Jerome Kern News

Barbara Cook's anticipated autobiography, BARBARA COOK: THEN AND NOW, is out via HarperCollins Publishers today, June 28.

In the year that the Congregacão Israelita Paulista (CIP) celebrates 80 years of great history and dedication to the Jewish community and the Brazilian society, the actor and singer Daniel Boaventura was chosen to be the attraction of the commemorative concert for the benefit of social work of the institution . The event, which takes place June 29 at the Teatro Sergio Cardoso, will be presented by Rubens Ewald Filho - also one of the directors and writers alongside Claudio Erlichman - and will journey for more than 50 years of history of the great Broadway classics, highlighting the strong Jewish influence in the American Songbook, which contributed to the emergence of a new artistic genre, the musical theater. The show, named 'Broadwish - From Shtetl to Broadway', created especially for this occasion, will bring a repertoire full of standards composed and written by renowned Jewish composers such as Irving Berlin, George & Ira Gershwin, Stephen Sondheim, Stephen Schwartz , Oscar Hammerstein II, Kander & Ebb and Burt Bacharach among others.

SHOW BOAT inaugurates a partnership between Fiddlehead Theatre and Citi Performing Arts Center Shubert Theatre. The lavish, spectacular production is co-directed by Meg Fofonoff and Stacey Stephens, features a 27-piece live orchestra, and a cast of 50 triple-threat performers. The costumes by Stephens are to die for and the musical numbers are triumphant. If only it had a little more heart.

Fiddlehead Theatre Company presents Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II's 1927 masterpiece SHOW BOAT at the Citi Performing Arts Center Shubert Theatre, 265 Tremont Street, Boston, from today, June 22-July 3, 2016.

Este concierto participativo ofrece a mas de 200 personas aficionadas a la musica la oportunidad de participar, junto con solistas y la emblematica orquesta, en un emotivo recorrido por la historia del teatro musical, desde sus origenes hasta hoy, a partir de fragmentos de algunos de los musicales mas emblematicos: Chicago, Hello Dolly!, Hairspray, Cats o los Miserables.

The third of a six-part, decade-by-decade video series sampling the legendary artist's performances of musical theatre classics.

Feinstein's at the Nikko and The Lesher Center for the Arts will present Grammy Award winner and Tony Award-nominated star of Hamilton, Leslie Odom, Jr., for one performance only - Saturday, July 23 at 8 p.m. - at The Lesher Center for the Arts (1601 Civic Dr., Walnut Creek).

Vivian Reed and her consummate band—led by conductor and pianist Billy McDaniel, and joined by guest vocalists Janinah Burnett and Raun Ruffin—dazzled a packed Metropolitan Room on May 23 with her new show, An Evening with Vivian Reed: Standards and More.

The fourth time was the charm for Minda Larsen, winner of the 2015 MetroStar Competition: “I have an MFA in opera,” she joked during the debut of her show, My Southern Song, at the Metropolitan Room on May 21, “So it took four tries in six years to win that competition.” The remark is typical of the self-deprecating humor of the versatile singer from Jacksonville, FL, who spent time in Georgia and went to school in South Carolina. Itching all her life to get out of the South, now she longs to get back. Her new show (a four-date run that is her award for winning the MetroStar) captures that longing with love, laughter, and an occasional tear.

The Ziegfeld Society of New York City will present ZIEGFELD GIRLS, a multi-media event hosted by Martin Schneit, with special guest stars Jamie Buxton, Erin Cronican and Candice Oden, on Saturday, May 28th, 2016. The event will take place at Lang Recital Hall, Hunter College (68th Street between Park and Lexington Avenue), and tickets for the 3:30pm performance are now on sale.

For her first appearances at The Metropolitan Room, Andrea Axelrod will present Almost Like Being in Love - exploring songs 'about the cusp of love', with music director Barry Levitt and bass player Jon Burr.

