Arts & Society

Georgetowner • February 14, 2013

The venerable George Town Club, known for members involved in business, politics and diplomacy, invited hundreds of the younger set of Georgetown to jazz up its menus, decor and programs Feb. 1. “Come Celebrate The George Town Club . . . and see everything this gem has to offer,” read the invitation that drew in the 20-, 30- and 40-something crowd in hopes of getting a rejuvenating rush of fresher ideas and new members. The historic dinner club, founded in 1966, boasts a site at Wisconsin Avenue and Volta Place with links back to George Washington, Pierre L’Enfant and the founding of Washington, D.C. [gallery ids="101158,141616,141582,141612,141589,141607,141596,141602" nav="thumbs"]

Mary Bird •

Marshall Coyne brought a new level of luxury to the nation’s capital when the Madison Hotel opened in 1963. Over the years, the hotel has welcomed presidents, kings, prime ministers and celebrities. It has now been acquired by Loews Hotels & Resorts and at a late morning reception on Feb. 1 officially became the Loews Madison Hotel. Loews Hotels & Resorts president and CEO Paul Whetsell, joined by Loews Madison Hotel’s managing director Jim Horsman, welcomed guests and acknowledged banquet waiter George Caracamo, who was at the hotel when the doors opened. He and fellow staff members joined in toasting 50 years of the property “being a preeminent part of Washington, D.C.” [gallery ids="101159,141613,141608" nav="thumbs"]

Mary Bird •

TheatreWashington announced the 29th Helen Hayes Awards nominees at the National Theatre’s Helen Hayes Gallery on Feb. 28. The awards celebrate 84 professional theatres which have made D.C. an internationally recognized cultural venue that attracts more than two million audience members annually. As no one could do better, board chair Victor Shargai exhorted theater lovers to “keep producing, take risks and go to a show.” The awards will reach their rightful recipients on Apr. 8 at the Warner Theatre. [gallery ids="101160,141655,141614,141650,141645,141620,141640,141628,141634" nav="thumbs"]

Mary Bird •

There was no lull in conversation as Meridian International Center and THIS for Diplomats honored embassy social secretaries at White-Meyer House on Feb. 5 for their valuable role in promoting cultural diplomacy. MIC president and CEO Stuart Holliday thanked “the people who make Washington work.” THIS president Phyllis Kaplan said social secretaries have provided the best link in welcoming incoming diplomats. Meridan board chair James Blanchard reported the representation of 61 embassies at the early evening reception. Chief of Protocol Capricia Penavic Marshall acknowledged Diane Brown, representing Tiffany, as “fellow soldiers in the event battlefield.” White House Social Secretary Jeremy Bernard hailed “a gathering or peers and friends.” [gallery ids="101161,141675,141647,141671,141654,141665,141660" nav="thumbs"]

Robert Devaney •

The Nationals’ Young Benefactors Off- season on Ice fundraiser skated around Washington Harbour’s ice rink and Nick’s Riverside Grill Feb. 7, thanks for mascots Teddy Roosevelt and Screech. Amid the donors and influencers at Nick’s was Mike Rizzo, general manager of the Nationals, being thanked for last season and getting ready for spring training. The night raised funds for the Nationals Dream Foundation, which benefits the Neighborhood Initiative and two new non-profits: the Washington Nationals Youth Baseball Academy and the Washington Nationals Pediatric Diabetes Care Complex at Children’s National Medical Center. [gallery ids="102583,119737,119743" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

Unsurprisingly, the phone rings right on time. I have some mixed expectations about the sound of Hilary Hahn’s voice—after all she’s been playing the violin since she was four years old and as a student at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, which makes for a grand total of 29 years of violin playing, all over the world, all over the place.

There’s no wear and tear in the voice–just friendly, inquisitive statements and answers to questions, sometime the tone of somebody who knows every inch and note and bit of musicology you can master living the life of a classical music star. Hahn will be giving a Washington Perforning Arts Society recital, accompanied by pianist Cory Smythe, at the Kennedy Center’s Concert Hall Saturday, Feb. 16. She is in the midst of a major tour with a program, the contents of which characterize where her musical life has led and now leads her.

“I don’t worry about what I haven’t done,” Hahn says. She’s calling from Tallahassee, Fla., where she’ll be heading for the airport in half an hour for a flight that will take her to San Francisco, exemplifying her nomadic touring life. “I don’t know what I’ll be playing 20 years from now, what kind of music. I’m always looking for ways to improving, to keep learning, how to best honor the people I’ve learned from, the music I love.”

