Thursday: War and Treaty at the Hamilton

As part of The View’s Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit cast reunion episode that aired in June, War and Treaty singer Tanya Trotter stepped center stage to sing the solo introduction to “Joyful Joyful.” Sixty seconds in, a male voice can be heard enthusiastically shouting from offstage “Go on, girl!” “Yes, that’s my big mouth,” Michael Trotter, co-singer and husband of Tanya, admits sheepishly. “I just could not control myself … There was a second there where I forgot that was my wife.” For Tanya (previously Tanya Blount), who performed in the 1993 movie alongside Whoopi Goldberg, Lauryn Hill (who was not at the reunion), and Sheryl Lee Ralph, it was wonderful to revisit with the people who gave her her first big break. “It was incredible,” says Tanya. “Whoopi has this way of making everybody feel like they’re that 17, 16-year-old kid again … So when I saw her and I saw—I call them my classmates—I immediately started crying because I remembered how it felt to be on that set with everybody.” The visit to The View is the latest in a continuous series of highs for the D.C. duo. This year alone has included Grammy nominations, a performance at the Emmys, another performance on Jimmy Kimmel Live, and touring as the opener for Zach Bryan. The year 2024 did include one awful low though. There was a cotton plant in their dressing room backstage at Austin, Texas’ Sips and Sounds Music Festival. Whoever used the plant as a set dressing was never determined; the duo received an apology from the promoter. Michael views the incident as a teachable moment. “With the temperature of our country and all that we’re going through with the ugliness of politics, I think that, in the spirit of following our current president, we need to tone it down a bit,” he says. “I would add to it—we need to tone it down a lot …What I would’ve loved to have seen is us and the promoter company come together and make a joint statement realizing that ‘Hey, the festival did not intentionally do this to us.’” Michael adds, “Also, letting people know that you can have a grievance and you can voice your grievance and it can be heard and it is not the end-all be-all.” After a brief respite at their home in Nashville, the duo will hit the road again, which includes a stop at the Hamilton on Aug. 22. As if that wasn’t enough for the couple, their biopic should (fingers crossed) start production this fall and a new album should land at the beginning of 2025. “We have a target date,” says Michael. “In good old Mike and Tanya fashion: Valentine’s Day 2025.” The War and Treaty play at 8 p.m. on Aug. 22 at the Hamilton, 600 14th St. NW. thehamiltondc.com. $25. —Christina Smart

Friday: Korchfest at the Black Cat

In about a month, Ben Gibbard will take the stage at Nationals Park for the HSFestival and get quite a workout. First, he’ll perform with his longstanding indie rock band Death Cab for Cutie before toweling off and then return to the stage with his beloved electro-pop side project the Postal Service. An impressive accomplishment by most rock standards until compared with Korchfest at the Black Cat this Friday. Local drumming stalwart Brandon Korch will celebrate his 40th birthday by performing in five bands, a feat of strength most musicians looking to avoid Carpal Tunnel Syndrome wouldn’t dare. While attending to see whether Korch collapses is worth the price of admission alone, the lineup presents a smorgasbord of punk-related genres that includes currently active bands and projects that had since gone dormant. I’m most looking forward to Pilau, whose grind-inflected hardcore is sure to make Korch sweat buckets mid-evening and the resurrection of Gnarly Rae Jepsen, a Carly Rae cover band (which includes WCP alum Matt Cohen) that will end the evening on an e*mo*tional note. Korchfest starts at 7 p.m. on Aug. 23 at the Black Cat, 1811 14th St. NW. blackcatdc.com. $15–$20. —Matt Siblo

Friday and Saturday: Local Theatre Festival at the Kennedy Center 

At its pre-pandemic peak, more than 40 theaters, universities, and playwriting collectives participated in the Kennedy Center’s Page-to-Stage, its free, annual Labor Day weekend festival of new play readings. Nearly every local actor in town who wanted to work over Labor Day weekend could—and the same went for anyone who wanted to see a free show. COVD ended what had been a great 18-year run. While the Kennedy Center’s Local Theatre Festival, the replacement event, which returns for its second year on Friday and Saturday, doesn’t offer the array of readings from heavy-hitter playwrights and theaters like Page-to-Stage did, it’s a step in the right direction, and at least tickets are still free. The 2024 Local Theatre Festival includes two panels, seven workshops, and 11 readings, which are mostly spearheaded by local emerging playwrights. The main draw is likely to be Friday night’s conversation between Peter Marks, the former longtime Washington Post theater critic who accepted a buyout from the paper in December, and Naveen Kumar, the New York-based freelancer for Variety recently tapped to replace him at our paper of record. Promising writer-generated readings include This Play Is Not About Brian, a semi-biographical show by Nikki Mirza, a multi-hyphenate artist wrapping up a star turn as Cynthia Weil in Olney Theatre Center’s production of Beautiful. Of the readings organized by local troupes, Spooky Action’s new musical adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita sounds the most intriguing. It’ll probably be weird, but in a good way. Teen theater geeks may be good candidates to enjoy the festival’s workshops, which will cover everything from set design to commedia dell’arte. The second annual Local Theatre Festival runs Aug. 23 and 24 at the Kennedy Center. 2700 F St. NW. kennedy-center.org. Free. —Rebecca Ritzel

Saturday: All Time Low at Merriweather Post Pavilion

Like all baby bands when they first start out, All Time Low would play any venue that would have them: VFW halls, churches, small bars—you name it. And like most baby bands, those early shows for the Towson, Maryland, band would typically have a sparse turnout. “I think the show [when] we played at Sidebar … I think we probably played for 14 people,” lead singer Alex Gaskarth tells City Paper. “There can’t have been over 20 people there. There were some really small ones but nobody knew who we were.” All Time Low don’t have issues with people not knowing who they are anymore. Twenty-one years into their career, the pop-punk quartet have released nine studio albums and their music has streamed more than 4 billion times worldwide. They also reached peak rock star status when they launched their own wine brand Everything is Wine. Not bad for a band that formed while attending Dulaney High School. Now, in celebration of their more than two decades career, the band are performing a series of shows that include playing a small club followed by a larger venue a few nights later. For Gaskarth, it’s a great opportunity for the band to get back to their roots. “We’ve been having a blast doing these kinds of clusters, these weekends of shows,” he says. “Those are the rooms that we grew up playing. I think our band really connects in those kinds of rooms and it’s really fun for us to actually be able to put on a show like that. Nothing beats that kind of energy.” Though the local small show, scheduled for August 22 at the Atlantis, is already sold out, you can still see the local band in another D.C./Baltimore suburb, not unlike their hometown. All Time Low play at 7 p.m. on Aug. 24 at Merriweather Post Pavilion, 10475 Little Patuxent Pkwy., Columbia. merriweathermusic.com. $45–$75. —Christina Smart

