After years of talking about performing a double header, two of the area’s nationally recognized entertainers will bring their acts to the Historic Palace Theatre on April 4.
Ventriloquist and comedian Kenny Byrd, who has toured with Broadway and TV star Ben Vereen, will open the event with Kenny Hawkins, Buffalo Music Hall of Fame guitarist and composer for Rick James, leading his band and singers through musical numbers.
For former city council member Flora Hawkins, the event will bring her long relationships with both Kennys full circle. Flora remembers growing up with Byrd on Market Street. In 2012, she married Hawkins, a Buffalonian.
“I’m a Lockportian, and I want to bring him to Lockport,” Flora said of her work behind the scenes. “He’s really good and I’ve been telling people they don’t want to miss this show. When he talks and sings, you don’t see his mouth moving at all!”
Byrd said he met Rita Moreno and Ben Vereen, star of the ground-breaking Roots TV mini-series, in the late ‘70s at Melody Fair, a former music venue on Niagara Falls Boulevard. Opening for Vereen’s live performances led to Byrd performing ventriloquism on the popular Dinah Shore and Merv Griffin TV variety shows and continues to work as a corporate event entertainer.
“Comedy was a natural thing around our house,” Byrd said. “I came from a family of 13 children. Everybody was always creating some kind of joke or humor about everyday stuff. I cut up socks and made some puppets and I had a built-in audience.”
While Byrd said his little brothers and sisters would tell him his lips were moving in the early days, they were still caught up in the performance. Byrd said he realized it was the life he put into the character that made it entertaining. At one point, he said he turned the puppet toward him and had it say, “Your lips were moving.” Everyone laughed.
“If you treat the character like someone else you would be talking to, people are going to feel its life,” he said. Giving the puppet gestures, moments of hesitation, stammering, and pretending to misunderstand each other all bring out an engaging personality, he said.
“Because you’re putting emotions in the voices, or personality, or dynamics and dimensions in the voice, it can change the way it looks.”
Early on, Byrd worked as a youth and family coordinator at the YMCA’s Main Street location.
“During the time I was there, I had a bigger audience than my brothers and sisters,” he said. “I would take a Tuesday afternoon, all these kids would pile into the lobby and I would pull out my puppet and create and have a conversation. I would develop routines, ideas, or concepts. It got to the point where I would go to do this, and at 4 p.m., you’d see more and more parents. It got to the point where I had to say, ‘Could the parents move to the back?’ ”
At a ventriloquism convention in Kentucky, Byrd was named one of the top ventriloquists to perform, and he was on his way.
Musician Kenny Hawkins said teaming up with Byrd was a great fit because “Playing on the road for years, we always had a comedian open up. We get along and we’re going to have a good time.”
Hawkins has recorded and performed with Rick James, Mary J. Blige, the Mary Jane Girls, Boyz to Men, The Goo Goo Dolls, and many other high-profile musicians.
Recalling his work with Buffalo’s Rick James, Hawkins said, “I produced and wrote a lot of songs like ‘Seventeen and Sexy,’ ‘My House’ and ‘Wild and Crazy Love.’We had a thing where we were like Mutt and Jeff. He would play an idea for me and I’d put it together. He was a phenomenal artist on stage, with an energy like no other. He was outrunning us and we’re in shape. He was pretty bold. In Motown everybody was a class act and he was the bad boy of Motown. He pretty much took like a rock and roll artist to R & B.”
Describing performing with Rick James, Hawkins said laughingly, “We had these (stage) bombs. And you can’t hear anything after that. All you can do is watch the drummer. A lot of the time you can’t see anything because the flash of the bombs even blinds the audience. We’d have to turn our heads.”
The band repeated the experience while touring across the nation and in Japan. Hawkins said the April event will offer family-friendly fare. His band will include recording artist and American Idol vocal coach Tonya Diona, “Soulful Showman” Corey Comer, and guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter Tom Lorentz who has long performed with the Beatles tribute band “SWITCH.”
“We’ve got good players and everybody’s played on the road,” Hawkins said. “We’re going it to give back to the arts. Comedy and music are those two things that bring people together. We just want to bring people together to have a good time and get away from these daily issues that are going on today. Sometimes you just gotta laugh to stop from crying.”
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