A Prairie Home Companion

As completely satisfying as the weekly 2 hour broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion is, it can seem like a souvenir when compared to a live broadcast, such as we’ve witnessed at Tanglewood the first Saturday of summer since 2000. The radio audience gets 120 minutes of humor and music; those in attendance get all that, plus the chance that the strolling serenading Keillor will help himself to their picnic goodies before airtime, and the opportunity to sing along with him, the show’s musical guests, and the Guy’s All Star Show Band for another hour afterwards.

Garrison Keillor and Andrea Suchy sing America the Beautiful, 2010 Tanglewood encore

With BSO opening night two weeks away, the show was without the usual participation of BSO/TMC musicians. Rather, it featured 3 musical guests, all drawn from the distaff side: Andrea Suchy, Hilary Thavis, and The Wailin’ Jennys. Expanding upon that gynocentric theme were the Lives of the Cowboys skit and the introduction of Erica Rhodes as Keillor’s replacement as the show’s host (once certain issues are resolved, that is).

The localised scripts were funny; especially Guy Noir on the case of the imaginary grandson of Edith and Teddy Wharton showing up to claim the Mount and convert it into a dirt bike race track. Scripts and podcast of the show are available at PrairieHome.org.

Update: Your intrepid reporter is seen on the Prairie Home Youtube clip (above) capturing Flip video of the encore:

June 29, 2009 Tanglewood concert review by Dave Read

How ’bout that Garrison Keillor, ladies and gentlemen, ain’t he something – signs you up for two hours of entertainment, then goes and delivers three! To the two hour live broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion, in the Koussevitsky Music Shed at Tanglewood, he appended a twenty minute pre-show and a forty minute after-show that included audience sing-alongs, duets with Heather Masse, and thrilling encore performances by guests Steve Martin with The Steep Canyon Rangers and hometown favorite Arlo Guthrie. (re: Arlo)

This was the tenth time he’s brought the 35 year old show to Tanglewood, and it keeps getting better. Arlo Guthrie, whose Thanksgiving garbage caper took place just down the road 42 years ago, was an unannounced guest; Keillor said he’ll be back next year so they can talk “Berkshire history.” Early afternoon showers had cleared by the time we arrived around 5PM and mother nature delivered a splendid tableau for the festivities. Maybe jealous at being upstaged by the lanky Minnesotan, midway through the show she delivered a steady drizzle that sparkled through bright sunshine to about one-third of the Lawnsters outside the Shed. Keillor asked Guthrie if that was typical Berkshires weather? “Oh yeah, it’s been like that for weeks.”

Actor Martin Sheen was the show’s non-musical guest, delighting the audience in the role of a prickly wi-fi hog at Arlo’s Dew Drop Inn. Sheen and family were seen around Stockbridge throughout the weekend, at Mass on Sunday and then greeting fans on the porch at the Red Lion Inn.

Keillor, Martin, and Guthrie are pretty good talkers

Even though all the music and comedy performed today was as good as it gets, this show is especially memorable because it displayed the powerful beauty of the spoken word; for the satisfying feeling of community that can arise from the plain speaking of artists whose medium is language.

Besides all their other talents, Keillor, Martin, and Guthrie are talking adepts, which raises all the connecting patter of show to the level of the performance. We’re envious, wishing we could summarize more smartly than by declaring that the tenth Tanglewood rendition of A Prairie Home Companion was a titillating picnic of linguistic penache, verbal verve, and jocular jello.

re: Arlo: You may be interested in : Arlo Guthrie concert reviews, photos, and an interview.

Article updated June 26, 2018 by Dave Conlin Read

The June 30, 2008 installment of “A Prairie Home Companion at Tanglewood, with Garrison Keillor” could be emended to read “…with Garrison Keillor and Inga Swearingen,” as the lovely Californian played a variety of roles in every segment of the show, except for the news, which only can be delivered by the lanky Minnesotan. When you consider that Keillor has been at this since the Nixon administration, it doesn’t take a genius to conjecture that he may be contemplating passing the torch to a new generation. Ms. Swearingen, for whom we’ve been carrying a torch since first seeing her on the 2004 show here, displayed the versatility and endurance that it would take to host a two hour show, partiucularly the facility to flow effortlessly between a comic and a serious persona. (Photo:copyright Denise Ofelia Mangen)

Of course there could be no Prairie Home Companion without the sui generis Garrison Keillor, but if there ever were to be a Regis and Kathy Lee for the smart set, we saw the model for it today.

