Friends of Bob live music co-op February 2012
                                          

We are thrilled and honored to be presenting Nellie McKay and her band. Having seen her perform, I can vouch that this is going to be a wonderfully entertaining evening. She’s musically dazzling and very very witty—and she is bringing a terrific band. Nelly will play grand piano and uke, and she’ll have a guitarist, drummer, bass player, and sax player with her.
She’s performing her musical adaptation of the 1958 film noir Academy-Award winner I Want to Live! The show has already had a NYC theatrical run and we reprint enthusiastic reviews elsewhere in this newsletter.
This is a very expensive show for us—please help us draw a sell-out crowd. The other venues on this tour are big: the chance to see Nellie in perfect little Duncan Hall is not to be missed.

Thursday, February 9th –7:30 p.m.
from NYC
Nellie McKay
& band
I Want to Live!

Duncan Hall, 619 Ferry St., Lafayette
$20 (advance) / $25 (day of show)
from JL Records, McGuire Music, and Von's Records
all-ages show
Advance tickets by mail are $21. Send your check to:

Friends of Bob, PO Box 59, Battle Ground, IN 47920

Please provide your name, address, phone #, and e-mail address

A “brilliant, zany film-noir musical biography” raves The New York Times about Nellie McKay’s new cabaret show “I Want to Live!,” inspired by the 1958 movie of the same name that won Susan Hayward an Oscar playing the convicted murderess Barbara Graham. “I Want to Live!” “combines Nellie McKay’s unlimited gifts as a singer, songwriter, actress, pianist, ukulele player, mimic, satirist and comedian into a show that is much deeper than its surface might suggest” (The New York Times). Joined by a stellar band, McKay combines period tunes with original tunes and more for a stunning night of theater

You should know that Nellie McKay is hard to categorize. She’s done Brecht on Broadway, opened for Lou Reed at Carnegie Hall, sung Woody Allen movie songs at the Hollywood Bowl, performed on A Prairie Home Companion, duetted with Eartha Kitt and Triumph The Insult Comic Dog, played Hilary Swank’s sister on the big screen, paid tribute to Doris Day, and released three wildly acclaimed albums of original music. Her music is as tuneful and clever as the best of the Great American Songbook—part cabaret, part sparkly pop. But beneath the charming melodic surface is a wit that cuts, and a sharply tuned social conscience. Nellie began playing her own songs (and lovingly chosen covers) in clubs in downtown New York City in 2003, soon catching the attention of music writers and a number of record labels—she was a gifted entertainer, an impressive musician, with songs unlike anything people were hearing around town. The Washington Post wrote, “McKay’s music evokes the lost elegance of pre-Elvis pop music because she recognizes that such stylishness and wit are worth pursuing. But those goals inevitably collide with the realities of money, sex and politics, and she documents those collisions in her tongue-in-cheek lyrics, emphatic beats and bubbly melodies,” and no less a rock and roller than critic Robert Christgau has written that Nellie McKay is “ebullient, funny and political. Her future looks brave and free to me.”
 Nellie has won a Theatre World Award for her portrayal of Polly Peachum in the Broadway production of The Threepenny Opera and performed onscreen in the film PS I Love You, as well as writing original music for the Rob Reiner film Rumor Has It and contributing to the New York Times Book Review.  Her music has also been heard on the TV shows Weeds, Grey’s Anatomy, NCIS, Privileged and Nurse Jackie, and Nellie has appeared on numerous shows including Fresh Air, Late Show with David Letterman, The View, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, Live with Regis & Kelly and CBS Saturday Morning.  In 2010, the Chase Brock Experience produced a ballet of her third album, Obligatory Villagers, while Nellie recently finished contributing to the soundtrack for the HBO series Boardwalk Empire.  Home Sweet Mobile Home is McKay’s latest album of all-original material and features the musical wanderlust, lyrical playfulness and unique point of view that have characterized her music since her breakthrough debut Get Away From Me.
Last spring, Nellie premiered her latest project I Want to Live! the “brilliant, zany film-noir musical biography” (New York Times) of Barbara Graham, the third woman to die in the gas chamber at San Quentin:  “McKay’s virtually unlimited gifts as a singer, songwriter, actress, pianist, ukulele player, mimic, satirist and comedian into a show that is much deeper than its surface might suggest…In the most lighthearted way they evoke a heartless environment of social injustice in which people who fall through the cracks are invisible to everyone else” (New York Times).
The New York Times: March 24, 2011   Review of I Want to Live!

“Fresh out of reform school — Barbara Graham,” announced a booming voice to open Nellie McKay’s new show, “I Want to Live!,” on Tuesday evening at Feinstein’s at Loews Regency. Wearing a copper-colored dress whose tarnished glitter suggested crushed Christmas ornaments and flashing a bright artificial smile, Ms. McKay, bounced onto the stage like an animated package of pretty poison.
The show that followed was a brilliant, zany film-noir musical biography of Barbara Graham, a convicted murderer who was the third woman to die in the gas chamber in California (at San Quentin) in 1955. In the 1958 movie “I Want to Live!” Graham was played by Susan Hayward, whose performance won her an Academy Award for best actress.
Ms. McKay is, if anything, the opposite of Hayward, whose screen alter egos tended to be embattled, humorless victims, weighed down by heavy psychological baggage. With her curly blond hair, light sinuous voice, and sunshiny aura Ms. McKay is closer to Shirley Temple. Physically she seems typecast to play a not-so-innocent Little Red Riding Hood who might carry a pearl-handled dagger in her basket of goodies.
“I Want to Live!” combines Ms. McKay’s virtually unlimited gifts as a singer, songwriter, actress, pianist, ukulele player, mimic, satirist and comedian into a show that is much deeper than its surface might suggest. Directly or indirectly, the songs, which come from here and there and include three originals, address America’s post-crash economic woes with references to crime and the Great Depression.
In the most lighthearted way they evoke a heartless environment of social injustice in which people who fall through the cracks are invisible to everyone else. In the most pointed satiric shot Ms. McKay blithely carols Irving Berlin’s “Isn’t This a Lovely Day” while her drummer, Ben Bynum, ostentatiously simulates shooting heroin while she pretends not to notice.
A fragment of the Bobby McFerrin hit, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” is heard twice. The sensibility that emerges is that of a champion of the underdog who editorializes through insinuation and juxtaposition.
Backing Ms. McKay is an excellent “hipster” quartet that softens Louis Jordan’s exuberant jive style into a slinkier pop-jazz sound, its subtlety exemplified by the tenor saxophonist Tivon Pennicott’s barely audible tonal brush strokes. Rounding out the group are Alexi David on bass and Cary Park on guitar.
The show’s final one-two punch is its death and resurrection coupling of “Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life,” sung Jeanette MacDonald style, with a growled rendition of the Tom Waits song “Straight to the Top.” In a matter of minutes Ms. McKay transports you from heaven into hell. Or is the other way around? She makes both worlds irresistibly seductive.