Arts & Entertainment
Sophie’s choice
‘90s hitmaker returns after seven years with new album
Sophie B. Hawkins released her first studio album in seven years last week. (Photos courtesy Trumpet Swan Entertainment)
How hard is it in this day and age to bounce back from a pop music career misstep? One likes to think pop culture — America ultimately voting with its pocketbook of course — eventually rewards and rediscovers the deserving.
One thinks of Kelly Clarkson who managed a comeback after the ill-advised downer (though it still went Platinum) 2007 album “My December.” And love her or hate her, Mariah Carey beat the odds with the monster-selling “Emancipation of Mimi” after her epic “Glitter” failure (both film and soundtrack).
But what if your supposed misstep isn’t even a bad album? Sophie B. Hawkins was well on her way to establishing distinguished career by the end of the ‘90s. She was red hot right out of the gate — “Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover,” which hit No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1992, is a defining song of the era. She was nominated for the Best New Artist Grammy that year (co-nominated with Billy Ray Cyrus, Kriss Kross and Jon Secada; Arrested Development won). She survived the sophomore jinx with another mammoth hit “As I Lay Me Down,” a VH-1 staple from her second album “Whaler” that peaked at No. 6 during a 44-week run on the Hot 100 and a whopping 67 weeks (six at No. 1) on the AC chart. Unless you were in a convent that year, you heard it many, many times.
With that kind of start, the sky was conceivably the limit and expectations ran extremely high for her 1999 follow-up, “Timbre.” But trouble loomed — it’s a famous story, actually: Hawkins’ then label (Sony) only reluctantly released first single “Lose Your Way” with a banjo accompaniment. They argued it was poison for pop radio. Hawkins said it was essential. Though re-released independently in 2001 and followed by an indie follow-up called “Wilderness” in 2004, Hawkins lost her commercial, but not her artistic, footing. “Wilderness” turned out to be an unfortunately apt title — she spent years wandering.
Perhaps this wasn’t a total surprise, though. Anybody who’d paid attention knew Hawkins had a wild streak. She shimmied and writhed like a woman possessed on her duet with Melissa Etheridge on the latter’s VH-1 special in 1995 with a slate of then-hot female singer/songwriters like Joan Osborne, Jewel and Paula Cole. Those who caught Hawkins in concert knew of her penchant for the unconventional. As her audiences got smaller, her jeans got more shredded, her stream-of-consciousness stage meanderings more fluid. She wrangled memorably with Howard Stern about why she doesn’t shave her legs.
Though she’s long shunned labels for sexual orientation, the fact that she’s been in a same-sex relationship with filmmaker Gigi Gaston for several years (Gaston’s “The Cream Will Rise” follows Hawkins on an early tour) is one of the more conventional aspects of her persona. And it’s easy to forget that her wildly eclectic albums are full of intricately crafted and sometimes epic, sometimes disarming power pop that at times rivals Joni Mitchell’s best stuff for complexity and lyrical depth — check out “Mysteries We Understand,” “Only Love” “Help Me Breathe” and “I Need Nothing Else” especially.
Her hit singles are only part of the story. An early MusicHound review said, “Dig (further) than (the hits) and her abilities to seamlessly weave in and out of jazz, folk and dance, all driven by a kind of tribal percussion sensibility (emerge).”
But Hawkins, now 44, is starting to sound her age. Not vocally — her singing still has the luster that struck her chart gold all those years ago, but her insights during an hour-long phone chat last week show a woman who’s thought long and hard about life, pop culture popularity cycles, music making in the Internet age and much more. With no apparent time constraints, Hawkins gamely goes anywhere the questions take her and beyond, from hair tips and why she’s a dog person to the deeper story behind the banjo battles and her still-complicated relationship with her mother (explored memorably in “Cream”). The impetus for all this is her interminably delayed new album “The Crossing,” her first collection of new material in seven years, which dropped last week.
“People were always telling me, ‘Oh, you sold out with ‘Tongues and Tales,’ or, ‘Oh, you sold out with ‘Whaler.’ I’m not saying ‘Tongues and Tales’ was just art for art’s sake, but that was really the best I could to try and reach people,” Hawkins says. “Those albums were the least weird I could possibly be. You want your music to reach people, you want it to get out there to as many as possible, otherwise it’s too isolating. It’s like masturbation, you’re not doing it with anybody.”
