| 23 July 2010
Hey Monday.
Music: Things might be a little soggy out there thanks to Tropical Storm Bonnie, but as of this writing, the Vans Warped Tour, 2010 edition, is set to hit the Cruzan Amphitheatre on Saturday for a day of bands and extreme sports. The skateboard company Vans, which launched this festival in 1995, welcomes 72 bands to this year’s tour, one of them being West Palm’s own Hey Monday. Lead singer Cassadee Pope, who’s just 20, has one of those big, powerful, keening female pop voices that seem so prevalent nowadays, and the band has built a steady fan base since forming out of Wellington High two years ago. The music starts at 12 p.m. Tickets are $31.93 and are available through Live Nation.
Weird Al Yankovic.
Or if your taste runs more to musical parody, you can catch Weird Al Yankovic on Saturday night at the Mizner Park Amphitheatre in Boca Raton. Yankovic has a had a successful career in a niche that’s very hard to sustain past initial novelty, and much of the credit for his longevity has to go to Yankovic’s basic musicianship and respect for the sources of his work. The concert starts at 8 p.m. Tickets range from $26.50-$46.50, and are available through Ticketmaster.
Earthquake 01.12.10, by Philippe Dodard.
Art: Haitian artist Philippe Dodard will be appearing Wednesday night as part of a new summer lecture series down at the Frost Art Museum on the campus of Florida International University in Miami. Dodard, born in 1954, studied in his native country and in France, and produces colorful, intense work – paintings, drawings and sculpture -- that he sees as spiritual reflections on the Caribbean and the African diaspora. Dodard will speak about his work during the lecture, which begins at 6 p.m. The event is free and open to the public. For more information, call 305-348-2890 or visit thefrost.fiu.edu.
A scene from The Kids Are All Right.
Film: Car chase and secret agent fans can wallow in the silliness of Salt -- the movie, not the condiment -- but if you want something smart about real people, try The Kids Are All Right, a family comedy that is genuinely funny without being jokey. It concerns a lesbian couple (Annette Bening and Julianne Moore) and their two well-adjusted teenage offspring, who have grown curious about the guy who donated the sperm that helped them come into the world. They probably should have left well enough alone, but meeting their biological dad, a footloose L.A. restaurateur (Mark Ruffalo) tests the family in unexpected ways.
Director/co-writer Lisa Choledenko (High Art, Laurel Canyon) gets some terrific performances from her cast, particularly Bening as the mom who is wound up too tight. In area theaters today. – H. Erstein
Barbara Bradshaw and Peter Haig in The Gin Game.
Theater: The official opening was postponed a week because of technical difficulties -- A playing card malfunction -- so Palm Beach Dramaworks unveils its summer production, D.L. Coburn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning dark comedy, The Gin Game, this weekend. This tale of two seniors who meet, spar and come to an understanding over a gin rummy grudge match at a seedy old age home never really deserved the Pulitzer, but it does have two terrific, juicy acting roles. There is every reason to believe area veterans Peter Haig and Barbara Bradshaw will devour them handily, under J. Barry Lewis’s direction. As long as the technical difficulties do not get in the way. Continuing through Aug. 15. Call (561) 514-4042 for tickets. – H. Erstein
| 22 July 2010
Michael Zager.
When Michael Zager founded the commercial music program at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton in 2002, it's unlikely that some students knew about the level of commercial success he'd achieved in the music industry.
Perhaps they know now. The 67-year-old professor and eminent scholar has had a 50-year career as a keyboardist, composer, producer, arranger and educator that includes 13 gold or platinum records and three instructional books.
The Passaic, N.J., native has also worked with jazz artists Herb Alpert, Joe Williams and Arturo Sandoval as well as R&B acts The Spinners, Luther Vandross and Peabo Bryson, written chart-topping hits, and discovered future six-time Grammy Award-winning singer Whitney Houston when she was only 14 years old.
