Writer: Keith Alessi
Director: Erika Conway
This show is described on Keith Alessi’s website as “A joke tellin’, banjo playin’, heart healin’ experience”, which gives potential audience members a very good idea of what to expect. A one-man show, performed by Alessi, it charts his story from accountant and successful businessman, through life-threatening illness and harrowing treatment to banjo-playing survivor.
Alessi comes on in a check shirt and jeans, smiling a little shyly at the audience. Like Alessi, this is a dressed-down production, being chiefly staged in informal performance spaces, without any lights and with little fuss.
Alessi is not an actor and he is not, as he is the first to say, a virtuoso banjo player. What he is is an engaging, sincere and amusing raconteur and a competent and enthusiastic musician. He has a story to tell that he thinks will be beneficial for us to hear and he does so in a manner that stops short of cloying sentimentality and avoids cliché. He sprinkles the evening with some of the legion of jokes that are made about the banjo and its players. These are generally quite funny, and he tells them well. Throughout, he plays a number of different banjos in a range of styles and the audience learns a lot about its various incarnations from a fairly primitive African instrument to the sophisticated examples around today.
The evening documents his early life as the son of an Italian immigrant family in Canada, where the titular tomatoes were a staple of their impoverished daily diet, and his stellar business career during which he collected over 50 banjos but never got round to learning how to play them. He tells how he ultimately quit his job to take music seriously and almost immediately, was struck down by third-stage oesophageal cancer and given only a 50% chance of survival. The tomatoes and other acid foods had led to prolonged and intense periods of heartburn, which he had treated with antacids and otherwise ignored. That heartburn can lead to cancer is one of the key lessons he is keen to share.
His presence serves as a spoiler alert to the outcome of his illness, of course, but the story he tells is uplifting and thought-provoking. He tells of overcoming elements of his own nature to let people help and heal him and of harnessing his own indomitable positivity to finally conquer the banjo and, more importantly, to learn to really feel the blue grass music of his adopted Blue Ridge Mountain home. He also conjures some of the memorable musicians he has encountered along the way.
His initial nervousness and the moments where he is clearly mastering his emotions only serve to reinforce the very personal and authentic nature of the show. Alessi is something of a philosopher and gives the audience a unique and memorable evening, rewarding for all but probably even more so for the numerous banjo enthusiasts that were among this audience at the Lit and Phil. He is playing one night stands only in the North East of England, touring to 17 more venues.
Reviewed on 5th April 2023.
