MUSIC & ARTS

Stephanie Kyung-Sun Walters in Theatre Exile’s Today Is My Birthday, photo by Robert Hakalski

SPRING THEATER HIGHLIGHTS

Patsy Cline & Rocky in the lineup

by Marialena Rago

The Theatre Geek

This spring, theater companies all over Philadelphia are blooming with new shows and performances! Here are some picks from stages in and around the city.

Walnut Street Theater

Always…Patsy Cline

Celebrate the unlikely friendship between country singer, Patsy Cline, and housewife, Louise Seger. The musical shares their letters, visits and stories of laughter and heartache all while featuring 27 of Cline’s classic songs. This is the second time Walnut Street Theater will be presenting Always…Patsy Cline. The last time was during their 2015-2016 season, when the show sold out all performances during its three-month run in the Independence Studio on 3 series. (April 12 - May 15)

Theater Exile

Today is My Birthday

Theater Exile is celebrating 25 years of engaging the imagination of their audience members. Their final show this season is about finding human connection in our digital-obsessed world. Emily, a wannabe writer, moves back home to Hawaii and creates an alter-ego for a radio show. Told through live radio, voicemail, and phone calls, it asks the question, what is real and what isn’t? (April 28- May 22)

Azuka Theatre

Reverie

When Jordan answers a knock at his door, he encounters Paul - the father of former boyfriend. Reverie talks about grief, being true to yourself and the family dynamics that can make everything else so challenging. (May 5 - May 22)

THEATER

Arden Theatre Company

School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play

This hilarious and biting story depicts high school ambition and the pageantry of competition when Queen Bee Paulina is threatened by an unlikely newcomer. (May 5-June 5)

People’s Light

Bayard Rustin Inside Ashland

Written and directed by Steve H. Broadnax III, this story follows Bayard Rustin, chief organizer of the March on Washington and openly gay Civil Rights Activist. Set in 1944 during the time of Rusin’s prison sentence in Ashland, Kentucky, it explores his time in the prison as he was targeted for his sexuality and nonviolent resistance to a system that was stacked against him. (May 18-June 12)

Theatre Horizon

Athena

Athena and Mary Wallace are determined and preparing for battle at the National Fencing Championships. Will they become friends with their competitors? Watch a series of fencing matches and quick wit! It’s a comedy about glory and friendship. (May 19 - June 5)

Lantern Theatre

Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine

Undine has it all…until her life begins to unravel in one funny event after another. Soon, she is forced to return to a life she had left behind. But can she really go home again? Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage is behind this satirical comedy. (May 26 to June 26)

The Academy of Music

Rocky in Concert

There are always so many great shows at the Kimmel Cultural Campus. But for Philadelphians, experiencing the cinematic masterpiece that is Rocky with a live orchestra performing the score, this event is a must! For one night only, the celebrated classic and one of Philadelphia’s beloved heroes will be shown on larger-than-life screens in an all new production. If you are a Rocky fan, you will not want to miss this. (June 3)

EgoPo Classic Theater

Curse of the Starving Class

In this classic Sam Shepard play, an idealist son is forced to shoulder the burden of keeping up the family farm while his family is falling apart. The Tate family is said to have a curse put upon them. Since they are broke, hungry, and always fighting, it is not too far of a stretch, but is the family too doomed to pull themselves out of their downward spiral? Or can they alter their futures? (June 15-26)

Major Lee Van Winkle a Future Denied

by GENO THACKARA

PHOTO OF “WINKLE” BY STACIE HUCKEBA

ou’d think that living with a deadly pandemic would be more than

Yenough for the world to handle. As awful as that is, though, it’s easy to forget that the damage from Covid-19 goes beyond just the people who get sick. The isolation and general uncertainty also cause their share of wider problems on top of it - and for some especially sensitive souls, it turns out that avoiding the virus still isn’t enough.

