Overview

Night Angel is a poignant and witty one-woman musical about a cabaret singer's efforts to resurrect her life and career in the aftermath of a painful divorce. During her comeback attempt in a nightclub in downtown Newark, New Jersey, she tries to pull together her singing career, her emotions, and her life. Night Angel, with concept, libretto, and backdrop paintings by the late Melinda Camber Porter, features the exhilarating music of Carman Moore presented in fourteen songs, ranging from hard rock to mystic ballad, all strong on melody, rhythm, and unexpected harmonies. It was my pleasure listening to Night Angel. It sounds very promising. The music is also genuinely effective. - Harold Prince Carman Moore is a pragmatic, soft-spoken composer and musician achieving particular eminence for his dance scores. - New York Times Night Angel is a one-woman musical of seventeen songs written by Melinda Camber Porter and Ms. Porter's large oil paintings hang as backdrops with music by composer, Carman Moore. Night Angel tells the poignant and witty story of a former cabaret singer who is struggling to make a new life after a difficult divorce. Night Angel is set a Newark bar. -New York Metropolitan News Night Angel created for one singing actress, backed by piano, guitar, drums, and improvising saxophone. Melinda Camber Porter's sassy libretto features an actress who is a hip and pungent monologist unafraid of exposing her feelings onstage. Night Angel was originally performed at the Lincoln Center Clark Theater in New York City in 1995 under the direction of Martha Banta and music direction by Tim Weill. Night Angel published here for the first time by Blake Press with the complete book, libretto, backdrop paintings and sheet music.

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9781942231332

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Reviews

It was my pleasure listening to Night Angel. It sounds very promising. The music is also genuinely effective. - Harold Prince Carman Moore is a pragmatic, soft-spoken composer and musician achieving particular eminence for his dance scores. - New York Times Night Angel is a one-woman musical of seventeen songs written by Melinda Camber Porter and Ms. Porter's large oil paintings hang as backdrops with music by composer, Carman Moore. Night Angel tells the poignant and witty story of a former cabaret singer who is struggling to make a new life after a difficult divorce. Night Angel is set a Newark bar. -New York Metropolitan News

Author Information

Melinda Camber Porter (1953 - 2008) was born in London and graduated from Oxford University with a First Class Honors degree in Modern Languages. She began her writing career in Paris as a cultural correspondent for The Times of London. French culture is the subject of her book Through Parisian Eyes (published by Oxford University Press), which the Boston Globe describes as a particularly readable and brilliantly and uniquely compiled collection. She interviewed many leading cultural figures including four Nobel Prize winners such as Saul Bellow and Gunter Grass, and others; Joyce Carol Oates, Joan Diddion, Frances Sagan, Michael Apted, Martin Scorsese, and Wim Wenders. Camber Porter's left over 50 audio recordings of these interviews. Her novel Badlands, a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, was set on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Publishers Weekly stated a novel of startling, dreamlike lyricism. A film documenting the creation of the paintings featured in this solo exhibition, entitled The Art of Love, showed regularly on Public Television stations nationally and a collection of her poetry and paintings, also entitled The Art of Love, served as companion to the show. Camber Porter's paintings have also served as the primary inspiration and as backdrops for several of her theatrical works. She created the backdrops, book, and lyrics for the musical Night Angel, with music by Carmen Moore and was originally performed at Lincoln Center in New York City. She created the book, lyrics, and backdrops for the rock-opera-in-progress, Journey to Benares, with music, direction and choreography by Elizabeth Swados, and was performed at the Asia Society and Museum in New York City in November 2003. Melinda Camber Porter leaves a prolific and creative legacy with thousands of paintings; over two hundred hours of audio and film interviews with global creative figures in the arts, film and literature; and her tens of thousands of pages of writings: novels, plays, essays, journalism and volumes of poetry. Her creative and spiritual works will be enjoyed for generations. Carman Moore composer: The New York Times, in a glowing review of his Magical Circles, called Carman Moore a composer who not only defies categories, but treats them with disdain. The reviewer continued, Mr. Moore has a lot of music in his head, the product of his upbringing in black culture, his classical training and his voracious curiosity, and in his multi-media extravaganzas he finds some distinctly odd and wonderful places for it. A Village Voice critic, reviewing another concert of Moore's music, wrote If all new music were so professional, so tightly-written, so patently made to gratify the ear rather than theories, mandates, and pretensions, the market for dead people's music would collapse. Born in Lorain, Ohio and growing up in nearby Elyria, Carman Moore earned his Bachelor of Music Degree at Ohio State Univ. before moving to New York City, where he studied composition privately with Hall Overton and at the Juilliard School with Luciano Berio and Vincent Persichetti where he earned his Masters Degree with distinction. Well-known as a composer for dance, Carman Moore served from 1986-1995 as Master Composer and Co-director of the American Dance Festival's Young Choreographers and Composers Residency Program. A dedicated educator, Moore has taught at the Yale University School of Music, Queens and Brooklyn Colleges, Carnegie-Mellon University, Manhattanville College, and The New School for Social Research. Mr. Moore was honored in 2013 with a 2-day CARMAN MOORE MUSIC FESTIVAL in New York City. Among its performers were Moore and writing partner Danish singer Lotte Arnsbjerg premiere-ing their anti-child-abuse song cycle GIRL OF DIAMOND MOUNTAIN. The Festival's first concert featured the Skymusic Ensemble, conducted by Moore performing the world premiere of his To High Heavens, which featured the virtuosic violinists Daisy Jopling and Jessie Montgomery.

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