On the Horizon: Incoming Icons

Story of Their Life

The British boy band One Direction (pictured at top) touches down in Nationals Park on August 11. Given the group’s ardent tween fan base, it’s safe to expect a sold-out crowd for floppy-haired Harry Styles and company.

Soldiering On

Chris Evans reprises his role as the most patriotic Avenger in the second Captain America movie, opening April 4. Captain America: The Winter Soldier—costarring Scarlett Johansson, Samuel L. Jackson, and Robert Redford—filmed several scenes in DC under the code name Freezer Burn. Watch for local landmarks being obliterated.

Three Guys Walk Into a Bar . . .

Denizens of Range, Ripple, or Velvet Lounge will see some familiar visages at Seven Faces Barroom, opening in DC’s Shaw in the next few months. The venture is from bartenders Owen Thomson, Patrick Owens, and Ashley May, so while details are sketchy, odds look good for the drinks menu.

Lincoln Logs

Sidney Blumenthal, the journalist and former adviser to President Clinton, has wrapped up a three-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln. The first installment, A Self-Made Man—to be released by Simon & Schuster in 2015—explores how “a ragged, ill-educated boy who thought of himself as a ‘slave’ became the man we recognize,” Blumenthal tells Washingtonian. While researching the book, the author found new material he describes as “startling,” including details about Lincoln’s assassination that will be revealed in the final book, due in 2017.

KenCen Welcomes the World

Delivering on its commitment to showcase arts from around the world, the Kennedy Center will host World Stages, an international theater festival, in March. Companies performing include Paris’s Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company—one of the creative forces behind the Tony Award-winning play War Horse—and England’s Bristol Old Vic.

Feeling Crabby

Joe’s Seafood, Prime Steak & Stone Crab, an offshoot of the Miami Beach mainstay, is to open a DC outpost January 31. It’s setting up shop in the old Union Trust Bank building at 15th and H, Northwest.

Mr. Fixit Goes to Maryland

When Kennedy Center president Michael Kaiser steps down in August, he plans to take his arts-management institute to the University of Maryland. But the man known as the turnaround king for his rescues of ailing arts organizations may have one more salvage job to do: helping manage UMD’s planned partnership with the cash-strapped Corcoran Gallery of Art.

Back to the Future

With 1,175 rooms, the $520-million Marriott Marquis Washington, DC will be one of the area’s biggest hotels when it opens in May across the street from the Washington Convention Center. While it will cater primarily to out-of-towners, longtime Washingtonians will cheer its Hot Shoppes restaurant, the chain that birthed the Marriott hospitality empire.

Photograph of Bristol Old Vic in association with Handspring Puppet Company by Simon Annand; Photograph of Lincoln courtesy of the Library of Congress; Photograph of Kaiser by Nikki Kahn/Getty Images; Photograph of Captain America courtesy of The Everett Collection; Photograph of rendering of hotel courtesy of Marriott International.

This article appears in the January 2014 issue of The Washingtonian.