Glenda Korella has done it again. The effervescent director of the Peninsula Singers has stitched together an action-packed, upbeat and altogether inspiring selection of music for Get Happy featuring A Salute to Canada. The spring concert series of the 55-voice show chorus’s will run April 25, 26 and 27 at Mary Winspear Centre in Sidney.

It’s the kind of feel-good show you expect from Korella, a mother of three, and grandmother of nine, who once conducted a 200-voice glee club in Calgary. Luckily for the Peninsula Singers, she moved to Dean Park several years ago, where she teaches piano and voice when she’s not directing the chorus The choir’s president, Lynda Spence, says Korella’s “joie de vivre, musicianship and boundless creativity spurs the choir on to greater professional heights every year.”

If you are attending for the first time, be warned. This is a choir that delights in surprising its audience with plenty of humour, lots of props and vocal and musical ensembles drawn from the chorus.

During the second half of the show you might encounter native chanting and a voyageur or two, not to mention Nelson Eddie and Jeanette MacDonald from the movie Rose Marie. You’ll also meet the Homemade Jam band complete with fiddle, banjo, guitar and washtub bass…

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“How did Natoma Avenue get its name?”

by Abby Lindros

This street, near Santa Barbara’s West Beach, is named after what has been called the “first American grand opera.” In 1909, composer Victor Herbert approached San Francisco attorney Joseph Redding to come up with a theme for a new opera. The result was Natoma: The Maid from the Mountains, an opera in three acts set in Santa Barbara in the early 1800s, when Alta California was under Spanish governance.

Victor Herbert, an Irish native, became one of this country’s greatest composers of light operas. His best-known works were Babes in Toyland, made famous by a film version with Laurel and Hardy, and Naughty Marietta, the movie that made stars out of the romantic duo of Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald.

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