“I was producing a record for her mother, Cissy Houston,” says Zager, who lives in Delray Beach with his wife (and has sons as old as some of his hit songs at ages 40, 37 and 33). “One of her background singers couldn't make the recording session. When I asked Cissy who she wanted to sub, she said her 14-year-old daughter, and I thought she was crazy. But Whitney came into the studio and seemed like she'd already been in the business for 40 years. I'd never heard anything like her, and had her sing on some of my own albums afterward.”
Some of Zager's original scores and recordings (with Houston, The Spinners, and his own self-titled band) are on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland. The professor's life experiences, as well as his multi-faceted musical education, helped to form the curriculum of his commercial music program.
“The goal is to produce graduates who are prepared for virtually every facet of the music industry as professionals,” Zager says. “We not only train them in the classroom, but we also have a professional record label, Hoot/Wisdom Recordings, so whatever they learn in class must be applied to a digital, globally distributed label. We have a creative track for students who want to be composers, arrangers and producers; a technology track for those who want to be engineers, and a business track for those who want to be executives. We also have two masters programs, one with a concentration on commercial music and the other focusing on music business administration."
“I got my master’s in commercial music at FAU in 2006,” says 46-year-old Israel Charles, a Fort Lauderdale-based composer, producer, drummer and educator. “Now I teach music technology and production at the performing arts wing of Dillard High School. It was great learning music production from Prof, and being able to make it my career. He talked to me at an educational conference in 2003, attracted me to his program, and was a great professor. I'd bring in mixes of songs that I thought were hot and ready to go, and he'd tell me what was missing and send me right back to the drawing board. He'd always find one or two elements that were needed, and he was always correct! Now I get the chance to show kids that knowledge in return, which is an awesome job.”
Zager was surprised to be hired full-time by FAU in the first place. A 1964 University of Miami graduate, he'd gone on to study at New York City institutions like Juilliard, the Manhattan School of Music and Mannes College of Music, a division of New School University. When he applied for a part-time position at FAU, administrators clearly knew about his history.
“I wasn't even a music major at Miami,” Zager says. “I loved warm weather; my grandparents were here then, and I studied to work in television, something that my oldest son ended up doing. He's a producer at Paramount. But I never wanted to go back to the cold weather.”
“I'd started teaching two courses in 1997 as an adjunct professor at the Mannes College of Music,” he continues, “back when I was a full-time composer and producer. But I wanted to move back down here and teach, and it was an accident that I got this full-time position. I really just came down here for an interview to teach a course as an adjunct professor.
“The vice president asked if I wanted to apply for my current position and it worked out, even though I'd never been a full-time academic. It was like ‘The Godfather’ in that they made me an offer I couldn't refuse. And it was the best decision I ever made to this point in my career.”
He'd certainly made some other good ones. Zager may not have planned to be in the music industry, but his career started rolling in 1968 as a member of the band Ten Wheel Drive -- horn-heavy contemporaries of Blood, Sweat & Tears and precursors to Chicago and Tower of Power. The keyboardist co-founded the group with guitarist Aram Schefrin, who now resides in Wellington. After a 1969 appearance at the Atlanta Pop Festival, the band was signed to Polydor Records, and released four albums by 1974 on either the Polydor or Capitol label.
“I was a jazz nut, and we were one of the early jazz-rock horn bands,” Zager says. “We got a record deal and became quite successful. But our management turned down Woodstock, or we might have been more successful. Although who knew then that Woodstock would be Woodstock? Once we saw what it turned into, that was our lowest point.”
Zager started composing for TV, radio, and films afterward, and built an impressive résumé that includes everything from IBM, Budweiser and Buick to Ally McBeal and the films The Eyes of Laura Mars and Summer of Sam. But the mid-1970s also produced a new musical trend called disco, something that Zager embraced wholeheartedly.