Hawkins considers herself part of a group of ‘90s women singer/songwriters — she mentions Paula Cole and Tori Amos as peers — who barely “squeezed through” the music industry gate before the doors shut altogether, from the advent of file sharing to endless label buyouts that left precious few major players in the game. Yes, there are still women hitmakers — Rihanna, Adele — but they’re few and far between and getting younger all the time.
“I think everybody knew what was going to happen, the chilly winds were already blowing,” she says. “I felt with the first album like, ‘Wow, I really got away with something’ in spite of all this. Then with ‘Whaler’ it felt like that again, although that was really the beginning of the fight. … In the ‘90s, it really started turning against the individual artist into this totally corporate thing in every way. It was like, ‘Oh, I’m with this group, I’m with that group, this is Sophie’s sound, this is the lesbian sound, the country artist, the right wing, the left wing — I feel like several of us just barely squeaked through in spite of all that.”
And yes, some of that line of thinking is what’s led Hawkins to shun traditional LGBT labels.
She admits she and Gaston have been in an exclusive relationship (Gaston is also her manager), but says a lack of general perception of nuance causes her to avoid certain language.
“It’s because nobody listens,” Hawkins says. “They just want to say it, and shut up and not hear any more about it. I love the word bisexual but it has such a negative connotation, I don’t know why. It’s like this big, scary thing for people so I’ve tried to come up with something that’s what I really think I am … I’m definitely not heterosexual or homosexual, I love men and women equally and passionately. I’m just having a relationship right now with a woman and I think there are very few men I could have a relationship with. I’m a very singular person. I’m committed to this woman, but if I were not, I’d probably be alone.”
The years since “Wilderness” have not been inactive for Hawkins. She became a mother — her son with Gaston, Dashiell, is 3. She popped up at the Grammys pre-show as a presenter, campaigned avidly for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, released several singles along the way including one (“The Land, the Sea and the Sky”) as a benefit for the Waterkeeper Alliance, an environmental group.
She released a live album and her song “Life is a Bomb” was on the soundtrack for the 2011 Garry Marshall film “New Year’s Eve,” a feat Hawkins says was wildly against the odds. She also tweaked “The Crossing” endlessly as the years went by and various proposed release dates came and went. Hawkins says it’s “a miracle” the album came out at all.
She also worked with Gaston on a musical for Kristin Chenoweth that’s on hold until Chenoweth’s producer of choice is available and she has high hopes for an October musical in Los Angeles (Hawkins lives in Venice, Calif., and has been on the West Coast for more than a decade) in which she’ll star as Janis Joplin.
Hawkins says she knew instinctively, she was supposed to do the Joplin piece.
“My reaction was just, ‘Yes,’ and I never say yes to anything right away. I just think there’s something I can do with Janis that will speak to every creative person out there who feels overlooked or treated in a way that’s not fair. … If we can get this ball in the basket, I have a good feeling about this, I think it could be a slam dunk. It will be so relevant to now, it really gives me a freedom I cannot even tell you.”
Hawkins guesses, counting the Chenoweth musical and “The Crossing” material, she’s written about 300 songs in the last seven years. The album will include acoustic remakes of “Damn” and “As I Lay Me Down.” Hawkins has a distribution deal with EMI for the release.
Hawkins says she’s a huge dog lover because she could never have one as a kid. She loves them because there’s “no barrier” to their affection and presence.
Of her trademark abundant tresses, Hawkins says her only hair care tip is to avoid washing it as much as possible. She insists hers looks best when it’s been weeks since the last shampoo.
“That’s when I always get the most compliments, people saying ‘Oh, you have such great hair.’”
She’s also realistic about “The Crossings” commercial prospects. She says she’ll never stoop to giving her music away but realizes the chances of duplicating her early chart success are practically nil.
On one hand, Hawkins says her art (she paints too) is something she “couldn’t not do.” Conversely, she says it’s Gaston who has urged her to continue against increasingly difficult industry and commercial odds.
“She’s so much more than a manager,” Hawkins says. “Things bother her more than they bother me. Oh, believe me, I would have just gone away by now and written and painted by myself if it weren’t for her. I don’t think I could have survived but she tells me, ‘You’re not giving up, you’re a great artist, it kills me that people don’t see this.’ She really takes it on as one of her missions.”
