The word “hope” gets tossed around easily during the holidays.
It’s in the title (“Hope of The Season”) of this year’s Tabernacle Choir concert, which airs at 8 p.m. Dec. 15 and 24 on PBS and often on cable. When the concert reaches its peak — 360 voices doing Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus” — it resonates with hope and joy.
But there are deeper levels here. By coincidence, this year’s soloist (Broadway star Ruthie Ann Miles) has a daughter named Hope. “Our daughter was named after a terrible family tragedy,” she said.
In 2018, Miles was crossing the street when a driver ran a red light. She was injured; her 5-year-old daughter and her unborn child were killed.
Two years later, her daughter was born; Miles says she and her husband chose the name carefully. “We thought about what our family could look like,” she said. “What this world could and would be like.”
The concert — filmed a year ago in Salt Lake City — rippled with emotion … as did the recent press conference discussing it.
Dennis Haysbert, 71, talked about meeting Kenyan philanthropist Charles Melli and telling his story. “It was probably the most profound experience of my life.” He also described growing up in a big family that held hands during prayer.
And Miles, 42, recalled the years of working with her mother, the music director at a bilingual, Korean Christian church in Hawaii.
By 10, she was conducting the children’s choir. (“I was helping the 5-year-olds sing ‘ding dong ding dong.'”) Soon, she was playing multiple instruments or stepping into the choir. When not needed during rehearsal, “I would be doing my homework in the pews.”
Then she went to the mainland for college and a career in acting (she was the judge’s assistant in CBS’ “All Rise”) and, especially, in musicals. Mile has been off-Broadway often, winning a Theatre World award for playing Imelda Marcos; she’s done four Broadway shows, winning a Tony in “The King and I” and a nomination in “Sweeney Todd.”
Now comes a consummate music experience — being backed by a 100-plus-piece orchestra and those 360 singers.
It’s an all-volunteer chorus, conductor Mack Wilberg said, rehearsing once a week and doing a weekly broadcast plus the annual Christmas show. “We also have to do everything by memory.”
That’s in a 21,000 seat theater — more than 10 times the capacity of anything on Broadway. “I had never seen a theater like that,” Haysbert said.
He has a voice that fits the supersized settings. Large and deep, it was ideal for his presidential role in “24” and for reading Luke’s account of the nativity.
“I never knew what kind of voice I had, growing up, because all the men in my family had this voice,” Hasbert said. “I just knew, at 10 years old, what I wanted to do,” which was to be an actor.
That’s the age when Miles was conducting the kids’ choir. She’s gone on to a life of success, setbacks and hope.
When she was young, she said, “hope was something sparkly and beautiful.”
Now it’s much more:
“Hope is something that goes deep in your heart, when it’s really dark and you’re looking for a single strand ….That’s what hope means to me and what my daughter is to me and what I hope the audience gets from this.”
Tabernacle concert
— On PBS, 8-9:30 p.m., Dec. 15 and 24.
— On BYUtv cable channel, 8 p.m. ET Dec. 18, 6:30 p.m. Dec. 21, 6:30 p.m. Dec. 24, 10:30 a.m. Dec. 25.
— On the streaming channels for both.
— Last year’s telecast, with Michael Maliakel and Lesley Nicol, will rerun at 8 p.m. ET Dec. 11 on BYUtv, which has a rich assortment of other concerts, new and reruns.