ONSTAGE
© Clay Patrick McBride
CE NTE R FOR TH E PE R FOR M ING ARTS AT PEN N STATE
Today’s performance is sponsored by
Richard and Sally Kalin
Community Advisory Council
The Community Advisory Council is dedicated to strengthening
the relationship between the Center for the Performing Arts
and the community. Council members participate in a range
of activities in support of this objective.
Nancy VanLandingham, chair
Lam Hood, vice chair
Judy Albrecht
William Asbury
Lynn Sidehamer Brown
Philip Burlingame
Deb Latta
Eileen Leibowitz
Ellie Lewis
Christine Lichtig
Mary Ellen Litzinger
Bonnie Marshall
Pieter Ouwehand
Melinda Stearns
Lillian Upcraft
Pat Williams
Nina Woskob
student representatives
Brittany Banik
Stephanie Corcino
Jesse Scott
CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS AT PENN STATE
presents
Rosanne Cash
The River & The Thread
Rosanne Cash, vocals and guitar
John Leventhal, guitars, vocals, and music director
Kevin Barry, guitars
Glenn Patscha, keyboards
Zev Katz, bass
Dan Rieser, drums and percussion
7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 9, 2015
Eisenhower Auditorium
Tonight’s program will be announced from the stage.
The concert includes one intermission.
sponsors
Richard and Sally Kalin
media sponsor
BIG FROGGY 101
Some photographs and moving images have been generously provided
by: James Jaworowicz and The Jack Robinson Archive, Memphis,
Tennessee; Dave Anderson, Little Rock, Arkansas; Oxford American,
A Magazine of the South; and The Library of Congress.
Rosanne Cash appears by arragement with Opus 3 Artists
and Cross Road Management.
The Center for the Performing Arts at Penn State receives state arts funding
support through a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state
agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the National
Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.
© Clay Patrick McBride
THE RIVER & THE THREAD
With The River & The Thread, Rosanne Cash has added the next
chapter to a remarkable period of creativity. In 2015, Cash was
awarded three Grammy Awards. The River & The Thread won for
Best Americana Album and the track “A Feather’s Not a Bird,” which
she co-wrote with her longtime collaborator (and husband) John
Leventhal, won for Best American Roots Performance and Best
American Roots Song.
Her previous two albums, Black Cadillac (2006) and The List (2009),
were both nominated for Grammys. The List—an exploration of essential songs as selected and given to her by her father Johnny
Cash—was named Album of the Year by the Americana Music Association. In addition, her bestselling 2010 memoir, Composed, was
described by the Chicago Tribune as “one of the best accounts of an
American life you will likely ever read.”
Rosanne Cash, who has charted twenty-one top-forty country
singles, including eleven number ones, wrote all of the new album’s
songs with Leventhal, who also served as producer, arranger, and
guitarist. Featuring a long list of guests—from young guns like John
Paul White (The Civil Wars) and Derek Trucks to legends such as
John Prine and Tony Joe White—The River & The Thread is a kaleidoscopic examination of the geographic, emotional, and historic
landscape of the American South. The album’s unique sound, which
draws from country, blues, gospel, and rock, reflects the soulful mix
of music that traces its history to the region.
“When we started forming the idea for this record,” Cash says, “it
felt like it was going to be the third part of a trilogy—with Black
Cadillac mapping out a territory of mourning and loss and then The
List celebrating my family’s musical legacy. I feel this record ties
past and present together through all those people and places in
the South I knew and thought I had left behind.”
The literal journey toward The River & The Thread began when
Arkansas State University contacted Rosanne Cash about its interest in purchasing her father’s boyhood home in Dyess, Arkansas. A
series of benefit concerts to get the project started featured artists
such as George Jones, Kris Kristofferson, Dierks Bentley, Willie Nelson, and The Civil Wars.
While helping with the purchase and renovation of the Dyess house,
Cash and Leventhal took several extended trips through the Southern states—visiting William Faulkner’s home; Dockery Farms, the
plantation where Howlin’ Wolf and Charley Patton worked and sang;
and Natchez and the blues trail.
