“New York, New York, a helluva town!” In the consummate WWII musical ON THE TOWN three sailors do The City in 24 hours. This musical visit is an attempt to experience Manhattan´s glory days in a single hour, in song and quote and memory.
The legendary names jog the memory: Harlem, The Empire State (Bldg), The Met, Central Park, Roseland, the Lower East Side, Tin Pan Alley, Fifth Avenue, Broadway, the Hudson, the Skyline…
“East side, west side, all around the town…”
“The Bowery, the Bowery, I’ll never go there any more!”
“Just picture a penthouse way up to the sky…”
“Through Central Park we’ll stroll/
Where our first kiss we stole, soul to soul…”
“It’s a city of strangers, some come to stare, some to stay…”
“They say the neon lights are bright on Broadway…”
“On the Avenue, Fifth Avenue/
The photographers will snap us…”
“Deep music fills the night/Deep in the heart of Harlem…”
“It was winter in Manhattan, falling snowflakes filled the air…”
“I like New York in June; how about you?”
“Here on the 27th floor, looking down on the city I hate…and adore.”
A rich tapestry, a mosaic, a jigsaw puzzle, a madhouse, a cauldron of genius, there has never been and there will never be another place like New York City, specifically Manhattan. It has been the engine driving America´s business, artistic and cultural life, the heartbeat of the 20th century.
In song, in fond recall, “it’s good to live it again.”
If you would like to engage Fred Miller for one of his Lectures-in-Song, please contact him directly at any time. For a full listing of all Lectures, click here.
Fred Miller’s Lectures-In-Song comprise a series of solo programs, each an historical, anecdotal and musical profile of some great personality or important aspect of American Popular Song. These Lectures are delivered by singer/pianist/narrator Miller at the piano, and each reflects his lifetime passion and appreciation for great music. He studied classical piano in his hometown of Albuquerque from ages 7-15 but early on gave up any notion of music as a profession. At that time, Fred assumed a musical career was either one devoted to the rigid discipline of classical music or being a freewheeling rock star, and he accurately decided he had no aptitude for either. However, at age 22, upon hearing Ella Fitzgerald sing Cole Porter, he found his calling and life’s mission.
Through the Seventies and Eighties, Miller studied and absorbed in minute detail the life and times and songs of nearly all the great American composers and lyricists who thrived during Broadway & Hollywood’s Golden Age between the two World Wars. In 1987, he founded Silver Dollar Productions in order to produce operettas, dramas, musicals and small cabarets. Silver Dollar Productions required ensemble casts, props, costumes and, most significantly, the challenges of publicity and selling tickets, and for a dozen busy years, the company presented an unbroken string of varied and highly lauded performances.
In 1999, Miller was simultaneously underwritten by both his local Hunterdon County Library and the Art Alliance of Philadelphia to present a series of six solo Lectures-In-Song, each devoted to one of the premiere Broadway/Hollywood songwriters: George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers, Jerome Kern, and Harold Arlen.
In presenting history, biography and psychology while sitting at a piano singing the superlative songs of his heroes, Miller has found a single performing medium that utilizes most of his intellectual and musical passions.The list of Lectures-In-Song that began with six in 1999 is now more than seventy(and growing!), a joyful tribute to the boundlessly rich field of American Popular Song.