Two weekends ago, The Hartt School presented its annual Collage Concert: a showcase of music, dance, and theatre performance from numerous performance disciplines. Free to the public, Collage consistently sells out every year, and is Hartt's "gift to the community", giving audience members the opportunity to see the best of what Hartt has to offer. I had the pleasure of attending Collage and was truly blown away by the myriad of performances the students gave.
The setup was fairly simple. The performance took place in Lincoln Theater, which is the largest performance space(capacity wise) the University offers, and the Hartt Orchestra was onstage for the entirety of the concert. This really helped the flow of the night as a whole, creating a nice fluidity and very little jarring movements between performances.
The concert featured a fairly equal representation of performances across Hartt's three main disciplines: Dance, Music, and Theatre. Some of my favorite, and in my opinion most moving moments of the evening came from Hartt's Theatre Division students. Associate Professor Kevin Gray passed away suddenly in the week before Collage, and the students performed a moving tribute to him, with the song Bui Doi from Miss Saigon, which Kevin directed. Seniors performed a rousing rendition of One Day More from Les Miserables, made even more popular by the recent movie.
Another performance highlight came from the Vocal Studies Division, where triplets Evan, Zach, and Chase Gutierrez performed Somewhere from West Side Story. It was a beautiful and almost haunting vocal arrangement that audience members speechless.
Collage's Finale was an energetic arrangement of the Beatles' Hey Jude, arranged by Hartt's very own Mike Morris, head of Music for the Theatre Division. This number paid tribute to each act of the night by showcasing them with a solo, and then slowly coming together to form an incredibly talented ensemble.
Hartt's annual Collage Concert was a fabulous showing of the talent that is present in the Hartt School. Being witness to the numerous acts made me so proud to be a student here at Hartt.
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