Arts & Society

Ari Post • August 10, 2012

Between the sculpture gardens at the National Gallery, the Kreeger Museum and Hirshhorn, there’s a lot to see around the streets of Washington. Throw in the fraternity of bronze-cast historic figures scattered throughout the city and there’s an all-star cast of artistic and historic characters around every corner. You’ll see Henri Moore and Henry Longfellow, Giacometti and Ghandi, Alexander Calder and Alexander Hamilton.

Indeed, there are so many longstanding outdoor fixtures that we miss on our daily commute alone (who among us has ever actually seen a Boundary Stone?), that it’s all too easy to overlook a new public installation. Doug Aitken’s “Song 1” at the Hirshhorn was a deserved success before it came down early last month, with projectors flashing a fully encompassing video around the building’s elliptical façade to a remixed exploration of the 1930s pop song “I Only Have Eyes for You.” It left audiences wanting more of that interactive, environmentally specific experience. Thankfully, the Hirshhorn isn’t lacking for new outdoor installations, and neither is the National Museum of Women in the Arts. And now is just the right time of year to be outside and experience them.

Chakaia Booker Scultures Roll Into New York Avenue

There is a peculiar group of sculptures on a well-kept, grassy median on New York Avenue between 12th and 13th Streets NW, amid the oil drum echoes of construction by Mount Vernon Square and the arterial bustle of downtown. Black and unusually textured, they appear almost aloof to their surroundings — curious as to what exactly is going on around them.

This is the work of sculptor Chakaia Booker, the second artist selected for the National Museum of Women in the Arts’ (NMWA) New York Avenue Sculpture Project, the only public art space featuring changing installations of contemporary works by women artists. Booker, by integrating discarded construction materials into large outdoor sculptures, works here with recycled tires which she slices, twists, weaves and rivets into radically new forms. Tires resonate with the artist for their versatility and rich historical and cultural legacy: The harvest and production of rubber is entwined with a history of brutal colonization, cultural injustices and slave labor in Africa and the world beyond.

Given the space they occupy, these sculptures are oddly modest in size, as if refusing to compete with surrounding noise and structures. They stick out from their environment by utter disassociation of urban aesthetics. They do not try to be big—and in this way they grow. These dancing forms, with interlacing planes that revolve through and around each other, are Brancusian in their suggestive shapes and movement, while their texture and tactility remain rooted somewhere firmly in the earth of this world.

They have the texture of nature, vines, bushes and nettles, like fictitious plants you might see in a Maurice Sendack illustration. Also like Sendack’s work, there is an undertow of darkness about them—a keyhole’s peek into a world of magnificent intrigue and epochal wrath. Perhaps it’s the wondrous patterns and textures against the sheer literality of the tires—once you get close to them, the sculptures are upfront about their material: masses of diced, slit rubber and hundreds of heavy screws securing them to their skeleton.

While there is a good chance you already passed them by without even noticing their presence, Chakaia’s sculptures are worth serious consideration. The good news is they will be on view through 2014, so there’s time to see them.

For more information visit www.NMWA.org.

Ai Weiwei Turns Heads at the Hirshhorn

“Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads” is the first major US public art project by internationally renowned Chinese artist and political activist Ai Weiwei. The installation comprises a dozen bronze sculptures, each roughly ten feet tall, that represent the signs of the Chinese zodiac (snake, horse, ram, monkey, rooster, dog, pig, rat, ox tiger, rabbit and dragon).

The sculptures are re-envisioned and enlarged versions of original eighteenth-century heads that were designed during the Qing dynasty for the fountain clock of the Yuanming Yuan (Garden of Perfect Brightness), an imperial, European-style retreat outside Beijing, which was pillaged in 1860. The Hirshhorn placed them encircling the fountain in the center of the Hirshhorn’s rounded courtyard.

Weiwei went to great pains to depict the animals with detail, down to the veins in the rabbit’s forehead and the chicken’s grainy crown, every surface suggestive of hair, feathers or skin. The heads cut off abruptly at the neck, the stanchions they are affixed to connecting rather artlessly underneath, as if they were each severed from the body and mounted on coarsely carved wooden spikes—like the pig’s head in William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies.”

