Arts & Entertainment
The new adventures of Lynda Carter
Singer/actress returns to Kennedy Center for latest show
Lynda Carter
‘Body & Soul Tour’
March 30
7:30 p.m.
90 mins.
Kennedy Center
Terrace Theater
$30-65
Actress/singer Lynda Carter returns to the Kennedy Center next weekend. (Photo by Karl Simone; courtesy JS2 Communications)
Lynda Carter has been singing her whole life, but her audiences haven’t always been so receptive.
Carter, who returns to the Kennedy Center next week with her “Body & Soul” show (her most recent album “Crazy Little Things” dropped last spring), says she “of course,” sang to her two children when they were babies. It didn’t last long, though.
“My daughter, as soon as she was old enough to sing herself, she’d put her hand over my mouth,” she says. “She didn’t want to hear me.”
Carter is most famous, of course, for “Wonder Woman,” the ‘70s TV show that despite a relatively short run (three seasons), linked her indelibly with the character — “as lovely as Aphrodite, as wise as Athena!” Last time we talked to Carter when she did the AIDS Walk Washington event for Whitman-Walker Health, we hammered her with “Wonder Woman” questions (it’s here if you missed it), so this time we focused solely on the music. “Crazy Little Things,” a mostly covers album, is her third release. “Portrait” came out in 1978; she returned from a long hiatus with “At Last,” another standards-heavy release that made the Billboard jazz chart in 2009.
“It sounds kind of silly but I remember our little record players and the one new single was all you could afford,” Carter, 60, says between coughs (she’s battling a cold the day we talk). “Now we’ve kinda gone back to that in some ways with all the digital downloads. But we listened to whatever was on the radio. My mom had a lot of blues, old juke joint things. We listened to music all the time.”
Carter was a little too young for the Motown heyday but remembers loving the Beatles and the Stones like everyone else in the later ‘60s.
“When I started singing professionally, I wanted to sound like Linda Ronstadt, Grace Slick, people like that,” she says. “Then on the other side of Linda Ronstadt, you had the Stone Poneys. So you had, well, it kind of shifted away from that ‘50s sound, with Paul Anka and that kind of thing. So even though we listened to that, I kinda missed it a little bit. It wasn’t as much in my mind anyway. It wasn’t as full an experience for me as, you know, the Doors and the Animals. That was my teenybopper era. … And then I was still a young adult when the ‘80s came around, so you end up falling in love with all that too. It’s all that.”
Actress/singer Lynda Carter at the 2010 AIDS Walk Washington, a Whitman-Walker benefit. The Potomac, Md., resident returns to D.C. next weekend for a Kennedy Center performance. (Blade file photo by Michael Key)
Carter, who cut her last album in Nashville for her own imprint Potomac Productions, says she enjoys recording and performing live. It’s still work — she likens making an album to climbing a hill or facing a blank sheet of paper — but says the payoff is rich. She especially enjoys playing the Kennedy Center and says, “it’s really the nation’s stage.”
The longtime Potomac, Md., resident says she and her family “have been going there for years.”
“I sometimes am envious of the people who live in town. It’s such an easy cab ride over to there and they have all kinds of stuff going on all the time … it’s a really special place and there are only a couple rooms like that, like the Jazz at Lincoln Center, that have that kind of prestige in the whole country.”
Carter will perform with six musicians and three singers. She has a horn section, a percussionist and some players who shift instrumentation depending on the song at hand. Most of them also played on the album and are veteran Nashville session players. The album was recorded over the course of about a year off and on. Carter, who co-produced, credits Kyle Lehning with helping her find fresh interpretations on classics like Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together,” Queen’s “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” Martha and the Vandella’s “Heat Wave,” the Carole King/Gerry Goffin classic “Locomotion” and others.
Carter says she works hard to make her stage presence connect with audience members. For years, she’s acknowledged and embraced her strong LGBT fan base.
“We seem to be pulling standing ovations every time we play, knock on wood,” she says, pausing for another cough. “I really try to work for the audience. I think a lot of performers kind of put a veil between themselves and it’s like they’re just jamming along with the band and it makes you feel almost like a voyeur and other shows you see it’s like the veil is lifted and the people are really with you. I like to see when people perform and really reach out and it’s really cool. The champion of that, of course, is Mick Jagger. He’s got the all-time stage presence.”
Team DC, the umbrella organization for LGBTQ-friendly sports teams and leagues in the D.C. area, held its annual Night of Champions Awards Gala on Saturday, April 20 at the Hilton National Mall. The organization gave out scholarships to area LGBTQ student athletes as well as awards to the Different Drummers, Kelly Laczko of Duplex Diner, Stacy Smith of the Edmund Burke School, Bryan Frank of Triout, JC Adams of DCG Basketball and the DC Gay Flag Football League.
