Flowertown Festival. The Cooper River Bridge Run. Lowcountry Cajun Festival. These are all great Charleston events, but what do they have in common?
They all happen just once a year.
Enter the Charleston Blues Revue, a new musical theater show which its founders, Daniel Island residents Charles Wyke-Smith and Chris Watson, are hopeful will fulfill Charleston’s lack of a continually running entertainment experience.
With a background in web development and independent design projects, Smith has also worked in live event production and in 2008 organized a benefit show at the Music Farm, which raised $6,000 for the family of a local soldier who was killed in Iraq. But it wasn’t until a business conference in Italy that Smith began to think about the dinner entertainment experience.
He and his co-workers were taken to a small theater in a town along the Amalfi coast. They were served a nice meal and enjoyed Italian wine while a group of performers put on a show about the history of Italian music.
“They did pantomime, they did opera, they even did Dean Martin, you know, ‘When the moon hits your eye’ and so on,” Smith recalls, “just a whole bunch of stuff and it was this great look at Italian music.”
Upon returning to Charleston, Smith began noticing how tourists wandered the streets downtown in search of something, some kind of activity, to do.
“They’ve been to a restaurant. They’ve spent the day looking at historic buildings, they’ve been out to Fort Sumter…Now they’re walking up and down East Bay Street, determining which bar might be okay to have a drink in,” he says. “There’s nothing that’s continuously running here that’s reliable entertainment.”
Smith began working with Chris Watson, whose background includes technology, government contracting and a passion for music, when Watson needed an iPhone app created for one of his business ventures.
“I enjoy building businesses, and I appreciate the heck out of music,” Watson says. One conversation led to another and soon, the two men were swapping ideas for the development of a Charleston-based, dinner and musical entertainment experience.
Smith had previously established the Lowcountry Blues Club, which hosts a revolving door of weekly shows around town, so the southern influence on modern music only seemed like a natural fit as the basis for what eventually became the Charleston Blues Revue.
And the timing seems right, as well. With internationally acclaimed events taking place in Charleston such as the Family Circle Cup tennis series and the Spoleto Festival, and the recent spotlight of Condé Nast Traveler naming Charleston the Number One City in the World in 2012, our quaint town has been receiving a lot of attention lately. And while it may not be the largest city along the east coast, there is enough viable energy and plenty of potential here to sustain a regular show like the Charleston Blues Revue.
“New York is an extreme example,” Smith says as he explains his motivation. “But that’s how people plan their trips for these cities. ‘I’m going to see these shows on these nights.’ They have a specific thing you can go visit. Charleston is great during the day. But at night you either go to a restaurant, or you go to a bar, and that’s about it.”
With the Charleston Blues Revue, Smith and Watson want to entice people to extend their visits to the Holy City.
“If ninety percent of tourists stay just one extra day,” Smith points out, “those things have massive multiplier effects.”
“I’ve seen a lot of other shows,” he continues, “and they tend to be very sanitized and saccharine sweet, and I wanted to do something a little more authentic that really caught the spirit of our times and the past [in Charleston], and America in general. The blues, it didn’t happen by accident, let’s put it that way. You can’t really look at the blues without looking at the social and political circumstances.”
Currently, the Charleston Blues Revue has its first two premiere shows scheduled for April 17 and 24 at Mad River Bar & Grille, on the market downtown. Described as a blend of “authentic sound, visual expression and historical sweep,” the show is already a sizeable operation featuring ten dancers and a dozen singers and musicians, all of whom were selected from right here in Charleston.
“We’re trying to do a show that locals will also want to go to,” Watson says. “This is not just a blues show.”
“You don’t have to scratch too far below the surface of any modern music to find the blues,” Smith elaborates. “So the first half of the show is a kind of narrative of how the blues evolved, and how America came to the 1960s which was a cataclysmic point in America. JFK, the decision to go to the moon, the pill, all these things, and of course the collapse of segregation, all these things dropped at once.”
Over the course of two hours, audience members will be taken on a journey from the depths of Delta blues with pioneers such as W.C. Handy, progressing out of the rural south and into ragtime and Chicago jazz, the birth of 1950s rock and roll, the tumult and explosion of the 1960s, and eventually into the genres of more recent popular music. Smith and Watson aimed to select songs that would be representative of their time period without using the usual chart topping suspects, and then took to writing their own arrangements.
“I want to invoke the spirit of the times, not copy it,” Smith says proudly.
In addition to dining on classic Lowcountry fare while enjoying great tunes, audience members can also look forward to taking part in the show, which is going to encourage crowd participation and have a strong interactive element.
“We’re packaged entertainment,” Watson explains.
Executing the Charleston Blues Revue is an impressive line-up of musicians and vocalists. Band leader and saxophone player Louie Dixson has shared the stage with the Derrick Trucks Band and members of the esteemed Dizzy Gillespie Band, and was offered multiple music scholarships before joining the Navy to support his family. Ben Hawes (trombone), Chris Williams (keys/sax/vox) and Wayne Mitchum (bass/vox) are all regular members of the local party band Plane Jane, who can be found playing a show almost any night of the week. Many of the featured vocalists have been singing since they were as young as three-years-old. The show’s narrator, Ermitt “Mr. Blues” Williams, was raised in Harlem but spent many summers visiting North Carolina, soaking in the southern blues culture.
The shows on April 17 and 24 are going to serve as a sketch of what the full performances will be like. Smith and Watson anticipate rolling out the Charleston Blues Revue’s regular run of three nights a week in the very near future, once the success of the premiere comes to fruition and they are able to gauge any final adjustments that may be needed. Mad River will seat about 115 people, but Smith and Watson hope to move the show to a venue that can seat at least 200 people, allowing them to create a bigger atmosphere for the show and increase its economic viability. It’s sure to appeal to all blues fans, but with the vast scope of styles that the show endeavors to pay homage to, the Charleston Blues Revue is likely to draw even the most casual of music listeners and Charleston buffs.
“I’m not trying to change the world, per se. I’m trying to put on a good show,” Smith says. “If people have something to take away from it, that’s great! Come for the music, leave with the story.”
Tickets for the shows include dinner and can still be purchased through the Charleston Blues Revue website at www.CharlestonBlues.com.
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