David “Sinbad” Adkins (above) brings his famously family friendly brand of comedy back to the Count Basie for an umpteenth encore this Friday night. Art Garfunkel (below) makes a belated Basie debut on Saturday.
With an incredible 14 scheduled events within the next 15 days — including sold-out sessions with the attorneys from Making a Murderer (tonight) and Rumson-bred pop sensation Charlie Puth (April 8) — the Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank surely ranks among the busiest palaces of amusement in these United States.
Its eclectic schedule keeps an enviably diverse audience making tracks to Monmouth Street, and the weekend ahead is no exception, as the venerable venue hosts a gamut of entertainments designed to attract fans of everything from all-ages clean comedy and Boomer-blessed pop, to the Old Masters of the conservatory and the new gods of the guitar-store shredders.
SINBAD: His major motion picture career (Houseguest, First Kid, Jingle All the Way) is largely behind him — although apparently so are the multi-million dollar financial woes that dogged his highest-profile years. But for the standup stalwart known as Sinbad, the live stage is his first and foremost port of call, an environment in which his signature style of observational, often stream-of-conscious humor works in sync with broad-based audiences in theater-scale venues that he continues to fill from coast to coast. The storyteller born David Adkins sails back to the Basie for a repeat engagement on April-Fools Friday night, with a set that promises a full dose of clean-yet-cutting comedy. Tickets for the 8 p.m. show ($25 – $59, with a VIP Meet and Greet option available for $109) ARE gettable right here.
ART GARFUNKEL: He may have lost much of his signature frizzy corona of hair (and packed a pound or two on his once-lanky frame), but Art Garfunkel has given up little in the way of his crystal-clear vocal gifts over the decades, even as too many of his 1960s contemporaries have fallen prey to hunching shoulders, flattening voices, and a race that the Reaper seems all too poised to win. Graced with a classical musician’s un-flamboyant reserve — the kind that can elevate an old jukebox doo-wop to the level of a sonata — the singer’s singer makes a belated Basie bow this Saturday (having postponed a scheduled appearance a few seasons back) with a retrospective that promises to feature Simon and Garfunkel signatures (prominent among them his finest hour, “Bridge Over Troubled Water”), as well as solo hits (“All I Know”) and his proprietary interpretations of classics by Sam Cooke, the Flamingos, the Skyliners and more. Take it here for tickets to the 8 p.m. show.
MONMOUTH SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA: From sophisticated pop to the rockstar antics of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — this Sunday afternoon sees the borough-based Monmouth Symphony Orchestra return to the Basie boards for a program that finds music director Roy Gussman welcoming flutist Gary Schocker and harpist Emily Mitchell for a turn in the spotlight with Mozart’s Concerto for Flute and Harp, on a 3 p.m. program that further features Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8. Weber’s Overture to Der Freischutz, and a Schocker original, Hannah’s Glade. Take it here for tickets ($35; senior and student discounts), with earlybirds welcome to enjoy a 2:15 p.m. pre-concert conversation between MSO’s Tom Avakian and the guest artists.
JOE SATRIANI: Taking a page from Beethoven’s whisper-to-a-scream dynamics and Mozart’s masterful flourishes, Joe Satriani has stood as an undisputed virtuoso of instrumental guitar dramatics for three decades and counting. WEhen the platinum-plated, chrome-domed fretmeister returns to Red Bank on Monday, April 4, he’ll be setting the normally quiet foothills of the working week ablaze with a retrospective “Celebrating 30 Years of Mind Bending Guitar DareDevilry.” It’s a Surfing to Shockwave set that spans his 1987 breakthrough Surfing with the Alien to his newest release Shockwave Supernova. Go here for tickets ($30 – $95) to the 8 p.m. event, which scale up to a $125 VIP option and a $325 Meet & Greet Package that boasts an “exclusive tour of Joe’s Guitar World.”
