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4/19: RENT Controlled ‘n Ready
April 19, 2012
Original Broadway cast members of RENT, Adam Pascal and Anthony Rapp perform both solo and in tandem in a Saturday night concert event at Monmouth University.
We spoke of many things — of baseball (esp. the Cubs and the Mets) and Spider-Man; of a band named XTC, and what it’s like to have a father in law who won the Nobel Prize. We even found a few moments to speak of a little phenom called Rent.
Illinois native Anthony Rapp was already a seasoned veteran of the stage (at age ten, he played the title role in the ill-fated musical The Little Prince) and screen (Adventures in Babysitting, Dazed and Confused) — and Adam Pascal was a native New Yorker whose only stage experience was in fronting a band called Mute — when the two became castmates (and their characters became roommates) in a show that did nothing less than change the face of latter-day Broadway.
Set in the once-forgotten but fast-transitioning landscape of Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the AIDS-ravaged 1980s, Jonathan Larson’s magnum opus borrowed the framework of Puccini’s La Boheme for a production that would win a fistful of Tonys AND a Pulitzer (not to mention a whole new generation of diehard Rentheads), fueled by real grass-roots buzz and the mind-bogglingly sudden death of its creator on the eve of the show’s first preview.
In the original cast of the 1996 Off Broadway premiere and its Broadway incarnation later that same year — a cast that also boasted Idina Menzel, Taye Diggs and Law & Order‘s Jesse L. Martin — Pascal played Roger Davis, the HIV-positive musician, with Rapp as Mark Cohen, Roger’s filmmaker friend and roomie (the two roles were riffs on Boheme‘s Rodolfo and Marcello).
The actors would eventually go their own ways — Anthony would come out and advocate tirelessly for LGBT rights, while Adam would “marry up” and form a partnership with playwright and superstar cookbook author Cybele Pascal (prominent in the food allergy community, and daughter to the Nobel-winning Eric Chivian). And, while the show would launch the Broadway careers of the two young stars in earnest (Pascal would play lead roles in the Elton John-Tim Rice Aida, in David (Bon Jovi) Bryan’s Memphis, and in the 1998 revival of Kander & Ebb’s Cabaret; Rapp would essay the title role in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown), it would also draw the Adam & Anthony team back together for the 2005 film version, and a 2009 tour.
On Saturday night, April 21, the colleagues reunite once more, in a concert presented under the name Adam Pascal and Anthony Rapp: Original Stars of Broadway’s RENT — a touring production that comes to Monmouth University‘s Pollak Theatre for one 8pm show.
The three-part program is set to kick off with Pascal performing with his three-piece combo “Me & Larry,” a project that finds the singer adding his powerhouse vocals (as well as his underrated guitar and bass skills) to pianist Larry Edoff’s bold sound in a set that draws from their album Blinding Light, with some eye-opening new takes on some familiar showtune standards, to boot.
Rapp, who documented his own voyage through life and Rent in his memoir Without You, will be performing a mix of savvy originals and surprising covers with his own five piece band — and the two co-headliners team up again for the concert’s climactic segment, an interlude in which the stars share stories and signature songs from that most game-changing (and career-defining) of shows.
UpperWETside spoke to Adam and Anthony separately, and in that order. What follows is a merry mashup of those back-to-back phone conversations.
2/23: Cowboys, Cukes, Bachelors ‘n Blues
February 23, 2012
Upstairs, Downstairs: In a career that presaged the whole Ameri-cousticana thing, Cowboy Junkies have had their share of…well, you know…but when they hit Monmouth U on Friday night, they’ll be bringing some delightful stylistic swerves from just this side of No-Mad’s Land…
It’s no exaggeration to suggest that it took an obscure band from Canada, recording with a single microphone in an old church, to chart a new course for American music in the new millennium. That the band was rather casually named Cowboy Junkies should never detract from the seriousness of the accomplishment.
Arriving as it did in the thick of a decade defined by synth drums, moussed hair and video playlists, 1988’s double platinum album The Trinity Session came as a breath of cool and refreshing air, from a place where “roots” didn’t necessarily refer to a problem for one’s stylist to address.
On Trinity, the Ontario-based Junkies — siblings Margo, Michael and Peter Timmins on vocals, guitar and drums respectively, plus Alan Anton on bass — brought a deceptively simple, quiet power to a set of originals and covers that ranged from Hank Williams and Patsy Cline to the Velvet Underground; propelling their next four albums to gold or platinum status, and helping to blaze a trail for the back-to-basics Americana musical movement of the 21st century.
Still together in its original lineup, the band has logged many miles on the road and issued many more releases on its own Latent Records label — including 2007’s Trinity Revisited, a new version of the breakthrough album recorded with guests that included Ryan Adams and Natalie Merchant. In 2010, the members of Cowboy Junkies embarked on an ambitious, four-album project entitled The Nomad Series — a cycle of self-released works that includes an entire set of songs by the late Vic Chesnutt (Demons) and the surprisingly hard-edged, electric Sing in My Meadow. Really, at a time when a new hypie generation trips over itself to come off Rootsier Than Thou, the folks who pretty much started this whole thing have taken a turn for the Sonic Youth side of the street.
