Category Archives: Theater

Celebrate the 4th of July with Stew and Dan Zanes

Posted on July 3, 2010 | Leave a comment

Dan Zanes.

Stew, of The Negro Problem and Passing Strange, has a lot on his plate these days, what with a new Shakespeare score being performed in Connecticut right now, a couple of musicals in the pipeline and some concert appearances. All of that is in the news section on the left side of Stew’s homepage.

Heidi Rodewald and Stew. (Copyright 2009, Steven P. Marsh)

For all the Stew completists who read Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?, tomorrow is the most important upcoming date. Stew is one of the “special guests” at the FREE Dan Zanes Jam & Jubilee, The Battery 4th of July Concert and Family Festival, presented by River To River in Battery Park.

Gates open at 1 p.m., with festivities kicking off an hour later. You can spend the day in Battery Park, dancing to the rhythms of La Cumbiamba eNeYe and singing along to Dan’s brand of Broadway classics! In addition to Stew, guests include spoken word poet Caridad De La Luz (La Bruja) and Joan Osborn.

You can even participate in the fun, as musicians of all ages are invited to perform 76 Trombones in a spectacular 4th of July Parade! You can download the sheet music and get detailed information on the festival website.

It should be a blast!

Victor Williams is Othello in the Shakespeare on the Sound production, with songs and music by Stew and Heidi Rodewald.

Meanwhile, if you haven’t been to Connecticut to see Othello, directed by Joanna Settle with songs and music by Stew and his longtime partner Heidi Rodewald, there’s still time.

Shakespeare on the Sound‘s Othello is performed outdoors at 7:30 nightly (except Monday) through July 11 at Baldwin Park, 100 Arch St., in Greenwich, Conn. While Stew and Heidi don’t perform live, you’ll get the full impact of their work on the recorded backing tracks and live singing by the actors. Last year Stew scored A Midsummer Night’s Dream for SotS, and is was fantastic.

Seating is on the ground around the stage, so be sure to bring blankets or low chairs (nothing that would block the view of people seated behind you) for comfort. Or if you want to go first class, you can fork over a $50 donation for a reserved seat in on of SotS’s chairs.

And why not arrive early and turn it into dinner theater! It’s a great spot for a picnic before the show. There is a concession stand selling decent food and beverages, including wine and beer.

Admission is by donation. You could walk through the gate without paying a dime, but that just wouldn’t be right. Show your support for Stew and Heidi by dropping a donation at the gate. $20 per person is suggested, but more or less is just fine.

nically free, but donations are expected at the gae.

The park is right on the Long Island Sound and within walking distance of the Metro-North station. It’s a beautiful setting, easily accessible from NYC. Click here for transit info.

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Posted in Concerts, Folk, Free, Music, News, Pop and Rock, Recordings, Theater

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The Bill Murray Experience: No, not that Bill Murray, but quite an experience!

Posted on June 26, 2010 | 1 comment
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The Bill Murray Experience at The Cupping Room Cafe on June 25. (Copyright 2010, Steven P. Marsh)

Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? knew nothing about The Bill Murray Experience until a couple of days ago, when the old-timey New York City based band was featured in this New York Post video about Play Me, I’m Yours, the art project that has put 60 pianos — available for anyone to play — in public places around New York City.

But it was love at first sight — and sound! Singer Jessy Carolina has an amazingly bluesy voice and her bandmates — Horatio Baltz on lead guitar, Jay Sanford on upright bass and the irrepressible Blind Boy Paxton on banjo — provide the perfect setting for it. It’s a new generation tackling early American roots music, jazz and pop standards from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It’s repertoire that has been a rich source over the years for artists like Leon Redbone, with tunes like “My Melancholy Baby” and “I Ain’t Got Nobody.”

How we’ve missed them is a mystery. They are fantastic, and proved it last night in performance before a small and not entirely attentive crowd at The Cupping Room Cafe at West Broadway and Broome streets in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood.

Peter Stampfel, of Holy Modal Rounders fame, knows a thing or two about this kind of music. And he sums up the band’s primary appeal quite well — it’s Jessy’s emotive and engaging singing. “She doesn’t sing songs as much as she embodies them. Her singing and moves are both about as good as it gets,” Stampfel says.

But Jessy needs the rest of the band to pull it off. Her interplay with the players — especially the jovial, overall-wearing Paxton — is charming adds so much to the overall feel of the performance.

BME plays around NYC quite a bit, at places like the “secret” Shanghai Mermaid, 893 Bergen St., Brooklyn, where they play at 9 tonight, June 26 and at the Jalopy Theater, 315 Columbia St., Red Hook, Brooklyn, where they’re performing at 8 p.m. Monday, June 28.

