Auditorium Theatre 2019-2020 Too Hot - Jazz-Gospel Messiah

6 | TOO HOT TO HANDEL | JANUARY 18+19, 2020 BRINGING TOO HOT TO CHICAGO Celebrating 15 Years of Too Hot to Handel: The Jazz-Gospel Messiah in Chicago! Too Hot to Handel: The Jazz-Gospel Messiah had its Chicago premiere at the Auditorium Theatre in 2006. It was not the first time selections from this landmark jazz-gospel arrangement of Handel’s Messiah had been heard in the city. Bill Fraher, the music director at Old St. Patrick’s Church, was impressed with the power and emotion of the unique jazz-gospel arrangement when he attended a performance of Too Hot in New York City in 1998 starring Rodrick Dixon (a featured soloist in the Chicago production). In 2000, Fraher subsequently introduced and directed several Too Hot pieces at the Old St. Patrick’s Church annual Christmas concert, Deck the Hall . When the Auditorium Theatre hired Brett Batterson as its new Executive Director in 2004, Batterson knew there were certain shows he had been involved with at the Michigan Opera Theatre in Detroit that he wanted to produce in Chicago. Chief among them was Too Hot . Immediately upon landing in the city, he contacted his friends Rodrick Dixon and Alfreda Burke and began discussing bringing the show to the Auditorium. In addition, he contacted his former Detroit colleague, conductor Suzanne Mallare Acton, and brought her on board for the Chicago production. Knowing how enthusiastic Batterson was about Too Hot , Dixon introduced Batterson to Fraher and suggested Fraher serve as the director of the Too Hot choir in Chicago. Batterson and Fraher hit it off immediately and the connection between the Auditorium and Old St. Patrick’s was forged. Acton suggested bringing in some members of the Rackham Symphony Choir (RSC), the choir she led in Detroit, as they would already be familiar with the difficult music. Fraher also auditioned local Chicagoans, as he continues to do today, in order to create the volunteer all-city Too Hot Choir that performs with the RSC. “[The Messiah ] is a great story, but I also think that it requires some kind of audience participation. It becomes an active listening experience when you’re allowed to stand up or clap your hands,” said Too Hot co-creator and original conductor Marin Alsop, who wanted to turn the performance into a participatory event. The creative team of Alsop, Gary Anderson, and Bob Christianson, who created this gospel and jazz adaptation of the Messiah in 1992, decided their version would encompass jazz, gospel, rock, and funk — to “break the classical sound barrier.” The result is a swinging performance of the traditional oratorio. Acton suggests that audiences listen for the basic melodic and harmonic outlines of Handel’s original composition that co-arrangers Christianson and Anderson creatively highlighted and reinvented by using scat, back beats, jazz and gospel vocals, instrumental improvisation, and the walking bass line played by the bass soloist. The recitatives, with their improvisatory style in Messiah, have been expanded to shout-and- response improvisations over a gospel organ and piano accompaniment. The use of the drum set is actually a natural progression from the metrical music of Messiah . The result is that Too Hot , with its jazz and gospel elements, acts as a modern day musical tribute to the original work by introducing a new generation to Handel’s masterpiece. The final piece of the puzzle in bringing Too Hot to Chicago fell to the leadership of the Auditorium Theatre. Led by at the time by then Chairman Mel Katten, the Auditorium Theatre Board of Directors was asked by Batterson to invest money in a totally unknown project and to commit to that investment over a number of years while the audience grew (as Batterson, Dixon, Burke, Fraher, and Acton knew it would). Katten and the Board made that leap of faith, and Too Hot was launched in Chicago to honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on a cold, snowy weekend in 2006. Now, thanks to the continued support of Auditorium Theatre Board and staff, Too Ho t celebrates its 15 th anniversary in Chicago. We are proud to present today’s performance, and we know you will leave the theatre singing and swaying, like everyone who has experienced Too Hot before you. Article courtesy of the Auditorium Theatre, Rackham Symphony Choir, and Chicago’s Old St. Patrick’s Church.