Arts & Entertainment
Going ‘Greene’
Broadway star joins Gay Men’s Chorus for annual holiday extravaganza

It’s that time of the year again and the Gay Men’s Chorus is ringing in the holidays and the opening of its 2011-2012 season with its annual holiday concert. This year’s version is being dubbed “Red & Greene” and features special guest Ellen Greene, Broadway’s original Audrey from “Little Shop of Horrors.”
“There’s nothing like a Jew who loves Christmas, by the way,” Greene says. “I’ve been known to have three Christmas trees … one for children in the front, one for the middle room where the piano was and then one in the back.”
Greene will be joined by pianist Christian Klikovits and Grammy Award-winning cellist Stephen Erdody. The three were in town last weekend for a dinner with the Chorus’s board, managing director David Jobin and a couple rehearsals with artistic director Jeff Buhrman and the whole chorus.
“David Jobin is such a spectacular producer,” Greene says. “We’ve been treated so well, everybody’s been lovely to us … this is my Christmas present.”
The show will include the full chorus singing holiday standards, including “Angels We Have Heard on High” and smaller ensembles having fun dancing and singing in full costumes.
“Christmas represents to me, theater, people, artists, and I mean artists acrossthe board … if you think, if you dream, if you create, you’re an artist … so Christmas represented … coming together as a family,” Greene says. “Anything that involves music and coming together feels holy and special and magical.”
Greene plans two dedications during the engagement — “Winter Song” for those who’ve died, and “Universal Child” for same-sex marriage rights and anti-bullying.
“My show is so depressing, that the reason I have to talk in between is I can make everyone laugh so I can sing another song,” she says.
This isn’t Greene’s first time singing with a chorus. Growing up, her whole family sang, earning them the nickname, “the singing Greenes” and she always had a big solo on holidays.
“I was singing with the cantor … and I got a 104 fever because I had tremendous stage fright … I don’t know why I picked this career,” Greene says. “My father … he says, ‘Let her sing.’ As soon as I sang, my temperature went down.”
Greene started her career as a nightclub singer in New York at Reno Sweeney, which is where she got all her shows. Her first starring role was in the Broadway bomb, “Rachael Lily Rosenbloom (And Don’t You Ever Forget It)” in 1973.
“Dead? Hollywood? Dead? My whole life I’ve dreamed I’d finally get there. You mean I finally get there, it’s dead? Take away my dreams, you take away my mind,” she recited from the play that closed before it even opened.
Buhrman says the Chorus members are thrilled to have Greene join them.“We had the opportunity to rehearse with her last weekend and she’s just a wonderfully talented performer,” he says.
Greene and the Chorus will each perform their own selections but will also collaborate on three songs Klikovits arranged specifically for the occasion. About 225 men will be in the Chorus, a record for the group. There will be no second-half skit as in previous years, but there will be several theatrical elements including a pageant of showboys, dancing nuns and more.
Buhrman says Greene was on the Chorus’s “wish list” of celebrity guests. “We contacted her management team and made it happen,” he says.
It’s been a big year of collaboration for the Chorus. For its 30th anniversary concert earlier this year, another Broadway vet joined them — Jennifer Holliday.
Greene was performing in Central Park during the 1977 New York City blackout.
“I was on stage, about to sing my big number … and it went absolutely dark in the park … all of a sudden, I just started to sing … and the pianist started followingme. And I said, ‘If you just do what you always do, walk straight, you will not fall off the platform,” Greene says.
They finished the show with car headlights lighting the stage.
Greene is also active politically, working with various groups including GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network) and more.
While working on the show “Pushing Daisies,” Bruce Cohen asked Greene to go to New Hampshire to campaign for Hillary Clinton with the “Lucky Charms.”
“She couldn’t be busier … she actually found my address and wrote me a letter,” Greene says. “I made [Klikovits] open the letter because I was shaking.”
Coming up, Greene is thinking of releasing a holiday album, rereleasing “In Her Eyes,” an album she made with Klikovits, and possibly a never-before-released album.
The Chorus will be giving four performances starting at 8 p.m. on Dec. 16. There will be two performances on Dec. 17 at 3 and 8 p.m. and a final performance on Dec. 18 at 3 p.m. Tickets range from $25 to $50 and can be purchased online at gmcw.org.
“I’m very excited to see all the dancing and singing and silliness … I know they’re going to take care of the fun part,” Greene says. “I’m excited to meet 225 men, I mean, it’s me and all those men, what’s bad about those odds?”
‘RED & GREENE’
Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington With special guest Ellen Greene
Lisner Auditorium 730 21st Street, NW
Dec. 16 at 8 p.m. Dec. 17 at 3 and 8 p.m. Dec. 18 at 3 p.m.
$20-$50 gmcw.orgNew book shares Chorus history
The holiday concert isn’t the only news about the Gay Men’s Chorus. Paula Bresnan Gibson has written a book, “Voices from a Chorus,” all about the group and its history.
The book is told through the perspective of a woman who served on the Chorus’s board of directors. It includes many interviews, including one with the first openly gay Episcopalian bishop Gene Robinson, a longtime supporter of the Chorus and recipient of its highest award.
The interviews show how men have overcome challenges such as dealing with their sexual orientation, their families, friends, living with HIV/AIDS and more just by participating in the Chorus.
Gibson is scheduled to make appearances at American University on Feb. 10, Proud Bookstore in Rehoboth Beach on Feb. 11 and Day of the Book Festival in Kensington on April 22.
The book is available for purchase online at voicesfromachorus.com and in local bookstores, Politics & Prose, Kramerbooks, Trohv Home & Gift and Kensington Row Bookshop.
The Blade wrote an extensive story of the Chorus’s history upon its 30th anniversary in June. It’s here.
Television
ICYMI: ‘Overcompensating’ a surprisingly sweet queer treat
A sweet, savvy show about breaking free to embrace your true self

