A Prairie Home Companion American Revival It’s time to join again in song for two more American Revival performances. We had so much fun in Denver and Nashville that we are bringing the crew together for a few more shows. This time, we are visiting Washington, D.C., and then on to The Town Hall in New York City. These are two great cities for some sightseeing as well as a visit with some old friends.
There’ll be humor, music, no end of fun, and, of course, all the latest News from Lake Wobegon. The Washington, D.C., show at The Anthem will feature two-term U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins, acclaimed soprano Ellie Dehn, vocalist Heather Masse, Broadway conductor and pianist Rob Fisher, Richard Dworsky, and The Friendly String Quartet. As usual, actors Tim Russell and Fred Newman will be on hand, along with guitarist Pat Donohue, and more.
At The Town Hall, featured performers include Tony Award-winning director Walter Bobbie, Broadway conductor Rob Fisher and the Coffee Club Orchestra, vocalists Christine DiGiallonardo and Heather Masse, keyboardist Richard Dworsky, actors Tim Russell and Sue Scott, and sound-effects ace Fred Newman.
THE DETAILS: Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion American Revival
WASHINGTON, D.C.: Friday, October 21, 2022, 8:00 p.m.
The Anthem, 901 Wharf St. SW, Washington, D.C. 20024
Tickets now on sale, $75, $95, and $125 GET TICKETS >>>
NEW YORK: Saturday, November 26, 2022, at 7:30 p.m. (lobby open 6:30; doors open 7:00)
The Town Hall, 123 West 43rd St., New York, NY 10036
Tickets now on sale, $59.50–$119.50
GET TICKETS >>> |
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A big event and then a major announcement I maintain there is always hope if you look around for it. I read the first few paragraphs of a story in the Times about fungi and how they absorb carbon that might otherwise be airborne and aggravate global warming and they enable plants to survive drought and serve as fertilizers. The headline was Unearthing the Secret Superpowers of Fungus and right there was my source of happiness for the day and I read no farther lest I come across the inevitable Buts and Howevers. My podiatrist says I have fungus under my toenails. This tells me that I shall be able to dance again and maybe run the low hurdles. Read the full column >>> |
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Featured A Prairie Home Companion Show: This week is a can’t-miss episode of A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor: a compilation fan favorites. In 2005, we asked our listeners to send us their favorite moments from the show and their memories that accompanied them. My, what a response! The staff had such a wonderful time reading and hearing your stories that they decided on putting together a Listener’s Choice show. Join us this Saturday where we revisit this wonderful program on our Facebook page; the link will appear at 5 p.m. CT (or, if you simply can’t wait, use the link below).
Highlights include the Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery Jingle, The Whippets Rag, Raw Bits, a few Guy Noir sketches, The Lives of the Cowboys, a six-minute version of Macbeth, plus clips from the News from Lake Wobegon, including Tomato Butt; Bruno, the Fishing Dog; and the Living Flag. The show also includes some of the fans’ favorite performers. It’s a “can’t-miss-catch-all episode of the old show. Listen to the show >>>
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More information about our featured guests:
Marni Nixon was dubbed by Time magazine as the “Ghostess with the Mostest,” a compliment to the famous invisible voice. Actresses who don’t sing are as common in musicals as actors who don’t fight are in action films, and the female singing voice you hear in West Side Story, My Fair Lady, An Affair to Remember, Mulan, and The King and I is her voice. She dubbed for Deborah Kerr, Natalie Wood, Audrey Hepburn, Rita Moreno; she did a voice in Secret Garden for child actress Margaret O’Brien, and she did the angel voices heard by Ingrid Bergman in Joan of Arc.
What an interesting career. She released albums on her own, including Marni Nixon Sings Gershwin and Marni Nixon Sings Classic Kern, and she appeared as a musical comedy and cabaret performer, opera diva, stage actress, symphony guest artist in both classical and pops repertoire, recitalist, and recording artist. She also taught master classes in voice.
“Hollywood’s Hidden Heroine” >>>
Emmylou Harris was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and grew up in North Carolina and Virginia. She began playing the guitar at sixteen, and eventually left college to pursue a career in music. After recording her first album in 1969, Harris joined forces with Gram Parsons, with whom she made two albums, GP and Grievous Angel. After Parsons’ death in 1973, Harris formed her own band and signed with Warner Bros. Records. She began making albums that encompassed her own vision of what country music ought to be, the first of which was Pieces of the Sky. The success of Pieces enabled Harris to continue writing songs that stood apart from much of the music coming out of Nashville in the late 1970s. By the mid-’80s, Harris had formed her famous Hot Band and had made several albums, including Elite Hotel. A serious bronchial infection led to an abrupt change in the direction of her career. No longer willing to sing over electric instruments, she broke up the Hot Band and created the acoustic Nash Ramblers. Their first album, was the Grammy Award-winning At the Ryman. Listen to “Tulsa Queen” >>> Renée Fleming was born in Indiana, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Rochester, New York; her parents were voice teachers. While studying at the State University of New York, she sang with a jazz trio and was discovered by jazz legend Illinois Jacquet, who invited her to tour with his band. Renée went to graduate school instead, where she focused on classical music at the Eastman School of Music and The Juilliard School. Renée Fleming’s professional break came in 1988 when she was invited to sing the role of the Contessa in Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro with the Houston Grand Opera, and in 1989 she made her New York City debut in La Bohème. She sang in London’s Covent Garden and returned to New York in 1991 to make her Metropolitan Opera debut. Since then, the multiple Grammy Award winner, who is recognized as a risk-taker in her field, has created many roles for the operatic stage and has premiered numerous songs written for her, performing at the world’s most distinguished venues with today’s foremost orchestras and conductors. An exclusive recording artist with Decca since 1995, her recent recordings include Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene, with Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Her book The Inner Voice was published in 2004. Listen to “Tacea la Notte Placida” >>> |
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Tom Keith: Sound-Effects Man
Tom Keith is featured in several sketches during Saturday’s classic A Prairie Home Companion episode. Tom provided sound effects and so much more, working alongside Garrison since 1969. Upon Tom Keith’s passing in 2011, this is what Garrison wrote:
Our colleague the actor and sound-effects man Tom Keith died Sunday night at his home in St. Paul. He performed on the show October 22 at the Fitzgerald with the cast and guest John Lithgow — played a zombie and a beery Elizabethan bartender, did the sound effects for “Lives of the Cowboys” and “Mom” and did a wonderful and shocking sound effect of a grade school teacher being shrunk from six feet to three inches, using a balloon, some small sticks, and vocal thwops and splorts, and then did the voice of a three-inch-tall female. He complained of shortness of breath the next week, but put off going to see a doctor, and collapsed Sunday night around 6 p.m. He was conscious afterward but died in the ambulance on his way to the hospital.
