Concert at the Coolidge

Tonight the Library of Congress, the W.W. Norton & Co. publishers, and the Shakespeare Theater Company presented a special private concert performance "Theaters Spectacular" to celebrate the publication and release of the new book Theaters by Craig Morrison. Theaters is a beautiful coffee table-type book that has thousands of photographs documenting the evolution of theaters, opera houses, and movie palaces in the United States. I would have loved to have gotten one during the book signing afterwards, but their list price was $71 and I decided I didn't need one that badly.

Anyway, it was an interesting book launch. The evening opened with an actor from the Shakespeare Theater reading the prologue from Shakespeare's Henry V who I distinctly recognized as one of the actors in a play I saw at the Studio Theater a couple of months ago. After greetings from the Theater director and the Library curator, the author gave a slide show "overview" of the book. Next, internationally-acclaimed architect Rafael Viñoly showed some photos of his designs for performing arts centers which he thought would bring the theater more to the people. Then, we got to the entertainment section of the evening.

First, a singer called Genevieve Williams from the Shakespeare Theater came out to do two songs from early 20th century American musical theater, Cole Porter's "Another Op'nin', Another Show" from Kiss Me, Kate and the Gershwin's "Someone to Watch Over Me" from Oh Kay, accompanied by Craig Fitzpatrick on the piano. Miss Williams is a large black lady with a lot of charisma and stage presence, but with questionable taste in clothing; she wore a too-tight short black dress with black panty hose and a pair of moderate, open-toe heels which she immediately took off and walked around the stage in her stocking feet! After the concert pianist played (see below), she came back out again to sign Irving Berlin's "There's No Business Like Show Business" from Annie Get Your Gun, wearing her shoes again, but midway through the song she took her shoes off again! Her songs were entertaining, but she did have an unfortunate tendency to go flat when she was "belting". I don't know why they split her performance into two segments; it would have worked just as nicely to hear all three songs together.

The main entertainer of the evening, though, was Russian concert pianist Svetlana Potanina. While Miss Potanina is not terribly well known in the United States, she has a major concert career in Russia, Europe, and Asia, and has quite a number of CDs in print. Her son is my friend Svet, who lives here in D.C., so that's how the Library was able to get her here to play. She was wearing a black, cocktail-length, multilayered, silk organza dress with an elaborate blue, green, and gold sequin design on the top half, with her long blonde hair worn up (I also noticed later she had a white cashmere overcoat with a white fur (Arctic fox? It was definitely not rabbit) collar). Her program included Rachmaninoff's Pieces-fantasies, op. 3, and Schumann's Fantasiestücke, op. 12, playing a couple of the five movements of the Rachmaninoff and three movements—The Night, Why, and The Gust—from the Schumann. For those of you who don't know the formal names of the Rachmaninoff repertoire, the first movement of Pieces-fantasies is the "Prelude in C-sharp minor" which is probably one of Rachmanimoff's most famous works. Miss Potanina made it look so simple to play, and I remember what a struggle and how much work that loud, bangy prelude really is! For an encore, she played Chopin's "Minute Waltz."