Judy Kuhn Brings 'Serious Playground' to Iridium Jazz Jan.10-31

Judy Kuhn, the acclaimed actress and singer, will bring her show Serious Playground - The Songs of Laura Nyro back to New York in the new year. Kuhn is currently starring on Broadway in the musical Les Miserables and makes a cameo appearance in the current box office smash Enchanted. After a sold-out run this fall, the show will be performed to the Iridium Jazz Club (1650 Broadway at 51st Street) on Thursdays at 7PM from January 10 - 31. All shows have a $30 cover and a $10 minimum. Doors open at 6PM and a full dinner menu is available. Please call (212) 582-2121 for reservations.

The show is based on her new CD, Serious Playground - The Songs of Laura Nyro, released this fall by Ghostlight Records. Serious Playground is the first-ever solo CD celebrating the pioneering singer-songwriter of the 1960s and 70s, who would have turned 60 this fall. The CD was produced by Music Director Jeffrey Klitz and Joel Moss, with Mr. Klitz leading an eight-piece band. Kurt Deutsch and Ms. Kuhn serve as executive producers. The recording is based on her sold-out concert at the Lincoln Center American Songbook Series in January 2007. That concert followed Judy's Obie Award-winning role in the Off Broadway production of Eli's Comin' at the Vineyard Theatre, which inspired her passion for Nyro's music.

Serious Playground features fresh arrangements of Nyro's best-known songs like "Stoney End," "Sweet Blindness" and "Save The Country," but also offers new interpretations of rarely-recorded songs like "To A Child," "Mother's Spiritual" and "Been On A Train." "Lonely Women," spare and haunted on Nyro's album Eli and the Thirteenth Confession - widely considered her masterpiece - here has the feel of a hard blues. "Upstairs By A Chinese Lamp," named an all-time favorite by Rickie Lee Jones, is given a delicate treatment, as if part of a chamber opera. "Save The Country," whose potent anti-war message had a particular impact during the tumultuous Vietnam era, has a renewed relevance in the current political climate.

Judy Kuhn has been nominated for three Tony Awards and three Drama Desk Awards for her work on Broadway in the hit revival of She Loves Me, the American premiers of Chess and Les Miserables, and Rags. She is the singing voice of Disney's Pocahontas and co-starred in the upcoming film Day on Fire, for which she also performed the soundtrack with John Medeski.

Also on Broadway she appeared in Richard Nelson's play Two Shakespearean Actors (Lincoln Center Theatre), Alan Menken & Tim Rice's King David, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Most recently she appeared in a new adaptation of Chekhov's Three Sisters by Craig Lucas at the Intiman Theatre directed by Bartlett Sher, and co-starred in the world premiere of Michael John LaChiusa's The Highest Yellow at the Signature Theatre in Arlington, VA. She played Fosca in the critically acclaimed production of Passion at the Kennedy Center's Sondheim Celebration, and created the role of Betty Schaefer in the U.S. premiere of Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. 

In London's West End she starred in Metropolis for which she received a Laurence Olivier Award nomination. Other theatre includes the title role in The Ballad of Little Jo at the Steppenwolf Theatre Co.(Jeff Award Nomination), As Thousand's Cheer (Drama Dept.), Dream True (Vineyard Theatre), Strike Up the Band (Encores!), The Glass Menagerie (McCarter Theatre), Martin Guerre (Hartford Stage), and Martha Clarke's Endangered Species (BAM).

Judy sang the title role in Disney's Pocahontas as well as the in the sequel Pocahontas II: Journey To A New World. Television appearances include "Hope & Faith," "Law & Order, "All My Children," "The Secret Life of Mary Margaret," "My Favorite Broadway: The Leading Ladies", The Kennedy Center Honors, the Les Miserables 10th Anniversary Concert, and "In Performance At The White House."

Judy has performed on concert stages around the world including appearances at Carnegie Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, and The Royal Albert Hall in London and with Peter Nero and the Philly Pops Orchestra. She has performed her solo concert Finding Home  which the New York Times called "revelatory" for Lincoln Center's American Songbook Series, Joe's Pub, the Kennedy Center and the Prince Music Theater in Philadelphia. She can be heard on numerous original cast recordings as well as her first solo CD, Just In Time: Judy Kuhn Sings Jule Styne.

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