The Dennos Museum Center at Northwestern Michigan College will present Christine Lavin and Don White’s comedy performance of On the Funny Side of The Street: A Night of Brighter Laughter on Saturday, January 30, 2016 at 8 PM in Milliken Auditorium. Tickets are $27 advance, $30 at the door and $24 for museum members plus ticket fees. Tickets may be purchased on line at www.dennosmuseum.org or by calling the box office at 231-995-1553 or My North Tickets at 800-836-0717.
Two of the funniest entertainers on today’s music scene. – The Boston Globe
Listen to Lavin and White: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLwRwZ7j3C4
Seeing Christine Lavin or Don White is a treat. Seeing Christine Lavin and Don White is an experience. Between the two of them, they more than 40 years of combined experience making music and laughter.
The Lavin/White co-bills have packed audiences in wherever they’ve played, from the Regent Theatre in Boston to The Ark in Ann Arbor Michigan. Audiences get a one-hour shot of each performer during their solo sets, and then a free-for-all when White and Lavin take the stage together and display the kind of chemistry you get from old friends and seasoned performers. You’ll never see the same show twice.
“Our show doesn’t sound like a folk concert, it sounds like a comedy concert, there’s 400 people screaming with laughter for the whole two hours,” says White. “It’s hard to describe what it is that Don does onstage, because there simply isn’t anyone out there like him,” says Lavin. “I’m a brave performer to share the bill with someone who knocks audiences out the way he does.”
Christine Lavin is a multi-award winning singer-songwriter, author, and knitter. She released her memoir, Cold Pizza for Breakfast: A Mem-wha??, in 2010. She is also a founding member of the popular folk collective, The Four Bitchin’ Babes. White is a celebrated singer/songwriter/storyteller who has released eight albums and three DVDs. His new CD, More Alive, is available now. His book, Memoirs Of A C Student, is available in print and for the Kindle and Nook. Lavin and White have also released a digital only live album, Live At the Ark: The Father’s Day Concert, available on CDFreedom.com.
Leave your worries at the doorstep and join Christine Lavin and Don White as they present a night of comedy unlike any other, The Funny Side of the Street: A Night of Brighter Laughter. Tickets to this concert includes free admission to the museum’s galleries one hour before the concert and a post-concert reception with the performers.
The Dennos concert season is made possible with support from the Robert T and Ruth Haidt Trust and Osterlin Performance Endowment, the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, the Michigan Council for the
Arts and Cultural Affairs with media support from WNMC 90.7and TV 29&8. Housing for our performers is provided by the Cambria Suites.
The Dennos Museum Center is open daily 10 AM to 5 PM, Thursdays until 8 PM and Sundays 1-5 PM. Admission is $6.00 adults, $4.00 for children and free to museum members. For more information on the Museum and its programs, go to www.dennosmuseum.org or call 231-995-1055. The Dennos Museum Center is located at1410 College Drive, Traverse City, MI 49686, at the entrance to the campus of Northwestern Michigan College.
Lavin & White – Background
Since emerging from the NYC singer/songwriter scene in the late 1980s, (along with Suzanne Vega, Shawn Colvin, John Gorka, etc), Lavin quickly established herself as an entertaining tour de force. Quick on her feet, witty, insightful, engaging, she remains one of the most popular and respected performers in the genre.
Christine has also been at the forefront of finding and promoting extraordinary new talent. She founded a songwriter’s retreat on Martha’s Vineyard, the On a Winter’s (and Summer’s) Night tours), The Four Bitchin’ Babes, Laugh tracks among many other projects, in the process releasing more than 10 compilations CDs, as well as more than 20 of her own.
Her co-conspirator, Don White, is the latest artist that Christine has championed. “He’s such an original; I call him sometimes a ‘blue collar intellectual,’” Lavin says. “Don has extremely high standards when it comes to what he does onstage. And he hits a grand slam every time. The first time we worked together he opened for me and it’s the only time in my entire career that I opened with a ballad because he was so funny, the audience was so laughed out.”
A product of the rich Boston Arts Scene of the 90s Don developed his songwriter/performer chops in the same Club Passim/ Olde Vienna Kaffehaus scene that produced Dar Williams, Martin Sexton, Lori McKenna and Vance Gilbert. He was also a regular comedian at the legendary Catch a Rising Star in Harvard Square in Cambridge,
Mass honing his comedic skills alongside Jimmy Tingle, David Cross, Wendy Leibman and a host of other cutting edge comics of the time. These experiences along with his immersion in the Boston spoken word scene that produced the National Poetry Slam Championship Team in 1992 all combined to make him one of the few performers who brings a comic’s wit, and a poet’s heart to his songs and stories.
“It doesn’t sound like a folk concert, it sounds like a comedy concert,” says White of his laughter-inducing co-bills with Lavin. “We rehearse and we rehearse and then inevitably, she’ll throw something at me that I have no idea about, with a mischievous grin that lets me know she’s been thinking about it all afternoon. Just to see what will happen. And she’s taught me to do the same.”
Audiences are looking for something fun, fresh, smart, and intriguing as well as thoughtful: On the Funny Side of the Street does just that.