Another afternoon in the theatre with Steve Blier proved to be a memorable experience. A full house, an adventurous and dedicated cast, and some irreverent and beautiful music.
These concerts undergo many changes in the several months leading up to the performance. Steve puts forth a number of options for the cast we’ve assembled, and we go back and forth, trying things on and refining the playlist.
We do our best at describing the concert when we print our season materials in early spring, and sometimes we get lucky. This time, the program changed significantly from what we thought it might be in March, and as a result, the printed brochure description varied a bit from the actual content. There were a few art song composers on the old description, but the program ended up being exclusively 20-th and 21st century American song, much of it from the musical theatre tradition.
The subject material for this afternoon was Relationships. We covered romance, break-ups, fidelity and the lack thereof, sex, marriage and divorce. Not exactly X-rated, but about as NC-17 as these things can get. All of it done with great care, honesty, humor, and sincerity; but nevertheless, it was challenging subject material.
I thought that it might be a bit much for our audience, but so far I’ve only received one formal complaint. It came from a patron who expected to hear the composers listed on the brochure from the spring and was upset not to hear any Fauré.
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