On a winter’s day nearly 50 years ago, the Beatles and composer Karlheinz Stockhausen arranged to meet in New York City to plan a joint concert. No such performance would ever take place. But its tantalizing promise is the departure point for Alarm Will Sound’s 1969. Told through their own words, music, and images, 1969 is the story of great musicians—John Lennon, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Paul McCartney, Luciano Berio, Yoko Ono, and Leonard Bernstein—striving for a new music and a new world amidst the social and political ferment of the late 1960s.
1969 is both a concert and a work of theater. As archival video and photographs are projected around the stage, the members of the ensemble play their instruments, sing, and voice the words of the composers and others in their circle, woven together to tell the story of how these artists galvanized one another and responded through their music to the momentous events of the day—the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the Vietnam War, the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention, the election of Richard Nixon. All of the artists suffered critically for their efforts, and yet, in the end, they would transform music and transcend their time.
In the work of Alarm Will Sound, a vibrant, technically dazzling new-music ensemble, listeners have grown accustomed to encountering the amazing, the amusing and, occasionally, the near-impossible. A musical event called 1969, which the group presented for a capacity audience at Zankel Hall on Thursday night, had all those qualities and more.
…a swirling,heady meditation on the intersection of experimental and commercial spheres, and of social and aesthetic agendas.
…Hearing impossible electronic collages like Stockhausen’s Hymnen and the Beatles’ “Revolution 9” rendered by live musicians was a consistent wonder.
– The New York Times
…When I tell you that 1969, an evening of music, video and theater performed Thursday at the Zankel Hall in New York, and based on the prospect that John Lennon and iconoclastic German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen planned to stage a concert together, was fantastic, I mean it in all senses of the word… They exploded musical genres, made history come alive and demonstrated that art — original, vivid, reckless — can lift the grim clouds of current events, if only for two hours.
Jon Patrick Walker (Lennon) was seen most recently in productions of Our Town and A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. Broadway : Young Frankenstein, High Fidelity, and White Liars. Off-B’way and Regional: She Stoops To Conquer (McCarter), Twelfth Night (NY Shakespeare Festival), Like Love (NYMF), Pete Townshend’s The Boy Who Heard Music (NYSAF); Debbie Does Dallas (Jane Street); The Compleat Wrks of Wllm Shkspr {Abridged}(Westside Arts); Dead End (Huntington); Playboy Of The Western World (Milwaukee Rep); Midsummer Night’s Dream and Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards The Somme (both Williamstown). Film: Campbell Scott’s Company Retreat, The Secret Lives Of Dentists, The Substance Of Fire, Vibrations. TV: Leading roles on The Fighting Fitzgeralds (NBC), and Holding The Baby (FOX); and guest appearances on Rubicon, Law & Order, Law & Order: SVU, Six Degrees, Melrose Place, Empty Nest, and Sex and the City.
Robert Stanton (Stockhausen) has appeared in Broadway productions of John Guare’s A Free Man of Color, Schiller’s Mary Stuart, and Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia. Off-Broadway: Love Child, written and performed with Daniel Jenkins (New World Stages/Primary Stages); Charles Grodin’s The Right Kind of People, Obie and Clarence Derwent Awards for David Ives’s All in the Timing (Primary Stages); The Bald Soprano (Atlantic); The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui with Al Pacino (National Actors Theatre); David-Lindsay-Abaire’s Fuddy Meers (MTC/Minetta Lane); Cymbeline, Measure for Measure (Delacorte Theater); A.R. Gurney’s A Cheever Evening (Playwrights Horizons); Cary Churchill’s Owners and Traps (New York Theatre Workshop); Keith Reddin’s Rum and Coke (The Public). Regional: The Front Page, Stoppard’s On the Razzle (Williamstown); Hay Fever (Westport); Jeffrey Hatcher’s Compleat Female Stage Beauty (Philadelphia Theatre Company); Twelfth Night, Major Barbara, Alan Knee’s The Lost Boys, Once in a Lifetime, The Homecoming, The King Stag (American Repertory Theater). Films: Luc Besson’s Arthur and the Revenge of Maltazard and Arthur and the Two Worlds War, Gigantic, Confessions of a Shopaholic, Find Me Guilty, The Stepford Wives, Head of State, The Quiet American, Mercury Rising, Next Stop Wonderland, Red Corner, <emWashington Square, Striptease, Dennis the Menace, Bob Roberts and A League of Their Own. TV: multiple guest leads on “Law & Order,” “Law & Order: Criminal Intent,” “Frasier” and Woody Allen’s television adaptation of his 1969 play, Don’t Drink the Water. M.F.A., NYU Tisch School of the Arts Graduate Acting Program.