“The thread” in the album’s title comes from Rosanne Cash’s friend
Natalie Chanin, a master seamstress in Florence, Alabama. “Natalie was teaching me to sew,” Cash says, “and she said, ‘You have to
learn to love the thread,’ in this beautiful accent, and it hit me as an
enormous metaphor.” The line appears in the album’s opener, “A
Feather’s Not a Bird,” a deeply swampy shuffle that Cash describes
as “a mini-travelogue of the South and of the soul.”
The journeys repeatedly took Cash and Leventhal through Memphis,
Tennessee, the city of her birth and a place that had a profound
impact on the album’s direction. They visited the studio of Sun
Records and watched their son strum a guitar in the same room
where her father cut his first record. “The connection to Memphis is
powerful and deep,” she says.
As the themes and subjects of The River & The Thread emerged,
Cash gradually envisioned how she wanted to connect the dots
into a cohesive work, connecting her own story to the rich history
of a region. “I guess I weave in and out of these songs, in a way,”
she says. “I don’t think I had a complete map of it, but John really
became a guide. We would write something and say, ‘This is part of
the geography, both emotional and physical.’”
Cash acknowledges that, even with fifteen albums and four books
behind her, it was difficult to start writing songs again after spending several years immersed in the masterful compositions featured
on The List. “You cannot keep that in your mind, except as an inspiration, a standard to aspire to,” she says. “To say, ‘I’m going to write
a song as great as ‘Take These Chains’—you’re not. So the only way
to not get dismantled by that is to stay connected to your own muse
and immerse yourself completely in what you’re doing, so it can be as
rich and authentic as it can possibly be. That’s all you can hope for.”
With The River & The Thread, she has risen to that challenge and
emerged with a beautiful and haunting album, one of the finest
works in an extraordinary career.
WHO’S WHO
JOHN LEVENTHAL (guitars,
vocals, and music director) is a
Grammy Award-winning musician, producer, songwriter, and
recording engineer who has
produced albums for Rosanne
Cash, Michelle Branch, Shawn
Colvin, Joan Osborne, Marc
Cohn, Rodney Crowell, and
many others. As a musician,
he has worked with all of the
above as well as artists such
as Elvis Costello, Dolly Parton,
Willie Nelson, Jackson Browne,
Emmylou Harris, Bruce Hornsby,
and Charlie Haden. As a songwriter, he has had more than
100 songs recorded by various artists. In 1998, he won the
Grammys for Record and Song
of the Year for producing and
co-writing “Sunny Came Home”
with Colvin. He lives with Cash,
his wife, and their children in
New York City.
KEVIN BARRY (guitars), a multiinstrumentalist based in Boston,
teaches guitar at the Berklee
College of Music and tours
regularly with Rosanne Cash,
Peter Wolf, Marc Cohn, and Ray
LaMontagne. He has also performed and/or recorded with
Jonatha Brooke, Mary Chapin
Carpenter, Susan Tedeschi,
Mighty Sam McClain, Sarah
McLaughlin, and the Consuelo
Candelaria group. Along with
acoustic and electric guitars,
Barry has disciplines in lap steel,
pedal steel, Dobro, bass, and
high-strung requinto.
GLENN PATSCHA (keyboards),
who was born in Winnipeg,
Manitoba, moved to Louisiana
in 1989 to study with Ellis Marsalis at the University of New
Orleans. He went on to play and
record with many New Orleans
icons young and old such as
Brian Blade, Nicholas Payton,
and Leroy Jones. A recording
and touring stint with Marianne
Faithfull reignited an interest
in composing and songwriting.
After moving to New York City
in 1998, Patscha started the
acclaimed band Ollabelle.
T Bone Burnett signed the
group to his Columbia Records
imprint DMZ. Patscha has
recorded and performed with
Levon Helm, Sheryl Crow, Bettye Lavette, The Holmes Brothers, Cubanismo, Madeline Peyroux, Roger Waters, Lizz Wright,
Ryan Adams, Willie Nelson,
Loudon Wainwright, and others.