The program for her Saturday performance at the Kennedy Center includes “Faure, Violin Sonata No. 2 in A major, Op. 13″; “Corelli, Violin Sonata No. 4a in F major, Op. 5” and “Bach, Chaconne from Partita No. 2 in D minor for Solo Violin, BWV 1004.” The last is a Hahn favorite. For her, it is demanding, challenging and rewarding.

“Bach brings out the best in me, I love the challenge,” Hahn says. “Bach is, for me, my touchstone. He keeps me honest.” For many musicians, Bach seems to remain a slightly taller god in a crowded firmament.

Then, there are — to name a few — Anton Garcia-Abril, Richard Barrett, David Lang, Du Yun, Michiru Oshima, Kala Ramnath and others, all of them composers of new music, encores lasting from five to ten minutes or more. “I started thinking about commissioning new kinds of encores for this century,” she said. It’s something she’s given a great deal of thought, and she included an open on-line contest for the 27th composition. The winner of that was Jeff Myers’s “The Angry Birds of Kauai.” In short, she was seeking to play a new kind of encore for our times and beyond.

I have to own up here: I have two of her CDs, but I’ve never seen and heard her perform in person. She has led the life of a prodigy and moved into her teens and young adulthood relatively smoothly. For the uninitiated or less-than-aficionado, it’s probably hard to pick out an individual violinist (or pianist or cellist) by style or sheer sound from just listening on a record. My first real exposure to violin music was a concert at the Music Center at Strathmore (where Hahn has performed) by Yitzhak Perlman, which led me to Anne-Sophie Mutter, Hahn, Joshua Bell and others. What strikes me while listening to Hahn is how clean and precise is the direction from sound to heart. She removes any obstacles that might be to feeling with laser focus.

Hahn talks somewhat the same way—she went way beyond prodigy and grew up in her performances and her recordings and her work before a generation of music lovers, the Virginia-born kid from Baltimore, now with souvenirs from hotel rooms in the greatest cities of the world and praise like a critical ticker parade from peers and critics.

Hahn has aptly handled her fame in a thoughtful way. Visit hilaryhahn.com to see that she’s very much her generation’s child, savvy about the internet and its uses, creating a site where she interviews other musicians on video, answers all sorts of questions, updates her tours and activities, puts up entries for a journal of postcards and, in general, invites her fans into her life. On her site, she answers questions about life on the road, how she works and her music. She mixes her charismatic seriousness with vivid chatter. She sounds that way on the phone, engaging, respectful, and witty–whip smart.

Classical music these days is seeing a lot of genre and form crossing. Bell not so long ago did an album with “a few of his friends” that included Josh Groban and Sting, a foray into pop, jazz and other genres. Yo-Yo Ma has taken up some blue grass.

But nobody has done a collaboration with the German pianist and composer Hauschka (aka Volker Bertelmann), who works both the edgy rock scene and the edgier shadows of classical music like John Cage and plays the prepared piano (pianos which included other materials to produce different sounds). Hauschka and Hahn spent ten days in Iceland working together to produce what would eventually become an album called “Silfra.”

“Everything stems from improvisation, which usually isn’t a part of classical music,” Hahn says. “But it’s also exciting and frees you to try new things.” One of the new things must have been the sound of ping pong balls, one of the ingredients of this particular prepared piano.

A YouTube video shows the two of them prepping, playing (in both senses of the word) in the company of producer Valgeir Sigurdsson. The music you get the hear seems sometimes discordant, playful and yet beautiful. Sometimes, Hahn seems to making tunes meant for Irish gypsies.

“There’s no reason not to get involved with other genres,” she said. “I’ve worked with singer-songwriters like Tom Brosseau and Josh Ritter, and that kind of mixing of genres and styles is invigorating.”

On YouTube, you see the concert and recital mistress Hahn, with or without orchestra, alone but hardly lonely. In one case, before a Mendelssohn piece, she walks with strong strides to her place on the podium in a blazing, bare-shouldered red gown. She shakes a violinist’s hand firmly, places the violin in place, smiles and begins. The music has no hesitation. It’s a full launch.

“When you come, listen to the audience,” she says. “I love hearing what the audience hears and thinks.”

