Last Kiss of Summer 8 Gala
• October 19, 2011

It is hard to believe that Last Kiss of Summer in support of Second Chance Employment Services recently held at The Four Seasons Hotel is the eighth such gala. ABC7/WJLA-TV anchor Alison Starling was master of ceremonies at an evening of silent and live auctions, dinner and dancing. SCES Board Chair Ronald S. Perlman, M.D., hailed SCES as a “one stop show” to empower women. Ludy Green founded the non-profit organization in 2002 to promote financial security for at-risk women and their children through free and professional comprehensive employment training and placement services. SCES has helped more than 3,000 women and placed more than 800 clients in meaningful long-term employment positions. Already serving clients nationwide from its D.C. base, SCES is opening sites in Palm Beach and Los Angeles. [gallery ids="100317,108081" nav="thumbs"]

Georgetown Village Launches
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Alan and Nancy Taylor Bubes opened their doors on a recent rainy evening to hail Georgetown Village. The soon to open non-profit membership organization will provide support and physical and social activities allowing participants to remain at home rather than relying on relatives or an assisted living facility. Founder and chair Sharon Lockwood enthusiastically introduced members of her board of directors and advisory board and reported that 152 members had pledged, and more than 90 offered to be volunteers. More good news is that an experienced executive director has been identified and is expected to be hired within the month. Guests departed with daffodil bulbs and treats from Georgetown Cupcake. [gallery ids="100318,108082,108088,108084" nav="thumbs"]

Friends of Rose Park Rally in Style
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Dr. James D’Orta, the current owner of the legendary N Street residence formerly home to Averell and Pamela Harriman, welcomed The Friends of Rose Park on Oct. 6 to raise funds to support the beloved Georgetown oasis. The host paid tribute to Georgetown doyenne Frida Burling, who served as the evening’s honorary host, a radiant 96 years old and going strong. Rose Park enhances Georgetown as it provides families and their pets with space to romp and thrive. [gallery ids="100328,108522,108543,108527,108539,108532,108536" nav="thumbs"]

Living In Pink Celebrates Its Cause . . . and Life
• October 17, 2011

With smart, strong women in the Fairmont Washington Hotel ballroom, the fight against breast cancer was on during Living in Pink’s eighth annual luncheon and boutique, Sept. 23. ABC7/WJLA-TV anchorman Greta Kreuz introduced the awardees and speakers. Presentation of the Living in Pink Award was awarded posthumously to Thomas J. Sanzaro, M.D., and accepted by Mrs. Kathy Sanzaro with remarks by Colette Magnant, M.D. The Noel Soderberg-Evans Award was presented to Christine Teal, M.D., by Jack Evans, Ward 2 councilman. Guest speaker was Pamela Peeke, M.D., M.P.H. Founded in 2004 by two-time breast cancer survivor and mother of four, Michele Conley, Living in Pink is set to help find a cure for breast cancer so that the next generation of women will not have to endure the emotional and physical pain of breast cancer surgery and treatment. [gallery ids="100322,108099,108097" nav="thumbs"]

Meridian Center Celebrates the Big Five-O
• October 13, 2011

The Meridian International Center, celebrating its 50th anniversary, did it up right Oct. 1 with its 42nd Meridian Ball that kept old and young dancing past 1 a.m. The evening began for us at a dinner
with the gracious Claudia Fritsche, Ambassador of Liechtenstein, on the Georgetown waterfront. Meridian House was decked out and packed with gala-goers from the foyer to the gardens and onto the party tent. Drinks flowed, desserts were top-drawer, and the music moved from ‘70s rock to the latest hip-hop. — Robert Devaney [gallery ids="99271,104380,104349,104376,104372,104354,104368,104359,104364" nav="thumbs"]

The Performing Arts Column
• October 7, 2011

THESE OUR ACTORS

We’re always talking about the richness of theater talent in Washington, but sometimes even we veteran theater-goers can still be amazed at what we witness.

At the Washington Shakespeare Theatre Company, and at the Studio Theatre, we’re seeing something remarkable, two performances by veteran, much-acclaimed and multi-awarded actors who might be excused if by now they had excused themselves from the game.