He scored the Sundance Grand
Jury Prize-winning film Sangre
De Mi Sangre with Brian Cullman, the award-winning Finnish
film Kukkulan Kuningas (On Thin
Ice), and a number of short films
by photographer Mary Ellen
Mark and Martin Bell. Recently,
Patscha has produced recordings for The Holmes Brothers
and Marc Cohn, plus a record
with his new band The Big
Bright with Fiona McBain (Ollabelle) and Liz Tormes.
ZEV KATZ (bass) first met and
worked with Rosanne Cash in
1993 on her album The Wheel.
Katz has been a friend and
associate of John Leventhal’s
since 1974. It is his pleasure to
be accompanying them in support of The River & The Thread.
Katz has also played, toured,
and/or recorded with a diverse
group of artists, including Roxy
Music, Bette Midler, James
Taylor, Donald Fagen, Luciano
Pavarotti, The Yellowjackets,
Hall & Oates, Mavis Staples, Dr.
John, and Ennio Morricone.
DAN RIESER (drums and percussion) has been active in the
New York City singer-songwriter
and jazz scenes since the early
1990s. He has performed and/
or recorded with Norah Jones,
Jesse Harris, Marcy Playground,
Two Ton Boa, Chris Cheek,
Seamus Blake, The Bloomdaddies, The Little Willies, Jenny
Scheinman, Marc Cohn, Rebecca
Martin, and Madeline Peyroux.
Rieser appears on Rosanne
Cash’s album The River & The
Thread and Foreverly, the
recent acclaimed collaboration
between Jones and Green Day’s
Billy Joe Armstrong.
MIRIAM NILOFA CROWE
(lighting designer and operator)
designs regularly for Latin
Grammy- and Grammy-winner
Lila Downs, Ko-Ryo Dance
Theater, The Drilling Company,
and Strindberg Rep. Her
recent projects include home/
sick (The Assembly), Honky
(Urban Stages), The Penalty
(Apothetae), What it Means to
Disappear Here (Ugly Rhino),
Gorilla (SATC), RescYou
(Eckert+SorensonJolink),
Project RUIN (Carlye Eckert
and Lucie Baker), Bridesburg
(Miscreant Theater), Symphony
for the Dance Floor (Daniel
Bernard Roumain), Life after
Dark (Dana Leong), Flags
(Firefly Theater @ 59E59),
Woman in Waiting (Farber
Foundry), Beowulf (Lincoln
Center Festival), and The
Intelligent Design of Jenny
Chow (Yale Rep). She is a
founding member of Wingspace
Theatrical Design.
www.wingspace.com/miriam
D. J. MENDEL (video designer),
a longtime collaborator with
Rosanne Cash, directed and
video designed her previous
two concert tours, Black Cadillac and The List, and the music
videos for her songs “Motherless Children” and “I’m Moving
On.” He also designed the video
for her Art and Ideas keynote
speech at the 2013 Association
of Performing Arts Presenters
Conference in New York City.
Mendel has directed two of
world-renowned composer and
violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain’s music-theatre pieces,
Darwin’s Meditation for the People of Lincoln and Symphony
for the Dance Floor. Both shows
premiered at the Next Wave
Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City
and toured the United States.
For nine years Mendel has
directed all of Cynthia Hopkins’
work, including the award-winning Accidental Nostalgia (Obie
Award), Must Don’t Whip ’Um,
The Success of Failure (Bessie
Award), The Truth: A Tragedy,
and This Clement World. Each
Hopkins show premiered at
St. Ann’s Warehouse in New
York City and went on to tour
the United States and Europe.
Mendel has directed two fea-
ture films—Make Pretend, which
he wrote, and Planet Earth:
Dreams, written by avant-garde
theatre legend Richard Foreman—plus numerous shorts
films.