There is always a lot of historical and political baggage when dealing with Ai Weiwei—and I mean that in the best possible way. A noted dissident, Weiwei has spent his career speaking up against social and political oppression in his homeland. He is a master of the conversation between abrasive confrontation (including a photographic series of his own middle finger interrupting otherwise innocuous snapshots of historic Chinese landmarks, such as Tiananmen Square) and subtle symbolism (covering the floor at London’s Tate Modern with hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds—a comment on mass consumption, among countless other things).

Knowing this, why would Weiwei go to the effort of such odd and meticulous realism if he didn’t mean them to be perceived that way? Without forcing anything on the audience, the work raises questions about repatriation and intention as well as our own blindness to suffering, religious misinterpretation and historical injustice.

For more information visit www.Hirshhorn.si.edu. [gallery ids="100821,125482" nav="thumbs"]

Georgetowner •

In Washington, there might not be a more accommodating neighborhood for contemporary visual art than Dupont Circle. It started as early as 1921, when Duncan Phillips began exhibiting his collection of modern art in special galleries at his home on the corner of 21st and Q Streets. Phillips played an important role in introducing the United States to contemporary art, exhibiting Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse when most of the country was still incensed by modernism. The Phillips Collection still stands at the site of Duncan’s old home—the original house now the southern section of the museum—and the gallery is still on the forefront of contemporary visual art (its current exhibitions of Jasper Johns and Antony Gormley are stunning proofs of that).

The foundation Phillips laid in his lifetime has only grown stronger; Dupont Circle is now a cultural mecca, housing some of the District’s most enviable performance spaces, restaurants and art galleries, nestled among honored historic landmarks, foreign embassies and international institutions. Its spirit is the living embodiment of Phillips’s lifelong focus of the continuous progress and tradition of art and culture. The galleries below have visual offerings this season worthy of multiple explorations. The owners know their stuff and enjoy sharing their knowledge and enthusiasm with interested patrons. There’s no better way to celebrate summer than with an evening walk through Dupont’s gallery crowd. For more on Dupont Circle’s gallery scene, check out the Dupont Circle Arts blog: www.DupontCircleArts.BlogSpot.com.

Studio Gallery

Studio Gallery showcases contemporary art from a variety of artists both American and international living in the DC area, and they always have a lot going on. One of their upcoming shows features the work of Jan Willem van der Vossen, whose series of abstract and wild landscapes are a swathe of color and line, taking the viewer from the red-hot landscapes of Andalusia to a minimalist forest of trees. Another show belongs to the work of Shahrzad Jalinous, whose debut exhibition with Studio will feature her large figurative oil paintings. Jalinous’s paintings are a blurred whirlwind of earthy texture and color, muted, saturated and entirely satisfying. The exhibits run June 20 – July 14.

2108 R St. NW. www.StudioGalleryDC.com. Hours: Wed. – Fri. 1 – 7, Sat. 1 – 6, or by appointment.

Hillyer Artspace

For the past six years, Hillyer Art Space has been dedicated to exhibiting underexposed D.C. area artists alongside those of established international reputation. To celebrate the occasion of six successful years, it has invited all of its previous artists to return to the gallery once more. This retrospective is a celebration not only of the gallery but of its family of artists that have come through the doors and realized great accomplishments. Each artist in this exhibition has shown in the gallery or is an Artist Advisory Committee Member. The exhibit runs through June 26.

9 Hillyer Ct. NW. www.ArtsAndArtists.org. Hours: Tue. – Fri. 12 – 6, Mon. & Sat. 12 – 5, or by appointment.

Burton Marinkovich Fine Art

Burton Marinkovich is a small gallery with a huge but well curated inventory of artwork, specializing in works on paper by modern and contemporary masters. Its collection ranges from some of the foremost artists of the past half-century—Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, Richard Diebenkorn, David Hockney and D.C.’s own Kenneth Noland—to mid-career and established artists still working today. “We opened in 1993,” says Royce Burton, who runs the gallery with Andrea Marinkovich. “And, actually, we chose this location for its proximity to The Phillips Collection.”

