Arts & Society

Mary Bird • March 26, 2013

An invitation only guest list previewed Dupont Circle’s newest sports bar, The Gryphon, on Mar. 19. Owners Tony Hudgins, David Karim and Rich Vasey were on-hand to introduce the venue, which boasts the social dining atmosphere of a restaurant, the heart of a pub and the view of a stadium. Executive Chef Joseph Evans served up towering plates of bite-sized menu highlights. The pub-meets-posh venue opens its doors just in time for March Madness 2013. The Gryphon’s fully-integrated media system, including 31 televisions, ensures that college basketball fans catch every air ball and alley-oop. [gallery ids="99234,103696,103694" nav="thumbs"]

Mary Bird •

We Will Survive Cancer (WWSC) recently hosted Ann Atkins, author of Eleanor Roosevelt’s Live of Soul Searching and Self Discovery at a sell-out Women’s History Month Lunch and Learn fundraiser at the National Press Club sponsored by Howard Fletcher and TTR|Sotheby’s. Gayela Bynum founded the non-profit WWSC to assist the families of cancer patients. In honor of Women’s History Month, Ann Atkins presented a compelling talk: Eleanor Roosevelt – the Arc of Her Journey. A card at each place setting reminded guests “We Stand Together With the Families. The message is clear: We Will Survive Cancer.” [gallery ids="99232,103684" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler • March 25, 2013

The more distant the recent past becomes, the more it tends to appear in our immediate rear view mirrors.

In America, we often suffer from selective memory, bracketed by convenient decades, or categories—Reagan’s Eighties, the transforming, revolutionary 1960s, the conforming, placid Leave-it-to-Beaver-disrupted-by-Elvis Eisenhower 1950s, the Greatest Generation, WWII, the Great Depression, the Roaring Twenties, and so on.

Rarely do the Seventies appear in that mirror with any intensity, and when they do, the images are thought to be grey and indistinct, the music bland or discordant, the cars too long and the gas lines longer. There’s a certain disdain and disconnect that’s accumulated about the decade, as if it was mildly depressing with signs of American decline appearing like pimples on a once confident teenagers face, it’s as if nothing much happened, and whatever happened, we’d just as soon forget about it and move into Reagan’s morning in America.

So what are all these folks doing here, many standing in line waiting to get into the National Archives last Friday?

Most of them were waiting to see the new exhibition “Searching for the Seventies, the Documentary Photography Project,” showcasing some 94 photos from about 22,000 taken by 70 photographers from 1971-1977.”

The title alone suggests that the Seventies haves gotten lost somewhere in the overcrowded American imagination which now feeds on reality shows that aren’t real, access to everything and connection to all, mostly without focus.

The documentary photography project is reminiscent of similar Depression Era efforts, including the classic James Agee/Walker Evans book “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” as well as the Roosevelt era Farm Security Administration’ photography program. “In Search of the Seventies” was a project of Documerica, which in turn was funded by the new Environmental Protection Agency, it had as a goal the idea of dealing with the energy crisis, a nascent spirit of environmentalism, urban renewal, economic crisis and challenges and the role and the rights of new political and social movements and identity by women in an America whose diversity in terms of racial, ethnic, gender and sexual identity, diversity was rapidly becoming visible and active.

Put that way, the project, instigated by EPA public affairs employee and former National Geographic photo editor Gifford Hampshire and headed by National Archives curator Bruce Bustard, seems almost dry and political.

It’s anything but that—while its focus seems to be on environmental issues—it appears to have reshaped the meaning of the word environmental to include the American human landscape, the human face that reminds us of ourselves over a period of ten years that were anything but uneventful. The result—as seen in the nearly one hundred photographs—is a look at how and in what ways and where Americans lived in a changing environment—the literal one as well as the metaphoric and social one.
On the day of the exhibition’s opening last week, there were lines, and inside, the seventies crowd mixed with young professionals, people who had brought their kids late in the day, and surely many of us who saw some vestiges of our younger selves in the photographs. “Oh my god,” one woman said, “there’s my Buick Skylark”. Cars, in fact, play a large role in the exhibition—as polluters, in a massive junkyard piled like GM auto corpses on top of one another, as rusted and abandoned by the side of a road in Arizona, as sleek, long American cars as proudly displayed in front of a garage in Lakewood, Ohio.

