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Broward Center for the Performing Arts

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Center for Broadway shows, concerts, and operas, plus a robust educational program.

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March 2026
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03/04/2026, 08:00 PM EST
Paul Anka

Life's been good to Paul Anka - very good, in fact. But even as he enters his 50th year in the music business, he's not satisfied when his own work is merely good. "For me," he says, "the good has always been the enemy of great. To be great, you've got to forget about that select few who are going to talk about you if you don't quite make the mark -- you've got to challenge yourself."Armed with a sense of tenacity as formidable as his talent, Anka has conquered many challenges over the course of the last five decades, forging a career that's unlike any other in the history of pop. As he made the transition from '50s teen idol to celebrated songwriter to a contemporary torchbearer for all that swings, he has maintained a commitment to quality, bringing his best to whatever he faces. Indeed, Anka's two most recent albums - Rock Swings and now Classic Songs, My Way - have inspired millions of music listeners to not just hear some familiar songs in new ways but to marvel at the enduring ingenuity and integrity of Anka as an artist and performer.Plenty of other artists have him to thank for some big hits, too. His 900-song catalog includes such titles as "She's a Lady" (Tom Jones), "Puppy Love" (Donny Osmond), "It Doesn't Matter Any More" (Buddy Holly) and "Teddy" (Connie Francis). The theme he wrote for The Tonight Show was heard every night by millions of Johnny Carson fans. As for "My Way," it can be heard at any given moment in a karaoke bar somewhere on the planet.His goal on Rock Swings - and now Classic Songs, My Way - was to "take great songs and rework them so they're natural for me." With the help of his five daughters, Anka spent months researching music from the '80s and '90s, trying to find the songs that would work in the radical new context he proposed. The songs that made the cut included Bon Jovi's "It's My Life," Lionel Richie's "Hello" and Eric Clapton's "Tears in Heaven." Even more dramatic were his transformations of "Wonderwall" by Oasis, "Black Hole Sun" by Soundgarden and Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit."With Rock Swings and Classic Songs, My Way, he has made a triumphant return to the recording studio, proving that his abilities as an artist and performer have hardly waned with the passage of time. Yet audiences at his shows all over the world already know that he remains an indefatigable entertainer. For Anka, getting the chance to wow a crowd is still the greatest thing of all.

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03/29/2026, 07:00 PM EDT
The Temptations and The Four Tops

