<\/p>\n
After years of talking about performing a double header, two of the area\u2019s nationally recognized entertainers will bring their acts to the Historic Palace Theatre on April 4.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m a Lockportian, and I want to bring him to Lockport,\u201d Flora said of her work behind the scenes. \u201cHe\u2019s really good and I\u2019ve been telling people they don\u2019t want to miss this show. When he talks and sings, you don\u2019t see his mouth moving at all!\u201d<\/p>\n
Byrd said he met Rita Moreno and Ben Vereen, star of the ground-breaking Roots TV mini-series, in the late \u201870s at Melody Fair, a former music venue on Niagara Falls Boulevard. Opening for Vereen\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cComedy was a natural thing around our house,\u201d Byrd said. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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, \u201cYour lips were moving.\u201d Everyone laughed.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you treat the character like someone else you would be talking to, people are going to feel its life,\u201d he said. Giving the puppet gestures, moments of hesitation, stammering, and pretending to misunderstand each other all bring out an engaging personality, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause you\u2019re putting emotions in the voices, or personality, or dynamics and dimensions in the voice, it can change the way it looks.\u201d<\/p>\n
Early on, Byrd worked as a youth and family coordinator at the YMCA\u2019s Main Street location.<\/p>\n
\u201cDuring the time I was there, I had a bigger audience than my brothers and sisters,\u201d he said. \u201cI 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\u2019d see more and more parents. It got to the point where I had to say, \u2018Could the parents move to the back?\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n
At a ventriloquism convention in Kentucky, Byrd was named one of the top ventriloquists to perform, and he was on his way.<\/p>\n
Musician Kenny Hawkins said teaming up with Byrd was a great fit because \u201cPlaying on the road for years, we always had a comedian open up. We get along and we\u2019re going to have a good time.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Recalling his work with Buffalo\u2019s Rick James, Hawkins said, \u201cI produced and wrote a lot of songs like \u2018Seventeen and Sexy,\u2019 \u2018My House\u2019 and \u2018Wild and Crazy Love.\u2019We had a thing where we were like Mutt and Jeff. He would play an idea for me and I\u2019d put it together. He was a phenomenal artist on stage, with an energy like no other. He was outrunning us and we\u2019re 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Describing performing with Rick James, Hawkins said laughingly, \u201cWe had these (stage) bombs. And you can\u2019t hear anything after that. All you can do is watch the drummer. A lot of the time you can\u2019t see anything because the flash of the bombs even blinds the audience. We\u2019d have to turn our heads.\u201d<\/p>\n
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, \u201cSoulful Showman\u201d Corey Comer, and guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter Tom Lorentz who has long performed with the Beatles tribute band \u201cSWITCH.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve got good players and everybody\u2019s played on the road,\u201d Hawkins said. \u201cWe\u2019re 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" After years of talking about performing a double header, two of the area\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2029532,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[383475,454829,454828,309956,454826,454827,344187,378768],"class_list":["post-2344846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-ben-vereen","tag-buffalo-music-hall-of-fame","tag-flora-hawkins","tag-hawkins","tag-kenny-byrd","tag-kenny-hawkins","tag-rick-james","tag-rita-moreno"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/In-Black-Rabbit-Jason-Bateman-and-Jude-Law-are-brothers.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2344846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2344846"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2344846\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2344847,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2344846\/revisions\/2344847"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2029532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2344846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2344846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2344846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}