Pride month 2025 is now behind us, and while it’s safe to say that this year’s celebrations had a darker edge than usual, it’s also true that they came with a particularly rich bounty of new queer movies and shows to entertain us – so many, in fact, that even if we are facing a lull until the fall another harvest of fresh content, there are still plenty of titles – which, for whatever reason, were off your radar – for you to catch up on in the meantime.
One of the most notable of these – the bingeworthy series “Overcompensating” (now streaming on Amazon Prime) – will most definitely have been ON the radar for the plentiful fans of creator and star Benito Skinner, the actor/comedian who rose to viral fame through his content on platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. For anyone else, it might have easily slipped through the cracks.
Created and written by Skinner as a loosely autobiographical “college comedy,” it aims for the kind of raucous, explicitly sexed-up tone one expects from the genre as it centers on Benny (Skinner), newly arrived as a freshman at prestigious Yates University. A former football jock and “golden boy” at his midwestern high school, he’s the picture of idealized youthful masculinity; he’s also deep in the closet, struggling to keep his sexuality hidden and maintain his macho front under the intense scrutiny of the college’s social scene – and under the resentful eye of his older sister Grace (Mary Beth Barone), who has already secured her own place at the top of the pecking order.
In the first episode, Benny’s difficulties are eased when he meets Carmen (Wally Baram), another freshman trying to navigate the politics of college life; a gamer from a home marred by tragedy, she’s an outsider who feels like she’s putting on an act, too, and they click – giving him the convenient “cover” of female companionship while providing them both with much-needed support and encouragement. He’s also befriended by a handsome film major from England (Rish Shah), who has already caught his eye, stirring other kinds of feelings and possibly even reciprocating them. Meanwhile, he’s being courted by the school’s “exclusive secret society” – headed by his sister’s aggressively “alpha” boyfriend Pete (Adam DiMarco) – and trying to stay interested in his studies, despite a growing realization that a career in business doesn’t actually appeal to him all that much.
That’s a lot to juggle for anybody, even an overachiever like Benny – whose “lucky” life so far has largely been the result of playing a role he is finding harder and harder to maintain. As the series goes on through its eight-episode arc, it becomes clear that he’s not the only one who is “keeping up appearances,” and he, along with the other confused and damaged young people in his orbit, begins the painful (but often hilarious) process of evolution that is required in order to become truly oneself.
Directed toward appealing to a younger demographic, “Overcompensating” is the kind of show that requires a few episodes worth of invested time to make an impression that feels like substance. Full of the bawdy farcical antics that go hand in hand with stories about hormonally charged college kids, it’s not above leaning into the formulas and tropes that have always driven these kinds of comedies. At first, while its broadly comedic strokes and frequently explicit sexual hijinks might elicit plenty of chuckles, the show might easily feel tiresome for more mature audiences; there’s a nostalgic fun to it, made even more appealing, somehow, by the “political incorrectness” of its frequently sexist and homophobic humor, but for a while things may feel like an unnecessary attempt to reinvent “Animal House” for the Gen Z crowd.
By the time the season reaches its halfway point, however, things have started to get real. The antics of these horny almost-adults take on a more pointed absurdity, informed by the increasingly tangled web of defensive deceit they weave among themselves – and, as things draw toward a cliffhanger climax, the consequences of maintaining it – until it achieves a sense of empathy toward them all. There’s a wisdom that smacks of lived authenticity underlying the whole affair, transforming it from the “sexploitative” teen comedy of its surface into something deeper. To be sure, things stay expectedly wacky, and the soap-operatic melodrama of its twists and reversals continue to maintain the show’s “mature YA” appeal; but beneath those trappings, by the end of the season a truer identity has begun to emerge, just as its characters have begun to find their own levels of self-actualization for themselves.
As creator, primary writer, and star, it’s obviously Skinner who deserves much of the credit. While it might be tempting, early on, to dismiss the show as an “ego project,” the internet-spawned sensation proves his talents quickly enough to get past such judgy suspicions, delivering a pitch-perfect blend of sauciness and sensitivity that extends its appeal toward both ends of the taste spectrum; just as crucially, he brings the same aforementioned “lived authenticity” to his winning performance – after all, he’s essentially playing himself in a fictionalized version of his own life – while also making sure that equal time (and compassion) is afforded all the other characters around him, each of whom are pushing at the boundaries of their own respective “closets,” too. It’s unavoidable to notice that – like most of his co-stars – he’s plainly a decade too old to be playing a college student; but by the time we reach that crucial halfway turning point, we’ve become too engaged by him to care.
The show is full of excellent performances, in fact. Relative newcomers Baram and Barone offer layers of complex nuance, while the more familiar DiMarco (“White Lotus”) is close to heartbreaking as the toxic BMOC clinging to the illusion of power as his life begins unraveling around him. Other standouts include the mononymic actress Holmes as Carmen’s “wild child” roommate, solidly likable turns as Benny’s parents from mature veterans Connie Britten and Kyle MacLachlan (whose presence, along with stylish elements in several key scenes, hints at an homage-ish nod to the late David Lynch), and podcaster Owen Thiele as an openly gay fellow student who has Benny “clocked” from the moment they meet. Finally, Lukas Gage makes a deep impression as a former high school teammate at the heart of Benny’s most haunting memory.
There’s no official word yet on whether “Overcompensating” will be renewed for a second season, despite the multiple loose ends left dangling at the end of its first; it has proven to be popular, and Skinner’s large fanbase makes it likely that the story will continue. Even if it doesn’t, the place of uncertainty in which it has left its characters rings true enough to serve as a satisfying endpoint.
As for us, we hope that won’t happen. For all its sophomoric humor, generic plot twists, and purposefully gratuitous sexual titillation, it’s one of the sweetest, kindest, and most savvy shows we’ve seen about breaking free from conformity to embrace your true self – and that’s a message that applies whether you’re queer, straight, or anywhere in between.
Photos
PHOTOS: Independence Day Weekend in Rehoboth
Wicked Green Pool Party, fireworks among festivities

