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QuickTake
“The Shedd Presents” series of concerts has focused on showcasing music from the Great American Songbook. Now, the artistic directors behind the series — all women — are moving into new musical territory, while continuing to pay tribute to the standards. Three of “The “Shedd Presents” shows are scheduled for April and May.
Correction: The original version of this story misspelled the name of the singer Eva Cassidy.
You can’t blame Vanessa Greenway if she seems a little nervous.
She has good reason: Not only is she the only vocalist in “Let Me Off Uptown,” this weekend’s concert at The Shedd Institute for the Arts honoring the life and music of the jazz singer Anita O’Day, the show marks Greenway’s debut as one of the artistic directors of “The Shedd Presents” series.
Directing one of these shows is harder than it looks, Greenway said during a recent roundtable at The Shedd Institute featuring Greenway, and most of the eight artistic directors — all women — who help to power the concert series.
Greenway’s comment prompted one of the other “Shedd Presents” artistic directors, Shirley Andress — who has more than 20 of these shows under her belt — to offer words of encouragement.
Sort of.
“I wish I could tell you it gets easier,” Andress said. “Well, I mean, in a way, it gets easier. But it’s never easy. … It’s hard and it’s a lot of pressure. We all feel that pressure.”
But that hasn’t stopped the artistic directors behind “The Shedd Presents” series from pitching new ideas for shows to Jim Ralph, the executive director of the arts organization. It hasn’t stopped audiences from coming to the concerts. And now, some of those artistic directors are crafting shows that are expanding the series’ musical horizons.
“The Shedd Presents” series features 10 or so concerts each season that focus, to some degree, on a single topic — a particular singer like O’Day or the pop vocalist Dusty Springfield. (The Springfield show, set for early May, is led by vocalist Siri Vik and pianist Vicki Brabham.)
Take a look at the duties that the artistic director handles for each concert, and you can understand why Greenway is feeling a little stressed.
The artistic director generally selects a theme for each show, chooses the music — often sorting through more than 100 possibilities before coming up with the 20 or so songs on the final set list — tracks down arrangements for each song, selects the musicians for each show, determines the costumes, researches the subject to create the narration that’s part of most shows, writes a donor letter to pitch the show and tackles other duties as needed.
In that frenzy, it can be easy for an artistic director to lose sight of the reasons why she pitched the show in the first place.
For Greenway, 48, it was O’Day’s musical prowess — and compelling life story. During her 70-year career, O’Day shattered the stereotype for female big-band singers, beat a long-running heroin addiction and kept recording albums until a few months before her death in 2006 at age 87.
It’s such a fascinating story that Greenway has too much raw material to work with.
“I’m just trying to edit it in a way that makes it interesting,” Greenway said. “There’s a lot of editing.”
Finding the arc
The goal of that editing — the song selection and order, the narration, all the other details — is to ensure that each show has a crowd-pleasing arc, said Evynne Hollens, 41, another artistic director. For Hollens, who has created a number of shows under a “Contemporary Songbook Project” banner, that means “a big number to open the show and then keeping the energy up and then we can go into ballads.”
Other artistic directors find different arcs.
Andress, 61, gravitates toward telling the stories of female performers, such as Doris Day and Judy Garland. “I think, besides their music, what is attractive to the audience is just learning their story,” she said. “So the most fun for me is to tell their story through music, and the audience gets to learn a little more about them, and so do I.”
Marisa Frantz, 44, recently created a show paying tribute to The Wrecking Crew, the crack group of Los Angeles musicians who played on many of the most iconic songs of the 1960s — tunes like “Be My Baby” and “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling.” As part of that show, Frantz wrote lines of dialogue for the musicians who were part of that show — a first for a Shedd Presents concert.
Every so often, Shedd Executive Director Ralph might pitch an idea for a show to one of the artistic directors — which is how Lynnea Barry, 44, started work on “Forever Young,” a mid-April concert that showcases the music of Bob Dylan and The Band from the late 1960s to early 1970s.
For Barry, the songs featured in “Forever Young” show the evolution of American music: “You take bits of this style of music and this style of music, and it morphs into something new,” she said.
For Vik, 49, her May show on Dusty Springfield — “Definitely Dusty” — is an opportunity to explore Springfield’s progression from pop to soul (and will draw from Springfield’s classic album, “Dusty in Memphis”). But, again, the music offers a window to explore the singer’s life.
For Tracy Tooze, 59, who’s working on an October show about Betty Hutton, the singer and actress who enjoyed fame in the 1940s and 1950s, the trick will be finding the balance between Hutton’s energetic performance style and an increasingly tragic personal life.
Barry said all of it requires “a lot of thought and a lot of prep and a lot of time that you put into it that people don’t always realize.”
As they expand the range of “The Shedd Presents” concerts, the artistic directors have their eyes on different potential shows. Barry is working on a show about James Taylor and Carly Simon, who were married for about a decade in the 1970s. There’s talk that Roberta Flack might be a good subject for a show. The late folksinger Eva Cassidy might be featured. Andress wants to do a Barbra Streisand show that focuses on the singer’s work in the 1970s. Vik is kicking around the idea of a 1980s revue that could be titled “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” and appears to be serious.
Regardless of the topic, Vik said the concerts have one thing in common: “We want to do good work. And through that process, sometimes in making decisions and trusting yourself and just going with it and going for it and not letting the mental demons — like a lot of artistic people have about our work — get to you. It’s in trusting yourself and not going to the dark side.”
It reminded Greenway of another process.
“And just like childbirth,” she said, “the only way is through. I just have to go through it and endure the ride.”
About the concerts
The Shedd Institute for the Arts has three “Shedd Presents” concerts scheduled over the next four weeks. Here are the details:
— Vanessa Greenway: “Let Me Off Uptown — the Best of Anita O’Day” plays 7:30 p.m. Friday, April 11 and 3 p.m. Saturday, April 12 at The Shedd Institute. The show travels to Corvallis for a 3 p.m. Sunday, April 13 performance at the LaSells Stewart Center on the Oregon State University campus.
— Lynnea Barry: “Forever Young — Dylan, The Band and Roots Rock” plays 7:30 p.m. Friday, April 18 and 3 p.m. Sunday, April 20 at 3 p.m. at The Shedd Institute. The show travels to Corvallis for a 3 p.m. show Saturday, April 19 at the LaSells Stewart Center on the OSU campus.
— Vicki Brabham and Siri Vik: “Definitely Dusty” plays 7:30 p.m. Saturday, May 3 and 3 p.m. Sunday, May 4 at The Shedd Institute. No Corvallis dates are planned.
— Mark your calendars: Tracy Tooze’s Betty Hutton show is scheduled for Oct. 17–19. Lynnea Barry’s Carly Simon and James Taylor show is scheduled for Nov. 7–9. And Shirley Andress’ “Christmas at The Shedd” show is scheduled for Dec. 19–21. All those shows will be performed at The Shedd and in Corvallis.
The Shedd Institute is located at 868 High St. in Eugene. Ticket prices vary. Tickets can be purchased at theshedd.org.
