Garrison Keillor at 80

media release: This is a General Admission – All Seated Show

GARRISON KEILLOR at 80 is a show of music, stories, and stand-up on the theme of cheerfulness—happiness depends on circumstance but cheerfulness is a choice. The show includes Keillor’s sung sonnets(“Prayer,” “Longevity,” “Love Song”) and duets with Masse on songs by Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Tom Waits, Greg Brown, Mark Knopfler, and Ann Reed, plus an extended medley of sung classic poems and jokes.

Keillor also does the News from Lake Wobegon, reflecting on his generation, the one that knew about outhouses, slaughtered chickens, hitchhiked, drove a straight-stick transmission, skated on outdoor rinks, and told jokes.

The program concludes with the audience singing a cappella an impromptu medley of familiar songs—“America,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Oh Susannah,” “In My Life,” “Going to the Chapel,” etc. “We are the last generation who knows all the words,” says Keillor. “When we’re gone, they’ll disappear.”

Garrison Keillor did A Prairie Home Companion for forty years, wrote fiction and comedy, invented a town called Lake Wobegon where all the children are above average, even though he himself grew up evangelical in a small separatist flock where all the children expected the imminent end of the world. He’s busy in retirement, having written a memoir and a book of limericks and is at work on a musical and a Lake Wobegon screenplay, and he continues to do The Writer’s Almanac sent out daily to internet subscribers (free).

Trained as a jazz singer at the New England Conservatory of Music, Heather Masse is equally versed in a variety of traditions—folk, pop, bluegrass, and more. As member of Billboard-charting group The Wailin’ Jennys, she has performed at hundreds of venues across the world. She was a frequent guest on A Prairie Home Companion, both solo and with The Jennys. One reviewer rightly lauded her “lush velvety vocals, capableof melting butter in a Siberian winter.”

For 23 years, Richard Dworsky served as A Prairie Home Companion’s pianist and music director, providing original theatrical underscoring, leading the house band, and performing as a featured soloist. The St. Paul, Minnesota, native also accompanied many of the show’s guests, including James Taylor, Bonnie Raitt, Yo-Yo Ma, Sheryl Crow, Chet Atkins, Renée Fleming, and Kristin Chenoweth.