Marinkovich told the Washington Post that the gallery is, “kind of messy, with the atmosphere of maybe a professor’s office or research library,” reminiscent of old-world European salons with intimate spaces full of treasures.

1506 21st St. NW. www.BurtonMarinkovich.com. Hours: Tue. – Sat. 11 to 6, or by appointment. Ring the buzzer to get in.

Cross-Mackenzie

Cross MacKenzie Gallery, a haven for those of us enamored by sculptural and ceramic arts, is exhibiting ceramic works by Anthony Stellaccio and paintings by Mary Armstrong. A curatorial research specialist for the National Museum of African Art by day, Stellaccio creates ceramics that are both scholarly and playful, referencing game pieces, pets and native toys and synthesizing his cultural studies with his artistic endeavors. This body of work is full of dynamic contrasts: rough, un-polished porcelain with cracked glazes atop smooth, reflective black and white Formica pedestal-like bases. The color in Armstrong’s paintings resonates with Stellaccio’s fresh green glazes and compliments the three-dimensional, hard-edged sculpture in the gallery. Armstrong’s soft paintings hover between landscapes and atmosphere, shifting back and forth from a view of a distant horizon to the drifting particles of dust and clouds. The exhibit runs through June 30.

2026 R St. NW. www.CrossMackenzie.com. Hours: Wed. – Sat. 12 – 6, or
by appointment.

Jane Haslem Gallery

Established in 1960 at the onset of the contemporary printmaking revival, Jane Haslem Gallery is well known for its thorough collection of prints by those artists responsible for reviving the medium in the U.S. after World War II. Currently on view are the works of Gabor Peterdi and Richard Ziemann. Peterdi, who died in 2001 at the age of 86, was a Hungarian-American printmaker and teacher who had a profound impact his students in the mid-20th century. Ziemann, a sort of spiritual documentarian of the natural world, has spent his life studying both the grandness and finiteness of the American landscape, focused particularly on the Northeastern woodlands. Ziemann was a student of Peterdi—in fact, the gallery was introduced to Ziemann’s work by Peterdi himself—and says of his teacher’s influence: “We all studied with Gabor Peterd… He taught us everything.”

2025 Hillyer Pl. NW. www.JaneHaslemGallery.com. Hours: Fri. 3 – 7 and by appointment. [gallery ids="100855,126818,126813,126801,126808" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

Washington has its own culture —and it’s not just the whole center-of-the world, seat-of-government thing. It’s about music and neighborhoods, actors and museums—all the things that are the mosaic and the background of our daily lives Washington’s culture gets richer every year because of the work of its native citizens—people who have ideas, see needs and get other people to see what they see. The result is an environment of cultural arts institutions, festivals, concerts and music series and a rich theater and art world that have endured and enriched Washington culture, its contents and its reputation.

A good chunk of the heavy lifting in this arena—not excluding the existing culture totem poles and brand names like the Kennedy Center—has been done by individuals who can best be described as originals, one-of-a-kinds.

We’ve always had them in one form or another. The late Raissa Tselentis, who created the Bach Competition, the late and larger-than-life Maria Fisher, founder of the Beethoven Society and the Thelonius Monk Institute, Jerome Barry practicing cultural and musical diplomacy with Embassy Series, Norman Scribner, the founder of the Washington Choral Arts Society, Chuck Brown, who gave the city its own go-go sound, and many others.

To that list should be added the name of Charlie Fishman, the founder and executive producer of what is now called the D.C. Jazz Festival, now in its eighth year, and celebrating all over town June 1 through 10. Jazz festivals have been tried before, but it was Fishman who has grown and expanded the festival, guided it through rough patches and made it what appears to be a permanent institution of Washington’s culture.

You can get all the evidence you want by looking at the full schedule and various features of the festival, spread to all corners of the city with its innovative “Jazz in the Hood” component. It has big name artists—Ron Carter, Kenny Barron, Anat Cohen, Paquito D’Rivera, Dianne Reeves. They will playing at the Hamilton restaurant in downtown Washington, the spectacularly renovated, refurbished Howard Theatre, neighborhood clubs and restaurants as well as featured jazz performances at the I Street Synagogue and the Kennedy Center. The festival, as it exists today, is marked by innovation, an eye to the future, tremendous variety and energy, and Fishman’s rock-solid belief in the future of jazz as an American art form.