Displaying Hahn’s ease at crossing genres, another YouTube video, recorded in Moscow, shows and tells. The alt and brawly indie rock group “And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead” performed in what sounded like a rowdy club when this small young woman with a violin came on stage, all in black—jeans and sweater—and launched into “To Russia, My Homeland,” striding the stage like a rock star, playing with great power and beauty all the same, like some really cool but wayward player at a biker bar. The crowd cheered, whistled and yelled. Someone from the band said, a little in awe, “Hilary Hahn.”

The scene at the Kennedy Center on Saturday will no doubt be different, but there will also be someone to say, a little in awe, “Hilary Hahn.”

Robert Devaney • February 12, 2013

The fourth annual Georgetown art show opened at the House of Sweden with a festive Feb. 7 reception which once again packed the gallery with admirers and artists. The show, put on by the Citizens Association of Georgetown, ran through Feb. 10 and exhibited visual artists who live or work in Georgetown. Most works were on sale; a few were on loan from private collections. The show was designed by Jennie Buhler and chaired by Laura-Anne Tiscornia. [gallery ids="101155,141535,141512,141530,141519,141526" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler • February 11, 2013

“Our Town” by Thornton Wilder, now enjoying a splendid 75th anniversary production at the Ford’s Theatre, is a paradox, a contradiction—in its aspirations and results, in the feelings it engenders and the way it has always and continues to be regarded. The play garners large amounts of affection with an almost equal amount of disdain and criticism.

Count this writer and critic in the affectionate corner, in regards to “Our Town,” and more generally, the works of Wilder as both playwright and novelist. This is not the place to talk about “The Bridge at San Luis Rey,” “The Eighth Day” or even Wilder’s career. We’re concerned with this production of “Our Town.” At this time and without hesitation, I would urge anyone with a mind or half a mind to go see it, experience it. I would urge children—accompanied by adults, if not critics—and young people and old people however slow of foot, and the residents of this city as well as visitors to see it, or the transient, if not transcendental stewards of our government to go see it.

The paradox—for directors and less so actors, not to mention the audience—of “Our Town” is that its three acts are rooted in invigorating, palatable specifics of time and place, yet are presented almost as abstractions—bare stage, uniform costumes, minimal props as when the play first saw the light of stage many decades ago. In addition, the characters behave and talk and come armed with memories and knowledge only of where and who they are living in a small American town and place—Grover’s Landing, N.H., in the early years of 20th century America. From the get-go, the play strives for the poetic universal, for the idea that its contents have wings and are ticketed to travel through time and universe. It means to echo and mirror whatever place, time and space it exists in a particular performance.

So, here we are in Washington in the year 2013, 75 years ago the play’s first production, a little more than 100 years past the setting of the action of the play when it opens. Some of us have heard these words spoken before. These characters and citizens of Grover’s Landing have lived for us before on some other stage, or on television back in the 1950s or more recently. The words are pretty much the same, and the characters are the same–but then again, they’re not. How things are said will be different, and how the people look will be different, and so on. Somewhere in there, something in what’s said, or a movement, or a voice, will strike someone differenty, maybe irritate them or pain them sadly. Important, too, is the fact that we are different.

Wilder shows us three things: a typical day in Grover’s Corner, the courtship and marriage of George Gibbs and Emily Webb, the son and daughter of the town’s chief doctor and editor of its newspaper, respectively, and then the dark third act where death and the meaning of the whole damn thing rears its clear-eyed head. He means to make us face our own lives, or more generously and broadly, have empathy for our humanity and its devastating limits. It is neither fully nor specifically a sentimental play for which it is often mistaken. In some ways, it is a remarkably cruel play–not because it is merciless, but because it is true. There is no question that the play has been played with sentiment and jerked for its tears the world over in all the languages known to man–and most publicly, for being the source of inspiration for the Sammy Cahn song “Love and Marriage.” Yet there is little if any sentiment here. This production, under the direction of Stephen Rayne, moves unavoidably and bravely to its conclusions.

The portrait of Grover’s Corner, it seems to me, is accurate about small town tastes, sentiment and rhythms, a town in Teddy Roosevelt’s time, where you might spot a car or two, where the constable and milkman made their rounds, where Dr. Gibbs comes home from delivering babies and where the poor Polish citizens might live. There are secrets in this town, but they’re of the kind known to and gossiped by everyone, especially the state of the clinically depressed church organist. We meet the Webb and the Gibbs family, see their children, Emily and George as teens and then boy and girl, who begin to get an inkling that they might love each other.

