Stay Awake 20th anniversary Gala Benefit

Hal Willner‘s Stay Awake 20th anniversary Gala Benefit in New York has added Gavin Friday to its line up. The event during which a large cast of musicians will be performing Disney songs will take place at St Ann’s at Dumbo, on April 2nd. Please note, tickets are between $300-1000, available from St Ann’s website.

St. Ann’s Gala 2008 will feature a concert celebrating the 20th Anniversary of the release of Stay Awake, record producer Hal Willner’s historic compilation of music from the Vintage Disney Songbook. First presented last summer at the Meltdown Festival in London, Stay Awake has never been performed live in America. Best known for a groundbreaking series of multi-artist tribute albums interpreting the work of composers such as Nino Rota, Kurt Weill and Thelonious Monk, Willner (often imitated, never duplicated) set out to match surprising material with extraordinary musicians from the nether regions of pop, rock, jazz and the avant garde, all thrown together to brilliant effect. Stay AwakeLive is an amalgam of the bizarre and the familiar, performed by a soon-to-be-announced spectrum of enticing artists. As Meltdown director Jarvis Cocker described this eclectic mix of enchanting, somber and, at times, sardonic adaptations of tunes from The Jungle Book, Snow White, Dumbo, Alice in Wonderland, Pinocchio, etc.: “Love ’em or hate ’em, if you leave the theater without having shed a tear you’re something less than human.”