So in hindsight, was the banjo battle worth it?
Hawkins says the story has gotten oversimplified as a kind of cautionary tale for supposedly overambitious pop singers — as in, “Remember Sophie B. Hawkins? Look what happened to her.”
She says it was more an issue of increasing pressure to write songs in huge groups of collaboration Hawkins found unwieldy and artistically stifling. She says she would have agreed to remove the banjo line for the radio version and kept it on a remix or B-side version (“Believe me, all those scenarios were discussed”), but push came to shove when label execs put their foot down over her using it for a live TV appearance.
“It was really the straw that broke the camel’s back,” she says. “It was such a clear thing to me. They were taking away my horse, in a way. I thought, ‘I can’t ride into battle without my horse. I can’t win without the horse.’ It just made me realize we weren’t on the same team anymore. … They were no longer rooting for me to win, they were trying to destroy me.”
Hawkins says she’s learned to find rewards in non-traditional places. Even though her relationship with her mother is still every bit as complicated as it was portrayed in “Cream,” Hawkins says there are sparks of healing and inspiration there too.
“There are artistic people out there struggling who never make at all,” she says. “So when somebody tells me they get it, it’s like winning an Oscar. My mother called me the other day and told me she’d listened to the new album. She said she’d felt it, whatever it was, this profound thing in the music. If your parents are alive and you get that, that’s my Grammy.”
Theater
World premiere of ‘Everything, Devoured’ oozes queer energy
Nonbinary playwright Katherine Gwynn delivers ferocious ghost story
‘Everything, Devoured’
Through May 10
Nu Sass Productions
Sitar Arts Center
1724 Kalorama Road, N.W.
$25 (general admission)
Nusass.com
As if the world weren’t already hideous enough, Kore, the trans woman protagonist in nonbinary playwright Katherine Gwynn’s “Everything, Devoured,” wants to summon a demon to her humble Chicago apartment. While her friends think it’s just a bit of afterwork fun akin to reading horoscopes or Tarot cards, Kansas born Kore is dead serious.
Nu Sass Productions’ world premiere of Gwynn’s play oozes queer energy. Messages come across as if delivered by blow horn. It’s not afraid of expository dialogue or padding a singular moment of queer joy.
In a truly intimate black box at Sitar Arts Centers in Adams Morgan just down the block from Harris Teeter, scenic designer Simone Schneeberg deftly creates the generic flat whose ordinariness is only overshadowed by some weak attempts at individuality, but that’s all about to change.
Plans have been made, and Kore (June Dickson-Burke) has invited her nearest and dearest to her place.
Her nonbinary lesbian partner Julian (Tristan Evans) has cheap red wine and weed on the ready. Dinner is in the oven. Soon, lively trans masc bestie Dante (Selena Gill) arrives bearing a hostess gift – it’s the specially requested bag of pig blood, integral to the evening’s fun. In little time, the twentysomething friends will have painted a pentagram circled with salt in the middle of the living room floor. Candles are lit. Sacred words are spoken.
Shifts in light and sound by designers Vida Huang and Di Carey, respectively, signal contact with the beyond. Much to the friends’ surprise, they’ve successfully summoned a demon and it’s a real doozy: Ronald Reagan as demon drag queen.
Costumed in a corseted pinstripe suit adorned with a few Gaultier cones, the pronoun-less guest star from the underworld makes quite an entrance – a full-on lip sync to Madonna’s “Vogue” replete with huge flashing eyes, an evil smile and darting tongue.
Spectacularly played by O’Malley Steuerman (“actor, DRAGster, playwright, and producer from Baltimore”) Ronald Reagan as demon drag queen is lewd, taunting, and reads with the kind of sharp wit that puts other queens in the shade.
The entertainment doesn’t stop there. Soon, the demon is juggling provocative props (fleshy dildo, a baby doll, and a copy of Marx) or performing sock puppetry to a 1982 recording of journalist Lester Kinsolving asking about the “gay plague” to which Reagan’s Press Secretary Larry Speakes charmingly replies, “I don’t have it … do you?” That proved a real knee slapper in the pressroom.
Throughout the play’s early scenes, a young man sits unnoticed at Kore’s kitchen counter. Now and then, he comments with a disapproving harrumph or a distinctly gay one-liner. He’s privy to all, but the lady of the house is unaware of him until he joins the party. His name is Michael (Christian Harris). He died in 1989 and has been hanging around ever since.
