Saturday, October 6, and Sunday, October 7
Prospect Park Auditorium, 1584 34th Avenue, Moline IL
Nominated for the 1994 Tony Award for Best Musical and boasting a cast of nearly two dozen musical talents, the Rodgers and Hammerstein revue A Grand Night for Singing will be presented October 6 and 7 as a special fundraiser for Quad City Music Guild and the Prospect Park Pavilion, treating patrons to a song-and-dance showcase in which, according to the New York Times, “the songs flow together in a sequence that treats them as lighthearted extensions of one another.”
Featuring songs from such lesser-known works as Allegro, Me & Juliet, and Pipe Dream, modest successes such as State Fair and Pipe Dream, and iconic hits including Carousel, Oklahoma!, The King & I, South Pacific, Cinderella, and The Sound of Music, A Grand Night for Singing was originally was presented cabaret-style at New York's Rainbow & Stars at the top of Rockefeller Center. It consequently moved to Broadway under the direction of Tony winner Walter Bobbie, and was quickly and widely praised for its theatrical innovation. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein III, for instance, probably never imagined The King & I's “Shall We Dance?’ as a comic pas de deux for a towering beauty and her diminutive admirer, nor did they suspect that one day a lovelorn young lad might pose The Sound of Music's musical question “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?” But that’s precisely the kind of invention lavished upon A Grand Night for Singing, with its witty musical arrangements including a sultry Andrews Sisters-esque “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair,” a swinging “Honeybun” worthy of the Modernaires, and a jazzy “Kansas City” that leaves no question about how terrifically up-to-date the remarkable songs of Rogers and Hammerstein remain.
Three Music Guild veterans – Bill Marsoun, Tom Morrow, and Mike Schmidt – co-direct A Grand Night for Singing, the proceeds for which will be used for restoration of the Prospect Park Pavilion as well as other renovations in the Moline park. The cast, meanwhile, finds songs from the Rogers and Hammerstein oeuvre interpreted by 23 gifted local performers, most of them happily familiar to Music Guild audiences: Kailey Ackermann, Victoria Beale, Amanda Bolt, Hillary Erb, Elizabeth Gonzalez, Gregory Graf, Anthony Greer, Sydney Greer, Christine Haas, Laila Haley, Paul Hansen, Kat Jecklin, Christina Myatt, John Donald O’Shea, Kevin Pieper, Erin Platt, Dolores Sierra, Jennifer Sondgeroth, Troy Stark, Mark Swessinger, Pami Triebel, Harold Truitt, and John Weigandt.
A Grand Night for Singing will be performed at Quad City Music Guild's Prospect Park Auditorium at 7:30 p.m. on October 6 and 2 p.m. on October 7, admission is $25, and more information and tickets are available by visiting QCMusicGuild.com.