Saturday: Washington Salsa Festival at Eaglebank Arena

Reggaeton, bachata, and Regional Mexican music may be the biggest Latin music genres these days but salsa will forever be popular, and the Washington Salsa Festival will feature a who’s who of veteran greats from the percussion and horn-filled dance music. Salsa has managed to stay timeless for decades thanks to its combination of tuneful vocals and energetic instrumentation. The old-school stars on Saturday’s bill include the South Bronx-raised singer and trombonist Willie Colon. His raw-rhythmed 1970s solo albums and collaborative efforts with vocalists Hector Lavoe and Ruben Blades are still considered classics today. Puerto Rico’s El Gran Combo have changed members over the years since their 1962 beginning. Still, this well-rehearsed, charismatic outfit always offer three vocalists who cleverly alternate call-and-response and harmony while dancing—propelled by the group’s keyboard, drums, and bass-led musical background. Puerto Rican singer La India has sung house music and pop over the years, but her strong-voiced ’90s salsa efforts are what many still treasure the most from her catalog. The event’s lengthy bill also includes Tito Nieves, Rey Ruiz, Frankie Negron, and Los Adolescentes. Expect to see couples dancing in the aisles all night long. Washington Salsa Festival starts at 8 p.m. on Aug. 24 at Eaglebank Arena, 4500 Patriot Cir., Fairfax. eaglebankarena.com. $39–$350. —Steve Kiviat

Ongoing: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Southwestern Pennsylvania at the National Building Museum

The central tension of the exhibit Frank Lloyd Wright’s Southwestern Pennsylvania at the National Building Museum is between the famed architect’s “realized” and “unrealized” projects. The “realized” projects—notably the Fallingwater residence—are justly celebrated. The “unrealized” ones? They’re more of a mixed bag. To the exhibit’s credit, it communicates Wright’s vision through more than just standard architectural drawings and scale models; it has partnered with Skyline Ink Animators + Illustrators to produce high-quality digital animations that capture both exterior and interior views of Wright’s unbuilt designs. Some of these animations are simply lovely. One shows a farm cottage blanketed with swirling snow and chimney smoke; another depicts a small Rhododendron Chapel with a fireplace full of quietly licking flames; another shows a never-built addition to Fallingwater with an unexpectedly castle-like roof that features a succession of small dentiles. More mundane is Wright’s circular-ramp design for a 1,100-space vehicular garage in downtown Pittsburgh; it was never constructed, but it eventually came to fruition more than a decade later for the infinitely classier purpose of housing New York’s Guggenheim Museum. The big swing-and-miss from Wright, however, was a proposed, multi-use civic center on Pittsburgh’s “Point,” where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers meet to form the Ohio River. In Wright’s vision, this triangular focal point for the city, a geographic and historical treasure, would have been overrun by a web of circle-and-spoke structures. Thankfully, the city went a different direction and built the simple, untrammeled greenery of Point State Park, which remains a civic treasure to this day. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Southwestern Pennsylvania runs through March 17, 2025, at the National Building Museum, 401 F St. NW. Thursday through Monday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. nbm.org. $7–$10.—Louis Jacobson

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Taylor Swift was still in her Red era when Beautiful: The Carole King Musical opened on Broadway in 2014. The high-end jukebox musical about the intersection of songwriting and relationships hits differently a decade later, in the golden age of Spotify. Today listeners analyze song lyrics like Bletchley Park codebreakers. Is Joe Alwyn “the smallest man who’s ever lived”? Is Drake dissing Kendrick yet again?

Nostalgia, not lyrical intrigue, is why boomers turned out in droves to see Beautiful on Broadway and the subsequent North American tours, which lapped through the Kennedy Center twice. The show features nearly two dozen hits by Carole King, her late lyricist ex-husband Gerry Goffin, and their songwriting frenemies Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, including “The Loco-Motion,” “Some Kind of Wonderful,” and “One Fine Day.”

Olney Theatre Center opened its own pretty fine production of Beautiful Saturday, July 6. The songs are still chart-toppers from ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, but the biographical drama now feels ripped from a Reddit thread in a way that may resonate with younger theatergoers:

“Will you still love me tomorrow?” That may depend on whether or not Gerry is still cheating. Though Carole is inclined to forgive Gerry, is it too late, baby? What if he really is the asshole?

See Beautiful and discuss!

Natalie Weiss, a multihyphenate performer with 239,000 subscribers to her YouTube channel, stars as King, who ages from a 16-year-old Brooklyn prodigy to 30-something star at Carnegie Hall. Weiss’ own journey to Olney started in 2012, when she talked a castmate on the Les Misérables tour into singing a few seconds of Beyoncé’s “Halo” with her backstage and launched her aforementioned YouTube series, Breaking Down the Riffs.

The trick to hitting a tricky accidental note in a riff, Weiss tells Briana Carlson-Goodman in the video clip, is to “Tilt your head and make a weird face like this.” Weiss cocks her head sideways and delivers a one-eyed squint. “Oh! That helps!” says her castmate. The two women proceed to ooo and ahh in homage to Queen Bey.

That combination of virtuosic pipes and off-kilter humor parlayed Weiss into theater-internet fandom, and makes her perfect to play the self-deprecating King, who wrote songs for others for decades before gaining the confidence to sing them herself. Like King, Weiss delivers her strongest performances when she’s seated at a piano and setting the tempo. She plays a baby grand live in Beautiful’s opening and closing numbers, and, at many moments in between, takes a seat and fakes it on an altered silent upright, her feet pumping nonexistent pedals out of habit.

Like that rejiggered piano on wheels, the rest of Olney’s production is uneven and has moments that feel low budget. Each actor switches wigs up to six times to indicate changes in character and decades, and many bobs, bouffants, and flat-tops are so atrocious they distract from the performances. As Goffin, Michael Perrie Jr. lacks ladies’ man charm, with a voice a bit too nasally for the job. Sometimes, when he harmonizes with Weiss, it’s a relief when the ensemble struts out to replicate the Shirelles, the Drifters, and other groups that bought songs from Goffin and King.

There’s no orchestra pit, so the sound of live musicians is piped in, and not at the same quality level as some other local theaters. Microphone tech issues also marred opening night. Most ensemble vocals, however, were still top-notch. D.C. regulars Kurt Boehm and Connor James Reilly stopped the show with the tenor and bass-baritone duet “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feeling,” a No. 1 penned by Mann and Weil for the Righteous Brothers.

