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[Future Events]

 

JAZZ AT TANGLEWOOD: For years, “jazz” at Tanglewood has meant a few concerts thrown together over Labor Day weekend while the BSO packed its bags. It appears that’s about to change, since the BSO has contracted veteran jazz presenter Fred Taylor (Scullers, the Jazz Workshop/Paul’s Mall) to put together what we’re hoping will become an annual event: the Tanglewood Jazz Festival (August 31 through September 2). Taylor, with his combination of jazz passion and marketing savvy, has put together a line-up that should have appeal both broad and deep. Symphonic-pop-jazz oldie Chuck Mangione kicks things off Friday night with opening vocal group New York Voices. Saturday afternoon it’s serious retro mainstreamer John Pizzarelli with his trio and young vocal phenom Jane Monheit (Taylor promises a jam between Monheit and guitarist/vocalist Pizzarelli). Saturday night cabaret superstar Nancy Wilson makes her first appearance with the all-female jazz band Diva; fusion/funk guys David Sanborn and Joe Sample open. Sunday afternoon brings all-time tenor champ and major legend Sonny Rollins, followed by an evening show of guitar god George Benson, salsa-jazz master Pancho Sanchez, and Nicholas Payton with his Louis Armstrong Centennial Band. Ticket prices vary (including special package deals for multiple shows). Call (617) 931-2000.

SUMMER SESSIONS: Loud-fast music fans will have quite a few big-ticket festival items to choose from come the hot season, with no fewer than three all-day metalfests plus the annual skate-punk Warped Tour scheduled to make visits here in the coming months. Ozzfest — featuring another Black Sabbath reunion, and Marilyn Manson leading a long list of nü-metal acts on the undercard — will take the stage of the Tweeter Center (617-931-2000) on August 8, and an announcement about the second annual metal-and-ink Tattoo the Earth tour is expected shortly. In the meantime, thrash gods Pantera have launched their own festival, dubbed the “Extreme Steel” tour, which will make the rounds of indoor arenas with Slayer, Static-X, Skrape, and Morbid Angel; the tour hits the Worcester Centrum on June 23, and tickets go on sale this Friday at 3 p.m. through Ticketmaster at (617) 931-2000. Tickets are also on sale this week — Saturday at 10 a.m. — for Warped; previously announced headliners Weezer have bailed out, but confirmed acts include Rancid, Kool Keith, and the Rollins Band at Suffolk Downs on August 9. Call (800) 477-6849.

NEXT WEEKEND

The Curse of the Bambino

How’s this for a curse on the Red Sox: The Curse of the Bambino, the new musical at the Lyric Stage Company about the Sox’ seemingly predestined penchant for breaking our hearts, is written by a former Yankee fan with another dude who was friggin’ cheering in 1986 when Bill Buckner had his little problem down the first-base side. Not to mention that during the past three seasons, as they’ve been working on The Curse, Steven Bergman and David Kruh have been praying that the Sox don’t win it all and thereby render their musical tribute to the team’s ineptitude obsolete.

But, hey, let’s cut these bums some slack. Bergman, who composed the music, and Kruh, who penned the book, have hit something of a theatrical home run by securing Spiro Veloudos, the Lyric’s producing artistic director — and, ahem, Red Sox diehard — as the show’s director. And the pair, who have both made the Boston area home for some time, can lament the Olde Towne team with the best of them. “We keep coming back year after year because we all have the need to believe in something, to have that hope,” says Kruh. “If there’s any message, as it were, to come out of this show, it’s that ‘there’s always next year.’ And that’s the title of one of our songs.”

The musical takes us through all the Red Sox “curses” since Boston owner Harry Frazee sold the team’s ace pitcher, the immortal Babe Ruth, to the Yankees. And unless you’ve been living in the hole in Buckner’s glove your entire life, the story the show tells will be old — and still painful — news. Still, with apologies to the vendor outside Fenway who so passionately sings, “Peanuts, pistachios, Cracker Jacks, and casheeeews!”, you may never before have associated the Sox with such musicality.

The Curse of the Bambino begins with the sixth game of the ’86 World Series, when a fan watching the game on TV is visited by the ghosts of the Royal Rooters, the name by which Sox fanatics went back in the 1910s. From there, the scene jumps back to those same Royal Rooters in 1919, just hours before they learn of the sale of Ruth.

The show slowly makes its way back to 1986, with the Royal Rooter ghosts, in the role of a Greek chorus, guiding us through the infamous “curses” in Sox history — Johnny Pesky holding the ball in ’46, Luis Aparicio slipping on the basepaths in ’72, and on and on. “We tried to differentiate the curses from the rest of the piece by writing them in the musical style of the year in which they occur,” says Bergman. “So the 1946 curse is in boogie-woogie style; 1967 is written in a psychedelia style.”

And who knows? Maybe come October we’ll have Bergman and Kruh to thank for a championship. After all, the baseball gods can only take pity when they see grown men and women on stage belting out the following to a disco beat: “Now we’ve seen it all before/We’ve watched countless times as they’ve tied the score/But nothing in our history has caused more lament/Than the homer we gave up to that man Bucky Dent.”

The Curse of the Bambino opens next Friday, April 20, at 8 p.m. at the Lyric Stage, 140 Clarendon Street. Performances are Wednesday through Sunday through May 19. Tickets are $20 to $36; call (617) 437-7172, or visit www.bambinomusical.com.

BY MARK BAZER

Issue Date: April 12 - 19, 2001