Hope of the Season: Christmas with the Tabernacle Choir (BYU Broadcasting, GBH, Intellectual Reserve, PBS, aired December 15, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, December 15) I put on a couple of TV shows on PBS and my husband Charles and I watched them together, though he had to bail on one of them a half-hour before the end because he got an emergency phone call from his church pastor. (Actually, it wasn’t that big an emergency; she just wanted to vent.) The first was formally titled Hope of the Season: Christmas with the Tabernacle Choir. The choir in question was formerly known as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and so were its Christmas specials, which frequently featured major guest stars like opera singer Kiri Te Kanawa. In 2024 they abbreviated the name of their show to Joy with the Tabernacle Choir, and they followed the same practice this year even though the Mormon connections were pretty evident: the show’s production was credited to the media department of Brigham Young University and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the Mormon Church’s official name, through a front company called “Intellectual Reserve, Inc.” Previous episodes of this show ran for an hour, but this one went an hour and a half and featured some rather emphatically phrased renditions of both familiar and not-so-familiar Christmas carols. Some were played instrumentally, some sung by the choir, and some were solos featuring Broadway star Ruthie Ann Miles (b. 1983). Miles briefly mentioned her background as a church singer in her teens; her mother was music director of a church in Honolulu, Hawai’i, and Ruthie got pressed into service whenever they needed a spare soloist for the church.

Her Wikipedia page indicates a far more Dickensian childhood than the one that got mentioned last night; though she was born in Arizona, her mother was Korean, Esther Wong, and moved them first to Korea and then to Hawai’i, where Ruthie recalled having to train herself to lose her Korean accent. She played Christmas Eve in Avenue Q, Imelda Marcos in Here Lies Love, and Lady Thiang (King Mongkut’s first wife) in the 2015 Broadway revival of The King and I. Then in 2018 Miles was involved in an accident that killed her daughter and unborn child; she and her husband were crossing a New York street when they were run over by a car. Miles returned to the stage in August 2018, five months after the accident, and she and her husband, Jonathan Blumenstein (his last name is German for “flower rock”), eventually had another daughter whom they appropriately named Hope Elizabeth. For the first half of the concert it was mainly just music, with Miles singing “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” and a medley of “Spirit of the Season” and “If You Just Believe” from The Polar Express (a 2004 animated film based on a 1985 children’s novel). The other selections were “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” “’Twas Midnight in the Stable,” “Welcome Christmas Morning,” and an odd selection called “Gamelan” by Murray Schaefer in which, by singing a cappella without words, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir attempted to duplicate the sound of a Balinese or Javanese gamelan ensemble. Then the orchestra re-entered and the choir started singing words again for “Sing We Now, O Child of Wonder,” though since there was no chyron it was probably just a tag for “Gamelan.”

After that, a pretty standard chorus-and-orchestra rendition of “Joy to the World,” and Ruthie Ann Miles’s The Polar Express medley, came one of the most intriguing bits of the program: a medley of three pieces called “Alleluia.” First was one by Johann Sebastian Bach based on the infamous “Air on the ‘G’ String” from the Orchestral Suite No. 3; then was a surprisingly advanced (musically) “Alleluia” from Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983) that verged on 12-tone technique and had an engaging celesta solo part that was not at all what you usually think of for that instrument; and last was the all-too-familiar “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s oratorio The Messiah. Next came a real surprise: a jazz version of the carol “Patapan,” also known as “When You Hear the Pipes and Drums,” with an organist contributing jazz licks along with a jazz-style pianist, bassist, and drummer. After that came the expected dramatic portions of the evening performed by African-American actor Dennis Haysbert. One was a tribute to an unusual civic leader from Kenya named Dr. Charles Mulli. He was abandoned by his parents at age six when they fled his native village with their younger children. After unsuccessfully trying to find a relative who would take him in, he spent the next 10 years homeless until he finally emigrated to Nairobi in search of a job. Mulli found one with a woman who hired him at first as a houseboy, then promoted him to supervise her field workers until he was ultimately running her plantation.

He gradually built a fortune selling automobile parts and became a multimillionaire until one day, in 1989, he turned down some street children who were begging for money and/or food. When he returned from work, Mulli found that the kids had stolen his car. He took this as a sign that his life until then had been meaningless and he had a moral obligation to help suffering children who were in the same position he’d been in years before as a homeless child himself. So he went home and told his wife that he was selling all his businesses and devoting the money to turning their home into an orphanage for street kids. Needless to say, she wasn’t thrilled about that and their own children were less than happy with their rambunctious foster siblings, but eventually Mulli’s combination of grit, determination, and business savvy led him to build a chain of orphanages across Kenya. Haysbert’s account of Mulli’s story included a Tabernacle Choir rendition of “Silent Night” and ended with an instrumental postlude whose title I missed. Afterwards Haysbert narrated the familiar Nativity story and the concert closed with Ruthie Ann Miles, the chorus, and orchestra doing “Angels from the Realms of Glory,” a French carol better known as “Angels We Have Heard on High.” (I suspect the difference is simply a variant translation of the original French.) Though the musical performances got a bit too loud and aggressive at times, it was nonetheless a stunning commemoration of the holiday season. I was a bit depressed at the overall whiteness of the performing forces – aside from the half-Asian Miles, there were a couple of Asian-looking choir singers but no discernible Blacks or Latinos (and there weren’t that many people of color in the audience, either! I just re-read my post about the 2024 telecast and was surprised that that one’s choir had been a lot more racially mixed than this one’s) – but overall it was a nice celebration of Christmas and better than I’d expected from these auspices.