Here’s a clip of the band that gives you great sense of its joyous, freewheeling style at a June 20 show at the Main Street Museum in White River Junction, Vt.

Of course any band that takes Bill Murray’s name in vain has to evoke Murray’s spot in Jim Jarmusch’s 2003 film Coffee and Cigarettes. Remember “Bill Groundhog Day, Ghostbustin’ ass Murray”? How could you forget? We’ll leave you with that:

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Posted in Blues, Folk, Jazz, Music, News, Pop and Rock, Theater

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Stew, Heidi and The Negro Problem in world premiere at BAM

Posted on May 29, 2010 | Leave a comment

Heidi Rodewald and Stew, creators of Broadway's Passing Strange, return to the stage this October. (Copyright 2009, Steven P. Marsh)

Stew and Heidi Rodewald, the creators of Broadway’s cult favorite Passing Strange, and this season’s Making It at St. Ann’s Warehouse will be back on the boards this fall with a show as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival.

Stew in "Making It" at St. Ann's Warehouse in February. (Copyright 2010, Steven P. Marsh)

The show, called Brooklyn Omnibus, is billed as a 75-minute song cycle about the borough that Stew calls his part-time home (his girlfriend and their child live there) and where Heidi seems to have settled full-time. It’s scheduled to run Oct. 20-23.

Interestingly, the performers are listed as “Stew & The Negro Problem,” which could signal a return to form for the longtime collaborators. They’ve billed most of their band efforts in recent years as The Broadway Problem, or some other — I daresay more politically correct — variation on their original band name.

Stay tuned for more details!

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Kelly Flint’s fourth act

Posted on May 6, 2010 | Leave a comment

Kelly Flint

If you remember the great NYC lounge band Dave’s True Story, you know Kelly Flint, the flame-haired singer, who doubled as the band’s smoldering sex symbol (apologies to frontman Dave Cantor and bass player Jeff Eyrich).

Late in DTS’s history, Kelly, who’s married to Jeff, gave birth to Ben, their beautiful son. Then she started performing as a singer-songwriter, moving into a very simple, confessional sort of performing — just girl and her guitar, sometimes with bass backing — which was something she has told me she had wanted to do for years.

But now comes the lovely Kelly’s fourth act, as an actress.

She hit the stage of Manhattan Repertory Theatre last night, and will appear again tonight and tomorrow, in a staging of Man on the Moon, a play by William Holland. It’s one of two works in Manhattan Rep’s Spring Play Festival 2010. Kelly’s not giving any clues about her character in the play, but she does have the female lead. I wish I could get there to see her make what surely will be a star turn. But I’m already booked elsewhere for all her performances.

If you go, please let your fellow Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? readers know what it was like by sending in a full report.

Doors open at 8:30 pm and the show starts at 8:45, running an hour. Manhattan Rep Theater, 303 West 42nd St., 3rd Floor. $20 cash. Rservations: (646) 329-6588.

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Posted in Folk, Jazz, Music, News, Theater

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Dance to Afrobeat at Midsummer Night Swing

Posted on April 15, 2010 | Leave a comment

Lincoln Center (Copyright 2010, Steven P. Marsh)

If the smash Broadway musical Fela! gave you the itch to hear more Afrobeat music, Lincoln Center’s Midsummer Night Swing lineup for this summer, announced today, will help you scratch it. Fela Kuti’s son Femi and his band Positive Force are scheduled to perform on July 12, with a a lesson in how to dance to the driving African beat taught by Maija Garcia, associate choreographer of the musical and a DJ set by Sahr Ngaujah, the actor who created the title role in Fela!

Femi Kuti

And if Afrobeat’s not your cup of tea, there are plenty of other styles of music and dance on offer during the 15 nights of performances at Lincoln Center’s Damrosch Park.

The cutting-edge programming by Lincoln Center Director of Public Programming Bill Bragin features the New York debuts of four bands: narcotango from Argentina, The Time Jumpers from Nashville, New Orleans’ Moonshiners, and Salsa Band La-33 from Columbia.

Bragin says: “The series offers an array of dance music styles including salsa, swing, disco, and tango.  For the first time this summer we are presenting a night of bhangra, the frenetic, hypnotic dance music from India by way of London and New York.  Famed DJ Rekha will spin bhangra and Bollywood beats with her special guest Red Baraat for a dance party like no other on July 8th.  Another highlight will be an appearance by Femi Kuti & Positive Force on July 12th.  Kuti, the son of Fela Anikulapo Kuti of FELA! on Broadway fame, extends the tradition with his contemporary Afrobeat sound.”