David Chandler (Berio) has appeared in Broadway productions of Lost in Yonkers, Death of a Salesman, and American Clock; and Off-Broadway: Underneath the Lintel (Soho Playhouse), Private Jokes, Public Places (LaMama), The Swan (New York Shakespeare Festival), Slavs! (New York Theatre Workshop), Phaedra (Vineyard Theatre), Black Sea Follies and Doris to Darlene (Playwrights Horizon), The Grey Zone (Manhattan Class Company), and Cellini (Second Stage). Regionally Mr. Chandler has worked at Berkeley Rep, The Guthrie, Long Wharf, McCarter, Yale Rep, Actors Theatre of Louisville, The Wilma, A.R.T., Berkshire Theater Festival, and Williamstown among others. Mr. Chandler appeared at London’s Bush Theatre in A Question of Mercy. His film and television credits include The Grey Zone, Hide and Seek, Death of a Salesman, Upheaval, The Portrait, Her Alibi, Seinfeld, Third Rock from the Sun, Arliss, The Undeserved, and numerous Law and Order episodes.
Andrew Kupfer is a writer and editor and a co-creator of 1969. Over the course of 20 years on the staff of Fortune magazine, he wrote extensively about technology, industry, and policy and was the author of stories about iconic American companies ranging from AT&T and Union Pacific to Apple Computer and Amazon. Before becoming a journalist, he was an urban planner in New York, his native city, and he holds graduate degrees in planning from the London School of Economics and Cambridge University. He began his first play, The Maid’s Room, a drama about Russian émigrés in New York following World War II, while on a writing sabbatical in Bath. He lives and works in Manhattan.
Nigel Maister is a director, writer, designer and performer, in addition to being the Artistic Director of the International Theatre Program at the University of Rochester. He is a founding member of Alarm Will Sound and a co-creator of 1969. His work as staging director for Alarm Will Sound has included Benedict Mason’s AWS/MILLER: the Fifth Music: Résumé with CPE Bach at Columbia’s Miller Theatre, the Odd Couples and A/Rhythmia concerts at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel auditorium (and elsewhere), as well as numerous smaller pieces in other Alarm Will Sound concerts (including Cal Performances, the Holland Festival, et al). With Alarm Will Sound, he also performed his text, Paper Trails (music by Stefan Freund) at the John Adams-curated In Your Ear Festival at Zankel Hall. Other performance credits include Rzewski’s Coming Together. Recent and noteworthy theatre productions include The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other, King Lear, Hello Again, John Cage’s Song Books, his own multimedia adaptation of The Iliad, and the NY premières of W. David Hancock’s The Puzzle Locker, Andy Bragen’s The Hairy Dutchman, Manfred Karge’s Conquest of the South Pole, and his own translation of Bernard-Marie Koltès’s Roberto Zucco. A Drama League Fall Directing Fellow, he has worked as an assistant to, and actor for Giorgio Strehler at Il Piccolo Teatro di Milano, and interned with Richard Foreman and Peter Sellars (amongst others).
Peter Nigrini has designed projection on Broadway for Fela!, 9 to 5: The Musical and Say Goodnight Gracie. Other designs include the Grace Jones Hurricane Tour, Der Ferne Klang (Bard Summerscape), Haroun and the Sea of Stories (City Opera), Blind Date (Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance), The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity (2nd Stage Theatre), Fetch Clay, Make Man (McCarter Theater Center), The Orphan of Zhao (Lincoln Center Festival), Sweet Bird of Youth (Williamstown), Dido and Aeneas (Handel Haydn Society), Biro (the Public Theater), for Nature Theater of Oklahoma, No Dice (2008 Obie Award), Romeo and Juliet (Salzburger Festspiele) and Life and Times, Epiode 1 (Burgtheater, Vienna) among others. Upcoming projects include, Wings (2nd Stage Theatre), Becoming Helen Keller (PBS American Masters) and the London Production of Fela!
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