Two-time Tony award winner and Broadway star Norbert Leo Butz is the seventh of eleven children who grew up in St. Louis. In 2009, his younger sister Teresa, the ninth in the family, was brutally raped and murdered in her Seattle home. Her partner Jennifer Hopper, a conservatory-trained vocalist, was also attacked but survived. Soon after the horrific event, a group of Jennifer and Teresa’s musician friends and three generations of Teresa’s family made an album whose proceeds benefitted the Voices and Faces Project, a national organization created to give voice and fact to rape survivors.
Following the album’s success, the Angel Band Project was founded in St. Louis. Co-founder Rachel Ebeling says “the mission is to help survivors of sexual violence and to change the way society thinks about this issue through the transformative power of music.” Norbert Leo Butz remembers that “music was really the thing that helped us put the pieces back together.”
Butz is currently in Chicago playing in Big Fish before it moves on to Broadway. He returns to St. Louis to headline two concerts to benefit the Angel Band Project. Says Butz, “The program features songs that celebrate Teresa including songs that she would have loved and some songs that we know she would love and other songs that just evoke her spirit.”
The first of the concerts scheduled for Wednesday, May 8 completely sold out, so a second one was added on Thursday, May 9 at 7:30 p.m. at the 560 Music Center in University City.
Norbert Leo Butz and Rachel Ebeling were Steve Potter’s guests on Cityscape to talk about the Angel Band Project and the benefit concert.
Related Event
The Angel Band Project Presents "An Evening with Norbert Leo Butz"
Thursday, May 9, 2013
7:30 p.m.
560 Music Center, 560 Trinity Ave.
(314) 534-1111
Metro Tix Website
