Tipton.
Conductor Chelsea Tipton, standing before the New Haven Symphony Orchestra in Woolsey Hall on Thursday night, rubbed his hand over his bald scalp.
“Sorry about my hair,” he said, “it’s kind of overblown.”
It was a fitting beginning to “Wicked Divas,” a Valentine’s Day concert in the symphony’s pops series that found the orchestra collaborating with the Connecticut Gay Men’s Chorus and vocalists Alli Mauzey and Julia Murney to present a program that ranged from Leonard Bernstein to Chicago to Titanic to — as the title implied — the Broadway musical of Wicked. But even the banter in between the selections showed the program’s light heart.
Mauzey.
The program started with a fleet run through the overture to Leonard Bernstein’s opera Candide — easily the most challenging piece on the program and possibly its most successful, with the composer’s genius for writing complex yet deeply affecting music on full display. It brought the audience to attention for a quick jaunt through some much more well-known selections from Georges Bizet’s Carmen, which gave Tipton another chance for humor. In between movements, when the audience began to clap, Tipton turned around and shook his head violently, wagging a finger at the audience in a perfect mockery of someone taking offense and shushing the crowd. It drew a laugh, and then the appropriate silence for Tipton to begin the Habanera, which Tipton had already described as “a kind of dipping sauce.” At the end, he turned and nodded vigorously: now clap. The audience did.
Tipton then counted aloud — “five, six, seven, eight!” — to began the main portion of the first half of the program, launching into “And All That Jazz” from the Kander and Ebb musical Chicago to introduce Mauzey, Murney, and the Gay Men’s Chorus. Is Woolsey Hall maybe a little too echoey for material like this? No matter: orchestra and singers and audience were game. Mauzey and Murney, both seasoned professionals, also effectively emceed the evening, introducing the chorus, dressed in tuxedos with red sequined vests and ties, as “the extraordinarily handsome group of gentlemen over here.”
Murney.
Then Mauzey turned to Murney. “I actually have the first solo, so I need you to — ” she gestured Murney offstage, a perfect mockery of the stereotype of the diva. Murney returned to the stage to join Mauzey for “Good Morning Baltimore,” from Hairspray. As the chorus was leaving the stage to give Murney space, she feigned offense: “Really, gentlement? That’s it? OK, bye!”
Murney then introduced “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” from Funny Girl, as having been made famous by a certain singer. “She was 20 years old, and her name was Barbra Streisand — and she’s here tonight!” She paused. “Just kidding. Can you imagine?” Her reverence for Streisand was clear, but she and the orchestra did the song proud.
After a spirited romp through “76 Trombones” from The Music Man, the Gay Men’s Chorus drew appreciative smiles with a wink-wink, nudge-nudge rendition of Frank Loesser’s “Standing On the Corner,” with its cheeky lyric “standing on the corner / watching all the girls go by.” The first act ended with a tear through Kander and Ebb’s “Ring Them Bells” from Mauzey and then everyone joining in for “You Can’t Stop the Beat,” also from Hairspray.
“Want to dance?” Mauzey said to the crowd. “Do it.”
The second act then exploded with an orchestral rendition of Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” — sorry, the overture to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Phantom of the Opera” — which set the stage for a foray into a series of ballads that felt good in the hall but lacked some of the snap of the first act. The Gay Men’s Chorus’s take on “Seasons of Love” from Jonathan Larson’s Rent picked things up quickly, however, as did the chorus’s moving rendition of “I Am What I Am” from La Cage Aux Folles.
The show then ended with Mauzey and Murney laying true claim to the show’s title by performing three songs from the musical Wicked, in which they performed on Broadway; Mauzey and Murney have, in fact, been performing these songs together with symphonies around the country for several years. So these were their strongest numbers yet, and the song “Defying Gravity” allowed Murney the chance to reveal what happened when a particular effect in Wicked — in which her character, Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, is supposed to fly at the end of the show’s first act — failed. According to direction, there was a Plan B, which she had to execute once onstage, extracting herself tactfully from a harness while proceeding to the front of the stage, rather than flying over it. Similarly, the crowd gathered onstage, who normally gawked at the actor flying overhead, instead lay down around her.
“Here, in Woolsey Hall, I also will not be flying,” Murney said, to laughter. She invited us, similarly, to lie down around her.
Connecticut Gay Men’s Chorus.
An encore in the form of a song from The Lion King brought everyone back on stage again. All in all, enough fun was had that it was almost toward the end of the first act when Tipton seemed to remember the occasion for the concert.
“I don’t think it has been acknowledged,” he said. “Happy Valentine’s Day!”
For information on the upcoming concerts in the rest of the symphony’s 2019 season, visit its website here.