As the witty Weil and hypochondriac Mann, Nikki Mirza and Calvin McCullough make a better couple than the leads, a credit to their voices, individual acting chops, and the relationship arc written by Douglas McGrath. Tap-dancing Bobby Smith, Washington’s go-to for middle-aged curmudgeons, moves the plot forward as Don Kirshner, the producer badgering both couples to hurry up and write more hits.

Many musical numbers are cleverly juxtaposed against the writers’ lives. “He’s Sure the Boy I Love,” for example, is positioned as a declaration from Weil to Mann. (They end up on the rocks later.) “Take Good Care of My Baby” references King and Goffin’s daughter Louise, born when King was still a teen.

Whether all lyrical nods in the musical are authentic references to real-life emotions and events is a matter for postshow internet searches. (Spoiler alert: Looks like the singer Goffin cheated with is named Jeanie, not Janelle.) The more immediate takeaway is that without King and Weil paving the way at 1650 Broadway, we never get to the Tortured Poets Era of 2024, a year that also brought us the likes of Chappell Roan, Cowboy Carter, new bops from Billie Eilish, and a fantastic album that still has me wondering what kind of asshole would stand up Maggie Rogers for a Knicks game?

At Beautiful’s end, after King finally cuts ties with Goffin, Kirshner assures the singer-songwriter that she still has a place in the music biz. “You write girl songs,” he tells her. “They’re really popular now.”

He’s right. They are.

Beautiful, directed by Amy Anders Corcoran, book by Douglas McGrath, and words and music by Carole King, Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann, and Cynthia Weil, runs through Aug. 25 at Olney Theatre Center. olneytheatre.org. $31–$96.

In the 13 years since D.C.-based Step Afrika! debuted Migration: Reflections on Jacob Lawrence, the field of percussive dance has grown by leaps and bounds. Black performing artists have benefited from an influx of support, including millions from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott. Meanwhile, many historically White arts organizations are continuing to increase racial diversity, both onstage and off.

And yet, the remount of Migration from Step Afrika!, now running at Arena Stage to close out its 2023-24 season, feels stuck in 2011, isolated from the growth enjoyed by the intersecting worlds of percussive and Black dance.

Rather than create new dance numbers inspired by Jacob Lawrence’s 60-painting series depicting the Northern migration of Black Americans, Step Afrika!’s founders mostly cobbled together material from previous shows and repackaged it with images of paintings projected in the background. Much of that packaging is very good—Step Afrika! is performing with nearly 30 musicians and dancers, its largest company ever—but as a longtime fan, I walked into the Kreeger Theater hoping to see something new and left disappointed.

C. Brian Williams founded the company in 1994 to preserve, perform, and promote stepping, a percussive dance form with roots in West African folk dancing and crystallized at historically Black colleges that combines tap with coordinated arm movements and rhythmic body slaps. Over the years, Step Afrika! has also integrated other dance disciplines from continental Africa and the diaspora. Dancers receive 11-month contracts, longer than those of any American ballet company. They perform at White House Juneteenth celebrations, Arena Stage’s annual holiday shows, and typically tour at least 50 dates per year.

Step Afrika! has enjoyed phenomenal success, without receiving a big-money grant from Jeff Bezos’ ex. But if the company has the resources, I do wish it would welcome fresh artistic advice. Hiring an out-of-house director, choreographer, or even a dramaturg could help Step Afrika! explore new territory and create a show worthy of Lawrence’s legacy today.

Migration proceeds mostly chronologically, tracing the forced migration of enslaved people to the Americas, then through slavery, freedom, and sharecropping in Act 1, and onward to the North and 20th century in Act 2. The images, projected on five screens suspended above the stage, include both detailed close-ups and full-scale images of Lawrence’s paintings. Opening moments will look familiar to anyone who has seen one of Step Afrika!’s shows that integrate African drumming. A dozen dancers rotate around freestanding drums in unison, the art of making noise synonymous with the art of fierce movement.

“Wade Suite,” a highlight of the new material, will remind dance fans of “Revelations,” the suite of spirituals that closes nearly every performance by Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Working in Step Afrika!’s favor, however, is the live vocal quartet crooning “Wade in the Water” and other spirituals to harmonically fabulous arrangements.

Gum-boot dancing, performed by dancers in thigh-high Wellingtons, is a clever addition—wading, get it?—but also anachronistic: The South African dance style turns up in other Step Afrika! variety shows, but makes little sense in the 19th-century American South.

Much more jarring: moments when the paintings bear no relation to the music and movement, or even detract from it, such as knee-slapping choruses of “Hallelujah” juxtaposed against a hanging noose.

At intermission, a friend and I theorized that maybe the point was to convey an indomitable spirit of survival despite the oppression of slavery and the long shadow of Jim Crow. But somber images keep popping up at tonally mismatched moments in Act 2, like randomly generated Jacob Lawrence screensavers. (The projections are credited to Step Afrika!’s former artistic director, Jakari Sherman, who also directed Migration and choreographed many of the numbers.)

Act 2’s “Trane” was lifted from a piece Step Afrika! debuted at a jazz festival in 2009, set to music by John Coltrane, performed with Lionel D. Lyles II playing onstage. There’s a bit more modern dance incorporated into Migration than other Step Afrika! shows, but regrettably the choreography doesn’t always flatter the dancers or the music, with far too many anguished reaches to nowhere.

Thankfully, the full “Trane Suite” also includes “Off the Train,” an upbeat number for the company’s men, luggage in hand, who pound the stage with suitcases and jaunty canes. (A common prop in stepping, well integrated here, with a Lawrence painting to match.) The show’s original finale, “Chicago,” also gets the balance of art, dance, and music right. Arena Stage’s in-house shop built new, easy-to-move-in costumes for the scene, several of which coordinate with the cloche-wearing women in Lawrence’s paintings.

In theory, if not execution, the Arena Stage revival of Migration may go down as one of the best collaborations in the history of D.C. arts. My hope for Step Afrika!, however, is that the company will look beyond the District and tap into the larger Black dance renaissance. There’s never been a deeper or wider field of Black choreographers: MacArthur “genius” Kyle Abraham, Jennifer Archibald (who has a premiere at the Kennedy Center this month!), Rena Butler, two-time Tony nominee Camille Brown, recent Washington Ballet debutante Chanel DaSilva—the list continues. Step Afrika!’s dancers deserve the fresh blood, that integrating spark that can keep their art form migrating forward for another 30 years.  

