GB Public Solo Fest Premieres Will LeBow's THE BARD THE BEAT THE BLUES
Performances run June 8-June 26.
Great Barrington Public Theater Solo Fest Premieres Will LeBow's The Bard The Beat The Blues. A master actor's muses and music take him from Greenwich Village and Lawrence Ferlinghetti to Shylock, Malvolio and Ma Rainey.
GB Public Theater 2022 stage season begins with four new solo performances that run for over five weeks. All feature stories of humanity and demonstrate the power of a single voice.
GB Public is proud to include in this series the premiere of Will LeBow's raconteurial jewel, The Bard The Beat The Blues (June 8-26), directed by company Artistic Director Jim Frangione and featuring the accomplished actor-musician LeBow, storytelling and versifying his creative arc, from his family's acting roots to a his life on stage--all presented with funny asides, anecdotes, screen media and musical interludes. In this mesmerizing, quickly-paced hour of storytelling, audiences will fall under the spell of a marvelous entertainer and musician; we move along with LeBow from his ancestry in the Jewish ghetto of Vilna, Lithuania to Brooklyn, where his grandfather acted in Yiddish theater, to growing up in 1950s, heading off to City College, discovering Shakespeare, being introduced to the nightlife in the heyday of Greenwich Village, the poetry of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and other influences that led him to a lifelong career on stage.
In his story, LeBow weaves bits from Shakespeare, Chekov, August Wilson, Mississippi John Hurt and Scott Joplin, the stream of anecdotes and life-lessons accompanied by LeBow at the keyboard, playing his own bluesy music. It's a seamless performance by a fantastic storyteller, loaded with laughs, heart, bite, and historical commentary. It recounts the world and road as they unfolded for LeBow, why it's ill-advised to bite our tongues when others tell us to, and, in his words, why this "nutzo, farkakte world" with all its randomness and unseen possibilities is the best world to be born in, if you have the creative bones to deal with it.
Will LeBow's musical pictorial memoir The Bard The Beat The Blues is onstage seven times only, in rotation with the other solo performances, from June 8-June 26, Thurs.-Sun., 7:30pm and 3pm, in the Liebowitz Black Box Theater, Bard College at Simon's Rock, 84 Alford Rd, Great Barrington, MA 01230. Ticket reservations are encouraged and can be made on the Great Barrington Public Theater website.
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