pt at large

Ch’ing-lish, A Smart Comedy by David Henry Hwang

Ch’ing-lish,  A Play by David Henry Hwang

The Lyric  Stage Company
140 Clarendon Street
Boston, MA
Through December 23, 2012

Barlow Adamson* as Daniel Cavanaugh; Alexander Platt* as Peter Timms;
Tiffany Chen as Miss Qian/Prosecutor Li; Michael Tow as Cai Guoliang
;Celeste Oliva* as Xi Yan; Chen Tang* as Bing/Judge Xu; Geming
Liz Eng as Zhao
*Denotes member of Actor's Equity Association.

Directed by Larry Coen; Scenic Design, Dahlia Al-Habieli; Costume Design, Emily Woods Hogue;
 Lighting Design, Matt Whiton;
 Sound Design, Arshan Gailus; 
Projection Design, Garrett Herzig; 
Production Stage Manager, Nerys Powell;
 Assistant Stage Manager, Sarah Morrison; 
Properties, Dahlia Al-Habieli; 
Language Coach, Gail Wang



Globalization has taken root in Boston with the Lyric Stage Company's production of Ch’ing-lish written by David Henry Hwang. “This is the best-selling play in the Lyric Stage’s history,” the house manager announced to a full house in her pre-play remarks.

Tell me a time half the play you’ve watched was in Chinese. And that the captions for the actors’ Chinese lines were translated in an electronic crawl on a screen across the top of the stage. And that four of the seven actors were Chinese. And the playwright was Asian-American. And that you enjoyed the heck out of it.

You want sociology, moral dilemmas, geo-politics, cultural collisions, history, a love story, juicy humor, fine acting? Ch’ing-lish had it all… a comedy of manners that made you laugh and think at the same time.

David Cavanaugh, an American businessman (Barlow Adamson) from Cleveland, visits the city of Guiyang, China in search of a contract for his sign company. He hires Alexander Platt, a wily ex-pat British professor (Peter Timms) with impeccable Chinese and a score to settle to act as his translator. 

Minister Xi Yan and businessman Daniel Cavanaugh/Photo by Mark S. Howard

Midwesterner Cavanaugh has no clue about his host's culture. His social skills are earnest but sophomoric. While trying to make deals with Minister Cai Guoliang (Michael Tow), and his wife, Vice Minister Xi Yan (Celeste Oliva), he steps on one cultural landmine after another. His attempts at learning Chinese phrases are wonderfully and unintentionally comic. Cavanaugh is embarrassingly American.

Cavanaugh’s stereotypes of the Chinese are matched by revelatory ones (spoken in Chinese, which Cavanaugh doesn’t understand but we read as captions on the screen over the stage) by the Minister, his wife; and Translator/Prosecutor Li (Tiffany Chen) have of Americans - evil, rude, without culture. The results are often hilarious and refreshingly non-PC. They represent obstacles both sides have to perceive before any business, or friendship, can be forged.

There are few cultural chasms as deep as that between America and China. The character of Cavanaugh as a sign maker eager to improve the signage in this Chinese city is a perfect vehicle for playwright Hwang to use humorous language to illustrate mutual distrust and insular ignorance, each culture believing it is superior to the other. A sign for a bathroom for the handicapped in the Beijing Airport reads “Deformed Man’s Toilet.”

Cavanaugh will have his work cut out for him if he can persuade the Minister to award him the contract for signage for the new Arts Center. In the meantime, the Minister is looking to further his own career with his choice.

The love story that unexpectedly blooms in the second act demonstrates the gulf between how the cultures view and value love and marriage. The conflict between Cavanaugh and Xi Yan gives us a chance to contemplate which culture more effectively manages the moral terrain when marriage falters.

The play is a sandbox for its set, lighting, and sound designers. The set, exquisitely evocative of a Chinese office/restaurant/hotel, is cleverly rearranged between scenes. The sophisticated light design directs your eyes and sets mood. It takes a few minutes to get accustomed to multi tasking: watch the captions floating across a screen above the stage, the facial expressions of the actors, register whether you’re listening to English or Chinese, and try to figure out the plot, which is a story inside a story inside a story. It can get confusing, and that’s the point.

