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It’s the toughest ticket in church entertainment.
Usually, people make a total of 1 million ticket requests to attend one of the three live performances of the annual Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square Christmas Concert in the Conference Center. The building’s capacity is 21,000, so in a normal year up to 63,000 people see one of the concerts, which are filmed and then edited to become a Christmas special broadcast on PBS and BYUtv.
This is no normal year.
For one thing, the choir’s phased approach to returning from the pandemic meant officials weren’t able to plan on a concert this year until October. For another, there are no tickets this year. The choir will tape the 2022 PBS/BYUtv Christmas concert special in front of a far smaller live audience made up only of family members of the choir and a small number of invited guests.
“We didn’t decide to do a concert this year until two months ago,” Tabernacle Choir music director Mack Wilberg said. “Most years, we think about the next year before we’ve actually executed the plans for the year before.”
Some audio is already in the can, but the show will be filmed Thursday, Friday and Saturday with the two headliners:
- Broadway star Megan Hilty is fresh off her appearance earlier this month in NBC’s musical special “Annie Live!” She was nominated for a Tony Award for best actress in a Broadway show in 2016, when she won the Broadway.com audience award in that category. She has also played Glinda the Good Witch in the Broadway production of “Wicked.”
- Award-winning actor Neal McDonough is a devout Catholic who once was fired from a network show for refusing to do sex scenes. He played Lt. “Buck” Compton in “Band of Brothers” and has appeared in over 100 films and almost 1,000 hours of major television dramas. He won has two Satellite Awards for best supporting actor.
Wilberg was still writing music last week for this week’s taping. That’s why he didn’t travel to New York for the news conference about the choir’s $100,000 donation to the Actors Fund. Instead, he joined a panel discussion by Zoom. At the end of the call, Tony Award winner Brian Stokes Mitchell encouraged Wilberg to get back to his piano to finish the concert music.
Mitchell told the news conference that the Tabernacle Choir usually only rehearses the Christmas concert songs three times. Wilberg said he had a problem with getting the music printed for one of the songs the choir will film on Friday, so the choir rehearsed that song just twice.
Of course, given the stringent musical requirements for joining the choir, its members are adept at picking up material quickly.
And for the record, the choir and the Orchestra and Bells on Temple Square and trumpet ensemble — nearly 500 people for the Christmas concert — still are tested for COVID-19 every time they get together, said Scott Barrick, the choir’s general manager.
My recent stories
Church finishes General Handbook update, completing two-year project (Dec. 15)
Helping Hands, Latter-day Saint Charities prepare to help tornado victims (Dec. 14)
2 suspects arrested in shooting of Latter-day Saint missionary in Alabama meetinghouse (Dec. 14)
Salt Lake Temple renovation project to be completed in 2025 (Dec. 13)
What I’m reading
President Dallin H. Oaks rededicated the Mesa Arizona Temple on Sunday.
A young sister missionary survived the eye of a tornado during the deadly storm last Friday night.
First Elder Quentin L. Cook spoke at Oxford about British history’s “precious precursors” to America’s key religious liberty documents. Then President Oaks spoke at a university in Rome about why religious freedom is “a fundamental feature of our religious doctrine” and that it blesses society. One noteworthy example he shared is that Latter-day Saint “volunteers donated over 6 million hours of labor in our welfare and humanitarian projects, not counting missionary service and what our members did privately.”
The church is opening its first mission in Rwanda.
Returned missionaries now can choose to share their contact info with mission leaders in member tools app.
It’s the Christmas season and if you like Nativity scenes, check out this nice photo gallery of a broad array of small Nativity scenes hosted by a Latter-day Saint congregation in Oklahoma. Thanks to Tulsa World for posting the photo story.
Nice reaction to a donation by the church of 44,000 pounds of food to Hunt County Shared Ministries/FISH, a food pantry east of Dallas, Texas. FISH is named after Jesus’ miracle of feeding the 5,000 with a few fishes and loaves of bread. “They are going to be blown away by this,” the pantry’s executive director said of 15 other food pantries and agencies that draw supplies from FISH. News outlets regularly write stories like this, but I haven’t shared one in a few months.
New data shows an unfortunate trend toward Americans watching more cable news and opinion now than they did five years ago. Hat tip to my colleague Jennifer Graham for including this data in her story about the cable news departures of Chris Wallace and Brian Williams.
I found an interesting analysis of how good Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens might have been if they hadn’t allegedly taken performance-enhancing substances. They both were locks to have Hall of Fame careers without them, but many baseball analysts believe their careers were prolonged with them. This analysis shares one computer model’s idea of how many home runs Bonds was expected to hit and how many games Clemens was expected win after their alleged enhancement.
How Latter-day Saint teens in Texas made their own giving machine to help Afghan refugees.
Behind the scenes
While I was in New York City last week, I stopped by the church’s Giving Machines across the street from the Rockefeller Center’s Christmas tree and ice rink.
Tad Walch, Deseret News
Items 150-58 in the church’s Giving Machines at Rockefeller Center allow users to purchase donations to the Actors Fund as shown in this photo on Dec. 8, 2021, in New York City.
Tad Walch, Deseret News
The Rockefeller Center Christmas tree is shown on Dec. 8, 2021, in New York City.
Tad Walch, Deseret News