Everything has changed since 2005, when the first festival was held. Yet when you visit Fishman at his Adams Morgan home in the basement-office, nothing much appears to have changed since we first met there three years ago before the fifth festival, when it was still called the Duke Ellington Jazz Festival. There is, if that’s possible, more clutter on his desk, and some additions to the array of stuff you find there—a huge library of jazz CDs, books, magazines and newspapers.

Fishman himself is parked behind his desk, wearing as always one of a collection of yarmulkes, handmade, a thin gray-white beard on his face. He’s plugged into a phone and his computer, doing what he was doing the last time I saw him here, which is checking schedules, checking incoming musicians’ hotel reservations, making sure his seven-year-old son Moses was being picked up from school

“Yeah, I think this city is rich in originators, in people who have influenced the culture, who’ve created something,” Fishman said. “I knew Maria Fisher, by way of the Monk thing for one. Now, there was an original. I can think of others—Ari Roth, over at Theater J, Bill Warrell, who was District Curator and tried to keep a jazz festival going. He was a forerunner.”

“Jazz is our—America’s—idiom, its most original cultural contribution,” Fishman said. “And that’s especially true here—the Duke Ellington history is here. There are so many terrific local jazz musicians here, and there’s an audience. But for a long time, given all that, we were still the only city in the country that didn’t have a proper jazz festival.”

That changed eight years ago, when Fishman, with the help of many others, turned vision into reality and maintained it. “It was shaky sometimes,” he said. “But I think we’ve turned the corner here.”
“I think the festival is in a very good place,” Fishman said. “But when you talk about making something permanent, you can’t think just in terms of a festival, however good it might be. We’re already doing some things—educational outreach, special programs throughout the year in the schools, at embassies, we had a thing with the Cherry Blossom Festival. To me, the jazz festival is a year-round thing, and it’s a part of the heart and soul of this city.”

Fishman, as any founder worth his soul, wants national recognition and respect for the festival. He tends to think big, including global—which is natural enough given his 20-plus years with the legendary Dizzie Gillespie. But he also sees the music and the festival as a living thing, part of the neighborhoods of Washington—hence, the “Jazz in the Hood” special, which can be found in parts of D.C. as different as Anacostia and Georgetown.

“To me and people I know, Washington is about neighborhoods,” Fishman said. “I like living where I do, in Adams Morgan. It’s a lively neighborhood, the kind of place where the music is appreciated, and you can talk about it with your neighbors and friends.

He’s living a life that seems to get richer—in terms of meaning, if not necessarily, money—with the passage of time, a development that seems to surprise him still. Fishman talks about his family—wife Stephanie Peters, an executive with Microsoft, and their son, Moses. “It’s our 10th anniversary this year,” he said. “She was a surprise to me. I was divorced, I’d been single for 19 years and I have three grown children. I just thought that was it, and I was going to spend the rest of my life alone. Then, I met Stephanie, and that was it. I’ll tell you, if anybody keeps the festival together, it’s Stephanie. ”

He and his wife have a shared passion for jazz, and a devotion to their son. “He’s amazing. He’s a gift. He really is.”

He’s a little something more—he’s steeped in jazz, which couldn’t be helped given his parents. He played drums, and now he’s playing piano. “Let me show you something,” Fishman said. He does some clicking and brings up a video of Moses confidently playing Thelonius Monk at age seven.
For Fishman, jazz is the music he’s always heard running through his life. “I see the festival growing, taking on its own life,” he said. When it comes to his own life, he added: “the rest is not yet history.”

DC Jazz Fest Sidebar
Jazz in the Hoods, Jazz Meets the Classic, Jazz and Family Fun Days, Jazz at theHamilton, Jazz at the Howard. It’s all that Jazz at the annual DC Jazz Festival June 1-10, with top drawer attractions, jazz legends and new blazing stars and musicians.

As always the festival honors the living legends of jazz, with the presentation of its Lifetime Achievement Award to Kenny Barron, called the “most lyrical piano player of our time” by Jazz Weekly, and Ron Carter, a legendary jazz multitasker as bassist, cellist and author, an artist with more than 2,500 albums to his credit and numerous awards including two Grammies.