I think everyone here comports themselves as who they act to be—the anxious Mrs. Gibbs who wants to see Paris desperately, Dr. Gibbs who has adopted an avuncular tone of wisdom which seems to be expected of him, the resonating authority displayed by Editor Webb and the exasperation often displayed by his wife in dealing with gardens and children. The touchstones of the family seem so real that you might think, if you ever went to New England, you would find their names on tombstones in a town that doesn’t exist.

There is always a person called the stage manager to lead us through his—I would bet he’s been played in Moscow, or in Warsaw, or small town high school productions. I have seen Robert Prosky play him to fatherly ends at Arena Stage , I have seen Frank Sinatra—yes, the Sinatra—in a television production where Paul Newman was George and Eva Marie Saint was Emily. I have seen Newman play the part on television. The stage manager—has been played every which way, including by a woman, the fine actress Pat Carroll who herself once played not just Mother Courage but Falstaff. And now we see the African American actress Portia play the part, in a way that I think suited the place and the time and gave the play immediacy and accessibility.

Portia’s stage manager is of the sort that is inviting. No nonsense, she is friendly, as if to suggest that this is important to the audience, but also a proceeding in which their presence is welcome, critical. She seems more plain spoken, a little more close to the audience than others, but always keenly aware that this is a matter of import, not in a pompous, church-and-classroom sort of way, but rather as part of a echoing conversation.

She talks about one of the town’s departed, at a point already near the end of the play when you viscerally, if not actually, believe in the town and its people and the words, a young man who had fought in died in the Civil War to “protect the union even though he hadn’t seen more than 50 miles of it.” He died, she notes, looking up at the martyred president’s box, to defend the United States. Then, you remember that, to these folks, Abraham Lincoln and the bloody war were recent memories not history.

This production also brings home to me that “Our Town” is a play about theater and its place in our lives—after all, we see the stagehands, the actors and such gathering on stage, one by one or in twos, finding their place, a chair, a corner—here comes the actor—the authoritative Craig Wallace, playing Mr. Webb, and here is Emily, sitting in a chair, and here comes Fred Strother who plays the constable, and John Lescault as Joe Stoddard the local historian, and Tom Story, bringing his Simon Stimson, the organ player on stage, and so forth.

By using the barest of stages and no props—you hear a horse whinnying, or the sad or loud notes of trains charging into town—you understand better what the theater has always done right from the first traveling story teller, to the Greeks in their amphitheatre, using masks, which is to imagine ourselves and times past and now. For a writer and journalist, I suddenly noticed a pretty blond girl sit down and pick something up and appeared to be holding and scanning. It was Alyssia Gagarin, who played Emily with poignancy and keen and keening awareness, as Emily holding up and reading a newspaper which wasn’t there. It seemed to me at least a sharp, even wounding illustration of the coming fates of newspapers.

In this production, it’s worth noticing the audience—this one, a day after the production opened seemed prone to want to clap with or without prompting, and seemed to be a part of an extension of the town itself.

On the 75th anniversary of “Our Town,” this production is a showcase, not only of the gifts of the artists and actors involved, but also of the inventive spirit and imagination of Thornton Wilder, who in giving us “Our Town”, gave us our towns and the places in which we live and the life therein.

“Our Town” runs through Feb. 24 at Ford’s Theatre. [gallery ids="101149,140886" nav="thumbs"]

Nico Dodd • February 7, 2013

Last Thursday, Jan. 24, the Greenbrier’s Upper Lobby hosted Cocktails with Carleton, a private cocktail reception at the Greenbrier’s D.C. concierge at 1427 H St., NW. At the event were hotel curator Carleton Varney, president of Dorothy Draper & Co., Greenbrier president Jeff Kmiec and the staff of the Upper Lobby. The Upper Lobby, which opened in November 2012, is a new concept by the hotel designed to attract travelers to the Greenbrier resort. The staff of the Upper Lobby can work with guests to book Greenbrier vacations, rounds of golf and other attractions. Guests of the Greenbrier can even book door-to-door transportation from the Upper Lobby to the Greenbrier Resort. The hotel is looking into opening offices like this one in New York, Chicago and Atlanta.

The Upper Lobby is decorated in the Greenbrier’s signature style in vibrant colors and bold contrasts. On the walls are photos of many of the resort’s distinguished guests over the years.

Hotel owner Jim Justice could not be at the event because was he was coaching high school basketball. Justice coaches both the men’s and women’s basketball teams at Greenbrier East High School.
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