The quartet, originally called the Four Aims, made their first single for Chess in 1956, and spent seven years on the road and in nightclubs, singing pop, blues, Broadway, but mostly jazz—four-part harmony jazz. When Motown’s Berry Gordy Jr. found out they had hustled a national “Tonight Show” appearance, he signed them without an audition to be the marquee act for the company’s Workshop Jazz label. That proved short-lived, and Stubbs’ powerhouse baritone lead and the exquisite harmonies of Fakir, Benson, and Payton started making one smash after another with the writing-producing trio Holland-Dozier-Holland. Their first Motown hit, “Baby I Need Your Loving” in 1964, made them stars and their sixties track record on the label is indispensable to any retrospective of the decade. Their songs, soulful and bittersweet, were across-the-board successes. “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch),” a no. 1 R&B and Pop smash in 1965, is one of Motown’s longest-running chart toppers; it was quickly followed by a longtime favorite, “It’s The Same Old Song” (no. 2 R&B/no. 5 pop). Their commercial peak was highlighted by a romantic trilogy: the no. 1 “Reach Out I’ll Be There,” “Standing In The Shadows Of Love” (no. 2 R&B/no. 6 pop) and “Bernadette” (no. 3 R&B/no. 4 pop)—an extraordinary run of instant H-D-H classics. Other Tops hits from the decade included “Ask The Lonely,” “Shake Me, Wake Me (When It’s Over),” “Something About You,” “You Keep Running Away,” “7-Rooms Of Gloom” and their covers of “Walk Away Renee” and “If I Were A Carpenter.” The group was also extraordinarily popular in the U.K. After H-D-H split from Motown, producer Frank Wilson supervised the R&B Top 10 hits “It’s All In The Game” and “Still Water (Love)” at the start of the seventies. The Tops also teamed with Motown’s top girl group, the Supremes, post-Diana Ross. Billing themselves The Magnificent Seven for a series of albums, they hit with a cover of “River Deep - Mountain High.” When Motown left Detroit in 1972 to move to Los Angeles, the steadfast Tops decided to stay at home, and with another label. They kept up a string of hits with ABC-Dunhill for the next few years: “Ain’t No Woman (Like The One I’ve Got),” a Top 5 hit; the Top 10 “Keeper Of The Castle”; and the R&B Top 10’s “Are You Man Enough (from the movie Shaft In Africa),” “Sweet Understanding Love,” “One Chain Don’t Make No Prison” (later covered by Santana), “Midnight Flower” and the disco perennial “Catfish.” In 1980 the group moved to Casablanca Records. The following year they were at no. 1 again, with “When She Was My Girl,” making them one of the few groups to have hits in three consecutive decades. They also scored R&B Top 40s with the ballads “Tonight I’m Gonna Love You All Over” and “I Believe In You And Me,” the original version of the 1996 Whitney Houston smash. And the Tops were heard in the film Grease 2 with “Back To School Again.” By 1983, riding the wave of the company’s 25th anniversary celebration, the Tops were back with Motown and H-D-H. The reunion resulted in the R&B Top 40 hits “I Just Can’t Walk Away” and “Sexy Ways.” They signed with Arista later in the decade, and there they racked up their final solo Top 40 hit, “Indestructible,” which was the theme of the 1988 Summer Olympics. That year they also partnered with Aretha Franklin, a longtime friend from Detroit, for the Top 40 R&B “If Ever A Love There Was.” During this period, Stubbs stepped out and gained notoriety for voicing the man-eating plant Audrey II in the film musical Little Shop Of Horrors, for which he sang the cult classic “Mean Green Mother From Outer Space.” In 1990, with 24 Top 40 pop hits to their credit, the Four Tops were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame. Though they would no longer have hits on record, the group continued to be a hit in concert, touring incessantly, a towering testament to the enduring legacy of the Motown Sound they helped shape and define. Following Payton’s death in 1997, the group briefly worked as a trio until Theo Peoples, a former Temptation, was recruited to restore the group to a quartet. When Stubbs subsequently grew ill, Peoples became the lead singer and former Motown artist-producer Ronnie McNeir was enlisted to fill Payton’s spot. In 2005, when Benson died, Payton’s son Roquel replaced him. For Rolling Stone’s 2004 article “The Immortals – The Greatest Artists Of All Time,” Smokey Robinson remembered: “They were the best in my neighborhood in Detroit when I was growing up (and) the Four Tops will always be one of the biggest and the best groups ever. Their music is forever." 

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03/31/2026, 08:00 PM EDT
Alan Parsons Live Project

