The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page C03

Tuesday, October 23, 2012 THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER www.phill3r.com C3 On new album, Kra 11 goes vintage, vixenish i tii 1 0 7.7 -'11! KO. i .2 0110- Kroll, 47, goes a bit risque with black lingerie on the cover of "Glad Rag Doll." Bone Burnett produced. --r--- ..111., 4kAll i NOP 4111 dZab 0 11401k Alik 41! 'L i 0 40111' i i- I lryit' NAV' ,...11.. "pl. it Alt 1111..

-111, 41 I Is 1- By Charles J. Gans ASSOCIATED PRESS NEW YORK Diana Kra II says she felt reinvigorated making her new CD Glad Rag Doll, which gave her a chance to escape the comfort zone of Great American Songbook standards on which the singer-pianist has built her reputation. "It's always exciting to do something where you surprise yourself and it's like, 'Wow, I didn't expect she said. "I felt it was time for me to do something which is about what I hear and I like, not a tribute to Nat Cole." On the CD, Kra II reimagines mostly vintage songs from the 1920s and '30s in an eclectic style that goes way beyond her jazz roots. The album was produced by retro Americana specialist Bone Burnett, best known for the Grammy-winning Robert Plant-Alison Krauss CD Raising Sand and the 0 Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack.

Burnett surrounded her with a new supporting cast of musicians, including the versatile guitarist Marc Ribot, who plays an intimate acoustic duet with Kra II on the title track and throws in references to Miles Davis' electric Tribute to Jack Johnson on "Lonely Avenue," a 1956 hit for Ray Charles. The essence of the album is captured in the slightly risque cover portrait. The 47-year-old mother of nearly 6-year-old twin boys poses in vintage black lingerie and stockings selected by Oscar-winning costume designer Colleen Atwood, yet her blond hair and makeup are in a contemporary style. Kra II says she was going for an updated version of Alfred Cheney Johnston's photographs of Ziegfeld Follies showgirls. Kra II insists the new album doesn't represent a change of direction but rather a change of pace.

This week, she begins touring in Europe with a new program that will include songs from Glad Rag Doll as well as standards from her repertoire such as "Flim Flam Sauce" and "Boulevard of Broken Dreams." (The tour reaches the Borgata in Atlantic City on April 13.) ano she used to record most of the CD. Kroll was reluctant to approach Burnett, a close family friend who had produced several albums for her husband, Elvis Costello. But he signed on after she sent him a demo solo CD with about 35 songs culled from her father's collection of 78s. Kroll says Burnett had a "no-holdsbarred" approach with nothing prearranged. "It was the most exciting, creative time for me in a very long time because it was spontaneous and by the seat of our pants," Kroll said.

Burnett suggested she include the 1961 Betty James rockabilly tune "I'm a Little Mixed Up." Kroll said playing rock is nothing new for her, although "it's new for me on a recording." Her supporting cast includes Howard Coward, a pseudonym for Costello. Kroll says her husband originally was going to do a few ukulele parts, but ended up playing mandola and tenor guitar as well as adding backup vocals, most notably on the closing "When the Curtain Comes Down." "We had such a good time in the studio," said Kroll, who met Costello 10 years ago and now lives with him in Greenwich Village. "He has a very deep understanding of what I do and there's just such incredible support. It's pretty cool to be so in love with somebody and then have on top of it a bunch of musical things in common." Canadian jazz pianist and singer Diana Kral! says she felt reinvigorated making her new CD; it let her escape the comfort zone of Great American Songbook standards on which she has built her reputation. BORIS GRDANOSKI AP Though many of the songs on Glad Rag Doll are obscure, they resonate with Kra II in a more personal way than the more familiar tunes by the Gershwins or Irving Berlin in her repertoire, bringing back fond memories of her childhood in Nanaimo, British Columbia.

"My dad collected records and old sheet music, and this is the music that I heard and discovered that I had a love for," Kra II said. "It's taken me 40 years to do this, but it's always been some thing I wanted to do." Kroll recalls gathering around the piano at her coal miner grandfather's house, and the stories of her great-aunt who left Vancouver to sing in vaudeville shows in New York in the 1920s. When she became more serious about music, Kroll found herself drawn to long-forgotten performers from that era like the sweetly seductive singer Annette Hanshaw. Four tunes on Kra II's CD including the opener "We Just Couldn't Say Good bye" and "Just Like a Butter ly That's Caught in the Rain" were recorded by Hanshaw. "I think songs like 'Just Like a Butterfly' are relevant today.

The story is the same it's still about loneliness and love and people still are drawn to that. The story doesn't change because it's 2012," said Kra II, interviewed at an ABC-TIT studio after performing the title track on Live With Kelly and Michael, using the same vintage 1890s upright Steinway pi In Philadelphia theater, the plot thickens Ilt I' 1 I I I' z-e. 1 It to. At I. -0', 0 it, 4k ,0111111.01 -it Alt P- .10 I 4 I '1 hm -4l 4 -4 ai1 4010, '4 A i '9 lot I IAI 41,, flit 4 1 0111: -1p Itt '''''-4 1' 411,,, lit i -Allk 4 ey, 41)1 i ,7,7 i r---.

