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| I've Got Your Number: Romance, the Rat Pack and Carolyn Leigh |
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Ticket Information:
Saturday, March 29, 8pm
Sunday, March 30, 3pm & 8pm
Monday, March 31, 2pm & 8pm |
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Meet the Artists |
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About Carolyn Leigh |
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| Meet the Artists |
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| Deborah Grace Winer |
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 Deborah Grace Winer is a journalist and playwright, who has written extensively about the American Songbook, and returns to the 92nd Street Y after two previous Lyrics & Lyricists™ shows: "Dorothy's Side of the Street," the Dorothy Fields Centennial tribute; and last season's "The Last Girl Singer," a tribute to her friend Rosemary Clooney. She is delighted that beginning next season, she has been named Lyrics & Lyricists™' new Series Artistic Director.
Winer is the author of On the Sunny Side of the Street: The Life and Lyrics of Dorothy Fields—the only book written about Dorothy Fields' life and work; The Night and The Music: Rosemary Clooney, Barbara Cook and Julie Wilson Inside the World of Cabaret; and is co-author of Sing Out, Louise!: 150 Broadway Musical Stars Remember 50 Years, and I Remember Too Much: 89 Opera Stars Speak Candidly of Their Work, Their Lives and Their Colleagues. She also authored three companion coffee table books included in each of three box sets (22 CDs in all) of the complete early recordings of Rosemary Clooney (Bear Family, 1997-2000). Winer's articles on music have appeared in the New York Times and Town and Country, among other publications. She was featured on the PBS American Masters special, Yours for a Song: The Women of Tin Pan Alley and on the A&E Biography of Rosemary Clooney, and she has appeared on NPR's Fresh Air and Morning Edition.
Winer's plays have been developed at Lincoln Center Theater, the Women's Project, the Actors Studio and the Westport Country Playhouse, among other theaters. Her play, The Last Girl Singer, starring Tony Award-winner Kelly Bishop, was produced Off-Broadway. Winer has also written many benefit shows for venues like New York City Center and Town Hall, including Fans!: the Sally Rand Centennial Celebration, and Gotta Dance: A Dance Tribute to Hollywood, featuring Mary Tyler Moore, Cyd Charisse, Esther Williams and others. She recently wrote the Lifetime Achievement tribute show to Bock and Harnick for the William Inge Playwrights Festival. Winer is a native of Manhattan and a graduate of Swarthmore College. |
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| John Oddo |
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 John Oddo is a musician with tremendous versatility, as comfortable conducting and arranging for a jazz trio as he is a symphony orchestra. He holds a Masters Degree in Jazz Studies from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY, and soon after he graduated, Woody Herman invited him to join the legendary Thundering Herd, where he contributed numerous arrangements and compositions. In 1983, Oddo met Rosemary Clooney and then remained at her side for more than 18 years as her musical director, pianist and arranger. His credits include work on 20 of her recordings as well as countless live performances and television appearances. He currently works as musical director for several artists, including Michael Feinstein, Linda Eder, Debby Boone and two-time Tony Award winner James Naughton. Among his past collaborators are Tony Bennett, Ray Charles, Stan Getz, Bob and Dolores Hope, Maureen McGovern, John Pizzarelli, Toni Tennille and Linda Ronstadt. Oddo's keyboard skills can be heard on Rod Stewart's current Great American Songbook release. Other recent recording projects include composing and performing the theme music for Our Town starring Paul Newman, and the recent NBC-TV special, Scott Hamilton & Friends for which he served as conductor, pianist and arranger. Oddo also produced and arranged James Naughton's CD, It's About Time and wrote the arrangements for Debby Boone's CD, Reflections of Rosemary: A Tribute to Rosemary Clooney. |
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| Debby Boone |