Born in Britain on December 20, 1948, Alan soon found that his interests lay in music. He studied piano and flute as a child and was always intrigued by gadgetry. He picked up the guitar in his early teens and played as a soloist as well as with various bands at school.One of his first jobs was at an EMI tape duplication facility in West London. At this time he was fortunate enough to experience the master tape of the Beatles Sgt. Pepper album and that boosted his determination to become a recording engineer. Says Alan, "I couldn't wait to find out the secrets behind the album. It left me totally in awe of the talent of The Beatles themselves of course, but also the work behind the scenes in the studio". His timing was perfect. He landed a post at the then not-so-celebrated Abbey Road Studios and garnered significant experience on the Beatles' Let It Be album, and actively participated in the famous Apple rooftop session. The Abbey Roadalbum (released before Let It Be but recorded later) helped Alan to make his mark with the Fab Four, although he was only an assistant engineer at that time. Still, it resulted in Alan going on to work as a full-blown engineer with Paul McCartney on McCartney, Wings Wild Life and Red Rose Speedway, including the singles Hi Hi Hi and C Moon. Alan adds "I couldn't have asked for a better grounding in recording - after all not many engineers got to work the greatest rock act of all time". He also helped out on George Harrison's All Things Must Pass album both as an assistant and as a mix engineer.After the experience of The Beatles Alan worked on a number of hits with The Hollies including He Ain't Heavy He's My Brother and The Air That I Breathe. However, his reputation was totally solidified with his engineering work on Pink Floyd's legendary Dark Side Of The Moon, which earned him the first of many Grammy nominations.Alan soon ventured into production with the British band Pilot and scored immediate success with the hit single Magic. (You know - "Oh Ho Ho It's Magic!!"). Other hits followed not only with Pilot, but also with Cockney Rebel achieving two consecutive British Number Ones. The hits continued with HiFly and Music by John Miles. Alan made three albums with Al Stewart, spawning the hit singles Year Of The Cat and Time Passages.Along with songwriter/manager Eric Woolfson, Alan decided to begin creating his own thematic records and founded the Alan Parsons Project. Although he occasionally played keyboards, guitar and sang background parts on his records, the Project was designed primarily as a forum for a revolving collection of vocalists and session players - among them Arthur Brown, ex-Zombie Colin Blunstone, Cockney Rebel's Steve Harley, the Hollies' Allan Clarke and guitarist Ian Bairnson -- to interpret and perform Parsons and Woolfson's conceptually-linked, lushly arranged and orchestrated music.I, Robot Album Cover The Project debuted in 1976 with Tales of Mystery and Imagination, a collection inspired by the work of Edgar Allen Poe. Similarly, the science fiction of Isaac Asimov served as the raw material for 1977's follow-up I Robot. After the further success of Pyramid in 1978, he moved to Monaco - an event that clearly influenced The Turn of a Friendly Card, a meditation on gambling, recorded in Paris in 1980. The Alan Parsons Project scored two Top 20 hits from this album, Games People Play and Time. Having resettled back home in England, 1982's Eye in the Sky, was their most successful effort to date, and notched a Top Three hit with its title track. More successes followed - Ammonia Avenue (1984), Vulture Culture (1985), Stereotomy (1986) and Gaudi (1987). A brief venture into musical theatre resulted in Freudiana in 1990.The show ran for over a year in the historic Theater An Der Wien in Vienna, Austria.Eric and Alan then went separate ways. Eric devoted his career to the musical theatre while Parsons felt the need to bring his music to the live concert stage and to continue to record conceptual symphonic rock music. With his long-standing previous collaborators, guitarist Ian Bairnson, drummer Stuart Elliott and orchestral arranger Andrew Powell, Alan dropped the "Project" identity for Alan Parsons - Try Anything Once in 1994. The partnership continued for On Air in 1996 and The Time Machine in 1999. During this time the "Alan Parsons Live Project" toured to sell-out audiences throughout the globe. Alan has also played various live shows with Ringo Starr, Yes, Kansas, Alice Cooper, John Entwistle and Ann Wilson.One of the most familiar Project tracks is Sirius, perhaps best known as the Chicago Bulls theme and featured at countless NBA games. P.Diddy (Puff Daddy) also chose Sirius as the backbone for the title track of his multi-platinum-selling CD, The Saga Continues. In 2000, Sirius was featured in an IMAX documentary movie about Michael Jordan.A long-standing fan of Alan's Music, Mike Myers as Austin Powers in The Spy Who Shagged Me decided to name his Dr Evil character's Death Ray "The Alan Parsons Project". Yeh Baby Yeh!!A Valid Path CD coverMore recently, Alan's music has taken a new contemporary direction into the world of Electronica. His latest album, A Valid Path, features a number of notables in the genre including The Crystal Method, Shpongle, and Uberzone. The album also features a guest appearance by Pink Floyd guitarist, David Gilmour. Alan's eldest son, Jeremy also plays an active part in the computer programming of the music. Alan says, "The industry is changing and I feel the need to capture a different kind of audience while still keeping my identity. Electronic music is the fastest growing music category right now and I'm enjoying working with new people and new technology".  The album is now available on DualDisc. The DVD side contains 5.1 surround mixes as well as video material, including interviews with David Gilmour and The Crystal Method as well as previously unreleased music videos and concert footage.Alan has written extensively for the Pro-Audio press and is an acknowledged expert in 5.1 Surround Sound recording. He has often lectured at Recording conferences and Schools of Recording and was the keynote speaker at The Audio Engineering Society convention in 1998.Alan's band has toured the United States, Europe, Russia and South America to promote A Valid Path. During 2006 and 2007, Alan has performed a number of astounding concerts with full symphony orchestra and a laser presentation.In the spring of 2007, a new Sony/BMG 2-CD compilation called The Essential Collection was released containing remastered versions of all the APP hits. Tales Of Mystery And Imagination, I Robot, Eye In The Sky and Vulture Culture were all re-released at the same time in expanded form, containing never-before-heard bonus material.

Contacts

201 SW 5th Ave, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33312, USA