Arts & Society

Georgetowner • May 23, 2014

More than 400 guests attended the 6th Annual Embassy Chef Challenge, benefiting Cultural Tourism D.C., at the Ronald Reagan Building May 15.

Chef Jiraporn Bunlet from the Thai Embassy won the Judges’ Choice Award for her spicy salmon salad, and chef Roman Shchadrin from the Russian Embassy won the People’s Choice Award for his salmon ice cream (not quite a dessert).

Former Chief of Protocol Capricia Penavic Marshall served as honorary gala chair and hailed “cultural diplomacy in action.” Board chair Tim Cox quoted Mayor Vincent Gray, who termed “culinary diplomacy as food for thought.” Fifteen embassies participated and were judged by Washington’s food elite, including Washington Post food reporter Tim Carman and cookbook authors Joan Nathan and Amy Riolo.
[gallery ids="101746,141875,141843,141847,141852,141858,141863,141872,141867" nav="thumbs"]

Georgetowner •

Noche de Estrellas/Night of the Stars celebrated the artistic vision and youth education initiatives of GALA — Group of Latin American Artists — May 13. Guests enjoyed a rooftop reception, featuring paella and other delectables, before a program that honored the late entrepreneur Michael Kappaz, philanthropist Malan Strong and Quin Tango chamber tango quintet. As an Argentine, GALA co-founder Hugo Medrano said that the group’s songs “explain the tango as a culture.” The entertainment also included soprano Elisa Córdova, performance artist Alina Collins Maldonado and Paso Nuevo, a project that helps at-risk Latino youth. Following a spirited live auction, guests enjoyed a champagne toast and dessert. [gallery ids="101745,141886,141890,141877,141883" nav="thumbs"]

Georgetowner •

On May 10, Washington Animal Rescue League President & CEO Bob Ramin welcomed “supporters both two- and four-legged” to WARL’s celebration of 100 years of providing animal welfare services to companion animals and their guardians in the National Capital area. Guests and their canine companions at the Fairmont Hotel gala enjoyed a reception, dinner, awards ceremony and dancing. Washington Post reporter and dog lover Jackie Kucinich emceed the evening. Best-selling author Nora Roberts and auto dealership executive Dottie Fitzgerald were Centennial awardees. WARL enters its second century with plans to expand its services in a building which it has acquired next to the shelter. [gallery ids="101744,141897,141892,141899" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

One of the finest—and most original—music albums of any sort came out late last year,  further enlarging the artist’s reputation and resurrecting a ghost of a jazz legend at the same time.
       

That would be the provocatively entitled “I Wanna Be Evil” by the surging and one-of-a-kind jazz singer Rene Marie, who with a ten-song work on the Motema label has managed to bring alive the high-spirited one-of-a-kind life and music of Eartha Kitt.

       
The album—subtitled “With Love to Eartha Kitt”—came out late in 2013 and proved to be a wonder.  It’s rich in the trademark songs of Kitt, who was one of those singer-performers who was way beyond category with big hits like “C’est Si Bon” and the hugely popular “Santa Baby” back in the 1950s, when she was one of the singular “New Faces,” right through 2008 when she passed away.
       

“There wasn’t anybody like her,” Rene Marie said of Kitt. “It’s why I wanted to do this. She inspired me more than anybody. I always wanted to sing, but I got kind of a late start.”
       

We had occasion to talk on the phone with Rene Marie a while back when she appeared in Bethesda.  She’s one of the most personable, straight-ahead people you ever want to meet.  On Saturday, May 24, Washington fans of both Kitt—and of Rene Marie, born Rene Marie Stevens, in nearby Warrenton, Va.—get a chance to hear her doing songs from the album as part of the two-day 19th Annual Mary Lou Williams Jazz festival at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater. Other performers on May 24 include Trio 3 performing a Mary Lou Williams repertoire and rising star Anat Cohen and her quartet.
       

Rene Marie isn’t exactly like Kitt, although both have appeared in Washington, D.C.—we talked with Kitt a number of years ago when she appeared at the now gone Charley’s Supper Club on K Street.  Kitt had a style that was damn tough to imitate and reproduce, and she had attitude to spare, but she also more often than not flat out made you listen and watch if you had the good fortune to catch her in person. 

