdinand, Orlando, Oberon, and Chebutykin in ‘Three Sisters” and Aslak” in “Peer Gynt”
To name a few.

Today, here and now, Zach Appelman is the king.

He has the title role in the Folger Theatre production of Shakespeare’s “Henry V”, directed by Robert Richmond, who directed successful productions of “Othello” and “Henry VIII” at the Folger, and who chose Appelman for the part.
Not every man or actor can be and play the king, especially this king, the heroic king, the king played by many young actors, including some very famous ones: there’s Kenneth Brannagh in HIS movie version, which some saw as an anti-war film, and there’s Sir Laurence Olivier’s patriotic 1940s film version.

“Yeah, those are big shadows, I suppose,” Appelman says. The voice on the phone is youthful, confident, engaging. “You have to find your own way into the part, bring it to yourself, to your own time. I think Henry is a very complicated man, it’s a complicated part, it’s not just the speech, the St. Crispin’s day speech, ‘we band of brothers.’ The play is so familiar, and that speech is so familiar, it’s been said and spoken and memorized by so many people.”

“You start with the text, and you find some very interesting things,” Appelman said. “This is the Henry now king, but still a part of him is the Henry hanging out with the ruffians in the taverns, with Falstaff, in “Henry IV”. One quality I’ve found is that he hides things from others, he’s secretive, he can’t just show himself, he likes disguises, especially when he’s king, and now, he has to be a leader, and be seen as a leader, he’s had to already deal with a conspiracy, and now he’s in France, and can’t be everyone’s friend, he’s the king. I think a lot of people think of this as a war play, or an anti-war play, but it’s not just about that. There’s tragic qualities to this, there’s so much humor.”

“It’s a lot of responsibility, and a major challenge,” he said. “I’ve done a lot of Shakespeare at Yale, in regional theatre, and different parts. If you’re my age—27, and by the way, that’s the age Henry was at this time in the play—you get a lot of the swains, the men that the women in the comedies fall in love with, the young guys. There was a production of “The Tempest” which I auditioned for and I got Ferdinand and I was kind of disappointed because I would have liked to have done Caliban, something meaty like that. I was told that giving life to the Ferdinands or the Orlandos, making them interesting and getting people to pay attention was the kind of thing that made you a good actor

“Same thing with Henry, he’s a lot more than the hero king, he has to be all things to all people, and that includes making decisions that affect people he cares about, he has to be the courtier with the French king’s daughter, a courtship that can be very funny.”
Appelman grew up in San Francisco Bay Area, in Palo Alto, home to Stanford, and first tried acting in college, which swept him on the road to a career.

He sounds perceptive, and thoughtful about his craft and how it echoes. “ This is first time here. I think Henry is one of those people who’s had to learn to be a leader, and that’s a theme that certainly echoes here in Washington at this time. I haven’t had much of a chance to explore the city, but there’s been a lot going on right now—the inauguration, and all the excitement around it—but we’ve been rehearsing. But that’s what we have now—a divided country, opposing forces or parties, it echoes strongly. “
Looking at his record—BFA from UC Santa Barbara, MFA in Acting from Yale School of Drama, a stint with the Adcademia Dell’Arte, honing his stage combat skills, listing as special skills juggling, dialects and accents, and playing blues, rock and folk guitar—you get a sense of an actor working to enrich his abilities and craft.
Which sort of fits—a president has to learn to be a leader, a king has to learn to rule, and an actor brings everything he has to the task of being a king on stage.

“Henry V” continues at the Folger Theatre through March 3.

Embassy Series Honors Gertrude d’Amecourt
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The Jan. 23 Embassy Series program of Schubert/Mozart Birthday Celebrations at the Embassy of Austria was dedicated to the late Viscountess Gertrude d’Amecourt to the delight of her family and many friends attending. Board Chair Ian Portnoy spoke of the “mission of musical diplomacy.” Founder and Artistic Director hailed “Gertie” as a grande dame of Washington and of the world.” He then took to the stage accompanied by pianist George Peachey to enchant with his internationally acclaimed baritone. The remaining program was ably interpreted by Lithuanian pianist Edvinas Minkštimas, and later by Yevgeny Kutik on violin and Timothy Bozarth on piano. A post-performance reception included tempting sweets from the Sweet Diablo Portuguese bakery. [gallery ids="102579,119856,119833,119841,119848,119861,119867,119874" nav="thumbs"]

Redskins Legend John Riggins Headlines ProFish Benefit at Tony & Joe’s
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If you can’t beat ’em, eat ’em.