The two men will be honored at the festival’s signature concert Jazz Meets the Classics in collaboration with the Kennedy Center on June 4 with a performances by the Classical Jazz Quartet (Barron, Carter, Stefon Harris and Lewis Nash), preceded by an opening concert with the festival’s co-artistic director Paquito D’Rivera and his Sextet.

Other highlights of the Festival include the mushrooming in size and events Jazz in the “Hoods”, which splashes jazz, its music and performers city-wide with 80 performances at over 40 museums, clubs, restaurants, hotels and galleries. It’s presented by Events DC, and attracts a large and diverse audience and showcases D.C.-based jazz groups.

Kicking things off in the ‘Hoods is Ron Carter headlining at the Bohemian Caverns, the popular jazz club on U Street, one of the key elements in the festival. Also part of Jazz in the ‘Hoods is the DC Jazz Loft Series, a three-day series of events that includes a mini-festival on June 9.

The Hamilton (on 14th Street), one of downtown’s newest clubs and hot restaurants, will be the Festivals main venue with ten nights of performances with such headliners as Monty Alexander, Jimmy Heath, Roy Hargrove, David Sanchez, Les Nubians, Marshall Keyes, Antonio Hart and others, along with Jazz Gospel Brunches, featuring with the WPAS Gospel Choir and Lori Williams.

Jazz at the Howard highlights and celebrates the return of the restored Howard Theater, which only recently opened and will including such performers as Grammy Award-winning vocalist Dianne Reeves and Italian guitarist Pino Daniele.

A highlight of this year’s festival is a performance by Israeli clarinetist and saxophonist Anat Cohen at the Sixth and I Historic Synagogue, as well as six concerts co-presented by the Kennedy Center at its Milenniuim Stage, with performers like the Bohemian Caverns Jazz Orchestra, Origem and Malika Zara.
[gallery ids="102455,121041,121058,121064,121034,121048,121052" nav="thumbs"]

Mary Bird •

As is to be expected at Hillwood, every detail exuded elegance for the June 14 opening gala of Prêt- à -Papier, showcasing the exquisite designs of Belgian artist Isabelle de Borchgrave. The evening was under the patronage of honorary chair Jan Matthysen, the Ambassador of Belgium. The stunning paper reinterpretations of gowns covering several centuries are displayed in the Adirondack Building and the Hillwood Mansion, the former home of Marjorie Merriweather Post. Hillwood president Ellen Charles greeted dinner guests and said, “My grandmother would be so pleased to welcome you here.” [gallery ids="102459,120965,120949,120984,120990,120957,120973,120978" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

People forget. Larry Kramer won’t let you.

There was a time in the early 1980s when gay men all over the country were dying at an alarmingly increasing rate of an unidentified disease which killed their immune system and no one seemed to notice.

Kramer, a gay writer and activist, noticed, because people he knew died, because the disease, invisible, undiagnosed, unresearched seemed to be all around him in New York. He wanted others—including his peers in the gay community who were living in what they thought was a free-love golden age—to stand up and take action.

In 1985, he wrote a play called “The Normal Heart,” which debuted on Broadway and shocked the world in its chronicle of the early fight against AIDS, when the disease did not have a name and went unrecognized, devastating the gay community, but also already spreading outward.

It told the story of a Kramer stand-in, an abrasive writer named Ned Weeks and his friends, and his battle to make the world, the government, gays themselves see what was happening. Weeks is a hyperbolist, a man with apocalyptic tendencies, urgent, impolite, impolitic, insensitive, passionate and complete out of control and in focus in his crusade. “The Normal Heart” is the story of his battle, with and against his friends, including a closeted gay named Bruce, who is a banker and former Green Beret who wants to work from the inside. There’s the embattled, ferocious doctor named Emma Brookner who first notices the diseases and some of its symptons, there’s Ned’s straight brother who tries reluctantly to help, there’s Felix Turner, a New York Times fashion writer who becomes Weeks’s lover and various activists, officials and victims to-be.