In 1999, the year her career started to take off, Rene Marie performed at Blues Alley, also in Georgetown. Rene Marie has an attitude too, but it’s the of the kind that’s looking to share music and help others. On line, you can see her singing for homeless people, in shelters or impromptu occasions.
       

She always entertained the thought of singing—her voice has a clarity that’s hard to subdue, but she was as she has said in “an abusive marriage” for years.  Rene Marie continued to try to sing and perform until her husband said, she told us, “Choose, me or your music.”  Encouraged by her  grown children, she chose music. “At that point, well, it was an easy choice,” she said.
       

So, Rene Marie was off at the age of 42 to start a singing career. It wasn’t easy, but she’s at what amounts to a personal zenith now, but never forgets that songs—like “Strange Fruit”—are about people, history and times, as well as the joy of making music. She’s written much of her own materials and songs as well as hewing to her own unique style of singing standards. 
       

When you listen to Rene Marie’s voice, her singing on the Kitt album, you hear strains of other voices—influences like Betty Carter, Ella, Dinah, Nancy Wilson and Sarah Vaughan, and, of course, Kitt. Mostly, however, it’s a voice you’ve also never heard before. 
       

The tribute to Kitt is different from Kitt. It’s a musical praise for Kitt’s courage as much as her unique talent. But Kitt always had something growly, a hot touch, unbeatable but not necessarily classical. 
       

Rene Marie is the real thing. She makes all the songs on the album her own, and therefore emotionally stronger, clearer and better.  She has a rangy, beautiful voice. “Santa Baby” becomes more than a playful tune, as does “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.” She has that throaty optimism that makes “I’d Rather Be Burned As a Witch” a lights-out effort.

Georgetowner •

When Ford’s Theatre’s co-production with Signature Theatre of “Hello Dolly!” won the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Resident Musical (a tie with Olney’s “A Chorus Line”), it was a sweet moment of validation for Ford’s Director Paul Tetreault.

“Actually, this was the first award Ford’s had received as an organization, and that was a really amazing moment for us,” said Tetreault, who is in the midst of his 10th anniversary as director of the historic theater. “Imagine that. We’d gotten individual awards for acting and such, but never a production award in the history of Ford’s.”
The award was significant because it showed that Tetreault had not only kept Ford’s status as a popular (and money-making) theater with a historic mission, but elevated it to the status of a theater respected for its productions and unique vision.

Signature Theatre’s artistic director Eric Shaeffer shared in the award for the remounting of Jerry Herman’s hugely popular musical, which originally starred Carol Channing. The “Hello Dolly!” co-production also featured a cast filled with local actors, including Ed Gero, who for the last several seasons has played Scrooge in Ford’s annual holiday show, “A Christmas Carol.”

“That was gratifying. Everything about the production and the result was certainly an achievement for both organizations,” Tetreault said. “Eric and I had worked together before with the ground-up production of the musical of ‘Meet John Doe,’ so it seemed natural for us to do so again. And I think this kind of cooperative effort is beneficial to Washington theater.”

Still, the award had its bittersweet aspects. Tetreault had high hopes for the season-opening production of “The Laramie Project,” the emotionally charged, realistic and inventive play about America’s reaction to the 1998 murder of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard and its aftermath.

“The Laramie Project,” by Moisés Kaufman and the Teutonic Theater Company, was scheduled to open during the infamous government shutdown. Because Ford’s Theatre is a National Historic Site, the theater was also shut down, and with it the opening production.

“Woolly Mammoth offered us a space, and we staged a production for the media, without the usual theatrical bells and whistles of lights, sets and so on. The sparseness was emotionally powerful, as were the productions we did free to the public at a church.”

The shutdown ended soon after.

It’s fair to say that Tetreault’s tenure so far has had its challenges – not forgetting the shutdown, but also remembering the conditions that prevailed when he first came here and took over the reins. Those reins had been held for 35 years by the legendary Frankie Hewitt, who had succumbed to cancer.

Tetreault arrived after an administrative career that included stints at Madison Square Garden and the Circle Repertory Company in New York and the Berkeley Repertory in California. He was managing director of the famed Alley Theatre in Houston, where he and artistic director Gregory Boyd produced over 100 plays and won the Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre.