Wry and undeniably spectral, Michael is the play’s link to queer past. He remembers the hurts and horrors of the AIDS epidemic, but not so much about the emergence of ‘genderqueer’ as an identity label, reflecting a shift toward a broader gender spectrum. That came later.
Without doubt, the uniformly queer cast is committed. They play their queer characters with authenticity, lending a realness to queer people’s valid concerns and fears in the current atmosphere. (For instance, anarchist/barista Dante accuses Julian of hiding out in their safe role of social worker at a nice nonprofit; and Kore speaks about the fear surrounding the Kansas bill making it illegal for transgender people to display their gender on a driver’s license.)
Based in Chicago, Gwynn has written a queer play with a punch; and prior to ever being staged, this new work was prestigiously named both a 2025 O’Neill Semi-Finalist as well as 2025 Bay Area Playwrights Festival Finalist.
Billed as a ferocious queer ghost story, “Everything, Devoured” doesn’t disappoint. In the hands of queer co-directors Tracey Erbacher and Ileana Blustein, Gwynn’s fevered yet thoughtful and quick paced but penetrating piece unfolds compellingly.
Intuitive staging and chemistry among players, especially two hander scenes involving Kore, display a quiet intensity that feels true to life. Other scenes bring out the anger, protectiveness and some divisiveness among the friends. Gwynn’s informed and powerful writing is brought to the fore.
Nu Sass Productions has been uplifting women and marginalized genders in all aspects of theater since 2009. The company’s two-part name stems from “Nu” (Chinese for woman) and “Sass” (sassy).
Its latest offering fits the bill and then some.
Sir Ian McKellen may now be known as much for being a champion of the international LGBTQ equality movement as he is for being a thespian. Out and proud since 1988 and encouraging others in the public eye to follow his lead, he’s a living example of the fact that it’s not only possible for an out gay man to be successful as an actor, but to rise to the top of his profession while unapologetically bringing his own queerness into the spotlight with him all the way there. For that example alone, he would deserve his status as a hero of our community; his tireless advocacy – which he continues even today, at 86 – elevates him to the level of icon.
Those who know him mostly for that, however, may not have a full appreciation for his skills as an actor; it’s true that his performances in the “Lord of the Rings” and “X-Men” movies are familiar, however, this is a man who has spent more than six decades performing in everything from “Hamlet” to “Waiting for Godot” to “Cats,” and while his franchise-elevating talents certainly shine through in his blockbuster roles, the range and nuance he’s acquired through all that accumulated experience might be better showcased in some of the smaller, less bombastic films in which he has appeared – and the latest effort from prolific director Steven Soderbergh, a darkly comedic crime caper set in the dusty margins of the art world, is just the kind of film we mean.
Now in theaters for a limited release, “The Christophers” casts McKellen opposite Michaela Coel (“Chewing Gum,” “I May Destroy You”) for what is essentially a London-set two-character game of intellectual cat-and-mouse. He’s Julian Sklar, an elderly painter who was once an art-world superstar but hasn’t produced a new work in decades; she’s Lori Butler, an art critic and restoration expert who is working in a food truck by the Thames to make ends meet when she is approached by Sklar’s children (James Corden, Jessica Gunning) with a proposition. Hoping to cash in on their father’s fame, they want to set her up as his new assistant, allowing her access to an attic containing unfinished canvases he abandoned decades ago – so that she can use her skills to finish them herself, creating a forged series of completed paintings that can be “posthumously discovered” after his death and sold for a fortune.
She takes the job, unable to resist an opportunity to get close to Sklar – who, despite his renown, now lives as a bitter and unkempt recluse – for reasons of her own. Though his health is fading, his personality is as full-blown as ever; he’s also still sharp, wily, and experienced enough with his avaricious children to be suspicious of their motives for hiring her. Even so, she wins his trust (or something like it) and piques his interest, setting the stage for a relationship that’s part professional protocol, part confessional candor, and part battle-of-wits – and in which the “scamming” appears to be going in both directions.
