The 8 PM concert is simply titled Emily Skinner & Alice Ripley Sing Broadway! The belting duo will offer a wide-range of Broadway duets, including many from their two acclaimed CDs, "Unsuspecting Hearts" and "Duets." Concertgoers can expect new material as well.
The evening — part of the second annual Broadway Cabaret Festival — will be recorded by the Kritzerland label for subsequent CD release. No official release date has been announced for "Emily Skinner & Alice Ripley Live at Town Hall."
"The very first moment [Emily and I] sang together," Alice Ripley recently told Playbill.com, "there was something that passed through us that I don't know quite how to describe. It was just a feeling of 'Oh yeah, this is something I'm supposed to do and give everything to' — the idea of singing with her and making the sound together. I have sung with a lot of different people in my life, and I had never felt that before. . . . There's something about our voices when they blend that make it sound so much bigger than when we're by ourselves. It's more than the just the volume, [it's also] the complementary tones, [but] it's a mystery to me."
About the concert and its recording, Broadway Cabaret Festival producer Scott Siegel previously told Playbill.com, "I'm very excited about it because I intend for Town Hall to be either the venue at which major musical theatre artists launch their CDs with live concerts or, as in this case, create their CDs right here at Town Hall with live concerts.
"There is so much interest in the reunification of Emily and Alice," Siegel added, "that I expect that we'll sell out before the date of this concert. They were very wise to avoid working together during these last number of years because the pent-up demand to see them together again is palpable. It should be an incredible evening." Alice Ripley, who starred in the Paper Mill Playhouse's production of The Baker's Wife, has appeared on Broadway in Side Show (Tony nomination), The Rocky Horror Show, James Joyce's The Dead, Sunset Boulevard, The Who's Tommy, Les Misérables and in the City Center Encores! production of Li'l Abner. She has also been seen in Tell Me On a Sunday, Company, Shakespeare in Hollywood, The Fabulous Invalid and Five Flights. Ripley's non-show recordings include two discs with Side Show co-star Emily Skinner — "Duets" and "Unsuspecting Hearts" — and a recording of her own compositions, "Everything's Fine." The singing actress also heads her own rock band, RIPLEY; the group has just released a CD titled "Outtasite," now available on iTunes, CDBaby and Pandora.com.
Emily Skinner received a joint Tony Award nomination — with co-star Ripley — for her performance in Side Show. Skinner's other Broadway credits include Jekyll & Hyde, James Joyce's The Dead, The Full Monty and Dinner at Eight. She was also part of the cast of the Disney musical On the Record, and she made her New York directorial with the Town Hall concert The Broadway Musicals of 1955. Skinner appeared Off-Broadway in Fanny Hill and in the Kennedy Center's production of Mame. She was also recently seen in Have a Nice Life, part of the New York Musical Theater Festival.
Tickets for the Ripley-Skinner concert are $50. Town Hall is located in Manhattan at 123 West 43rd Street. For more information visit www.the-townhall-nyc.org.
