Spotlight: A Strong Spring Lineup At Strathmore
From David Sedaris to Lea Salonga, The Music Center at Strathmore kicks off the Spring with an abundance of worthwhile performances.
Since last fall, David Sedaris has been touring and performing a slew of new essays that the dry-witted gay humorist wrote and published during the pandemic — all without the usual benefit of crowd-testing.
“My fear is that I’m going to read them out loud and I’ll realize, ‘Oh, I was completely wrong about this and this and this,'” Sedaris said in a rare TV interview with MSNBC’s Ari Melber last summer.
He went on to explain how he gauges what works based on audience reaction: “If it’s funny, they’re gonna laugh and let you know it’s funny. If they cough a lot, it’s like they’re throwing skulls at you.”
Expect a whole lot more laughs than coughs when Sedaris appears at the Music Center at Strathmore on Friday, April 4, at 8 p.m., helping to kick off a strong spring lineup of performers.
Other highlights over the next two months include:
a thousand thoughts, a wildly creative and experimental evening in which Oscar-nominated filmmaker Sam Green (The Weather Underground) and Emmy-winning writer/editor Joe Bini (Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired) take the stage to offer live narration for a new documentary about the Kronos Quartet that will screen as the groundbreaking classical ensemble performs on stage, an evening combining “the magic of cinema…with the energy and urgency of live performance” (4/21).
Lea Salonga: The Dream Again Tour 2022, a concert featuring the Tony-winning Broadway star of Miss Saigon and Les Miserables who is also known as the singing voice of Disney princesses Jasmine (Aladdin) and Fa Mulan (Mulan and Mulan II) (4/23).
Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, a new fully staged opera adapted from the masterpiece sci-fi novel from pioneering Afrofuturist Butler and developed by gay Black artist Toshi Reagon in collaboration with her mother, Bernice Johnson Reagon, co-presented by the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company (4/29).
Yotam Ottolenghi, the James Beard Award-winning cookbook author and chef from Israel who builds on his bestsellers Plenty and Plenty More for his much-anticipated new cookbook Ottolenghi Flavor, featuring more than 100 plant-based recipes (5/1).
The Music Center at Strathmore is at 5301 Tuckerman Lane, North Bethesda, Md. Call 301-581-5100 or visit www.strathmore.org.
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