D.C.-area nightlife, events and dining

As a teen, Georgia Anne Muldrow possessed a voice and musical sense far beyond her years, infusing the sparse underground hip-hop styles of the early aughts with blues and free jazz. Her creative output has burst forth in torrents since then, with the two consistent elements being her elastic, emotive voice and her thirst for new stylistic territories. She has done bouncy West Coast beats, enigmatic lo-fi jazz explorations and spare, atmospheric ballads. At any moment she’s conjuring J Dilla and Sun Ra, or P-Funk and G-Funk. Her newest record is with California mad scientist Madlib. Get your ears around it at Liv.

Saturday’s annual Artini cocktail party at the Corcoran has sold out, but if you want to sample some of the drinks that talented local bartenders have created just for the event, there are two chances this week, both from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. On Tuesday, the Passenger’s Alexandra Bookless unveils her “artini” at the Shaw bar, and on Thursday, Joe Ambrose of the W Hotel’s P.O.V. takes his turn. There’s no cover charge for either event.

he Kennedy Center is mounting a festival of Vienna, Budapest and Prague! It's like hosting a festival in Washington to celebrate the Mall: shining a spotlight on something that's central to, even ubiquitous in our daily lives. For classical music fans, this festival offers an excuse to hear Beethoven and Strauss - composers who are hardly underperformed in regular years. All right: there are a lot of concerts of a lot of repertory we love: Beethoven's "Fidelio," Schubert's "Winterreise" with Matthias Goerne, and a lot of the great Bartok repertory that is already well known to NSO audiences thanks to the Hungarian roots of the orchestra's last principal conductor, Ivan Fischer. And, of course, we get the Vienna Philharmonic. There will surely be some musical highlights, but as a festival, it might as well be titled "Business as Usual, Only More So."

Sing your heart out to raise money for the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis. Sounds like a no brainer, right? Head for George — usually a members-and-guests-only Georgetown bar behind Cafe Milano — for a night of karaoke where retro tunes rule and money talks: You have to drop a $1 donation for every song you want to sing, and an extra $5 donation will move your name to the top of the list. (If other crowded karaoke nights in D.C. are anything to go by, the skip-the-line donations should bring in a lot of cash.) The first tune is sung at 9 p.m., and the party goes until midnight.

If you missed puppeteer Basil Twist's staging of "Petrushka" at the Lansburgh Theatre last week (or even if you didn't), "Symphonie Fantastique" promises to be different. The five-movement performance -- accompanied by a Hector Berlioz score performed by Christopher O'Riley -- is set inside a 1,000-gallon water tank, with mirrors, slides, air bubbles and even fishing lures helping tell the story. Performances are Friday at 8 p.m. and Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m. At the Kogod Theatre.

Theater J remounts its 2010 production, based on the 1656 interrogation of the Jewish philosopher and alleged heretic Baruch De Spinoza.

"Is Wayne Brady going to have to..." imitate Sammy Davis Jr. and Sam Cooke in a musical tribute to two of soul music's most legendary figures? If you recognize the opening quotation, from Brady's cameo on "Chappelle's Show," then you already know the answer. The "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" performer inhabits the songwriting of Davis and Cooke, with musical accompaniment by the National Symphony Orchestra Pops, Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. At the Concert Hall.

Wanna get away? This isn't a Southwest Airlines commercial, but rather a brief plot summary of Fin Kennedy's play inspired by author Doug Richmond's 1985 manual for going off-the-grid. But in Kennedy's hands, it's an examination of the characteristics that define us in the 21st century. Dylan Morrison Myers leads the five-person cast when pay-what-you-can previews begin Saturday at 8 p.m.

Japanese Embroidery Center presents an exhibition that showcases the art, beauty and culture of a Japanese embroidery technique that goes back 1,600 years.