On the heels of receiving a Tony nomination for best lead actor in a musical for his outstanding role as Aaron Burr in the Broadway phenomenon Hamilton, Leslie Odom Jr. will soon show fans his vocal prowess in another musical setting, the recording studio, when his superb self-titled debut album of jazz classics, LESLIE ODOM JR., is released June 10 on S-Curve Records.

Today in 1946, the second Broadway revival of Showboat opened at the Ziegfeld Theatre, and ran for 418 performances. Show Boat is a musical in two acts with music by Jerome Kern and book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. It was originally produced in New York in 1927 and in London in 1928, and was based on the 1926 novel of the same name by Edna Ferber. The plot chronicles the lives of those living and working on the Cotton Blossom, a Mississippi River show boat, from 1880 to 1927. The show's dominant themes include racial prejudice and tragic, enduring love.

MORE THAN YOU KNOW is a dramatic recreation of Helen Morgan's final night in residency at New York City's Simplon Club in 1932. Written and performed by Lauren Stanford, the play contains songs the chanteuse made famous, including Jerome Kern's 'Bill' and 'Why Was I Born.

Birdland Jazz Club has announced its lineup for May 23-29, featuring Eliane Elias, A Sophisticated Reunion: Terri Klausner, Valerie Pettiford and Ty Stephens, Bill O'Connell and the Latin Jazz All-Stars, and more. 

Meg Fofonoff and Stacey Stephens, Producing Artistic Directors of Fiddlehead Theatre Company, announced today the cast of Show Boat, the company's first production in partnership with the Citi Performing Arts Center Shubert Theatre, 265 Tremont Street, Boston. Show Boat will run for twelve performances from June 22-July 3, 2016. Co-Directed by Fofonoff and Stephens, Show Boat will feature a cast of 50 starring seasoned international and off-Broadway performers including Kim Corbett (West Side Story, Les Miserables) as Magnolia Hawks, Jeremiah James (The Fantasticks) as Gaylord Ravenal, Lindsay Roberts (The Gershwins' Porgy And Bess) as Queenie, and Brian Kinnard (Buddy - The Buddy Holly Story) as Joe. Show Boat is Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II's epic of life on the Mississippi River with some of the most beautiful and influential music ever written for the stage including 'Ol'Man River,' 'Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man' and 'Bill.' Show Boat will be choreographed by Wendy Hall, with a 27-piece live orchestra under the direction of Charles Peltz.

The inimitable Charles Busch, two-time MAC Award winner, Tony nominee, and drag legend, returns to Feinstein's/54 Below on Friday, June 10, and Saturday, June 11, at 7pm with an anniversary celebration of both his four year collaboration with his dashing musical director, Tom Judson, and their Feinstein's/54 Below debut.

This limited season of Daniel Evans' five star Sheffield Crucible production of Show Boat will now play its final West End performance on 27 August 2016. The production was previously announced to be booking to 7 January 2017.

As exhilaratingly in-your-face as only the very best of contemporary theater can deliver, Green Day's American Idiot - now onstage in a startlingly emphatic and exuberant production at Clarksville's Roxy Regional Theatre - exemplifies just how far the company itself has come since its beginnings as a community theater. Now, serving as a training ground for some of the very best of musical theater stars-to-come, The Roxy has more than come into its own, continuing to push the envelope, to challenge audiences to expand their artistic purview and to create theater that is as compelling as any you'll find on a stage anywhere in the good ol' US of A.

I don't know when Ann Hampton Callaway started this chapter of her life, but she's emphatically in a new one. The artist savors every note, propelled headlong into her songs with uncommon exuberance. Signature authority extends not only to stellar scat but to enacting selected material. Accompanied by The Ted Rosenthal Trio (Ted Rosenthal, piano; Martin Wind, bass; Tim Horner, drums), Callaway shines luminous at Birdland (where I saw her latest show Wednesday night and which continues for two more shows Friday and Saturday night at 8:30 and 11 pm).