Baylor Showtime! to Perform March 27-28

by Richard Veit

Baylor University ShowTime! will offer two presentations of their spring program, "It's ShowTime 1998," in the Jesse H. Jones Theatre of the Hooper-Schaefer Fine Arts Center. The performances will be at 8 p.m. Friday, March 27, and at 2:30 p.m. Saturday, March 28. The director of Baylor ShowTime! is Leta Horan, associate professor of piano, and the group's choreographer is Jerry MacLauchlin.
The program will open with Horan's own setting of the familiar "Looney Toons Overture." Also in the first set will be arrangements of "Swingin' on a Star," "Short People" and "Spinning Wheel."
Baylor ShowTime! will take the audience back to the 1970s with "The Sound of Silence" and from the musical Chicago, "All That Jazz." Horan's "Forever Polyester" is a medley of hits from the seventies by Barry Manilow and others, including "I Write the Songs," "Love Will Keep Us Together," "Knock Three Times," "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing," "The Dr Pepper Song," "Copacabana," "Feelings" and "I Can't Smile Without You."
Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Requiem" contains a beautiful setting of "Pie Jesu," which Baylor ShowTime! will sing, along with Ward Swingle's arrangement of the Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein standard, "All the Things You Are."
As its title suggests, the operetta The Merry Naught Pirates is a pastiche of familiar melodies from musicals by Sigmund Romberg, Victor Herbert and Gilbert & Sullivan. To close its program, the Baylor ShowTime! troupe will present the tuneful and lively finale.
Tickets for "It's ShowTime 1998" are available from the Baylor department of theatre arts. Tickets are priced at $5, and to make reservations call 710-1865. For further information, call the School of Music at 710-3991.