DAVID MANN (sound mixing
and tour manager) has been
on the scene as a recording
engineer and live sound mixer
for many years. His list of associations is a who’s who of the
music industry. Emmylou Harris, Paul Simon, Preservation
Hall Jazz Band, Herbie Hancock,
Suzanne Vega, Aimee Mann,
Marc Cohn, Ingrid Michaelson,
and The Waterboys are only a
few of the artists with whom he
has worked. Mann has worked
with Rosanne Cash since 2011.
CAMELOT
THE STORY AS YOU’VE NEVER SEEN IT BEFORE
7:30 P.M. MONDAY, APRIL 20
EISENHOWER AUDITORIUM
cpa.psu.edu
814-863-0255
support provided by
Eisenhower Auditorium
Endowment
Scott Suchman
CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS AT PENN STATE
Bold listings represent members who
increased their donations by 10 percent
or more this season. Be Bold! Contact
Dave Shaffer, assistant director for
special programs, at 814-863-1167.
Members
The Center for the Performing Arts recognizes the following members
for their support. For information on the membership program or
how you may contribute to the Center for the Performing Arts, please
contact Dave Shaffer at 814-863-1167 or [email protected].
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Help us continue to present world-class
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Contributors
$150 and more
We recognize the following donors who have contributed to endowments at the Center for the Performing Arts in the past year. For more
information about how to contribute to existing endowments, contact
Dave Shaffer at 814-863-1167 or [email protected].
John L. Brown Jr. and Marlynn Steele Sidehamer
Endowment
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Mr. and Mrs. James Horne
Penn State International Dance Ensemble Endowment
Elizabeth Hanley and Patrick Kolivoski
vision
Enriching lives through inspiring experiences
mission
The Center for the Performing Arts provides a context, through
artistic connections, to the human experience. By bringing artists
and audiences together we spark discovery of passion, inspiration, and inner truths. We are a motivator for creative thinking
and examination of our relationship with the world.
CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS AT PENN STATE
“Four classical musicians performing
with the energy of young rock stars.”
cpa.psu.edu I 814-863-0255
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Brooklyn Rider
Sarah Small
7:30 P.M. TUESDAY, APRIL 14
SCHWAB AUDITORIUM
Center for the Performing Arts Staff
George Trudeau, director
Lea Asbell-Swanger, assistant director
Annie Doncsecz, finance director
Medora Ebersole, education and community
programs manager
Lisa Faust, audience services manager
Tracy Noll, sales and development services director
Deanna Heichel, assistant finance director
Laura Sullivan, marketing and communications
director
Tom Hesketh, events manager
Wanda Hockenberry, assistant to the director
Amy Dupain Vashaw, audience and program
development director
Christine Igoe, ticket manager
Shannon Arney, assistant ticket manager
Erik Baxter, multimedia specialist
Shannon Bishop, downtown ticket center manager
Len Codispot, sales and development accounting
coordinator
Gary Collins, production supervisor
Aimee Crihfield, contracts/logistics coordinator
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Urszula Kulakowski, art director
Heather Mannion, advertising associate
Sherren McKenzie, group sales coordinator
John Mark Rafacz, editorial manager
Dave Shaffer, assistant director for special programs
Chad Swires, production supervisor
Mark Tinik, production supervisor
Front cover photos: 1. Diavolo Kenneth Mucke 2. Antibalas
Marina Abadjieff 3. Imago Theatre’s Frogz Jerry Mouawad
4. SISTER ACT © 2014 Joan Marcus 5. Cyrille Aimée 6. The
King’s Singers Axel Nickolaus 7. Time for Three Sherry
Ferrante 8. THE CHIEFTAINS Kevin Kelly 9. Brussels Jazz
Orchestra’s Graphicology Philip Paquet 10. eighth blackbird
Luke Ratray 11. Rosanne Cash © Clay Patrick McBride
12. Theatreworks USA’s The Lightning Thief Jeremy Daniel
13. Brooklyn Rider Sarah Small 14. CAMELOT 15. The Nile
Project Matjaz Kacicnik