Show Times

• May 11, 2024 7:30 pm

Ticket Prices

$39.50 plus fees

About The Show

“I was in a long-distance relationship with music for many years,” jokes songwriter Vienna Teng. “Now we’re finally moving back in together.” Long-distance, perhaps, but long-running.

In 2002, Vienna released her debut album Waking Hour, landing her on NPR’s Weekend Edition, The Late Show with David Letterman, and the top of Amazon’s music charts. Four more albums followed, most recently Aims in 2013, which became the first album to win four Independent Music Awards. She also composed the music for The Fourth Messenger by playwright Tanya Shaffer, which premiered in 2013 and was a featured production in the 2017 New York Musical Theater Festival.

Still, other pursuits have always beckoned. A computer science major before she was a recording artist, Vienna is a nerd at heart, as comfortable in spreadsheets as the spotlight. She returned to academia in 2010 to study environmental sustainability, which led to a new career working on climate change, energy and waste issues. She also became a bonus parent to her partner’s two kids, and in early 2020 welcomed a newborn addition to the family – just in time for pandemic lockdown.

In 2022, she launched a “music x climate action” community on Patreon, combining monthly livestream shows and recording studio updates with Zoom climate action sessions, as well as working one-on-one with patrons on their own climate projects.

On the road, she’s started hosting workshops between concerts, bringing members of her audience together to share knowledge and take real steps for climate – events that participants have described as “life-changing,” “rocket fuel,” and “the perfect antidote to despair.”

The long-distance phase is over. Now it’s time for communion – and moving forward.

Opening Act:
Jean Rohe writes one-of-a-kind narrative songs, concerned as much with the interior lives of her narrators as with the wider world outside them. Jean recently won the 2022 Kerrville Folk Festival New Folk songwriting contest with her deeply personal and timely song “Animal”. Her latest full-length record as a bandleader, Sisterly, produced by longtime collaborator Liam Robinson, won best Adult Contemporary Album at the Independent Music Awards in 2019.

A prolific songwriter, Jean is perhaps best known for her video single, “National Anthem: Arise! Arise!” an aspirational alternative national anthem performed live with brass ensemble and choir, which has now been covered hundreds of times by soloists and choirs across the US. Her co-write with Liam Robinson, “The Longest Winter” was featured on the 2020 Hadestown cast holiday album. Her award-winning 2013 debut release, Jean Rohe & The End of the World Show, was hailed by an Elmore Magazine reviewer as “enchanting” and “remarkable in so many ways I can think of no comparison.”

Woodbridge Township presents Vienna Teng at The Avenel Performing Arts Center with support from Woodbridge Arts.

Story Brief