Tetreault didn’t lack for a resume or a vision, but the Ford’s job was still somewhat daunting.

“Frankie, you have to give her all the credit in the world, she was the mainstay of the theater and gave it energy and life. She was a legend, a major Washington figure, and that sort of thing is a challenge for anybody coming in,” he said, adding: “I like to think like an outsider in some ways, to see myself that way.”

In Washington and beyond, Ford’s Theatre has a unique niche. As the place where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, it’s a shrine to Lincoln and his ideas and ideals, complete with the presidential box where he watched “Our American Cousin.”

“It’s an American theater, a certain kind of place that exists not only as theater but in the public imagination,” he said. “So, there’s some things you can’t do.”
What Tetreault has done is to create a kind of theater of Americana, not in the cliché sense, but with productions that strike the themes of American inclusion: race, opportunity, outsiders and their dreams. And he kept the theater in the public eye when it lost a little more than a season during major renovations.

The Lincoln plays that have been done – and a commissioned work about Mary Todd Lincoln that’s on the agenda for 2014-2015 – have been remarkably good theater, from the musical “The Civil War” to “The Heavens Are Hung in Black” and “The Rivalry.”

Standout productions have included the powerful musical “Parade” about the lynching of Leo Frank, a controversial production of “Our Town” and “Black Pearl Sings,” as well as “Meet John Doe,” the musical based on populist director Frank Capra’s common-man hit.

“I’d still like to see that show again, to keep it alive,” said Tetreault.

Georgetowner •

Photographer Fred Maroon was — and remains — well known throughout Washington and was a friend of The Georgetowner. He allowed the newspaper to use his spectacular images from time to time. The newspaper ran his photos, did features on him, especially a 1999 cover story. Maroon’s widow Suzy Maroon and sons Paul and Marc were at a May 15 reception for the Artists’ Proof exhibit, “Far Out Fashions: An Exhibition of Fashion Photography by the Late Fred J. Maroon,” which runs through June 1.

Ari Post • May 22, 2014

The thought of a mid-to-late 20th-century artist painting washed out landscapes of rural America and being hailed as a cultural icon and national treasure is almost unimaginable. In the most aggressively transformative century in recorded history, the geography of art alone shifted so drastically and disparately that it is virtually impossible to sum up its evolution. Compared with Cubism, performance art, film and digital media, a pastoral scene of meadow grass and an old barn does not seem like much at all.

Yet Andrew Wyeth, a rural painter of American regionalist life and landscapes from Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, managed to capture the imagination of this full-throttle era, and his work continues to challenge and inspire new generations to this day.

At the National Gallery of Art through Nov. 30, “Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In,” is a new exhibit centered around the recent acquisition of one of the artist’s seminal paintings, “Wind from the Sea” (1947). This is the first fully realized exploration of Wyeth’s frequent use of windows as subjects in his work, showcasing some 60 watercolors, drawings and tempera paintings. It reveals how the artist returned to windows repeatedly, probing the formal and conceptual richness of this most common subject in his and all our lives.

The works in this exhibit are haunted by ghostly shadows and memories that lie just beyond the picture plane. Wyeth devoted himself to visual art when he was still a child, trained by his father, the renowned but troubled illustrator N.C. Wyeth, whose paintings for such literary classics as ‘Treasure Island’ remain among the most acclaimed illustrations of all time. From his father, Wyeth inherited a love of nature and poetry, particularly an affinity for Robert Frost, but it seems like he absorbed a great deal of subtle, narrative illusory qualities as well. However, unburdened by the shackles of commercial illustration, Wyeth was able to realize a far greater level of dissonance and durability than his father’s work could ever achieve.

Windows allow for reflection, as seen in the watercolor “Rod and Reel” (1975), where a darkly reflective window set into a whitewashed wall slowly reveals tiers of subtly fragmented landscapes from the adjacent farmland through the glass. Onlookers are suddenly brought into an unexpectedly dimensional world on the surface of the paper.