Vacationers and residents alike enjoyed Independence Day Weekend activities in Rehoboth Beach, Del. The Wicked Green Pool Party drew hundreds to the CAMP Rehoboth fundraiser on Saturday. That evening, revelers went to the rooftops to watch the fireworks display.
(Washington Blade photos by Daniel Truitt)













Music & Concerts
Red, White, and Beyoncé: Queen Bey takes Cowboy Carter to D.C. for the Fourth of July
The legendary music icon performed on July 4 and 7 to a nearly sold-out Northwest Stadium.

Just in time for Independence Day, Beyoncé lit up Landover’s Commanders Field (formerly FedEx Field) with fireworks and fiery patriotism, bringing her deeply moving and genre-defying “Cowboy Carter” tour to the Washington, D.C. area.
The tour, which takes the global icon across nine cities in support of her chart-topping and Grammy-winning country album “Cowboy Carter,” landed in Prince George’s County, Maryland, over the Fourth of July weekend. From the moment Beyoncé stepped on stage, it was clear this was more than just a concert — it was a reclamation.
Drawing from classic Americana, sharp political commentary, and a reimagined vision of country music, the show served as a powerful reminder of how Black Americans — especially Black women — have long been overlooked in spaces they helped create. “Cowboy Carter” released in March 2024, is the second act in Beyoncé’s genre-traversing trilogy. With it, she became the first Black woman to win a Grammy for Best Country Album and also took home the coveted Album of the Year.
The record examines the Black American experience through the lens of country music, grappling with the tension between the mythology of the American Dream and the lived realities of those historically excluded from it. That theme comes alive in the show’s opening number, “American Requiem,” where Beyoncé sings:
“Said I wouldn’t saddle up, but
If that ain’t country, tell me, what is?
Plant my bare feet on solid ground for years
They don’t, don’t know how hard I had to fight for this
When I sing my song…”
Throughout the performance, Beyoncé incorporated arresting visuals: Black cowboys on horseback, vintage American iconography, and Fox News clips criticizing her genre shift — all woven together with voiceovers from country legends like Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson. The result was a multimedia masterclass in storytelling and subversion.
The “Cowboy Carter” tour has been a social media sensation for weeks, with fans scrambling for tickets, curating elaborate “cowboy couture” outfits, and tailgating under the summer sun. At Commanders Field, thousands waited in long lines for exclusive merch and even longer ones to enter the stadium — a pilgrimage that, for many, felt more like attending church than a concert.
One group out in full force for the concert was Black queer men — some rocking “denim on denim on denim on denim,” while others opted for more polished Cowboy Couture looks. The celebration of Black identity within Americana was ever-present, making the concert feel like the world’s biggest gay country-western club.
A standout moment of the night was the appearance of Beyoncé’s 13-year-old daughter, Blue Ivy Carter. Commanding the stage with poise and power, she matched the intensity and choreography of her mother and the professional dancers — a remarkable feat for someone her age and a clear sign that the Carter legacy continues to shine.
It’s been nearly two decades since Beyoncé and Destiny’s Child parted ways, and since then, she’s more than lived up to her title as the voice of a generation. With “Cowboy Carter,” she’s not just making music — she’s rewriting history and reclaiming the space Black artists have always deserved in the country canon.
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