Presented by Arena Stage, The Migration: Reflections on Jacob Lawrence, directed by Jakari Sherman, choreographed by Sherman and others, runs through July 14 in the Kreeger Theater. arenastage.org. $56–$105.

Thursday: Nicole Chung at People’s Book

Author Nicole Chung continues to take the DMV by storm with an event celebrating the paperback release of her bestselling 2023 memoir, A Living Remedy. Chung will be joined by Clint Smith, the D.C.-based author of How the Word Is Passed and an Atlantic columnist. Chung has done many events across the region and just read at Capitol Hill’s East City Bookshop on May 2 (featured in our 2024 Spring Arts Guide), but Thursday’s event marks her first time reading at People’s, Takoma Park’s newest addition to our robust indie bookstore scene. In the nearly one year since People’s Book opened last June, the store has become a hub for community events, readings, workshops, and more. Similarly, A Living Remedy has brought people together in its first year of publication, thanks to Chung’s vulnerable and resonant writing, as well as her long tour that’s convened readers and writers across the country. Chung shared on X that this will be her last event in the area for a while, so make sure to catch her and Smith in conversation. Nicole Chung talks at 7 p.m. on May 16 at People’s Book, 7014-A Westmoreland Ave., Takoma Park. peoplesbooktakoma.com. Free. —Serena Zets 

Saturday and Sunday: Walk Weekend throughout the Dupont-Kalorama Neighborhoods

This Saturday and Sunday is “Walk Weekend,” a free, community-oriented event organized by the Dupont-Kalorama Museums Consortium. For two days, seven of the city’s “off the mall” museums will open their doors to guests of all ages, complete with music, special exhibitions, and tours, as well as hands-on activities to excite even the youngest of museum-goers. The participating spots include many favorites, as well as some hidden gems, that run the gamut of specializations from architecture to fine arts: Dumbarton House, the National Museum of American Jewish Military History, the Phillips Collection, the Woodrow Wilson House, the American Revolution Institute of the Society of Cincinnati, Dupont Underground, and, for the first time, O Museum in the Mansion.

If it’s novel retrospection you’re after, consider the Revolution Institute’s exhibit titled Fete Lafayette, or, translated to English, the much less catchy Party Lafayette. The thorough collection celebrates—through letters, textiles, silvers, and other rare artifacts—the 200-year anniversary of the Frenchman’s farewell tour of America. His visit took a whopping 13 months to complete and allowed the famed Marquis and civil rights supporter to witness the country’s democratic experiment in bare light. Alternatively, if it’s sleuthing among cherry blossoms that strikes your fancy, the O Museum, aka Rosa Parks’ former abode, will open the gates of its Secret Gardens of Asia exhibit, filled with hidden passageways and whimsical blooms. And if you’d like to get your hands messy and brain whizzing with art of your own, the Phillips will host interactive arts and crafts for walkers of all ages. Consider checking out the vibrant, Technicolor collages of Sam Gilliam or the flowery, bold abstractions of Alma W. Thomas before you take to the page for gummy inspiration. Visit the Consortium’s website for a complete map of participating museums. Walk Weekend runs from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on May 18 and 19 throughout the Dupont-Kalorama neighborhoods. dkmuseums.com. Free. —Emma Francois

Sunday: “Zodiac Suite,” presented by U.S. Air Force Band and Washington Performing Arts at Lincoln Theatre

Washington’s military bands are not generally associated with breaking new ground in jazz or classical music; John Philip Sousa, evening tattoos, and “Hail to the Chief” are more their jam. But thanks to a partnership with local concert presenter Washington Performing Arts, the United States Air Force Band will deliver the D.C. premiere of “Zodiac Suite,” a landmark work for piano trio and orchestra by pioneering composer, pianist, and arranger Mary Lou Williams. Originally written just for piano trio, then enlarged for jazz ensemble, and, eventually, an orchestra, “Zodiac Suite” was played at New York’s Town Hall in 1945. But as Black woman, Williams saw her grand accomplishment undeservedly shelved for decades, and there was no definitive copy of Williams’ orchestrations. Until the pandemic, that is, when out-of-work pianist Aaron Diehl began seriously noodling around with a scratchy recording and Williams’ scores, determined for “the lady who swings the band” to find an audience again. He has succeeded. Last November, Zodiac Suite, Diehl’s album recorded with New York classical ensemble the Knights, received a Grammy nomination. Williams’ music dates “from an era when Black composers with sway in jazz circles dared to pursue hybrid musical styles, all while meeting various forms of resistance or disrespect,” wrote New York Times critic Seth Colter Walls in his glowing album review.  You can listen on Spotify, but wouldn’t it be better to hear Diehl, his trio, and the Air Force Band play “Zodiac Suite” live—for free? The concert also includes George Gershwin’s “Lullaby for Strings,” William Grant Still’s “Out of the Silence,” and Duke Ellington’s classic “Caravan.” “Zodiac Suite,” presented by the U.S. Air Force Band and Washington Performing Arts, starts at 7:30 p.m. on May 19 at the Lincoln Theatre, 1215 U St. NW. washingtonperformingarts.org. Free. —Rebecca Ritzell

Ongoing: So It Goes at Photoworks

Few of the more than two dozen photographers in the Photoworks exhibit So It Goes are making truly revolutionary work, but that can be forgiven: They’re students from four local high schools (Holton-Arms, Walter Johnson, and Sienna in Maryland, and Virginia’s Potomac). Still, many of these young artists have soaked up moods from their photographic forebears impressively well. Zachary Dalva–Baird’s red truck surrounded by brambles channels William Christenberry’s depictions of Hale County, Alabama, right down to its muted color palette; Alexis Vaughan’s moody portrayal of a blue car suggests the visual ballads of Gregory Crewdson; Karina Satoskar’s rocky seascape communicates the fluidity of a 19th-century landscape by Carleton Watkins; while Kabir Singh’s image of three figures in the distance framed by a semicircular canopy call to mind W. Eugene Smith’s “A Walk to the Paradise Garden.” Other notable works include Javier Almonte’s photograph of a stray dog reclining next to a beige wall that echoes the color of the dog; Britt Nordquist’s collage-like depiction of a figure holding old-school photographic negatives to the light; Addison Burakiewicz’s image of a face blending into a backdrop of tree branches; Ella Moore’s orderly look through 10 repeating sandstone-colored doorways; and Alden Darufsky’s pair of inscrutable abstractions, one in placid blue green and the other in fiery orange red. The standout image, albeit an understated one, may be Maisy Bedell’s black-and-white photograph of a half dozen small drops of water, which, despite their pleasing chiaroscuro, end up being less interesting than the copious negative space that surrounds them. Bonus: The images sell for a very reasonable $50 or $75. So It Goes runs through May 26 at Photoworks, 7300 MacArthur Blvd., Glen Echo. Saturdays, 1 to 4 p.m.; Sundays, 1 to 7 p.m. glenechophotoworks.org. Free. —Louis Jacobson

Editor’s note: This has been updated with the correct start time for “Zodiac Suite,” which starts at 7:30 p.m. on May 18.