“Searching for the Seventies” isn’t necessarily about the dangers to the environment per se—although it came about a year after the first Earth Day was held, the EPA was signed into existence law by Richard Nixon. The photographers—all working with color, all of them gifted and talented—had a broad mission to follow what they were interested, what their lens and hearts saw, or so it seems judging by the results, some of them with very specific assignments. Broad themes are also here—“Everybody is a Star”, “Ball of Confusion”, “Pave Paradise”, alongside the specific journeys Jack Corn moved through Appalachia—traveling through West Virginia, Kentucky, and Virginia, coal mining territory, where he photographed the miners, their plights their families, many of them suffering from black lung disease, or the dangers inherent in the grueling work they did. There are miners. There’s a pool hall. There’s the hopeful young face of Clarice Brown, 19, who worked as a secretary for the United Mine Workers in Charleston, West Virginia, the man with the red helmet and lamp in Virginia-Pocahontas Coal Company #3 close to Richlands, Virginia.

There’s John H. White, the Chicago Daily News photographer who shot images of Chicago’s black population and neighborhoods, which struggled with poverty but also exuded a new vibrancy captured by his lens.

There’s Lyntha Scott Eiler who went on assignment to Arizona, especially in the north, capturing development surges, Native American children, the effects of strip mining and the smoke from power plants.

And then there’s Tom Hubbard, who once worked for the Cincinnati Enquirer and returned to his old stomping grounds to find a little bit of the soul of 1970s America in Fountain Square, an all-purpose square and park in downtown Cincinnati, which appears not so much as a specific place but a generic American place with a fountain, benches, musicians and jugglers, lunchers and people playing chess and protesting and carrying signs, much as you might find at Freedom Plaze, Dupont Circle or Farragut Square. The clothes look different, hats are from then not now, and dresses are as short as they are now and bell bottoms are the rage among dudes.
In a section called “Everybody is a Star”, you see the emerging people who fueled some of the outbursts of change in the 1960s—protesters, a man with a t-shirt emblazoned with a USA logo, wearing tie-dyed pants, sporting a beard and muscles and a black lab puppy. You see them all, rising up, the young black couple, he in a blue suit, topped by an Afro, she in bright red dress, three women sitting outside a retirement home in South Beach, farmers keeping safe during a dust storm, migrant workers, a bright-eyed teenager in her bedroom in Meeker Colorado, a guy selling Italian Lemonade.

You don’t necessarily hear America singing.

Actually, it’s John Fogerty and Creedence Clearwater Revival or Linda Rondstadt, bawling her man out with “You’re No Good, You’re No Good”—or Carole King going on with “I feel the earth move under my feet” as you move along.

What you see is planes, trains and automobiles, people waiting in line for a Metro shuttle in Bethesda, the smoke and rust of factories, run-down neighborhood, small towns hanging on, diners and the freeways of America.

What you see in the rear view mirror is the daily rhythm of change in America, moving out of the sixties, trudging toward the eighties. What you see in this rear view mirror is a younger face, looking vaguely familiar. [gallery ids="101195,143776,143770,143743,143765,143749,143761,143755" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler • March 18, 2013

“Nordic Cool,”, the vast, exciting, diverse, and indeed cool international festival of theater, dance, music, visual arts, literature, design, cuisine and film with participation of more than 750 artists celebrating the arts of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Greenland, the Faroe Islands and the Aland Islands will finish its dazzling run on Sunday night, March 17.

The festival was held at the Kennedy Center which was itself transformed by the festival from Feb. 19 onward. The visuals and art which arrived with the festival literally changed the look of the Kennedy Center day and night, what with a blue northern lights show at night, to begin with.

But I’m going to miss the ship of shirts.

