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Blogs -> Isaiah's Blog -> Reflections on the 30th Birthday Bash
Wow! If you
weren’t at the 30th Anniversary Star Studded Birthday Bash, oh, you
shoulda been there! It turned out to be a memorable night, and a lot of fun!
Every single seat right up to the back of the balcony was filled with
participating artists, present and former Board and Staff members, old friends,
elected officials, sponsors and supporters, and ticket buyers attracted by the
dazzling list of participants. At the very end, tears streamed down many faces
on and off stage, including mine, as all the artists, and many audience
members, joined in the anthem to the tune of “Somewhere” from West Side Story…“You’re a home for us,
artistic home for us, thirty years and you’re growing still, we’ve all loved
you and always will, thirty more years—right here!!”
The
logistics of the performance itself were always uncertain. Could we get each of
the 46 performance slots on and off stage swiftly without the whole event
shlepping on into the wee hours? But everyone arrived at the red carpet outside
the theatre at 6:15, as instructed, and for just one hour, until the doors had
to open for the audience at 7:30, the whole procedure had to be organized—who
would sit where out in the house, when each group would be summoned backstage
through the house right curtains by our fearless Project Coordinator, Allegra
Vecchio, and my Assistant, Mac Barrett, and delivered over to the master stage
manager Matthew Oberstein, our Assistant Producer, and sent by him and Technical Director Denis Heron to their
assigned entrance points and microphones, while our Production Manager Richard
Koch called the light cues. And I did voice-over intros on the stage left
microphone.
But once
the show started, it all ran smoothly and on schedule, and I was very proud of
all our staff, including Ed Budz and the house managers who accomplished the
challenging task of getting everyone back into their seats at the end of the
intermission with a glass of champagne in their hands for the toast offered by Allan
Miller and me to the artists and everyone else who made the evening, and the
three decades of Symphony Space, possible. A friend of mine had one complaint:
“It’s hard to applaud, with a champagne glass in your hand.”
The two and
a half hours of performances fulfilled my hope of showing off the very broad
range of Symphony Space’s cultural offerings, from the kickoff of the huge and
spectacular Taikoza Japanese Drums, part of our CAP education program, to the
great cellist Timothy Eddy’s unaccompanied Bach’s Cello Suite or Eugenia
Zukerman playing a contemporary Chinese composer’s flute piece; from five Selected
Shorts micro-fictions read by five stars of the series to Theodore Bikel coming
from Los Angeles to sing “If I Were A Rich Man” in Yiddish! to all potential
donors; from great poetry read by the likes of Marian Seldes, Estelle Parsons,
Joanna Gleason, and Roy Blount, Jr, and from comedy turns by Stiller and Meara
and Calvin Trillin to baseball haiku read by Stephen Lang and stirring vocal
solos by Donna Murphy, James Naughton, Liz Callaway, Melissa Errico, and KT
Sullivan, and choral works performed by such great groups as Hudson Shad and
The Western Wind; from a Duke Ellington dance and song piece to Don Byron
playing Bach on the clarinet, not to mention the 28 stars who took part in
seven historical “Newsflashes” about Symphony Space’s past, present, and
future! All this and much, much more. You hadda be there.
But if you
were not, we will soon have an audio sampling right here on this website, and
no doubt some bits of the video coverage will make their way online here before
too long.
The
morning after the Birthday Bash, we were already busy on what’s coming up next.
For me, that’s the January 28th Thalia Follies on the subject of the
tightening and perhaps frightening Presidential race. I hope you’ll come to the
6:30 or 8:30 show to hear songs about the
front-runners and the big issues, as well as advance drafts of Mike Bloomberg’s
“Big Announcement” and Mike Huckabee’s planned Inaugural Address. See you
there.
Permanent link: http://www.symphonyspace.org/blogs/isaiah/22
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