Ted van Griethuysen and Floyd King who have graced Washington stages and elsewhere at least since the 1980s with wonderful performances in works ranging from Shakespeare to the rawest contemporary cutting edge works seem as if by magic to have hit their stride, and doing their best work in two astonishing performances. It’s as if they’ve hit some hitherto unheard of second wind, dominating their respective stages and giving honor to the whole area theater community.

Here is van Griethuysen, many times nominated and often a winner in the Helen Hayes derby, well in the autumn of his theater life at the vortex of Alan Bennett’s delicious, smart and earthy play, “The Habit of Art,” which is actually a play within a play about the latter-life and times of geniuses W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten. Van Griethuysen plays an actor playing Auden, the foul, brilliant, razor-witty resident-great-poet of our times, sickly, brazen, sexually hungry in older age. It is one of those performances that bare the heart and fragile body, a brave, gutsy piece of work and the wonder is that he manages to be playing two parts almost at the same time. His performance is the gut-wrenching soul of what is also an ensemble piece about theater itself where Paxton Whitehead, no slouch himself, can hold his own as the more demure Britten.

What Van Griethuysen has done here shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it does. He’s funny and heartbreaking and astonishing at the same time — and that capacity to still surprise an audience is what’s remarkable.

In his own way, Floyd King does something similar in “The Heir Apparent,” a smart, foul, almost hip but true-to-the-form update of an obscure French comedy in the post-time of Moliere. It has a rich, presumed-to-be-dying aristocrat, avaricious relatives and servants and all the usual suspects in such matters, and it has King, who is king of this sort of thing and has been since around the 1980s. Classic clowning is an work that King practically owns — along with such modern acts of weirdness as “The Mystery of Irma Vep” and “A Tale of Two Cities.” He has played the fool for quite some time now, and knows their inner workings, including the one in “Lear.” But as Geronte, the doddering old man who not only seems to die several times but talks endlessly of his bowel movements, makes retching sound like a climb to Everest, he’s outdone himself, which is saying something. He’s bewigged, bothered and bewildered — and befuddled and bedeviled. He’s the star in a play that has some star turns: Nancy Robinette who can steal entire scenes like a pickpocket in the Louvre, not to mention the appearance of a piglet named Cordelia.

A gift they are — van Griethuysen and King — to Washington theatergoers, a present quality they’ve shown time and time again, including when they appeared together in the Folger Theater production of “The Dresser,” in which van Griethuysen was a fading, aging Shakespearean actor and King his dresser.

So much for aging and fading.

BEST BET YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF

“Lungs” is a two-character, world premiere and inaugural production of the Studio Theater’s Lab Series. It is the work of new English playwright Duncan Macmillan, a short piece in which a youngish couple navigates through their relationship against the backdrop of the very recognizable world we live in. It’s often funny, often and finally heartbreaking, very much a part of how we live, full of the instantly recognizably wise ways men and women completely fail to hear each other. It’s a play that sneaks up on you like a heavy-breathing puppy. You don’t know whether to kick it to the curb or to let it into your heart.

It’s a very modern, very smart play with all the frantic, repetitious pausing that is often so characteristic of people who live young in the age of instant communications. The questions they deal with — getting married or not, having a baby or not, staying at home, making money — sound banal on the surface and become earthshaking in the acting. That’s thanks primarily to Brooke Bloom as the young woman, meaning no disrespect to Ryan King as the man. The woman doesn’t just talk, she reiterates, she gesticulates, she injects noises into sentences, and feelings, always with the feelings. She’s so compelling that the man’s little betrayals, his denseness in the face of his stormy partners, are sympathetic. I suspect MacMillan tried to say something about love in the age of now and soon — and succeeded. (Through Oct. 16)

CAN YOU HEAR THE PEOPLE SING? YOU BET.

You might have heard. The kids are back on the barricades. No, it’s not the Arab spring or demonstrations on Wall Street. It’s the return of “Les Miserables,” a new 25th Anniversary Production now at the Kennedy Center, complete with newer bells and whistles and projections, big voices and more death scenes than “David Copperfield” (the Dickens novel, not the magician).
Let’s be clear: It’s as rousing as ever and seems to move faster than usual, although it still runs well over two and a half hours. Many of these revolutionaries weren’t even born when “Les Mis” and its deathless logo first made their appearance here, a production I happened to see, not to mention several since then.