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 Debby Boone earned instant fame in 1977 with her overnight hit, "You Light Up My Life." The song sold in excess of four million copies and went on to win an Academy Award, while Boone received a Grammy Award for Best New Artist. She has since won two additional Grammys and has received seven Grammy nominations. In addition to her recording career, Boone has starred in numerous stage productions, such as Seven Brides for Seven Brothers on Broadway and Lincoln Center's 30th anniversary production of The Sound of Music. She also starred as Rizzo in the Broadway production of Grease, toured nationally in Meet Me in St. Louis and performed the role of Anna in the 50th anniversary staging of Rodgers and Hammerstein's The King and I. Boone launched her symphony program, "Debby Boone Sings Stage and Screen," and her latest project, Reflections of Rosemary, is an intimate musical portrait of her late mother-in-law, the legendary Rosemary Clooney. The CD is a collection of 14 tunes, and she tours the show "Reflections of Rosemary" with musical director John Oddo at many performing arts centers and symphony halls throughout the U.S. Most recently, she performed the show at the Gold Coast in Las Vegas to rave reviews. Boone has also written six best-selling children's books in collaboration with her husband, Gabriel Ferrer, who created the illustrations. |
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| Loston Harris |
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 Now in his sixth season performing five times a week at the famed Bemelmans Bar in the illustrious Carlyle Hotel, Loston Harris delights audiences with his blending of traditional jazz riffs, gospel and blues into his own unique stylings. Born in Bangkok to military parents, he studied at Virginia Commonwealth University and Howard University where initially he was a percussionist, eventually switching to piano at the advice of Ellis Marsalis, father of the famed Marsalis jazz family. He was a member of the prestigious Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, led by Wynton Marsalis and appeared worldwide on the PBS special Portraits in Blue with fellow pianist Marcus Roberts. As Harris developed his interest in classic vocalists like Nat King Cole and Tony Bennett, he decided to record an album showcasing both his vocal and instrumental skills. The resulting Comes Love was a critical and commercial success and led to performances at such high-profile events as the VIP Academy Awards in Los Angeles and the GQ Man of the Year Awards in New York City. His current release, Timeless, demonstrates his talents as a composer in such love songs as "If I Say I Love You" and "Twilight" and as an interpreter of such standards as "How Deep is the Ocean" and "On The Street Where You Live." His website is www.lostonharris.com. |
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| James Naughton |
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 From drama to comedy to musicals, James Naughton has won critical acclaim for his exceptional range in theater, television and film. He is the winner of two Tony Awards as Best Actor in a Musical: for 1997's Chicago and for 1990's City of Angels, which also earned him a Drama Desk Award. A graduate of Brown University and the Yale School of Drama, Naughton made an award-winning New York debut as Edmund in the 1971 production of Long Day's Journey Into Night. His other Broadway credits include starring in Democracy as Chancellor Willy Brandt, Four Baboons Adoring the Sun, I Love My Wife and Whose Life Is It Anyway, and most recently he directed a production of Our Town starring Paul Newman, which appeared on Showtime. He has met with equal success in his solo concert/cabaret acts: "James Naughton Live" at the Manhattan Theater Club, "Street of Dreams" and his most recent, "Looking for the Heart Of Saturday Night." Off-Broadway he has appeared in Drinks Before Dinner and Losing Time, and he both performs and directs at the Williamstown Theater Festival. Naughton's film credits include The Devil Wears Prada, Labor Pains, The Good Mother, The Glass Menagerie and The First Wives Club, and he has appeared in numerous television movies. He has also starred in several television series, including the Law & Order franchise, Ally McBeal, Making the Grade, Brooklyn Bridge and Who's the Boss? |
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| Karen Ziemba |
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 Karen Ziemba received the Outer Critics Circle Award and was nominated for the Tony, Drama Desk and L.A.'s Ovation Award for her performance as Georgia Hendricks in the musical Curtains, currently on Broadway. She received the Tony, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards for playing The Wife in Contact at Lincoln Center Theater. Ziemba's other Broadway appearances include Never Gonna Dance (Outer Critics Circle Award, Tony nomination); Kander and Ebb's Steel Pier (Tony, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle nominations); A Chorus Line, 42nd Street, Crazy for You and Chicago. Off-Broadway she appeared in And The World Goes 'Round (Drama Desk Award), I Do! I Do! (Drama Desk nomination) and in leading roles at the New York City Opera in 110 in the Shade and The Most Happy Fella. For Encores! at City Center she starred in Bye Bye Birdie, The Pajama Game, Ziegfeld Follies of 1936 and Allegro. Regionally, she has performed at the Shakespeare and Ford's Theatres in Washington, D.C., the Hartford Stage, GeVa Theatre in Rochester (NY), the Williamstown Theatre Festival (MA) and the Magic Theatre in San Francisco. Her film and TV appearances include The Producers, Scrubs, the three Law & Order series, The Kennedy Center Honors; and for PBS, My Favorite Broadway: The Leading Ladies, Gershwin at 100, Evening at the Pops and Stephen Sondheim: A Celebration at Carnegie Hall. |
