KVNO News

Broadway Style Comes to Brownville Concert Series. Tony Yazbeck Performs “The Floor Above Me”

By Corbin Hirschhorn, KVNO News

April 26th, 2017

Omaha, NE—The Brownville Concert Series will host singer, dancer, and actor, Tony Yazbeck this weekend, on Friday April 28, Saturday, and Sunday. The Broadway performer is currently playing the role of Billy Flynn in Chicago, but he is coming to Brownville to perform an original piece titled The Floor above Me.

Yazbeck tells the story of his life, passions, and path to a career in show business through popular music and tap dancing. He explained how he began working on The Floor Above Me.

“I was sort of in a place in my life where I really wanted to grow deeper as an artist and I thought to myself, well why not do it myself?” Yazbeck said. “And so I started to write a little bit about things that have been going on throughout my life, and the story of how I got to where I am, and then I started to put together some songs that really meant something to me.”

Yazbeck appeared in his first Broadway show at age 11, and he is strongly influenced by classic showmanship.

“I started to think about how I was maybe trapped in the wrong era or born in the wrong era, and sometimes I’m more attracted to the old black and white movies of Fred Astaire and in the movies of Gene Kelly,” Yazbeck said. “I started thinking about how can I make it, and it started to become sort of an interesting parallel to my life, so I put together songs like Irving Berlin songs and Gershwin songs. But then later on the show you hear contemporary songs like songs from Coldplay and Joni Mitchell and the Beatles, so I like to sort of interweave the old with the new and show an audience how it really can connect seamlessly that way.”

Yazbeck explained the role of traditional song and dance today.

“I always wanted the challenge just because now in 2017 I always asked myself, how do I connect to an audience now? How do I connect to the young people? So my challenge was, let me see if I can find new contemporary pop tunes and put myself as an old song and dance man into that. What does that do? And what I learned is it still works. They’re all pop tunes–the old Irving Berlin and Gershwin songs were the pop tunes back then so that’s what was interesting is, as an experiment myself with the show, I found that it all relates and it’s not necessarily like one era and another era. They all sort of connect there just to read it did a different turn.”

Yazbeck will perform his original show, The Floor Above Me, at the Brownville Concert Hall this weekend, April 28 and 29 at 7:30 pm, and the 30 at 2pm. For tickets, visit Brownvilleconcertseries.com.

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