I can’t rave enough about the Harvard Pops, and last night’s concert may have been the best since Pops Gets Cursed in 2006, which got huge points for introducing me to Wicked.
Sammi Biegler, whom you can watch on YouTube singing Mack the Knife from last year’s Pops Jumps the Shark concert, even came back after graduating (as Pops members are wont to do) to portray The Rules in the game of Risk.
They put to excellent use Ernst Toch’s Geographical Fugue (performed there by a different group), and I declare here that Larry O’Keefe’s short opera The Magic Futon, which the Pops commissioned and premiered four years ago, knows no rival. Of course, you’d only be able to judge for yourself if you attended the concert.
Let that be a lesson: attend the next one. (Then you’d also know that the title of this post is probably my favorite lyric from the show.)