A couple of songs into the show of this new-to-me performer, I noticed that I believed what she was singing. The quality doesn’t shout, it just “is.” Her classically trained voice is ripe for American Songbook.…
Aside from Chita Rivera and Gwen Verdon, performance thoughts of John Kander and Fred Ebb inevitably land on Karen Mason. History with the material is only part of the reason. This is an artist who…
Steve Ross tells us he sat beneath his mother’s piano as a child, that after Beethoven, she’d play Cole Porter. Absorption came early. Sumptuous arrangements are a treat tonight. Classical background feeds perhaps today’s most…
“Jazz is about the choices you make between the notes.” Louis Armstrong Louis Daniel Armstrong (1901 –1971) was likely nicknamed “Satchmo”/”Satch” by the Karnofsky family who took in his sister, mother, and him in New Orleans.…
Founded in 1946 by José Limón and Doris Humphrey, the company is acclaimed for its “dramatic expression, technical mastery and expansive, yet nuanced movement.” Choreography combines power and finesse, aesthetic combinations and impressionistic narrative. “We believe…
Romance novels generate over $1.44 billion in yearly revenue. Some of them are historical, some deal with contemporary issues, others are fantasies i.e. they’re no longer axiomatically bodice-rippers or greeted with snobbery. “There’s a boom…
In 1978, when Steve Olsen opened West Bank Café and theater in the shadow of year-old Manhattan Plaza, the area was, to say the least, questionable. Seventy percent of tenants in “Broadway’s Bedroom” were performing…
In 1927, George and Ira Gershwin/George S. Kaufman’s anti-war satire Strike Up the Band ran in Philadelphia to mixed reviews and closed out of town. Kaufman had just co-written The Marx Brothers’ Coconuts. A touch…
