Arts & Society

Mary Bird • August 15, 2013

The Nyumbani Home, Kenya’s first and largest facility for HIV+ children, was founded by the late Father Angelo D’Agostino, S.J., M.D., and by current Executive Director Sister Mary Owens, IBVM. Sister Mary recalled the early days as “divine anxiety.” The Children of God Relief Fund hosted the annual fundraising gala at the Ritz-Carlton on Sept. 28. Staunch Nyumbani supporter and renowned director of the Disney Chanel’s High School Musicals Kenny Ortega urged everyone to “muscle up tonight and bid” at the live auction. Nyumbani means “home” in Swahili and generous loyalists Kathleen and Chris Mathews were delighted to learn that a new guesthouse will be named “Mathews House.” [gallery ids="101005,134833,133554,133599,133594,133564,133588,133572,133579" nav="thumbs"]

Mary Bird •

Serious shoppers flocked to the Italian Embassy on Sept. 27 to support the Goodwill of Greater Washington 2012 Runway Show & Gala and departed with some incredible bargains. Forget cast- offs! There were designer suits, evening clothes, several furs and very gently worn accessories. The shopping frenzy was fueled by wines and a lovely Italian buffet provided by Geppetto Catering. Guests enjoyed a runway show of fashions available at Goodwill Retail Stores and opera selections by Jen Corey. After attending its free job training program, Nadine Prince said, “Before Goodwill, I never had a set of keys, because I never had any doors to open. [gallery ids="101008,135157,135147,135153" nav="thumbs"]

Georgetowner •

American Marketing Association of D.C.’s September Networker was held at EPIC Smokehouse in Pentagon City on Sept 24. AMADC President-elect Brian Rutter picked three win- ners from the business card fishbowl to win $50 gift certificates (each) from EPIC.
AMADC is the oldest chapter in the country, celebrating its 80th anniversary on Oct. 25 at the Carnegie Science Institute. The national organization is only 75 years old.

Ari Post •

The first flecks of yellow are dotting the trees around Washington, a seasonal indicator that, among other things, signals the arrival of the fall arts season. The galleries around 14th Street, between U Street and Logan Circle, exhibit works by new and emerging local artists as well as those of national and international renown. The monumental quality of work brings together painting, sculpture, photography, installation and multimedia into a color show that rivals our annual foliage display. These galleries, all within a 15-minute walk of each other, represent the best of D.C.’s local art culture. Here’s what’s coming up.

Hamiltonian Gallery

“Heritage Aesthetic” is a new body of work by artist Amy Boone-McCreesh, which runs through Oct. 13, with an artist’s talk on Tuesday, Oct. 2 at 7 p.m. Exploring the dialogue between painting and sculpture, Boone-McCreesh sources a variety of materials, incorporating fabric, hand-made paper, rope and fur, to investigates the visual language of ceremonies and rites of passage while exploring themes of transformation and transcendence. Her found object installations are a pastiche of cultural heritage, adopting material cues from tribal ephemera, Middle Eastern ornamentation, and American Indian vestments. Her deconstructed global aesthetic appropriates the embellishment associated with celebrations from across the globe, speaking broadly to human accomplishment, customs and the universal tradition of decoration.

Gallery Plan B

Sheep Jones (on display through Oct. 14) is
a locally based artist, who operates a studio
out of the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, Va. Working in oil and encaustic, her paintings, which look both timeless and fresh, transport us to a different place and state of mind—they are in themselves lessons in how to look at and interact with the world. Cavernous mysteries of color
and environment grow in the shadow cast by a worn, tin-roofed shack. A community of glowing, entwined root systems exposes the playful source of life beneath a garden. And though her work playfully celebrates of life, there is a graceful stillness that leaves you with a sense of calm, as if all is right and as it should be.

Hemphill Fine Arts

Hemphill opens its fall exhibition season with “William Christenberry:
Assembled Memory,” on view through Oct. 27. This retrospective of sorts
spans over 50 years and stretches seamlessly across Christenberry’s wide variety of media such as drawings, objects, photographs and sculpture. The work of this renowned artist is held in the
collections of the Hirshhorn, The Phillips Collection and MoMA, to name a few, and his exhibit at Hemphill brings together a diverse group of work from the earliest days of his career rooted in abstract expressionism, his mid-career, which speaks to the wonderment and pathos for the passage of time, and his more recent work, which expresses undercurrents of good and evil within our architectural heritage.