Tom was one of radio’s great clowns. He was serious about silliness and worked hard to get a moo exactly right and the cluck too and the woof. His whinny was amazing — noble, vulnerable, articulate. He did bagpipes, helicopters, mortars, common drunks, caribou (and elands and elk and wapiti), garbage trucks backing up, handsaws and hammers, and a beautiful vocalization of a man falling from a great height into piranha-infested waters.
He was an engineer at Minnesota Public Radio in 1971, when I did the morning show in the studios in Park Square Court in Lowertown St. Paul, and he took the name Jim Ed Poole, did the sports segment, and talked about his pet chicken, Curtis, who lived with him at the Hotel Transom. When Prairie Home Companion started in 1974, he engineered most of the first two seasons, using a five-channel mixer, and then graduated to the stage where he played three roles in the ongoing “Buster the Show Dog” — the dog, Father Finian, and Timmy, the Sad Rich Teenage Boy. He was Maurice the maître d’ at the Café Boeuf and he was Larry who lived in the basement under the Fitzgerald stage.
He was an ex-Marine (who could do a fine drill instructor), a good golfer, a sturdy, reliable, can-do colleague, a gifted performer with the unassuming demeanor of a stagehand. Whenever Tom came onstage for a sketch, I could see the audience’s heads turn in his direction. They could hear me but they wanted to see Tom, same as you’d watch any magician. Boys watched him closely to see how he did the shotgun volleys, the singing walrus, the siren, the helicopter, the water drips. His effects were graceful, precise, understated, like the man himself. All of us at the show are shocked by his passing and send our sincere condolences to his family and also to the listeners who enjoyed his work so much.
Here is an excerpt from a guest interview with Tom Keith from 2010:
How is it that you came to work with Garrison Keillor?
I first started working with Garrison when he began doing his Prairie Home Morning Show in 1974 … I think that was the year. It was the third time he did a daily morning show on MPR. I was the engineer on duty at that time of morning. I had never heard the earlier shows but I first heard about Garrison when I was taking a comedy class at the University of Minnesota and our class had to critique an article he wrote for The New Yorker. I told him about that and he asked me what I thought of the article and I said, “It was OK.”
You have been a part of many memorable scripts including “The Six-Minute Hamlet,” the opera spoof “La Influenza,” etc. When do you first see a script and how do you prepare or get ready to perform the piece?
We, the Academy of Radio Actors, first see the scripts on Friday during our first rehearsal. That’s when it is timed for length and I try out my sound effects to hear what works and what doesn’t. Garrison knows what I have in my sound-effects kit, but sometimes I have to come up with something new. If I can’t, then the script will be adjusted. The next day we will get the scripts again with edits. Sometimes on Saturday we might even get a new script we haven’t seen and run through it during rehearsal and then have that edited just before broadcast. You have to be flexible.
Is there a lot of “live” ad-libbing of sound effects?
Sometimes it looks like Garrison is trying to trick me, but I usually know when it is going to happen. But there have been one or two times where he has extended a script by adding a few extra sound effects.
What is your favorite sketch to participate in? Any episodes that stand out in particular?
Some of my favorite sketches were the ones that we did touring as the “Annual Final Show.” Those were Buster and Timmy with Sheila the Christian jungle girl, played by Kate MacKenzie. “Guy Noir” is always fun and is usually filled with sound effects and can be quite a challenge. Read the full Guest Interview >>>Explore his sound-effects table >>> |
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Leaving Home (Lake Wobegon stories) “Keillor has a rare gift for celebrating and finding humor in commonplace events, and his affection for his characters and for small-town life shines through … Some tales are wildly hilarious, others gently poignant but all are simply wonderful.” —Publishers Weekly
Leaving Home is the first collection of Lake Wobegon short stories. The book includes 36 fan favorites taken from the live broadcasts of A Prairie Home Companion. The short stories are mostly from shows performed during the late ’80s. There is a wonderfully funny tale about a septic tank in “Homecoming,” a gathering of Lutheran ministers on a pontoon boat, an usher convention in Hawaii, news from the State Fair, and a fond farewell to a favorite son’s hometown taken from what was, at that time, the final APHC in 1987. Purchase the book >>> |
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The Family Radio A sampler of crowd-pleasers from A Prairie Home Companion including four "News from Lake Wobegon" monologues, spoof commercials for Bertha's Kitty Boutique and the Fearmonger's Shoppe, and great music. All selections are from original live radio broadcasts. Get the CDs >>> |
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