By Lynda Sturner****Don’t cry La La, it ain’t over yet! Carnival was crazy fun and the ten thousand people who came to watch the parade have left town and even though Drag Bingo is over until next year, the dick dock is jumping and Ptown is still the place to be.
The one and only Marilyn Maye, who is celebrating her 90th birthday this year, plays the Art House from August 24-27. Broadway star of Falsettos and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Stephanie J. Block, comes to the Art House August 21 and 22.
Don’t miss Dina Martina at The Crown and Anchor and while you’re there, get a ticket to see Anthony Rapp, who was in the original production of Rent and is currently on the TV series “Star Trek: Discovery,” playing Science Officer Paul Stamets, the first openly gay character on the series.
One of the great evenings in town is with the Well-Strung boys at the Art House, doing songs from the movies. Now certainly drag is fabulous and we get Broadway’s best playing to sold out houses and the show girls in Illusions are drop dead gorgeous, but this string quartet is something else altogether. You know that expression “you can’t have it all?” Forget about it. They do. They play string instruments like you dream of hearing them, they sing, they make you laugh and you can’t take your eyes off them onstage.
Melissa Manchester is coming back to Provincetown with her new album, The Fellas, a tribute to Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Mel Tormé and Tony Bennett. She’ll be singing some of their most iconic songs like “Night and Day,” “Love is Just Around the Corner,” “Smile” and “Ain’t that a Kick in the Head” at Fishermen Hall (12 Winslow Street), Tuesday, August 21 at 9:30pm.
Well, La La just saw Melissa Manchester’s first show at Fishermen Hall tonight and was blown away! Even though I’ve heard countless renditions of “Night and Day,” when Manchester sang it, I could almost smell the all-consuming fire burning inside her. Obviously, I always known what that song was about, but until she sang it, I never fully felt how intense that love was.
My other favorites were her duet with Barry Manilow on video of “For Me and My Gal,” the Peter
Allen, Carole Bayer Sager song “Don’t Cry Out Loud” and her tribute to Marvin Hamlisch, “Looking Through the Eyes of Love.”
There are two more opportunities to catch her show, Tuesday 8/21 at 7pm and 9pm. Don’t miss this!
“Those fellas captured a moment in time. What I bring is not a literal homage to what they’ve done, it’s my female energy and appreciation of their male energy,” she said. “The Fellas is a completion of an idea that started a long time ago in 1989, when I competed an album called Tribute. This was a tribute to some of the great woman singers that meant everything to me. I always wanted to do the fellas, but in those days, there wasn’t a way I could make it happen. There was no record company that was interested in it. I was still under contract.”
Today, it’s all changed and the record industry is as outmoded as landlines or snail mail. However, Manchester has changed with the times. Her students at USC College taught her about crowd-funding to create your own albums. She is now an independent artist. “It feels great to have the creative freedom to choose your own projects. It’s also code language for doing 4 times the work myself. But artistically, there are no boundaries and so I’m catching up with my dreams and stepping into myself as much as possible.”
Manchester was born into a musical family in New York City. Her father was a bassoonist at the Metropolitan Opera Company and her mother, sister, aunts and grandmother all sang. “I always chose the odd harmonies,” she said.
She knew singing was her destiny when she was 5 and heard Ella Fitzgerald sing. “I didn’t know what she was singing but there was something in the tone of her voice which was clear as a light, as if you were shining a light bulb on her face,” says Manchester.
She was making money as a jingle singer at 17 while auditioning for record companies. “I started paying hard dues singing at the coffee houses at universities in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, frequently playing with my back to the audience. This was before electronic keyboards and I was playing with any piece of crap that hadn’t been tuned in 5 years. I played in real shit holes. I had to learn how to hold a room. I just kept doing that and things started turning around and I was signed to Arista Records.”
She studied composing with Paul Simon, won a Grammy (You Should Hear How She Talks About You), written two Academy Award nominated songs (“Through the Eyes of Love” and I’ll Never say Goodbye”), recorded dozens of albums and appeared in films, television and on stage.
“Artistically you live in chapters and sometimes I would bow to the record company who thought I should try something that didn’t feel entirely comfortable. Sometimes it worked sometimes it didn’t, but I just wanted to keep at it because I love doing what I do so much. There were periods when I had to walk away. Thankfully, I had my two children to raise. As I eased back into it, I could see that the landscape was changing and I was not sure how I would fit in, but eventually, it unfolded and here I am today as a record company owner and an independent artist. I’ve grown into what I was supposed to be.”
What she was supposed to be was a performer whose formidable career spanned six decades and is still going strong.
So, cabaret lovers, late August does not mean summer is over. The music and action is still alive and well in Ptown. And although the sunsets are earlier now than in July, it’s not too late to party!
