Neranenah Spotlights Broadway’s Julie Benko

Broadway star Julie Benko wound up Neranenah’s spring season of concerts with a love letter to the music of New Orleans. The evening of music from what has generally been acknowledged as one of the most musically alive cities in America was largely taken from her recently released recording, “Euphonic Gumbo.”

Benko has had a love affair with the city since visiting it with her husband for a seminar in jazz education. As a writer, her play, “The District,” set in New Orleans’ legal red light district prior to World War I, was named a semifinalist at the 2022 Eugene O’Neil National Playwrights Conference.

She’s turned that affectionate relationship with the Crescent City into a program she has done at Birdland, the celebrated jazz club in mid-Manhattan, for the past four years just before the pre-Lenten holiday of Mardi Gras.

In introducing the Neranenah evening, she asked rhetorically what a Mardi Gras program was doing in a Jewish music series. It might be easier to take, she suggested, if the audience just imagined they were at an event where Purim meets the night before Yom Kippur.

As if to mirror the tradition of throwing beads and trinkets from the floats in the Mardi Gras parade, Benko brought along her own trinkets to hand out to the audience. There was a New Orleans key chain, a paper cut out done from a recent Broadway show in which she appeared, and an autographed copy of “Euphonic Gumbo.”

For those who weren’t able to attend the performance at the Sandy Springs Performing Arts Center’s Studio you can recreate much of it much of it from a listen to “Euphonic Gumbo’s” 10 songs on CD.

Songs like the ragtime hit, “Pretty Baby,” and “Don’t You Come Home Bill Bailey” have been given the energetic Benko Broadway musical treatment. She has a natural gift for song, a relaxed way of improvisation that is so evident on the recording and in the way the Sandy Springs audience was quickly swept up by her charm.

She was accompanied by her musical director and husband, pianist Jason Yeager. He is a professor of practice at the Berklee College of Music, and he shared the spotlight with her in solo breaks that showed off this musical mastery. His virtuosity mirrored the tradition of strong piano players that have been an important part of New Orleans music. Performances by artists like Jelly Roll Morton and early rock & roller, Fats Domino, to the legendary Professor Longhair have stood alongside the vocal work of jazz vocalist like Benko.

Among the lesser-known works that Benko and Yeager performed was the reflective “Lakes of Ponchartrain” and the soulful Cajun melody of love and loss, “J’ai Passé Devant Ta Porte.” The latter is a work that speaks to the passing of someone who has been lovingly glimpsed only through an open door.

A romantic ballad from a somewhat different source that was a part of the Neranenah evening is “Ma Belle Evangeline,” literally “My Beautiful Evangeline,” by composer and lyricist Randy Newman from the 2009 Disney animated film, “The Princess and The Frog.” Benko even room for the well-known Yiddish tune, “Tumbalalaika.”

Benko created a sensation during the 2022 revival of “Funny Girl” on Broadway, when she stepped into the role of Fanny Brice after the show’s troubled launch. Her acclaimed transformation from understudy to star won her the Dorothy Loudon Award for Excellence in the Theatre and was named the New York Times Breakout Star of Theater and Variety’s 10 Broadway Stars To Watch.

Her show-stopping performance gained her national media attention and she even received a timely mention on “The Simpsons.”

She originated her first major role on Broadway in “Harmony: A New Musical” in 2023. The musical told the true story of the Comedian Harmonists, a six-person German vocal group closely tied to the Jewish community there in the late 1920s that was disbanded as the Nazis came to power. The musical had an early performance at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre in 2013.

Benko just completed a three-month appearance as the Jewish anarchist Emma Goldman in the successful revival at Lincoln Center of “Ragtime.” It is a musical adaptation of E.L. Doctorow’s novel that has received 11 Tony nominations this year including Best Musical Revival.

To climax the evening, Neranenah’s Artistic and Executive Director, Joe Alterman, joined Benko’s husband at the piano for an impressive rendition of “When the Saints Come Marching In.” The saints, as Benko was quick to point out for her Jewish music audience are, in this case, Barbra Streisand and Mel Brooks.

You can listen to Benko’s “Euphonic Gumbo at https://www.juliebenko.com/copy-of-christmas-wiith-you