(Washington Blade photos by Michael Key)
The 2024 National Cannabis Festival was held at the Fields at RFK Stadium on April 19-20.
(Washington Blade photos by Michael Key)
Covering the @NatlCannaFest at RFK Stadium for @WashBlade . Stop by the LGBTQ+ booth and pick up a paper if you are here. pic.twitter.com/is7hnsaPns
— Michael Patrick Key (@MichaelKeyWB) April 20, 2024
Theater
‘Amm(i)gone’ explores family, queerness, and faith
A ‘fully autobiographical’ work from out artist Adil Mansoor
‘Amm(i)gone’
Thorough May 12
Woolly Mammoth Theatre
641 D St., N.W.
$60-$70
Woollymammoth.net
“Fully and utterly autobiographical.” That’s how Adil Mansoor describes “Amm(i)gone,” his one-man work currently playing at Woolly Mammoth Theatre.
Both created and performed by out artist Mansoor, it’s his story about inviting his Pakistani mother to translate Sophocles’s Greek tragedy “Antigone” into Urdu. Throughout the journey, there’s an exploration of family, queerness, and faith,as well as references to teachings from the Quran, and audio conversations with his Muslim mother.
Mansoor, 38, grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and is now based in Pittsburgh where he’s a busy theater maker. He’s also the founding member of Pittsburgh’s Hatch Arts Collective and the former artistic director of Dreams of Hope, an LGBTQ youth arts organization.
WASHINGTON BLADE: What spurred you to create “Amm(i)gone”?
ADIL MANSOOR: I was reading a translation of “Antigone” a few years back and found myself emotionally overwhelmed. A Theban princess buries her brother knowing it will cost her, her own life. It’s about a person for whom all aspirations are in the afterlife. And what does that do to the living when all of your hopes and dreams have to be reserved for the afterlife?
I found grant funding to pay my mom to do the translation. I wanted to engage in learning. I wanted to share theater but especially this ancient tragedy. My mother appreciated the characters were struggling between loving one another and their beliefs.
BLADE: Are you more director than actor?
MANSOOR: I’m primarily a director with an MFA in directing from Carnegie Mellon. I wrote, directed, and performed in this show, and had been working on it for four years. I’ve done different versions including Zoom. Woolly’s is a new production with the same team who’ve been involved since the beginning.
I love solo performance. I’ve produced and now teach solo performance and believe in its power. And I definitely lean toward “performance” and I haven’t “acted” since I was in college. I feel good on stage. I was a tour guide and do a lot of public speaking. I enjoy the attention.
BLADE: Describe your mom.
MANSOOR: My mom is a wonderfully devout Muslim, single mother, social worker who discovered my queerness on Google. And she prays for me.
She and I are similar, the way we look at things, the way we laugh. But different too. And those are among the questions I ask in this show. Our relationship is both beautiful and complicated.
BLADE: So, you weren’t exactly hiding your sexuality?
MANSOOR: In my mid-20s, I took time to talk with friends about our being queer with relation to our careers. My sexuality is essential to the work. As the artistic director at Dreams of Hope, part of the work was to model what it means to be public. If I’m in a room with queer and trans teenagers, part of what I’m doing is modeling queer adulthood. The way they see me in the world is part of what I’m putting out there. And I want that to be expansive and full.
So much of my work involves fundraising and being a face in schools. Being out is about making safe space for queer young folks.
BLADE: Have you encountered much Islamophobia?
MANSOOR: When 9/11 happened, I was a sophomore in high school, so yes. I faced a lot then and now. I’ve been egged on the street in the last four months. I see it in the classroom. It shows up in all sorts of ways.
BLADE: What prompted you to lead your creative life in Pittsburgh?
MANSOOR: I’ve been here for 14 years. I breathe with ease in Pittsburgh. The hills and the valleys and the rust of the city do something to me. It’s beautiful, it’ affordable, and there is support for local artists. There’s a lot of opportunity.
Still, the plan was to move to New York in September of 2020 but that was cancelled. Then the pandemic showed me that I could live in Pittsburgh and still have a nationally viable career.
BLADE: What are you trying to achieve with “Amm(i)gone”?
MANSOOR: What I’m sharing in the show is so very specific but I hear people from other backgrounds say I totally see my mom in that. My partner is Catholic and we share so much in relation to this.
I hope the work is embracing the fullness of queerness and how means so many things. And I hope the show makes audiences want to call their parents or squeeze their partners.
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‘Amm(i)gone’ explores family, queerness, and faith
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