Friday April 4 and Saturday April 5, 2014, at 8 pm, $20 door, $15 advance (call 905-543-8512 or book advance tickets online via PayPal). Well-known performer, musician and activist Eric Nagler performs Tales from the Attic: A retrospective in story and song. 
Two-day run! “Brimming with humour and heart, Eric takes his audience on a musical journey through his past and into their future.” [Note: Adult content, not a children’s show.]
Canada remembers Eric from his appearances on The Elephant Show and Eric’s World which dominated Children’s TV in the 80s and 90s. But he began his performing career a decade earlier with Columbia Artists, doing Community Concerts throughout North America. His life experiences have taken him from Washington Square in the hay day of the sixties folk revival, to Bosnia, Spain, Ireland and just about everywhere on this continent. Eric has marched with Martin Luther King, has been tried for draft evasion, directed folk festivals, opened the first Folklore Centre in Canada. 
Along the way Eric has rubbed shoulders with the likes of Bob Dylan, Bruce Cockburn, Brownie Magee and Sonny Terry, The Reverend Gary Davis, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, John Lee Hooker, and a host of others. – and he has a story to tell, a song to sing or a tune to play about each cross road and companion he’s encountered. http://www.ericnagler.com/
Eric writes about his new show Tales from the Attic:
“I’ve never been more excited about a performance. In many ways it represents the culmination of a life’s adventure in music and personal growth. I’ve played Tales from the Attic to several audiences so far, and received rousing applause, tears, laughter and appreciation. For me it is an honour to share my vulnerability and spin a connection of common humanity from me to you:
– To paint images of war-torn Sarajevo, and the confused disarray I saw on the faces of Kosovo families as we sat and made music together in a make-shift refugee camp.
– To describe a mystical experience witnessing Martin Luther King laying out his dream for us.
– To relate how my life was changed by a construction worker who stopped my wife and me on the road to ask if we’d like to adopt a baby.
– To take you where I was sitting not two feet from a hilarious misadventure when John Lee Hooker introduced himself to the Reverend Gary Davis.
– To recall the heights and depths of a year on cocaine.
– To relive the discovery that my most terrible anger was born from my deepest love.
And more… anecdotes about hanging with Bruce Cockburn, Murray McLauchlan, John Hartford, Bob Dylan… learning my chops at the fountain in Washington Square and Alan Block’s sandal shop… as much story and song as I can fit into an evening. Some of the songs that accompany the stories are mine, but others I’ve gathered along the way… fiddle tunes from my father-in-law, Bob fiddler Beers; banjo pieces from Paul Cadwell, an old classical player; guitar riffs from the Reverend.
I want to come into your life for an evening, to perform in a living room or intimate theatre, where we can be close, look in each other’s eyes and see ourselves, to share the energy and love we can create with each other.
Excerpts from Eric Nagler’s Biography on his website:
“During the late 50s and 60s I had spent every weekend in Greenwich Village, hobnobbing with the beats (we didn’t become ‘beatniks’ until sputnik in 1957), picking banjo and absorbing the blues from some of the greats. I stood outside City Hall in defiance of the air-raid sirens, marched with Martin Luther King in 1966 (listened to him deliver his ‘I have a dream’ speech on the lawn of the capital building in Jackson Mississippi) and managed to avoid getting my head bashed in by truncheons when the cops attacked us in Washington Square for singing without a license.
By 1978 I was immersed in the art of family music, performing before live audiences and TV across the continent: The Elephant show… Eric’s World…. For a while I was one of North America’s favourites. The master of many instruments, from the well known (banjo, mandolin, guitar and fiddle), to the not so well known (psaltery, musical saw, spoons and bodhran), to the truly bizarre (sewerphone, nose flute), I shared the joy of music-making with kids and their parents in Canada, the U.S., Ireland, Spain and Bosnia.”
