The New York Pops’ 37th season opening concert, at Carnegie Hall, under Music Director and Conductor Steven Reineke’s knowing baton, featured welcome guest artist from Broadway, film, and television Jeremy Jordan in a program billed as “One Night Only: Jeremy Jordan.”
The evening started on an unusual, but not inappropriate note, with the celebratory fanfares and anticipatory flavor of Dmitri Shostakovich’s “Festive Overture.” Jordan introduced himself by conveying excitement—and an apt touch of apprehensiveness?—in a beautifully sung “Something’s Coming,” by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, from “West Side Story,” in Larry Blank’s arrangement, followed by Joe Iconis’ “Broadway, Here I Come!,” from TV’s “Smash,” with eagerness, but, suitably, without the swagger of the previous song, as arranged by Charlie Rosen and orchestrated by Sam Shoup, and Sara Bareilles’ “She Used to Be Mine,” from “Waitress,” in Reineke’s adaptation, quiet and sincere, the singer unfazed by its highest phrases. Reineke and the Pops offered, as an insistently seductive orchestral interlude, Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine,” in Ralph Hermann’s arrangement.
Jordan took on two Rodgers and Hammerstein favorites: a new father of a daughter, he looked at Billy Bigelow’s very different view of such a situation, in the Soliloquy from “Carousel,” orchestrated by Don Walker, giving a virtuoso account of the tour-de-force, and brought a swinging contemporaneity to “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’,” from “Okahoma!,” as arranged by Benjamin Rauhala, with Lee Musiker at the piano. Jordan probed Oscar-winning standards in a medley arranged by Johnny Mandel for Andy Williams: Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster’s “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing;” Ray Evans and Jay Livingston’s “Mona Lisa;” Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer’s “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe;” Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn’s “All the Way,” going up the octave in the penultimate line; and Henry Mancini and Mercer’s “Moon River,” ending on a triumphant high note.
The Pops’ rousing pairing of “At the End of the Day” and “Do You Hear the People Sing,” from Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil’s “Les Misérables,” in Reineke’s arrangement, introduced the haunting and high “Bring Him Home,” by Schönberg, Herbert Kretzmer, and Boublil, sung with refinement, with much of it in head tone, by Jordan. The singer gave us a hot “Moving Too Fast,” from Jason Robert Brown’s “The Last Five Years,” arranged and newly orchestrated by Brown, which he followed with his own “Undertow,” a lament inspired by the loss of a wedding ring in the water at the beach, as arranged by Rauhala and orchestrated by Adam Podd.
Jordan and spouse Ashley Spencer, both of whom performed in “Rock of Ages,” though not at the same time, collaborated on a rocking mash-up of Gary Cherone and Nuno Bettencourt’s “More Than Words” and Jani Lane’s “Heaven,” orchestrated by Ethan Popp. The Pops followed with a spirited medley of Alan Menken’s songs from “Hercules,” “Tangled,” “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” “Enchanted,” “Little Shop of Horrors,” “Newsies,” “Aladdin,” television’s “Galavant,” “The Little Mermaid,” “Pocahontas,” and “Beauty and the Beast.” Long associated with the role of Jack Kelly in “Newsies,” Jordan concluded with a rapturous “Santa Fe,” ode to a dreamed-of city, by Menken and Jack Feldman, adapted by Reineke.
For an encore, Jordan and Spencer offered a medley of favorite duets from musicals: “Our Children,” by Ahrens and Flaherty, from “Ragtime;” “Follow Your Heart,” by Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis, from “Urinetown;” “As Long as You’re Mine,” by Stephen Schwartz, from “Wicked;” “Come What May,” from “Moulin Rouge,” by David Baerwald and Kevin Gilbert; and the ever-popular “Suddenly Seymour,” from “Little Shop of Horrors,” by Menken and Howard Ashman.
The New York Pops returns to Carnegie Hall on December 20 and 21, remembering Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald with “A Frank and Ella Christmas,” with Tony DeSare, Capathia Jenkins, and Judith Clurman’s Essential Voices USA. Visit www.newyorkpops.org for further information. At its April 27, 2020 Gala, Reineke announced, the Pops will honor Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez (“Frozen,” “Avenue Q,” “Book of Mormon”).