'r ,4 411-1---- 1 -i. Si .04 -1Atir 2., ell Je -le 1 11,,,,,, it, 461! 1 kill 'N. IF iN 1 4,4 lit, IC '4. 1 I i''r, 1C) we, 0 se lima 111 .0. 11e 7 4 1 kLin' THEATER from Cl for a town hall-style meeting to decide what's next how to move forward as a unified voice for theater, how to support new companies and young stage artists, and how to fulfill the specific marketing, audience, and production needs of the region's theaters.

What brought all this on was the decision in the spring by the Theatre Alliance of Greater Philadelphia to dissolve itself. The alliance, a service group for the region's theater community, also operated the annual Barrymore Awards, honoring outstanding work. Now, the future of the awards the alliance's most visible project, and one that boosted careers of recipients and the companies that hire them is cloudy. Monday night's event was called "Theatre Philadelphia: A Celebration," and, in addition to bringing stage people together as a way of replacing the red-carpet Barry-more celebration that would have been held this month, it provided a means for awarding the last of the Barrymores: two cash awards, and a lifetime achievement award. The achievement award went posthumously to Jiri Zizka who, with his then-wife, Blanka still artistic director of Wilma Theater took over the small Wilma in 1979 and staged work that enlarged the notion of theater here for both audiences and artists.

Zizka died of liver failure in January; he was 58. The Barrymore cash awards not disclosed last month when the performance and stage craft awards were announced by e-mail and on the Internet went to the actor-director-choreographer Steve Pacek and to Flashpoint Theatre Company. Pacek won the $10,000 F. Otto Haas Award for an emerging artist. Like many theater professionals in the city, Pacek, 34, is homegrown (Lansdale) and visible on several stages here, and has chosen Philadelphia as the place to make a living in his field.

He is a cofounder of the 11th Hour Theatre Company. The $25,000 Brown Martin Philadelphia Award, which recognizes a theater company for a production representing "the diverse individual, cultural and spiritual differences among us," went to Flashpoint Theatre Company, for last season's SlipShot, a new drama about race, family loyalty, and the way shifting impressions can play into what people call truth. Local playwright Jacqueline Goldfinger wrote SlipShot, and already had won a Barrymore for outstanding new play among the awards announced last month. Leaders of the celebration also an From left, Steve Pacek, Michael Philip O'Brien, Whitney Bashor, Alex Keiper in "Ordinary Days." Pacek is a cofounder of the llth Hour company. JOHN FLAK The cast of ifaciav Havel's "Leaving" in its 2010 U.S.

premiere; this was Jiri Zizka's final show with the Wilma. Zizka died in January at 58. must represent all the arts, which worries some. "My fear is that the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance is so large, some smaller theater companies might get lost in the shuffle," said Kevin Glaccum, who runs one of those, Azuka Theatre, which performs in a new space in Center City. Glaccum is one of the eight who met to try to chart a course.

"With an organization focused strictly on this discipline, theater, I think more people will get more service." So Monday night's celebration is over, and on Tuesday the group, which calls itself Theatre Philadelphia, will come together at the Arden with scores of other professionals, signing on to take control of what they hope will be a unified came together to explore whether theater companies from the Walnut Street Theatre, which has more than 50,000 subscribers, the most of any theater in the English-speaking world, to the fledgling but growing all-classics Quintessence Theatre Group could operate without moral and practical support from one another. "We were just trying to talk about what might happen; there were a lot of questions in the air," says Terrence J. Nolen, producing artistic director of Arden and one of the eight people who've been part of the discussion since the alliance folded. "Folks seemed to be galvanized by the idea that, although the theater community now is vital, an alliance or coalition can be really helpful for the overall theater ecology," he says. The Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance had stepped in immediately to help continue some services, among them a website for job announcements and an Internet list-serve on which theater artists communicate.

But the Cultural Alliance nounced a new, recurring 810,000 award, the June and Steve Wolfson Award for an outstanding small theater company, to be presented for the first time in 2013. What to do about the Barrymores which over 18 years have been a source of grumbling about judging procedures even as they've been a source of pride was a major point of discussion over the summer, as was what to do about the loss of the organization that represented Philadelphia-area theater, which produces upward of 180 professional shows a year. The Theatre Alliance's board had declared that it did not want to compete for funding with the theaters it served, and said the region now has such a vibrant theater community that its mission was fulfilled. No one can disagree about vibrancy; audiences here display an appetite for live theater, supporting not just the large pool of professional companies but also plenty of new work, plus one of the nation's largest festivals of fringe and experimental theater and a growing number of companies devising all their own work in group efforts a relatively new model in the American theater. The alliance board's reasoning that theater professionals no longer needed a group to provide general services, run programs that nurture emerging companies, and market theater in general sounded like hokum to theater artists and artistic directors.

So a group immediately Contact Howard Shapiro at 215-854-5727, hshapirophillynews.com, or philastage on Twitter. Read his recent work at www.philly.comhowardshapiro. Hear his reviews at the Classical Network, wwwwwfm.org..