50 Years of (Polite) Star Power
By Justin Sondak in Arts & Entertainment on Aug 19, 2005 5:29PM
Saturday night’s your last chance to experience the free “high culture” of the Grant Park Music Festival and your best chance to wish WTTW a Happy 50th. When it comes to birthday bashes, these folks aren’t messing around. The emcess for the night are Joe “Fat Tony” Mantegna and Irma P. Hall who, for all their work supporting Hollywood’s biggest stars, have never actually worked together until now.
The rest of the evening reads like a who’s who of Chicago talent: jazz vocalist Anne Hampton Callaway, Broadway diva and Cats star Liz Callaway, Irish fiddler Liz Carroll, omnipresent opera stars Samuel Ramey and Suzanne Mentzer, gospel soon-to-be-legend Otis Clay, eventual jazz legend Orbert Davis, rock star and attention hound Billy Corgan and of course “much, much more.”
If you can’t make it down to Millenium Park, you can still catch the festivities on WFMT radio and on—surprise, surprise—WTTW.
WTTW11’s 50th Anniversary Celebration Concert begins at 7:30pm at Millenium Park’s Pritzker Pavilion. Carlos Kalmar conducts. For more information, call the Grant Park Music Festival at (312) 742-7638 or visit www.grantparkmusicfestival.com
Images courtesy of WTTW.