Ms. Swearingen, with a Master’s in music to compliment Keillor’s mastery of English, radiates joy, beauty, and artistry from the stage unlike any performer we’ve ever seen. She, too, is one of a kind, and until we find a weekly show for her, you’ll have to be content with her recordings and gigs, or you could enroll in her course at Cuesta College in her hometown of San Luis Obispo.

Besides those two, this show featured the Del McCoury Band and recent Poet Laureate Donald Hall, as well as the usual funny business, with Tanglewood angles, and musical augmentation from the ad hoc Tanglewood/B.S.O. rhythm section, “Old Wood and Heavy Metal.”

McCoury and band were brilliant, crisp picking and strumming along with rich harmonizing; it was Bluegrass at its best – taut and restrained, rather than showy. Their choice of material was marked by lyrics so simple and direct that even an English major could get them.

Simple and direct characterizes also the poetry of Donald Hall, whose genius it is to embue plain language with the pathos of a life not only lived well, but with ardent attention to one’s place on earth and to one’s place in relation to another.

(More about Donald Hall and Dave Read)

The annual pre-Fourth of July performance of “A Prairie Home Companion, with Garrison Keillor” at Tanglewood allows the audience an afternoon of unabashed fellowship, giving us a glimpse at our heritage that is strong enough to quiet the clamorous ire aroused by today’s power-mongers and a feeling that it’ll be all right (if only we keep Powdermilk biscuits in our diet).

Inhabiting a media-soaked world, we’re seldom free of the streaming messages of Washington, DC and Wall Street, and so we need to tune into the News from Lake Woebegon and find the truth about who we are. And those of us fortunate to attend the performance get the extra reward of participating in the pre- and post-show songfest, that has us, unwittingly or not, professing faith while expressing kinship and national devotion.

It’s some bit of alchemy for Garrison Keillor, as politically engaged and insightful an entertainer as Mark Twain was, to somehow channel Pollyanna and send his audience on its way full of hope when their first inclination upon resuming their plugged-in lives would be less spiritual.

This year’s show, the seventh consecutive performed in Tanglewood’s Koussevitsky Music Shed, was as good as it gets even though it was almost devoid of local color. All the previous shows included at least one musical component showcasing Tanglewood musicians as well as skits with Berkshire themes. The “Guy Noir” episode this year, though set at Tanglewood, was really about the current national talent show craze.

Instead, it got its theme from the new Robert Altman movie about the Prairie Home Companion, featuring (as does the movie) a Berkshire neighbor, Meryl Streep, Gospel singer Jearlyn Steele, the Hopeful Gospel Quartet with Robin & Linda Williams, and the Guy’s All-Star Shoe Band.

Ms. Streep was a casually beautiful and charming presence throughout the show: in conversation with Mr. Keillor, in the skits, in singing “What’ll I Do?,” in skillfully reading a selection of poems, and poignantly (arm in arm – cheek to tear-dripping cheek) with Ms. Steele for the post-show singalong.

And re-joining the Royal Academy of Radio Acting was actress Erica Rhodes to play the part of Ms. Streep’s prodigal daughter in an hilarious episode of True Stories from Scripture. This was the second star turn here for Ms. Rhodes, who in 2001 played the role of a teen-aged Emily Dickinson hiking Monument Mountain with Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The musical selections were splendid, including a surprisingly sublime rendition of the Reggae anthem “One Love” done by the Hopeful Gospel Quartet and Guy’s All-Star Shoe Band and Jearlyn Steele’s soulful treatment of Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released,” accompanied by Hopeful Gospel Quartet, and Guy’s All-Star Shoe Band.

Special guests were the luminous Wailing Jennys from Canada, Ruth Moody, Nicky Mehta, and Annabelle Chvostek, whose a capella version of “Bring Me A Little Water, Sylvie” brought to light the genius of Huddie Ledbetter, a.k.a.Leadbelly. On other numbers, “One Voice,” and “Calling All Angels,” their instrumental skills were on display as well.

(Originally published on NewBerkshire.com)