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| George Rabbai |
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| George Rabbai (trumpet & flugelhorn) toured with the Woody Herman Orchestra as a jazz soloist, performing at jazz festivals and concert halls throughout the U.S. and abroad and recording with Herman on the Concord and Toshiba EMI labels. He was selected as part of the Woody Herman All-Star small group and also performed as a soloist with the Concord Jazz All-Stars. As a leader, Rabbai has recorded with jazz greats Hank Jones, Rufus Reid and Mel Lewis for the Naxos label, and he is featured in Ken Burns' documentaries, Baseball and The West. Rabbai has worked as a soloist behind Rosemary Clooney and is featured on her Demi-Centennial: A Girl Singer's Golden Anniversary A&E special. Most recently, he has worked with vocalist Michael Feinstein and is a soloist on Feinstein's double CD. He has also recorded with Margaret Whiting and was heard with Tony Bennett on his television special, Tony Bennett with Love. Also a jazz educator, Rabbai appears at area schools as a jazz clinician, festival adjudicator and featured artist and is on the faculties of Philadelphia's University of the Arts and The Maynard Ferguson Institute of Jazz at Roan University in Glassboro, New Jersey. |
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| Mark Vinci |
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| Saxophonist and composer Mark Vinci (reeds) has toured as a soloist in Denmark, the Czech Republic, Poland, Germany, Ibiza and the U.S. where he has performed in such places as One Step Down and The Nest in Washington, D.C., Catalina Bar and Grill in L.A., and Birdland in NYC. He has performed, toured and/or recorded with artists such as Joe Lovano, Stefon Harris, Rosemary Clooney, Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Zoot Sims, Benny Carter, Tommy Flanagan and Michael Feinstein. Vinci is lead altoist with John Fedchock's New York Big Band and is a veteran of the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band, Maria Schneider Jazz Orchestra, and Woody Herman and Gerry Mulligan big bands. He has performed at numerous festivals such as North Sea, Kool, Montreaux, Monterey and Nice. A four-time Grammy nominee, Vinci has recorded on Bluenote, Capital, Concord, Telarc and SONY, among others. His three albums, Grand Slam, As I Think About You and Interplay, present him as both leader and composer, and he has received numerous commissions including a 200-piece concert band performance at the United Nations. Vinci is on the faculty of Skidmore College and has taught at colleges and high schools throughout the U.S., Denmark and the Czech Republic. His website is www.markvinci.com |
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| Jay Leonhart |
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| A superior bassist, Jay Leonhart (bass) also has a parallel and sometimes overlapping career as a lyricist and singer. As a child, he attended the Peabody Conservatory, and by the time he went to the Berklee College of Music, Leonhart was already a working jazz musician. In the early 1960s he played with the likes of Judy Garland, Nancy Wilson, Buddy Morrow and Mike Longo and was a busy freelance musician in New York, earning the title Most Valuable Bassist in the recording industry by the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences three times between 1975 and 1995. Among Leonhart's many associations were Marian McPartland (with whom he recorded in 1971), Jim Hall, Urbie Green, Chuck Wayne, Phil Woods, Gerry Mulligan, Lee Konitz, Don Sebesky, Louie Bellson and pianist Mike Renzi. Leonhart started becoming well-known as a lyricist in the 1980s when he began leading his own recording sessions and having his songs recorded by other singers. He now has recorded 15 solo albums, and as a leader, Leonhart has recorded for DMP, Nesak and DRG. He has created the one-man show, "The Bass Lesson," about his life in music, and his next show, "Nukular Tulips," is in the works. His website is www.jayleonhart.com |
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| Ray Marchica |