That’s it, in a nutshell. A short synopsis really does describe the entire plot, save for the ending which, of course, we would never spoil. Even if it’s technically a “crime caper,” the most action it provides is of the psychological variety: there are no guns, no gangsters, no suspicious lawmen hovering around the edges; it’s just two minds, sparring against each other – and themselves – about things that have nothing to do with the perpetration of artistic forgery and fraud, but perhaps everything to do with their own relationships with art, fame, hope, disillusionment, and broken dreams. Yet it grips our attention from start to finish, thanks to Soderbergh’s taut directorial focus, Ed Solomon’s tersely efficient screenplay, and – most of all – the star duo of McKellen and Cole, who deliver a master class in duo acting that serves not just as the movie’s centerpiece but also its main attraction.
The former, cast in a larger-than-life role that lends itself perfectly to his own larger-than-life personality, embodies Sklar as the quintessential misanthropic artist, aged beyond “bad boy” notoriety but still a fierce iconoclast – so much so that even his own image is fair game for being deconstructed, something to be shredded and tossed into fire along with all those unfinished paintings in his attic; he’s a tempestuous, ferociously intelligent titan, diminished by time and circumstance but still retaining the intimidating power of his adversarial ego, and asserting it through every avenue that remains open to him. It’s the kind of film character that feels tailor-made for a stage performer of McKellen’s stature, allowing him to bring all the elements of his lifelong craft in front of the camera and deliver the complexity, subtlety, and perfectly-tuned emotional control necessary to transcend the cliché of the eccentric artist. His Sklar is comedically crotchety without being doddering or foolish, performatively flamboyant without seeming phony, and authentic enough in his breakthrough moments of vulnerability to avoid coming off as over-sentimental. Perhaps most important of all, he is utterly believable as a formidable and imperious figure, still capable of commanding respect and more than a match for anyone who dares to challenge him.
As for Coel’s Lori, it’s the daring that’s the key to her performance. Every bit Sklar’s equal in terms of wile, she also has power, and yes, ego too; we see it plainly when she is deploys it with tactical precision against his buffoonish offspring, but she holds it close to the chest in her dealings with him, like a secret weapon she wants to keep in reserve. When he inevitably sees through her ploy, she has the intelligence to change the game – her real motivation has little to do with the forgery plan, anyway – and get personal. Coel (herself a rising icon from a new generation of UK performers) plays it all with supreme confidence, yet somehow lets us see that she’s as wary of him as if she were facing a hungry tiger in its own cage.
It’s after the “masks” come off that things get really interesting, allowing these two characters become something like “shadow teachers” for each other, forming a shaky alliance to turn the forgery scheme to their own advantage while confronting their own lingering emotional wounds in the process; that’s when their battle of wits transforms into something closer to a “pas de deux” between two consummate artists, both equally able to find the human substance of Soderbergh’s deceptively cagey movie and mine it, as a perfectly-aligned team, from under the pretext of the trope-ish “art swindle” plot – and it’s glorious to watch.
That said, the art swindle is entertaining, too – which is another reason why “The Christophers” feels like a nearly perfect movie. Smart and substantial enough to be satisfying on multiple levels, it’s also audacious enough in its murky morality to carry a feeling of countercultural rebellion into the mix; and that, in our estimation, is always a plus.
The DC LGBTQ+ Community Center is marking a milestone year in its new home with a vibrant birthday celebration, inviting the community, allies, and media to join the festivities on Saturday, April 25 at 1 p.m.
Since opening its doors in Shaw, The DC LGBTQ+ Community Center has become a hub of support, advocacy, and celebration for LGBTQ+ residents across the District.
The birthday bash promises a day of programming including Yoga (Center Wellness), Micro Bouquet Making (Center Social), Zine Making (Center Arts), and so much more. Guests can also enjoy tours of the Center’s expanded facilities, showcasing spaces for programs, services, and community events.
Since relocating, the Center has expanded its programs, providing critical services. The birthday bash underscores the DC LGBTQ+ Community Center’s commitment to creating an inclusive space where everyone regardless of identity, age, or background can find community and empowerment.
For more details, contact Paul Marengo at 202-705-2890.
From red carpet to chaos: A first-person narrative of the WHCD shooting
World premiere of ‘Everything, Devoured’ oozes queer energy
BREAKING NEWS: Shots fired at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner
An acting legend meets his match in ‘The Christophers’
Community mourns passing of D.C. trans rights advocate SaVanna Wanzer
Second trans member announces plans to resign from Capital Pride board
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