Rich joined the HMC Board of Directors in July 2020.
HMC has been in my blood since 2003. I joined as a singing member and found the best friends of my life. I was certainly young and had just come out as gay and was certainly in a low place. HMC became my family and I’m so very thankful to be a part of the board and help shape the future of this amazing organization.
What song makes you happy?
All of the songs from naked man or from the charts “Rise Up” by Andra Day
What are you looking forward to the most after the pandemic?
Seeing people I haven’t seen in over a year and TRAVEL!!
Love’s boundaries in 1920s and 30s Berlin
/in ReviewsAnthony Rodgers | KC Metropolis.org
Beginning with “Wilkommen” from Cabaret, the stage was set for a night of song and dance highlighting the musical styles of the 1920s and frivolity of all in the hopping jazz clubs in Berlin. Masterfully arranged by Eric Lane Barnes, numbers included the spectacular Yiddish tune “Bei Mir bist Du schoen,” Weill-Brecht collaborations such as “Bilbao Song” and “Mack the Knife,” and the Cole Porter hits “Love for Sale/What Is This Thing Called Love?” A group of dancers featured in various numbers throughout the act were highly entertaining if not the most trained in this art. Wilson L. Allen acted as emcee for the production, narrating the storyline and providing comedic commentary on the performers, all with an exceptional singing voice, gender-blurring appearance, and unobtrusive German accent. A chamber orchestra of cabaret-like instrumentation was light and well balanced within themselves and with the large chorus. Overall, the vocal ensemble was musically engaged and blended sweetly, particularly when the parts harmonically divided, although there were moments in which they felt reluctant to enter creating a slight distraction from the arrangement. The standout group of soloists from the night were featured as characters in “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” notable for their humorously large props. Sounding like a collegiate fight-song, the gay anthem “The Lavender Song” was full-voiced, rousing, and still inspiring. The whole act was a show from beginning to end, flowing smoothly and transporting the Folly audience to the raucous intimacy of the cabaret.
Although times were as fun as the show’s first act, a new German regime in the 1930s changed the attitude toward homosexuality, reinforcing it as criminal love, and so the second half of the evening’s performance took a similar turn to the serious. Jake Heggie’s one-act opera For a Look or a Touch sets the tale of two young, gay lovers that were separated by death but reunited on the stage by their own words. Stirred from his sleep, Gad Beck (Kip Niven) sees the ghost of his former lover, Manfred Lewin (Morgan Smith), and discusses the struggles they both faced in and out of the Nazi concentration camps. Taken from the journals of Manfred and an interview with Gad from the 2000 documentary Paragraph 175, the words of the men are combined into a dialogue that is as cathartic for the audience as it is for those on stage.
Combining the eccentric with the somber, HMC still made the effort to not add extra commentary on a modern society with their presentation of the two contrasting adventures. And with such great charisma and uniqueness, it’s no wonder that the Folly Theater was full for their spring concert, which left us with the reminder to just have fun, because life really is a cabaret.
REVIEW:
Heartland Men’s Chorus
Falling in Love Again
Saturday, March 23, 2013 (Reviewed)
Sunday, March 24, 2013
Folly Theater
300 W. 12 St., Kansas City, MO
For more information, visit https://hmckc.org/
The Holocaust is remembered in “Falling In Love Again”
/in ReviewsSteve Wilson | Examiner.com
Wilson L. Allen was fabulous as the emcee for act one, “Life Is A Cabaret”. Allen entertained the audience with subtle humor and a beautiful voice which was accompanied by the chorus. One of the most humorous pieces was “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” in which Todd K. Gregory-Downs, Matt Patterson and Jim Harlow donned pig noses and Rob Kottenbrock wore a wolf’s head, while acting out the children’s fable.
Mark A. Lechner, Josh Krueger, Jesse C. Davis, Benjamin Helmers, Damon Jones, Jeff T. Kalin, Wilson Pipkin, Samuel W. Zorn, Steven Jeffrey Karlin as Marlene Dietrich and Scott White as Frau Schnaub were featured in solo performances during the first act, while the Heartaches took the stage to sing T’ain’t No Sin.
Act Two; “For A Look Or A Touch” included music by Jake Heggie, Libretto by Gene Scheer, Morgan Smith as Manfred, Kip Niven as Gad and dancer Stephen Plante as Joe. The Heartland Men’s Chorus, dressed in prisoner-of-war uniforms accompanied Smith in the songs. William Whitener was a Guest Choreographer for the song, “Story of Joe.”
Act one was light hearted fast paced and was highly enjoyable but didn’t require much thought by the audience. In contrast act two is a strong, powerful tale of the forbidden love of two men in Nazi Germany. Niven gives a dynamic, heart wrenching performance as the lover who survived the Holocaust. It is hard for the audience not to cry with him as he sobs while talking to the ghost of Manfred.
Smith’s voice bellowed through the theater with a haunting beauty that added to the illusion of the ghost of Manfred. While Smith sings The Story of Joe, Plante dances, visually telling of the death of a Holocaust victim. It is hard to imagine the horrors that gay men of Germany were forced to face, just because of their sexual preference. Smith was featured in the first performance of the musical in May 2007.
The music and text for the chamber opera are based on the Manfred Lewin’s journal in the United State Holocaust Memorial Museumin Washington, D.C.
KC chorus tackles Nazi persecution of gay people
/in PressMaria Sudekum | Associated Press
The lives of gay men in Germany in the early 20th century — from their freedom in Berlin’s rowdy nightclubs in the 1920s to their persecution under the Nazis a decade later — are the focus of an upcoming production by the Heartland Men’s Chorus.
“It’s an important chapter in history, and the history of gay men,” said Tom Lancaster, marketing director for the Kansas City-based chorus. “It’s one that is really underrepresented, and it’s a part of the Holocaust that a lot of people aren’t aware of. … Even people who were aware gays were persecuted under the Nazis, they weren’t aware of the scope.”
The Heartland Men’s Chorus, a nonprofit group that often takes on social issues for its programs, performs the two-act “Falling in Love Again” Saturday and Sunday at Kansas City’s Folly Theater. The program also includes a companion exhibit from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The small exhibit, “Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933-1945,” runs through April 10 at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
The Nazis, who killed 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, considered homosexuality an aberration. They didn’t try to exterminate all German homosexuals, but thought they could change them or isolate them with treatment that included imprisonment, castration and hard labor at concentration camps, according to the Holocaust Museum. The Nazis sent anywhere from 5,000 to 15,000 homosexual men to the concentration camps, the museum says.
The chorus performance opens with a musical glimpse of what gay men experienced in the liberal Germany of the 1920s when “Berlin had more gays bars than New York in the 1980s,” Lancaster said. The music in that portion of the program includes selections from Cabaret, Cole Porter’s “Love For Sale” and “The Lavender Song,” considered to be among the first gay anthems.
The second half of the program is based around an opera, “For A Look Or A Touch,” and portrays the treatment gay men endured under the Nazis, beginning in 1933 when Hitler came to power. The opera, based on interviews from the documentary, “Paragraph 175,” tells the story of one gay man who survived the Nazis and another who died during that time. Baritone Morgan Smith and actor Kip Niven portray the couple. A dance performance choreographed by William Whitener, artistic director of the Kansas City Ballet, is also part of the performance.
Fran Sternberg, with the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education in Overland Park, Kan., said the HMC program is important “because of the kind of homophobia that still lingers.”
“We need to know where that kind of thing leads,” Sternberg said. “Everybody needs to know about this. … The important thing to understand is the Nazis come to power legally, and they campaigned in regular elections and people voted for them.”