The idea of reflections is fitting, as this collective work becomes a journey into the artist’s mind – which in Wyeth’s case dwarfs almost any effort by Surrealism to explore the depths of the unconscious. Wyeth lived most of his life in his Brandywine Valley hometown and at his summer home in Cushing, Maine, where the familiarity with his environment grew so intimate that he was able to truly divest himself of self-awareness and external forces of judgment. He spent so much time painting these scenes that they became a part of him, and so the work is at once an exact portrait of the artist’s mind as well as the reality of the subject. And Wyeth’s painterly expression of this duality gets contentedly lost within its own schism.

The paintings have a temporal haze to them, as if they could just vanish at any moment; the atmosphere he manages to produce is a depiction of something that can really be seen only in a state of unfocused rumination. (This idea might be an indication as to why Wyeth always insisted he was an “abstract” painter.)

There are occasional moments in his works where things just vanish, as in his tempera painting “Seed Corn” (1948). A high window looks out onto a sprawling gray landscape, with strung-up corn on either side drying out for the next season’s seeds. Peculiarly, the center rail of the window just disappears halfway out, fading into the muddy gray sky. At first it seems like a shallow surrealist gesture, but really it is much purer than that. It’s as if Wyeth had lost sight of the fact that the rest of the window even existed, as his eyes and brush strayed out toward the rolling hills beyond. And the strange thing is it looks perfectly natural.

Some of Wyeth’s appeal is absolutely his technical facility with his medium. His work offers such spoils of formal virtuosity, floating between hyperrealism and textured painterly richness, that scholars and museum-goers alike should swoon with awe.

From a historical perspective, there is also a great deal to play with. In many of these paintings, it is difficult to ignore the undertones of Wyeth’s contemporary influence, from the geometric purity of Piet Mondrian or Franz Kline, to the softer geometric haze of Hans Hofmann or Mark Rothko, and even the textural harmony and distributed brushwork of Mark Tobey’s all-over early abstract style of painting.

From the early regional side of things, there are parallels between Wyeth’s work and the atmospheric landscapes of forgotten early American painters like Dwight Tryon, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, John Henry Twachtman and Albert Pinkham Ryder. Of course, a great deal is further owed to his predecessors Thomas Eakins and James McNeill Whistler as well, but quite frankly this game could go on forever.

One mark of a great artist is surely their ability to influence an audience to think and consider their surroundings. In the case of Wyeth, his subject is perhaps thought and environment itself. It is the moment when we look out a window into the gray sky, catching a glimpse of mortality as we ponder our myriad little human dilemmas, mired by history and personal experience but singularly products of our own creation, moving unavoidably into the future.

*“Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In” is on view at the National Gallery of Art through Nov. 30. For more information, visit [www.nga.gov](http://www.nga.gov).*

Gary Tischler • May 15, 2014

Arena Stage Artistic Director Molly Smith called the songs of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller the soundtrack of a generation, the songbook of our lives.

Listening to and watching—and moving to and being moved by—the Randy Johnson-directed production of “Smokey Joe’s Café,” which features some 40 songs by the dynamic songwriting and rock-n-roll pioneering duo of Leiber and Stoller, you got the sense that this music could connect generations.

Often with early rock-n-roll songs, you get that karaoke itch. They’re the song still being done on public television nostalgia shows by surviving members of the groups that had hot hits with them quite some time ago. When you’re talking soundtrack and songbook of a generation, you have to ask just a little which lives, what generation, which songs.

There’s no question that this music might not get to everybody —for every bobbing bald and white haired head in the audience, there were at least a few folks like the two thirty-something men next to me who just barely seemed to manage a heartbeat.

This version of “Smokey Joe’s Café” avoids the karaoke pitfall thanks to Johnson’s heartfelt if narrative-free concept and direction. It lets the very gifted, high-energy and individualistic performers tell the story of the music, and in the process shakes off the dust of over-familiarity from the songs, some of which got tens way back on American Bandstand.

The production wasn’t trouble-free. It had to contend with the over-heated expectations and energy of an official opening night (Stoller was in attendance; Leiber died in 2011.) Some technical glitches like a dead mike and projections that did little to clarify matters. Such things no doubt will be dealt with for the show—which runs through June 8.

