Gay Men’s Chorus Turns 20 in Show Spiced With Variety

When the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles hit the local music scene, it arrived on the heels of gay consciousness of the ‘70s and before the dark years of the AIDS epidemic. Twenty years later, the chorus is a mainstay in the area’s musical landscape, and, via touring and recording, has helped promulgate the gay chorus phenomenon elsewhere in the world.

The group, which used to perform at Hollywood High School, celebrated its big 2-0 in the more ornate digs of the Alex Theatre in Glendale, with performances on Friday and Saturday of a variety show called “Seasons of Our Lives: The 20th Anniversary Concert.” Variety was the spice, and the limitation, in a program that willfully swerved from pithy classical works, anthemic pop ditties, musical theater tributes to Stephen Sondheim and Cole Porter, and, to quote managing director Peter Massey, “the campy delight of gay satire.”

In the satire department, the show was stolen by a hilarious bit closing the concert’s first half. A group of mute choristers in monk’s garb “performed” Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus with a crisply timed display of flash cards. Shtick ruled.

The chorus is a generally strong organization, led since 1987 by artistic director Jon Bailey, that knows how to put on a show and how to bask in the emotion of its extra-musical agenda. Scattershot programming doesn’t help sustain coherency, though.

Brief forays through the classical stuff of Faure, Wagner, and Tchaikovsky revealed a choral sound more grounded in heft and spirit than focus or clarity. The main event here, in a sense, was the premiere of Robert Moran’s “Canticles,” the latest of many works commissioned by the chorus.

The three-movement piece, with a sweetly poetic libretto by James Skofield, teeters between accessible melodic grace and neo-Baroque airs, with contrapuntal writing and pleasant tunesmithing. It was nicely handled by a chorus with a solid track record-in-progress.