Too much Christmas? Not by these standards

Sure, we might wonder if TV overdoes the holidays.
Two channels had new Christmas movies in October. Others jumped in as soon as the Thanksgiving Day parade ended. A week later, another proclaimed the “25 days of Christmas.”
But in some parts of the world, that would be restraint. In the Philippines, Lea Salonga said in a virtual press conference, “the Christmas season actually starts in September.”
Now she stars in “Christmas With the Tabernacle Choir,” at 8 p.m. Dec. 12 on PBS and at 8 p.m. ET Dec. 17 on BYU-TV. “I told my brother about it,” she said, “and he was like, ‘Oh my, that’s huge!’”
He could have been referring to sheer size. There are 500 volunteers – choir, orchestra, dancers more – performing before a crowd of 21,000. “I’ve never been to such a sized auditorium,” said actor David Suchet, who was the concert’s storyteller.
But “huge” also relates to its reputation. Each year, the concert has a star soloist (Audra McDonald, Gladys Knight, Bryan Stokes Mitchell, Sutton Foster, Renee Fleming etc.) and an actor.
The music flows between popular and classical, between secular and sacred. For this one (filmed a year in advance), Salonga was asked if she wanted to sing something from her Filipino heritage.
That led to another call to her brother, Gerard Salonga, the Malaysian Philharmonic conductor. He suggested “Payapang Daidig,” written in Tagalog (one of the two national languages of the Philippines, alongside English) and carrying deep emotional weight.
After years of bombardment, Manila had emerged from World War II. A young composer looked down on the ruins, Lea Saloga said, and “saw how peaceful it looked.”
His song, said Mack Wilberg, the concert’s music director, is “akin to ‘Silent Night.’”
The Salonga kids grew up in a re-constructed world. The daughter of a rear admiral, Lea moved with her family to Manila when she was 5 and soon became a performer. She cut her first record at 10 and originated the lead role in “Miss Saigon” at 18, winning the Olivier award in London and Tony award on Broadway; she’s gone on to do other Broadway roles and to sing in movies (“Mulan,” “Aladdin”).
She was a teenager in London, just as British TV was launching its Hercule Poirot mysteries. “I got so much comfort from that little man,” she said.
That’s logical to Suchet, who played him. His son-in-law once called Poirot “the great moral compass.”
Suchet’s own moral views have transformed. He grew up without religion, later choosing Christianity.
He has become an officer in the British Bible Society and read the full Bible for an audio recording. In the Tabernacle concert, he tells about Nicholas Winton, a man of quiet accomplishment.
Cleaning the attic, Winton’s wife found a scrapbook of notes and pictures of children. He had failed to mention that time, a half-century earlier: For eight months, he spent every moment (outside of work as a London stockbroker) arranging for 669 Jewish children to leave Nazi-held Czechoslovakia. He then returned to a quiet life, married, was discovered at 80 … and lived to 106.
“He’s so well-known here,” Suchet said in England. This was “one man who’s changed so many lives.”
Suchet tells the story in the final half-hour of the concert and reads the gospel account of Christmas.
Then, as always, the show ends with “Angels from the Realms of Glory” … which Salonga had to learn. She made some mistakes – unnoticeable ones, Wilberg said – but the show is filmed on all three nights. “I was running out of chances,” before getting it right.