Like many young adults working in the arts, Luke Casserly spent time at his childhood home during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Unlike many other young adults, he wrote a beautiful play about it.

Distillation, Casserly’s taut, elegiac reminiscence about changing life in the Irish Midlands, amounts to far more than an amusing account of socially distant walks and family history delivered via a charming accent. It’s a one-man show, but with only 19 audience members seated at a large roundtable covered with bog soil, the effect is more like Casserly has invited you over for tea and a poetic TED Talk. Distillation may be a fine Irish tradition, but the reference here is not to whiskey but to perfume making, and the art of boiling a story down to its essence, so memories of the performance linger longer than the scent on your wrist.

Solas Nua, a D.C.-based nonprofit that promotes Irish arts and culture, commissioned Distillation in 2023 and welcomed Casserly for a developmental staging at the Stable last summer, but the play’s roots stretch far further, to those long, mid-pandemic walks on the peat bogs near his childhood home in County Longford, bogs finally allowed to lie fallow after decades of industrial peat harvesting.

A critically praised multidisciplinary performer, Casserly has won a series of honors related to arts and ecological practice, including a 2023 Next Generation Award from Ireland’s National Arts Council. Word that a small American theater troupe had commissioned him to write an immersive show about perfume and peat bogs intrigued many on the Emerald Isle. The Abbey, Ireland’s national theater cofounded by William Butler Yeats, came on board as a co-producer, and, along with diplomatic partners, helped Solas Nua arrange a North American tour that will take Casserly and his peat-covered roundtable from D.C. to Albany, Buffalo, and Toronto, and back again for another District run next year.

But before Distillation embarks on that theatrical journey, local audiences should take Casserly’s adroitly piloted trip through Ireland’s dirty rural past. The venue, as with two previous Solas Nua projects, is downtown’s Eaton Hotel. Rather than being lured to the rear bar, however, Distillation audiences take the elevator to the hotel’s library-like top-floor conference room and pull up a chair at a circular table covered with three-inches of fragrant, legally imported Irish peat. Once everyone is settled, the play begins with Casserly, dressed in a loose linen suit and Harry Potter-esque glasses, passing around handfuls of decomposing matter and inviting audiences to take a deep whiff.

Up until 2020, we learn, Casserly’s father worked for Bord na Móna, a semi-state company charged with harvesting fuel from Ireland’s bogs. As “Dad” explains in the play, he cut strips of decomposing plant matter and dried them in log-like clumps. While immensely cheaper than wood or gas, harvesting peat is a double-edged ecological disaster, emitting harmful aerosols when burned, but able to absorb harmful gases as a “carbon sink” when left intact. While some personal harvesting is still allowed, industrial practice is not, ending Casserly’s father’s career. 

His father also raises cattle, just as his grandfather did, the herds not large enough to  make money. What will happen to the family’s land—and the former peat bogs near it—are the questions that hang in the air like the smoky, mossy fragrance created by Cork-based perfumer Joan Woods for a sensory experience incorporated into the show. 

Distillation may sound oddly specific, but what’s so wondrous about Casserly’s play is those specifics tap into relatable universals, cracking open a mental space for audiences to think about their own relationships to familial traditions, family-owned homesteads, and the 21st-century siren song to take better care of the planet. 

I thought, for example, of my father’s birthplace on a Chesapeake Bay tributary north of Baltimore, in a shack without indoor plumbing. For my paternal grandparents, crabbing and fishing were a means of collecting dinner. A college-educated generation later, crabbing has evolved into a pastime, but in an ecosystem far more fragile. I thought also of my maternal great-grandmother, a mother of 10 who became a crane operator during World War II, and kept working until the steel mills in Baltimore started shutting down, gathering rust along the waterfront.

The world changes. Industry changes. The landscape changes. 

“I began to see the landscape as a vulnerable thing, unable to speak up for itself,” Casserly says.  

I’m sure Greta Thunberg would agree. But Casserly would rather speak to a handful of theatergoers than the United Nations General Assembly. Distillation is not the theatrical equivalent of doomscrolling. What Solas Nua is offering, in addition to tea and tiny vials of Woods’ perfume, is a space to think and a sense of hope.

Birds chirp from hidden speakers. Smoke rises from the center of the table. Visions of flowers arise from surprising places. Like a priest exhorting his parishioners to go in peace, Casserly sends audiences out into spring night renewed. “In the same way that my Dad hopes for me to look after this place when he’s gone, you are now invited to look after your little piece too,” he says.

That “piece” could be the Eau de Ireland perfume sample, your family’s ancestral land, or a nearby park in need of a little TLC. 

 “Let it travel out from here, across the city, and further afield,” Casserly says. “I’m certain it’s in safe hands now.”

Presented by Solas Nua, Distillation, written and performed by Luke Casserly, runs through May 12 at Eaton Hotel; and from May 15 to 19 at Round House Theatre. solasnua.org. $45.

It’s easy to sit in a dark theater, listen to a tuneful new musical, and thoroughly enjoy yourself. All it takes is pleasant piano, decent voices, and interesting visual elements. Yet upon leaving, you can still turn to your companion and say, “Wow, that show has some issues.” 

Such is the case with Unknown Soldier, a flawed but charming intergenerational musical that traces the lives of two women over 100 years. Composer and co-lyricist Michael Friedman died of complications from HIV/AIDS in 2017, less than two years after Unknown Soldier’s premiere at Williamstown Theatre Festival. A New York off-Broadway premiere was cut short by the pandemic in 2020. Now Arena Stage is hosting the show following a fresh round of tinkering from the play’s remaining creators. 

Unknown Soldier features a book by Daniel Goldstein, who also jointly wrote the lyrics with Friedman. Broadway vet Trip Cullman directs. More male-presenting names are listed as the orchestrator, music director, and choreographer, as well as the costume, set, lighting, sound and hair/makeup/wig designers. It’s astounding that Arena Stage is comfortable mounting a musical that’s almost completely helmed by men. Disappointing on principle, but also because there is likely a correlation between this stage full of underdeveloped women characters and the roomful of men who invented them.