Adamson Gallery

Through Oct. 27, Adamson Gallery will host the work of London-based artist Karen Knorr. The
collaged images in her exhibit, “India Song,” insert animals into large format digital photographs of interiors in
various palaces, mausoleums and holy sites in India. The series takes inspiration from Indian mythology, depicting scenarios that are at once otherworldly and hyperreal, the lush and surreal images achieving feats of stunning, exotic beauty. In “Edge of the Forest, Agravena, Agra,” two tigers lie relaxed and aware at the entry to the Taj Mahal. Their presence defamiliarizes our knowledge of the Taj Mahal as a contemporary tourist attraction, moving the space out of the present and into a mythical past. The viewer becomes a traveler, not through space or time, but through worlds.

Project 4 Gallery

“TOIL” is an exhibition of recent work by British artist, Jill Townsley, in her first solo exhibition in the United States, at Project 4 Gallery through Oct. 13. Her work examines the role of repetition in life, through sculpture, installation, drawings and video. Through tedious, rote tasks like scribbling, counting
and stacking, and using materials as banal as cash register till rolls and hairgrips, Tillman transforms these objects into something greater. These gestures are the exploration of industrial, workmanlike environments—the way a factory operates or a clock’s gears turn. There is a piece of paper almost entirely black. Accompanying
it is a video that shows Townsley scribbling manically on a white sheet of paper, and we watch as the paper and her lines become lost in time. [gallery ids="101010,135180,135166,135177,135172" nav="thumbs"]

Mary Bird • August 9, 2013

The 2012 Capital City Ball took place on Nov. 17 at the historic Washington Club in Dupont Circle. Proceeds from the evening benefited the important and innovative work of Courtney’s House, Global Centurion and Urban Light in the fight against human trafficking and modern-day slavery. The elegant and fun black-tie gala included a cocktail buffet, open bar and silent auction. Guests took to the dance floor past midnight to the sounds of Bittersweet, an 11-piece, high energy dance band. [gallery ids="101072,137179,137156,137174,137169,137164" nav="thumbs"]

Georgetowner • August 8, 2013

Capital City Ball held a cocktail happy hour on the roof of the Graham Hotel in Georgetown on July 16. Proceeds from the evening benefited Courtney?s House, which provides a safe haven in a loving home environment for domestic sex trafficked girls between the ages of 12 and 18 years of age. Courtney?s House launched in 2008 and was founded by Tina Frundt, a domestic child trafficking survivor who has received several awards for dedicating her life in freedom to help others.

Kelley Hudak •

Kia Motors teamed up with Open Table at Fiola restaurant on July 29 for the first-ever debut of its new luxury car, the Kia Cadenza. Select guests were able take the car for a test drive and enjoy a four-course meal, prepared by chef Fabio Trabocchi, the recent recipient of the coveted RAMMY Chef of the Year award. The Kia Cadenza team will head to Boston next for the second in a series of eight showcase events. [gallery ids="101417,154930,154934,154941,154938" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

You don’t see “ A Chorus Line ” too often anymore, certainly not in many regional theaters.

“It’s not that people have forgotten it, or that it’s not a popular show,” said Christopher Youstra, associate artistic director and director of musical theater at Olney Theatre Center, where the ground-breaking, and record-breaking Broadway musical is getting a vivid staging. “It’s a very difficult thing for regional theaters to do properly, it’s a big cast, it’s physically demanding.”
“The show also places some special demands on casting,” said Youstra, who’s worked at Round House Theatre and Studio Theatre and is a fixture on the Washington area theater scene. “You’re looking for triple threats—acting, singing and dancing, and especially dancing, because that’s what the show is about.”

“It’s a mega show. It’s a musical about show business, specifically about all those people who went to auditions to flesh out chorus lines in musicals,” he said. “In that sense, it’s a little bit of a history piece—those kinds of splashy, big musicals with those kind of musical and dance numbers are not so much in evidence any more, and Broadway itself has changed.”

It’s true enough. You don’t get much talk about the dancing in mega-hits like “The Lion King,” “Spiderman” or “The Book of Mormon.” Revivals and new stagings of the likes of “Anything Goes” only serve as reminders of what Broadway musicals used to be.

The denizens of Broadway included exactly the kind of people who were essential to the legends and lore of Broadway musicals—remember the director’s admonition to the chorine who has to take the place of the star in “42nd Street”? “You’re going out there as a chorine, but you’re coming back a star,” he said.