It’s still a fight between Valjean, the ex-convict who helps and saves everybody after serving two decades on a prison gang for stealing a loaf of bread, and Inspector Javert, the relentless police inspector who hunts him down to the end of the earth, or to a barricade in Paris where students in the 1830s have staged an ill-fated uprising against the powers that be. There’s love, romance, there’s the “Masters of the House,” and beautiful songs and J. Mark McVey as Valjean and Andrew Varela as Javert, both superb singers.

The youngsters — from Fantine to Cosette, to Eponine, Marius and Enjolras — are sometimes uneven in voice, but always appealing in character. Jeremy Hays makes an exceptionally heroic revolutionary as Enjolras. If you’ve never seen “Les Mis,” go see it and you’ll figure out what all the fuss was about, and if you have seen it and missed it, say welcome back.

SCENA’S BACK WITH GREEKS BEARING THEATRICAL GIFTS

Scena Theater and Artistic Director Robert McNamara have been around for 24 years. They’re kicking off their season with “Greek” by the caustic, cutting, smart playwright (and sometime actor) Steven Berkoff.

“Greek” is Oedipus Rex written differently and set in modern day London. According to Berkoff, this modern take came to him by “way of Sophocles trickling its way down the millennia until it reached the unimaginable wastelands of Tufnell Park.” For NcNamara, the play echoes: Greek meltdown and London riots resonate in it.

(Begins Oct. 20 and runs through Nov. 27 at the H Streets Playhouse, 1365 H Street, NE.)

MICHAEL KAHN TO BE HONORED

The Shakespeare Theatre Company is celebrating its 25th anniversary season by honoring Artistic Director Michael Kahn at the Harman Center for the Arts Annual Gala Oct. 17 at Sidney Harman Hall and the National Building Museum. It promises to be something of a class reunion what with stars Patrick Stewart (a Starfleet captain, but also once “Othello” here), Harry Hamlin, Stacy Keach, Pat Carroll, Bradley Whitford and Richard Thomas all on hand — along with Chelsea Clinton, Donald Graham, George Hearn, Terrence McNally, Lonette McKee and many others.

Looking for a Good Time? ‘The Heir Apparent’ Puts on a Show
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They should plant those old barkers they used to have near San Francisco topless bars and bordellos whispering the pointed come-on “Looking for a good time?” in front of the Lansburgh Theatre these days.

So: “Looking for a good time?”

“The Heir Apparent,” now at the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Lansburgh Theatre, is the reason everyone should go to the theatre as opposed to 50 critics and selected friends of the house and board.

The play, which is the opener for the company’s 25th anniversary, is the work of 16th-century French playwright Jean-Francois Regnard, who wrote it in 1708. It’s also a world premiere, the reason for which you can entirely blame and praise adapter/translator and rhymer extraordinaire David Ives, who has been having quite a time in Washington and elsewhere this year.

Ives has taken this somewhat musty, obscure comedy which has its roots in the genius-level works of Moliere as well as English restoration comedy, shaken off the dust, and re-written the text in iambic pentameter (I think) and certainly pedantic rhyme with a touch of burlesque, comedy and Catskills drollery thrown in. It’s no small measure of Ives’s considerable gifts that it’s not too difficult to imagine John Gielgud and Buddy Hackett working side by side in this production. The superb cast jumps on the rhymes like Chinese acrobats shot out of a cannon.

Ives did something similar last year at the Shakespeare Theatre play with an adaptation-re-arrangement and re-do of “The Liar,” for which he won a Helen Hayes Award for outstanding new play. With his work in “The Heir Apparent,” you know for sure that everything old is new again, especially Floyd King’s Geronte, a monstrously funny creation and capstone to King’s career as a classical theatre comic royalty.

Ives has transfixed critics to the point where they want to turn into rhymers themselves. I refuse to stoop so low as to rhyme before my time.

That being said, “The Heir Apparent” is a hoot, hewing to the traditions of both Moliere in his most sarcastic and preposterous laugh-machine period, and the wonderful excesses of Sheridanian (is that the word, my lord?) and Goldsmithian restoration comedy.