It’s really a salute to a time and place and the gifts of two young guys in tune with the coming times who were also deeply saturated in the blues. Their songs were recorded by just about everyone worth talking about, all kinds of singers—Peggy Lee, Elvis, the Coasters, Ben E. King and the Drifters, Fats Domino, the Everly Brothers, Aretha Franklin, Little Richard, Muddy Waters and, yes, even Edith Piaf.

Johnson’s direction and the choreography by Parker Esse provide a kind of welcome mat—along with the band in the center of the stage, the balcony and staircase, the jukebox, along with cool duds from the period, old stuff which has often been worn anew and again.

This isn’t just kid stuff—although Leiber songs like “Hound Dog” and “Jailhouse Rock” helped send Elvis into the teen stratosphere of the 1950s—because the blues, jazzy torch songs and the fast-paced patter-chatter songs of the Coasters make their way in here as well as less familiar songs.

The ostensible out-of-town star of this show, Levi Kreis, who won a Tony for his piano-banging Jerry Lee Lewis stint in “Million Dollar Quartet,” takes on “Jailhouse Rock.” While not trying to be Elvis, he makes it his own—without ever losing any of its jolting flavor. But it’s E. Faye Butler, as dangerous as ever, full of the blues that they all but spill out of her with emotion, who ends the first act with the God-loves-you Gospel rouser “Saved.” She adds her own often rowdy, always accessible soul and blues flavored style to the proceedings as she has done before in “Crowns,” “Dinah Was” and “Oklahoma.” She’s one of ours, even if she still lives in Chicago.

There’s a gaggle of Coasters-flavored fun songs—“Young Blood,” “Yakety Yak” and “Charlie Brown”—the kind that made rock and roll rock and also did yeoman duty in fueling the culture-bridging blowback of pop music.

Watch great dancer Ashley Blair Fitzgerald show Austin Colby just what to do in “Can You Show Me How To Shimmy?” Listen to Colby’s deep yearning when he sings “Spanish Harlem” and Butler make an anthem out of “Fools Fall in Love.” Nova Payton and Stephawn Stephens break hearts in the “Love Me” and “Don’t,” a combo of searing ballads.

Often, it’s the unfamiliar that surprises you here: “Don Juan,” “Shopping for Clothes,” “D.W. Washburn,” “Pearl’s a Singer” and “Some Cats know.” They’re practically a showcase for the song-writing range of Leiber and Stoller.

The duo is also the reason for the huge success of Ben E. King—still performing—and the Drifters in the early 1960s, from “Broadway” to the evocative “Dance With Me” and “There Goes My Baby,” ending up with “Love Potion No. 9” that eventually just caused the audience to sway and levitate a little. And, then, the best for last: “Stand By Me,” a personal keepsake for this writer and many in the audience from the look and sound of things.

What this high octane company—and Johnson—manages to do was to give the Leiber and Stoller songs a way to jump up and live again, fresh as the first time anybody heard them. In this way, we repeat ourselves, come full circle to the place where everything old is really new again.

Mary Bird • May 13, 2014

The Washington Home & Community Hospices celebrated its 125th anniversary Italian-style — “Celebrazione della Cura” — held at the Embassy of Italy April 26. Board chair Sharon Casey welcomed guests and introduced CEO Tim Cox, who said at 125 years “we look really good and are going strong.” Many diplomats and local leaders enjoyed Design Cuisine’s tastes of Italy. Instead of the familiar auction format, the evening featured an Italian market with unique items from Neó Shop, Rome, DePandi, D& M Design and Paul’s Wine & Spirits among other temptations. The net proceeds of purchases will provide much need funds to assist the aging and terminally ill. [gallery ids="101732,142098,142110,142107,142092,142103" nav="thumbs"]

Mary Bird •

Dorothy and her companions were in good company on their way to Oz as they were joined by supporters of Sitar Arts Center on a walk down the Yellow Brick Road and an evening in Emerald City, the theme of the May 1 benefit at the Mexican Cultural Institute. Generous contributions raised over $253,000 in critical funds that will directly support more than 800 students whose lives are positively impacted each year through Sitar’s afterschool, weekend and summer programs. The Host Committee members created a matching gift opportunity to ensure that no child will be turned away because of a family’s inability to pay for the Center’s transformational arts education programs.
[gallery ids="101725,142422,142431,142427,142417,142440,142442,142436" nav="thumbs"]