“I didn't know anything about disco,” he says. “My musical partner, Jerry Love, was the head of A&R at A&M Records in New York City at the time. When he left, we formed our production and publishing company in 1975, Love-Zager Productions, where he handles the business end and I handle the creative side. He started hanging out at Studio 54, and he said, ‘This disco thing is going to blow up, so let's make some dance records.’ I started listening to it and really liked it, right as it exploded. We ended up having hit after hit.”
The biggest was Let's All Chant by the Michael Zager Band, which reached No. 1 on the Billboard disco chart in 1978.
“I get more checks now for that song,” he says. “I sold more than five million copies of that record, and it's bigger than ever, especially outside of the United States. That's the case with most of my records. But I had a hit here with The Spinners called ‘Working My Way Back to You,’ and one with Peabo Bryson called ‘Do It With Feeling,’ which went to the top of the R&B charts.”
Disco may be a four-letter word to some music fans, but Zager is unabashedly unapologetic about the genre.
“Disco is bigger than ever now, but they just call it dance music or electronica,” he says. “What do you think Lady Gaga is? There's no difference, other than they're using synthesizers instead of orchestras. They use more tricks in the studios now. Look at the talent from that era. There were some of the greatest singers and musicians in the world recording disco.”
Most figures as successful as Zager don’t go back to school after topping the charts, but he checked his ego at the door of Mannes College between 1984 and 1988.
“I wanted to start film scoring and do big orchestrations, but I got scared that I didn't know enough,” he says. “So I went back to school and majored in composition. And this was after I'd been at Juilliard and the Manhattan School of Music, plus studied with Stephen Sondheim for several years.”
Zager’s students praise the professor for showing them the intricacies of the music biz.
“When you walk into Prof's office, you see gold and platinum records on the wall,” says Charles, “so the hardware speaks for itself. As a songwriter and producer, that's the same impact that you want to make on the music industry. He has so much practical experience to go with his knowledge that you just keep quiet, listen, and try to soak it all in. He let me produce my own 10-song CD as my thesis, since I wanted to do something hands-on rather than written.
“I got an area singer I was working with, Rachel Brown, to contribute vocals. After I graduated, I formed my own label. And one of those songs, ‘Let's Fall in Love Again,’ ended up going to No. 1 on the ‘Billboard’ hot R&B single sales chart.”
Zager is at work on a fourth educational book, plus producing a singer named Karina Skye. He even released his own independent smooth jazz CD called South Beach Wind a few years back. While some in the industry avoid South Florida because of its tourist-driven music scene, Zager shakes his head at his good fortune.
“I wasn't even familiar with FAU before Jerry Love told me about it,” he says. “It was one of those things that happens once in a lifetime. I love being here. My job as an eminent scholar is to stay very active professionally, so it's very fulfilling, especially when I see my students get out into the world and do well. It's a dream job.”
| 20 July 2010
Sandra Reaves-Phillips, Mississippi Charles Bevel, Felicia P. Fields and Gregory Porter in Low Down Dirty Blues.
Over the weekend, Florida Stage unveiled its new roomy, yet still cozy home at the Kravis Center’s Rinker Playhouse, inaugurated with a shapeless musical revue imported from Chicago, Low Down Dirty Blues.
The show is enormously entertaining, thanks largely to its powerhouse four-member cast, but as with last summer’s erroneously named Some Kind of Wonderful, the nation’s largest company devoted exclusively to new and developing work demonstrates that it is far less rigorous when it comes to showcasing musical material.
Low Down Dirty Blues plunks us down in a South Side Chicago blues club, ’round midnight, after the tourist trade that keeps requesting the same old, predictable songs has gone back to its hotels. That is when the local blues singers and musicians arrive to sing and play for each other, reaching for some of the bluer -- as in off-color -- blues numbers, revealing their affection for songs based in double entendres and innuendo.
Typical is My Handyman, growled and winked to perfection by Sandra Reaves-Phillips as Big Momma, proprietress of the club. As she sings the praises of a guy who can “churn my butter … cream my wheat,” we quickly understand that his real talents are not culinary. Reaves-Phillips gets the party started, lifting her voice in songs that are blue, but definitely not downbeat, as she keeps time with slaps on her beefy thighs.
