Photo Credit: Ross Zentner
“Could I get a band aid?” Michael “Ding” Lorenz requests of the stage manager then addresses the audience with a shrug and an easy smile, “Anything can happen in live theater.” Having scraped his finger on one in a long lineup of kettle drums, Lorenz thus set the tone for the evening’s performance.
Buried in the back row of a vast array of percussion racks, antique instruments, a giant marimba, wind chimes, an upright piano, sleigh bells and a pipe organ, sits a green sparkle drum kit. Lorenz’s collection of “toys” sprawls across the floor in front of the first row of seats, taking over the entire stage and running to a second deck backstage, concluding with a 12-foot slide. It would seem you can’t take the drummer out of the kid.
Things that Go Ding! continues the lineage of comedic vaudeville performances that ignore genres. Percussionist Lorenz, pianist Jamie Johns and vocalist Ray Jivoff took the audience on a two-act whirlwind spectacle that ran the gamut from the National Anthem to a silent cartoon soundtrack to a tribute to Fred Rogers. Instrumentally, Lorenz ranged freely, from rubber chickens to the esoteric caisa (a cousin to the Caribbean steel drum). While humor played a large role in the performance, Johns’ prodigious keyboard skills were on display throughout the evening, channeling some of the best-loved classical composers including Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor and Georges Bizet’s Carmen. Jivoff’s occasional spots found him donning a bunch of oversized purple grapes, banana or Napoleonic bicorn for laughs.
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Titles like “Gene Krupa Meets George of the Jungle” and “Tribute to Spike Jones: ‘The Man Who Murdered Music’” were hints that Lorenz and company, as talented as they are, were not about to take themselves too seriously, much like their brethren P.D.Q. Bach.
Yet Lorenz might have shed light into his serious side in a moody, atmospheric solo piece that opened with him tapping out a melody on caisa before adding gong and windchimes. The show’s tour de force, Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 (as previously ransacked by Bugs Bunny and Roger Rabbit) featured Johns on piano and Lorenz racing the length of his concert grand marimba, winded at the end of the number.
Through March 3 at Broadway Theatre Center’s Cabot Theatre, 158 N. Broadway. For tickets, call 414-291-7800 or visit skylightmusictheatre.org.
