It was eighteen months in the planning, involved many, many hours of work by many, many people and took a musical mastermind to envision and coordinate.
“I knew the Big Sing 2024 would be a big job and it turned out to be bigger than I was expecting,” Alex Fiddes says. “But I thrive in a little bit of chaos. I find it exciting to live like that, rather than see something like this as stressful.”
The Big Sing has featured prominently in the history of My Pop Choir, beginning in 2014. According to Alex, the Big Sing 2024 was always something that was going to happen. “It was always my intention to continue that tradition because of how special it was. And then Covid put a halt to it. That’s why it took six years between them. But it was something that needed to happen.”
Here is a look at all the threads that came together to create the amazing Big Sing 2024.
Alex began serious consideration early in 2023. He recalls a specific time when he thought: “Let’s start the Big Sing - let’s get it going.”
Almost immediately there came an e-mail from Oakville MPC singer, Naomi Uy. “One of my positions in life is corporate event planning and I was wondering if there was anything I could do for you,” was her message.
“The timing couldn’t have been better,” says Alex. “Here I was about to start a massive event where I would need an event planner.”
“I’d been in the choir long enough to know that Alex is a wonderful artist, a wonderful choir director and music arranger,” says Naomi. “But he always used to say that spreadsheets were not his forte!”
Naomi comes from the project management and operations world, with event planning experience - exactly what Alex needed. For the first months, the two of them worked on the preliminary details.
“Finding a venue took a very long time,” Alex says. “I began looking for a location where we could have all 300 singers on stage, or at least physically together. Koerner Hall was one of my first choices but it didn’t fit all 300 on the stage so I had ruled it out.”
Over the months to come, Alex looked at every possible venue in Toronto until he ran out of options. Besides the challenge of accommodating 300 singers, there were choral risers to consider, as well as backstage space.
“Then it occurred to me that splitting the choir into Act One and Act Two would not just logistically be possible, but would also be more interesting for choir singers. I didn’t think every choir member would want to sing a dozen songs, that’s a much bigger ask than five or six songs in each act.”
Alex remembers coming to that realization, and how excited he was because after months of active planning there had been no venue to that point that was satisfactory. Now it seemed that there was a solution.
“I back-pedalled to Koerner Hall again. And they have their own risers – a huge expense elsewhere – and the cost would just involve setting up.”
Other venues also did not have a backstage area. But Koerner had Temerty Hall, an attached theatre space that the singers could use as a green room.
“It was overall such a perfect place to do this. Koerner is very reasonable, one of the best rated venues in the city and it’s a majestic, magical spot,” Alex says.
Once this decision was made, the planning moved into high gear. At this point Bettina Goodwin (manager of the Oakville and Burlington choirs) joined the team.
“It began with me being the communications person – writing e-mails and answering queries that came through e-mail,” she says. She later asked for a more involved role and was added to the planning team.
There were meetings, general input on procedures, things from merchandise to messaging. “I saw the Big Sing Shirt pre-orders through from beginning to end. Then when tickets went up for sale, we created a system and a form for people to fill out and submit. I took care of all the tracking for that,” Bettina recalls. “And there were lots of other small things that came up over time, many of which I can’t remember!”
The team started to grow and downtown Toronto MPC singer, Marlee Maslove, came on to the team to look after choir placement.
Marlee’s role was handling logistics planning and choir placing. “I think she nailed it,” says Alex. “All the pages and pages of work that she had to work her brain around in order to place people based on voice group, which acts they were in, how tall they were, who they were carpooling with, were they in Show Choir, did they want to do both acts.”
As December 5 moved closer and closer, the team just naturally kept growing– videographers, team captains, volunteers to sell merch. There are dozens listed in the program.
And then there was the band, which would be one of the key components in the event’s success. In September, Alex asked Joel Saunders, guitarist, audio producer, videographer and long-time collaborator with MPC, to create the band.
“He did the entire operation of band planning. I did not do a single part of that. I literally told him to find a band and to rehearse them. Here are the songs, show up for rehearsal. He decided how many people there were and what they needed to learn. He took complete charge of the band and it was marvellous.”
The planning team of four now started rehearsal organizing, finding stage managers and assessing the needs of the choir. Because the Big Sing 2024 was completely new in its scope and scale, it was all fresh territory.
Alex points out how the team members brought different perspectives: “We all figured out what logically needed to happen next. We thought about what the choir needed and would feel. Naomi, Bettina and Marlee brought different types of thinking, which was so useful in our partnership.”
Finding rehearsal space was another major challenge, according to Alex. “Finding a rehearsal venue was a really big job and quite stressful. Anywhere we picked was bad news for somebody, mainly because of transportation. But Port Credit was a good compromise. And the people at the Port Credit Legion were wonderful.”
The weekend before the show saw two full days of rehearsals, which ran with precision as the singers found out where they would be positioned on the Koerner stage. The camaraderie in the choir was instantaneous among many who had only just met. Naomi sums up the experience: “It was as if the 300 singers had joined the team and I knew that there was no way this show was not going to be successful.”
And the Big Sing 2024 was indeed a huge accomplishment. “I loved every minute of my involvement with the production,” says Bettina. “I was so thrilled at how smoothly everything went on the night of the event.”
What made the Big Sing 2024 such a success was months of effort and planning, and the countless people who spent many hours in focused effort. Its moving parts came together in one performance that certainly fulfilled Alex’s vision, as he described it in the show program:
“My Pop Choir’s Big Sing is one of those grand adventures. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for mostly non-professional singers to step onto a world-class stage, performing with a 5-piece band and over 300 voices united in harmony. I want our singers to walk away feeling rejuvenated, refreshed, and deeply proud of what they’ve accomplished – a memory they’ll carry for life.”
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