Every Rose has its Horn

This past weekend was awesome. As many of you may have noticed, the weather was finally fabulous and it appears we may have some sunshine in this lifetime to enjoy. Aside from the bright sunshiney days, I also basked in the brilliance of musical talent.

Saturday evening I went to Jazz at Lincoln Center to see The Music of Jelly Roll Morton as part of their New Orleans Celebration. The Marcus Roberts trio (Marcus Roberts, piano; Rodney Jordan, bass; Jason Marsalis, drums) joined forces with talented horn players (Alphonso Horne, trumpet; Ron Westray, trombone; Stephen Rile, saxophone; Richard Pascal, saxophone; Joe Goldberg, clarinet) for an evening of Jelly Roll’s famous tunes.

I sat dead center orchestra in the Rose Center theater – which, by the way, is a stunning theater—for the low, low price of $10. TEN DOLLARS! Jazz at Lincoln Center offers Hot Seats, $10 tickets for each Rose Center performance and select Allen Room performances available at the box office on the Wednesday before the show. Cheap tickets in advance! No age or student status required. This was a find, my friends.

The concert was fantastic for those of you jazz fiends out there. These instrumentalists are at the top of their game. Watching Marcus Roberts, a pianist who lost his sight at age 5, was astounding. Something like watching Ray Charles live. The sound of his piano and the horns filled that Rose Center with that old New Orleans, upbeat Dixie sound.

I felt so classy dressing up and heading to JALC, arguably a place where the more sophisticated residents of New York spend their evenings clapping respectfully and drinking $20 beverages with their pinkies up. It felt mature to join this crowd of high-society music aficionados.

But the music didn’t stop there. I tried my luck at The Book of Mormon lottery for the fifth? sixth? who’s counting anymore? time. I lost. Never have I had such terrible luck at a lottery. It could have been that there are never less than 150 people there, but still. So I decided to just deal with it and try for a Standing Room Only ticket. Now I am VERY against standing room—not the fact that it exists, but the idea of buying a SRO ticket for myself. I KNOW I am going to end up in pain from standing for so long and that it will distract me from the show. But, I was at my wit’s end. So for $27 I had a dead center orchestra SRO seat. I stood the whole show.

This experience, a little less class and a little more sass. The show is fantastic, although the reason it is selling out like mad is because of the shock value in its offensiveness towards religion, Mormonism, AIDs, female circumcision and general poverty in Africa. The humor is not necessarily my cup of tea, which is why I am not instantaneously obsessed.

It’s not that BOM doesn’t deserve a full house, but people wouldn’t be clamoring as they are if this was just a well-put together musical about the same flambouyant Mormon missionaries but they end up working in, say, England. The British aren’t that amusing to make fun of.

Andrew Rannels (Elder Price) totally deserved his Tony nom. His voice is clear as a bell. It does not sound like he has been singing that song, that high in his range, 8 times a week for over a year. Brava. The story is solid, unlike so many Broadway shows with characters you don’t feel for (see: Ghost The Musical) or haphazard books. The music is of the classic showtune variety and each song sounds like it has a place in THIS show in one unified score.

I feel like sending Casey Nicholaw (Director/Choreographer) a Valentine. I love his work and he is truly a master at classic Broadway. He allows the show and its dance numbers to be cheesy at times, but not overly so. He demands character depth from his actors.

All in all, the show is great, but it IS offensive. This time: every rose has its thorn, and for me, much of the humor in the script was the thorn on this blossom of a musical.

Lucky for me, the weekend as a whole was simply rosy. Here's hoping the week follows suit.