The house was almost full at the Knights of Columbus Hall on
Merchants' Row in Middlebury on Saturday night, March 8, for a folk music
double-bill. Greg Greenway and Lucy Kaplansky shared the March installment of
the After Dark Music Series, and provided excellent evening entertainment.
Greenway opened first, the result of his winning a backstage
coin toss. Holding his guitar silently in front of him, he began the a capella
opening of "A Road Worth Walking Down." After two verses, his guitar
leaped to life for the remainder of the song. As promised in the introduction,
the second song was a sing-along. It was "folk music with a groove,"
and the audience loved it.
His fourth song was "a sing along dedicated to people
who hate to be asked to sing." called "Don't Make Me Sing," The
audience sang along - though not everyone did - and laughed along with the
reasons given for why the audience should not sing, and do the work of the
performer on the stage.
Two other highlight songs were inspired by current events. The first was his own reaction to the firebombing of a
Turkish family's house in Germany ,
called "Race is a Myth," a warning about the human tendency to react
violently to fear and ignorance. The second, "Free at Last," was an
expression of the energy Greenway felt in the crowd which welcomed Nelson
Mandela to Boston
when Mandela visited that city.
Greenway's fingering, strumming, and hammering on his guitar
drew out more sounds from one instrument than most know exist. An excellent
entertainer and comfortable with the audience, Greenway had the rare pleasure
of doing an encore even before intermission!
Kaplansky took the stage after the break, and seemed
intimidated by the crowd, which had responded enthusiastically to Greenway's
performance. She sang a number of covers and took quite a bit of time finding a
niche in the audience's hearts, a task she never fully accomplished. She sang a
number of songs with dense and convoluted lyrics, though with exquisite vocal
range and expression. (She sang the only song this reviewer has ever heard
which used the word "renege" - "Don't Renege On Our Love.")
In addition to performing her own songs, Kaplansky covered
songs by Paul McCartney, Richard Thompson, and her father. Irving Kaplansky
wrote some songs front the 1930s through the 1950s, and his daughter shared two
of them with the audience at the Knights of Columbus Hall. He wrote an
intriguingly prescient love song about space in 1951, long before we knew much of
anything about interplanetary space. Called "On an Asteroid With
You," it was the song her father wrote for her mother on their honeymoon,
and included references to the not-yet-invented spacesuit and weightlessness,
which had not been discovered.
Most of her songs were about love and relationships, though
she approached from different angles from song to song. Kaplansky's own
background is tightly tied to the human experience and intensity of feeling.
For ten years she was a clinical psychologist. Only a month ago she finally
closed her practice and is singing and performing full-time again. She felt,
after years of being a therapist and in therapy herself, that she was avoiding
singing because she was scared of it. She has now "jumped off the cliff,"
as she puts it. Her encore was indicative of this: called "Still
Life," it was about no longer running away.
The pair was an odd match, though each was an impressive
performer individually. The audience enjoyed both performances, though Greenway
was clearly better at working with the audience than Kaplansky.
The After Dark Music Series is sponsored by many local
businesses, including Main Street Stationery, the Middlebury Inn, and Otter
Creek Brewing. The April concerts will be the final ones of the 1996-1997
season, and will be Garnet Rogers at 8 pm on Friday, April 11, followed by
Mustard's Retreat at 11 am on Saturday, April 12, both at the Knights of
Columbus Hall. Tickets can be purchased at the Middlebury Inn or Main Street
Stationery. The 1997-1998 season will begin in October.