If you missed the 2011 production of the musical comedy In His Grace at Cité des Arts, you missed a helluva show. At turns touching and uproariously funny, the musical traces an arc familiar to the Louisiana psyche: three cousins in Ferriday, La., — Lester, Buck and Sonny — stake their claims to the world along different paths. Lester becomes an evangelical preacher; Buck becomes a country/western singer and Sonny blazes a trail in rock ’n’ roll. Sound familiar? D’uh. In His Grace is loosely based on the story of real-life crooning cousins Jimmy Swaggart, Mickey Gilley and Jerry Lee Lewis.
The musical was a hit, due in no small part to the 16 finely crafted tunes that punctuate it, each written by Jane Martin Billeaudeaux, who co-wrote In His Grace with John Verly Richard. Billeaudeaux recently gathered some of the Acadiana’s best musicians together, along with the original cast members, and recorded the music for In His Grace. It’s available on a fine new CD ahead of a revival of the production coming up in May back at Cité.
The songs, richly produced by multi-instrumentalist Chris Stafford (Feufollet) at his Staffland Studios — Stafford also performs on the record — run the gamut from rollicking ’50s rock ’n’ roll to country to gospel, effectively conveying the divergent yet musically congruent paths the cousins took in life — both the fictional characters and the men on whom they’re based. Musicians on the record include Philippe Billeaudeaux, Josef Butts, Danny Devillier, David Egan, Glenn Hebert, Scott Landry, Robert A. and Robert J. Luckey, Joel Savoy, Mike Stafford, Scott Alan Stagg and, to give it a whiff of estrogen, the lovely Esther Tyree. That’s a pretty stellar roster by any measure.
The In His Grace soundtrack is available at iTunes, the Facebook MusicStore and CDBaby.com and will be available where local music is sold soon. “I have sinned against you, my Lord!” — Walter Pierce
Is it a crime for citizens to photograph, video, or take notes of a police officer in the line of duty, or a right protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution? Locally, such activity, as witnessed recently, will at the very least result in a night spent behind bars.
David Calhoun and Elizabeth “EB” Brooks are the first two employees of Lafayette Central Park Inc., the nonprofit charged with turning Lafayette Consolidated Government’s 100-acre Johnston Street Horse Farm property into a passive public park. Calhoun was named executive director, and Brooks is director of planning and design.
At Thursday's State of the Economy luncheon, LEDA President and CEO Gregg Gothreaux said PXP has already quietly hired 180 people for its Broussard expansion.
Episcopal School of Acadiana’s Dr. Joshua Caffery, chair of the school’s English Department, is headed to Washington, D.C., and the Library of Congress as the latest winner of the Alan Lomax Fellowship in Folklife Studies.
This year’s Cool Town issue is all about people who are not native to South Louisiana but made a conscious decision to be here, to be among us, to participate in our culture and contribute to it.
A shelved ordinance transferring $200,000 from a northside drainage project to a south Lafayette development may not break any laws, but it stinks to high heaven.
An effort to restore a shuttered dancehall and document other vacant or razed honky-tonks could serve as a model for saving an endangered species of entertainment.
Lafayette’s gene pool has been host to a long line of eccentric characters who have blurred the lines between crazy, genius, disturbed and curiously entertaining.
If you missed the 2011 production of the musical comedy In His Grace at Cité des Arts, you missed a helluva show. At turns touching and uproariously funny, the musical traces an arc familiar to the Louisiana psyche: three cousins in Ferriday, La., — Lester, Buck and Sonny — stake their claims to the world along different paths. Lester becomes an evangelical preacher; Buck becomes a country/western singer and Sonny blazes a trail in rock ’n’ roll. Sound familiar? D’uh. In His Grace is loosely based on the story of real-life crooning cousins Jimmy Swaggart, Mickey Gilley and Jerry Lee Lewis.
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