Carolyn Montgomery-Forant to Guest Star in 13th Street Rep's THE IRVING BERLIN RAGTIME REVUE

Award-winning cabaret, theater, and concert star Carolyn Montgomery-Forant will be a special guest at select performances of "The Irving Berlin Ragtime Revue" at the 13th Street Repertory Theater (50 W. 13th Street, NYC). Montgomery-Forant-who has won the MAC Award, the Bistro Award, and the New York Nightlife Award--will take time out from her own concert schedule to make guest appearances in the revue at the following performances: Sunday, November 16th at 3 pm and 7 pm, and Sunday November 23rd at 3 p.m.

She will sing "The Girl on the Magazine"-which was a huge hit when originally introduced on record in 1916. (Coupled on disc with "I Love a Piano," it was the first two-sided hit record in history.) And Montgomery-Forant will join longtime associate K.W. Andersson to sing "Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil in Hades," which Berlin himself felt was one of his all-time best songs but considered virtually "impossible to sing." She and Anderrson will sing it in counterpoint, as Berlin originally envisioned, in an arrangement reconstructed from Berlin's original notes by the show's creator, ASCAP Award-winning writer/director Chip Deffaa, and its music director, Richard Danley.

For Montgomery-Forant, the reunion with Andersson in a show of Deffaa's feels perfectly apt, since they first worked together, a dozen years ago, in Deffaa's production "The Johnny Mercer Jamboree" and are featured on the cast album (Original Cast Records). "No one in the business has better pipes than these two-and they just keep getting better," commented Deffaa. "It's a joy to hear them together once again."

Montgomery-Forant appears often in New York City at such venues as 54 Below, Town Hall, and the Laurie Beechman Theater, and has been featured in supper clubs from coast to coast, ranging from Davnports in Chicago to the Plush Room in San Francisco. She's also played leading roles regional productions of such musicals as "A Little Night Music," "West Side Story," and "Pippin." Montgomery-Forant will also participate in a special surprise awards presentation at the 13th Street Theater this Sunday.

"The Irving Berlin Ragtime Revue"--which is running in repertory at the theater with Deffaa's long-running "One Night with Fanny Brice" and Israel Horovitz's "Line"-is the fourth production of Deffaa's to open at the theater this year. (And Deffaa's next production, "Mad About the Boy," is expected to open at the theater in 2015.) The theater's longstanding mission, according to founder/artistic director Edith O'Hara, 97, has always been to nurture up-and-coming American playwrights, such as Deffaa (who's become the theater's defacto playwright-in-residence), and to nurture up-and-coming performers. O'Hara has long taken pride in the fact that the theater helped give early exposure to such performers as Christopher Meloni, Chazz Palmintieri, Barry Manilow, and Bette Middler.

In keeping with the theater's traditions, "The Irving Berlin Ragtime Revue" features a mix of established and up-and-coming players, including: K.W. Andersson, Michael Czyz, Maite Uzal, Michael Kasper, Rayna Hirt, Jonah Barricklo, Emily Bordonaro, Ken Adams, Missy Dreier, Andrew Lanctot, Ann Marie Calabro, Brandon Pollinger, Timmy Thompson, Marisa Budnick. Alex Acevedo and Tyler DuBoys are co-choreographers Kate Solomon-Tilley is stage-manager; Peter Charney is assistant director and videographer, and Megan Ulan and Matt Nardozzi are production asssociates. (Assisting in varying ways with production are 13th Street Rep regulars Nick Linnehan, Joe Battista, June Rachelson Ospa.)

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