Just days before the scheduled release of The Wilderness, the fourth and final entry in the series — the musical nomads from Toronto journey to the West Long Branch campus of Monmouth University, for an 8pm performance on the stage of the Pollak Theatre this Friday night, Feb the 24.
Presented by the Center for the Arts at Monmouth as part of the 2011-2012 Performing Arts series, the concert will showcase numbers from the new, all original set of songs; many of which have been part of the band’s live sets in recent years (and several of which are said to have been inspired by Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead).
With the core quartet joined by multi-instrumentalist Jeff Bird, audience members can expect an evening that runs the gamut from the folky intimacy of the band’s earliest efforts, to an always surprising selection of covers (Springsteen, Stones, Talking Heads, The Cure) to the “acid blues” and sonic experiments of recent seasons — although to be sure, delivering “the expected” has never been part of the Cowboy Junkies playbook. Pollak Theatre at Monmouth University, Cedar and Norwood Aves., West Long Branch • Friday 2/24 at 8pm/ $35 – $55
But why stop there? Flip the rekkid over for MORE picks toward the weekend ahead…
2/12: Dropping In, with Chocolates
February 12, 2012
Everything old is new again — and so’s the Carolina Chocolate Drops, the new lineup of which (Dom Flemons, Rhiannon Giddens and Hubby Jenkins, with guest cellist Leyla McCalla absent on picture day) visits the Pollak Theatre at Monmouth U on February 17.
Carolina Chocolate Drops, you had us with the spoons. Or was it the bones? The jugs? The quills?
Whatever. Just because a band gets period-precise (or rummages the kitchen junk drawer) in pursuit of an authentic “old timey” sound doesn’t make them any less than hypercurrent — provided the music is purveyed in the raucous spirit of a fruitjar corn-squeezins barndance shivaree, rather than a sleepy sermon or a fusty lecture.
Rest assured that the Chocolate Drops are THAT old-timey, thanks to their collective scholarly specialty — the black string band/ jug band music that began to capture the nation’s fancy right around the time that scratchy radios and 78 rpm Victrola records started replacing battered pianos and sheet music in American homes. Call it “dirt floor music” — but reckon that a dirt floor can be a firm foundation on which to construct a happy house made up of field-recording folk, crossroads blues, hayride bluegrass and speakeasy jazz, with a permit posted for new additions like hipster alt-country and houseparty hip-hop.
And yeah, the Chocolate Drops are THAT new-fangled, thanks to a deft mastery of social media and post-musicbiz meltdown marketing — a DIY savvy that’s allowed the Piedmont-spawned combo to top the Billboards, play the Grand Old Opry (first black string band EVER to do so, if you can believe that) and win a Grammy for their 2010 major label debut Genuine Negro Jig, nary five years from the time that founders Dom Flemons, Rhiannon Giddens and Justin Robinson first made each other’s acquaintance via a Yahoo group.
They’ve even got a new lineup — with NYC-based multi-instrumentalizer Hubby Jenkins replacing Robinson in the core trio — and it’s this troupe of troubadors (augmented by cellist Leyla McCalla) that visits the Upper Wet Side for the first time on Friday night, February 17, for a concert at Monmouth University‘s Pollak Theatre.
The 8pm show — for which the opening act is the hot ‘n spicy bluegrass blueplate specialties of the Brooklyn-bred M Shanghai String Band (look here for our past interview with Monmouth County mandolin master Richard Morris) — occurs just under two weeks in front of the “drop date” for Leaving Eden, the band’s followup release on the Nonesuch label and the first recorded evidence of the current CCD configuration.
Recorded in the home studio of lately legendary Americana-man Buddy Miller — producer of Solomon Burke’s Nashville and some seminal sessions by Patty Griffin, Emmylou Harris and Robert Plant — Leaving Eden finds the Carolina Chocolate Drops fortified by McCalla plus human beatbox (and occasional tourmate) Adam Matta for a set of fifteen chestnuts and original seedlings that run a gamut and a gauntlet between instrumental and a capella; mournful plaints of loss and gleeful declarations of independence; barndance breakdowns and rocking-chair reveries.
We got an advance listen to this warm and inviting (but still playfully boundary-busting) platter, and we dug especially the band’s driving rip through the high-mileage hillbilly chestnut “Ruby Are You Mad at Your Man;” the jaunty bee-sting twang of “Mahalla” (we swear it sounds like one of Jonathan Richman’s friendly folk instros) and the ominous back-country detour through “West End Blues.” Taking the majority of the vocal leads, singer-fiddler-banjobelle Rhiannon Giddens is in awesome form, as evidenced on the trilling Ethel Waters strutter “No Man’s Mama” and her self-penned “Country Girl,” a hiphop-infused spotlight track that stakes a claim to new corners of the band’s stylistic turf.