That was the theme of ProFish’s Annual Invasive Species Benefit Dinner at Tony & Joe’s Seafood Place at Washington Harbour Jan. 28. Top on the list: the snakehead, an invasive species native to China and Korea that found its way into the Chesapeake Bay and is one ugly, fierce-looking fish. ProFish, a seafood provider, figures to make the snakehead more marketable, thus leading to its decline in the bay.

Washington Redskins legendary running back John Riggins was the benefit headliner. The NFL Hall of Famer has a show on the Sportsman Channel, “Riggo on the Range,” where he hunts for the prey which he later shows how to cook in his kitchen.
Dining with Riggo was a who’s who of chefs, fishery operators, watermen, outdoorsmen, community leaders and those who wanted to have a unique five-course dinner and donate their $125 meal ticket money to the Oyster Recovery Partnership, a Maryland non-profit that is bringing more oysters back to the Chesapeake Bay, and D.C.’s Miriam’s Kitchen, committed to ending chronic homelessness.

Besides the surprising tasty snakehead — think grouper, a firm, white fish — was mackerel, rockfish and pork. Hors d’oeuvre included oysters, crab cakes, yellow perch and “local invasive blue catfish.”

The guys in the kitchen included Scott Drewno from the Source, Chad Wells of the Rockfish, Phillipe Reininger from J&G Steakhouse, Dennis Marron of Poste Moderne Brasserie — and, of course, David Stein, executive chef at Tony and Joe’s Seafood Place.

ProFish’s director of sustainable efforts John Rorapaugh issued this mission statement on the evening’s menu: “This issue of the flip side to the sustainable coin. Snakeheads need to be eradicated. Not controlled, not managed, eradicated!” While auctioning off two of his cooking aprons from his show, Riggins — who has a very good auctioneer’s pace — said snakeheads “need a makeover.” Perhaps even a name change, he said. The benefit raised at least $15,000.

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The Georgetowner’s Fourth Annual Photo Competition
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As 2013 rears its flu-riddled head, weary from a long year of bitter political standoffs and tempestuous clashes of conflicting social mores, now would seem a good time for all of us to sit back, watch the sunset and remember that we all live under the same sky. Maybe we can look back over the past year and see it a little differently: a year of confronting our demons, overcoming our obstacles and learning our limitations. It could have been a year of achieving unprecedented feats, or perhaps it was a year when we were humbled by the realizations of our shortcomings. Thick or thin, the onset of a new year is a good time to take stock of the last 366 days in review.

The Georgetowner’s annual photo competition, like any annual competition, was founded to commemorate the preceding year. Our neighborhood teems with life, and as these photographs make clear, it is ultimately the smaller seasonal and daily occurrences that make up our memories and define us for ourselves. There are friends and families, summer days on the Potomac, and autumn evenings walking along the canal, with the timeless grandeur of our historic row houses serving as an ever-present backdrop.

Of all the standout entries we received, the camera lens most regularly seemed to settle on our neighborhood as a focal point for some of Washington’s most memorable landscapes and cityscapes, but the overwhelming submissions that flowed beyond Georgetown and into the wider limits of our city were impossible to ignore.

Sometimes, it takes a picture to capture the essence of a time and place. In Georgetown’s case, this is especially so, as time and place are bridged tenuously between the tradition of the past and the promise of a future. As we look on from Waterfront Park, past the Kennedy Center and into the city beyond, one thing remains in focus: we live in a beautiful place.
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The Universal ‘Our Town’
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On Feb. 4, Ford’s Theatre, the city’s singular historical theater, will hold a 75th Anniversary celebration for Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” a play often performed, and often misunderstood, sometimes scorned, but always enduringly loved and unforgettable.

It has always seemed like a peculiarly American play, posited in a vaguely uncertain but specific place, that may, but does not usually, carry a New England accent somewhere in the early years of the 20th century and yet every word in it, every sentence said by every character strives, without seeming to try, for the universal.