I will miss Trondur Pattursson’s painted glass birds which gave of the romance, the sadness, the danger, the freedom of flight all over the center. The birds—seagulls, the widespread, sometimes orange, blue and red wingspreads of what might have the albatrosses and teals that accompanied sailors to the sea—have flown away again.

I will miss the elks roaming the grass outside the Kennedy Center—not real elk, but wooden sculptures called “Elk Towers”, assayed by Juha Pykalainen from the Aland Island, the elk fitting in nicely with the triumphant outdoor sculpture of “Don Quixote.” The elk will be gone along with the sound of rushing water.

That would be the paneling that accompanies a photographic exhibition centered on waterfalls and the disappearance and shrinking of water resources in the world by the internationally famous artist-environmental activist Ruri from Iceland. “The world’s water supply is shrinking at an alarming rate,” she told us. “It’s not just in my country but everywhere.” She then took us to a series of panels which, when you pulled them out, allowed you to hear the roar of waterfalls and rivers and stream, each with a distinctly different sound, which will be more different still, say, five years from now, and not as loud, until decades from now, the sound might be that of a rivulet.

All over the Kennedy Center, upstairs and downstairs, exhibitions hallmarked the state of contemporary Nordic design—especially the furniture, including a chair with a bears head prominently featured, but also a chair one would take great care to sit on. This is the land of Ikea, after all, as well as Ibsen and Bergman.

Upstairs, a large section was roped off for the use of children, who create anything they wanted with an abundance of Legos. Houses of the future—environmentally cool and practical, it appeared, if sometimes strange to navigate—were on display, near where a wintry fashion show was.

In the Hall of Nations, an installation called “Are We Still Afloat” was immediately dubbed the ship of shirts in that it was created entirely by the use of thousands of donated shirts from the locals—including Kennedy Center staffers—by Kaarina Kaikkonen, a Finnish artist who’s known for her use of found material in her sculptures and installations. The sculpture—which filled the Hall of Nations and created a stir as visitors stopped and searched the decks, so to speak, or had their pictures taken. “The ship is broken,” Kaikkonen told us. “Parts of it are lost.” She then asked me where I might put my shirts, front and outside, or inside. It was an interesting question—there’s no really satisfying answer.

We happened upon Trondur Patursson, the Faroe Islands painter and sculptor who with a large and quite kinetic beard looked like a relative of the ancient mariner—and he turned out to be a veteran seafarer. “They remind me of the seas and my travels and my homeland,” Patursson said of his stained glass birds, many of which seemed, in certain lights and times, to be flying, looking perhaps for him.

Go to the Kennedy Center this weekend—last chance to hear the flapping of colored birds, the rush of water, the billowing of sails made of shirts, elks trudging on grass in a blue light. Last chance to see “Nordic Cool,” which is way cool.

Mary Bird •

Placard bearing stern “suffragists” greeted guests to the Embassy of Finland on March 1 where Ambassador Ritva Koukku-Ronde and Joan Bradley Wages, president and CEO of the National Women’ History Museum, hosted a reception for the Suffrage Centennial Celebration. The evening was part of a weekend honoring U.S women who made history by marching in 1913 for voting rights ultimately obtained with passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. The ambassador spoke of her country’s stellar track record in promoting gender equality. In 1906, the women of Finland gained full political rights and today constitute 50 percent of the Finnish diplomatic corps. [gallery ids="101201,143859,143837,143854,143844,143850" nav="thumbs"]

Kelley Hudak • March 16, 2013

The “Luck of the Irish” was the evening’s wish as 500 guests flooded the atrium of the Ronald Reagan Building March 2 for a casino night to benefit the National Kidney Foundation. Notables included Washington Redskins Pro Bowler and honorary chair Lorenzo Alexander with fellow teammates Reed Doughty, Kedric Golston and Chris Wilson as well as Dallas Cowboy Anthony Armstrong. The event was emceed by ABC7’s Jummy Olanbanji and ESPN 980 host Scott Jackson. Each of the speakers has been personally affected by kidney disease in some way and came out to raise awareness for the cause. There are approximately 700,000 in the D.C. area suffering from kidney disease, nearly 6,000 on dialysis and 1,500 waiting for a lifesaving kidney transplant.

