Jim Owen and Sean O’Loughlin are bringing The Beatles to life again. Their Classical Mystery Tour: A Tribute to the Beatles concert—which has been happening since 1996—will have the Victoria Symphony putting a different spin on classic cuts.
“For people like myself, we never got the chance to see the Beatles live,” says Owen. “I wasn’t old enough, you know they stopped touring in 1966, that was the last chance for anybody to see The Beatles live. Of course they had their rooftop concert in London in 1969, but hardly anybody saw that. It wasn’t any kind of a tour. So, really, they stopped in 1966 and so much of the music they recorded after that time are the songs that had a lot of great orchestrations in them.”
Owen points to songs like “Yesterday,” “I Am The Walrus,” and “The Long and Winding Road” as tracks that didn’t get performed live a lot but featured prominent orchestration. So now Owen gets to bring these songs, with their orchestration, to an audience.
“It feels… I don’t know where to start with that because it’s something I wanted to do as a kid,” he says. “I already knew I wanted to do Beatles music when I was seven or eight years old. And I’ve been doing it so long, and I can tell you, it never gets old. I enjoy it every time, everyone in our group does. There is something about Beatles music, it’s so exciting, and of course you present it to a different audience each time, every time it feels new. It’s just wonderful to be able to do this.”
The audience can also expect a treat as far as how the performers are dressed, says Owen.
“That’s part of the fun of a Beatles concert like this one,” he says. “If the band can give you the illusion that you might be watching the original Beatles, it lends an extra excitement to it. Yeah, so you can expect the group looking as much like the original Beatles as we can. We have some costumes and makeup to help the illusion, and I think we are doing our usual show there with three costumes. Starting with the kind of early, young, Beatles look where they wore all the matching black suits. Then we’re going to do the Sgt. Pepper costumes and do some of those songs and then I think the third costume is kind of what they looked like on their cover of the Abbey Road album. Like, for example, John Lennon had his white suit, long hair and glasses, things like that.”
Owen invites the audience to join in and sing along at the concert.
“I think many people feel like they shouldn’t sing along, but then there’s others doing it anyways,” he says. “And from our point of view, we’re happy when people sing along. It’s definitely something that we would invite people to do is to really get involved and sing along. At the end of the show, people might even stand up and dance along.”
Classical Mystery Tour: A Tribute to The Beatles
8 pm Saturday, May 7
2:30 pm Sunday, May 8
$20 student tickets,
Royal Theatre
rmts.bc.ca