Peter Timms as Alexander Platt and Michael Tow as Minister Cai Guoliang  deliver solid performances as men who have their own interests in mind. Barlow Anderson is a wonderful study - a slap-on-the-back, glad-handing businessman trying to recover his dignity after being involved in a spectacular scandal in the USA that he tries to hide. When he desperately reveals it because he believes the deal has collapsed, it ends up elevating his status with the Chinese officials. (Go figure.)

Celeste Oliva as Xi Yan is a joy to watch. Using expressive hand gestures, comic timing, body language, shrewd business acumen, and a deep understanding of China’s moral code, she’s the lynchpin of the story. Her moral compass is what ultimately helps Barlow’s Cavanaugh to find his true north.

Director Larry Coen has a firm grip on what playwright Hwang is up to. His actors have worked with language coaches to master dialogue.  The play’s conclusion is a little too tidy but so be it. Chinese-American relations can use a little  optimism.

Asians represent the fastest growing population in Boston. There were more Asians in the audience tonight than I’ve seen in ten years of attending plays in Boston. For years, theater companies have met with limited success at reaching out to minorities. Whether Ch’ing-lish is a one hit wonder or a trend remains to be seen. Either way, the Lyric Stage Company has taken a bold step forward.

Louisiana Folk Roots Housewarming: A SuperJam!

Louisiana Folk Roots Housewarming Party at Begnaud House

Vermilionville Living History Museum and  Folk Life Park
340 Fisher Road
Lafayette, LA
December 15, 2012, 1:00-3:30 PM

Louisiana Folk Roots has a new home. It will surprise no one who knows a sliver about southwest Louisiana that their house warming party included food and a huge “Jam” behind the back porch of their new digs in the historic Begnaud House on the grounds of Vermilionville Living History Museum and Folk Life Park.

Top row: The Begnaud House at Vermilionville; bottom row photo right, Ray Landry in black cap, Henry Hample, orange shirt.

You didn’t have trouble finding the place. Park the car and roll down the window. The sound of Cajun music floated over the pond behind the Begnaud House all the way to the parking lot. Musicians from age 5 to 75 sat in folding chairs in a huge circle had a grand old time, singing ballads, waltzes, and playful songs. Cajun French lost its linguistic similarity to Parisian French long ago so I’m sure my high school French teacher Ms. Curtain would forgive me for not comprehending most of the lyrics.What wasn’t lost in translation was the bond the musicians had with the language.

The coolest thing about these “jams” is the range of musicians. Fiddle legend Michael Doucet played with stalwart fiddlers Mitch Reed and Henry Hample and veteran accordionist Sheryl Cormier. There is no caste system at work. Everyone is welcome.
  

Above photo left: Sheryl Cormier (red shirt, accordion), Mitch Reed (black shirt,fiddler), Michael Doucet (fiddle); middle photo on right - Zack Fuselier; Michael Doucet

Cajuns and Creoles embrace their heritage. Founded in 2000, the mission of the non-profit organization Louisiana Folk Roots is simple:  Keep it going. They promote learning opportunities in music, crafts, language, and  natural history. The fact that their new office is now on the grounds of the Vermilionville Living History Museum and Folk Life Park in Lafayette is a perfect fit.

LINK http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsLdmcWKHhY
Mitch Reed and Michael Doucet play an impromptu sweet ballad. Double fiddle playing is common in Cajun music. You won't find two better proponents of the style than these two men. Young fiddler Zack Fuselier, in foreground, is soaking it up.

 

LINK http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKpKdmDa7Zc

Superjam organizer Ray Landry invites some real hot shots: Michael Doucet, Mitch Reed, Sheryl Cormier, and Henry Hample. They're joined by a whooping and hollering bunch of amateurs (note the two little fiddlers at the 18 second mark) on the pondside back porch of Louisiana Folk Roots' new home in the historic Begnaud House on the grounds of the Vermilionville Living History Museum and Folk Life Park in Lafayette, LA. Watch fiddler Henry Hample get the train rolling!

 

LINK http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RdT_JA6OLg

Young Zack Fuselier sings a ballad as Mitch Reed and Michael Doucet accompany him. Zack's been playing fiddle for about three years.

 

LINK http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Gly0jDF7G4

At Jam leader Ray Landry's request, Henry Hample, renowned for his children's songs as well as his Cajun repertoire, treats the crowd with "Mrs. Murphy's Chowder" You'll see why he's so highly regarded by children of all ages.

