Arts & Entertainment
Of queens and minions
Washington National Opera features high-stakes and high-jinks in new season
Sondra Radvanovsky in the title role of ‘Anna Bolena.’ (Photo by Cade Martin, courtesy WNO)
‘Anna Bolena’
Washington National Opera
Sept. 15-Oct. 6
‘Don Giovanni’
Sept. 20-Oct. 13
Kennedy Center
2700 F St., NW
$25-$300
202-467-4600
kennedy-center.org
From epic royals to legendary libertines, Washington National Opera’s 2012-2013 season openers are a perfect fit for capital city audiences mired in a presidential election year.
First out of the gate is Gaetano Donizetti’s “Anna Bolena,” opening Sept. 14. Starring soprano Sondra Radvanovsky in the title role, the 19th-century opera follows the waning days of Anne Boleyn’s reign as Queen of England before being found guilty of adultery and beheaded.
“The opera is amazing dramatically,” says Radvanovsky, “and the music on top of it is just any soprano’s dream.”
Radvanovsky made a name for herself in the dramatic soprano repertoire of Giuseppe Verdi, but in recent years, she started branching out to explore other roles. Often compared to renowned soprano Maria Callas, who revived “Anna Bolena” from near obscurity in the 1950s, Radvanovsky’s voice possess a full-blooded timbre that’s matched by a riveting acting sense, according to her director for this production, Stephen Lawless.
“The intelligence which she brings to the playing of Anna is thrilling and moving,” says Lawless, who’s gay. “She always puts her abilities to the service of the job in hand.”
The opera culminates in a heartbreaking and defiant mad scene for Anna, yet both Lawless and Radvanovsky feel this isn’t the garden-variety hysteria portrayed in other operas, including the same composer’s calling card “Lucia di Lammermoor.”
“She’s emotionally naked,” Radvanovsky says of the queen. “The easy card to put down is to play cuckoo-for-Cocoa-Puffs. Anna Bolena isn’t crazy; it’s just too much for her to handle, and I think that’s something that more people can relate to.”
“She finds inner resources that I suspect she never knew she had,” Lawless says about the doomed queen, adding that her death transforms tragedy into “something glorious.”
DESPITE THE TUDOR-ERA setting for the story, the opera’s themes bear striking relevance to today’s social and political climate. Donizetti contrasts Anna’s undoing with the ascendency of the social-climbing Jane Seymour, who has caught the eye of Henry VIII and will become queen after Anna’s decapitation. However, Anna’s betrayal of a true love from girlhood haunts her throughout out the story, reminding Jane Seymour and audiences that dreams of power can’t buy happiness.
“I started singing when I was 11,” says Radvanovsky. “When I was 18 years old, I said, ‘By the time, I’m 30, I’m going to be singing at the Met.’” This dream came true for the singer, as did her chance to sing with legendary tenor Placido Domingo. She sang with him during “Cyrano de Bergerac” on her 35th birthday, causing her to ask the older legend what she should do now that she’d accomplished her goals.
“He told me, ‘Oh, Sondra. You must go get a new dream.’”
Now in her 40s, Radvanovsky feels that anyone, from the American people trying to choose a president to a young girl aspiring to be queen of 16th-century England, needs to focus on the moment at hand instead of an unpredictable future.
“If [Anna] had lived in the moment, she would have seen that she wasn’t in love with [Henry], but she was looking a year ahead. We are looking into politics in the same way. We put so much hope in these dreams, hoping that Obama or whoever continues down the road we want.”
Lawless, a British native, sees the opera’s connection to today’s audience in a slightly darker hue, recounting how Russian President Vladimir Putin visited the United Kingdom during the recent Olympics. While there, he was asked about Pussy Riot, the female punk band who staged a protest act against Putin weeks before his recent election to the presidency.
“He said, ‘I hope the courts will be lenient with her,’” remembers Lawless, “and that’s exactly a Henry [VIII] statement. It’s that kind of abuse of power that gives this piece its ironic resonance. Henry’s abuse of power should make you as angry as the Pussy Riot thing.”
WASHINGTON NATIONAL OPERA’S next piece, Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” follows close on the heels of “Anna Bolena” and opens Sept. 20. The infamous womanizer of the title gets his karmic comeuppance by opera’s end, attended throughout by his long-suffering servant, Leporello, played by gay bass-baritone Andrew Foster-Williams.
