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Garrison Keillor’s celebrated radio broadcast A Prairie Home Companion ran for forty years. He wrote the comedy sketches and more, and he invented a “little town that time forgot and the decades could not improve.” These days, his shows are packed with humor and song, plus the audience-favorite News from Lake Wobegon. This new show, Keillor & Company, is an evening of stand-up, storytelling, audience song, and poetry starring Garrison Keillor and featuring pianist Dan Chouinard, and vocalist Prudence Johnson.
There are sung sonnets, limericks and musical jokes, and the thread that runs through it is the beauty of growing old. Despite the inconvenience, old age brings the contentment of LESS IS MORE. Your mistakes and big ambitions are behind you, nothing left to prove, and small things give you great pleasure because that’s what’s left. (“I was unhappy in college because it was a requirement for an intellectual, but then I went into show business and discovered that people won’t pay to be made unhappy, their kids will do it for free.)
There is the News from Lake Wobegon, a town booming with new entrepreneurs, makers of artisanal firewood and gourmet meatloaf, breeders of composting worms, and dogs trained to do childcare. But some things endure, such as the formation of the Living Flag on Main Street, citizens in tight formation wearing red, white or blue caps, and Mr. Keillor among them, standing close to old neighbors, Myrtle Krebsbach (“Truckstop”) and Julie Christensen (“Bruno, The Fishing Dog”) and Clint Bunsen. And an a cappella sing-along with the audience singing from memory an
odd medley of patriotic songs, pop standards, hymns, and ending with the national
anthem.
Dan Chouinard is a St. Paul-based honky-tonk pianist, concert soloist and accompanist, street accordionist, sing-along enabler, Italian and French teacher, and bicycling vagabond. He’s been writer and host of a number of live history-with-music shows broadcast on Minnesota Public Radio and Twin Cities Public
Television. He played on a dozen live broadcasts of A Prairie Home Companion plus a half dozen Prairie Home Companion cruises, and served as rehearsal pianist for Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, and Lindsay Lohan on the 2005 movie.
Prudence Johnson’s long and happy career as a singer, writer, and teacher has landed her on the musical theater stage, in two feature films (A River Runs Through It , A Prairie Home Companion), on a national radio show (several long stints on A Prairie Home Companion), and on concert stages across North America and occasionally Europe.
Links
https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCusGjo4R2lMZDV6MWnnYTBQ
https://twitter.com/g_keillor
https://www.facebook.com/PrairieHomeCompanion/
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Fox Theater Spokane, 1008 W 1st Ave, Spokane, WA 99201, United States,Spokane, Washington
Tickets
