Be Our Guest with Joan Ross Sorkin & Randy Klein (Black Swan Blues)

Musical Theatre Radio presents "Be Our Guest"

JOAN ROSS SORKIN is a playwright, musical theatre bookwriter and lyricist, opera librettist, and screenwriter. Her two most current musical projects are Black Swan Blues with Randy Klein, and Bordello with Barbara Bellman and Emiliano Messiez. Black Swan Blues had a staged reading in October, 2022 as part of The York Theatre Company’s Developmental Reading Series, and Bordello is scheduled to have the same in December, 2023.

Joan’s family musicals include Dandelion, with Mary Liz McNamara, with its world premiere at Playhouse on Park, W. Hartford, CT in April, 2023, and the award-winning Isabelle and The Pretty Ugly Spell with Steven Fisher with productions at The Actors’ Playhouse at the Miracle Theatre, Coral Gables, FL (Winner, National Children’s Theatre Award), NYMF (Outstanding New Family Musical), and Vital Theatre; and Go Green! Prince Charming’s Quest for Love and Ecology in NYC with Mary Feinsinger, presented in the very first New York Children’s Theater Festival.

Randy Klein is a multi-award-winning composer, pianist, record producer, author and music educator.

He is the composer of For My People, a song cycle featuring the poetry of American author, Margaret Walker. For My People was featured at the Furious Flower Poetry Festival at James Madison University and the University of Kansas. The music premiere of the renowned poem by Margaret Walker ‘For My People’ was April 2, 2011 at the Forbes Center for the Arts, James Madison University, VA. His compositions, Facing It and Dear John, Dear Coltrane, based on the poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa and Michael Harper premiered at the 2014 Furious Flower Poetry Conference featuring the combined James Madison University and Morgan State Chorales.

His musical, Black Swan Blues, in collaboration with Joan Ross Sorkin, bookwriter and lyricist, inspired by the ballet “Swan Lake,”. Black Swan Blues explores white privilege and racism in America in the South in the early 1960’s. Set in New Orleans, a rich, idealistic journalist and a poor, vulnerable blues singer’s true love is challenged when secrets from their tangled past involving race, murder and the Ku Klux Klan are revealed. Only through the magic of voodoo do they find eternal love. The score is timeless and contemporary evoking the period.