“I have played it once before, where he was very dark,” he says of the character. “I’ve since come to realize that’s not right. It needs to be multi-layered. We need to remember that it’s a ‘dramma giocoso’ — a dark comedy.”
Paul (left) and Andrew Foster-Williams. Andrew plays Leporello in Washington National Opera’s production of Mozart’s ‘Don Giovanni.’ (Photo courtesy WNO)
The singer travels the world with his partner, photographer Paul Foster-Williams, who grew into an avid opera devotee because of his 14-year relationship with Andrew.
“I didn’t come from an opera background,” Paul says. “Now, I would do anything to go and see opera. It gives you the most returns in any art form.”
Paul compares opera with baseball, a realization he came to after going to see a Nationals game while staying in D.C. last spring for Andrew’s turn in “Werther.”
“I had no idea what was going on,” Paul says, laughing. “If you go to the football or soccer game and you don’t know the rules, you might not ever go to another game. It’s the same with opera. The more you experience, the more you get it, the more you will be come absolutely addicted to it, I promise.”
“The reasons people enjoy baseball is because they understand the rules,” Andrew adds. “They learned the rules, therefore they understand the skill of the players.”
The charming British couple hastens to add that opera is performed with translation surtitles projected above the stage, so no one need sit through hours of unintelligible bellowing.
THE FOSTER-WILLIAMSES are clearly a couple who have their own rules down pat. They say they’ve had to develop particular ways of living a life that’s eternally on the road.
“We land in a place,” says Paul. “Andrew goes out and gets provisions. I try to make the apartment feel like a home. We don’t speak to each other at least for a couple of hours.”
“If you’re going to have an argument, it’s then,” Andrew concurs.
“I think some people would end up killing each other,” says Paul. “We’re very lucky. Other people go to separate jobs, and they have separate things to share. What we’re sharing is the discovery of different places together.”
Some productions settle them in a city for a couple of months, while others find them hopping four continents in one week, as it did last spring. After finishing up in D.C., they went to London, Hong Kong and finally Sydney, Australia, which was locked in the grips of winter.
“We had to buy new clothes and leave some new clothes,” Andrew says.
Despite the chaos, the couple remains passionately committed to the arts. Paul’s photography has had to take on a new character, as long-term projects are out of the question now, so he ends up photographing the artists Andrew works with as well as the city locations Paul explores during his partner’s long rehearsal hours.
“Experiencing so much music traveling with Andrew, I think I understand singers well. Singers adapt to each evening, each audience, the atmosphere that evening. It’s so organic, it’s so alive all the time.”
Andrew sums up the role of the artist as an obligation to restoring the humanity to operatic characters.
“This is about making opera real again. The fate of it rests in the hands of the artists singing it.”
Movies
‘Thelma and Louise’ remains landmark of unspoken queer rebellion
Celebrating iconic film 35 years after its release
Hard as it is to believe for those who were around when it happened, “Thelma and Louise” celebrates the 35th anniversary of its release this year.
Deeply popular with both critics and audiences at the time, its reputation continues to ride high; it’s a movie that manages to exist within a nexus of intersecting genres – the “buddy picture”, the “crime thriller,” the “action adventure,” the” “western,” the “neo-noir” – by blending them seamlessly into a crowd-pleasing wild ride of a story, all while delivering a powerful feminist message of outrage, defiance, and empowerment.
And no, “Thelma and Louise” is not a “queer movie” – but it feels like one.
That’s partly because It exists within another genre, too: “lesbian noir,” which blossomed in its wake with films like “Bound” (1996) and has re-emerged in recent films like “Love Lies Bleeding” (2024) and “Honey, Don’t” (2025) – but that also stretches back across decades into the days of old Hollywood, when coded queer characters were a regular fixture in the seedy film noir classics of their time, never overtly identified as such but obvious to spot for anyone savvy enough to read the subtext. That’s why “Thelma and Louise” resonated (and continues to resonate) with lesbian and bisexual audiences who see themselves reflected in its two lead characters, even if there is nothing queer about their relationship — on the surface at least.
Of course, that can be a sore subject; subtext might seem like a “cop-out” for those who long for more open representation for LGBTQ people on the screen – but it’s everything when it comes to recognizing the queerness of older movies (and a lot of newer ones, too), and just because something is not explicitly stated, that doesn’t mean it’s being hidden. After all, most good stories rely on the transcendent power of nuance, which always relies on subtext to shine through. And if any movie relies upon subtext, “Thelma and Louise” is certainly one of them. In its masterfully crafted narrative of a weekend “girl’s trip” that goes horribly wrong, a lot of the most important information is left unspoken.