Photos and videos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

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PS

Cajun musicians rarely go anywhere without packing their fiddles, accordions, and guitars. This Saturday morning I witnessed a morning jam at the Cafe Joie de Vivre (http://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2012/12/joie-de-vivre-and-music.html), an afternoon jam here at the Begaud House, and one that spontaneously erupted at a house party Saturday night (below).

Joie de Vivre - and Music!

Joie de Vivre Coffee and Culture Café


107 N Main Street
Breaux Bridge, LA 70517

11:30 AM, Saturday, December 15, 2012

Well, just another Saturday morning around here. Dikku Du and The Zydeco crew have finished playing at the Cafe des Amis. Correspondingly, things have picked up at the Joie de Vivre Coffee and Culture Café, one of the new music destinations one block away in Breaux Bridge.

Fourteen musicians have pulled up chairs in a big circle. It looks pretty ragtag but everyone is listening intently to what’s going on around them. What a collection of instruments. Three fiddles, six guitars, one washboard bass, one t-fer (a metal triangle struck rhythmically with an iron rod) and one accordion. All the songs are sung in French, a carousel of ballads, waltzes, and two steps. VIDEO

The main thing here is to have fun. The robust volume isn’t always pitch perfect but the enthusiasm more than compensates. The range of abilities is stunning. Sprinkled amongst the earnest amateurs are world-class musicians. Some of them live around the corner. Breaux Bridge may have more musical talent per square block than any other city in Louisiana. Come here for a few Saturdays and you will hear scores of Cajun ballads and waltzes that have been sung in southwest Louisiana for over a hundred years.

Any musician who can carry a tune, speaks or understands Cajun French, and wants to join in a musical conversation is welcome.There might be rules about how to participate. I learn one of them today.

“Only one accordion at a time,” says the fellow who just relinquished his chair to another accordion player. "When two accordions play together in a jam the sound gets muddy,” he says, then adds that accordion players are often the vocalists, true for most of this morning.

   
This would be John Romano (in grey shirt, photo above right), who’s taking the time to talk to me after he discovers my Sicilian ancestry. “Hey, I’m half Sicilian and half Irish,” he says with the grin of a co-conspirator. John’s another transplant, originally from Wisconsin, who’s been struck with the Cajun stick.

A potent invisible pheromone in the key of D major swirls over the prairies around Lafayette. I’ve lost count of the number of people Ive met from North Carolina, Wisconsin, Oregon, California, Florida and a bunch of other states who’ve been drawn here because of the music. Like John, now playing guitar,  they’ve retired or moved lock, stock, and barrel to this area and worried about making a living after they’ve picked out the color for their new living room.

 
A tall woman with a gorgeous mane of blonde hair walks in. A fellow in the circle gets up from his chair and hands her his guitar. “Who’s that,” I ask.

Christine Balfa,” John says, “ Brazos Huval gave her his guitar.” Brazos Huval, one of the talented siblings in the Huval family, moves to another chair and picks up a triangle and begins to play along. Oh, and he’s the bass guitar player for Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys, a Cajun band that’s toured the world.

Christine Balfa is Cajun royalty, her dad was the esteemed Dewey Balfa who singlehandedly put Cajun music on America’s play list when he wowed crowds at the Newport Jazz Festival when promoter George Wein invited him and his brothers to perform in 1964.

David Greely (tan hat, photo above) walks in and unpacks his fiddle. David’s one of the founders of the aforementioned Steve Riley and The Mamou Playboys. Greely lives in Breaux Bridge.

Bernard Ussher (in cap), my menu, music and dance adviser in Lafayette, a transplant from Dublin via Massachusetts, introduces me to Melanie Harrington, the five-foot ball of energy who owns the café.

"We've just been birthed," she laughs. “We’ve been open for three months and one day. I'm a Cajun. I’ve spent most of my life in Vermilionville, Terre Bon, and St. Martinville Parishes and lived here in Breaux Bridge for 15 years.”

Melanie has a good thing going. She’s just introduced a Friday night dance. “It’s the only way I can dance since I’ve opened the café,” she says with a sigh. The café puts out breakfast and lunch. Bernard says she has a smashing lunch for the incredible price of $6.00 and specializes in vegetarian food.