In short, there is mincing and messing around, vulgarity aplenty and lechery of the sort, where old men drool while young women breathe heavily in their not-quite-right-sized bodices, and much brainless skullduggery helped by the servant class.

Michael Kahn directs here, and he moves things along with such reckless timing and all-in gusto that you have to remind yourself that Kahn is not known for his splapdash comedy shows and has never been on Saturday Night Live.

But the highlight of the evening—all right, one of the highlights—is when the would-be heirs try to eliminate far-flung cousins with the appearance of not one, but three female pig farmers, big and pink as a pig’s snout, bearing gifts of bacon and pork, and that’s something you haven’t seen on a Washington stage, at least not for real.

Ives and Kahn have a wonderful cast to pull off a rousing comedic miracle, especially King, who outdoes himself as Geronte, whom we first see in raggedy old clothes, a stringy wig and a nightcap which no one but the dead should wear. Geronte scuffles on as a phlegmatic apparition, a living cough who talks mostly about money and bowel movements before he lets on that he wants to marry Isabelle (Meg Chambers Steedle), the young woman his nephew is in love with.

This leaves the charmingly inept but very cool nephew Eraste (played with breathless aplomb by Andrew Veenstra) speechless and sets the servants Lisette (Kelly Hutchinson) and Crispin (Carson Elrod), a frend of Eraste, to scheming nonstop because they know Geronte is worth a million, a million, as they remind themselves with grand goofiness.

Nancy Robinette is also on hand as Madame Argante, one of those greedy aristocrats who walks in billowy dresses as if fighting a headwind, and Clark Middleton has a nice turn as the lawyer Scruple who is height deprived, or, in short, short.

“The Heir Apparent” is such grand entertainment – the set is deliciously detailed and lacks only a dozen doors that should be slamming – that you forget the price immediately because you get your money’s worth.

Pssst.

Looking for a good time? Go see “The Heir Apparent,” running through Oct. 23.

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20 Years of Bob Schieffer’s ‘Face the Nation’
• October 6, 2011

Bob Schieffer’s 20 years as anchor of CBS News’s “Face the Nation” — which premiered November 1954 — was applauded Sept. 21 at the St. Regis with politicians, journalists and other Washington types enjoying the warmth (or humidity), food and bipartisanship. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) was in the room along with former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Old and new media moved freely — from familiar Posties, ThomsonReuters editors to Media Bistro. [gallery ids="100321,108092,108095" nav="thumbs"]

The United States Navy Memorial’s Lone Sailor Award
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The United States Navy Memorial’s Lone Sailor Award is given to Sea Service veterans who have excelled with distinction in their respective civilian careers while exemplifying the Navy core values of Honor, Courage and Commitment.The 2011 award recipients will join an impressive list of men and women who have distinguished themselves by drawing upon their military experience to become successful in their subsequent careers and lives, while exemplifying the core values of Honor, Courage and Commitment.

This year’s recipients of the Lone Sailor Award
Beau Bridges—Actor, Director, Producer, United States Coast Guard Veteran
Jeff Bridges—Actor, Producer, United States Coast Guard Veteran
Lloyd Bridges (in-memoriam)—Actor, Producer, United States Coast Guard Veteran
Brian Lamb—Founder and Chief Executive Officer, C-SPAN, United States Navy Veteran
Jerry Coleman—Famed Major League Baseball Second Baseman and Broadcast Announcer, United States Marine Corps WWII and Korean War Combat Veteran
Bob Feller (in-memoriam)—Famed Major League Baseball Pitcher, United States Navy WWII Combat Veteran
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Lunch with Actress Charlotte Ross
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Christine Warnke invited media pals to the City Tavern Club to meet actress Charlotte Ross, best known for roles in NYPD Blue and currently Glee. The actress was in Washington to join The Humane Society of the United States in Congressional briefings. The intent is to seek an end to invasive research on chimpanzees and promote passage of the Great Ape Protection and Costs Savings Act of 2011, which has strong bipartisan support in today’s cost-cutting climate. The United States is the only developed country continuing to confine chimpanzees in laboratories where they are frequently not used in active research but spend long solitary lives. The goal is to save taxpayers approximately $30 million annually by releasing our closest relatives in the animal kingdom to humane sanctuaries. [gallery ids="100319,108085" nav="thumbs"]