Take Thelma (Geena Davis), to start with: a naive young housewife whose husband Darryl (Christopher McDonald) treats her like a possession, she blithely ignores his mediocrity and disregards – or at least, pretends to – his repressive tactics to control her, choosing instead to live in a tenuous illusion of “traditional” marriage dynamics; yet when her bestie Louise (Susan Sarandon) offers her a chance to escape for a weekend, she jumps at it – even if she has to skip the part where she asks his permission.
Louise (Susan Sarandon), a bit older and a lot more worldly, is a waitress who spends her days fending off the insults and advances of her male customers at the diner where she works; she sees Thelma’s situation clearly, and hopes that a temporary respite from Darryl will help her recognize the dead-end reality of her marriage. We understand this immediately, even though a direct word is never said about it, and she’s right, of course. They’ve barely even gotten on the road before Thelma’s longing for attention from someone other than her inadequate husband – a honky-tonk Lothario (Timothy Carhart) she meets in a roadhouse where they stop for drinks on the way out of town – leads to an attempted rape that is only prevented when Louise shoots the predator dead in the parking lot.
That killing is the catalyst that turns them into fugitives; as Louise rightly understands, there’s no evidence of sexual assault, just a dead body and a pair of runaway women, and the letter of the law is not on their side. But in truth, that fatal shot is fired not to save Thelma, who has already been freed from her would-be rapist’s clutches when it happens, but because Louise has traumatic memories – and a chip on her shoulder – over something that “happened in Texas,” years before. We never find out what it was that happened, and we don’t need to; our imaginations tell us all we need to know, just as we know that the killing, while it may have been cold-blooded murder, is a justifiable homicide all the same.
There’s more of that subtextual nuance throughout, from the perversely inspiring motivations of hitchhiking hustler J.D. (Brad Pitt, in the sex-on-a-stick performance that launched him on his trajectory to stardom), who takes advantage of Thelma’s gullibility to rob the heroines even as he teaches her the tactics that will soon launch them on their fateful ride-or-die fugitive adventure; to the self-serving “chivalry” of Louise’s erstwhile boyfriend (Michael Madsen) as he casts himself as the “martyr” in letting her go. And yes, even to the benignly sublimated patriarchal programming that drives police investigator Hal Slocumb (Harvey Keitel in an uncharacteristically empathetic role) to act as the would-be savior of these two “fallen” women, though they want no part of his well-meaning attempts to “rescue” them from the consequences of their choices. And when the two fugitives terrorize a piggish trucker (Marco St. John) before blowing up his big-rig tanker, nobody says – or needs to say – why it feels to them like the right thing to do; it simply IS the right thing, and we, as the audience, know it. What we have seen up to that point has placed us firmly on Thelma and Louise’s side already, and we’re as ready to watch the puerile patriarchy burn as they are.
None of this is spoken aloud, nor is it even alluded to, but it comes through, nonetheless. Chalk it up, if you like, to the power of cinema, especially in the hands of a versatile, stylish, and seasoned director like Ridley Scott, to communicate what is inherently beyond the power of words.
Thelma and Louise may not be “a couple,” but we can’t help but notice as their clothing evolves from frilly-femme to “butch” utilitarianism along the way, or how their connection to the men in their lives easily dissolves without fanfare. And by the time we reach the movie’s thrilling denouement, when all they have left is their commitment to simply stand up against all the things that have kept them feeling incomplete, unfulfilled, and unacceptable, it’s an achingly familiar feeling for any queer viewer who has experienced the same.
We all know what happens, so it’s no spoiler to say that, when they drive off into oblivion in the Grand Canyon, they choose freedom over life itself – and when they head over that cliff, fully embracing their fate as a feminist iteration of the Bonnie and Clyde brand of “noble” outlaws, they seal their fate with a kiss.
At that point, no explanation is needed. Their love for each other transcends anything they’ve felt with the inadequate men in their lives; and in that final freeze-frame moment, when they drive off the cliff and sail into oblivion, we like to think that their car – like Danny Zuko’s at the end of “Grease” – simply flies away into the bliss of an endless summer, and you can’t get any queerer than that.
