Arts & Entertainment

Unlocking Her Dream

Cindi Rosner Kelly mixes business with
pleasure to stage The Key, her new musical.

Suzanne Chessler
Special to the Jewish News

L

ongtime musician and composer
Cindi Rosner Kelly was inspired to
write a musical theater piece and
then developed the determination to fund
her project for a local stage.
The results will be on view Nov. 20-21 at
the Seligman Performing Arts Center with
the debut of The Key, a five-year project sup-
ported by local entertainers and backers.
Kelly, 56, a full-time therapist and
part-time musician, started composing a
series of songs and realized they could fit
together into a storyline taking off from
her experiences in a blended-religion
household. She soon decided to establish a
nonprofit organization as her fundraising
resource to have the work produced.
"This is a musical production with all
the parts being sung:' says Kelly, who lives
in Orchard Lake Village. "The music is
extremely diverse so that every person in
the audience can have some portion of the
show covered by what that person espe-
cially appreciates and enjoys, whether the-
ater style, pop, rock, jazz, swing or sacred:'
The plot centers on a romance between
college sweethearts of different cultural
and religious backgrounds — one of them
Jewish — at Michigan State University in
the 1970s and how their differences affect
their lives over the next 50 years.
"The storyline is a combination of real-
ity and fantasy. I am currently married to
someone not of the Jewish faith, and I cer-
tainly relate to the struggles experienced
by the main characters in their relation-

Jews

4.1 I Nate Bloom
mini Special to the Jewish News

Lit

et Friends Forever

I? Bruce Campbell, 52, just appeared
tit at the Seattle horror film fest, called
vow Zombcon 2010, and showed a newly
CU restored print of The Evil Dead (1981).
The film launched the directing career
%IF of Detroit native Sam Raimi, 51.
Raimi and Campbell met and
became
friends at
Birmingham's
Wiley E.
Groves High
School and,
while in
college at
Greene and Raimi
Michigan

52

November 11 • 2010

ships with one another;' says Kelly, who
has performed during the High Holidays
at Temple Beth El in Bloomfield Township.
A music therapy and music educa-
tion major at Michigan State University,
Kelly, upon graduation, ran the Expressive
Therapy department at Mt. Carmel Mercy
Hospital in Detroit, where she worked with
children in psychiatric care. After the pro-
gram began losing funding, she decided to
get a master's degree in social work from the
University of Michigan and went into private
practice, now carried out from Bloomfield
Hills and Madison Heights offices.
Kelly, wife of Pat Kelly and mother of
15-year-old Colton, has set aside time to
perform on piano at weddings and bar
mitzvahs. She also has played clarinet and
composed for the Rosner Trio, a group
that includes her mother, pianist Collette
Rosner of West Bloomfield, and sister, flute
player Kim Rosner Saxe of Ann Arbor.
"I attended a Paul McCartney concert
and had an emotional reaction that start-
ed the round of composing for The Key;'
Kelly explains. "My reaction got expressed
through the piano.
"I thought what I was playing sounded
like musical theater; and as I continued,
the pieces sounded like they went together.
It was nothing that I planned out. There
was no conscious decision that I was going
to write a musical. It just happened:'
Because Kelly had only composed
instrumental music, she began studying
vocal range and scoring.
"I knew I didn't want this project to just
sit on a shelf' Kelly says. "I am never one
to take anything lightly, and I wanted to

State, made a very low budget flick
that attracted investors and evolved
into The Evil Dead (starring Campbell).
Campbell has gone on to co-star
in many horror flicks, some directed
by Raimi, and he's now best known
for his co-starring role as Sam Axe,
a wisecracking, womanizing, ex-Navy
Seal on the hit USA Network show
Burn Notice.
Campbell spoke about Raimi to a
Seattle newspaper:
"I consider him a great friend. But
he's an A-list director now. He's very
busy. If I want to see him, I just go to
a bar mitzvah in Detroit. He has like
nine kids." (For the record, Raimi and
his wife, Gillian Greene, daughter of
Bonanza's Lorne Greene, have five
children.)

see this through to
completion."
Although it took
Kelly only eight
months to write the
42 songs for The
Key, it took her four years to bring it to the
stage. She established Key Performing Arts
Inc., which is run by a board of directors,
and scouted performers by attending com-
munity theater and musical productions.
Funds were raised by a series of spe-
cial events, including a Musical Montage,
which spotlighted groups and soloists
from professionals to students, and a Fall
Film and Frolic, which showcased movies
made by University of Michigan students.
A documentary on the development of
The Key, narrated by retired radio person-
ality Dick Purtan, also brought in money
through a public showing. Another cash-
raising initiative was a folk concert held in
Ann Arbor.
"I have not taken a penny, and I have
invested my own funds to make this hap-
pen;' Kelly says. "It was my mission to
create a product that supported Metro
Detroit's finest talents so the only out-of-
state talent utilized in The Key was Emmy-
nominated orchestrator David Duvall:'
Starring in the romantic leads are
Amber Williams as Kini and Aaron Sanko
as Dak, both with professional credits at
the Michigan Opera Theatre.
Director Tom Logan is owner and
director of the Starlight Theatre in
Waterford. Music director Bruce Snyder
heads the Vocal department at Andover
High School, from which Kelly graduated.

New Flicks

Opening Friday, Nov.
12, is Tamara Drewe,
a British comedy-
of-manners about a
former ugly duckling
(Gemma Arterton)
whose new beauty
Stephen
triggers all sorts of
Frears
complications when
she returns to the
bucolic village of her youth.
The almost all-British cast is
directed by two-time Oscar nominee
Stephen Frears, 69 (The Queen, High
Fidelity).
Frears, who is secular, discovered
as an adult that his late mother was
Jewish. His brother spilled the beans
when Frears was about to marry

"It was my
mission to
create a product
that supported
Metro Detroit's
finest talents."

Cindi Rosner Kelly

Choreographer Jeff Rebudal is on staff at
Wayne State University and owner of a
dance company in New York.
"This is an out-of-the-box show;' says
Kelly, baking and freezing cookies to sell at
the performances as her husband handles
marketing and set construction tasks in
his hours off from sales work.
"It's allowing each aspect of the expres-
sive arts team to show something new, like
a presentation of pictures flashed during a
scene and a full-scale marching band."
While the top five performers are being
paid, the others have volunteered their
services, knowing they will be paid if
funds remain after expenses are met.
"I think there's a piece of my day job with-
in the storyline of The Key as the piece sends
a powerful and important message that we,
as human beings, make mistakes, but our
mistakes often are righted," Kelly says. "That
goes along with my helping people make
their lives richer and better as they deal with
feelings and understand themselves:'

❑

The Key will be performed 7:30 p.m.
Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov.
20-21, at the Seligman Performing
Arts Center, 22305 W.13 Mile Road,
in Beverly Hills. $15-$75. (866) 967-
8167; www.thekeythemusical.com .

his present wife,
Jewish artist Anne
Rothenstein.
Opening the same
day is Skyline, a
sci-fi thriller about
an extraterres-
trial attack on Los
Eric Balfour
Angeles. The film
stars Eric Balfour,
33, a constantly working TV and film
actor.
My research just uncovered that
Eric's paternal grandparents were
Jewish, and "Balfour" was originally
"Begelfer." His maternal grandmother
was Jewish, too – but his maternal
grandfather was probably a Lakota
(Sioux) Indian. Li