Joan Cushing (August 18, 1946 – May 21, 2024Joan Cushing, singing satirist of ‘Mrs. Foggybottom’ revue, dies at 77) was a political satirist and playwright. She is best known for her character Mrs. Foggybottom, a wise-cracking society woman who wittily mocked Washington, D.C. as part of her cabaret shows and other appearances from the 70s through the mid-90s. In a 1987 article, The Washington Post dubbed her "The Clown of Powertown." Her next gig was writing musicals for young audiences. A 2001 commission by Imagination Stage to adapt Harry Allard and James Marshall's humorous children's book Miss Nelson Is Missing! to the stage led to many more similar collaborations with the theatre, as well as with others.
Early life and family Joan was the oldest of eight children. Her mother, Marie Donnelly Cushing, was a talented pianist who received a scholarship to Webster College. Marie married her former high school boyfriend, Vincent Cushing, in 1945. Vincent graduated from the University of Notre Dame with degrees in physics and mathematics. Many earlier Cushing family members also had attended the university, including Vincent's father, John F. Cushing, who donated $300,000 to Notre Dame to build a hall of engineering. At the Illinois Institute of Technology, Vincent Cushing received a Doctorate in Physics. He went on to have a distinguished career, and was awarded 28 patents. In 1967, with her eight children attending, Marie graduated from American University with a bachelor's degree. She became a teacher of low-income children with Head Start during the program's early years. In 1982, she received a master's degree at Notre Dame College of Belmont, CA in Montessori education, subsequently becoming a head primary teacher. The Cushing children were raised in Winnetka, IL (near Chicago), Kensington, MD, Deerfield, IL, and Huntington, NY. Marie and Vincent's marriage lasted nearly 75 years, ending with his death in 2018. Marie died in February 2023.
Political satire After graduating from the University of Maryland in 1970, Joan Cushing taught second grade in Landover Hills, Maryland. At night, she moonlighted as a singer and pianist at area piano bars. Eventually Cushing decided she was having more fun playing piano than teaching children. Mrs. Foggybottom, a gossipy dowager, became a staple character in her act after the owner of the Fire Escape Lounge in Alexandria, Virginia suggested using comic chit-chat between songs to engage the audiences at this club above the former Café Lafayette. The character was named after a district in DC where the Watergate Complex, State Department and George Washington University are located. She and Mrs. Foggybottom would go on to perform there on Fridays and Saturdays for nine and a half years, gaining notoriety and fans.
Cushing and her character Mrs. Foggybottom also became known through appearances in Washington, D.C.'s Hexagon, an annual benefit political comedy revue. Cushing was a performer, writer, and songwriter for Hexagon for at least 15 years. Hexagon re-emerged in 2023 after a break during the pandemic.
By 1987, Cushing was considered part of the "upper crust" of Beltway comics, along with Art Buchwald and Mark Russell. Her "Mrs. Foggybottom" character gave a humorous take on political news, and threw zingers at Capitol Hill personalities while wearing white gloves, rhinestone glasses, and a feathered hat, drinking a martini and clutching a cigarette holder. Mrs. Foggybottom's top choice in books was the Green Book, and her favorite vacation destination was the Betty Ford Center. Cushing wrote original songs for her aging Washington socialite, such as the "Water Music Minuet," which joked that "the Trickle-Down Theory [was] working at last" with mandatory drug testing under the Reagan administration. "Political satire has an essential role in this town," she once told The Washington Post. "People do take themselves too seriously."
Cushing appeared both as herself, and as her society woman Mrs. Foggybottom, at political parties, conventions, and events. Mrs. Foggybottom's out-of-town gigs had a $1,500 price tag. Cushing also wrote a column for the Georgetowner and Roll Call.
Eventually Cushing's show became a multi-person revue, "Mrs. Foggybottom & Friends," which opened at the New Playwrights Theatre in 1986, and then moved to the Omni Shoreham Hotel’s Marquee Lounge in Northwest Washington, D.C. "Mrs. Foggybottom & Friends" ran until 1995, when the hotel changed owners. In 2014, she told The Beacon that she didn't expect to quit performing when they lost the venue. "I stopped after the Shoreham [was sold], but I expected to start up again and just didn't." Cushing told The Washington Post that she never revisited the accompanied version of the revue because of the death of its director, Ron O’Leary.
In 1988, Mrs. Foggybottom campaigned for President as the candidate of the "Cocktail Party," declaring, "I believe that what the country needs after eight years of Ronald Reagan is a four-year happy hour." Candidate Foggybottom promised that by the time she left office, every American would be able to spell the term "hors d’oeuvres."
Adult musicals While Mrs. Foggybottom was making special appearances from time to time, Cushing was also busy re-inventing herself as a playwright.
Flush In July 1998, Cushing's original musical Flush! opened the Source Theatre Company's 18th Annual Washington Theatre Festival along with Roy Barber's musical Gift. Describing the origins of her play to The Washington Post, Cushing said, "I took a wedding and a funeral and thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny to do a revue where you only see people in the restroom?’... People’s anxieties come out, you have secrets."
