Those who have worked with him, along with a bevy of critics, all agree — BSO Principal Pops Conductor Jack Everly is the king of themed programming.
Thursday at Strathmore, he adds another gem to the crown with his latest offering, “Do You Hear the People Sing?: Miss Saigon to Les Miserables.”
“Jack puts together these marvelous programs where he talks to the audience and draws the connection between the last piece [performed] and the next piece, giving us a background on where each song fits in the original production,” said Tom Hall, director of the Baltimore Choral Arts Society. He is preparing 120 of his singers to make what he calls “a joyful noise” alongside the orchestra in the rendering of such classics as “Land of Our Fathers” and “I Dreamed a Dream.”
| Onstage |
| ‘Do You Hear the People Sing?: Miss Saigon to Les Miserables’ |
| » Where: Strathmore, 5301 Tuckerman Lane, North Bethesda |
| » When: 8 p.m. Thursday |
| » Info: $34 to $98; 410-783-8000; bsomusic.org |
Indeed, this program pays tribute to the music of two of the world’s most prolific writers of contemporary musical theater, Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg.
BSO, Baltimore Choral Arts Society and vocalists Peter Lockyer, Terrence Mann, Jennifer Paz, Kathy Voytko and Marie Zamora also perform selections from the award-winning team’s shows “Martin Guerre,” “The Pirate Queen” and “La Revolution Francaise.”
“Miss Saigon” is a modern rendition of Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly.” In Boublil and Schonberg’s version, a GI and a Vietnamese bar girl fall in love, even as they deal with war, family and death.
Other songs include “The American Dream,” “On My Own,” “Bring Him Home” and, as a finale, “Do You Hear the People Sing?” All are completely new arrangements of these classics and new to the Baltimore Choral Arts Society, whose members always look forward to learning new arrangements, especially when they work with Everly at the helm.
“He’s encyclopedic about this genre of the American musical theater,” Hall continued. “There isn’t a better expert out there, always telling folks about it in an entertaining and compelling way. By the time the program is over, you feel you’ve been on a wonderful musical journey.”
While these Broadway masterpieces are not as well-known as some of the great musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein or Lerner and Lowe, in terms of contemporary theater, these are among the biggest works to light up stages in the past 30 years.
“My expectation is that the audiences are really going to have a good time, with a big chorus and a big orchestra,” Hall noted. “By transplanting this music to a concert setting, this is the kind of thing that you don’t even really see on Broadway.”
