IU Auditorium hosts Garrison Keillor's ‘A Prairie Home Companion’ broadcast

The sold-out crowd at the IU Auditorium alternated between laughter, silence and thunderous applause Friday night as Garrison Keillor and company showed that after 32 years, his radio variety show, “A Prairie Home Companion,” is still going strong.\nWhile Keillor’s comedic sketches always resulted in audience guffaws, a hush came over the theater each time one of his guest musical acts performed their classical pieces.\nNow in its 32nd year, the broadcast variety show combines comedy and local musical acts broadcast on National Public Radio from a new location each week. Shows occasionally broadcast from its home in St. Paul, Minn.\nKeillor kicked off the show a few minutes before the show was broadcast on WFIU live by leading the audience in singing the national anthem, followed by a sung “Lesson in Audience Etiquette.” \n“Live life fully, because it doesn’t last long,” he told the crowd, “which you didn’t know in junior high, but you know now.”\nHe also introduced the string section, comprised of Jacobs School of Music students.\nOnce the show started, Keillor sang one of several songs about life at IU, including a line about how “beating Indiana at basketball is Minnesota’s dream.”\nHe then went through his version of a typical Jacobs School musician’s day (“percussionists, who make good starter boyfriends”), before the show’s weekly performer Pat Donahue performed a song about how “I learned the hard way,” singing and playing the guitar.\nOne of this week’s pseudo-sponsors was a classic: The Coffee Institute.\n“So important, especially to you young musicians,” Keillor said. “Coffee is your friend.”\nHis jingle further mentioned that “when you play the violin, you don’t want beer or gin.”\nKeillor then brought out the Violin Virtuosi, a group of 13- to 18-year-old violinists from the Jacobs String Academy.\nAfter the Virtuosi played its first piece, Fritz Kreisler’s Praeludium and Allegro, all but two of them – sisters Ren and Zoë Martin-Doike – \nleft the stage. The Martin-Doikes played a duet written for them by Jacobs school professor Atar Arad.\nAfter a word from another recurring fictitious sponsor, Powdermilk Biscuits (“winner of numerous awards”), Jacobs school pianist \nIgnasi Cambra came onstage to perform Chopin pieces. Cambra, who has been blind since birth, said he either learns his music through Braille or a teacher records a piece, each hand’s part separately, and Cambra plays what he hears.\nJacobs Dean Gwyn Richards – “6-foot-6, looks like Superman, which I suppose is a good thing when your name is Gwyn” – enlisted “Guy’s” help in a case that resulted in the discovery of an interrogation chamber where Homeland Security used a violin, a banjo and bagpipes as a torture technique.\n“Waterboarding was so messy. ... Now we know who killed Jimmy Hoffa,” said the “interrogator.”\nViolinist Esther Kim, accompanied on piano by Jacobs School Dean Emeritus Charles H. Webb, performed Sarasate’s Zapateado. \nAfter a five-minute intermission, Keillor came back with “Greetings,” in which people send in messages to be read on air, such as “Indiana – does anyone really know what time it is?” before singing three sonnets for Valentine’s Day.\nAfter talking about the beautiful IU Bloomington campus (limestone “which is kinda like the vinyl siding of quarry”), Keillor also gave a short tribute to Herman B Wells, mentioning his work desegregating the campus, supporting Alfred Kinsey and building up the library, among other accomplishments.\nBaritone Jacobs masters’ student Aleksey Bogdanov performed “Credo in un Dio Crudel” from Verdi’s Otello in Italian and Tchaikovsky’s “None but the Lonely Heart” in Russian before Kim returned to play Gershwin’s “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”\nKeillor then gave his weekly report from Lake Wobegon, a traditional feature of the radio show, talking about Valentine’s Day and winter in his Minnesota town and one man who couldn’t find a heart-shaped box of chocolates last-minute and had to get a kidney-shaped one.\nAfter one last performance from the Virtuosi – Johannes Brahm’s “Hungarian Dance #8” – Keillor and company ended the show with a song about returns and friends, before saying goodnight.\nThe broadcast and script will be available at http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/programs in about two weeks.