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| Ray Marchica (percussion, March 29) is a graduate of Brooklyn College where he studied percussion with Morris Lang and received a Bachelor of Science Degree in Music Performance. Marchica held the chair as the house drummer at Radio City Music Hall for two years before going on to the Broadway productions of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Damn Yankees, The Will Rogers Follies and Mamma Mia, where he is currently the drummer. Marchica was the drummer on The Rosie O'Donnell Show for its entire six-year run. He has worked and toured with Bernadette Peters, Betty Buckley, Christine Andreas, Tommy Tune, Joel Grey, Leslie Uggams, Michael Feinstein, James Naughton, Jimmy Webb, Keely Smith and others. He is the leader of his own group and freelances in all different types of settings. Marchica has recorded with James Brown, Little Richard, Dan Hartman, Roy Buchanan and Earl Klugh. He is the drummer with The Mike Longo New York State of the Art Jazz Ensemble, The Gary Morgan Pan Americana Big Band, and The Ed Palermo Big Band that has been specializing in performing the music of Frank Zappa. |
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| Jim Saporito |
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| Since graduating from the Eastman School of Music, Jim Saporito (percussion, March 30 & 31) has enjoyed a flourishing career as a freelance drummer/percussionist in New York City. He has played on over 60 major motion picture soundtracks and 150 records with artists that range from Marilyn Horne to Gladys Knight, Billy Joel to Barbara Cook and Tony Bennett to Celine Dion. He has been a member of countless Broadway show orchestras from the original La Cage aux Folles to last year's The Wedding Singer. He often performs with the New York Philharmonic as their drummer and as a percussionist/drummer with the New York City Ballet. He is currently touring with Michael Feinstein, Linda Eder and Barbara Cook. Saporito is most proud of his two children and his wife, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Melinda Wagner. |
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| About Carolyn Leigh |
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Carolyn Leigh was the youngest of the three female lyricists—along with Dorothy Fields and Betty Comden—at the center of the golden age of American popular music. Like Fields, but even more so, she is underappreciated, and the fame of her work is in sharp contrast to the obscurity of her name. Yet with her sexy wit and ability to cut to the core of emotional truths, the songs she wrote are some of the finest to be ingrained in American daily life. Leigh has hundreds of songs to her credit, including pop standards like "Young at Heart," "How Little it Matters, How Little We Know," "Witchcraft," "The Best is Yet to Come," "Hey, Look Me Over" and "I've Got Your Number," as well as such Broadway scores as Peter Pan and Little Me.
Born Carolyn Rosenthal into a middle class family in the Bronx, Leigh attended the academically competitive Hunter High School and both Queens College and NYU. She began her career writing radio announcements at the classical music station WQXR, then writing copy at an advertising agency and scripts for early television programs, including The Phil Silvers Show. She began writing lyrics professionally when she fell into conversation with a man at the end of a wrong number in an ad agency. They chatted; he was short a lyric writer; she came in and was hired on the spot. A few years later, her music publisher handed her a tune by the arranger Johnny Richards, and in three hours she came back with a lyric. The result, "Young at Heart," was promptly recorded by Frank Sinatra and changed her life. She was 27 years old.
It was Leigh's success with "Young at Heart" that immediately won the young lyricist her first Broadway job in collaboration with the composer Mark "Moose" Charlap: the score for Jerome Robbins' 1954 Peter Pan, starring Mary Martin. More musicals followed, notably (with Cy Coleman) the flop Wildcat, the classic Little Me, and (with Elmer Bernstein), the Tony-nominated How Now Dow Jones.
But it was her collaboration with the composer Cy Coleman that showed the depth of her abilities. In a stormy professional relationship that spanned many years, Leigh and Coleman produced a string of hits and brilliant lesser-known songs that were a mainstay for both the great recording artists of the 1950s and 60s, and also sophisticated nightclub "singers' singers" like Mabel Mercer, Sylvia Sims, Julie Wilson, Blossom Dearie and Barbara Carroll. Even after she and Coleman broke up their partnership, they would reunite for projects over the years.
Bombastic and passionate about her work and married three times, in later life she began performing her own material in nightclubs. She appeared several times at the 92nd Street Y's Lyrics & Lyricists™, holding forth on her songs—the last time just shortly before her death in 1983 from a heart attack, at the age of only 57. She left behind a slew of some of the best known standards in the American Songbook and a level of craft and sophistication in the art of lyric-writing that has rarely been surpassed.
Ticket Information:
Saturday, March 29, 8pm
Sunday, March 30, 3pm & 8pm
Monday, March 31, 2pm & 8pm |
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© 2009 92nd Street Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association
All Rights Reserved. |
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