What's Up - Your guide to what's happening in Fayetteville, AR this week!
Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/1473357
Jazz Band from New Orleans, which he adored as an art student and still watches from the side of the stage each night. "If you need music to uplift your spirits during this time, look no further than 'Pres-Hall.' They are unbelievable, [and] to have them with us is a total blessing," Groban says. "We [also] have a brand new singer- songwriter, Eleri Ward, whose voice is just so smooth and so incredible. She's a voice that I'm so proud to showcase on this tour, and fans are absolutely loving her. She's out there doing interpretations of all different kinds of songs — Sondheim songs, her own personal songs. Then our friend Lucia Micarelli, who is a virtuoso violinist who we haven't toured with since the early days of the 'Closer' and the 'Awake' tours, back when I started, she's come out with us as a special guest to play and even do a little singing. It's like a family reunion. "Not to mention, the local choirs and local orchestra musicians that we have every night that represent the cities that we're in," Groban adds. "And my incredible band, my incredible six-piece band that many of them have been like family for me over the course of decades. And it's a lot of musicians, a lot of singers on stage. It's a big celebration, big, eclectic music." Groban also uses his live shows to thank teachers, whom he says saved him when he was a "shy kid" in choir and band. "Every night that I'm on tour I talk about my teachers," he says. "I was a really shy kid, and had a really hard time in school. And being able to sing, being able to play piano and drums and sing in a choir and act in school plays? Even if I'd never gotten into this professionally, it would have still had the same impact for me as a human being. And so my foundation is called Find Your Light. And it's all about making sure that we give grants to as many of those programs that are helping to serve that purpose for young people, especially in communities where there's great poverty and where those programs are getting cut. To make sure that those kids have a voice and make sure that those kids have an opportunity to have the well-rounded curriculum that only the arts can bring into a young person's life. It saved my life. And that's going to save many others." Speaking of saving others, November marked the 25th anniversary of the singer's self-titled debut when he was still a shy 19-year-old. "First of all, I can't believe how time has flown. I can't believe I'm still here," he says. Although it was a stressful time, and he was singing songs that were out of his emotional depth, he says to sing them again, "with the perspective of the life that I've lived, I think makes them even more meaningful for me. … When I sing those songs, now I actually enjoy singing them more now than I did with all that pressure back then. I do love it, they hold up." He adds that he would advise his teenage self to "smell the roses" and broaden his view. "I viewed what was happening to me back then with a really narrow lens. It was all about 'Am I going to deliver and is it going to be good? Am I doing the right thing?' I would go back and I would tell that kid to widen his lens and smell the roses and enjoy what's happening. … I think I did all right. I'm still here. But I think I definitely could have given that kid some wisdom." JULY 17-23, 2022 WHAT'S UP! 7 COVER STORY Sondheim On Stage ERIC E. HARRISON Arkansas Democrat-Gazette E leri Ward's main metier is musical theater. That was her major, and the area in which she took her bachelor of fine arts degree at the Boston Conservatory. So while she's now making her living as an indie singer- songwriter, it was a natural fit to create indie-folk arrangements of 13 songs by Stephen Sondheim for her first album, "A Perfect Little Death." It's available on all streaming platforms through Ghostlight Records with a recent release on vinyl. Ward sings four or five of those songs each night as she opens for Josh Groban on a nationwide tour that brings them — and also the New Orleans Preservation Hall Jazz Band and violinist/singer Lucia Micarelli — to the Walmart AMP in Rogers on July 21. So far, "we've been really lucky," Ward says. "The weather has been wonderful and not too hot." It's her first tour of this kind, she adds, "and we've had such a wonderful response." Ward says doing a handful of Sondheim songs in the first 20 minutes of a concert that ends with Groban's set of songs from his latest album, "Harmony," is actually a good fit. "Josh is a musical theater kid at heart, and so am I, and I think the fans relate to that as well," she says. Ward got the inspiration for an all-Sondheim album, which she also self-produced, after creating a spontaneous Instagram cover of "Every Day a Little Death" from "A Little Night Music" in 2019, according to her website (eleriward.com/sondheim). Then, during the pandemic, she crammed herself into a closet in her New York apartment and recorded the rest. The lineup: • From "Sweeney Todd": "Johanna (Reprise)", "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd" and "Pretty Women" • From "A Little Night Music": "Send in the Clowns" and "Every Day a Little Death" • From "Into the Woods": "Children Will Listen" • From "Sunday in the Park With George": "Finishing the Hat" • From "Passion": "Loving You" • From "Follies": "Losing My Mind" and "In Buddy's Eyes" • From "Company": "Being Alive" • And "Take Me to the World" from "Evening Primrose," also the title song of the televised "Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration." She says the 13 songs are a "mix of favorites and what I was inspired by at the moment." Some of them, she adds, came as a bit of a surprise. A second all-Sondheim album is in the works. Ward won't reveal what songs are on it, or what shows they come from, but she recently released as a single "Another Hundred People" from Sondheim's musical "Company." A couple of others, she says, will follow in the next couple of months. "I'm definitely in the Sondheim mindset," she says. "I can't say what is to come yet, but I will say I've taken suggestions from a lot of people to heart." Ward says she mostly does the same songs in concert each evening, but she will mix them up a bit "depending on how I'm feeling that day." And if she gets the chance to play a Sondheim character someday on stage, Ward says, her dream roles include the Beggar Woman in "Sweeney Todd," the Witch in "Into the Woods" and Fosca in "Passion." Eleri Ward adds musical theater to Groban's tour Eleri Ward opens for Josh Groban July 21 at the Walmart AMP in Rogers. (Courtesy Photo)