She is soon joined by Mississippi Charles Bevel, a slight, dapper, low-key performer, adept at his acoustic guitar and a punch line, as he demonstrates on a number called Jelly Roll Baker. Next up is hulking Gregory Porter, who booms out the ominous Born Under a Bad Sign. All three are terrific, and yet they seem mere preface to the arrival of Felicia P. Fields, a mountainous woman with the sound to match. Fields, prominently in the original cast of The Color Purple, arrives announcing in song I Got My Mojo Workin’, and the spell she casts over the proceedings is palpable.
Low Down Dirty Blues was created by Randal Myler and Dan Wheetman, who also co-conceived the Tony Award-nominated It Ain’t Nothin’ But the Blues in 1999. The only dialogue between the 22 songs is a few biographical lines, taken from interviews with actual blues singers and dealt out here to the cast in an unpersuasive attempt at character development. There is plenty to enjoy in the musical numbers, but they never manage any dramatic synergy.
The first-rate sound bodes well for Florida Stage’s future in the space, though much of it is probably due to the acoustic design of Victoria DeIorio.
The attractive club set by Jack Magaw, decorated in regional beer paraphernalia, is located far from the three-sided audience, with a few club tables and chairs on the floor where subsequent plays will presumably be staged.
The Rinker in this new configuration has great potential for Florida Stage’s future, and Low Down Dirty Blues is likely to make the company plenty of new fans.
LOW DOWN DIRTY BLUES, Florida Stage at the Kravis Center’s Rinker Playhouse, 701 Okeechobee Blvd., West Palm Beach. Through Sunday, Sept. 5. Tickets: $47-$50. Call: (561) 585-3433 or (800) 514-3837.
* * *
Kevin Crawford and Heidi Harris in Macbeth.
Celebrating its 20th anniversary, Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival dips into the Bard’s bag and pulls out a bloody good crowd-pleaser, the tragedy of that ambitious, murderous Scot, Macbeth, a play the company debuted with and revisited 14 years ago.
Directing the production and playing the title role is Kevin Crawford, long the company’s best asset. His performance dominates the evening with his signature skill with the Elizabethan language, rendering the text with clarity and attention to the poetry.
In a reprise of the Festival’s production from 1996, Crawford is again partnered by Heidi Harris as his goading wife, who pushes him to take control of the political situation and realize the royal prophecy of the witches. In the intervening years, Crawford has grown burlier and Harris more buxom, but they still make a combustible couple, striking sparks of passion onstage while rendering these two towering roles with greater maturity and nuance.
Fourteen years ago, the festival was more inclined towards gimmick production concepts, and that previous Macbeth borrowed heavily -- and pointlessly -- from Braveheart, the hot movie of the day. Crawford places the new production in contemporary times, but is relatively restrained with references to the times.
True, Lady Macbeth first hears from her spouse by text message and the final showdown between Macbeth and Macduff is a duel by pistol rather than swordplay -- an update that drains the scene of its theatricality -- but otherwise the production is straightforward and conventional.
Concentrate on Crawford and Harris, because the performance quality drops off substantially when it comes to the supporting players. As Macbeth’s buddy Banquo, Andre Lancaster fights a losing battle with his lines of dialogue. You are unlikely to mind that his death renders him a mute ghost. Better are the three “weird sisters” -- Krys Parker, Trinna Pye and Greta von Unrue -- a trio of Goth babes who crawl about Daniel Gordon’s steeply raked stage. Either Crawford had a thematic notion or he was trying to save on salaries, but these witches keep popping up as members of Macbeth’s court and as his homicidal henchmen.
The festival is already crowing that its opening week set a new attendance record for Seabreeze Amphitheatre in Jupiter’s Carlin Park. For the past two decades, the company has become a fixture in the community and probably the main opportunity for many Palm Beach County residents to brush up their Shakespeare. That is commendable, but the troupe could still use a few more classically trained actors.
