Southeastern Louisiana University

Legendary entertainers, musicals headline Fanfare's third week

Contact: Christina Chapple

10/6/06

      HAMMOND – Two legendary Louisiana entertainers and two musicals share the spotlight during the third week of Fanfare, Southeastern Louisiana University’s annual festival of the arts.

     Pianist Ronnie Kole will be center stage at Southeastern’s Columbia Theatre for the Performing Arts in downtown Hammond on Oct. 18, while Irma Thomas, the “Soul Queen of New Orleans,” will star in Amite on Oct. 21 as the guest of Fanfare’s community partner, the Amite Arts Council.

     Throughout Fanfare’s third week, approximately 50 local children will audition and rehearse for the Oct. 21 Missoula Children’s Theatre musical production of the fairytale favorite “Snow White.” And Southeastern’s acclaimed Opera/Music Theatre Workshop will bring to the Pottle Music Building Auditorium stage Oct. 18-21 the eclectic musical review “Songs for a New World.”

     A one-man Broadway show, Ronnie Kole has been described as having “the humor of Victor Borge, the showmanship of Liberace, and the virtuoso sounds of a full symphony orchestra.” Fellow pianist Harry Connick Jr. said, "When you look up ‘piano’ in the dictionary, you will see a picture of Ronnie Kole. He's one of the great players of our time."

     Kole has recorded at Carnegie Hall, performed throughout the world solo and with trios, septets and orchestras, and entertained millions of fans, including a pope and several presidents.

     Tickets for his 7:30 p.m. performance at the Columbia are $12, adults; $10, senior citizens, Southeastern faculty, staff and alumni; $8, group rate; and $5, all students.

     Ponchatoula native Thomas, who recently wowed a national television audience with her rendition of the National Anthem at the re-opening of the New Orleans Superdome, will appear Oct. 21 at 7:30 p.m. at the Amite High School Performing Arts Center, 403 S. Laurel St. During a career spanning more than four decades, Thomas has thrilled fans with her accomplishments as an artist, bandleader, and record producer.

     Tickets for her Amite Arts Council concert are $25 and $21 and are available at Ruby’s, 111 E. Thomas St., Hammond, 985-345-4745, and the Amite Chamber of Commerce, 101 SE Central Ave., Amite, 985-748-5537. 

     A perennial Fanfare favorite, Missoula Children's Theatre casts local children in a musical fairytale, providing dozens of youngsters with an unforgettable, fun, confidence-building experience – and the opportunity to become stars in just one week.

     The company’s Fanfare 2006 production of “Snow White” has the princess on the run from her cruel royal stepmother, a band of evil Bats, and the “Black Forest Creatures.” Finding a haven with the Seven Dwarfs, Snow White is menaced by the mean Queen, but her evil plans are thwarted by Snow White’s Forest Friends, father “King Backwards,” the trusty dwarfs, and, of course, Prince Charming.

     Auditions, scheduled for Oct. 16, 4 p.m., at the Southeastern Lab School gym, are open to children in grades kindergarten through high school. Tickets for “Snow White” are $12, adults; $10, senior citizens, Southeastern faculty, staff and alumni; $8, group rate; and $5, all students.

     The Opera/Music Theatre Workshop’s production of Tony Award winner Jason Robert Brown’s “Songs for a New World” is scheduled for the Pottle Music Building Auditorium Oct. 18-21, with curtain time 7:30 p.m. nightly.

     The musical review fuses pop, folk, rock, jazz, gospel, funk, and cabaret with dramatic, poignant, comic, and always theatrical lyrics. The audience is musically transported from a 1492 Spanish ship to a ledge high above Fifth Avenue where they meet a startling array of characters -- from a young man who has decided that basketball is his ticket out of the ghetto, to a political prisoner begging to have his life back, to the latest Mrs. Santa Claus.

     The revue, originally produced in 1995, preceded Brown's 1999 Tony award-winning “Parade” and his 2002 Off-Broadway show “The Last Five Years.” The show has an “R” rating because of some adult language.

     Tickets are $14, general admission; $10, senior citizens, Southeastern faculty, staff and alumni, and non-Southeastern students. Southeastern students are admitted free with their university I.D.

     Also during Fanfare’s third week

     -- the Sunday With the Arts series at area churches continues Oct. 15 with “Jazzical!” at Hammond’s First Baptist Church, 401 W. Morris. The 3 p.m. concert teams dreamy Spanish guitar with cool jazz as Southeastern’s Guitar Ensemble, directed by Patrick Kerber, and the Jazz Band, directed by Richard Schwartz, team up for a program of Spanish classical music and jazz standards – and combine for an eclectic finale of spicy Latin jazz. A reception honoring the artists will follow.

