Herringbone – A Concert Recording

Tony Award-Winner BD WONG makes his solo CD debut in a unique concert recording of the demanding one man, Off-Broadway musical HERRINGBONE, in which Wong plays 12 characters who sing 14 songs.  It was recorded at a special event for Dixon Place in New York City. This is also the first recording of this marvelously spooky show by Skip Kennon (music), Ellen Fitzhugh (lyrics), & Tom Cone (book).  In two acts, it was recorded with a live audience, and is presented in its entirety in a handsome two CD 6 panel digipak.

 Wong has headlined four critically-acclaimed productions of the ambitious musical – the Williamstown Theatre Festival (2007), McCarter Theatre (2008), and La Jolla Playhouse (2009), all directed by Tony Award-winner Roger Rees (Nicholas Nickleby, Peter And The Starcatcher). He also starred in a production directed by Kenneth Elliott at the American Music Theatre Festival in 1994.

Herringbone was first produced in New York at Playwright’s Horizons in a memorable 1982 production starring David Rounds. The Dixon Place production marked Wong’s first appearance in New York of the show, timed with the 30th Anniversary of the original New York production. The conceit of a single performer enacting all of the characters underlines its theme of the human struggle to negotiate the light and dark sides within. In this remarkable recording, the magical medium of audio highlights Wong’s effortless multi-character performance, which is not only hauntingly compelling, but astonishingly clear.

“BEST OF 2008” list – “Virtually every one-man show causes an actor to play many characters, but among Wong’s dozen, he had to portray five different Depression-era victims during a single conversation.” –  Newark Star Ledger

“BEST OF 2007” list – “…Wong fulfills the play’s intent: to make us reflect on how all of us build our sense of ourselves, are possessed by the characters in our lives, and somehow, if we’re lucky, manage to live a real life anyway…What most amazes us in Herringbone is not the dazzling trickery of its surface, but the poignant tenderness and full humanity of its unexpected depths.” – Boston Globe