The 13th live broadcast from Tanglewood of A Prairie Home Companion, with Garrison Keillor, featured the familiar guests Arlo Guthrie, Heather Masse, and The DiGiallonardo Sisters, as well as the Guys All Star Shoe Band and the Royal Academy of Radio Actors, Tim Russell, Sue Scott, and Mr. Fred Newman.
The show got off to a fast start with the DiGiallonardo Sisters harmonizing on a hilarious Berkshires version of George M. Cohan’s Give My Regards to Broadway:
“Give My Regards to Stockbridge, Remember me To Lenox and Lee;
…
Oh how my heart is yearning, to see the Koussivitsky Shed;
Give my regards to Tanglewood, We’re gonna try to knock’em dead.”
By the time the live broadcast closed with City of New Orleans, Arlo Guthrie at the grand piano leading a vast chorus of singers, Mr. Keillor had once again delivered a thoroughly entertaining program, comprised of a perfect blend of heartfelt and hokey singing and humorous skits with pan-o-sonic effects. Then there’s the News from Lake Woebegon, which always has a poignancy because its denizens and their misadventures, for all their odd particularities, are pretty much like the people we know, some of whom we miss now.
Sometimes at Tanglewood, the 2 hour radio program can feel like a pretty fancy warm up to the best event of the day – the on-stage after party concert and sing-along that today lasted well past 9PM. We left the Shed during the enchanting Swing Low Sweet Chariot, which is great fun to sing as a member of an ad hoc choir of thousands.
Thirty minutes earlier we sang along with Arlo on Home on the Range; watching him singing that song and wearing a handsome cowboy hat, we remembered that Arlo Guthrie was named for Davy Crockett!