Tragically, Major Lee Van Winkle was one of those non-obvious

casualties. The Philadelphia music scene knew him as a wildly creative and colorful figure. Eagles fans might have known him for doing an occasional pre-game rap on the 94WIP radio show. As his father Don tells us, though, Major spent his life struggling with issues just as mysterious as Covid and just as invisible. Manic depression was a constant presence throughout - and while the up moments would sometimes help feed his music, the downs eventually led him to suicide in September of 2020.

Don (or just plain Winkle if you meet him) explains that it was a consequence of many factors, but that year’s sudden isolation was the last straw. “I think he was an old soul. He was an outstanding, loving, caring person. The mania was a big part of his motivation and talent, so it was a really fine line he was walking,” the older Van Winkle relates. “But he had been struggling with the lightness and darkness for a long time. He was infatuated with the afterlife, and I think the demons in his mind got the best of him. The funny thing is, if you go back to his lyrics, all the pain and struggle is in there. I just mistook it for creative soul-searching. I didn’t realize it was so autobiographical.”

Major had a deeply musical family to grow up in, being both the son of Don (a longtime local fixture with his own band The American Dream) and the nephew of Rich and Charlie Ingui, who are beloved among Philadelphians as founders of the Soul Survivors. It was only natural for the youngster to develop a natural knack, though of course he took it in his own direction. Anyone on Spotify or Youtube can search his name to find a small but wickedly clever catalogue mainly rooted in hip-hop.

The strange spring and summer of 2020 put the brakes on what would have been his next album and tour but gave the father and son time together to work on more new music instead. Van Winkle recalls, “It started out okay. We ended up working together on songs. I got a lot of communion with Major before it happened. We lost his mom in 2017, so it was just us in the house. A bunch of songs just came out, 13 of them. I tell you, it was like a premonition. I never write that prolifically. I might finish a song here, then maybe one more. But this just kept coming early in 2020, song after song after song. I think it was the cosmos preparing me for some big event, it turned out to be.”

Those pieces are being mixed into an album for release later in the year, with Major singing a handful of leads. “I really wanted him to sing on the whole thing. I said, I’m 73, people are tired of hearing me,” Don continues. “I was lucky enough to get three songs recorded with him on lead vocals. The rest is all the material that swamped me that year.”

Alongside that final recording comes A Future Denied, a documentary by filmmaker Scot Sax that was Kickstarted in early 2021 and is due to be screened this spring. The tribute promises to be a “heartbreaking yet hopeful” portrait of the young artist largely told through his own words and music.

Van Winkle explains, “It all just speaks to the loyalty of Major’s friends and the love he exuded. It’s really a story of who he was, and who he was to other people. There are some heartbreaking moments, but also a lot of joyful ones in the film itself. We had to tell both sides, the whole story, otherwise it wouldn’t be honest.

“One of Major’s dreams was also to be on vinyl, so one of his friends and I put his latest album Selfish Presley out on vinyl, and all the profits went to an organization out of Ardmore called Minding Your Mind. They deal in mental illness and suicide prevention. In 2020 and 2021, we had marathons where people all over the country – actually, all over the world - would run to one of Major’s songs and then mail in a video, and for each one we contributed money. We raised about $8000 each year. People just jumped on it. There were people from Brazil that sent snippets of themselves running to his music. It was a beautiful thing.”

Minding Your Mind (mindingyourmind.org) will also receive any profits from the upcoming album and Sax’s documentary. Van Winkle and Sax agreed that the best tribute they could pay was to continue spreading the love and help for those still out there who might need it. “I think that mental health awareness has really been at the forefront of everyone’s mind since Covid,” he says. Since the pandemic has no end in sight and there will doubtlessly be other levels of isolation to come, he’s happy for Major’s memory to provide a positive way to connect.

“I’m blessed to have this channel for my grief, to be able to turn it into the music, and now this film which is a very positive project,” he concludes - truly the best gift he can pass along to friends, loved ones and those who have yet to discover his son’s legacy for themselves. “It’s not the quantity of life, it’s the quality. By that standard, he had a wonderful life.” PRH

“It’s not the quantity of life, it’s the quality. By that standard, he had a wonderful life.”

MUSIC