Renowned film and stage composer and Buffalo native David Shire is collaborating with the students and faculty of The Nichols School, his alma mater, on a special musical project.
In Concert with David Shire will be in performance at 8 PM Friday, April 21st and Saturday, April 22nd in the Glenn and Audrey Flickinger Performing Arts Center on the Nichols campus.
Student singers, instrumentalists, and dancers will be presenting songs from Shire s extensive catalogue. Concert highlights include excerpts from the newest Maltby and Shire show, Take Flight, as well as several new Shire pieces arranged specifically for the Nichols ensembles. Actor and comedienne Didi Conn and Buffalo s own Mary Kate O Connell will headline the performances, with Mr. Shire at the piano and occasionally on the conductor s podium.
I ve been a fan of David Shire s music since high school, when I first heard the main title to Norma Rae, said Karen Wieland, vocal director and event producer. I am elated that David is giving our Nichols students this opportunity. Typically, only students in elite college musical theatre programs would be involved in a project like this.
Plans for the event were hatched last June, when Shire returned to Nichols for his 50th reunion. As I was ushered into the Flickinger for the first time, I was blown away, he explained. When I was at Nichols (1951-55), there was a men’s glee club (no other arts and no women students), but that was about it. And now here was this gorgeous, state-of-the-art theatre, plus institutionalized dramatics, musical theatre performances, a large chorus, a full orchestra, a dance ensemble, you name it. I could only think, where was all this when I could have used it? Shire has been meeting long-distance with the Nichols arts faculty since last summer, and he will be visiting Buffalo to work directly with performing arts students beginning in mid-February.
Upon Shire s graduation from Nichols, he attended Yale, where he met his long time collaborator Richard Maltby, Jr. Yale s stages were the venues for Maltby and Shire s earliest musical theatre projects. The team went on to write widely acclaimed Broadway and off-Broadway hits such as Baby, Big, Starting Here, Starting Now, and Closer than Ever. Shire has also scored hundreds of films, including The Conversation, All the President s Men, Norma Rae (winner of an Academy Award for Best Song), Saturday Night Fever (winner of two Grammy Awards), The World According to Garp, The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3, Farewell My Lovely, and Return to Oz.
Shire s songs have been recorded by Barbra Streisand, Maureen McGovern, Judy Collins, Melissa Manchester, Jennifer Warnes, Michael Crawford, and many others, and include the international Billy Preston & Syreeta hit With You I m Born Again and the Oscar-winning It Goes Like It Goes.
Proceeds from In Concert with David Shire will be used to finance technological updates in the Nichols theatre. For ticket information, please contact Karen Wieland at 875-8212, x 303.