'The Start of Something Big'?: Jim Rice will 'Celebrate Steve & Eydie' with Valerie Roy

The name Jim Rice was known to theatergoers in Worcester in the 1980s and '90s not as a baseball player for the Red Sox but a musical director of shows at the new former Foothills Theatre Company and Forum Theatre.

Rice said he was the musical director for 10 shows at Foothills, and the Worcester native has been a pianist, arranger, director and conductor at numerous theaters, concert halls, clubs and cabarets around the country and throughout Europe.

About eight years ago, he also added singing to his resume.

And it is as pianist/singer, as well as orchestrator and arranger that he'll be joining singer Valerie Roy on stage at Mechanics Hall at 2 p.m. Aug. 16 for “Celebrate Steve & Eydie — The Music of Steve Lawrence & Eydie Gormé" with an eight-piece Las Vegas style band. The free show is directed by Ilyse Robbins and the program is supported in part by a grant from the Worcester Arts Council, which was made possible with American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) Funding from the City of Worcester.

Rice has been developing the show and the Mechanics Hall performance will be the first with an eight-piece band.

Lawrence and Gormé were a beloved pop vocal duet and married couple. They were already successful solo artists in 1953 when they first began their five-year run as regular performers on the "Steve Allen Show," soon to become "The Tonight Show."  They married in Las Vegas four years later. They performed constantly for over four decades in Las Vegas, Broadway shows, symphony concerts, and in their own Emmy award winning television specials and earned several Grammy Awards for their many albums. Gormé died Aug. 10, 2013, at the age of 84.

Packing them in on Mondays

Rice and Roy, who grew up in Grafton, are not married. In fact, Rice presided over the wedding of the then Valerie Snead and Jason Roy at Dunkin' (Donuts) in Worcester in 2019. However, they have known each other for many years.

Roy has appeared in musicals, including with Foothills Theatre, and created and sung at her own cabaret shows in Boston, New York and Florida where she was living for a time before returning to the local area. She now lives in Worcester with her husband.

Rice helped arrange many of Roy's cabaret shows, then during the pandemic they decided to become a performing duo with Rice now also a singer.

The "Jim and Val Show" has been a regular at the Napoleon Room at Club Café in Boston since 2021.

In July, "The Jim & Val Show" was at  Mechanics Hall for a free summer series of "Matinee Music Mondays" starting at 2 p.m. July 10 and continuing July 17 and 24.

The series was packing them in on Monday afternoons.

"It has been, people would say, a big success. The crowds keep getting bigger each time," Rice said.

Celebrating Steve & Eydie

As for “Celebrate Steve & Eydie," Rice said, "In a way I started the project about eight years ago in Boston. It was a small thing I did. I wanted to take it further."

However, he moved from Boston, where he was living at the time, to New York City, and the singer who had been involved in the first iteration of the project dropped out.

Rice them moved back to his hometown of Worcester, where he has since stayed, and "decided to resurrect it ('Celebrate Steve & Edye') with a lot more detail," he said.

"They (Lawrence and Gormé) were really a Las Vegas act, so you really want a brass section there and a band."

So in addition to performing the "Jim and Val" show, Rice and Roy also began started working together on "Celebrate Steve & Edye."

"Working with Val it was such a joy. We were always together over the past 30 years. On stage we're a perfect fit," Rice said.

They have performed "Celebrate Steve & Eydie" recently at venues ranging from Florida to Rhode Island, but the Aug. 16 show at Mechanics Hall is the latest step in its development with an eight-piece band, Rice said

In the 1950s, '60s and '70s, Lawrence and Gormé had success with songs such as "This Could Be the Start of Something Big,” “Make Someone Happy,” “A Lot Of Living,” "The Two of Us," and “If He Walked Into My Life.” Their stage shows also included an easy and entertaining banter.

Frank Sinatra was a friend and mentor. “Steve Lawrence was a really fine singer,” Rice said. “In fact, Sinatra said many times that Steve Lawrence was a much better singer than he was. And Eydie was a perfect match for him.”

Lawrence and Gormé's shows included solo songs and songs together, Rice said.

In "Celebrate Steve & Eydie," which has 17 numbers, "(Almost) Everything we do is a duet. We do the best stuff they did together," Rice said. Rice and Roy also have one solo number each as Lawrence and Gormé.

As for stage banter, "Oh yes, absolutely. Sometimes we make it up as we go along. That's why you need someone you know well to do it with. You need to be able to pick up the cues," Rice said.

Roy has said "We have history. There's an unspoken thing."

The set also includes a medley that is about 10 minutes long, itself quite challenge.

"We do not imitate them. It's not like an Elvis show or Beatlemania," Rice said.

With that, Rice and Roy sound similar to Lawrence and Gormé, and they've studied the star couple's phrasing.

"It's the two of us (Rice and Roy) on stage, but faithful to their (Lawrence and Gormé's ) style," Rice said.

He never met Lawrence and Gormé and didn't see them perform live.

"All I know if is from watching videos on YouTube," Rice said.

"They are very old fashioned in what they do," he said. Gormé once observed, "We were old fashioned from day one," Rice noted.

"They never tried rock and roll. They did what they did and they did it well. The reason they were in Las Vegas was because they were very, very good."

"Celebrate Steve & Eydie" could have more shows to celebrate with.

"There are a lot of smaller performing arts centers that would love this show," Rice said.

"There's plenty of places to play in New England." He joked, "We're (Rice and Roy) not famous, so they can afford us." As for a band, "We can do it the two of us alone with bass and drums, or add a horn section. It depends on the budget, how big the theater is," he said.

'You evolve throughout your life'

Rice grew up in the Lake Avenue area of Worcester and graduated from North High School.

"I started out as a pianist," he said. At Berklee College of Music in Boston he studied music arranging.

He got into theater locally with Foothills and Forum and also with regional productions and touring shows. Then "I got out of theater" and did 15 years in cabaret and club work, he said.

His shows have been praised as "sophisticated and richly crafted” by Cabaret Scenes in New York City.

Rice had "11 different addresses in 20 years," and then came back to Worcester just before the pandemic.

After giving the matter some thought he began singing and "started to really focus the past eight years. Now I call myself a pianist/singer," he said.

"You evolve throughout your life. You just find something new and keep doing it."

As a music director "I was always around the most incredible singers," Rice said. That led to the thought, "Oh no, they're much better than me," he acknowledged.

Still, "I decided to put the work in," Rice said.

When people ask him about why he took up singing later in his career, Rice said he often replies, perhaps only half-jokingly, "I got bored. It just made it more interesting. And it was a challenge."

The "Jim and Val Show" has been a regular the Napoleon Room at Club Café in Boston since 2021, and Rice also has shows at Club Café with other performers as well as sometimes doing a solo performance. Other solo shows include the Arctic Playhouse in West Warwick, R.I., where he is also music director.

Rice and Roy would like to see the "Jim and Val" show return to Mechanics Hall. Now there's the possibility of traveling with “Celebrate Steve & Eydie."

"It's a hard business to be in," Rice said.

"I do it full time. It's a hard business to do full time so you've got to make sure you find projects that you like doing," he said.

'Celebrate Steve & Eydie — The Music of Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé' — Jim Rice and Valerie Roy

When: 2 p.m. Aug. 16

Where: Mechanics Hall, 321 Main St., Worcester

How much: Free. Reservations are recommended by visiting www.mechanicshall.org or calling Mechanics Hall at (508) 752-5608

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Worcester's Jim Rice will "Celebrate Steve & Eydie" with Valerie Roy