Highlights included traditional casino games, a silent auction, a performance by the ladies of the O’Neil James School of Irish Dance and a dress-up photo booth where guests donned their favorite costumes and snapped silly pictures. The night was capped off by a version of the latest viral Internet dance craze, the Harlem Shake, where NFL players and guests alike joined in the fun.
[gallery ids="101200,143845,143841,143807,143836,143814,143832,143820,143826" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler • March 14, 2013

Around ten years ago, singer Helen Reddy says she just got tired of performing and needed to move on to other things.

“I was just plain tired,” she said. “Of touring and everything that went with it. I’d done it most of my life from a kid on.” And then, recently, something happened. Reddy realized she missed performing.

“I sang at a birthday thing with my sister,” she said. “And I realized that I missed singing. I missed the audience, and so I thought I wanted to come back.”

Not without some trepidation. At first, Reddy did gigs in California, which had been the base and home for the Australian-born musical superstar of the 1970s and 1980s, the period when she had some of her biggest hits.

Now, she’s coming to Washington, to the Barns at Wolf Trap specifically for two concerts, Thursday and Friday, March 7 and 8, at 8 p.m.

“You know what I really like?” she asked. “It’s that contact with the audience, that back and forth, the emotional tug. It’s not just about nostalgia, or a greatest hits’ kind-of-thing. I have some of my old band mates, and I’ll be doing some of my hits, sure, but also standards, and songs of mine that perhaps aren’t so familiar, but that I love.” “No, no backup singers,” she said, laughing.

In a way, her presence in the states and in Washington has a little bit of serendipity to it—the city is and the country is in the midst of celebrating March as National Women’s History Month. Where would Women’s History Month be without a mention, the very presence of a kind of women’s history anthem, still defiant, still particular and pertinent?

Where would any mention of women’s history be without “I Am Woman”? Reddy’s hard-fought signature and anthem song, released in May 1972, had an up and down journey on the charts before finally making its way to the top of the Billboard charts in December of that year.

Not only did she first record and sing the song, but Reddy is its listed co-writer with songwriter Ray Burton. What happened after all that is something else again: the song resonated with women and the women’s liberation movement to the point that it became a musical flag for the women’s rights and remains so. There are millions of women—and no doubt quite a few men—who know the song by heart and will sing it without being asked. History keeps right on moving and the song moves with it. There are still firsts for women. Witness that the song was heard in the background after Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win an Academy Award for Best Director.

Reddy’s presence in the nation’s capital, when all kinds of historical and commemorative exhibitions, symposiums and marches on women’s rights are being held, seems appropriate. You can bet that the song will be part of her show at the Barns, although not quite in the form you’re used to hearing it. “Yes, I will perform it,” she said. “Of course. It’s a strange thing, that song. I’m so proud of it, but it’s also one of those things, an achievement that’s kind of hard to top. I mean I’m a part of history now. So, that song has a huge importance to me and to others.”

“Woman” is not the only hit song Reddy ever wrote, recorded and sang—she’s had a big and long career, being part of an Australian show biz family, and setting out on a singing career in the United States in the 1960s. Her breakthrough hit was “I Don’t Know How To Love Him,” the Mary Magdalene ballad from “Jesus Christ Superstar.” It was followed by “I am Woman” and a host of other hits, including “Angie Baby,” “Delta Dawn” (the Alex Harvey-penned song also recorded by a teenaged Tanya Tucker and others) and “That’s No Way to Treat a Lady” among many others. Reddy reportedly has sold more than 25 million records worldwide—which is to say that in the 1970s and 1980s, she was huge.

That kind of red-hot heat of fame rarely lasts, but Reddy was to the stage born and toured often and also made forays into the legitimate theater stage, where she appeared as “Shirley Valentine” and in “Anything Goes” and “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” in addition to appearances in movies and on television.

