Fiddle Me This

Barrage

Friday, April 2, 2010

Lewis Family Playhouse -- Rrrrrrancho Cucamonga, CA

I was planning on going to see Barrage with Wendy and Jeff, but Wendy needed to stay home with her dog, so Linda agreed to take the ticket.  She asked me what Barrage was, and I couldn't really describe it much more than "violins and stuff", since I had never actually seen them when they were playing regularly at Disneyland.  No, I didn't think to look it up on the website first, or tell her to look it up. That's too easy.

So off we went to Rrrrancho Cucamonga, and we had plenty of time before meeting Jeff for the show, so we shopped.  Yeah, I bought shoes.  Don't judge.  How could I resist when they were buy one, get one free?  Shhhh...don't tell Linda that the shoes I got for her birthday were so inexpensive!  :)  (I gave myself the free ones).

We met up with Jeff, and he told us that Wendy didn't believe that a group on TV included fiddle players who danced around while playing the fiddle.  She swore that it was some kind of recorded music that they were listening to, but Jeff was a believer, and we were about to find out if Wendy was right.

The show began, and 5 fiddle players took the stage, with a drummer, a guitarist, and a keyboard player.  It was lively.  It was rocking.  They DANCED while playing their fiddles.  Yes, Wendy, fiddle players can dance, too!  Oh, and they can sing and dance at that same time.  These people were dang talented.  

The orchestra geek in me took over.  I played the violin for 9 years, and if anyone had ever shown that I could do this stuff eventually, I would have practiced my ass off!  No giving up the violin to the Bro for me.  Alas, I am too old for all of that jumping around now...but I digress.  They were quite the virtuosos, these fiddle players based in Canada.  

They played rock, country, Irish jig...just about any style of music I could think of, except rap and hip-hop.  Maybe they're working on that, too.  I don't know.  After the intermission, I pointed out one of the songs to Linda:  "Orange Blossom Special".  Now, they had already done my favorite Country Bear Jamboree song, "Ghost Riders in the Sky", and you're telling me that they're going to do a Billy Hill and the Hillbillies song, too?  Oh, my heart!  That's the song that they opened with after intermission.  No, they didn't do the "Train Thang", but they did do some choreography that made them look like train wheels moving.  It was cool.

Throughout the show, I was wishing that Bro (current owner of the family violin) was there to watch all of this.  He would have eaten it up with a spoon.  But the part that made me miss him the most was when they played "Por Una Cabeza", otherwise known as the Tango from "Scent of a Woman".  That fiddle player can dance!  I have memories of Bro trying to learn that song on the violin, and playing it over and over again.  Bro, seriously.  If they ever go to AZ, you NEED to see the show.  Heck, I'll go with you.  Oh, and then I missed Brady, because they played one of his favorite songs, ColdPlay's "Viva La Vida".  Awesomeness.

I was in awe of the virtuosity of everyone, including the guys not playing the violins.  The drummer had a great solo during "Sing, Sing, Sing", and the guitarist was amazing during the Latin music portion of the show.  I waited, though, to see if the violinists were going to play something from the Virtuoso of Violinist Composition of all time:  Paganini.  Toward at the end of the show, I got what I was waiting for.  It was just a small portion, during "Devil's Nightmare",  but I was still happy.  This wasn't a classical music concert, but they all had a classical background, so it would only be natural for them to have some Paganini in their repertoire.  


Here they are in 2007:

At the end of the show, the male violinists jumped off the stage and played in the aisles of the audience, just to show Wendy that they were actually playing those things.  But Wendy wasn't there.  Bummer.

I didn't buy a CD because I couldn't decide on one, and I heard that they were going to produce a new DVD this year with the current cast, so I'm going to wait until that comes out.   I will definitely try to see them again when they return to SoCal.