Klea Blackhurst to Receive Founders Day Award

Everything’s Coming Up Klea!

Klea Blackhurst to Receive Founders Day Award

Theatre alumna Klea Blackhurst will receive the Founders Day Distinguished Alumna Award on February 22, 2012, at the Little America Hotel in Salt Lake City. The award, one of the U’s highest, recognizes outstanding professional achievement and public service.

Klea is an actress, singer and comedienne who is best known for her award-winning tribute to Ethel Merman, Everything the Traffic Will Allow. Among many accolades, this production earned her the inaugural Special Achievement Award from “Time Out New York” magazine, and the recording of Everything the Traffic Will Allow was named one of the top ten show albums of 2002 by Talkin’ Broadway.com. Her Autumn in New York: Vernon Duke’s Broadway premiered at New York’s Café Carlyle, with a subsequent sold-out engagement at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater. Her most recent cabaret project, Dreaming of a Song: The Music of Hoagy Carmichael, is a collaboration with jazz pianist Billy Stritch.

Klea is currently starring as Mama Rose in Gypsyat the Drury Lane Theatre in Chicago. Klea calls it “her role of a lifetime,” which is not surprising considering her penchant for Ethel Merman, who originated the role of Mama Rose on Broadway. Considered to be one of the greatest American musicals ever written, Gypsy features music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by Arthur Laurents. Says Blackhurst,”When you’re an actress in the theater, you reach that moment in your career when you realize age and experience has you ready for the ‘Mama Rose’ years, and I think that’s a great time to be on the stage.”

Klea has performed with symphonies, orchestras, and in theatrical productions across the country and abroad, appearing in the London Palladium’s presentation of Jerry Herman’s Broadway with Angela Lansbury and as Ado Annie in the BBC Proms concert of Oklahoma! at Royal Albert Hall in London. She has sung with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, and performed at ten Mabel Mercer Foundation Cabaret Conventions, The Town Hall in New York City, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, New York’s 92nd Street Y Lyrics and Lyricists, and The Chicago Humanities Festival.

New York theatre credits include the recent revival of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Bingo, By Jupiter, Radio Gals, and Oil City Symphony. Professional regional theatre credits include Call Me Madam, Chicago, The Great American Trailer Park Musical, Red Hot and Blue, and Anything Goes.

Klea’s TV and radio appeareances include “Law and Order: SVU,” “The Rosie O’Donnell Show,” “Sesame Street” and “A Prairie Home Companion.” Currenlty, Klea plays former prosecutor and hypercritical pundit Shelby Cross on the IFC’s “Onion News Network.”

Klea’s albums are on the Ghostlight Records label and available at www.sh-k-boom.com and www.ghostlightrecords.com. She’s also featured on Jule Styne in Hollywood on PBS Classics; the original cast recordings of Bingo and Radio Gals; Lost in Boston IV, Unsung Irving Berlin, and The Best of Off Broadway.

Born to Utah actor and U Fine Arts graduate Winkie Tedesco Horman, Klea graduated from Cottonwood High School and attended the U on scholarship. At the U, she followed her mother’s footsteps onto the Pioneer Theatre Company stage, playing in Guys and Dolls and Hello Dolly, among many others. Klea received the College of Fine Arts’ Distinguished Alumna Award in 2009.

To learn more about Klea, visit her website at http://kleablackhurst.com.