Next generation of Huval musicians? The little kid sitting on Brazos Huval's lap is the son of his brother, who's now playing accordion, the third to play accordion since I've arrived.

Christine Balfa chats with me as she leans against the standup bass that Brazos dragged out from the back room. "It’s the house bass," Christine says.

"Do you come here for the history, the culture, friends, the tradition, the rejuvenation of the French language?” I ask.

"This is medicine for my soul," Christine Balfa says. “I live nearby, have a list of house chores to do but I know I will feel better if I come here for a while. I come here because it's good for my spirit."

I guess that's why I'm here, too.

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Christine Balfa , Francois Roissard and Bernard Ussher

John Prestigiacomo  (L) and J.B. Theriot, Breaux Bridge

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

POST SCRIPT MARCH 2, 2013

A comment about this story by John Prestigiacomo sparked a great email exchange with him and this addendum to the post.

I thought more about Cajun music after John Prestigiacomo and I traded emails about this story.  John's been generous with his time and his point of view about Cajun music. Thanks to talking with him I have a deeper appreciation for what goes on in the jams I wrote about in this post.

Lafayette and the constellation of cities and towns surrounding it are the stronghold of Cajun music - they draw music enthusiasts and converts like bees to clover. Not only do they want to listen to it, they want to play it. Learning to play it is tricky. The spirit of the music isn't in the lyrics and the notes on the page. Old time Cajun music was open to improvisation and interpretation, sung from the heart and soul. Sung in the moment, it created joy, communicated shared values and heartaches, and a need to grab a partner and express yourself on the dance floor.

In the past decade, Cajun music has exploded from small market roots music to a larger audience. One visit to Breaux Bridge or one of a bunch of dance halls in Lafayette and you'll hear why. Groups like Grammy-nominated Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys are just one of dozens of Cajun bands that play all over the region.

John Prestigiacomo was raised in the bayous of South Louisiana. After careers with AT&T and IBM, he's retired and happy to be back home in southwest Louisiana and Breaux Bridge.

"I have a degree in music and a degree in clarinet but one of my passions has always been to play Cajun fiddle, that fiddle is a beast within itself, " he says.

He's only been at it for eight months but he jumped in with both feet. " I take lessons from Mitch Reed and Brazos Huval and practice and play at jams and with friends as much as I can. Mitch and Brazos teach me the tunes, and I put my spin on it - like Cajun music should be. I've had fun playing with guys like Hubert Maitre and Harry Trahan, guys who play it like it was played many years ago. Unstructured. Unmetered. Unsmooth. The way Cajun music was intended....from the heart and soul."

"Having lived in many places in the US and now back home, I worry about Cajun Music becoming homogenized...homogenized by technology, homogenized by passionate, music-loving newcomers who attempt to make the music and every note more precise than what I think it was meant to be. "

John told me a funny story that illustrates his point. "When I was asked to play with a legendary Cajun musician, I told him, 'I am not good enough to play in public with you.' His comments were something to the effect...ah...we just gonna have fun.  As long as people dancing...they having a good time.  They will only be upset if the beer ain't cold."

And, minus the beer, that's exactly what you hear when you step inside little cafes like the Joie de Vivre in Breaux Bridge. Old time music played by veterans and beginners who are on a perfect glide path that bridges the past and the future.

 

"Holiday Memories": Capote's Reminiscences Warm The Heart

"Holiday Memories" by Truman Capote
Staged version of two of Capote’s short stories by Russell Vendenbroucke: told in two parts
Directed by Michael Hammond
New Repertory Theater at the Arsenal Center for the Arts
Charles and Mosessian Theater
December 10, 2012, runs through December 23, 2012

Jon Savage, scenic designer, Molly Trainer, costume designer,Chris Brusberg, lighting designer,
Edward Young, sound designer, Amelia Gossett, properties designer,Christine Lomaka, production stage manager

Sentimentally rendered stories and the name Truman Capote aren’t usually associated with each other but in the New Rep Theatre’s production of “Holiday Memories” they fuse together like incense and myrrh. The entire production, from set to costume to music to lighting is a gem of anecdotal story telling and theatrical execution.