Wilder, an ambitious, unique American novelist and playwright always thinks big but within readily identifiable framework: from the Rome of Julius Caesar in “The Ides of March,” to 18th-century Latin America in “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” to the wildly disarrayed, time-spanning family network and dynamics that exist in “The Skin of Our Teeth.”

Yet, it has been “Our Town” that has, in terms of interest, readership vor revivals, outlasted all of his work and his own life by many years. Some critics have delved into it and tasted common (and perhaps uncommon) sentimentality and dismissed it, while directors treat it like a Shakespearean work, expanding the character base in terms of types and ethnic groups, fleshing out Wilder’s specific and specified stage landscape.

It is probably safe to say that somewhere in the United States and in the world, there is a production of “Our Town” being staged, often in the gymnasiums and auditoriums of small towns in America. Perhaps that’s what irritates critics—it’s a play that feels simple on the surface but is hardly simplistic. It charms you, even as it’s telling you hard, difficult truths about life and death and the whole damned thing, and if high school kids can do it and do it well, it cannot possibly be good.

Upon its first debut that the McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J. on Jan. 22, 1938, followed by another debut at the Wilbur Theatre in Boston on Jan. 25 and then, officially on Feb. 4 at the Henry Miller Theatre in New York, “Our Town” was something of a revolutionary undertaking. Directed and produced by Jed Harris, the play ended up winning a Pulitzer Prize for Wilder, and anchoring itself in the imaginations of theatergoers everywhere.

With its bare-bones set—lots of places and things are talked about, but only seen by the characters—and its somewhat revolutionary role of the Stage Manager who is the audience’s guide to Grover’s Corners and “Our Town” traces the comings and goings of the residents of a very small town and specifically the fortunes of two particular families—the family of the town doctor, Frank Gibbs and the family of the editor of the Grover’s Corners Sentinel, Charles Webb.

The story’s protagonists are the young couple of George Gibbs and Emily Webb, whom we see in high school, whom we hear dream about their lives, whom we see fall in love, marry and suffer tragedy. All of it is about life and birth and death and love, and it affects audiences in mysterious and truthful ways.

If you have any doubts that in “Our Town,” Wilder is thinking big, just know how one of the characters writes a return address for a piece of mail, a letter: “Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, United States of America, Continent of North America, Western Hemisphere, the Earth, the Solar System, the Universe, the Mind of God.”

The Stage Manager, who takes on many characters in the play, never blinks in staring at and talking about his characters—it’s clear there is love there, but there is a diamond-hard, clear eye that knows that people often and maybe most of the time, don’t understand the life they’re living or appreciate it, or refuse to accept it. Paraphrasing another now forgotten writer, people sometimes wake up amazed at being in a life at all, but life’s rush of events, of daily duty and doings, erase that amazement, by plying it, not ever in equal doses, with joy and sadness. All of that sort of echo is in “Our Town”—it can take place in any mind’s memory and seem not alien at all.

“Our Town’s” life is extended often—by revivals like the one at Ford’s and ground-breaking efforts in New York and the Village, and there have been many stage managers (including Geraldine Fitzgerald, breaking the gender wall), as well as Spalding Gray and may Gibbs and Webb families and Emily’s and George’s, and trips to the graveyards by high school students playing the young lovers. I wouldn’t be surprised, were it not for the nightly awesome fear, that I dreamt of being the stage manager too.
William Holden, just on the verge of becoming someone special in the movies, played George to young Martha Scott’s Emily. There was a musical version on Producer’s Showcase, one of those network live plays with big stars, which featured Frank Sinatra as the stage manager, singing about “Love and Marriage,” and Paul Newman and the ethereally beautiful Eva Marie Saint play George and Emily. Years later, Newman became the Stage Manager in a television film version, still alive but not much longer.

Arena Stage took “Our Town” (and “Inherit the Wind”) to the Soviet Union, then, years later, restaged it with the perfect Stage Manager, Robert Prosky, who was the kind of actor who could command the stage with wisdom and comforting pity for all of mankind.

You see in “Our Town” newspaper boys, soldiers-to-be, daughters becoming mothers, a town that still had what it called the other side of the tracks, baseball players, an undertaker, the rumored drunk, the milkman, the choir director, the farmer.
The play is specific because of its title—but you could change that: our block, our neighborhood, our wherever we live in a group and as families, where there might as always be nightclubs and churches, clinics and homes.

