On a current Thursday at Mickey’s Downtown Bistro, two males in enterprise fits determined to place the “duel” in “dueling pianos.” They sipped wine and slapped $50 payments on the newborn grand in a fierce bidding conflict to listen to the higher basic: “Edge of Seventeen” or “Landslide.”
Within a half-hour, $500 materialized in entrance of pianists Alissa Musto and Leon Novembre on the dim, stage-lit Lauderdale-by-the-Sea spot, their faces bathed in bouncing circles of greens and blues. Novembre turned to Musto, eyebrows raised, and quipped into the microphone, “Hey, why not play both?”
“People get a couple of drinks in them, you’d be amazed how picky they get with the music,” she says. “It’s all in good fun. This place is set up for crowd interaction.”
After a decade with out them, dueling piano bars are as soon as again tickling the ivories in South Florida. Mickey’s Downtown Bistro — with dueling-piano reveals from Thursdays by Sundays — is the primary such bar in the tricounty space in practically a decade, filling a void left by bygone haunts corresponding to Howl on the Moon at Fort Lauderdale’s Beach Place and 88′s Dueling Pianos at Seminole Hard Rock Hollywood. Mickey’s debuted April 28, with a grand-opening social gathering scheduled for Fourth of July weekend.
Not far behind, dueling-piano chain Howl on the Moon is about to stage a Fort Lauderdale comeback in summer season 2023. It will open downtown at 600 SE Second Court inside a to-be-constructed, 5,000-square-foot venue behind Big City Tavern on Las Olas Boulevard, says Bradd O’Brien, president of Howl on the Moon.
At Mickey’s, the Mediterranean-accented Italian steakhouse is the brainchild of chef-owner Mickey Josephs and his brother, Moti, two Israeli restaurateurs who ran an identical dueling-piano eatery in Hamden, Conn., till the pandemic killed that 15-year-old enterprise.
“It got to be too expensive there, what with the 25% occupancy and shutdowns,” explains Mickey Josephs, who scouted storefronts from St. Augustine to Sarasota earlier than touchdown in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea. “But life went on in Florida, it was open. I realized we were in the wrong state.”
The Pompano Beach resident and chef, who went to culinary faculty in Connecticut however realized Mediterranean cooking from his mom, says he needed his delicacies to characterize a greater class of dueling-piano bar. He additionally dropped about $200,000 for state-of-the-art sound tools, together with stage lighting and wall insulation.
Because dueling piano reveals get loud, soundproofing the bar from the remainder of the neighborhood —together with residential neighbors in the residences above Mickey’s — was key.
“There’s 6 inches of insulation above the ceilings,” he says of the room’s acoustics. “They haven’t complained to us yet.”
The electrical energy of a dueling-piano present, in fact, is fueled by ideas and alcohol. Customers jot down first and second tune selections on paper slips and go away them on the piano. If somebody ideas $5 for Elton John however a Neil Diamond fan slips $10 to the pianist, then “Piano Man” is out and “Sweet Caroline” is in. (That is, till it’s overridden by a $20 plea for Three Dog Night barnstormer “Joy to the World.”)
Dueling-piano reveals have developed in current years, says Brad Alexander, founding father of the Flying Ivories, a New York-based community of dueling pianists. (Mickey’s completely makes use of Flying Ivories musicians.) Shows have softened the bawdy intercourse jokes, onstage comedy bits and misogynistic humor that used to dominate the style, he says — an indication of rising sensitivity after the #MeToo period.
“Some of that bawdy humor doesn’t fly with today’s audiences,” says Alexander, who started enjoying dueling-piano reveals in New York in 2001. “But depending on the night, maybe you’ll get dirty lyric parodies of Disney songs. Our musicians not only have to memorize thousands of songs but know how to work an audience.”
When Howl on the Moon debuts subsequent yr in Fort Lauderdale, the format can be completely different from that of Mickey’s, O’Brien says. Howl on the Moon will take fewer tune requests, he says, relying extra on a preprogrammed setlist backed by a full band: two pianists, a drummer, a bassist and two guitarists.
“Our concept now is based around all music from all decades, from rap to hip-hop to metal to the classics,” O’Brien says. “There’s no bits, no joking vulgar humor list we did in the past. Las Olas needs quality nightlife energy and we’re the ones to bring it.”