Capote’s two short stories, A Thanksgiving Visitor 1967 and Christmas Memories 1956 are set in the Depression era rural Alabama household of distant relatives into which Buddy’s (young Truman’s) wayward mother has deposited him like a summer hat that’s gone out of fashion.

Truman Capote’s evocative prose can describe the depths of torment caused by a schoolyard bully, the redemptive power of friendship, and the ability of imagination to sustain life in impoverished circumstances. It’s a warm reminiscence of his two years in a mildly dysfunctional household in rural Alabama before Capote became everything you can read about in Wikipedia.

Whether you have your own softly burnished memories of the holidays that you’d like to have rekindled or you’d like to borrow these two gently told tales, you’re in for a treat.

You don’t have to dive into the theater program to grasp what is transpiring in the two acts. Plain and simple, it’s the story of a loving intergenerational friendship that transforms the lives of Buddy, Michael John Ciszewski playing the role of a 7 year old Truman Capote, and Miss Sook, his sixty year old distant cousin, played by Adrianne Krstansky.

Marc Carver, as the 35 year-old Capote, and young Buddy take turns telling bits of the Capote’s short stories directly to the audience. Woven between are scenes enacted by Buddy, Miss Sook and three other members of the cast who play minor roles of the bully, a local moonshiner and the other relatives who share living in this household.

Buddy, dressed in knickers, and Sook, in her sack of a brown housedress keep their southern accents steady throughout the show. Truman, impeccably dressed in a tailored navy suit, shows how much distance he put between himself and his southern heritage with his polished urban English.

The Thanksgiving Visitor (Act 1) is based on Capote’s experience of being bullied at school by a larger and older boy. Sook has the indomitable ability to strain their hardscrabble life through a sieve that allows only the good parts to pass through and willfully ignores the hurtful parts that remain. Her solution is to create a friendship between the boys by inviting the bully and his family to Thanksgiving dinner. The results are powerful and unexpected.  Sook’s declaration to Buddy at the end of A Thanksgiving Visitor is holiday lesson number one: "You know what the one unforgivable sin is, Buddy? Deliberate cruelty."

The second act, Christmas Memories, is a worth the price of admission all by itself. It’s centered on what Sook calls “Fruitcake Season” in which she enthusiastically enrolls Buddy to help her make 31 fruitcakes. "Fruitcake fuels the heart, it's fruitcake weather!" she shouts.

They don’t have two pennies to rub together. Through narration, we learn that they spent months organizing little events for which they can charge a penny a ticket. Their late night meetings to count their coins show that uneducated Sook has trouble with her figures but no trouble persisting until she’s accumulated enough money to purchase ingredients for her cakes.

Director Michael Hammond pulls out all the stops when he stages Sook and Buddy’s excursions to the local moonshiner Mr. Ha Ha to buy liquor for her fruitcakes and a foray into the woods to chop down, drag home and decorate an enormous Christmas tree with home made ornaments. The two endearing scenes come across as tenderly acted tone poems choreographed and performed with joyous simplicity, augmented with music and wonderful hand colored pen and ink drawings projected on the screen deep behind the stage.

Whether or not Sook’s kindness and generosity became models for Capote’s future behavior is doubtful but they certainly touch us as she describes her list of recipients.  Besides the obvious donations to friends and relatives, she is way ahead of the curve in her random acts of kindness. One goes to a couple from out of state who got lost and showed up at the house earlier in the year, one goes to a neighbor who’s fallen on hard times, one goes to a shopkeeper who is lenient with credit, and one is wrapped up in brown paper and sent to President and Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt (who reportedly send her a thank you letter).

Throughout the play, the director and the actors do so much with so little, just the way Capote remembers himself and Sook in this gauzily recollected holiday season.
Marc Carver and Michael John Ciszewski as the older and younger Truman Capote give solid performances but the heart of the cast is Adrianne Krstansky as Sook. With words and gestures, she strikes a delicate balance between her eternally childlike outlook and the homespun practicality and wisdom of a self-sufficient country woman.

The warmly lit set features two tall honey-colored hewn wood panels on each side of the stage that serve as beds, cupboards, windows, coatracks, even a piano.  A screen centered behind the set is used to project hand-colored pen and ink sketches or to cast characters in silhouette. Rarely do the elements of a set add so significantly to the arc of a play.