In many ways, “Our Town” is a play in keeping with Ford’s tradition and image, which is still evolving, as it is the play itself. This production is directed by Stephen Rayne, who has put sharp Americana edges on “The Heavens Hung in Black,” “Sabrina Fair” and the dark musical “Parade.”

“ ‘Our Town’ is a play which transcends differences in culture, class and race, and speaks to the great themes common to all great art: love, death and marriage,” Rayne said. “From its first production in 1938, the play struck a powerful chord with the American psyche, and it is as fresh and relevant today as it was then. I am hoping to bring a fresh perspective to this great classic and present a production that Ford’s and Mr. Wilder will be proud of.”

“Our Town” will be performed at Ford’s Theatre Jan. 25 through Feb. 24.

Cool and Hot GoldenGlobes
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Showing off a Sue Wong gown, District Council staffer Elizabeth Webster again made the Hollywood scene: this time for the Jan. 13 Golden Globes at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, Calif. The annual film and TV awards dinner is seen as a prelude to the Academy Awards in February. Big winners: “Argo” and “Les Miserables.” Webster works for Councilman-at-large Vincent Orange who encourages the District’s efforts to bring more film industry jobs to the city. “It was so cold in Los Angeles this past week,” she said. “But it was great to catch with my L.A. friends.” Webster’s Globes’ highlight: “Jodie Foster’s speech was the most touching of the evening as she brought everyone to tears when she announced she’s starting a new chapter in her life after being in front of the camera for the past 47 years.” [gallery ids="101125,139582,139572,139576" nav="thumbs"]

‘The Candle Burns’
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Three generations of family and more than 120 well-wishers gathered at the National Press Club on Jan. 12 for a late afternoon reception and program that honored Mrs. Azar Vakil Gilani (Mafi), author of a new book of Persian poems, “The Candle Burns.” Incoming club president Myron Belkind welcomed guests, who enjoyed Persian music and Dr. John Mafi’s rendition of U2’s I Still Haven’t Found What I‘m Looking For.” As the keynote speaker, Dr. Mafi spoke lovingly of “Maman Azar.” Other family members echoed his sentiments and read several of her published poems in both English and Farsi. Ambassador of Bulgaria Elena Poptodorova extolled the importance of the work of the family’s Azar Foundation in protecting abandoned and underprivileged children.

‘Million Dollar Quartet’: Present at the Creation of Rock-n-Roll
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Goodness gracious, I don’t know how much nostalgia an old body can handle.

These past few months have seen Janis Joplin re-emerged in the person of Mary Bridget Davies at Arena Stage like a furious, fiery storm of blues right out of 1960s San Francisco. I’ve seen and talked with old icon, Rambling Jack Elliott, singing under the shade of a cowboy hat as part of a star-studded tribute and centenary celebration of folk hero and working-man minstrel Woody Guthrie at the Kennedy Center.

And now, this: Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lewis on stage together live, at least in the very live facsimile persons of Cody Slaughter, Robert Britton Lyons, David Elkins and Martin Kaye, respectively, in the touring production of “Million Dollar Quartet,” a musical play by Colin Scott and Floyd Mutrox now at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater through Jan. 6.

The show is based on a historical fact—that on Dec. 4, 1956, Presley, Perkins, Cash and Lewis ended up hanging out at Sam Phillips Sun Records Studio in Memphis and did a number of impromptu songs together and separately which were taped and recorded and became known as the Million Dollar Quartet. It was the only time the four were ever together in each other’s presence at the same time, all of them having been discovered by Phillips before they became rockabilly and rock-n-roll juggernauts whose fame lasted unto death and beyond for Presley, Perkins and Cash, while Lewis, a slower and somewhat chastened version of his “Killer” self is still recording and performing.

What you get in “Million Dollar Quartet” is essentially a live concert, mixed in with less convincing and more contrived dramatic elements. There is the return of Elvis for a visit after he has already gained mega-fame and celebrity. We see Cash wanting to jump to a major record company even as Phillips is planning to extend his contract. Perkins shows smoldering resentment of Elvis and frustration with his own floundering career, while Phillips weighed an offer to join RCA, where Elvis is king. And there is an Elvis girlfriend who seems cooler, smarter and more savvy that the wailing girls usually surrounding the king of rock-n-roll in those days.

