JEFF MACAULEY Celebrates Henry Mancini Songbook With New Show at Metropolitan Room Tonight

By: Apr. 15, 2015
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After two years performing his highly praised show, It Was Me, honoring the songbook of famed lyricist Norman Gimbel at New York's Don't Tell Mama, Bistro Award-winning vocalist and BroadwayWorld.com "Best Male Vocalist" nominee Jeff Macauley presents a new show this spring at New York's Metropolitan Room. In Mr. Lucky, Macauley will celebrate the music of the iconic composer Henry Mancini. Macauley's orchestra for Mr. Lucky will be Award-winning Musical Director/pianist and arranger Tex Arnold with Jon Burr on bass.

Opening night of the three-show run is tonight, April 15, 2015, with additional shows on May 6 and June 17. All shows are on Wednesday nights at 9:30 pm. The Metropolitan Room is at 34 West 22nd Street, NY, NY 10010, 212-206-0440.

With Mr. Lucky, Macauley covers Mancini's classic songs as well as some lesser-known television and movie themes spanning 30 years from the mid-1950s through the mid-1980s. Among Mancini's legendary lyricist collaborators were Alan and Marilyn Bergman, Johnny Mercer, Leslie Bricusse, Rod McKuen, Norman Gimbel, Bob Merill, Don Black, Ray Evans and Jay Livingston, Felice Mancini, and Robert Wells.

Henry Mancini (1924-1994) was a four-time Academy Award winner and 20-time Grammy Award winning composer who wrote almost exclusively for film and television. Starting in the mid-'50s, Mancini pioneered a jazz-pop style of film and TV scoring that dominated the big and small screens for the next 20 years. Among his best known compositions were "Moon River," "The Days Of Wine And Roses," "Two For The Road," and "Charade," as well as instrumentals such as "The Pink Panther," "The Baby Elephant Walk" and the "Peter Gunn Theme." Mancini also wrote many classic film scores, including: Touch Of Evil, Hatari, Arabesque, and Victor/Victoria.

Macauley became a fan of Henry Mancini as a youngster while listening to music coming over his mother's living room console radio. "It was considered 'Beautiful music for beautiful people' and it had a long-lasting effect on me," Macauley recalls. "With their lush syrupy themes and thick, embarrassingly romantic orchestrations, this music was the aural background of my life and Henry Mancini's wistfully warm and melancholy tunes brought more depth and emotion to the days than my uneventful suburban life warranted. With Mr. Lucky: The Songs of Henry Mancini, I'm taking a closer look at the songs that have been playing in the background, pretty much non-stop, for over 50 years, and finding they've actually stuck with me because they're pretty great."

Jeff Macauley has been singing in cabaret rooms in Los Angeles and on the East Coast since 1990, appearing at The Gardenia, The Cinegrill, Eighty Eights, Arci's Place, Odette's, Don't Tell Mama, and now at The Metropolitan Room. Jeff recently completed a highly praised two-year run of It Was Me--The Lyrics of Norman Gimbel, a show that earned him a 2012 BroadwayWorld.com Cabaret Award nomination for "Best Male Singer." In 2014, Jeff produced a studio recording of the show that is available for download on Amazon and iTunes and for purchase at CDBaby.com.


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