Garrison Keillor is bringing an evening of storytelling, poetry, and song to Ogden. The man who spent 42 years hosting A Prairie Home Companion is headed downtown with his longtime music director Richard Dworsky at the piano for a Friday night of limericks, sing-alongs, and that voice you’d recognize anywhere.
As creator and host of A Prairie Home Companion, Keillor drew more than four million listeners a week with monologues that somehow always landed exactly where they needed to. Now 84 and touring with what he calls a show about “the beauty of growing old,” he brings the same gifts to the stage, just without the broadcast clock ticking. Expect poetry, limericks, the familiar characters of Lake Wobegon, and the sharp, cheerful wit of a natural storyteller who has only gotten funnier with age.
Dworsky is a Steinway Artist and composer who served as music director for A Prairie Home Companion for 23 years. If you listened to the show, you know his playing. He was the one at the piano underscoring every sketch, every monologue, every guest performance from James Taylor to Bonnie Raitt to Yo-Yo Ma. He appeared in Robert Altman’s 2006 film alongside Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin. Together, Keillor and Dworsky are the musical and narrative heart of the Prairie Home experience, reunited for a night that feels less like a concert and more like a visit from an old friend.
The evening wraps with the audience singing a cappella, an impromptu medley of familiar songs: “America,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Oh Susannah,” “In My Life.” “We are the last generation who knows all the words,” Keillor says. “When we’re gone, they’ll disappear.”
If you’ve seen artists like The Wailin’ Jennys or Shawn Colvin at Onstage Ogden, you already know performers who shared the Prairie Home stage with Keillor and Dworsky. This is a chance to see the source. Peery’s Egyptian Theater, a stunning 1924 Egyptian Revival house in the heart of downtown Ogden, is exactly the kind of intimate, beautiful room this show was made for. For one Friday night, it becomes the little town where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average. October 2 at 7:30pm.
