We can all bow down to the Empress of Soul Sunday when Gladys Knight gives a concert at Melbourne’s King Center. Now 72, Knight is still a powerful vocalist, one of the few female stars from the 1960s still drawing crowds to large venues.
She’s paying tribute these days to icons like Ella Fitzgerald, and also offering pop covers of stars including Bruno Mars, Alicia Keyes, Adele and Sam Smith.
Then, next weekend at the King Center, John Lodge, who played a key role in one of the pioneering progressive rock bands, the Moody Blues, is touring with his own band now, having watched his second solo album get considerable recognition.
The band, named for the album, the 10,000 Light Years Band, includes a couple of Moody Blues members besides Lodge, a bass player and vocalist.
Lodge performs Friday, Feb. 3, at 8:30 p.m.
Two non-musical plays take the stages at Riverside Theatre, and that is something of a rare event. In the black box theater, Jim VanValen, the theater’s new education director, does an excellent job as a disheveled suicidal millionaire at the center of “An Empty Plate at the Café du Grand Boeuf.” And on the main stage Tuesday, Noel Coward’s “Private Lives” opens.
Johnny Mathis is performing at the Sunrise Theatre in Fort Pierce Friday night. Now 81, and still known for romantic standards, he’s also done jazz, soul and even pop. Altogether he’s sold 350 million albums on the Columbia label, and his longevity with the company puts him up there with Bob Dylan and Barbra Streisand.
And like those two, he’s been a champion of civil rights since the early 1960s, the rare African-American artist able to cross over into the white mainstream.
In the early 1980s, he faced death threats after coming out as gay – albeit obliquely, saying he’d “become accustomed” to the gay way of life.
“When are we going to find out we’re all the same?” he asked in a recent interview.
Palm Beach Opera stages Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” this weekend at the Kravis Center. Sung in Italian with English subtitles projected above the stage, the story is so well-known you’ll hardly need them. A Japanese geisha falls in love with an American G.I., renounces her religion to marry him, then is abandoned when he leaves her – pregnant – for the States. The Moldavian soprano Inna Los sings the role of Cio-cio San Friday and Sunday; Alexandra Loutsion, a young soprano hailed by the Washington Post as “a singer to watch,” sings the role Saturday. Performances are at Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets start as low as $20 for the rear balcony and go up to $225 for the orchestra.
For a small town, Vero Beach has an unusual number of stained-glass windows. That’s thanks in large part to the presence of a nationally known stained-glass maker, Conrad Pickel Studio, that our Stephanie LaBaff wrote about a couple of issues ago. Saturday, there’s a tour of all the colorful windows around town, both by Pickel and others. The Stained Glass Crawl, as it’s called, is the initiative of Christie Garst, who became interested in Vero’s stained glass after looking into the windows at her church, Lutheran Church of the Redeemer. That’s where the crawl begins at the church at 9 a.m. There is no charge.
Friday night at Vero’s Community Church, we can put a face to a nation in the news. The National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine performs as part of the Indian River Symphonic Association’s season. The concert includes works by Dvorak, Shostakovich and Schumann. Tickets are $80.
In contrast, there are two “free-will offering” concerts at the same church: Jonathan Moyer, associate professor of organ at Oberlin College, offers a concert on the magnificent pipe organ at Community Church at 4 p.m. Sunday. Then Thursday, Feb. 2, the Gustavus Choir conducted by Gregory J. Aune performs at 7 p.m. Both musical events are part of the church’s Community Concert Series.
Another fun – and affordable – concert of film scores is in the offing from movie buff Aaron Collins, conductor of the Space Coast Symphony Orchestra. This time, Collins pulls together the music of famous Westerns for a rousing tribute to greats like “High Noon,” “How the West was Won” and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”
The concert, which includes film clips screened behind the musicians, takes place Saturday night at 7 p.m. at the Vero Beach High School Performing Arts Center.
