Josh Groban’s Stage, Screen and Symphony tour reaches Bethel Woods Center for the Arts on Sunday, August 23, and the choice of venue carries a kind of gravitational irony worth acknowledging before the first note is played. Bethel Woods sits on the same ground that absorbed half a million people in August of 1969, and there is something distinctly 21st-century about deploying a voice of Groban’s theatrical refinement — orchestral, deliberate, built for concert halls and Broadway houses — against a backdrop that has never quite shaken its association with amplifiers and mud. The setting, whatever your feelings about the program, is going to do some of the work for you.
Groban has been one of American pop’s more quietly durable presences for the better part of twenty-five years. His 2001 debut arrived and eventually went five-times platinum; Closer, his 2003 follow-up, reached number one on the Billboard 200 and sold more than six million copies in this country. What has distinguished the career since is a consistent pull toward the orchestral and theatrical — a disposition that makes the Stage, Screen and Symphony format less a calculated pivot than a natural continuation. The Bethel show draws its material from two distinct catalogs: Stages, his 2015 Broadway album, and Cinematic, released May 8 of this year, which reimagines iconic film songs with collaborators including Jennifer Hudson and the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles across ten tracks. At Bethel Woods specifically, those selections will be performed with the Greater Newburgh Symphony Orchestra — a regional ensemble whose involvement gives the evening a degree of local investment beyond the standard touring format. Groban has summarized the show’s ambitions plainly: “I’ve always been drawn to music that tells a story, whether it’s on the Broadway stage, in film, or through a great symphonic arrangement.” The Bethel date falls midway through a thirteen-stop summer run that opened in Cincinnati and closes in Texas in early September.
Hudson Valley audiences will know Bethel Woods as one of the region’s most consequential outdoor venues — the Pavilion provides covered seating for 5,000, with the surrounding lawn accommodating an additional 11,000. On a clear August evening in Sullivan County, an outdoor orchestral concert is a proposition worth taking seriously on its own terms.
Tickets & On-Sale: The general public on-sale is Friday, May 15 at 10 a.m. local time. An artist presale is currently active through Thursday. Tickets are available via the link below or at JoshGroban.com. Showtime is 7:00 PM.