Previews: TOMATOES TRIED TO KILL ME BUT BANJOS SAVED MY LIFE at Foulds Theater

Article and photo by Tom Hall

Among the nine acts included in this year’s Fort Myers Fringe Festival is Keith Alessi’s Tomatoes Tried to Kill Me But Banjos Saved My Life. Alessi will be on the Foulds Theatre stage at 5:30 on Saturday (June 1) and 2:30 p.m. on Sunday (June 2).

Alessi has been performing variations of the show since he debuted it at the Toronto Fringe Festival in 2018.

“I only intended to do five shows at Toronto Fringe, but I’m now up to 370 performances seen by more than 30,000 people worldwide, including the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland the last two years,” Alessi notes.

The show’s appeal inheres largely in its inspirational message coupled with Alessi’s gift for storytelling. As the title denotes, banjoes figure prominently in the storytelling. In fact, they’re akin to characters in a play. But the choice of banjo isn’t obvious, not even to Alessi.

“I was a first generation Italian. I didn’t have banjos ringing in my ears growing up.”

Then one day, he was watching some TV, when the “Ballad of Jed Clampett” came across the airwaves.

Eight years ago, Alessi decided to retire from corporate life and take up the banjo in earnest. As fate would have it, he was diagnosed two weeks later with esophageal cancer in the course of a routine check-up.

“Until the time I received my diagnosis, I thought I was perfectly healthy. It came literally out of left field in a routine physical examination. Yeah, it was a wake-up call, to say the least.”

The prognosis was bleak. Doctors gave him a 50 percent chance of surviving for a year, but only a 15 percent chance of living for five.

“I threw myself into trying to learn to play the banjo while I was going through my treatments because it kept my mind off of the medical issue at hand.”

That experience lies at the core of “Tomatoes Tried to Kill Me But Banjos Saved My Life,” which he created with his producer, Erika Conway.

“[In the show] I really encourage people to pursue their long-delayed passions,” Alessi explains. “You shouldn’t need a death sentence to pursue something you feel strongly about.”

It’s a lesson that Alessi learned the hard way.

“When I was a corporate CEO, I used to always admonish my people to have a balanced work life situation, and there’s a lot to be said for that to have outside interests from work. [Ironically] for me it took this major life event to really wake me up.”

But while banjos make a consistent appearance in Alessi’s story, he wants everyone to know that Tomatoes Tried to Kill Me But Banjos Saved My Life is not a concert.

To read the complete article, visit Tom's site Arts SWFL here.

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