PHILIPSBURG –You can “travel” to the 1920’s on Saturday, April 20 when the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra returns to the historic Rowland Theatre.
The PRO performs original music with silent films, recreating how people first enjoyed movies complete with opportunities to boo at the villains and cheer for the heroes.
Rebecca Inlow, a Rowland Theatre board member, explains how it works.
“Setting up in the orchestra pit, the musicians play the original scores to silent films, including all of the sound effects. You lose yourself in the films and don’t even realize that the music isn’t part of the film.”
A regular visitor to the Rowland, this year’s PRO show will feature a centennial screening of Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. with the premiere of conductor Rick Benjamin’s reconstruction of the movie’s original 1924 score.
“This is considered one of the greatest silent films of all times, and it is being presented exactly 100 years after its premiere,” she noted.
The show, which starts at 7 p.m., will also include the short feature Cops from 1922 by Mack Sennett and Buster Keaton.
“There is really nothing like watching a 100-year-old silent film in a movie theater that probably played the movie when it first came out,” Rebecca said.
“It’s so fun to think that you are sitting in the same place someone a century ago sat, watching the same film in the same way someone would have experienced it then.”
The PRO “is the world’s only year-round, professional ensemble re-creating ‘America’s Original Music’ – the syncopated sounds of early musical theater, silent cinema and vintage dance,” according to their Web site, paragonragtime.com.
It began in 1985 after Benjamin discovered thousands of orchestra scores once belonging to Victrola recording star Arthur Pryor.
The Orchestra made its formal debut in 1988 at Alice Tully Hall – the first concert ever presented at Lincoln Center by such an ensemble, the website says in their biography of the group.
“Since then, PRO has appeared at hundreds of leading arts venues, including the Ravinia Festival, the Smithsonian Institution, Chautauqua, the Brucknerhaus (Austria), the New York 92nd Street Y and the American Dance Festival.
“Over the years, the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra has been heard on the soundtracks of several motion pictures and television programs.
“The Orchestra’s audio and video recordings have been widely praised, and considered instrumental in rekindling interest in America’s rich traditions of theater, cinema and dance orchestra music.”
Benjamin is known as the leading conductor of music for silent films, with over 758 screenings to his credit.
His extensive research in early movie music is ongoing, and has led him to create one of the “world’s best archives of silent film scores – nearly 1,000 titles ranging from 1898 to 1928.”
Benjamin has written several articles on American music that have been published in several international journals, and his lecture tours have taken him to more than 100 colleges and universities across North America.
His reconstruction of the Scott Joplin opera Treemonisha was premiered to great acclaim in San Francisco and on tours. A recording by Benjamin and the PRO is available in a two-CD album set for New World Records.
He is working on two books: The American Theater Orchestra and Encyclopedia of Arrangers & Orchestrators: 1875-1925.
The movie for this film, Sherlock Jr. has been called “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” by the National Film Registry. It was listed as #62 in the American Film Institute’s AFI 100 Years . . . 100 Laughs.
In the movie, Keaton plays a movie projectionist who is competing with another man for a woman’s affections. After a set back with her, he falls asleep while showing a movie about the theft of a pearl necklace, he enters the film as the character, Sherlock Jr., a world famous detective there to solve the crime.
This is not the first silent film presentation at the Rowland and it won’t be the last.
“We are a perfect pairing. Our theater was built for a Paragon show, and they were meant to be playing in a theater like the Rowland. We love them, and they love coming to us,” Rebecca said.
Tickets for the show are $25 and links to purchase them online are at the Rowland Theatre Web site, www.rowlandtheatre.com, and on their Facebook page. They will also be available at the box office prior to show time at 7 p.m.
The PRO’s performance is co-sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts.