At the end of the first installment of Francesca Zambello’s American Ring Cycle, last year’s Das Rheingold premiered at Washington National Opera, the gods went into Valhalla on what looked like the gang plank of a cruise liner, clinking their champagne flutes. Richard Wagner adapted the libretti of his four-opera cycle from German mythology, and Zambello’s idea was to exchange the German myths in the operas for American ones. The gold-hungry Alberich became a…

>>On Thursday, La Maison Française (4101 Reservoir Rd. NW) is hosting a double screening of two of the funniest movies ever made in France. First, at 6:30 p.m., it is Patrice Leconte’s Les Bronzés (1978), whose story follows a group of nutcases trying to relax at a vacation resort in Ivory Coast. Second, at 8:45 p.m., they will show Jean-Marie Poiré’s Le Père Noël est une ordure, which mostly takes place in a suicide hotline…