Among my questions for the Unknown Soldier squadron: What 41-year-old Manhattan doctor never asks her 100-year-old grandmother about their family history and suddenly becomes a genealogy detective once granny’s in the grave? And why is her male romantic interest—a nerdy Cornell librarian who assists the ob-gyn in her search—the most relatable character in this women-focused musical?

Beyond the gender-driven issues, the central problem plaguing Unknown Soldier is that its most intriguing elements seem to hail from completely different shows, dovetailed together with Friedman’s lovely piano-driven chamber music and a sledgehammer. 

To be clear for D.C. audiences, Unknown Soldier has no connection to Arlington National Cemetery. Instead, the title refers to a fictional amnesiac in uniform found wandering Grand Central Station during World War I. The story follows three different time-and-place continuums: one in 1918, one in 1973, and another in 2003. 

The mystery of his identity—both to those wondering in 1918, and to Ellen (Lora Lee Gayer), who, in 2003, finds an old magazine clipping with a photo of her grandmother and the soldier—drives the show. Astute audience members will likely solve the mystery faster than Ellen and her librarian friend (an endearing Adam Chanler–Berat), who connect first by email, then instant messenger, then landlines, and finally meet in person.

“How about you get out of that dusty basement and come get nerdy with me?” MisterDarcy98 types to Ellen on AIM, because the 2003 track of the show is trying to be an upstate New York version of You’ve Got Mail, replete with jokes about Ithaca being gorgeous.

Scenes set between 1918 and 1920 are the strongest, and not coincidentally, the most surprising. Kerstin Anderson, channeling a younger version of Glynis Johns (the suffragette mother in Mary Poppins) plays Lucy Lemay, Ellen’s eventual grandmother. Lucy’s given little backstory, but most likely she’s upper class, judging by her spiffy hats, nice dresses, and that she hails from Troy, the Albany suburb that stands in for Manhattan on HBO’s The Gilded Age.

One standout musical number finds Lucy preparing breakfast for her soldier, methodically setting plates and making toast until the deconstructed waltz completely unravels and she breaks down in tears. A few songs later, Nehal Joshi, playing a sanitarium doctor, leads the ensemble in a lively dance number about the unknown solder, “our favorite shell-shocked amnesiac celebrity.” A musical about amnesia starring a dancing psychiatrist and his asylum nurses? Sign me up! 

But Unknown Soldier is not that musical. Instead, “The Memory Song” is a lively distraction from the strained romantic comedy and the slightly sentimental Great War plotline. A third time-place continuum depicts young Ellen (a spunky Riglee Ruth Bryson) at age 10, living with her grumpy grandma Lucy (Judy Kuhn) in 1973. I kept waiting for Kuhn’s character to become a scene-stealer like the grandma experiencing dementia in Billy Elliot, but the Tony nominee’s talents are largely wasted here.

All three tracks play out on the same white minimalist set, marked by seven white tables, piles of file boxes concealing props and hanging lamps that evoke a clinical atmosphere. It’s cool, but not nearly as effective as the similar tableau employed in Here There Are Blueberries, a superior wartime photography mystery staged at Shakespeare Theatre last year.

Ellen’s longing to complete a narrative from the past is, to a certain extent, a universal desire. That sentiment also likely drove Arena Stage’s decision to stage the musical. Championing Unknown Soldier is a valiant cause. But Friedman’s output was prolific—his noteworthy musicals include Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and Beautiful City—but the work I’d most like to see now is his “State of the Union” songbook, written for the presidential election of 2016 and sadly just as relevant today. 

Without Friedman alive to revise it, Unknown Soldier may never become more than snippets and memories that paint an incomplete picture. Like Ellen’s familial quest, the search is worthwhile, but the end result not entirely satisfying. 

Unknown Soldier, music by Michael Friedman, book by Daniel Goldstein, lyrics by Friedman and Goldstein, and directed by Trip Cullman, runs through May 5 at Arena Stage. arenastage.org. $56–$95.

American songwriter Burt Bacharach didn’t have to die to have a moment, but he did have to die to get a D.C. cabaret. 

Nova Y. Payton, one of Washington’s most beloved theater artists, acknowledged that reality early on in her endearing 90-minute cabaret act, “That’s What Friends Are For.” (The tuneful evening at Arlington’s Signature Theatre runs through Feb. 4.) The singer said she wanted to craft a tribute concert for Bacharach for some time, but couldn’t figure out how to squeeze a cabaret run into her own busy theater schedule. (Her recent engagements included guesting with the National Symphony‘s Holiday Pops.) 

Then the esteemed composer died last February, at age 94, after seven decades of songwriting. Signature’s artistic director Matthew Gardiner called Payton and said, “We have to find the time.” 

They settled on January 2024, a typically dark period for Washington theaters, and picked 12 songs that should brighten anyone’s midwinter. Though, to be honest, baby boomers who heard Roberta Flack, Barbra Streisand, Dionne Warwick, and others sing Bacharach’s hits in real time may be more enthralled than those of us who have posthumously listened to the canonical highlights. 

“I dug deep, y’all,” Payton told the crowd regarding her song selections, apologizing in advance if she and music director Daryl L.A. Hunt had omitted anyone’s favorites. (“Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” and “The Look of Love” are among Bacharach’s classics that did not make the cut.) 

A four-piece band—Hunt on keys, DeAnte Haggerty–Willis on guitar, Michael Bowie on bass, and Carroll V. Dashiell III on drums—opened the show by jamming through a Bacharach medley. When Payton sashayed onstage, it was to ask a rapt audience, “Do you know the way to San Jose?” A disco-ball ring beckoned on her left hand, and a fitted coral dress lured listeners to the swinging West Coast of the 1960s. Lest any audience members thought this evening in an Arlington black-box would be a formal occasion to sit back and listen, Payton immediately asked for a little audience participation. 

“Wah-wah-whomp-whomp-wah-wah-wah-wah-wha,” she instructed everyone to echo. “I don’t have backup singers for this show,” she noted. “You’re it.” 

Payton also coaxed the crowd into adding oomph to the chorus of “I Say a Little Prayer.” That 1967 chart-topper features the second-most famous “forever and ever” refrain in music history, trailing behind George Frideric Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus. But it’s an unquestionably first-rate example of the success Bacharach and his writing partner Hal David found with Warwick, the pop culture icon who received an overdue Kennedy Center Honor in 2023. 

