Serious Playground: The Songs of Laura Nyro

Judy Kuhn, the acclaimed actress and singer, will bring her show Serious Playground: The Songs of Laura Nyro back to New York. The show is based on Kuhn’s new CD. Serious Playground is the first-ever solo CD celebrating the pioneering singer-songwriter of the 1960s and 70s, who would have turned 60 this fall. The recording is based on her sold-out concert at the Lincoln Center American Songbook Series in January 2007.

Serious Playground features fresh arrangements of Nyro’s best-known songs like "Stoney End," "Sweet Blindness" and "Save The Country," but also offers new interpretations of rarely-recorded songs like "To A Child," "Mother’s Spiritual" and "Been On A Train." "Lonely Women," spare and haunted on Nyro’s album Eli and the Thirteenth Confession – widely considered her masterpiece – here has the feel of a hard blues. "Upstairs By A Chinese Lamp," named an all-time favorite by Rickie Lee Jones, is given a delicate treatment, as if part of a chamber opera. "Save The Country," whose potent anti-war message had a particular impact during the tumultuous Vietnam era, has a renewed relevance in the current political climate.

Judy Kuhn has been nominated for three Tony Awards and three Drama Desk Awards for her work on Broadway in the hit revival of She Loves Me, the American premiers of Chess and Les Miserables, and Rags. She is the singing voice of Disney’s Pocahontas and co-starred in the upcoming film Day on Fire, for which she also performed the soundtrack with John Medeski.

Judy has performed on concert stages around the world including appearances at Carnegie Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, and The Royal Albert Hall in London and with Peter Nero and the Philly Pops Orchestra. She has performed her solo concert Finding Home which the New York Times called "revelatory" for Lincoln Center’s American Songbook Series, Joe’s Pub, the Kennedy Center and the Prince Music Theater in Philadelphia. She can be heard on numerous original cast recordings as well as her first solo CD, Just In Time: Judy Kuhn Sings Jule Styne.