Updates from the Fort

FORT SALEM THEATER HOSTS MAINSTAGE PIANO CONCERT SALEM, NY — Fort Salem Theater rolls its seven-foot Steinway Concert Grand piano centerstage on Sunday afternoon, June 4, when piano virtuoso Deborah Young-Weiler returns to the Fort for an afternoon of piano music designed to touch the souls of its audience. Mrs. Young-Weiler was born in the Tennessee mountains near the Kentucky border. She hadn’t even  reached her third birthday in her earliest memory of playing piano. “There I was at Grandma’s side,” she recently said. “She sat with me, playing her ragtime tunes. I’d play along at the high end of the piano. Later, I would sit alone and play, thinking that if I kept on sitting there, something good would eventually come out.”  She was nine years old when the preacher at a local church asked her to accompany a prayer service. Playing in church became a regular gig during her teen years. Not until Deborah went to college to study classical music did she...

FORT SALEM HOSTS  AN AFTERNOON OF FUNNY SONGS SALEM, NY — The third in Fort Salem’s series of Sunday Afternoon Cabarets comes to the Washington County venue Sunday, May 21, at 2:00 PM, with humorist Byron Nilsson’s intimate one-man program of funny and forgotten pieces, “Rhyme on My Hands: A Tribute to the Comic Song.” Nilsson is an actor and writer who appeared in several musicals at the New York State Theatre Institute, was featured in two episodes of Law and Order , and as a playwright has been produced at the New York Fringe Festival and the Ensemble Studio Theatre. A former chef, he served for thirty years as restaurant critic for Albany’s alternative newspaper, Metroland . In his spare time, he keeps bees and grows garlic and San Marzano tomatoes on his small Montgomery County farm. Classics by Flanders & Swann, Noël Coward, and Tom Lehrer share the bill with heretofore lost songs of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including “Why Do They All Take ...

TV NEWS ANCHOR RETURNS  TO SALEM CABARET SALEM, NY — Benita Zahn, WNYT news anchor, returns to Fort Salem Theater on Sunday afternoon, May 7, at 2 PM, in a cabaret entitled BZ and the Girls: Women Who Sing. A part of the theater’s inaugural season eleven years ago, Ms. Zahn has returned at least once in each subsequent season, sometimes with fellow Singing Anchors Jerry Gretzinger and Jessica Layton, sometimes as the lead in a musical ( I’m Getting My Act Together and They’re Playing Our Song ), and often as a solo cabaret performer. As an actress, she has performed with every major performance group in the Capital Region. This year’s outing finds her in the skilled company of three other Fort veterans, singers Keri Alonzo, Sue Caputo, and Lynne Kerr. These four Women Who Sing will light up the stage with four-part harmonies: the theater’s website calls them “The Andrews Sisters and The Supremes on steroids.” Interspersed with pop tunes like “Stop in the Name of Lo...