NEW YORK — “Sweet Mary Jane,” a jukebox musical revue celebrating the marriage of music to marijuana, will light up this spring.
Danny Fried, co-founder of the fabled China Club in New York City and Los Angeles, is putting a band together to launch the show at the Cutting Room on East 32nd Street.
“The time is ready for this. We’ve been locked up,” Fried said. “People need to have fun.”
Pot came to New Orleans, where Louis Armstrong was born, in the 1920s with sailors from Asia. “Armstrong smoked pot every day of his life,” Fried said.
Armstrong’s short-term manager, clarinet player Mezz Mezzrow, reportedly had a connection in Mexico and supplied many musicians.
The villain is President Herbert Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics chief Harry Anslinger, who once declared: “Marijuana is a shortcut to the insane asylum. Smoke marijuana cigarettes for a month and what was once your brain will be nothing but a storehouse of horrid specters.”
The show features the music of Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald, Willie Nelson, Bette Midler, Rick James and Bob Dylan, who supposedly introduced reefer to the Beatles.
“The show traces the symbiotic relationship marijuana has had on generations of music makers,” Fried said.
His timing is good, as legalization spreads around the country and dispensaries pop up everywhere.
When China Club began back in the ‘80s, its regulars included David Bowie, Rod Stewart, Elton John and Jon Bon Jovi.
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The federal government is still sending pot dealers to prison.
Jonathan Wall, 26, has been behind bars for 21 months for cultivating and selling grass and will go to trial in federal court in Maryland on May 2. Prosecutors say Wall, along with 10 others, transported over 1,000 kilograms of cannabis from California to Maryland over two years. If convicted, he faces a sentence of up to 15 years in federal prison.
Wall, who rejected a plea deal, said, “I’m terrified of spending decades in prison, but what they say I’ve done isn’t wrong. It’s the government that’s wrong.”
Jason Flores-Williams, who represents Wall, told me, “It’s sickening. It’s not my client who should be on trial, it’s the government.”
Seth Rogen, Jay-Z, Chelsea Handler, Gwyneth Paltrow and Martha Stewart are some of the stars now hawking pot products.
“It would almost be a joke, if it weren’t so heartbreaking,” Flores-Willams said.
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Pharrell Williams has pulled the plug on a plan to bring his Something in the Water festival to Norfolk, Virginia, on April 22-23.
City officials had been excited that the singer wanted to stage the festival at various locations in Norfolk because of the millions of dollars it would have generated for the local economy.
Sources say that Williams has already made new plans to stage the festival in June at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C.
Williams originally was planning to stage this year’s festival in his hometown of Virginia Beach, but he pulled out in October because he didn’t like how the city handled the aftermath of his cousin getting shot and killed by a cop there.
Norfolk folks who were subsequently counting on him to hold the event in their fair city will not be happy to learn that he’s moving it again.
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One bright spot in the tragic Russian invasion of Ukraine is the emergence of Sarah Williamson on conservative news and opinion website Newsmax.
The Australian former model arrived in Ukraine a couple weeks before Russian troops invaded.
“When it really kicked off, we were in bed in Kyiv,” Williamson told me by phone. “We could see and hear the explosions, and a big fire at a gas depot. It was bright red in the sky.”
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Jennifer Garner chatted with supermodel Kylie Vonnahme at the premiere of “The Adam Project” at Alice Tully Hall.
The film stars Ryan Reynolds, Zoe Saldana and Mark Ruffalo in addition to Garner. Guests at the premiere included Hugh Jackman, who had the night off from his hit Broadway show “The Music Man.” The film starts streaming Friday on Netflix.
Vonnahme is known as “the ice queen” because she swims all winter in the frigid waters in front of her home in the Hamptons as part of her beauty regimen.
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Tyra Banks, John Legend and Catherine Zeta Jones are among the VIPs who have been shot by celebrity photographer Udo Spreitzenbarth. The shutterbug will have a show at Carlton Fine Arts on Madison Avenue in the spring.
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Australian pop star Samantha Jade, who won the fourth season of “The X Factor” Down Under, performed at the black tie opening of Brickworks on Fifth Avenue on Thursday.
Jade did a full concert to celebrate the company that makes designer bricks for luxury homes.
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