Sook’s dream of buying Buddy a bicycle for Christmas remains just that. The final scene of the two of them flying the kites (projected on the screen) they made for each other is wistfully brilliant.

“It’s hard enough not to get what you want for Christmas, Buddy. Even harder than that is not being able to give someone what they really want,” Sook says to Buddy in final scene.

Sook is a simple woman who never lost a childlike ability to squeeze joy from the corners of everyday life. Without her influence, it’s hard to see how Buddy, a ‘sissy’ and an odd loner, would have survived anywhere, let alone rural Alabama.

Photo: Andrew Brilliant Photography

Chesapeake - Art? Arf!

Chesapeake
A Play by Lee Blessing
New Rep Theatre
Arsenal Center For The Arts, Black Box Theater
November 29, 2012

Runs through December 16, 2012
Performance schedule: Wednesday and Thursday evenings at 7:30; Friday and Saturday evenings at 8:-00; Saturday afternoons at 3:00; Sundays at 2:00. There will also be a Tuesday evening performance on Dec. 11 at 7:30 p.m. 

Tickets cost $36, general admission. Students, seniors, and groups of 10 or more receive discounts. Tickets and more information available online at www.newrep.org or via the box office phone at 617-923-8487.

Chesapeake. Art. Arfff.

There are enough ideas in this two- hour one actress play to make your brain feel like it's living on a treadmill.  The main conceit is so off-the-wall – and delightful – that it would be a sin to tell you about it right now. Suffice it to say, the play is about a man and his dog, politics, the nature of relationships, sex, artistic drive, dogs, religion, performance art, private versus public lives of politicians, dogs, personal fulfillment, dogs, and redemption.

Originally written by Lee Blessing in 1999, the year in which a photograph of a plastic crucifix submerged in a yellow liquid (urine) ignited a firestorm in the Christian right, it is also a stark raving manifesto for public support of the arts by the National Endowment For the Arts, which had awarded a grant to the artist who created this photograph.

To be candid, you need to have patience and stamina to stay with the opening hour. The first long act is a set up for Act Two, with Kerr the artist dishing out several story lines that sail around like Frisbees. The humor is cerebral and we keep wondering where it's going and when it's going to get there.

Kerr is a deliciously right-brained and driven artist whose destiny is to perform.She’s the kind of actress who says, " Performances that don't run the risk of jail time are a failure." She’s a possessed performance artist whose artistic sensibility is based on the scholarly readings she recites to us with the fervor of Angela Davis dressed as a kooky Harvard Square hippie in the 60s. With seductive and seditious glee, Kerr describes her earthy habit of inviting the audience to remove her clothing during her performances whilst she reads The Song of Solomon, 117 specifically lusty verses in the Old Testament.

Enter Throm Pooley (sounds a lot like Strom You-Know-Who) a South Carolina Congressman running for Senate, who condemns Kerr’s performance art as pornography, and stirs up enough conservative righteousness to be elected. Kerr’s revenge is a cockamamie scheme to kidnap Pooley's beloved dog, which was prominently used in his anti-pornography political ads.

When the playwright hollers "fetch" at the weird beginning of act two, we dive right in with the vitality of a Chesapeake retriever with a duck in sight, an allusion you’ll understand once you wrap your head around what Lee Blessing s up to.

Aside from its astute political and philosophical ruminations, the real reason to see this play is to watch Georgia Lyman at work. Big boned and tall, with a luxurious mane of thick auburn hair tumbling over her broad shoulders, she inhabits her several roles with the determination and single mindedness of Rover racing after the bone you’ve just chucked.

Lyman uses the 12' x 12' raised wooden platform in the midst of U shaped theater configuration as her playground – a stage, a lush sprawling lawn, the Chesapeake Bay, a senator’s study, the scene of a car chase, among other bits. Her easy physicality in one of her key roles has the immediacy of a big, galumphing, resilient, love-me–right-now dog. One difference that barks to differ is that dogs aren’t usually involved in deliberations about the value of art, the nature of politics, and the nature of love and loyalty.

You wouldn't believe me if I told you the trajectory of Lee blessings second act, you'll just have to see it to believe it. The result is a satisfying night at the theater, a  night when your imagination and your intellect have been exercised and your belief in the goodness of human – and canine – nature has been vindicated.

Photo by Christopher McKenzie Photography