In 1985, the play startled New York and the country’s audiences with its hard-driving, polemical and super-charged, dramatic style and also moved them.

Today, after millions of deaths, and almost 30 years later, a new production of “The Normal Heart” at Arena Stage (and after a critically acclaimed revival in New York ) has astonishing power. It seems as fresh as it was in its debut, perhaps even more so because time has worked its insidious ways by making people, if not forget, allow themselves a considerable distance from what remains a worldwide crisis.

The play—directed by George C. Wolfe—retains its power and gains some, too. You shouldn’t be surprised if you notice, especially in the emotionally charged second act, that people around you are wiping away tears or sobbing, or for that matter, if you are, too. Mind you, there is not an ounce of sentimentality in this play: it’s as clean as a knife to the heart. Kramer has taken care not to create martyrs or characters who are types. That unaffected uniqueness shows through especially with Weeks, who on the surface is the least likely person to lead a crusade, he’s loud, driven, he hurts people without trying, and he has a desperate need for love. “The Normal Heart” is always about people in a moment of extreme crisis — they fight, they battle, they cling to each other, and they yell and shout and weep and cry out.

If need screams at government officials for not caring, Weeks is tough on himself and the gay community. “We’ve got to stop thinking we’re just about sex. We’re Michelangelo, we’re DaVinci, we’re Socrates and Alexander the Great, we’re Keynes and Porter,” he says. “. . . And we’ve got to stop doing this [casual sex]. We’re killing ourselves.”

No one thanks him for his observations.

Weeks display a combative style. Confronted with the prospect of love, however, he becomes a puppy who thinks he doesn’t deserve his lover.

This production never lets up and when the disease draws closer, it grabs you by the throat and shakes you up—or in the street vernacular—messes you up. Bruce’s lover dies and he recounts a harrowing experience to take him home to Arizona, the doctor unleashes a jeremiad against the government and medical community and Weeks’s lover becomes ill.

Our hearts swell and crack in those moments. No one, I think, at that point can feel separate from the stage and the people on it.

In a host of outstanding performances, Patrick Breen as the combative, bristling, enraged and enraging Weeks is so kinetic that you start to feel toward him exactly as his friends and allies do. Luke MacFarlane as Turner has—like the character must—charm to burn until the bitter end when he himself is consumed. Patricia Wettig—of television’s “Brothers & Sisters” and “Thirtysomething” fame among many credits—gives a blunt, brave coating to the doctor, in a wheelchair for most of her life because of polio—and her outburst in the second act inevitably draws cheers.

The play is performed against a background of a list of victims’ names and headlines, which grows during the course of the two-and-a-half hour run—I spotted without trying Liberace’s name. Suddenly, you remember where you were and where you are.

“I’m exhausted,” a woman walking out said to her husband. “We all are, honey,” he said.

Outside, there are portions of the AIDS quilt, which will also be on view in part at the Kennedy Center and will form a key part of the annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival this year. Outside, they hand you a missive from Kramer, which gives an update on the fight against AIDs.

People forget. We’re lucky that Kramer hasn’t.

“The Normal Heart” will run at Arena’ Stage’s Kreeger Theatre through July 29.
[gallery ids="100865,127142,127137,127131" nav="thumbs"]

Mary Bird •

The Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington honored the Washington restaurant scene at its “Hats Off to Restaurants” gala, held June 24 at the Marriott Wardman Park hotel. Guests were encouraged to don their most elegant millinery for the 30th annual black-tie event. President Lynne Breaux hailed “responsible hospitality” in her opening remarks for award recipients who were recognized for multiple categories of excellence, concluding with the presentation of Chef of the Year to Vikram Sunderan of Rasika in Penn Quarter. Party-goers enjoyed a reception, awards presentation, dinner reception and danced until the wee hours. [gallery ids="102460,120947,120941,120960,120935,120927,120920,120913,120883,120905,120900,120891,120953" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

Comings And Goings

All the world’s a stage. And when it comes to Washington’s world of performance, as everywhere else, change is a constant

FOR THE NEXT ACT

Ryan Rilette has been named the new producing artistic director at Round House Theatre in Bethesda, assuming full-time duties Aug. 1.