If your pop heart was baked in the songs of these four men all of your life, then this musical play is like being at a high school reunion where everybody is still alive and young and where are heard the songs, “Hound Dog,” “Ghost Riders of the Sky,” “Matchbox,” “Great Balls of Fire,” “Peace in the Valley” and “Blue Suede Shoes.” You just gotta get up and dance even if you’ve got two left feet.

Everybody in this audience did get up, as some of them managed to do it very slowly. They clapped, and some shook their fragile booties, while others just slapped their program on their knees.

What’s remarkable about this show is just how good the young musicians are—they’re more musicians than actors at this stage. This realization leads you to see just how great that million dollar quartet really was, and why the music is laid so deeply in our veins—just as you recognize, beneath all the trivial contrivances in the show, what a great songwriter Irving Berlin was seeing “White Christmas” next door at the Opera House.

All of these guys—the real ones—ended up in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and all of them influenced a host of musicians and singers and legends that came later. From Eric Clapton to Bob Dylan and beyond, all of them shone the light on the source of their particular appeal, where they heard the music and who played it—Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino and Jimmy Reed. They came from the sharecropper fields of Mississippi and Alabama, from New Orleans and the segregated south where all of them grew up poor. All of them heard the blues, rhythm and blues, gospel and country, and drunk with that music they invented something new. Phillips’s genius was to recognize their music as something new and overwhelming. After that, pop music was never the same.

What Lyons, Elkins, Slaughter and Kaye do isn’t exactly acting. It’s inter-acting with each other. It’s performing the music and hitting it out of the park. It’s a presence that’s convincing for the real-life characters they’re inhabiting.

Watch Kaye when he sits down at the piano as a young, completely irreverent and raw Jerry Lee Lewis—the kid doesn’t have a bone or inhibition in his body. He crawls over the piano and thumps and runs with it. It’s like a wrestling match where everybody wins and out comes “Real Wild Child,” making the Phillips character stand up and take notice. Watch Elkins as Cash, the epitome of the man in black cool. He’s kind of languorous and dangerous. He sings “I Walk the Line” and “Folsom Prison Blues” (with that cold line “I shot a man just to watch him die”), as if they were as fresh as a cold beer on a hot day.

Then, there’s Slaughter, who’s got the job of catching Elvis as a meteor rising, flush with success and a longing for simpler times. He tells Phillips of how the colonel got him to do a gig in Vegas where the older audiences booed him. “One thing I can tell you,” he says, “you’ll never catch me playing Vegas again.” He’s got a chunk of the Elvis sound and all of his moves. And there’s Kelly Lamont, as the girlfriend, coming home to meet his momma, who’s as slinky as the recently invented slinky in a pink-purple 1950s dress where women seemed to move around inside the dress, in case you weren’t paying attention. She sings the Peggy Lee standard “Fever” as if she has one.

Most interesting of all in this show where the glory tends to be shared and nurtured except when Jerry Lee Lewis is in the area is Robert Britton Lyon as Perkins, who looks like a walking, dark-haired short fuse, but who plays an electric guitar like he came out with it on day one. He is the master musician, if not the great singer among the four. Still burned up over Elvis gaining fame with “Blue Suede Shoes,” a song that Perkins rode to number one status until a car wreck sidetracked his career, Perkins lets the anger get into his playing which makes it zing with danger.

It doesn’t take long to talk yourself into feeling, if not knowing, that you’re present at the creation. Your feet twitch, your elbows get restless, you shake your head. It’s 1956 when you were . . . well, no you’re not.

But, still, it feels like a million bucks up there and out there, too.

Washington Performing Arts Society Presents Yo-Yo Ma
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WPAS launched the first of this season’s Stars Series with a sold-out concert by cellist Yo-Yo at the Kennedy Center Dec. 3. WPAS’s staunchest supporters enjoyed a pre-concert Silk Road buffet in tribute to Ma’s Silk Road Project, a nonprofit arts and educational organization. The performance was generously underwritten by Gary Mather and Christina Mather. The program included the first three Bach cellos suites and marked the 30th anniversary of Ma’s first appearance under WPAS auspices. The cellist conducted several workshops at the Savoy Elementary in Southeast Washington the following day. [gallery ids="101095,137968,137964,137947,137959,137954" nav="thumbs"]