MACBETH, Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival at Seabreeze Amphitheatre, Carlin Park, A1A and Indiantown Road, Jupiter. Through Sunday, July 25. Tickets: Free, donations accepted. Call: (561) 575-7336.
| 18 July 2010
Louis XIV, king of France and Navarre (1638-1715).
In the days when Louis XIV was an actual presence and not merely the name of a favorite rococo interior design fashion, the faithful gathered in churches for communion with the Almighty but also for music, for the sound of a pure, unclouded voice ascending into the severe angles of a sacred space.
That very same experience, without the king, was that of an audience Saturday night at All Saints Episcopal Church in Fort Lauderdale, as two sopranos and an organist presented an hour of early 18th-century devotional music by two major French composers. This concert (called The Court of the Sun King: Music From Versailles), one in a series of summer events from Miami’s Seraphic Fire chorus, offered intensity and beauty in equal measure.
Sopranos Kathryn Mueller and Rebecca Duren, accompanied by Seraphic Fire founder Patrick Dupré Quigley at the petit orgue, performed four motets by Louis-Nicolas Clérambault and the three Leçons de Ténèbre of François Couperin. This is unadorned music despite its ornaments, a kind of Baroque style that has greater affinity with the plain sources of the Catholic liturgy than it does the powdered wigs of Versailles.
Kathryn Mueller.
Mueller and Duren, both members of Seraphic Fire, have similar voices that are admirably suited for Baroque music. There is a clear, open quality to both of these singers’ instruments that is particularly impressive in the upper registers, where nary a vibrato wobble or sign of strain was heard. Mueller’s voice is slightly larger, rounder and more powerful than Duren’s, but both women sang beautifully, and demonstrated first-rate diction and high musical intelligence as well.
The program was sung without intermission, and began with the four Clérambault motets, the first in honor of the king (which by 1733, when these motets were published, was Louis XV), and the other three for the Virgin, Christmas, and Holy Tuesday. Clérambault’s style is very much of its time, though he also writes with some attractive variety, and his basic harmonic layout is less relentless than that of Couperin, which might have something to do with his being the younger man.
Duren’s ability to sing with a smoothness of line was readily apparent in the Motet de la Sainte Vierge (one of several Clérambault composed), and Mueller’s ease in the higher reaches of her voice was much in evidence during the Motet pour le jour de Noël. Both sopranos could be heard trading between higher and lower parts when singing together, with scarcely a noticeable difference, and during the Motet pour le Mardy de la Quinquagezime, they blended with exemplary loveliness at the words beginning Domine est salus.
Quigley, as always, made an expert accompanist, supporting and following his singers, and during the Christmas motet showing his usual engagement with the music by bobbing along in rhythm to the joyous text and music.
The three Tenebrae lessons of Couperin, written for Holy Wednesday in 1714, are with his books of keyboard Ordres his most celebrated works, and they are good examples of the vividness of Couperin’s musical language. Each of the initial melismatic settings of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet set a fresh color for the verses to follow, and the singers and Quigley were careful to bring it out.
Rebecca Duren.
This is demanding listening, with its spare performing forces and deeply pious focus adding to the challenge of its particular aural archaisms, but it repaid the effort with a shared concentration that was most noticeable during the interior pauses and the breaks between the separate lessons. Again, the crystalline clarity of the women’s voices was paramount, with Mueller showing this effectively in the long held note on the words ejus gementes in the Daleth section of the first lesson.
Duren’s purity of tone and trilling skill gave polish and nobility to the second lesson, and in the third, the climbing, sweetly clashing notes of both singers added a yearning quality that was quite attractive. At the end, too, Mueller and Duren had to leap into the upper reaches for a key passage, and both handled it with plenty of muscle to spare.
This was in some ways music only for the connoisseur, but the large audience at All Saints was deeply attentive throughout and amply appreciative at the close. Seraphic Fire and other area musical organizations have had a good run in the past year or so with explorations of the Baroque repertoire, and this visit to the world of French monarchism at its height marks another fine event in that series.
