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The classically trained singers bring slick staging and tight choreography to a wide range of tunes.
By JOHN FLEMING, Times Performing Arts Critic
© St. Petersburg Times, published March 31, 2002
TAMPA -- A Three Mo' Tenors concert is like a cross between a classical recital and a nightclub act and a gospel sing, with opera and Broadway and jazz and blues thrown in for good measure.
The tenors are Thomas Young, Rodrick Dixon and Victor Trent Cook. They're the African-American answer to the original Three Tenors: Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras. Those opera titans have a lot going for them, but their lumbering treatment of show tunes inspired Three Mo' Tenors conceiver and director Marion J. Caffey to form a threesome who could get crossover right.
And do they get it right. When Young, Dixon and Cook launched into a medley of Love Train, Midnight Train to Georgia and other soul classics, complete with tightly choreographed moves worthy of the O'Jays, the audience at Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center on Friday was in heaven.
The program was artfully put together, opening with an operatic section that featured all three in La Donna e Mobile, the Duke's aria to fickle womanhood from Rigoletto, with musical director Joseph Joubert at the grand piano.
The singers were amplified, equipped with face mikes. For most of the slickly staged show, they were backed by a five-piece band. In the second act, the tenors were joined by a gospel quartet.
Young and Dixon are lyric tenors, and Cook is a countertenor. Their voices blended to striking effect in close-harmony numbers such as Have You Heard About the Baby and Glory to the Newborn King. Dixon and Cook performed a soaring arrangement of America the Beautiful.
The tenors are on an extensive tour, and their voices showed some wear and tear at times. Cook in particular sounded shrill in the upper reaches of What Kind of Fool Am I. However, he more than made up for it with his zoot-suited romp through Cab Calloway's Minnie the Moocher.
Cook was also the soloist in a resonant Good Friday rendition of the spiritual Were You There?
The concert program was much the same as the versatile trio's PBS special, but with additional numbers such as Young and Cook's pairing of Try to Remember from The Fantasticks with Not While I'm Around from Sweeney Todd and Dixon's moody version of Leon Russell's A Song for You.
Along with infectious music and good vibes, the concert had a point to make about classically trained black singers deserving recognition and opportunity. It was expressed in the lyrics of Make Them Hear You, the uplifting anthem of revolutionary Coalhouse Walker Jr. in Ragtime.
Judging from the enthusiastic response of Friday's crowd of about 1,200, Three Mo' Tenors will be heard from again.