Rilette will be following Blake Robinson, who has been producing artistic director here for the past seven, often innovative and acclaimed, years. He moves on to become artistic director at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park.

Rilette comes to Round House from the Marin Theatre Company, a very successful mid-sized company in Marin County in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he most recently directed the world premiere of “Bellwether” by Steven Yockey and “Gods of Carnage” by Yasmina Reza.

Sally Patterson, president of Round House Theatre’s board of trustees, said: “We are proud to be in Montgomery County, to provide innovative and challenging theatre, and to continue our commitment to artistic engagement for all ages. Ryan embodies our greatest hopes for all our aspirations.”

“It’s a great honor to follow in the footsteps of Blake Robison and Jerry Whiddon,” Rilette said. “I’ve long been a fan of both Round House and the D.C. theater community.”

CURTAINS OPEN AT OLNEY

Martin Platt, currently the co-director of the Perry Street Theatricals, a New York-based producing company, has been named the new artistic director at the Olney Theatre Center.

“There are great challenges and even greater opportunities in what we can accomplish in expanding and enriching Olney Theatre Center’s program and making Olney Theatre Center a true performing arts Center in Montgomery County with a great producing theatre company at its core,” Platt said.

Platt has headed such performing arts companies as the Birmingham Opera Theatre and the New Mexico Repertory Theatre. He has worked in London, founded the Santa Fe Stages festival and directed plays at the Cincinnati Playhouse like Sophie Bingham’s “Treason” (about Ezra Pound), “True West” and D.H. Lawrence’s “The Daughter In Law.”

BOWING OUT

Christina Scheppelmann, the long-time director of artistic operations at the Washington National Opera (WNO) will step down, effective Nov. 30.

Scheppelmann has been a WNO leader since 2002, overseeing the management of the acclaimed Domingo-Cafraitz Young Artist Program, helping to create the American Opera Initiative for young American composers and librettists, helping to produce new works, while overseeing new broadcast and simulcast initiatives and helping to select the WNO repertory of works each season.

“Christina has served Washington National Opera well in her decade here,” said Kennedy Center President Michael Kaiser. “Her hard work and diligence were key to making WNO”s recent affiliation with the Kennedy Center a success.”

JOINING HANDS

Adventure Theatre and Musical Theater Center are joining up, co-mingling and becoming one.

The combination will be called Adventure Theatre MTC, “uniting award winning theater productions with high-quality musical theater training. The combined entity will be able to serve more of the DC region and its young people,” according to the new group.

“It is the right step in the exciting evolution of these two entities, Adventure Theatre’s Michael Bobbitt said.

The announcement came in March on the 60th anniversary of Adventure Theatre.

Lots of Good Theater

In years past, summertime was a quiet time for the performance arts in the Washington, usually shifting to outdoor concerts and venues. Theaters tended to shutter their doors.

That’s not the case anymore. For one thing, the time between the old season and the new one coming up has narrowed dramatically. For another — well, for some perverse reason or another — there are lots of show on the boards, lots to see and do.

Here are some interesting choices going on right now. The list is by no means complete.

TWO FOR THREE AT THE KENNEDY CENTER

You can’t get two more diverse and entertaining offerings (make that three, if you count “The Music Man” at Arena Stage) than “First You Dream” and “Memphis” now at the Kennedy Center. “First You Dream” is a showcase project, originated at Signature Theatre by Eric Schaeffer, rifling with great verve and imagination through the songs and music of John Kander and Fred Ebb and with six great singers strutting and vocalizing, dramatizing and — above all — breaking hearts with songs from “Cabaret,” “Chicago,” “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” “Zorba,” and “The Happy Time.” One of the best, but not only, reason, to go is to see and hear the gifted Heidi Blickenstaff once again. (Through July 1 at the Eisenhower). “Memphis,” which won a pack of Tonys (best musical), is a totally different breed of animal, a junk yard dog of a musical about race, the South circa the 1950s, the birth of rhytmn and blues and a melo-plot, featuring a white Memphis hipster hung up on race music and a beautiful black singer. In a heated way, it’s a very engrossing and entertaining show (at the Opera House, also thorugh July 1), and the music is terrific and you can dance to it in your dreams.

Just so you know: “The Addams Family” (the musical) is landing at the Opera House beginning July 10 and running through July 29, click, click. Gomez, Morticia, Wednesday Addams, Uncle Fester, Lurch and the rest are all here.

CLASSICAL LAUGHS AND A NEW DIFFERENCE

Laughs in the classical vein are still available at the Shakespeare Theatre Company. There’s the return of Falstaff in “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” directed by Brit Stephen Raye, a very late Shakespeare play which features scheming wives and the return of Falstaff through July 18 at Harman Hall. Queen Elizabeth loved Falstaff. Extended at the Lansburgh is the latest (well, circa the 16th Century) rage in laughs, commedia dell’ arte style. Through July 8.

The Studio Theatre, under Joy Zinoman and now under David Muse, could and can always be counted on for the new, the odd, the unusual and the original. Two examples are now being staged there, beginning with the caustic “fem” comedy, “Bachelorettes,” directed by Muse himself and extended through July 8 at the Mead Theatre. In the nothing-like-it category is the hauntingly titled “The Animals and Children Took to the Streets” in collaboration with the group 1927, the Spoleto Theatre Festival and the Studio Theatre. It’s a beyond-category piece, described as part Tim Burton, part Dickens, “a graphic novel burst into life.”

IF YOU GIVE …

Speaking of Adventure Theatre, there’s the popular “If You Give …” series: now with “If You Give a Moose a Muffin,” a sequel and, if you can believe, “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.” Directed by Jeremy Skidmore with Michael Russotto, now through Sept. 2 at Glen Echo.

THREE DAUNTING WORDS

For the ultimate theater nut in you, heed these words: Capital Fringe Festival, July 12 to July 29.?

Mary Bird •

In a glorious collaboration, Imagination Stage and The Washington Ballet have made magic with their own “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” The spell was cast at the June 22 opening, replete with reception, and will continue to delight audiences through August 12. Jean-Marie Fernandez, Anne Marie Parisi-Trone and Evonne Courtney Connolly were the “Lion Ladies,” ensuring funding for the voyage through the wardrobe. Morgann Rose is a daunting wicked White Witch and designer Eric Van Wyk’s inspired lion puppet Aslan had the audience aroar. Please bring your nearest and dearest of every age to this inspirational marvel.

Robert Devaney •

Well, these babes ain’t no blushing types. Washington’s on-air glam reporters and anchors put on a rubicund show — it gets bigger and better every year — to support the fight against breast cancer. The fourth annual D.C. NewsBabes Bash for Breast Cancer pinked it out June 19 at the Howard Theatre to gather $18,000 in donations for George Washington University’s Mammovan. Some of the boys in the TV and radio newsrooms were allowed to attend as “Men in Pink” for the first time. A few hundred others joined the fun.

TV media personalities included cancer survivor Jennifer Griffin, Pamela Brown, Alison Starling, Angie Goff, Rebecca Cooper, Brianna Keilar, Eun Yang, Britt McHenry, Anita Brikman, Lesli Foster, Doreen Gentzler, Andrea Roane and Sue Palka. Some of the guys included Bob Madigan, Leon Harris, Derek McGinty and Ed Henry. NBC News’s Andrea Mitchell was the night’s honoree. [gallery ids="102461,120875,120886,120881" nav="thumbs"]

Mary Bird •

Broadway stars lit up THEARC (Town Hall Education Arts Recreation Campus) in Anacostia June 20 to honor the multi-faceted Ted Leonsis and to benefit Covenant House Washington, which provides protection and mentoring for at-risk and homeless young people. Leonsis said, “We can do well while doing good.” Mayor Vincent Gray and Linda Mercado Greene were honorary co-chairs. Acclaimed composer and lyricist Neil Berg produced the performance, which featured Broadway headliners in such mega hits as “Phantom of the Opera” and “Les Miserables.” The evening also showcased Covenant House Washington youth, who garnered a standing ovation. Guests enjoyed a pre-performance reception and mingled with the stars for desserts afterwards. [gallery ids="100870,127318,127311,127303,127296,127288,127281,127333,127273,127340,127265,127347,127257,127353,127325" nav="thumbs"]