This program will be repeated this afternoon at Miami Beach Community Church in Miami Beach. The concert begins at 4 p.m. Tickets are $30 and are available at the door, through www.seraphicfire.org, or by calling (888) 544-FIRE (3473).
| 18 July 2010
The cast of Broward Stage Door's 'The Drowsy Chaperone.'
Broward Stage Door Theatre has a tendency to overreach with its musicals, biting off a beloved, not-quite elaborate show and not quite delivering on the pleasures we once enjoyed with it.
Now, however, it is presenting a modest little show, the intermission-less The Drowsy Chaperone, a multiple Tony Award winner from 2006 that is bound to be new to most of its audience, and renders it very capably with just the right touches of affection and whimsy.
Much of the credit goes to the company’s former artistic director, Dan Kelley, who stages the production deftly with a perpetual wink as well as playing the show’s central character, known simply as Man in Chair, with complete commitment to his musical comedy world. Every now and then one sees an ideal match of performer and role like this. If Man in Chair were not written as a wedding gift for Bob Martin, one of the show’s co-authors, you would swear it was tailor-made for Kelley, fluttery hands and sly comic takes and all.
You see, Man in Chair is an avid fan of musicals, preferably from an earlier era, long before they were lazy copies of popular movies or before Elton John began attempting to pen theater songs. And when he feels a little blue, nothing brings him out of his funk like putting on a record -- yes, a vinyl record -- of a cherished, bygone, fictitious show from the 1920s, like Gable and Stine’s The Drowsy Chaperone. And as he narrates and annotates the show, it comes to life in his otherwise drab apartment.
As students of musical theater know, shows from the ’20s were one degree removed from vaudeville, a series of specialty numbers for variety performers that were barely connected to a storyline. Dramatic logic was beside the point and that is the world that The Drowsy Chaperone -- the show, not the show-within-the-show -- celebrates.
The plot, such as it is, concerns the imminent wedding of celebrated stage star Janet Van De Graff, who is about to make the supreme sacrifice of giving up her career for domestic life with her beau, Robert Martin. Trying to prevent the nuptials is her producer, who would hate to lose such a lucrative meal ticket.
For no particular reason other than daffiness, the groom is soon careening about the stage, blindfolded and on roller skates. Perhaps it is a metaphor for marriage. In any rate, the stage is soon filled with pun-slinging gangsters posing as bakers, the title tipsy matron charged with looking after the bride, a dense, but harmless Latin Lothario, a ditsy dowager prone to spit takes and a few other stray comic types.
The Tony-winning score by Broadway newcomers Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison is well attuned to the sound of the period and highly democratic in the way it provides everyone -- even a barnstorming aviatrix, so tangential to the show, she should have bought a ticket to get in -- with a spotlight number.
Among the standouts are Laura Oldman (Janet), who opening anti-want song, Show-Off, puts her through a dizzying display of narcissistic talents, from plate-spinning to snake-charming to ventriloquism. Matt Ban’s Adolpho is, by necessity, broad, but he earns his laughs with surprisingly precise comic timing. And Kelley is truly ideal as Man in Chair, holding together the mayhem with an effortless hand while supplying the show’s emotional heart.
The ever-inventive Chrissi Ardito supplies the vintage feel-good choreography, Ardean Landhuis gives solid support with his scenic design and lighting and David Nagy’s music direction is adroit, although the orchestra is pre-recorded.
The Drowsy Chaperone is not a great show for the ages. It seems unlikely that Man in Chair’s great-grandson will be listening to it 80 years from now. But it is a lot of fun, and Kelley’s production delivers on every wacky bit of schtick it contains.
THE DROWSY CHAPERONE, Broward Stage Door Theatre, 8036 W. Sample Road, Coral Springs. Through July 25. Tickets: $38-$42. Call: (954) 344-7765.
