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Cotton Club Parade 2011
NY City Center and Jazz At LC Takes You Back to the Roaring Twenties
The first production of a new partnership between the New York City Center and the Jazz at Lincoln Center will take audience members back to the Roaring Twenties and the days of big bands, swing dance and vaudeville.
Duke Ellington’s “Cotton Club Parade” opens November 18 at the New York City Center and will run through November 22 with six performances. This is the inaugural production of a new producing partnership between the two artistic centers which combines their specialties of musical theater and jazz music.
Ellington is credited with creating American music and giving it a unique sound with enduring hits such as “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing.” The performance uses Ellington’s music as a centerpiece to recreate the Harlem nightclub atmosphere of one of his floor shows at the Cotton Club, where he and his orchestra had a four-year residency beginning in 1927, a time when swing dance, big bands and novelty acts were all the rage.
Ellington performed more than 20,000 times around the world and composed more than 3,000 songs during his 50-year career. His awards include the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1966 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969.
The performance was conceived by Jack Viertel, senior vice president of Jujamcyn Theaters, which owns and operates five Broadway theaters, and artistic director of Encores!, a Tony-honored musical theater series that has been performing rarely heard works of American lyricists and composers since 1994.
Viertel says he hopes audience members will have a sense “of having gone to another world where this kind of evening…happened for several years, and then disappeared off the face of the earth.”
“The Cotton Club Parade” was directed by Warren Carlyle (“Hugh Jackman: Back on Broadway”) and will also feature the talents of Grammy nominated singer and songwriter Carla Cook; tap, hip-hop and street jazz artist Jared Grimes; and Broadway and film actress Adriane Lenox.
In addition to works composed and arranged by Ellington, the performance will include songs by other great jazz composers of the time including Jimmy McHugh, Dorothy Fields and Harold Arlen, as well as dancers, singers and variety acts.
Selected texts by Langston Hughes, read by Tony Award-nominated musical theater performer Brandon Victor Dixon, will be “the glue that holds the evening together,” Viertel says.
Pieces of Hughes’ poetry will help introduce and give context to performance moments, and serve as “the little thread that carries you from one thing to another,” he says.
The New York City Center, dedicated in 1943, was the first performing arts center in Manhattan and is home to many companies including Encores!, Manhattan Theatre Club and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.
The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, directed by Wynton Marsalis, is composed of 15 jazz soloists and ensemble players and has been the resident orchestra at the center since 1988.
Virtel says there is no band that compares to Jazz at Lincoln Center “playing this kind of music anywhere in the world, so we’re incredibly lucky to have that.”
Go here for more information, tickets and showtimes.