It probably takes a lot to thrill a Tony-winning singer-actor whom The New York Times once dubbed “the last leading man,” but Broadway star Brian Stokes Mitchell admits he was really excited to be part of “Christmas With the Mormon Tabernacle Choir Featuring Brian Stokes Mitchell and Edward Hermann,” a one-hour holiday concert premiering Wednesday, Dec. 16, on PBS (check local listings — many affiliates also will air a Christmas Eve encore of the telecast).
That’s partly because this choir was a big part of Christmas as Mitchell was growing up in San Diego, he says.
“We always had music in the house, although my parents weren’t musicians,” he recalls. “One of my mother’s favorite albums at Christmas was ‘Christmas With the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.’ I can still see the album cover in my mind, because it was always one of the Christmas albums we would play while we were opening the gifts.
“Remember the old stereos with the spindles, and you would stack the LPs, and they would thump down as each one finished, and then you would flip the whole stack over? That’s what we had. My dad was an electronics engineer, and he actually built our stereo, so we always had the best hi-fi in the neighborhood because he was such an audiophile. I always loved Christmas music. It’s just beautiful, and it was really exciting to do this show with the choir and this amazing 90-piece orchestra, I might add.”
The telecast, which includes former “Gilmore Girls” star Hermann reading “The Christmas Story,” features musical numbers from Mitchell and the choir including “Once in Royal David’s City,” “Sleigh Ride,” “I Saw Three Ships,” “Hallelujah” from Handel’s “Messiah” and “The Friendly Beasts,” in an arrangement that especially pleases Mitchell.
“Mack Wilberg (the conductor) and I both liked that song, and we both wanted to do something that hadn’t been done before,” Mitchell says. “I liked it because of the possibility to act it and to vocally become each of the characters. He did this brilliant arrangement expanding on that concept, and in between each character — the donkey and sheep, etc. — he has the choir singing donkey or bird sounds, whatever, but it’s all just incredibly musical and very clever and subtle. I think it turned out exactly like we both had envisioned it could.”
Also on the program is a striking arrangement by Mitchell himself of Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” adapted from an earlier arrangement he had done for an intimate concert in a New York cabaret, backed only by guitar, six-string bass and percussion.
“I sketched out another arrangement having the choir do what the guitar was doing in that earlier concert,” Mitchell explains. “It’s an a cappella thing, with me doing a vocalise on top of them, and I sing it in a very high soprano voice you wouldn’t normally hear. It’s a joyous song, and yet it’s almost somber the way it originally was written by Bach, and I wanted to make it more joyful and fun.”
The Mormon Tabernacle Choir concert, already available on CD and DVD, is one of two passion projects Mitchell has in stores this holiday season. The other is an alphabet book, “Lights on Broadway: A Theatrical Tour From A to Z” by children’s author Harriet Ziefert. A portion of the proceeds from the book benefits The Actors Fund; Mitchell is the organization’s current president.
“It’s the perfect book, because I always talk about how as theater artists, all these disparate disciplines come together miraculously every night, and everyone does the job flawlessly,” Mitchell says. “Elliot Kreloff did a spectacular job with the art, and it made me realize that all these people from A to Z are the ones that allow a show to go on. They asked me to write the introduction, and I was so excited that I couldn’t turn my head off, and I wrote … what became the Z entry, and then I wrote a postscript.”
The book also comes with a CD of Mitchell performing “I Was Here” by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, the lyricist and composer behind “Ragtime,” one of Mitchell’s first Broadway smashes.
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