Vero’s resident celebrities have gotten plenty of ink of late. Singer Gloria Estefan has her hit Broadway musical, Pop-country’s Jake Owen sang his hit for Ellen DeGeneres, and Met soprano Deborah Voigt came out with a tell-all book last year called “Call Me Debbie: Confessions of a Down-to-Earth Diva.” (How down to earth? Last week, Voigt dropped a major F-bomb in a hilarious fake German accent in front of a packed Vero Beach High School Performing Arts Center.)
With all that big-time celebrity in our small town, the granddaddy of famous residents is the one we hear least about: Folk legend Arlo Guthrie, son of Woody, has been here since the 1980s, when he bought a derelict crab processing plant along the lagoon in Sebastian and turned it into a winter home for his extraordinarily talented family.
This week, Guthrie touches down on a number of Florida stages – including tonight (Friday) at Stuart’s Lyric Theatre and Sunday at Melbourne’s King Center – on his Alice’s Restaurant 50th Anniversary Tour.
It’s been just over 50 years since Arlo tried to help his neighbor Alice move some trash out of her yard one Thanksgiving Day.
The song that described the craziness that ensued first aired on a New York radio station when Guthrie himself performed it – all 18 minutes of it. That was in 1966, and the next year, when he recorded “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” and introduced it to the world on his debut album, it became a huge hit, reaching No. 17 on the Billboard chart.
The song – a whole segment, actually – has been played as a Thanksgiving tradition on classic rock radio ever since. Because of its length, Arlo got sick of singing it at concerts and decided to only perform it every 10 years.
Last Thanksgiving, at its fifth decade, it got major play including a concert that aired on PBS and one at Carnegie Hall.
His son Abe Guthrie will be joining him on keyboards.
Another icon of the 1960s, Graham Nash, is appearing next week at Fort Pierce’s Sunrise Theatre.
Nash’s autobiography, “Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life,” now out in paperback, has to be at least as wild as Voigt’s memoir. But as the “normal” guy in Crosby, Stills and Nash (and eventually Young), he’s another one who’s down to earth.
Nash came to the U.S. with the Hollies, after growing up poor in Manchester, England. He found himself in the hills of Laurel Canyon, Calif., where he quickly fell in love with all things American.
He also fell in love with Joni Mitchell, and at one point, Rita Coolidge, whom his bandmate Stephen Stills, was also seeing (OK, so maybe not that normal). His love of harmony was born early on listening to the Everly Brothers, and it evolved into the writing of summery songs for Crosby, Stills and Nash followed by the deeper, darker four-part harmony supplied by the addition of Neil Young.
Together with Mitchell’s influence, his music told meaningful stories, deepened, Nash has said, by a consciousness altered by pot and sometimes LSD, though he did not go as far down that path as bandmate David Crosby.
Nash, who just released a solo studio album, “This Path Tonight,” 13 years after his last release, “Songs for Survivors,” performs at the Sunrise Jan. 30.
This weekend, the third season of Vero’s first resident professional ballet company, Ballet Vero Beach, offers us an ambitious, 40-minute-long world premiere of Adam Schnell’s “Pastoral Symphony,” set to Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, as well as the main stage premiere of “Museum Pieces,” that left audiences spellbound when they were performed in 2014 at the Vero Beach Museum of Art. (More on those efforts in this section.) Performances are Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon and evening at Vero High’s Performing Arts Center.
Sunday, the Bolshoi Ballet performs the French choreographer Jean-Christophe Maillot’s version of Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” in a performance captured live and screened at Vero’s Majestic 11 theater. The ballet airs at 12:55 p.m. Sunday and is repeated Wednesday at 6 p.m.
Next Thursday, Jan. 24, the Majestic has a simulcast from London of Christopher Hampton’s modern adaptation of “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” the 1782 novel of sex and betrayal that shocked the world. This version, directed by Josie Rourke, stars Elaine Cassidy, Dominic West and Janet McTeer and won the Olivier and the Evening Standard awards for Best Play. As the theater world mourns Alan Rickman, who played the manipulative séducteur the Vicomte de Valmont on Broadway, there’s another sad note about this production: Michelle Dockery, who plays Lady Mary on “Downton Abbey,” was slated to play Cassidy’s role, but pulled out of the production in October as her young fiancée was dying of cancer.
With all these excellent offerings locally, save a little appetite for next weekend when Miami City Ballet performs its second program of the season at West Palm’s Kravis. Along with a Balanchine “La Source” and Peter Martins’ “Barber Violin Concerto,” the program features Twyla Tharp’s “In the Upper Room,” set to the post-modern score of Philip Glass. I saw this work in November in Montreal performed by the National Ballet of Canada and it was absolutely staggering. I have no doubts that Miami City will do it justice and then some.
