Former Ridgewood resident Mike Janke and RHS alumni to paint Ridgewood’s sky for 4th of July
Tuesday July 3, 2012, 12:58 PM
BY LAURA HERZOG
STAFF WRITER
The Ridgewood News
Pages: 1 2 3 4 > display on one page | Print | E-mail
Former Ridgewood resident Mike Janke is an artist who literally paints the sky.
For about 15 years, Janke has been one of the people behind the Ridgewood Independence Day fireworks display. Formerly a private fireworks contractor, he now works with the company Fireworks Extravaganza, which has lit up the Ridgewood skies for the past four years on July 4.
“We call ourselves artists, and the sky is our canvas,” said Janke, who was raised in Ridgewood and attended Ridgewood High School.
This year, with the addition of music and timed fireworks choreography, the display promises to be more artistic than ever before.
https://www.northjersey.com/community/161228825_Fireworks_to_paint_Ridgewood_s_sky_on_Fourth_of_July.html
Did not like the music witht the fireworks at all; I think it distracted from the fireworks and and had too many dead moments while songs changed. Couldn’t the contractor find an American singer to sing “God Bless the U.S.A. (Celine Dione is Canadian)? How about a little John Philips Souza? I also thought ALL of the music should have been patriotic; it is the 4th of July, is it not? The crowd wasn’t sure if the finale was actually the finale . . . not a good thing. I thought the fireworks were a bit less extravagant than past years but I’ll still buy my ticket and send in my donation as I think the overall production is good. I thoroughly enjoyed the bands.
Kudos to the Committee for another wonderful July 4th.
Agree 100% with Anonymous’ comments above. This turned out to be the most disappointing fireworks display in Ridgewood that I’ve seen over the decades.
The fireworks themselves were beautiful, as always, but the package they were put in (with really bad, droopy sounding, s-l-o-w, non-patriotic music (Jurassic park???) totally ruined the light show, and generally I’m a great fan of music accompanying fireworks. But if you aren’t the Boston Pops or the Chicago Symphony Orchestra playing the William Tell Overture with fireworks going off at the exact time they should for the max effect, better not try! Bad bad bad choice of music. I even heard a local hound dog chorus to one of the songs.
Honestly, the whole thing was so badly done that no one knew when the finale was happening. I mean — really — if your audience has no sense that the performance is reaching or has reached a crescendo– you really directed things badly, don’t you think? We all waited another five minutes expecting more — but that more never happened.
In contrast — last year’s performance was wonderful — the best! Hope I can say the same next year.
Agree with #1 AND # 2 above. Music selection was poor, sound was not good. Audience confused by the whole thing. I thought the hearts and winking eye fireworks were cute but I came for explosive fireworks, not cute.