“I think there’s nothing like that connection between audience and singer,” she said during our interview. “I really love it. I look out there and see members of several generations, people my ages, old fans, to be sure, but also new ones, and women with their teenaged daughters. That’s very emotionally satisfying to me.”

This month, for sure, it will be good to see and hear Helen Reddy at the Barns at Wolf Trap. She is, after all, Helen Reddy, a star who has lived a life from there and back again. The song and its lyrics resonate for women everywhere, but surely for her, too: “Oh yes I am wise/But it’s wisdom born of pain/Yes I’ve paid the price/but look how much I gained/If I have to/I can face anything/I am strong/I am invincible/I am woman.”

Gary Tischler •

What was it with Puccini and his women?

We know all about Mimi in “La Boheme” and “Madame Butterfly.” It’s a wonder he didn’t create Violetta, given his affinity for ladies dependent on men, falling in love with the wrong man, or ending up in tragic circumstances.

Manon Lescaut, a very young courtesan-type, seems to have attracted the genius successor to Verdi from the get-go, so much so that he ignored the fact that two operas had already been assayed about Manon, the heroine of a popular 18th-century novel by Abbe Prevost. Giacomo Puccini is said to have called Manon “a heroine I believe in. She can love more than one man. So, there can be more than one opera.”

On the surface of it, you have to wonder: Manon likes glitz, glitter and stuff, the high life, she is young, not exactly a femme fatale or even a practiced courtesan, but what she has is more than enough for Geronte, a wealthy, powerful, and need we say it, much older aristocrat who apparently sees her as a shiny elixir and rejuvenator of the flesh, a damsel he can dress up and own for his pleasure. Manon, who’s pushed on Geronte by her brother Lescaut for his own advancement—has a go at real love with the dashing, sensitive and impassioned young Chevalier des Grieux before she’s spirited away into the wealthy arms and high life of the world of Geronte.

That’s the setup, and you ask what’s to like about Manon. The way she’s embodied by soprano Patricia Racette in the Washington National Opera’s spring-season opener, there’s a lot to like, and even love about “Manon Lescaut,” both the character and the opera. In terms of both propensity of plot and music, this is early Puccini (1893), but it has all the earmarks and tells of his later grand works of genius, which followed “Lescaut—“La Boheme,” “Tosca” and “Madame Butterfly.”

We’ve already seen Racette, a singer with a rich, rangy voice, and in her case just as important, a gift, even a will to embody theatrically the parts she performs, in “Tosca,” but Manon, which she portrays for the first time in her career, is an entirely different challenge. It’s a traditional kind of role in the sense that it leads to wonderful duets (with the very able Bulgarian tenor Kamen Chanev soaring with her in heroic fashion) and arias. Chanev, in “Donna, non vidi mai,” sings with such believable passion that you understand as clear as heartbreak why he’s so smitten, and Racette when she joins him and by herself, gives him something to be smitten about, in spite of Manon’s appetites for baubles and dresses.

Director John Pascoe has staged most of the production in traditional fashion, with sometimes dazzling period costumes and wigs that have of their own. His principal design conceit is giant leaves in which audiences can read pages from the novel—an indication that, if you haven’t read the book, that Abbe Prevost writes in a style perfect for the creation of operas—super-charged poetically and emotionally. It’s a conceit that grounds the production when it needs to be, except on one occasion when we see entirely too much of the book, and not enough of the characters.

The production and the opera centers squarely on Manon and des Grieux, since the brother, ably sung and portrayed by Giorgio Caoduro, isn’t so much an imposing player as an onlooker. Jake Gardner as Geronte is a threatening, shadowing physical presence but doesn’t impress vocally.

In Racette and Chanev, “Manon Lescaut” has a convincing, passionate pair of lovers, ill-matched initially, but hearts entwined desperately, and sadly in the end, when Manon and des Grieux, through a series of revenge-minded events engineered by Geronte, end up in French-held Louisiana, cast out and fled into what appears to be a great desert. From their first meeting, recognition of love to Manon’s tragic end in a strange land, these two rise vocally and emotionally to making you care about the two lovers.