Flemons, the Arizona-born banjo expert and former National Poetry Slam competitor whose multi-faceted contributions also include vocals, African gourd and the aforementioned quills (think of an Irish tin whistle’s African cousin), stopped to chat for a spell somewhere on the road between the Piedmont and Eden.
Six Ladies Playing, at Monmouth U
April 26, 2011
A cherished tradition at Monmouth University for several years running, Joanie Madden and Cherish the Ladies get a crucial jump on NEXT St. Pat’s Day by way of A CELTIC CHRISTMAS, Saturday night at the Pollak.
(Originally published in the Asbury Park Press, December 17, 2010)
As someone who’s eternally grateful to be “making a living doing what I love,” Joanie Madden seems happy to just be at whatever airport or lodging she happens to find herself in, as she dashes hither and yon on a typically busy tour itinerary.
At some point, however, it surely occurred to Madden that Cherish the Ladies had become bigger than the personal happy zones of she and her bandmates in the long-running Celtic musical group — had become, in fact, a family tradition that spanned generations, geographic regions and seasons of the calendar year.
Prominent among those seasons is the Yuletide interlude; a time of year in which the band (the current core of which comprises bandleader Madden on tin whistle and flute, plus Scottish pianist Kathleen Boyle, guitarist Mary Coogan, Belfast-born fiddler Roisin Dillon, and County Galway accordionist Mirella Murray) plays to packed houses of kids, parents and grandparents — with audiences singing along to such Christmas classics as “Silent Night,” “O Holy Night” and “Angels We Have Heard On High.”
“The Christmas show is my favorite time of the year — the family time, when we treat the concert hall like a big living room,” says the champion musician, under whose stewardship the unassuming tin whistle becomes a dynamic centerpiece to a whirl of often raucous sound and motion.
“This all started when a promoter hounded us to go out on the road with a Christmas show — I told them sure, we’ve got a Christmas show, no problem,” recalls Bronx native Madden, who together with fellow New Yorker Coogan marked a quarter century of membership in the band this year.
“I hung up the phone and told everyone, okay, now we’ve gotta get a Christmas show together!”
That first seasonal tour was a surprise success, as was the 2005 album “On Christmas Night” — a set that was hailed by the New York Times, USA Today and others as among the year’s best, and a release that represented another milestone for the internationally lauded band.
“Our record was sold in Costco,” says Madden with a laugh. “You know you’ve made it when you wind up in Costco!”
Now on their seventh annual Christmas excursion, Cherish the Ladies is touring behind a second album of seasonal standards, “A Star in the East” — jaunting from Alabama to Connecticut to Arkansas to New Hampshire, with the five instrumentalists augmented onstage by returning vocalist Deirdre Connolly and four Irish dance specialists (including Canadian stepdance champion and fiddler Dan Stacey).
It’s an expanded show that brings the Shore area favorites back to the Pollak Theatre at Monmouth University for the first time in 2010 — their previously scheduled appearance having been snowed out in the wake of last February’s blizzardly blitzkrieg (weep not for the Ladies this winter, as they’ll spend late January and early February on their nineteenth Caribbean Cruise of Irish Stars).
For the 8:00 p.m. performance on Saturday, December 18, Madden promises a mix that reflects the spirit of the new record; an eclectic set that juxtaposes spoken word and centuries-old folk favorites with a new Boyle original and Madden’s own lead vocal on the African American spiritual “Rise Up Shepherd and Follow.” In addition to which, Madden says, “we’ll get the audience involved; teach them new things; take some old classics and ‘Celticize’ them, if that’s a word.”
All in a night’s work for a musical institution that’s keyed in to an affinity for the warmth and intimacy of traditionally arranged Irish music, in audiences that range from Monmouth U (where the Ladies have established themselves as an annual signifier of the Performing Arts schedule) to China, where the band played five dates last September.
“Irish music is the basis of so many American musical traditions — old timey pop, folk, bluegrass,” Madden observes. “It’s a music of emotional highs and lows…it’s breaking your heart one moment, then ripping your head off the next.”
Prior to Saturday night’s show, dancers from the Celtic Christmas program will conduct an “Introduction to Irish Step Dancing Workshop” inside Anacon Hall (at the Rebecca Stafford Student Center) on the West Long Branch campus. Participants are invited to “bring some leather soled shoes” as they “learn the rudiments of Irish dance, including the basic threes and sevens” and the form’s Canadian cousin, Ottawa Valley Stepdancing. The 6:00 p.m. event is open to students and general public alike, with separate admission available for $10 (the session is free to holders of tickets to Saturday’s show).
Tickets for “A Celtic Christmas” and the Step Dancing workshop are available by calling the Monmouth University Performing Arts Box Office at 732-263-6889, or online at www.monmouth.edu/arts.
