Will's New York Nite Life

How very fitting that the major brother act in contemporary swing music, the saxophone-playing Anderson Twins (Peter and Will) should celebrate the greatest brotherly team in the history of the big band era, the fabulous trombonist Tommy Dorsey and clarinetist-saxophonist Jimmy Dorsey. Like the Dorseys, the Andersons possess a unique combination of off-the-charts technical skills - all four brothers, both historic and current, are genuine, classical-level virtuosi - coupled with an equally immeasurable ability to swing and to entertain an audience. And, like the Dorseys before them, the Andersons know well the value of putting together a great band: in addition to the brothers themselves on all the reed instruments, there will be trumpeter Bruce Harris, pianist Jeb Patton, bassist Clovis Nicolas, drummer Aaron Kimmel, and two guest stars of Dorsey-esque proportions, trombonist Wycliffe Gordon and vocalist Brianna Thomas. Expect to hear such Dorsey classics as “Marie,” “Song of India,” “So Rare,” and “Tangerine,” while I, for one, will refuse to leave the Appel Room until I hear Mr. Gordon and Ms. Thomas sing together on such classic boy-girl duets as “Yes Indeed” and “Green Eyes.”

The good news is that the JALC will give two more performances and it will hopefully be live streamed as well, details here:

In 1942, Irving Berlin broke new ground with a remarkable revue of new songs (and comedy sketches) starring an all-military, all-male cast and featuring some of the legendary composer’s absolute greatest songs, like "This Is The Army, Mr. Jones," "I'm Getting Tired So I Can Sleep," "I Left My Heart at the Stage Door Canteen," "That's What the Well Dressed Man in Harlem Will Wear," and "Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning." The production not only played Broadway, but then toured the country, was made into a stunning technicolor movie musical in Hollywood, and then was staged for the benefit of service audiences of both the European and Pacific fronts - for the first time, the theater of war became a theater for musical comedy. The show broke new ground in all kinds of ways, featuring an ensemble of freely-mixed African-American and Caucasian cast members (way before the Armed Forces were integrated), and even had cross-dressing soldiers, way before "don't ask, don't tell." Irving Berlin, who toured with the show even in some of the most dangerous places in the world, considered This is the Army one of the crowning achievements of his amazing career, and this 75th anniversary staging (the first time it’s been produced since WW2) will show us why.

Quick: what factor most makes the 1931 Of Thee I Sing into one of the great works of the American theater? If you said the score by George & Ira Gershwin, almost unbelievably, you’d be wrong. (By Gershwin standards, this particular batch of songs is far from one of their greatest. In fact, where most Gershwin shows have at least a dozen classic songs, a mere three tunes here became standards: the title number, “Love is Sweeping the Country,” and “Who Cares?”) In a way that’s still surprising, this is virtually the only classic musical of its era that became immortal by virtue of its book. The line “Satire is what closes on Saturday night” became one of the legendary George S. Kaufman’s most famous encomiums, but he broke his own rule with this brilliant work of political and musical satire, which played many, many Saturday nights and matinees during the Great Depression, and since. It's the book which makes this one of the few book musicals of the pre-Oklahoma! era that’s regularly revived, although for some mysterious reason, New Yorkers always seem to bring it back during moments of Republican ascendency - shortly before the election of Eisenhower in 1952, then during the Bush II administration in 2006, and now in the days of POTUS #45. (No conspiracy there, of course.) But no matter what your politics are, this is a blissfully funny and tuneful show with the power to unite us all, red and blue alike. It’s satire seems more on target than ever, almost 90 years after it was first written - even though the idea that the fate of a nation can hang on something as trivial as corn muffins somehow doesn’t seem quite as preposterous as it once did.