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‘City of Roses’
Volume XLIV
Number 17
www.portlandobserver.com
Wednesday • April 15, 2015
Established in 1970
Committed to Cultural Diversity
P AUL F ARDIG /C OURTESY S TUMPTOWN S TAGES
Pianist and composer Michael Allen Harrison sits at the piano surrounded by the cast of ‘Soul Harmony,’ an original musical produced by Portland’s Stump-
town Stages and based on the birth of R&B with the unlikely partnership between Deborah Chessler, a young Jewish woman, and Sonny Til and the Orioles,
a dynamic black male vocal group.
PHOTO BY
O LIVIA O LIVIA
T HE P ORTLAND O BSERVER
Stumptown Stages, a Portland theater production
company with an acumen for embracing diversi-
ty, gears up this week for the world premiere of its
all-original musical, Soul Harmony, based on the real
life history of the birth of R&B, American soul music,
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young Jewish woman, Deborah Chessler, and the dy-
namic black male vocal group, Sonny Til and the Ori-
oles. In fact, the main character, Sonny Til, is played
by his own grandson, De’Sean Dooley.
Til was known for putting heroic anguish in de-
BY
Soul
Harmony
Portland theater group
tackles birth of R&B
mure ballads about loneliness, pushing his sleepy,
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sunrise. Sonny Til and the Orioles did serious busi-
ness in the late 1940s in Harlem, essentially replac-
ing jazz as youth music, and creating fan hysteria at
the famous Apollo Theater.
Soul Harmony reveals their rise to music nobility
and the role they played in challenging segregation
in the south. The production is co-directed by Stump-
town Stages founder Kirk Mouser and Julianne R.
Johnson-Weiss, one of Portland’s premier vocalists
C ONTINUED ON P AGE 4