The national touring company’s production
of “Jersey Boys,” now playing at The Fox Theatre, is one of the best shows I’ve seen in years.
Now I know a lot of musicals are corny—”Mama Mia!” comes to mind—but this isn’t one of them. This is a story about a dream to bust out of a poor neighborhood and rise to the top in the music business.
“Jersey Boys,” winner of four Tony Awards, including Best Musical, lets you peer into the lives of a few hoodlums from a tough neighborhood in New Jersey in the 1960s. Along the way, we meet Joe Pesci—yes, that Joe Pesci—who helps the roughnecks put a band together and names it the Four Seasons. We watch as the group plays dives around New Jersey, until it finally meets its match when it partners with songwriter Bob Guadio, then a one-hit wonder for Who Wears Short Shorts? For Frankie Valli, the nearly four-octave singer who sometimes sounds like a woman, he writes Sherry, which catapults the band to Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand,” launching the song to the No. 1 spot on the charts. While many other Top-40 hits follow and many millions of records are sold, the band members struggle through personal and professional ups and downs, including stints in prison, divorces, the loss of their fortunes, the death of a child, and for some, a fall back to the blue-collar life. read more…
Photo credit: Eric Hermann
Imagine living life as a heterosexual in a homosexual world. “Zanna Don’t,” now playing at Actor’s Express in Atlanta, shows us what it could be like if our sexual preferences were outside the norm.
Playwright Tim Acito skillfully shows us what it’s like to live in someone else’s shoes. In a land of upside down living, he takes us to a place where chess players are studs, football players are geeks, and heterosexuality is an anomaly.
It’s all done tongue-in-cheek, but it’s a fun show with light, catchy pop tunes reminiscent of those in “Little Shop of Horrors.”
The story revolves around read more…
Written by guest blogger: Karin Koser
Lush. Lyrical. Light.
That was the fare tonight at the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra concert at Symphony Hall. From the moment guest conductor Sarah Hicks lightly, quickly entered the stage, the hall was filled with fresh air. What, a female with bare arms leading the ASO? Long silky brown hair shaking as she directed, Hicks was warm, engaging and enjoying herself and the caliber of the musicians under her baton. Guesting from her usual assistant conductor spot in Minnesota, Hicks led the ASO in a breathless version of Debussy’s Claire de Lune. As in, I dared not breath during it, so as not to miss a single, perfect note. read more…
pictured: Chuck Leavell
Chuck Leavell, keyboard player for the Rolling Stones, will perform with Randall Bramlett in Athens, Ga., to benefit the Music Business Certificate Program at the University of Georgia (UGA). The program, a joint venture of the university’s schools of music and business, was created to prepare students to work in any field of the music industry.
The concert will be held Friday, May 1 at the Melting Point at 8 p.m. Music Business Program co-founder Bruce Burch hopes to raise $50,000. Prior to the concert, he will auction off a trip to Nashville and signed memorabilia, including a guitar signed by Chuck Leavell and Randall Bramblett.
A member of The Rolling Stones for the past 25 years, Leavell has played with some of the biggest names in the music business, including read more…
Photo by Michael Schwartz/WireImage
Don’t let Paula Poundstone kid you. The observational comic may say she “always loses,” but she’s got to be joking. Just days after she said that, she was the week’s champion on “Wait, Wait. . . Don’t Tell Me,” the NPR news quiz show where she is a regular contestant. The self-proclaimed “loser” bested Harvard graduate and journalist Mo Rocca and political satirist Adam Felber.
In addition to her regular travels to Chicago to serve as a panelist on “Wait, Wait,” Poundstone traverses the country performing about 100 shows a year at large venues and theaters. She is the recipient of two Cable ACE Awards, an Emmy, and the American Comedy Award for Best Female Stand-Up.
Poundstone began her comedy career in the late 1970s playing clubs around Boston. She soon moved to California where she pursued more opportunities, and was cast in a couple of movies. But although she originally dreamed of becoming a comedic actress like Lucille Ball or Carol Burnett, she found more success in stand-up comedy, and today appreciates read more…
The world premiere of Quiara Alegría Hudes’ “26 Miles,” premiering at The Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, presents the story of young Olivia’s broken family, her isolation, and the repair of her relationship with her father and mother.
