'Two Steps Forward--One Look Back'--performed on Wednesday May 14 at 9:45pm at the Metropolitan Room--is a revue of folk, country, bluesy/jazzy pop, nouveau swing and singer-songwriter music of the 1950s-1980s. Songwriters include Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, kd lang, Bonnie Raitt, Willie Nelson, Patsy Cline, Mose Allison, Squirrel Nut Zippers, Jon Cleary, The Kingston Trio, etc. It is the cabaret debut of operatic singer Kathryn Allyn (formerly Kathryn Friest) of NYCO among others, musical directed and accompanied by jazz/cabaret/piano bar pianist ShelDon Forrest.
Kathryn Allyn was born in…yes, they call it this…The Little Apple: Manhattan, Kansas. Her childhood, spent in various dusty towns along Tornado Alley, was accompanied by a sound track performed by her father, tenor and player of guitar, mandolin and ukulele, singing folk music and the great old country hits made long before video killed the radio star. The songs of
Hank Williams,
Willie Nelson, The Kingston Trio, The Limeliters,
Roger Miller and so many others entertained the Moore girls at the fairly-regular bedtime concert. But, you know, kids rebel. At eighteen, never having seen an opera, Kathryn decided to learn about it, and ultimately loaded up her Ford Escort and her twelve hundred dollars and headed east to try her luck. A bunch of great gigs later, but coming up on sixteen years performing operatic repertoire, and entering a very big decade in a lady's life.
Dramatic mezzo-soprano Kathryn Allyn, called a "vocally lustrous earful" by the Philadelphia Enquirer, hailed as "note perfect" by the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, and described as "grandly libidinous" by Opera News, has most recently appeared the title role in Carmen at Florida Grand Opera and in two twentieth-century works at the New York City Opera, Die Tote Stadt (Brigitte) and Richard Rodney Bennet's The Mines of Sulphur (Rosalind). Other assignments have included turns in Madama Butterfly (Suzuki) and Handel's Flavio (Teodata), as well as creating the role of Princess Batcheat ("the most difficult task of the day," according to the New York Sun) in Charles Wuorinen's and Salman Rusdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Ms. Allyn's turn as Niklausse in Palm Beach Opera's Les Contes d'Hoffmann, under the baton of
Julius Rudel, was called "outstanding" by the Palm Beach Post, and The New Jersey Classical Society Journal noted that, in her appearance in New Jersey performances of Opera Orchestra of New York's La Donna del Lago, she "knocked off another amazing vocal feat…every time she came onstage". In concert repertoire, Kathryn has been heard with the Tokyo New City Symphony as Alto Soloist in Mahler's Symphony Nr. 2, as well as at
Carnegie Hall and New York City's Weill Hall, in repertoire including Handel's Messiah, Vivaldi's Gloria, and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, among others. A graduate of The University of Kansas (B.M. 1991) and The Wichita State University (M.M. 1993), Ms. Allyn is a 1997 winner of The McAllister Awards (Third Prize, Professional Division), the Birmingham Opera Theater Awards (Third Prize) and was a 2000 Finalist in the Chicago Lyric Opera's LOCAA Competition. A student of Catherine Green, she makes her home in New York City.
$18 cover and $15 food/drink minimum.
To make reservations by telephone please call 212-206-0440.
www.metropolitanroom.comwww.kathrynallyn.com
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