When you think of doo-wop music, names like The Shirelles, Five Keys, the Duprees, Dion and the Belmonts and the Bel-Airs come to mind.
But Jason Mraz? Adele? Michael Jackson? Maroon 5?
If you’re the Doo Wop Project, five guys moonlighting from their roles in any number of Broadway musicals, the American Top 40 Countdown is fair game for “doo-wopifying.”
“We take ubiquitous songs from pop culture like Jason Mraz’s ‘I’m Yours’ or Michael Jackson or Amy Winehouse and we kind of make them into doo-wop songs,” said Dominic Nolfi, one of two Dominics — the other is Dominic Scaglione Jr. — who came up with the idea of the Doo Wop Project.
“We look at pop songs that we call ‘modern classics,’ that we think will stand the test of time, that are part of the pop lexicon,” added Charl Brown (“Motown the Musical,’ “Jersey Boys”). “We start with the melody line, then, like the guys did back in the day, we’ll start in someone’s living room or off in a car even driving to our gigs, and we’ll throw in some doo-wop harmonies, some oohs and ahhhs and stuff onto it.”
Doo-wopified.
Expect to hear some examples when the Doo Wop Project brings its show to the Fox Tucson Theatre on Friday, Feb. 22.
And expect to have fun, Brown said.
“That’s the great thing about this project. Generally, we all have fun with each other on and off stage,” he said.
This will be the first time in its seven years that Doo Wop Project — Nolfi, Brown, Scaglione, Russell Fischer and Dwayne Cooper — will perform in Tucson. We are on the early leg of the group’s tour that takes it across the country through May.
That wasn’t exactly what the group, under the musical direction of Santino Paladino, had planned when Nolfi and Scaglione first started in 2012. They imagined doing 40, maybe 50 shows when they weren’t in Broadway productions.
“What we didn’t realize was that we could do 80 to 100, which is where we are now,” Nolfi said during a phone interview with Brown.
“As actors we’re always looking for other avenues to support ourselves,” Brown said. “This was a side gig that turned into a gig-gig and has grown beyond what we first imagined for it.”
In addition to standard doo-wop fare, expect to hear the Doo Wop Project perform doo-wopified versions of Motown hits, songs from Broadway’s “Jersey Boys” and their doo-wop take on the Broadway classic “The Impossible Dream.”
Brown said that when the quintet takes the Fox Tucson stage on Friday and they find that sweet spot when the harmonies are tight and their voices blend and their vibratos begin to match, “That, to me, is pure magic because that’s something that none of us can do on our own.”
“When we harmonize like that … to me it’s spiritual,” he said.