Fifteen-year-old Olivia lives with her father, Aaron, and step-mother, who both are too self-involved to listen to her needs. After making herself sick, Olivia calls her mother, Beatriz, whom she hasn’t heard from or seen in nine years. The two plan to go for a short drive but end up taking a road trip from Pennsylvania to Wyoming. Her parents come to know precocious Olivia through the small magazine she self-publishes and through her journal, which describe her analyses of her life experiences.
The trip allows mother and daughter to finally get to know and love one another, and the father to appreciate his daughter once she returns. It also gives space to Beatriz’s relationship with her boyfriend, Manuel, who sees during her absence how much he needs her.
The set design, by Kat Conley, is simple and effective. So lifelike is her backdrop of projection images that during the Yellowstone Park scene a woman in the audience gasped and flinched when an elk seemed to suddenly dart in front of Beatriz’s car.
While all the acting is good, the highlight of the show is watching Olivia, portrayed by Bethany Anne Lind. Although her voice and body language portray a character much younger than a teenager, she brings every moment to life in a truthful and interesting manner.
Hudes’ plays have been performed around the nation. Her musical “In the Heights” won the 2008 Tony Award for Best Musical and her play “Elliot, a Soldier’s Fugue” was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
“26 Miles” runs through April 12.
Terry "Big T" Williams
Terry “Big T” Williams was named “Blues Guitar Player of the Year 2009” on Sunday, March 29, by the Bay Area Blues Society’s West Coast Hall Of Fame.
From the time he was born, in 1962, Big T was listening to the blues that poured forth from the radio at home where he lived with his parents and 15 siblings. His grandmother told him stories about her friends Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker. And he’d listen to musicians play at the home of Ike Turner, who lived just one block away.
At age 11, Big T met Johnny Billington, a renowned Delta blues musician and music teacher in need of a bass player. Billington put a bass in the young boy’s hands, and said he had been chosen read more…
Sue Mingus, widow of one of the all-time great bass players and composers, Charles Mingus, is doing all she can to carry on her late husband’s compositions consisting of more than 300 tunes. Having studied classical and jazz, Charles Mingus was at the forefront of avant-garde music. Ballet companies have danced to his music, and pop icons Joni Mitchell and Elvis Costello each individually partnered with him to play and write lyrics to his tunes.
Before he created his own band, Mingus toured with bands such as Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory, and Lionel Hampton, and recorded with the all-stars, including Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, and Duke Ellington.
Since his death at age 56 of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) in 1979, Sue has carried on his legacy, creating three separate Mingus bands devoted to playing the composer’s music. While any of the bands might tour throughout the year, The Charles Mingus Big Band will be playing April 4 in Atlanta at The Rialto Center for the Arts. It will also be giving a free master class.
Sue Mingus talked to me from her office in New York.
SA: I understand you have three read more…
Photo: Getty Images
One of the most popular comics on the circuit in the ‘70s, Robert Klein, is back on the road perfecting his act, preparing to tape his ninth HBO special. And at age 67, he’s still funny.
Klein performed two nights, March 24-25, at Atlanta’s most renowned comedy club, The Punchline, to an audience mainly of baby boomers.
Whether you have seen Klein live before, there are plenty of reasons to see him in your town: Foremost, he is a legend. Klein honed his craft at the premier training ground for comedic actors of his day, Chicago Second City, where he worked with Fred Willard and Peter Boyle. He has starred on Broadway, has penned an autobiography, “The Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue,” has hosted read more…
No one will ever match Sid Caesar’s portrayal of hundreds of comedic characters that he created on his sketch-comedy show with Imogene Coca in the 1950s, but Lance Krall comes mighty close. And just as TV hailed Caesar with his own show, so it does for Krall, as Vh1 launches the second season of “Free Radio,” which will run eight consecutive Thursdays at 11 p.m. beginning April 2.
Although in “Free Radio” Krall sticks to one character–versus the hundreds of them that he easily slides into in a heartbeat when he performs with an improv troupe–no one, not even Krall himself, knows what his self-titled character, Lance, will do. Playing a moronic morning radio host read more…
