Randy Edelman, the film composer and songwriter whose credits stretch from “Gettysburg” to “Kindergarten Cop,” came to the small stage at the Stonewall Inn on July 25 for a performance. He closed with the song that first made his name as a hitmaker, “A Weekend in New England,” a fitting climax, and not only because it remains Edelman’s best-known composition.
The version most people know is Barry Manilow’s, a No. 10 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 in January 1977, drawn from Manilow’s 1976 album “This One’s for You.” But the song began, a year earlier and in a different form, as Edelman’s own recording, tucked away as the B-side to “Concrete and Clay” on his 1975 solo album “Farewell Fairbanks.” Edelman made some changes to the song (at Clive Davis’ request). The song was a waltz with a title that is never mentioned in the song Manilow made it a standard. At the Stonewall Inn, decades later, it was Edelman’s own voice carrying the song he wrote twice.
Long before he became one of Hollywood’s more prolific film composers, Edelman was a pop recording artist and songwriter in his own right, releasing solo albums and singles through the 1970s before his work turned toward the screen. That later catalog would come to include scores for “The Last of the Mohicans,” “Gettysburg,” “Dragonheart,” “The Mask,” “Kindergarten Cop,” “My Cousin Vinny,” “Ghostbusters II” and “Billy Madison” — a range wide enough to cover Civil War epics and Adam Sandler comedies within the same career. It is a body of work that rarely gets a cabaret-scale showcase, which made Saturday’s setting notable on its own terms.
The Stonewall Inn is not, of course, a room booked lightly. It was here, in the early hours of June 28, 1969, that patrons resisted a police raid and set off several nights of protest that are now widely regarded as the catalyzing event of the modern LGBTQ rights movement. The bar and the surrounding streets were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999, designated a National Historic Landmark in 2000, named a New York City Landmark in 2015, and in 2016 became the Stonewall National Monument — the first unit of the National Park System dedicated specifically to LGBTQ history. Nearly six decades on, the site still carries that dual identity, as both a working bar and a place of pilgrimage, a combination that shapes the tenor of anything staged there.
Edelman’s set did not lean on that history for effect; it simply unfolded inside it. When he reached the closing notes of “A Weekend in New England,” the moment carried the weight of a song returning, briefly, to the writer who first put it down on tape half a century ago.
Randy Edelman’s New York dates continue this fall, with an engagement at the Triad Theatre on October 2 and 3, and a return to Carnegie Hall on December 19 for “Randy Edelman: American Original,” his third performance on that stage.
Photo Credit: Charles Wills