Gary Tischler •

I’m guessing—I could be wrong here—that there’s no video game called “Druids and Romans” or “Gauls and Romans.” Ancient Britain of Gaul under the occupation of Ancient Rome is a tough task for movie makers as well as stage directors who have to cut through the thicket that is Shakespeare’s “Cymbeline.”

It’s tough for opera, too, but that’s exactly where we find ourselves in Vincenzo Bellini’s bell canto mountain of an opera, “Norma,” which has as its main characters the powerful druid high priestess Norma, her (secret) lover and father of her two children, the Roman general Pollione, the young novice priestess Adalgisa, with whom has fallen in love, and the druid Oroveso, who is also Norma’s father.

As a druid—the priest class of the ancient Celts—Norma is a high priestess of the land’s power and its magic. She interprets the will of the gods: Should the druids war against the Romans or sit back and wait? This is a paramount question during this opera, but the biggest question of all is what happens when Norma finds out that she’s essentially being dumped for a younger rival. Things do not end well, as is wont to happen in ancient Britain and in opera.

Perhaps none of that matters too much when you having the rising star soprano Angela Meade, performing and singing the role of Norma and knocking it out of the park, aided and abetted almost on an equal plane by mezzo soprano Dolora Zajick as her rival.

Meade has already done parts of the role and a concert version of “Norma,” the big rock candy mountain of bell canto singing for any star soprano worthy of the name. There have been some great Normas by all accounts, including the legendary Maria Callas. I’m guessing there’s another one that can be added to that list and her initials are A.M.

Meade is known for her technical virtuosity, something I can’t argue with. According to some critics, she isn’t yet the actress that she might be. For all the high notes—the riverboat gambling singing that is the musical equivalent of skipping a pebble on water and making it go forever—what Meade accomplishes in this role is to act with her singing. She loads her voice up not only with impossible amounts of breath and breadth and tone, but also with the most important part of the music—the singing—which is invested with the heart of Norma. This happens whether Meade is singing alone in the horrific scene where she almost “Medeas” her children (“Teneri, Teneri Figli”) or when she’s singing with Zajick in which forgiveness and sisterhood reign in a deliriously delicious duet (“Mira o Norma”, but it could be BFF).

Norma is torn—war against the Romans, revenge against Pollione—and she still has to tell her people that she is the mother of two, fathered by the Roman general.

This sort of thing is difficult to put together, because great music (yes!) or not, great singing (yes!), the action and the characters don’t exist in a vacuum. While the ladies make you care about the ladies, you have to be comfortable in the surroundings in which so much often preposterous things goes on. Director Ann Bogart and designer Neil Patel have opted for a bare-bones, bone-clean primitive look which seems somehow perpetually cold—an angled slab of stage, a wall propped up by what look like long wooden spears, an omni-present moon which the druids worship. It has just enough strangeness to make you realize just how strange that world must have been. The Romans, fixed in their legionnaire uniforms seem out of place in this environment—which seems right—while the locals range from robes to whatever the middle-class druids might wear, while vestal virgin types in shimmering white make patterns on the stage. In this group, Dmitry Belosselskiy as Oroveso resounds with authority. On the other hand, Rafael Davila has a little too much reckless petulance in his voice, but then he is playing a cad.

But as for Meade, certainly, and Zajick as well, I can only echo the gentleman behind me who voiced his pleasure at Meade’s solo and their duets with a resounding “Bravissima!”

The Washington National Opera’s “Norma” runs through March 24 at the Kennedy Center.

Robert Devaney •

It may seem far off, but April 27 is coming fast for home-owners, volunteers and designers working to make the 82nd Georgetown House Tour a success. The main players met to strategize and socialize March 6 at the 34th Street home of Frank Randolph, who is again co-chairing the house tour with Stephanie Bothwell. There are eight houses on the tour. The tour’s popular Patrons’ Party will be held April 24 at the home of Marc Schappell and Tom Anderson, both executives at Washington Fine Properties, LLC. For more details, visit www.GeorgetownHouseTour.com, or call 202-338-2287. [gallery ids="119500,119490,119495,119483" nav="thumbs"]