Out & About
LGBTQ Military Happy Hour set for Sept. 15
In-person gathering to be held at Tom’s Watch Bar
Modern Military Association of America will host “Pride in Service: An LGBTQ+ Military Happy Hour” on Tuesday, Sept. 15 at 4 p.m. at Tom’s Watch Bar.
This in-person gathering is the perfect chance to connect, share stories, and celebrate the diversity within the military community. Come relax, meet fellow LGBTQ+ service members and allies, and enjoy a fun, supportive atmosphere. Don’t miss out on an evening full of pride, camaraderie, and good vibes. Visit Eventbrite for more details.
Friday, September 11
Go Gay DC will host “Out in DC LGBTQ+ Community Social” at 7 p.m. at Hotel Zena.This is a chance to relax, make new friends, and enjoy happy hour specials at this classic retro venue. Attendance is free and more details are available on Eventbrite.
Women in their Twenties and Thirties will meet at 8 p.m. on Zoom. This is a social discussion group for queer women in the Washington, D.C. area. For more details, visit Facebook.
Saturday, September 12
Go Gay DC will host “LGBTQ+ Community Brunch” at 11 a.m. at Freddie’s Beach Bar & Restaurant. This fun weekly event brings the DMV area LGBTQ+ community, including allies, together for delicious food and conversation. Attendance is free and more details are available on Eventbrite.
The DC LGBTQ+ Community Center will host screenings of “Princess Sparkles” and “Kiloran Bay” at 1:30 p.m. “Kiloran Bay” is a 13-minute musical short set amid the wild beauty of the Scottish Hebrides and the fierce joy of a wedding cèilidh. “Princess Sparkles” is about a girl who accidentally signs up to pet-sit a princess only to discover she’s actually a nippy, Fox News-watching pig. More details are available on the DC LGBTQ+ Community Center’s website.
Sunday, September 13
“Nellie’s DC Drag Brunch” will be at 12 p.m. at Nellie’s Sports Bar. Come get served like a queen by a queen. Join Sapphire Blue, Deja Diamond and their team of amazing drag performers for the most fun you’ll have all weekend. Tickets are $58.51 and are available on Eventbrite.
Monday, September 14
“Center Aging: Monday Coffee Klatch” will be at 10:00a.m. on Zoom. This is a social hour for older LGBTQ+ adults. Guests are encouraged to bring a beverage of choice. For more information, contact Adam ([email protected]).
Tuesday, September 15
Center Bi Pan+ Roundtable will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This is an opportunity for people to gather in order to discuss issues related to bisexuality or as Bi individuals in a private setting. Visit Facebook or Meetup for more information.
Wednesday, September 16
Job Club will be at 6 p.m. on Zoom upon request. This is a weekly job support program to help job entrants and seekers, including the long-term unemployed, improve self-confidence, motivation, resilience and productivity for effective job searches and networking — allowing participants to move away from being merely “applicants” toward being “candidates.” For more information, email [email protected] or visit thedccenter.org/careers.
The DC LGBTQ+ Community Center will host “Movement for Healing” at 3 p.m. This trauma- and yoga therapy–informed class is designed to help guests gently reconnect with their body and their breath. Through mindful movement, somatic awareness, and grounding practices, guests will explore how to release tension, increase mobility, and cultivate a deeper sense of safety and ease within. For more details, visit the DC Center’s website.
Thursday, September 17
The DC Center’s Fresh Produce Program will be held all day at the DC LGBTQ+ Community Center. People will be informed on Wednesday at 5:00 pm if they are picked to receive a produce box. No proof of residency or income is required. For more information, email [email protected] or call 202-682-2245.
Virtual Yoga Class will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This free weekly class is a combination of yoga, breathwork and meditation that allows LGBTQ+ community members to continue their healing journey with somatic and mindfulness practices. For more details, visit the DC LGBTQ+ Community Center’s website.
‘Thelma and Louise’ remains landmark of unspoken queer rebellion
Comings & Goings
LGBTQ Military Happy Hour set for Sept. 15
Calendar: September 11-17
Multi-billion-dollar 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund to continue until 2090
Nominate your favorites for the Blade’s 25th annual Best Of LGBTQ DC Awards
Md. groups receive state grants to fight hate crimes
Gloria Steinem’s life of substance and consequence
PHOTOS: SUNFESTIVAL