Tussaud Next up, in 2000, was the macabre and dark story of real-life waxworker Madame Tussaud. According to Joan Cushing's website, her musical Tussaud "attempts to strip away the carnival atmosphere, and put a human face on the woman who was at the very center of one of the most turbulent and bloody periods of French history." Madame Tussaud was born Marie Grosholtz, and she was trained by a Swiss master waxworker, Phillippe Curtius, during the French Revolution. Marie developed her trade by casting death masks of famous people from their guillotined heads. Cushing's musical Tussaud was presented through at least four staged readings from 2000 to 2006, including another opening slot at the Washington Theatre Festival in 2000. There Cushing won the Pat Murphy Sheehy New Play Fund Award, and the cast, directors and musicians were honored for their ensemble work. In 2006, Tussaud received a full production at the University of Florida's Footlights Theatre in Tampa, Florida. Song titles included "Familiar Faces/Carry On," “I’ve Got a Date with Voltaire," “Bonjour, Robespierre," and "In My Hands."
Breast in Show In 2011 the musical Breast in Show was first produced, with Cushing writing the music and lyrics and playwright Lisa Hayes, the script and book. The idea for a musical about breast cancer came in 2009 to the play's executive producer Eileen Mitchard, who wanted to give voice to those touched by the disease. The show was based on over 200 interviews done by Mitchard, Hayes and Cushing over a two-year period. The project had to be postponed in 2010, when Cushing's husband Paul Buchbinder was dying of pancreatic cancer. Cushing found that returning to writing the musical after her husband passed was an experience of healing, bringing a new awareness and a feeling that she had something to say. The production's director was Kathryn Chase Bryer, who was working with Cushing at Imagination Stage on theatre for young audiences. The Breast of Show script featured four women and one man with breast cancer. The show's goals included raising awareness about the disease, and in an interview with the Quad-City Times, executive producer Mitchard said, "It'll make you laugh, it'll make you cry. It'll make you do both at the same moment, but it ends on a hopeful note." The show received six full productions, starting with the JCC Theatre in Rockville, Maryland in 2011. Promotion for Breast of Show at the 2014 Capital Fringe Festival proclaimed, "This is the show that puts humor in the tumor." DC Theatre Arts reviewer Terry Byrne wrote, "…hats off to composer/lyricist Joan Cushing… I cannot summon enough praise for Cushing’s creations." The show has been performed over 30 times, including productions at the Acts of Faith Festival in Richmond, Virginia in March 2013, the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse in Rock Island, Illinois in October 2013, the Art Barn in Gaithersburg, Maryland in September 2014, and O'Connell and Company of Buffalo, New York in September and October 2016.
Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) musicals
Cushing's theatre writing took a new direction after she was commissioned in 2001 by Imagination Stage to adapt the popular children's book Miss Nelson Is Missing! by author Harry Allard and illustrator James Marshall. She developed the book into a musical for their theatre at White Flint Mall. This would be her first Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) project. "It is a very edgy, witty, clever book," Cushing told The Washington Post. "I like writing for other people. I'm not performing right now." The story is about a class of uncontrollable kids at Horace B. Smedley Elementary School whose sweet teacher, Miss Nelson, stops showing up. In her place is the ferocious hag, Miss Viola Swamp, who the children hate and fear. Suddenly the children have a new appreciation for their missing teacher. Cushing used much of the language of the book in the script and lyrics (such as the kids considering if "a swarm of angry butterflies" took their teacher away). She interspersed items for adults to enjoy, such as theatre references, local topics, and politics. This show was performed as far away as China and Papua New Guinea, and remained in production through 2023. Describing a production at the Manhattan Children's Theater in 2005, The New York Times reviewer Laurel Graeber said, "A gifted playwright and composer, Ms. Cushing has created a musical that will charm anyone who has ever sat in front of a schoolteacher's desk – or, for that matter, behind it."
Imagination Stage also commissioned Cushing's adaptation of author Barbara Park and illustrator Denise Brunkus’s book Junie B. Jones and a Little Monkey Business! The show opened at the Imagination Stage's new $12 million center in July 2003. This musical centers on a raucous five-year-old kindergartener (Junie B. Jones) who steps on stage and sings "The World According to Me," underscoring how she rules her world. Soon she has to deal with the worrisome, pending arrival of a sibling. Also, Junie has no idea what to share in the next show-and-tell at school. The two issues combine to lead the musical into humorous developments. Interviewed about her TYA playwriting process at the time by The Washington Post, Cushing commented, "I gear them to kids, but I don't write down to them. I write them for families... I think it's nice when a grandparent and a child can go to a musical together and get something from it." While Cushing's central story was from Park's monkey business book, she lifted scenes from other books in the Junie B. Jones series to make the play work. "I didn't feel there was enough in that book to write a whole musical on," Cushing shared with The Washington Post. "...I had to go and wrap my arms around the whole series to really feel the characters."
Cushing went on to write additional TYA musicals commissioned by Imagination Stage, including Miss Nelson Has a Field Day!, Petite Rouge: A Cajun Red Riding Hood, Heidi, George & Martha: Tons of Fun and 101 Dalmatians.