Friday, January 7, 2011

Band bring Broadway tribute of the Beatles to Heinz Hall

Band bring Broadway tribute of the Beatles to Heinz Hall

Band bring Broadway tribute of the Beatles to Heinz Hall

Posted: 05 Jan 2011 09:40 PM PST

Cylia von Tiedermann

Rain: A Tribute to the Beatles channels the Fab Four, including the "Sgt. Pepper" phase.

It's widely known that the Beatles were on "The Ed Sullivan Show" on Feb. 9, 1964. But no one talks about what else was on that night.

Mark Lewis, 12 at the time, was watching NBC, which had a "Wonderful World of Disney" episode called "The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh." No doubt it was scintillating viewing, but fortunately, the Lewis family had two TVs.

"Rain: A Tribute to the Beatles"

Where: Heinz Hall, Downtown.

When: 7:30 Tuesday-Thursday; 8 p.m. Friday; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday; 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sunday.

Tickets: $24 to $62; 412-392-4900; www.pgharts.org.

"My mom said, 'Mark, you have to come in and watch this.' She always dragged me in to watch stuff 'cause I took piano lessons," he says, "and usually that meant Liberace or someone was on, and she thought it would inspire me. I went in and took a look and the Beatles' first performance was on, and I was blown away. The next day I went out and bought 'Meet the Beatles,' and I was hooked ever since."

Forty years later, Mr. Lewis is touring the country with "Rain: A Tribute to the Beatles," which debuted on Broadway in the fall and opens at Heinz Hall Tuesday. The show, a straight-up "Beatles" concert running through the various phases of the Fab Four, originated with a band called Reign that the keyboardist formed in the mid '70s.

The goal of Reign was to make it big with original material, but because they were all fans, they decided to insert a full set of Beatles songs. They got such a good response that they talked a club owner in San Fernando Valley, Calif., to give them a Monday night for "Reign: A Tribute to the Beatles."

"We invited all of our friends and we figured we'd have around 20 people there," Mr. Lewis says. "It wound up that the club was packed, maybe 300 people, and we walked away with $800 or $900, which was outrageous."

More clubs wanted the Beatles tribute, and then high schools and colleges. They added costumes to the performance and changed the name to Rain, after the Beatles song. The band got its first break when Dick Clark showed up at a club and then hired them to record the soundtrack for the 1979 made-for-TV movie "Birth of The Beatles," because they couldn't use the actual Beatles music.

They still intended to get back to Reign as an original enterprise, but over time there was turnover in the band and they ended up incorporating guys from "Beatlemania," which had hit Broadway in 1977.

"While we were going, 'Beatlemania' started," Mr. Lewis says. "We didn't look at it as competition. They were a Broadway show. They were hired guns hired to play in someone else's idea. And we were a band doing our own thing. When the show ended, their careers ended. Some of them joined Reign, and here we are."

The touring Rain: A Tribute to the Beatles consists of four Beatlemania vets: Steve Landes (John Lennon), Joey Curatolo (Paul McCartney), Joe Bithorn (George Harrison) and Ralph Castelli (Ringo Starr), with Mr. Lewis on keyboards.

He says it's not easy finding guys who can nail the Fab Four.

"Some of the guys who did 'Beatlemania' were good look-alikes but not that good of players and singers, and some of them were great players and singers but not great entertainers. There were just a few guys who had the whole package, and those guys became a part of Rain."

Since then, he says, it's been a "long and winding road." Rain expanded out from clubs and schools to casinos, corporate parties, cruises and county fairs.

"As we grew we invested into our show and eventually we became a show that sat in a showroom -- a casino in Lake Tahoe for about two years. During that time, we reinvested and made our show more of a production."

By the time it got to Broadway, "Rain" was a 30-song set that re-enacted the "Sullivan" performance and the momentous Shea Stadium concert, and then moved on to the non-touring "Sgt. Pepper" and "Let it Be" eras.

Reviews have been up and down.

The New York Daily News called it a "well-traveled, well-rehearsed and, well, sorta cheesy production." The New York Times compared it to "enhanced karaoke, like a collective night in front of a giant television playing the new Beatles video game ..."

For Mr. Lewis, it's all in the service of simulating an event -- a Beatles concert -- that few had the privilege to see.

"The Beatles are the most loved musical act in history. They left that void and what we've done is filled it, to some extent accidentally."

First published on January 6, 2011 at 12:00 am

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php
Five Filters featured site: So, Why is Wikileaks a Good Thing Again?.
Posted by at

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)