The shows start at 6:30 pm with a dance lesson, followed by live music and dancing from 7:30-10.

Tickets and passes are on sale now. Multi-evening Swing Passes are priced at $90 for six nights, and $160 for the full season.  Tickets for individual evening events are $17.

The Swing box office is located in the lobby of Avery Fisher Hall, Broadway and 65th Street. Tickets for individual events and passes can be purchased in advance or on the night of the event at a box office in Damrosch Park.  Tickets and passes can also be purchased through CenterCharge at (212) 721-6500, or online. Twitter users can follow Midsummer Night Swing  @LCSwing for ongoing news and updates.

Click through to the jump for more info and the full lineup: Continue reading →

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Posted in Dance, Music, News, Pop and Rock, Theater, World Music

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Missy Mazzoli’s making an uproar

Posted on February 25, 2010 | Leave a comment

Composer and performer Missy Mazzoli. (Photo by Stephen Taylor)

Composer Missy Mazzoli‘s having a great year — and it’s only February. She’s been working hard to get her music heard, and it’s really coming together.

Tomorrow night and Sunday, her chamber opera Song from the Uproar is being performed by students from the Bard College Conservatory of Music Graduate Vocal Arts Program, run by the estimable soprano Dawn Upshaw. It’s part of an opera triple bill, which also includes Vinkensport, or The Finch Opera, a world premiere by David T. Little, and L’Enfant et les sortilèges by Maurice Ravel  in the amazing Sosnoff Theater on the Bard College campus in Annandale-on-Hudson. For more info about those shows and to buy tickets, priced from $20-$75, click here. If you’re willing to take a randomly assigned seat, you can pay just $10 by clicking here and using the password “triplebill.”

The lyrical piece examines the life of 19th Century Swiss explorer Isabelle Eberhardt, with text inspired by and responding to her journals, which Missy set to music for soprano and small ensemble, against a backdrop of film by Stephen Taylor. A 40-minute version of the piece presented last May at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn was enchanting and provocative entertainment.

Missy’s opera will be heard again in New York City in the spring, when it’s presented as part of New York City Opera’s Vox showcase of new operas. Although Vox hasn’t formally announced its season yet, Time Out New York‘s Olivia Giovetti reveals in an interview with Missy that it’ll be held April 30 and May 1 this year. Although the venue has not been announced, Vox has been presented for the past four years at Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at New York University.

Missy Mazzoli and her quintet Victoire.

Then, in her rock-club guise as leader of the quintet Victoire, Missy will be performing in March and April with American Composers Orchestra.

The first show is at 4 pm Sunday, March 21, at Dweck Center at the Brooklyn Public Library, Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn.  Admission is free. Call (718) 230-2100 or click on www.brooklynpubliclibrary.org for more information.

The second show (on a bill also featuring Arp & Anthony Moore) is presented as part of the Wordless Music Series at 7:30 pm on Wednesday, April 7 at (Le) Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker Street, Manhattan.  Tickets are  $15. Call (212) 505-FISH or click here.

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Posted in Classical, Music, News, Opera, Pop and Rock, Theater

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EXCLUSIVE: How you can attend a reading of The Last Goodbye

Posted on February 23, 2010 | 1 comment

[picapp align=”none” wrap=”false” link=”term=jeff+buckley&iid=5553490″ src=”3/8/3/4/A_Wished_For_599e.jpg?adImageId=10652850&imageId=5553490″ width=”436″ height=”594″ /]

Daily Variety reported last night that The Last Goodbye, New York director Michael Kimmel’s musical play pairing Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet with the music of Jeff Buckley, is headed to the stage next season. The item also said there would be a developmental reading in NYC soon. What Variety didn’t tell you is when that reading will be and how you can attend. But Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? has those answers for you exclusively.

The reading will be held at 2 pm on Friday, March 12. The New York City venue hasn’t been named yet, though the creative team will have that finalized soon.

As for getting tickets, it’s a bit of a crap shoot, but the rules are simple: Just drop an email, including your full name, email address and telephone number to newsletter@jeffbuckley.com by 12 am ET on March 1. That will put you in the running for a free pair of tickets.

I’ve been a huge fan of Jeff’s work for ages. After I saw the concert version of this show at Joe’s Pub last year, I wrote that it blew my mind and I couldn’t wait to see it develop. That time is fast approaching!

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The new Stew review, comin’ right at you!

Posted on February 22, 2010 | Leave a comment

Stew in his breakup show, "Making It," at St. Ann's Warehouse on Feb. 21. (Copyright 2010, Steven P. Marsh)

I avoided reading reviews of Stew and Heidi Rodewald‘s new show, Making It, playing  at St. Ann’s Warehouse through tomorrow night. I wanted to go to tonight’s show with fresh, unsullied eyes, ears and mind.