Payton contributed her own tribute to the Warwick oeuvre after singing a slowed-down, ethereal “Walk on By.” A year ago, she shared a car with Warwick en route to a Los Angeles memorial for A&M Records co-founder Jerry Moss (who died five months before Bacharach). Warwick repeatedly overrode the driver’s GPS, insisting that he not “take the freeway” on the way to rehearsal. 

“But ma’am, we may be late,” the driver warned. 

“They’ll wait,” Warwick coolly retorted. 

Payton’s invite to sing at the Moss tribute, which also included artists such as Peter Frampton and Amy Grant, underscores her growing stature as a performer beyond D.C. She’s been a fixture at Signature since the early 2010s, delivering star turns in Dreamgirls, Hairspray, The Color Purple (for which she won a Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Lead Performer), and many more musicals. A 2012 list of “12 Washington Actors We Love to Watch,” from the Washington Post called Payton a tornado in “lipstick and heels.” She has fans, and this cabaret proves she has super fans. (At the Jan. 18 performance that I attended, a boomer couple in matching cable-knit turtlenecks sat at the center table raising glasses to Payton after each number, while a group of women whooped at every opportunity.)

Musical theater skills and cabaret chops are not synonymous, however, and Payton still has some stretching to do. What’s missing from “That’s What Friends Are For” is friendliness, that is, Payton’s personal connection to the material. Instead, she quoted liberally from Bacharach interviews available on YouTube. Her factoids provided helpful context, but audiences expect to leave a cabaret feeling that they’ve grown more intimate with the performer.

On that note, Payton does not deliver. What she does do is continue to set her voice apart as one that can go from breathy jazz to melismatic belt to steady croon, often all in the same song. After a quick-tempo delivery of the titular number from Bacharach’s lone Broadway show Promises, Promises, Payton awkwardly dashed offstage for a hair and costume change, remerging in a black dress and bouffant, perfect for the lover-done-me-wrong classic “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” recorded by Warwick but made famous by Dusty Springfield.

Bacharach was exacting and specific in his writing, but once songs were out there, he “enjoyed hearing other people’s takes on his music,” Payton said. That’s true, but I’m not sure he would be thrilled with every arrangement Hunt devised. He opted to recreate a synthesized brass section on several numbers, but the effect sounded a bit like a kid fooling around with a Casio keyboard circa 1995. With a grand piano and capable musicians onstage, it is better to be creative and use what’s available in the present, not replicate a tinny version of what listeners heard in the past. 

Because those recordings will always be there, and Bacharach’s songs will be around for reimaging in years to come. 

“I’m so grateful that he has left us with a beautiful catalog of music,” Payton said. Music that is “still relevant today, and will never grow old.” 

“That’s What Friends Are For: Nova Y. Payton Sings Burt Bacharach” runs through Feb. 4 at Signature Theatre. sigtheatre.org. $45.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this review misstated Payton’s involvement with the musical Ragtime. She was not in the production. This post has been updated.

City Lights this week includes SIX at National Theatre, two throwback movie screenings, golf at new venue, and an artist talk on existentialism. Events hand picked by us for you.

Opens Thursday: City Swing at 901 New York Ave. NW

Even though the sport of golf is several centuries old, it is still viewed by some as an exclusive, costly hobby that requires expensive membership fees and equipment. Tari Cash is looking to change all that with the opening of City Swing on July 7. Cash, a former executive for Tesla and Under Armour, realized early on in her career that her love of golf, something she started casually in her childhood, was extremely beneficial. “Knowing how to play golf allowed me to connect with the executives at all of these very different companies and form relationships in a way that I otherwise would not have had the opportunity to do,” Cash says. “There’s no question that that helped advance my career.” The realization that none of her girlfriends played golf, and weren’t comfortable being complete amateurs on a course, sparked the idea for City Swing, which started as a pop-up in 2018. Now at its permanent location on New York Avenue NW, people can get introduced to the game in an inclusive environment. With simulators that show various courses from around the world, players can take lessons from a certified instructor, compete in a league, or practice their swings. In addition to the brick-and-mortar location, Cash also created the City Swing Golf Truck—a golf simulator on wheels that will go into communities that don’t typically have access to the sport. Additionally, the non-profit arm of City Swing, the City Swing Foundation will help ​​underrepresented and underserved communities enter the sport. “It’s a tremendous gift to give a kid the ability to feel comfortable around the golf course, because, while I didn’t play seriously as a child, as soon as I started to play for professional reasons I had a little bit of a foundation to build upon and that really made a difference in terms of how quickly I started to enjoy the game later on in life,” Cash says. City Swing opens July 7 at 901 New York Ave. NW. cityswingdc.com. —Christina Smart

Ongoing through Sept. 5: SIX at the National Theatre

Divorced. Beheaded. Died. Divorced. Beheaded. Survived. The opening lines of SIX list the fates of Henry the VIII’s half dozen wives, and despite setting a rather dire tone, the pronouncement has already become an iconic musical theater intro. SIX opened an ambitious two-month run in Washington this week on July 5, the longest tenure a cast has spent at the National Theatre in more than a decade. It’s the second stop for these touring queens, who set up court in Chicago for three months. The musical is essentially a clever concert, full of great pop-rock vocals, witty 16th century banter, and quotes from the period-appropriate “Greensleeves.” Here’s the concept: Katherine of Aragon, Anna of Cleaves, and their fellow ladies-in-waiting-to-lose-their-heads compete to prove their royal marriage ended with the most tragic story. Cambridge College BFFs Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss wrote SIX as fourth-year students in 2017, and have been driving the musical juggernaut ever since, from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, to the West End, to Winnipeg, to cruise ships, and finally to Broadway, where the show picked up a Tony Award for best score in June. Each of Henry’s exes has one or two “Queenspirations,” from recent decades of popular music, including Beyoncé, Adele, Avril Lavigne, and Alicia Keys. It’s a break-up anthem contest for the ages, and you’ve got all summer long to see it. SIX runs through Sept. 4 at the National Theatre, 1321 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. broadwayatthenational.com. $65–$150. —Rebecca Ritzel

