TORONTO — Idina Menzel makes her first live apperance in Toronto to a sold out crowd at the Royal Conservatory downtown. This concert however was very special for the simple fact that it was being taped live, for a PBS special that will be airing the concert in March as well as a live CD and DVD. The moment I …
MILWAUKEE — One doesn’t so much tell Broadway history as sing and play it. The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and its principal pops conductor, Marvin Hamlisch, took a musical jog through a century of Broadway history Friday evening. The program, “Marvin Does Broadway,” began with a George M. Cohan medley and ended with tunes from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Phantom of the Opera,” …
PITTSBURGH, PA — The Pittsburgh Symphony Pops hooked up with high-energy dancing to open its season Thursday night with a program meekly titled “Ballroom With a Twist.” “Ballroom Boogie” would be more like it, because this show mixed styles with joyous abandon. The orchestra was pushed back into the shell to create considerable depth for the dancers at the front …
DUBLIN, IRELAND –National concert hall One night it is serious Beethoven with Lang Lang; the next it is a Broadway musical with Marvin Hamlisch. The RTE Concert Orchestra is nothing if not versatile. This is something the US composer, conductor, pianist, vocalist, raconteur and Pulitzer Prize winner reflects on at the National Concert Hall, where Hamlisch is the focus of …
OKLAHOMA – Fine Arts Series – Armstrong Auditorium – The Gershwin Project. – On September 8th, a pleasantly temperate evening presaging Fall, Marvin Hamlisch, owner of several Oscars, Tonys and Emmys, one of only thirteen such artists internationally, inaugurated the season’s fine arts series at Armstrong Auditorium with an all Gershwin concert that left his audience cheering for encores. Having …
Pasadena, CA — Marvin Hamlisch and the Pasadena Pops Orchestra concluded their 2012 season last night, Hamlisch’s first with the orchestra and the ensemble’s second and last at The Lawn Adjacent to the Rose Bowl (they move to the Los Angeles County Arboretum in Arcadia next season). What appeared to be the largest crowd of the season came out on a balmy evening to hear …
TORONTO — Rexall Centre: It was a laugh-till-you-cry show, and just when you thought it doesn’t get any better than this, it did. It was like Raúl Esparza standing on the lid of the Steinway belting out “Defying Gravity” (Wicked, 2003) that brought the audience screaming to their feet, and you wonder ‘how can anybody follow this?’ And Brian Stokes Mitchell kind of slides …
NEW YORK — Idina Menzel, the Tony-winning “Wicked” star, was making her Philharmonic debut with a one-woman show over the weekend, part of an ongoing concert tour. And despite the rarified environment of Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall, she wasn’t going to ignore any Gleeks that might have been lurking in the audience — fans, that is, of the Fox megahit “Glee,” on which she …
Philadelphia, PA – It was a nice surprise to find that Sunday afternoon’s Great American Songbook concert at the Kimmel, with Marvin Hamlisch and Michael Feinstein, was on despite the snowstorm. Even more surprising was to see how many people attended. Lots. The predominantly over-50 crowd showed up because, like the practitioners on-stage, they hunger to keep the standards of …