Why You Can’t Get Tabernacle Choir Christmas Concert Tickets This Year

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It is the most difficult ticket in church entertainment.

Usually, people make a total of 1 million requests for tickets to attend one of the three annual Tabernacle Choir live performances at the Temple Square Christmas concert in the conference center. The building’s capacity is 21,000, so in a typical year up to 63,000 people see one of the concerts, which are filmed and then edited into a Christmas special on PBS and BYUtv.

It’s not a normal year.

On the one hand, the choir’s gradual approach to coming back from the pandemic meant officials weren’t able to plan a concert this year until October. On the other hand, there are no tickets this year. The choir will record the special Christmas 2022 PBS / BYUTv concert in front of a much smaller audience consisting only of choir family members and a small number of guests.

“We only decided to do a concert this year two months ago,” said Tabernacle Choir Music Director Mack Wilberg. “Most years we think about the next year before we actually execute the plans of the previous year.”

Audio is already in the box, but the show will be shot Thursday, Friday and Saturday with the two headliners:

• Broadway star Megan Hilty just stepped out of her appearance earlier this month on NBC’s music 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 also played Glinda the Good Witch in the Broadway production of “Wicked”.
• Award-winning actor Neal McDonough is a devout Catholic who was once fired from a network show for refusing to do sex scenes. He played Lieutenant “Buck” Compton in “Band of Brothers” and has appeared in over 100 films and nearly 1,000 hours of major television series. He won two Satellite Awards for Best Supporting Actor.

Wilberg was still writing music last week for this week’s recording. That’s why he didn’t come to New York for the press conference on 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 return to his piano to finish the music for the concert.

Mitchell told the press conference that the Tabernacle Choir typically only rehearses the songs from the Christmas concert three times. Wilberg said he had an issue with printing the music for one of the songs the choir will be filming on Friday, so the choir has only repeated that song twice.

Of course, given the strict musical requirements for joining the choir, its members are adept at picking up material quickly.

And for the record, the choir and Orchestra and Bells on Temple Square and the trumpet ensemble – nearly 500 people for the Christmas concert – are still tested for COVID-19 every time they get together, said. Scott Barrick, general manager of the choir.

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The church opens its first mission in Rwanda.

Returning missionaries can now choose to share their contact information with mission leaders in the Member Tools app.

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Nice response to a church donation of 44,000 pounds of food to Hunt County Shared Ministries / FISH, a pantry east of Dallas, Texas. FISH is named after Jesus’ miracle of feeding the 5,000 a few fish and loaves of bread. “They’re going to be blown away by this,” the pantry executive director said of 15 other pantries and agencies sourcing from FISH. The media regularly writes stories like this, but I haven’t shared one for a few months.

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In the wings

Tad Walch, Deseret News

Tad Walch, Deseret News