Doris Day News

Coming up this week, 54 BELOW, Broadway's Supper Club, presents some of the brightest stars from Broadway, cabaret, jazz and beyond. To purchase tickets or for more information, visit www.54Below.com or call (646) 476-3551.

This August and September 54 BELOW presents an exciting lineup of the brightest talent from Broadway and beyond. Located just below the legendary Studio 54 at 254 West 54th Street.

UnsungMusicalsCo. (UMC) will present Unsung Bob Merrill hosted by three-time Tony Award nominee Marc Kudisch (9 to 5, Assassins, Millie). Created and directed by Ben West (Unsung Carolyn Leigh, The Fig Leaves Are Falling, Make Mine Manhattan), the intimate evening will play 54 Below on Tuesday, August 5 at 9:30 PM.

Opening night of Doris and Me at the El Portal Theatre in NoHo hosted many celebrities including actors who costarred with Doris Day.

Actor/singer Scott Dreier is, by self-description, consumed with Doris Day. He has been a fan since a tender age, watching every Doris Day movie and listening to every Day album hundreds, perhaps thousands of times. We all love Day. Who doesn't? She symbolizes all that is sweet and good in life! Because of her genuine spirit, it became OK for actresses like Mary Tyler Moore and Valerie Harper to have their own shows, representing ordinary yet intelligent young middle-class women and their problems. Because of her, four legged creatures have more organizations looking out for their total welfare. Because of her, our overall lives are a whole lot happier. Scott Dreier, like Day, is genuine, warm with a strong lilting vocal instrument and possessing an infectious charisma, with that famous 'sparkling smile' that will not quit on or off stage. He is the perfect entertainer to extol Doris Day and to sing her unforgettable music.

3000 Miles Off-Broadway Musicals (a division of Rock N Roll Inc.) proudly presents, DORIS AND ME: The Doris Day Songbook starring SCOTT DREIER at El Portal's Monroe Forum Theatre, in the NOHO Arts District, North Hollywood, CA. This special engagement will be presented today, July 24 through August 3, 2014, with a Special Gala Opening July 23 to benefit the Doris Day Animal Foundation.

Steve Ross and Karen Oberlin's recent duo effort at 54 Below, Cheek to Cheek, was a show oozing charm, class, charisma, and chemistry, but most of all they conveyed their love for these legendary performers and the classic tunes associated with them.

3000 Miles Off-Broadway Musicals (a division of Rock N Roll Inc.) proudly presents, DORIS AND ME: The Doris Day Songbook starring SCOTT DREIER at El Portal's Monroe Forum Theatre, in the NOHO Arts District, North Hollywood, CA. This special engagement will be presented July 24 through August 3, 2014, with a Special Gala Opening July 23 to benefit the Doris Day Animal Foundation

NJTV, New Jersey's public television network, and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC) announced the artists who will perform in the second season of American Songbook at NJPAC, to be taped before a live audience at the Arts Center for a series to air on NJTV, WLIW and THIRTEEN this fall.

Acclaimed vocalist, recording artist and actress Karen Mason heads into Chicago to perform her acclaimed one-woman show The Secrets Of The Ancient Divas . Performing this acclaimed show all over the country, Mason brings it back to Chicago where it was hailed by Chicago Tribune critic Howard Reich who praised it saying "No show of Mason's travels as quickly between light and dark as her newest." And "no one in cabaret walks the line between humor and sorrow, joy and despair as nimbly as Karen Mason." With her Broadway stage performances, TV appearances, CD recordings and live concerts, Karen "has few peers when it comes to ripping the roof off with her amazing voice that knows no bounds" (TheaterScene.net), which her performances always reaffirm. The multi-MAC and Backstage Magazine Bistro Award winner, most recent CD release, Right Here/Right Now, also received a MAC Award for Album of the Year.

Cabaret performers thinking about launching duo shows could certainly take a lesson in chemistry from watching and listening to singer Karen Oberlin and guitarist Sean Harkness in their current show, A Wish, which is based on their superb recently released CD of the same title, launched with two shows at Kitano on February 1 (to celebrate the CD release), and has taken up a once a month residency until late August at the Metropolitan Room (the next show is on June 25 at 9:30 pm). While theirs is not a romantic off-stage chemistry (both are happily quite happily married, thank you), on stage and in the recording studio Oberlin and Harkness have concocted a delicious musical interaction that conjures up romance to the nth degree.

UnsungMusicalsCo. (UMC) will continue its 2014 Unsung concert series at 54 Below with Unsung Bob Merrill and Unsung Carolyn Leigh, Vol. 2, following its recent sold-out, critically acclaimed Unsung Carolyn Leigh concert for Lincoln Center's American Songbook. The two all-new evenings are created and directed by Ben West (Unsung Carolyn Leigh, The Fig Leaves Are Falling, At Home Abroad) with musical direction and arrangements by Fran Minarik (Unsung Carolyn Leigh, At Home Abroad).

Peter French will play The Pheasantry, Kings Road, Chelsea, tonight, 6th June 2014 with selections from Harry Nilsson's 'A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night'. Show time 8.30pm. Doors open 6.30pm.

Iconic film pair Doris Day and Rock Hudson are celebrated in a fascinating new featurette narrated by Day herself in honor of TCM's June Star of the Month, Rock Hudson.

Peter French will play The Pheasantry, Kings Road, Chelsea, on Friday, 6th June 2014 with selections from Harry Nilsson's 'A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night'. Show time 8.30pm. Doors open 6.30pm.

In honor of this weekend's sure-to-be spectacular BroadwayWorld special event EVERYTHING'S COMING UP BROADWAYWORLD.COM: A JULE STYNE TRIBUTE, today we honor the man behind the music for many of the greatest musicals of all time.

I was just a little more than a year into my new side career as a cabaret show reviewer when I first saw a Karen Oberlin show. It was Valentine's Day night 2012 and Oberlin—with guitarist Sean Harkness and guest violinist Aaron Weinstein—would be performing her romance-laced set, Stringing Along With Love, at the Metropolitan Room. At the time, all I knew about Oberlin was that she was considered among New York's best female cabaret singers, and I hadn't researched her performing history pre-show. About a third of the way into her set I leaned over to my wife (it was Valentine's Day after all) and whispered, “You know, she has a real Doris Day quality in her voice and in the way she delivers some lyrics.” This immediately ratcheted up my appreciation for Oberlin since there are four passions I inherited from my Dad—baseball, reading the morning papers, sports writing and Doris Day (well, also Sophia Loren, but that's for another column). Since Dad had grown up during the prime of the Big Band Era of the 1940s, I heard the sultry sounds of a young Doris Day singing songs like “Sentimental Journey” on the family stereo more than a few times. Once I saw Day's strikingly adorable blondness on a record cover and her rocking body in one of her films, I knew what Dad was talking about. As popular, famous, and near iconic as Doris Day became, in my book, as a singer and screen beauty she's always been vastly underrated. Little did I know that Karen Oberlin had been doing a Doris Day tribute show so since 2001 at places like Firebird, Iridium, and the late Danny's Skylight Room, and produced a CD, Secret Love: The Music of Doris Day, in 2002. Karen Oberlin had instantly become my secret love.

Birdland Jazz Club has announced its schedule for April 21 - April 27, featuring James Carter Organ Trio, Donna Vivino in 'Beautiful Dreamer,' David Ostwald's Louis Armstrong Eternity Band, Karen Oberlin in Secret Love: A Tribute to Doris Day, and more.

The rare pairing of Hollywood and recording icons Doris Day and Frank Sinatra is available for the first time on Blu-ray via a new edition of the 1954 movie musical YOUNG AT HEART.