Saturday: Priya Vadhyar’s artist talk, Wedge of Darkness at Material Things

In “Multiverse II,” one of artist Priya Vadhyar’s recent works now on view at the Material Things Studio in North Brentwood, a misty bloom of white seems to break through intersecting twilight planes, beckoning thoughts of the existential nature—the sort of thoughts best put to bed before sundown. Then again, these are the exact musings, though difficult, that are often the most prescient, as Vadhyar’s work proves. The artist, whose transient collections in acrylic and water-soluble graphite have earned her a global reputation, takes inspiration from what science writer Loren Eiseley dubbed one’s “interior geography,” the inexact, artful investigations of the ever-expanding “universe within,” which, he wrote, must accompany the exploration of the galaxies (or the everyday, magical world) beyond. Through weedy drippings and lines that evoke entire characters (as seen in “Surge”), Vadhyar demonstrates her love for the brush and ontology, reminding viewers of life’s uncertainty and impermeable in-betweenness. Amid this pretty, chaotic mess, the self emerges, both all-knowing and lost, attempting to understand its physicality in the liminal. Still, there are moments of clarity; in the carefully placed knickknacks from the artist’s studio (shells, a beaded strand, a well-worn copy of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, from which the exhibition, titled Wedge of Darkness, gets its name) and in the definitive lines that cut through gently blended structures of color, as seen in “Sliver (Fleeting).” For even in the dewy abstractions, where graphite or paint appears to have “bled” at Vadhyar’s direction, there is an assured faith—faith in life’s fluidity, and in the paradoxes of the known and, as Vadhyar calls it, the “not-known.” The exhibit runs through July 16 at Material Things Studio, 4531 Rhode Island Ave., North Brentwood. (Tuesdays 4 to 7 p.m. and Sundays from noon to 3 p.m.) The artist talk starts at at 5 p.m. on July 9. materialthingsstudio.com. Free. —Emma Francois

Sunday: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at the National Gallery of Art

“Most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they’re capable of anything.” From the 1972 classic Chinatown, this quote is one example of a time-honored literary theme: our divided human nature. In that spirit, the National Gallery of Art, in tandem with its exhibit The Double: Identity and Difference in Art since 1900, offers the fascinating film series Dark Mirrors: The Double in Cinema. The program launches on July 10 with a 35mm print of director Rouben Mamoulian’s innovative 1931 horror film Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, adapted from Robert Louis Stevenson’s timeless tale of a respected London doctor (Fredric March) whose alter ego is a monster (and looks like a funhouse Jim Carrey). The mad scientist’s fatal error is his desire to play God: He concocts an ominously swirling potion that he hopes will isolate the moral center of the brain and encourage good behavior. Alas, the experiment backfires, and out comes the bad teeth and bad behavior. Cinematographer Karl Struss, a sometime Vogue photographer, uses a subjective camera to immerse us in the good doctor’s point of view, from the doting fiancée (Rose Hobart) to the horrifying transformation. Struss frequently deploys clever camerawork, like a series of extreme close-ups of passionate eyes that anticipate Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns. The visual razzle-dazzle will be a treat to see on the big screen, and doubles as a startling reflection of Jekyll’s inner turmoil. While the hairy beast that emerges can come off as old-fashioned camp, the lurid spectacle of shame and condemnation resonates uncomfortably with our own highly divided times. Dark Mirrors: The Double in Cinema screens  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at 2 p.m. on July 10 at the National Gallery of Art, East Building Auditorium, 4th Street and Constitution Avenue NW. nga.gov. Free, registration required. —Pat Padua

Tuesday: Can I Kick It?:The Warriors at Franklin Park

On July 12, the DowntownDC Summer Flicks CAN I KICK IT? movie series will show the 1979 pulp classic The Warriors. Set in the wee hours in New York, the self-titled crew is mistakenly accused of killing a gang leader, leading to an all out turf battle extending from Coney Island to the Bronx. Brash, bold, and badass—it’s cinematic juvenile delinquency par excellence. What makes this experience even better, besides being held under the stars, is that it will be scored by DJ 2-Tone Jones, one-half of the D.C. creative collective Shaolin Jazz. In 2019, Can I Kick It? brought The Warriors to the Kennedy Center—one of Jones’ favorite movie events he’s ever scored—and later to Hudson River Park for their outdoor Manhattan debut to over 600 moviegoers. “I’m actually planning to revamp the soundtrack again for the movie,” 2-Tone tells City Paper. “It will include some original breaks and hip-hop tracks that compliment the era of gang culture in N.Y. in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s as depicted in the film.” Their last showing, Spider Man: No Way Home, brought out a huge crowd to the revamped Franklin Park, with treats provided by Whole Foods and DowntownDC BID. Arrive early to avoid any Warriors-like action while finding a prime viewing spot, and enjoy guest DJ Whorocdaspot, visiting from Philly, who’s tasked with setting the evening’s vibe. Then, as darkness descends, get the popcorn ready and enjoy what the great Pauline Kael of the New Yorker described as “​​a night-blooming, psychedelic shine to the whole baroque movie.” DJ Whorocdaspot starts spinning at 7:30 p.m. on July 12 at Franklin Park, 1332 I St. NW. shaolinjazz.com. Free. —Colleen Kennedy

American Ballet Theatre at Kennedy Center

“It’s humiliating to think that dancers should only dance and concentrate on their art, ignoring what’s going on around them,” world renowned choreographer Alexei Ratmansky wrote on Facebook recently. In the month since Vladimir Putin began bombing Ukraine, Ratmansky has made it abundantly clear that he cares very much about the world beyond ballet studios, and has become one of the loudest voices in the global dance community speaking out against the invasion. Although he trained in Russia, attending the Bolshoi School, Ratmansky grew up in Ukraine. His parents and his wife’s family still live in Kyiv. He was working in Moscow in late February, when his wife Tatiana called from New York to share news of the invasion. Within hours, Ratmansky and his creative team were packing, their unplanned departure scuttling two planned premieres at the Bolshoi Ballet. Moscow foregoes Ratmansky’s ballets this spring, but Washington will not. American Ballet Theatre opens its six-day run at the Kennedy Center on Tuesday, March 29 with Bernstein in a Bubble, a new work created during the pandemic at a YMCA retreat center. The cast includes Bethesda native Aran Bell, who joined ABT in 2014 and was promoted to principal in 2020. The run continues through Sunday, April 3, with performances of the classic story ballet Don Quixote. Bell debuts in the lead role Saturday afternoon. But for many local balletomanes, Tuesday and Wednesday’s program featuring Bernstein in a Bubble and two other new ballets are the main attraction. A hometown dancer starring in a new work by a choreographer weeping for his homeland? There may not be a dry eye in the Opera House, all lit up in yellow and blue. The American Ballet Theatre performs from March 29 through April 3 at the Kennedy Center, 2700 F St. NW. kennedy-center.org. $29–$229. Proof of vax and masks required.