[NEohioPAL] Review: ‘Elliot & Me’ is a love's labor's lost

[Bob Abelman]

 ‘Elliot & Me’ is a love's labor's lost 



The name Elliot Willensky, which belonged to a middle-class Jewish songwriter from Bayonne, New Jersey, never achieved national recognition.  But his songs certainly did. 



During the ‘70s and '80s, Elliot – a charming, cocky, medical school dropout – penned hit tunes for top artists, including Whitney Houston, Gladys Knight, Smokey Robinson, Tony Orlando, Chaka Khan, and The Fifth Dimension. He once pitched a song to the Beatles, which they turned down, but “Got to Be There” appeared on Michael Jackson’s 1972 solo debut album and sold over 3 million copies worldwide.  



The composer/lyricist died of a stroke in 2010 at the age of 66 and his brother, Steven, has been attempting to secure Elliot’s legacy in an autobiographical, two-man, pop music-infused play co-written with Scott Coulter. In 2011, a reading of “Elliot & Me” premiered in Northeast Ohio – Steven’s wife Judy was born and raised in University Heights – at the Cleveland Institute of Music.  A revised version got a staged concert reading at the Idea Center in Playhouse Square in 2014.  More recently, the work was primed for a live stage production at Hudson Theatre Works in New Jersey, featuring professional actors Eric Briarley as Elliot and Drew Seigla as Steven.  And then the pandemic hit.    



A production of the show was staged and video recorded this past November, in partnership with Woodstock Theater Group, and will be streamed by the Chagrin Valley Little Theatre this week as a pay-per-view event from February 18 – 21.



For more of this review, go to: https://www.clevelandjewishnews.com/columnists/bob_abelman/
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