New York City Center, which is currently closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, is posting daily highlights from former Encores! and Gala productions.
This week's offerings, curated by Tony-winning composer Jeanine Tesori, the creative advisor for the Encores! Off-Center series, have the theme "Somewhere … Songs of Yearning for Another Place."
The first selection is Taylor Mac singing "Lost Horizon" from the 2018 Encores! Off-Center production of Steve Cosson and Michael Friedman's Gone Missing.
Watch the performance below:
: Taylor Mac "Lost Horizon"
— New York City Center (@NYCityCenter) April 21, 2020
Encores! Off-Center Gone Missing 2018
In the words of Jeanine Tesori, "The Off-Center production of Gone Missing, Anne Kauffman’s first season as Artistic Director, was produced after Michael Friedman’s death. pic.twitter.com/Rkj7hjIXRM
Says Fun Home's Tesori, "As I sit in my new 'office' (a corner of my bedroom), I am looking out onto the newly-emptied streets of Manhattan, counting blessings but also cans of beans. I haven’t been able to quite, I don’t know, take this all in. I have often joked to my friends that I haven’t had a true feeling since 1989, perhaps the result of getting slightly hard-boiled by a life in music, the constancy of parenting, of trying to plan for the future but aspiring to live in the moment. Trying to be of service in a country that underserves so many.
"So, when I approached this offering for the City Center community, I was surprised to finally find some tears rolling down my cheeks listening to Kate Baldwin sing 'How Are Things in Glocca Morra?' I have never really thought about Finian’s Rainbow, nor that song, as applying to me, and certainly not as a much-needed release this weekend. But listening to Kate’s voice, that celestial voice, I was able to hear this, and all these songs in a new way. In anything found, there is something lost, and in loss, there are things we find. This week’s songs all have this in common; a yearning to be in another place or time, new feelings of nostalgia, and the acceptance that life, like theatre, is a transient and beautiful affair."
The famed Manhattan venue launched the series March 22, Stephen Sondheim's 90th birthday, with a week of videos from Sondheim musicals. You can watch a playlist of all of the performances on City Center's YouTube page.