That was the dream of every guy and girl auditioning for the chorus. It was the late director Michael Bennett—with the help of a process that included actual interviews of actors and gypsy chorus aspirants-who turned the material—with a book by James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante, lyrics by Edward Kleban and music by Marvin Hamlich—into Broadway gold.

With Donna McKechnie in a star turn as Cassie, with glamorous production numbers and solos, and an often heartbreaking but always honest and gritty story line, “A Chorus Line” began with workshops and an Off-Broadway run before opening on Broadway on July 25, 1975. It was a huge success at a time when Broadway and Times Square were going through a decline. The production got 12 Tony Award nominations and won 9—and earned a Pulitzer Prize. When it was all over and said and sung, it had rung up 6,137 productions, sailing past the previous record holder, “Grease,” with ease. The run was finally surpassed by “Cats” in 1997, but it still remains the sixth longest-running Broadway show in history. “A Chorus Line” was revived in 2006 and just recently, another revival opened in the West End of London.

“The show revived Broadway, it brought people to Time Square, who, even if they couldn’t get tickets to it, went to another show,” Youstra said.

“A Chorus Line” is about show business, about dancers in particular, and in that sense, the world the characters in the show occupy has changed radically. McKechnie, a gifted dancer along the lines of Chita Rivera and Gwen Verdon, won a Tony award for her performance in “A Chorus Line,” but there were not too many shows calling for star dancers on the horizons, except for revivals. The age of great dancers and dance producers and directors was coming to a close at the time—there were few Gower Champions (who famously died of cancer just before the opening of “42nd Street”) or Bob Fosse of “Chicago” fame. Fosse, who had a sterling film career directing “Cabaret,” “Star 80” and “All That Jazz” equally famously died on his way to the opening of the revival of “Sweet Charity” at the National Theatre on Pennsylvania Avenue, accompanied by his ex-wife Gwen Verdon. “Sweet Charity” starred McKechnie.

In the end, “A Chorus Line” is an echo of Broadway past and theater now—“What I Did for Love” is a standard, but it’s also unique to the show, just as is the “One.”

Broadway musicals, and the people in them, have a life of their own, and the stories go on. Sometimes, they come back. McKechnie will add a flavor to the times, bringing her own cabaret show, “Same Place, Another Time,” to the Olney on Sept. 1.
And this production of “A Chorus Line” brings with it its own lore: Nancy Lemenager, originally cast as Cassie, had to leave the show due to injury. Michelle Aravena, who had been cast as Morales and a Cassie understudy, took over, with Jessica Vaccaro, who played Morales at Paper Mill Playhouse, stepping into the role at Olney. [gallery ids="101418,154925" nav="thumbs"]

Eve Barnett • July 29, 2013

One-woman performances bring up one question: can a single storyteller actually hold an audience’s attention for the entire show? You might be tempted to think not.

But, Israeli storyteller Noa Baum does just this, defying any skepticism.

In “Impossible to Translate, But I’ll Try,” her first show in the Capital Fringe Festival, Baum engagingly and humorously carries the audience through waves of memories. She narrates everything from growing up as a young Jewish girl in Jerusalem to living as an Israeli adult in America. Through five distinct stories, Baum invites us to meet her beloved “bubbe” (“grandmother” in Yiddish), learn about her namesake, the original Jewish feminist, watch her fall in love – twice – and reflect on the meaning of motherhood. As a Jewish viewer, I related to her stories, appreciating the rawness of her experiences.

Imagining Baum’s Israeli childhood through her verbal vignettes, the audience hears a unique, loving perspective on a country most often associated with violence and vengeance. We learn about neighborhood hideaways she enjoyed with friends in Jerusalem and the dating scene. Her honest, warm tone conveys youthful frivolity and happiness and humanizes Israel in a refreshing, engrossing way.

Baum, an experienced storyteller, is quite funny. Her mannerisms, Yiddish interjections and voice changes keep the audience laughing. Her show primarily draws a 40-and-over-crowd, but the relatable humor and self-deprecation in her show also make it family-friendly.

Seventy-five minutes of memories and laughter later, the audience will have its question about one-women shows answered: yes, it is possible. Baum proves it.

Tickets are still available for shows on Sunday, July 21, 5:45 p.m., and Sunday, July 28, 4:45 p.m., at Goethe Institut, 812 7th St. NW, Tickets can be bought at www.capitalfringe.org/.