LITTLE ROCK — Just how old is Broadway, anyway?
Composer, musical director and pianist Neil Berg is bringing his 100 Years of Broadway concert revue, covering (at least) a century of Broadway shows, to Little Rock’s Broadway - Robinson Center Music Hall, West Markham Street and Broadway, 7:30 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday. AT&T is the sponsor.
The show, featuring five Broadway stars accompanied by an all-star New York band, will also be on stage at 7 p.m. March 4 at the Vada Sheid Community Development Center, Arkansas State University-Mountain Home, 1600 S. College St. Tickets are $35, $17.50 for students and children 12 and under, plus handling fees. Call (800) 514-3849.
But wait! The same cast will perform 102 Years of Broadway at 7:30 p.m. March 5 at the Arkansas Best Performing Arts Center, Fort Smith Convention Center, 55 S. Seventh St., Fort Smith, part of the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith’s Season of Entertainment 32. Tickets are $30 and $27; call (479) 788-7300 or visit ticketsage.com/uafs.
The show features songs from The Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables, Cats, Jesus Christ Superstar and Jekyll & Hyde, among many others, sung by people who performed them on Broadway - Carter Calvert (Grizabella, Cats), Danny Zolli (Jesus, Jesus Christ Superstar), Sandra Joseph (Christine, Phantom of the Opera), Ron Bohmer (Phantom, Phantom) and William Michals (Beast, Beauty and the Beast).
So just what, besides two years, is the difference between the shows?
“The first time we do a show at a venue, we do the ‘branded’ show, 100 Years of Broadway,” Berg explains. “And when we started getting asked back to venues, presenters said, ‘We want to make sure that people have the idea that it’s not exactly the same show.’
“So every time we go back to a venue, we add a year - 101 would be two years [at a venue], 102 would be three years - so people who have seen the show can have a little inkling that the song selection is a little different.”
The song selection, Berg says, depends on his cast.
“I bring five of the biggest stars from Broadway, all these artists have starred in one, and some of them in dozens of musicals, and they’re all some of the most famous roles in Broadway history, and they get to re-create some of those roles.
“I always play to their strengths, so for example, if I’m bringing the star of Phantom, even if we did it [there] the year before, there are people in the audience who haven’t seen it, so I make sure that we do the major songs, the major pieces, again. A, people love it, and B, if you have the actual star from the show, you always want to make it special for the audience.”
The show takes a nonchronological look at the history of Broadway; “In the [basic] 100 Years of Broadway, we’ll always start 100 years ago with ‘Give My Regards to Broadway,’” Berg says. But in choosing songs from musicals that were on Broadway before his stars were, Berg says, “I always pick songs that are right for my singers; I’ll never force them to sing something” that isn’t appropriate. “If they were a star of a different era, what would they sing? That’s basically how I do it.
“If I have somebody from Show Boat, we’ll do songs from the ’20s, but if I don’t, I’m not going to force somebody to sing something from Show Boat. I basically play to the strengths of my team. It’s always done very well. I don’t do things chronologically, because I’ve found that the audience started anticipating the show.”
Between songs, “As the host and narrator, I basically get to tell inside stories about each of the songs and performers before they perform them,” Berg adds. “One of the biggest [reasons], and we’ve been doing this nine years on tour, this has been the most successful Broadway touring concert is because, if people haven’t seen a show, by my narrating and telling a little bit about it, or some anecdote or story about Leonard Bernstein or how My Fair Lady was written by Lerner and Loewe, people become more connected to the material, and care more about the songs.
“It’s not just a concert, it’s a kind of retrospective. I’m at the piano playing but I’m also hosting the evening. It could be 1,500 seats, a sold out audience, but it’ll still feel like it’s in my living room and I’ve invited everyone for a big party. I just happen to have five friends who are the best singers in the world.”
The cast is subject to change at the last minute because, “any of these performers, at any given moment, I’ll lose them for months or for years - they go and pop in and out of shows that they’re doing,” Berg says.
Some things are pretty certain: Zolli, whom Berg says has starred in more different productions of Jesus Christ Superstar than anybody else, “even Ted Neeley,” will likely sing hits from that show. Expect to hear solos and duets from Phantom of the Opera from Ron Bohmer and Sandra Joseph, his wife - they met starring opposite each other in that show.
“Ron Bohmer - it’s not what shows he’s done, it’s what hasn’t that guy done?” Berg says. “He starred or featured in over a dozen Broadway shows. … He just did El Gallo in The Fantasticks because he’d never done it. He’s incredible.”
Bohmer says he hasn’t yet gotten a good look at the set list for these shows, “because we change the show based on a number of factors. We do the show with five Broadway shows, so the first thing that [affects] it is who’s available to do the show, who’s not doing something in New York right now, and that can change from week to week because people jump into things very quickly.
“The premise of Neil’s shows is always the same, which is to give people their absolute favorite music from Broadway shows.
In the second version, which would be either 101 or 102, depending on how many times we’ve been to the city before, that’s where we begin to go a little deeper into a show - like if we’ve done, say, something from Jersey Boys, we might, if we opened the show previously with ‘Oh, What a Night,’ we might do something like ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You’ or ‘Sherry.’ We might look a little further into the score.”
“The one show we seem to not be able to omit is Phantom of the Opera,” he adds. “We’ve tried it. We’ve thought, ‘Maybe this year, because we did Phantom last year, or we’ve been here for three years in a row, let’s not do Phantom this year.’ And people get angry. Because it is the longest running show of all time.
“The wonderful thing is that when I’m in the show and Sandra Joseph is in the show, is that we’re a married couple and we met starring opposite each other in Phantom of the Opera, and fell in love, so it’s a little kind of an added bonus, not just to see Phantom performed in the show but to see a couple whose history is so deeply steeped in it, their 10 years of marriage is based on that happenstance of being cast in those roles.”
Style, Pages 49 on 02/24/2013