     -- Louisiana Writers Reading the South will feature Southeastern English Department colleagues -- writer-in-residence Bev Marshall, author of “Walking Through Shadows,” “Right As Rain,” and “Hot Fudge Sundae Blues,” and poet Alison Pelegrin “Squeezers,” and “The Zydeco Tablet.” They will read from their works Oct. 16 at noon in D Vickers Hall, room 125.

     -- Southeastern faculty and students will shine in “Soaring,” a collaboration of the music and dance programs. The free concert, scheduled for Oct. 17, 7:30 p.m., at the Columbia Theatre, will feature choreography and music by award-winning faculty and showcase the talents of Southeastern dancers, musicians and ensembles.

     -- the “Then and Now” lecture series sponsored by the Department of History and Political Science, will feature Michael Kurtz, Southeastern's nationally recognized historian of crime, on Oct. 18, 1 p.m., in the Pottle Music Building Auditorium. Kurtz’s free lecture, “Presumed Guilty: Bruno Richard Hauptmann and the Lindbergh Kidnapping Case,” will detail one of the 20th century's most controversial cases, the 1932 kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh's 18-month old son.

     Kurtz will discuss the controversial arrest, trial, conviction, and execution of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, detailing how he says authorities falsified evidence and manipulated facts to secure a conviction against a German immigrant at worst guilty of extortion, and questioning if Hauptmann made a sacrificial lamb to close a high profile, politically motivated case.

     -- the Foreign Film Series continues with the German film “Nowhere in Africa,” a story spanning two continents and depicting the true story of a Jewish family that flees the Nazi regime in 1938 and adjusts to farm life in Kenya. The film, scheduled for Oct. 18, at 3:30 p.m. in the Music Recital Hall, is rated R and contains some nudity and sexual content. It will be subtitled in English.

     -- a new lecture series, the Judge Leon Ford Lecture in History, will debut featuring John Boles, William Pettus Hobby Professor of History at Rice University. In lectures at 10 a.m. in the Student Union Theatre and 6:30 p.m. in the Music Recital Hall, Boles will examine "Climate, Geography, and Southern History: The Influence of Non-Human Factors." His free talk deals not only with global factors such as climate and geography, but also with local environmental factors from the honeybee and boll weevil to the mosquito and cattle tick.

     “Human action always occurs in an environmental context,” says Boles. “It is important in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to consider the synergistic relationship between nature and human history.”

     Fanfare tickets are available online at columbiatheatre.org and at the Columbia box office, 220 East Thomas St., Hammond, (985) 543‑4371. Box office hours are noon to 5 p.m., weekdays, and one hour before performance time for events at the Columbia Theatre.

Captions …

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JAZZICAL! – Southeastern Louisiana University jazz and guitar musicians – directed by Richard Schwartz, left, and Patrick Kerber, right, will team up for a program of Spanish classical music and jazz standards, Oct. 15 at 3 p.m. at Hammond’s First Baptist Church. The concert is part of Fanfare’s “Sunday With the Arts” series.

slu_fanfare06_marshall and slu_fanfare06_Pelegrin

LOUISIANA WRITERS – Southeastern Louisiana University English faculty colleagues Bev Marshall and Alison Pelegrin will read from their works at noon, Oct. 16, in D Vickers Hall as part of Fanfare’s “Louisiana Writers Reading the South” series.

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SOARING AT FANFARE – The talents of Southeastern Louisiana University music and dance faculty and students will “soar” in a special Fanfare concert, “Soaring,” at 7:30 p.m., Oct. 17, at the Columbia Theatre for the Performing Arts.

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SENSATIONAL CRIME – Southeastern Louisiana University historian and author Michael Kurtz will examine the notorious Lindbergh kidnapping in a Fanfare “Then and Now” lecture Oct. 18 at 1 p.m. in the Pottle Music Building Auditorium.

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PIANO LEGEND – Entertainer Ronnie Kole will be the special guest of Southeastern Louisiana University’s Fanfare on Oct. 18, appearing at 7:30 p.m. at the Columbia Theatre for the Performing Arts.

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JUDGE FORD LECTURE – Rice University professor John Boles’ lecture on “Climate, Geography and Southern History: The Influence of Non-Human Factors” will initiate a new Fanfare series honoring the late Judge Leon Ford III with two lectures on Oct. 19 at Southeastern Louisiana University.

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MUSICAL SNOW WHITE – The popular Missoula Children’s Theatre returns to Southeastern Louisiana University’s Fanfare with a musical retelling of “Snow White.” Auditions are 4 p.m. Oct. 16, at the Southeastern Lab School gym with the performance on Oct. 21 at 2 p.m. at the Columbia Theatre for the Performing Arts.

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SOUL QUEEN AT FANFARE – Irma Thomas, the Soul Queen of New Orleans, will be presented Oct. 21 by Southeastern Louisiana University’s Fanfare partner, the Amite Arts Council. She will perform at 7:30 p.m. at the Amite High School Performing Arts Center.