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Monday, Oct 06, 2008
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Dan Wheetman on the John Denver Holiday Concert |
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| Dan Wheetman on the John Denver Holiday Concert | ||
| by Miryam Gordon -
SGN A&E Writer BACK HOME AGAIN: A JOHN DENVER HOLIDAY CONCERT BY RANDAL MYLER AND DAN WHEETMAN THROUGH DECEMBER 24 SEATTLE REPERTORY THEATRE Ben Moore, Managing Director of the Seattle Rep, wants everyone to know that the Rep is in "holiday mode." Boy howdy, is it! This musical overview of John Denver's music is very holiday focused. If you're looking for the top 20 hits, this isn't the show you'll find it. If you really want more holiday music, this is just the place for you! The production is brought to you courtesy of the people behind last season's Fire On the Mountain. That lovely, heart-wrenching revue was a compilation of songs from the coal mines, accompanied by haunting black-and-white photo projections. This production has a lot of similar elements, including many photos chosen from John Denver's own photography. The musician/performers on stage - Dan Wheetman, various strummings, Nova Devonie, accordion and piano, David Jackson, bass, David Keenan, various strummings, and Denny Brooks and Gail Bliss on vocals - stick mostly to music. There are a few narrative contexts talking about Denver and his love of Aspen and the holidays. The set is made to look like an old barn and it's a pretty straightforward music show. The "dramatic lighting" is a bit overdone, but the rest of the show is simple. Many of these folks worked with Denver for a number of years and know his sound well. Denny Brooks even sounds like him, if you squint. Dan Wheetman talks about how he and his writing partner, Randal Myler (or Randy) came to create this holiday concert. A few years ago, there was a sort of "John Denver Top 20" revue done in New York City. Dan explains, "Theaters are always looking for something to do at Christmas - carols or whatever. There are very few holiday shows to do. Randy and I said, 'Let's do a Christmas show and wrap it up in John Denver wrapping.' We felt that the season celebrates something in our hearts that is opening and that feeling and John's music are very parallel. Not that John's music is Christian music, exactly, but the core of the holiday and John's connection with humanity is what lines up." He continues, "My whole reason for doing this was to try to give the feeling of what John felt about the music. He was a folk singer and tried to reflect that kind of sensibility. It's not a biography, it's a holiday show. I thought of three categories: Christmas songs, songs about family, and a few songs like 'I Wanna Live' and 'Sweet Surrender' that speak about John's philosophy of life. Milt Okun, John's producer, told me something recently. He said John never wrote a song in a minor key. John lived his life in a major key." Dan was on the road with John Denver for eight years. He talks about working with John Denver as opposed to seeing friends and of his work with other famous performers. "He was great to be on the road with. I have a [musician] friend whose [performer] boss never said hello to her and [the performer] would fly in a private jet while the rest of the crew took the bus. John would pick us up in a Lear jet and fly us to our next job. John would lease a corporate jet to fly us around. It would be outfitted with a bar and a couple of little sleeping rooms & John was very generous. He paid for everything: long distance phone calls home, meals. When [the movie] Top Gun came out - John loved to fly and was a great pilot - he rented an entire theater for a performance and we all, the crew and band, watched Top Gun and ate popcorn and laughed. He was more a friend than an employer." Regarding which holiday songs to include, Dan assures that, "Every song we do John recorded. He made five Christmas albums, TV shows and a radio show. Some of the way we do the songs is recreated from actual recordings like one from the Muppets album. There's a lot of that recreating." Dan recaps his knowledge of how Denver died, in 1997, from crashing an experimental plane he was flying. "They [investigators] think he was doing 'touch-and-gos' [bringing a plane in to land and then taking off without stopping] in Monterey, California, and he was out over the ocean probably two or three hundred feet up. In this type of plane, to switch the gas tank, you have to reach behind you and they think he might have turned backward and maybe hit the rudders with his foot and put himself into a spin, but he wasn't high enough up off the water to correct. He was a great pilot and he was doing something he loved. I hope that for all of us our time comes when we're involved in something that we're passionate about or we have completed our passion and are ready to move on to what's next for us." Denver is remembered for reaching a diverse audience. Dan relates, "We regularly played arenas with 22 to 24 thousand seats and his audience would be filled with teenagers and kids and nuns, all kinds of people. I don't think his albums ever came close to what he was like in concert. When he performed live, everyone felt like he was singing just to them." Dan wants the Rep audience to leave with the feeling that they are part of "a bunch of friends doing something we like in a holiday spirit." I think the audience feels like he and the band pretty much deliver exactly that. For more information, go to www.seattlerep.org or call (206) 443-2222. Comments on reviews go to sgncritic@gmail.com. |
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