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Thursday, December 5, 2019

Kean Stage celebrates the holidays with the incomparable Darlene Love

DARLENE LOVE

WHEN: 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, December 14
WHERE
: Wilkins Theatre, 1000 Morris Ave., Union, N.J. on Kean University’s main campus
TICKETS: $40-$70 and can be purchased at the Kean Stage Box Office in Wilkins Theatre, by phone at 908-737-7469 or online at www.keanstage.com. Save 25% with code HOLIDAY19.

The incomparable Darlene Love returns to Kean Stage at to perform Love for the Holidays, a Christmas show like no other.

“I’m thrilled to be performing my annual holiday show at Kean Stage in celebration of my 50-plus years in showbiz and to bring some love and joy to the folks in Union, N.J. by singing my #1 classic, Christmas, (Baby Please Come Home), said Love.

If you want to hear Love perform that song, which she first recorded on the 1963 album A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector, this is the place to be. Although she sang the holiday favorite every December for nearly 30 years with Paul Shaffer and the CBS Orchestra on Late Night with David Letterman, Love vowed never to perform it on another late night TV talk show. The move was out of respect for Letterman, whose support helped relaunch her career in the mid-1980s.

Over the years, Love’s name has become synonymous with several other holiday songs, including A Marshmallow World and All Alone on Christmas, which was written by Steve Van Zandt for the 1992 movie Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.

But Love for the Holidays will not be exclusively Christmas music. Expect to hear some of her classic hits, including Wait ‘Til My Bobby Gets Home, He’s a Rebel, A Fine Fine Boy and (Today I Met) The Boy I’m Gonna Marry.

Darlene Love started out as a member of The Blossoms and also sang background vocals for many of the biggest artists of the 1950s and 1960s, including the Righteous Brothers, Dionne Warwick, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, Tom Jones, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and the Beach Boys. She has been featured in major motion pictures, including the Lethal Weapon series, and appeared on Broadway in Hairspray and Grease. Love even starred as herself in Leader of the Pack, credited as Broadway’s first ‘jukebox musical.’

In 2011, she was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and in 2014 was the subject of the Academy Award-winning documentary, Twenty Feet from Stardom.  Love continues to captivate audiences worldwide with her warm, gracious stage presence and superb performances.

“Darlene Love’s thunderbolt voice is as embedded in the history of rock and roll as Eric Clapton’s guitar or Bob Dylan’s lyrics,” raved the New York Times.