Kelli O'Hara, Deven May, Becca Ayers, Aaron Lazar & Barbara Walsh Celebrate Composers in TRUNK SONGS

[Caruso]

Posted: 9/21/06 at 12:54pm

The Songbook Project, whose upcoming TRUNK SONGS benefit will feature work by composers Ricky Ian Gordon (Dream True) Ben Moore (Ben Moore: 14 Songs), and Laurence O’Keefe (Bat Boy, upcoming Legally Blonde) happily announces the addition of Kelli O’Hara (The Light in the Piazza), Deven May (Bat Boy), Becca Ayers (Avenue Q), and Rachel Flynn to the cast. Previously announced guest vocalists will be Aaron Lazar (The Light in the Piazza) and Barbara Walsh (Hairspray, upcoming Company).

This very special evening will take place on Sunday, September 24th at 7pm at The Laurie Beechman Theatre. For reservations, please call 212-695-6909 after 12pm. There is an $18 cover charge, as well as a $15 food or drink minimum. The Laurie Beechman Theatre is located within The West Bank Café, 407 West 42nd St. @ Ninth Avenue. All major credit cards are accepted.

TRUNK SONGS, an ongoing venture by The Songbook Project, debuted last season, featuring new music from Jeff Blumenkrantz, Craig Carnelia and Andrew Lippa. THE SONGBOOK PROJECT, INC is a charitable 501 (c) (3) organization, dedicated to the promotion of the art of live performance with a special focus on new and classic popular songs. Further, the organization strives to preserve this heritage of song and to foster its artists, and present these songs in schools, community centers and other venues with the goal of educating and developing new audiences. This event is co-chaired by Frank and Mary Skillern. On the advisory board of The Songbook Project, Inc: Lucie Arnaz, Danny Burstein, James Gavin, Malcolm Gets, Calla Guild, Ralph Guild, Edythe Kenner, Robert Lopez, Rebecca Luker, Jeffrey Marx, Ian Ralfini, Barbara Rudd, Frank Skillern, Mary Skillern, Rex Urice and Margaret Whiting.

RICKY IAN GORDON has been praised for the lyrical quality of his music and for bridging the worlds of theater and art song. In 1995, Gordon created Only Heaven, a stage work that presents 29 songs set to poems by Langston Hughes. The AIDS-related death in 1996 of Gordon's lover inspired Gordon to write the songs that eventually found their home in Dream True (199. Gordon's other works include Stonewall/Night Variations (1994), a musical commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion. The site-specific work was performed on a vacant Hudson River pier in New York. Among Gordon's operatic credits are The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1996), an opera with a libretto by Jean Claude Van Itallie; Autumn Valentine (1992), a two-character operetta based on the works of Dorothy Parker; and Night Flight to San Francisco (2000), an operatic monologue from Tony Kushner's Angels in America. Gordon's work is available on several recordings: Audra McDonald recorded several of his songs for her debut CD, Way Back to Paradise (199. McDonald also appears on Bright Eyed Joy (2001), an impressive collection devoted to Gordon's songs, which also features Dawn Upshaw, Adam Guettel, Theresa McCarthy and other performers. The original cast recording of Gordon's score for My Life with Albertine, a musical based on the work of Marcel Proust, is also available. This show, with book by Richard Nelson, who also collaborated on the lyrics with Gordon, was produced off-Broadway in 2003 with Brent Carver and Emily Skinner in the cast. Gordon's work has also been performed by the New York City Gay Men's Chorus, and soprano Renée Fleming has added his setting of Emily Dickinson's "Will There Really Be a Morning?" to her repertoire.

BEN MOORE’s music has been performed by many of Broadway and classical music's leading singers including Audra McDonald, Deborah Voigt, Susan Graham, Jerry Hadley and Nathan Gunn. The Metropolitan Opera’s farewell gala for Joseph Volpe last May opened with Ben’s comic specialty song for Deborah Voigt and also included a song for Susan Graham. The program was broadcast nationally on PBS in June. Ms. Voigt premiered four of Moore's songs and reprised his encore piece “Wagner Roles” in her Carnegie Hall recital debut on April 7th 2004. In September 2005 EMI released Voigt's first recital CD entitled All My Heart which includes eight of Ben's songs. Opera News praised “Moore’s lyrical, keenly nuanced selections” forming “the centerpiece of the disc.” In March of 2006 the volume Ben Moore: 14 Songs was released by G. Schirmer including the songs on the CD. Ben's association with Ms. Voigt also includes a tribute to Montserrat Caballé commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera Guild which was performed last year at the Guild's annual luncheon. The Metropolitan Opera featured his duet “We Love the Opera” on their radio broadcast on New Year's Day, 2005. January 25th of this year saw the premiere of Ben's song cycle on women poets, “So Free Am I,” commissioned by the Marilyn Horne Foundation for their annual festival at Carnegie Hall. Mr. Moore's music spans many styles and genres, from cabaret songs to text settings of great poets for concert stages. A lyricist as well as a composer, his work includes several musical theatre scores. In 1999 Jerry Hadley commissioned Ben and writer Barry Kleinbort to create the chamber musical Henry and Company, a four-character memory piece set in small town America. It was presented at North Carolina's Appalachian Summer Festival in their development series in 2002. Special comic material for opera singers includes a song for Susan Graham entitled “Sexy Lady,” which is featured on the CD Susan Graham at Carnegie Hall released by Warner Classics. In The New York Times review of Miss Voigt's Lincoln Center recital in 2002, critic Allan Kozinn called “Wagner Roles” “The clear highlight...a brilliant comic song.” Ben wrote the score for the musical Bye Bye Broadway, with book and lyrics by Carl Ritchie, which ran at Canada's Drayton Festival Theatre in 1999. Stratford's Beacon Herald called the show “the most original and refreshing entertainment this observer has seen in a very long time.”

Composer/lyricist LAURENCE O’KEEFE will be making his Broadway debut with Legally Blonde, which opens at The Palace Theatre in April 2007. Larry won the 2004 Ed Kleban Award for lyrics, the 2001 ASCAP Richard Rodgers New Horizons Award and a 2001 Jonathan Larson Award for his music and lyrics. He penned music and lyrics to Off-Broadway's Bat Boy: The Musical (2001 Lucille Lortel and Outer Critics' Circle Awards for Best Off-Broadway Musical). The cult-hit show has been produced in Boston, Tokyo, Seoul and the West End, among other places. He co-wrote book, music and lyrics with Nell Benjamin (also his wife and collaborator on Legally Blonde), for Cam Jansen and The Curse Of The Emerald Elephant (Drama Desk nomination for Best Book), and Sarah, Plain and Tall, which now tours the country for TheatreWorks USA, and was expanded in 2003 into a full-length show at the O'Neill Festival.

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Posted: 9/22/06 at 2:54am

*bump*

(I am so there.)

~JJJ