Sarasota Pops: Broadway Hits
Before Broadway became a streaming playlist and a touring spectacle, its songs traveled by memory: a melody from West Side Story hummed on the way home, a South Pacific ballad carried across a room, a
By Edit Sarasota Staff
Before Broadway became a streaming playlist and a touring spectacle, its songs traveled by memory: a melody from West Side Story hummed on the way home, a South Pacific ballad carried across a room, a phrase from Oklahoma! that seemed to belong to everyone. Those durable tunes take center stage when the Sarasota Pops Orchestra presents Sarasota Pops: Broadway Hits, a concert devoted to the music of Broadway’s golden age.
The program promises a lively encounter with some of the American musical theater’s most enduring scores, including selections from West Side Story, South Pacific, and Oklahoma!, among others. Heard with full orchestral accompaniment, these songs gain a breadth that can be difficult to capture in smaller settings—the sweep of strings, the brightness of brass, the rhythmic lift of a full ensemble. Guest soloists with Broadway experience will bring the material’s theatrical instincts to the fore, balancing the intimacy of a well-known lyric with the scale and color of a symphonic performance.
For Sarasota, a concert like this occupies a meaningful place in the region’s cultural life. The city’s audiences have long made room for both classical traditions and popular forms, and the Pops orchestra offers a welcoming bridge between them. Broadway is familiar without being slight; its best scores combine hummable melodies with sophisticated orchestration, emotional complexity, and a keen sense of place. A concert built around that repertoire gives longtime theatergoers a chance to revisit beloved songs while inviting newcomers into the larger language of orchestral music.
The setting adds its own note of occasion. With its distinctive purple façade and position along Sarasota Bay, the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall has become one of the city’s most recognizable cultural landmarks. Its stage has hosted an expansive range of performances, and its waterfront presence lends an especially fitting backdrop to an evening shaped by music that has traveled so widely and lasted so long.
Sarasota Pops: Broadway Hits takes place Friday, August 21, 2026, at the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall, 777 N Tamiami Trail, Sarasota, Florida 34236. Expect an evening where familiar songs return with fresh orchestral dimension—and where the golden age of Broadway gets to sound as vivid as ever.