But somehow I just couldn’t resist. And then, once I read the pan by Jon Caramanica, I just knew Stew had to have had something to say about it on his blog. Stew goes in fits and starts, but recently he’s been taking to the blog to set the record straight about inaccuracies in things that have been written about his work. And boy, he didn’t disappoint with his response to Caramanica. He wrote  a highly entertaining, deliciously acerbic post that you can read for yourself by clicking here. (One inaccuracy that Stew didn’t correct in The New York Times review is the tagline that said  the show “continues through Sunday,” it has another performance tomorrow (Monday) night. Has the Times‘ fact-checking  department been eliminated?)

Bottom line here, is that everybody’s entitled to an opinion. But I couldn’t disagree with Caramanica more. Stew’s response may have been rather, ummm, emotional (understandably), but he’s still right. I don’t know what Caramanica was seeing the night he reviewed the show, but he must not have seen the show I saw tonight.

Sure, Making It is not Passing Strange. But it doesn’t pretend to be. It’s a document of a breakup — somewhat fictionalized, like every good work of art— presented in the form of a staged concert. And it rocks!

If you want to see this show, you are probably out of luck. The last show is tomorrow (Monday, Feb. 22) night, and as of a couple of minutes ago, there were only three seats left, priced at $78 apiece. But don’t take my word for it, check out the St. Ann’s Warehouse  web site. If you do get to see it, you’ll be glad you made the effort. It is an amazing show.

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Stew sez: The Negro Problem is touring this fall!

Posted on February 8, 2010 | Leave a comment

Stew and Heidi perform as The Broadway Problem at Lincoln Center Out of Doors last summer. (Copyright 2009, Steven P. Marsh)

Deep in his critique of the New York Magazine‘s piece about his upcoming show Making It, composer and bon vivant Stew lets drop a little bomb that is sure to please his fans, especially those outside of New York City: “The Negro Problem will be on tour this Fall.”

Stew, is that a promise? Or a tease? Let’s hope it’s the former.

Some form of The Negro Problem —  with Stew and Heidi Rodewald at the core but under names like The Broadway Problem — has played around NYC in the last year. But fans elsewhere have had to rely on the movie version of Passing Strange (on the big screen, on PBS, On Deman, or on DVD) to get anything resembling a TNP fix. So this is nothing but good news.

More on Making It, which begins its six-show run at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Dumbo, Brooklyn on Feb. 17, will follow. I just wanted to get this tidbit on the table.

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Posted in Music, News, Pop and Rock, Punk, Theater

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In the Heights headed to the silver screen

Posted on December 15, 2009 | 1 comment

Lin-Manuel Miranda (center, wearing cap), who created and composed In the Heights, is set to reprise his starring role as Usnavi in the big-screen version.

The New York-themed hit Broadway musical In the Heights will follow in the cinematic footsteps of its contemporary, Passing Strange, with a film adaptation.

The Hollywood Reporter says the movie will be directed by Kenny Ortega, the director of the High School Musical movies and Michael Jackson’s This Is It. No dates have been announced.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, who created and composed the show about three days in the lives of neighbors in NYC’s Washington Heights section, is starring and producing the movie. Quiara Alegria Hudes, who wrote the book for the musical, is writing the script. Lin-Manuel originated the starring role of Usnavi in the off-Broadway production, and opened in the show when it transferred to Broadway.

In keeping with a trend on Broadway, a movie star — Corbin Bleu of High School Musical — is set to take over the show’s starring role starting Jan. 25.

In the Heights was nominated for 13 Tony awards in 2008, and won for best new musical. Passing Strange got seven 2008 Tony nods, and won best book of a musical.

This is just the latest parallel between theatrical classmates Heights and PS, both of which were staged off-Broadway to great acclaim in 2007 and transferred to Broadway in 2008. NYC-themed Heights won the East Coast-West Coast battle against PS, which tells the story of a black man growing up in Los Angeles. Heights, which had its first Broadway performance a week after Passing Strange transferred, remains open, while PS closed on July 20, 2008, after 186 performances during a six-month run.

Director Spike Lee, a Strange Freak (a term used to describe the most devoted Passing Strange fans), filmed the final performances of PS. His film — a relatively low-buget record of the stage show with few grand cinematic tricks — was released earlier this year. The Heights movie is being billed as an “adaptation,” which suggests a slicker, big-budget project complete with location shots. Heights struck me from Day One as an updated West Side Story, and this approach to making the film seems likely to underscore the comparison.

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Posted in Movies, Music, News, Theater

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