MERIDIAN, Miss. (Queen City Newsfeed) – What a way to kick off a 20th anniversary.
Before Kristin Chenoweth ever stepped onto the stage Saturday night, MSU Riley Center Executive Director Morgan Dudley reminded the audience that this fall marks 20 years since the historic downtown Meridian venue reopened its doors.
Chenoweth made sure the celebration started appropriately.
She came running onto the stage in a sparkling blue dress, temporarily hidden beneath a maroon Mississippi State T-shirt, grabbed an MSU cowbell and started ringing it with everything she had.
The crowd erupted.
Within the first few minutes, it was pretty clear what kind of night we were in for.
Chenoweth’s stage setup was surprisingly simple. Mary-Mitchell Campbell, her longtime friend and musical collaborator, sat at the piano. Chenoweth had a microphone. That was basically it.
When you have a voice like Kristin Chenoweth’s, though, what else do you really need?
She opened with “Que Sera, Sera,” eventually tossing the Mississippi State shirt into the crowd and revealing the full blue sequined dress underneath.
I’ve seen Chenoweth in movies. I’ve watched the television specials. I’ve heard the Broadway recordings. None of that quite prepares you for hearing that voice in person.
It’s powerful, bright and sometimes almost impossibly high. With no band competing for attention and very little happening on stage, there was nowhere for her voice to hide. Not that it needed to.
As the opening number reached its end, the audience joined her for the final notes. Chenoweth looked out at the crowd and asked, “Should I do it?”
She didn’t really give us time to answer.
The final notes went soaring through the historic opera house, and suddenly the simplicity of the stage made perfect sense.
Of course, this is Kristin Chenoweth, so the music was only half the fun.
Between songs, she talked. A lot. That’s a compliment.
She told the audience she arrived in Meridian late Friday night and spent much of Saturday exploring downtown. She ate breakfast at Weidmann’s, including biscuits, sausage and gravy, bought a pair of $9 earrings at a local boutique and stopped by the newly completed Ann’s Alley.
Her day exploring Meridian led into a conversation about something particularly fitting for a night inside the Riley Center.
The arts.
“The arts have the power to change lives, and it’s all over your city,” Chenoweth told the crowd.
She praised the Riley Center itself, saying that despite performing on stages around the world, there was something special about the acoustics inside Meridian’s restored opera house.
That would become important later.
The evening moved effortlessly between music and stories.
“The Song Remembers When” led into a story about her parents and then “Fathers and Daughters.” A hilarious story involving Dame Julie Andrews, 12 flights of stairs and a poorly timed fried chicken delivery ended with a piece of advice Chenoweth said Andrews once gave her: “Kid, get used to it. Life is life.”
“I Could Have Danced All Night” followed, complete with a soaring high C.
At one point, Chenoweth announced that she is 58 years old, quickly clarifying that she isn’t old. She’s “seasoned.”
Fair enough.
Her cover of “The Way We Were” brought one of the quieter moments of the evening.
Strangely enough, that’s when my attention drifted away from the stage for just a moment.
I usually attend shows like this alone. I’m working. I take notes, watch the crowd and try to catch the little moments that might otherwise be forgotten. I normally have an empty seat beside me.
Saturday was different.
I brought a friend who is new to Meridian and will only call this city home for a little more than a year while working toward the next chapter of his career.
Sitting there, I found myself hoping he was taking all of this in.
Moving to a smaller city for a relatively short period of time can probably feel like an eternity. Meridian doesn’t feel like a city simply waiting for time to pass right now.
There’s renewed energy downtown. New businesses are opening. Mississippi State is expanding its presence. Historic spaces are finding new life. Bigger names are coming to town.
Some locals have called it a renaissance.
Sitting inside a packed, beautifully restored opera house listening to Kristin Chenoweth sing while my friend experienced it all for the first time, that word didn’t feel like much of an exaggeration.
I hope when his time in Meridian is over, nights like this are part of what he remembers.
Another enthusiastic round with the cowbell quickly brought me back to reality.
She really loved that cowbell.
Later in the show, Chenoweth invited another musician onto the stage, introducing him as someone she’d met at her niece’s wedding before revealing the not-so-secret truth.
It was her husband, Josh Bryant.
Armed with only a guitar, Bryant joined his wife for “Desperado.” Before they could get there, Chenoweth turned simply sitting on a stool in a short dress into an entire comedy routine, repeatedly repositioning herself while trying to maintain some modesty.
The audience loved every second of it.
She joked about the couple’s age difference before shifting into something more sincere, talking about their shared Christian faith and her belief that God places certain people in our lives for a reason.
That mixture of humor, faith and sincerity became a recurring theme throughout the night.
After Bryant left, Chenoweth moved through “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart” before combining two of her favorite musical worlds: Broadway and country.
She pointed out that both genres rely heavily on storytelling and wondered what it might sound like if Stephen Sondheim and Willie Nelson had made music together.
Her answer was a Broadway-style rendition of Nelson’s “Always on My Mind.”
Naturally, that came with another story.
Chenoweth recalled Nelson visiting her on Broadway and later inviting her onto his tour bus, where she said they stayed up singing with musicians until about 3 a.m.
She joked that afterward she “wafted home, if you know what I mean.”
The audience definitely knew what she meant.
Chenoweth was just as comfortable moving from a cannabis joke to a conversation about faith. She spoke about being a Christian while recognizing that people of different faiths and backgrounds had come together to enjoy the same performance. Her message was simple: everyone wants peace on Earth.
Her next selection, a Latin aria, was one of those moments when you stop taking notes.
Her voice filled the room. The high notes seemed to hang above the audience. It was haunting and beautiful, a reminder that underneath the Broadway fame, television roles, jokes and larger-than-life personality is an extraordinary classically trained vocalist.
Soon came the song a lot of people were waiting for.
“Popular.”
Chenoweth told the story of meeting a very young Ariana Grande backstage during the original Broadway run of “Wicked.” Grande’s family insisted the young girl was an incredible singer. Chenoweth recalled politely responding, “That’s so sweet,” while clearly not realizing just how correct they were.
We all know how that turned out.
As the opening notes of “Popular” began, the stage lights turned pink and suddenly it felt like 2003 again.
Chenoweth bounced through the lyrics with the same quick, bubbly delivery that made Glinda iconic more than two decades ago. The audience joined in near the end, and afterward she even offered snippets of the song in German and Japanese.
She said she’ll always sing it for her fans.
I don’t think they would let her stop if she tried.
“Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” a song she said she sang growing up in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, came later, along with the hilarious “Taylor, the Latte Boy.”
Meridian also got something special.
Chenoweth announced she was about to perform a song live for the first time. “Your Love Is My Saving Grace” flowed into “How Great Thou Art” before eventually returning to “Your Love Is My Saving Grace.”
You truly never knew what was coming next in the Kristin Chenoweth rolodex.
She recognized veterans and active-duty military members in the audience before singing “Bring Him Home.”
The tone became deeply personal as the show moved toward its final stretch.
Chenoweth talked about reaching a low point recently, even questioning whether she wanted to continue her career. She credited God with lifting her back up and said the songs she has been singing on this tour have helped heal her and remind her that she is exactly where she is supposed to be.
That led into “I Was Here.”
The audience rose to its feet.
Chenoweth eventually left the stage, but nobody in the Riley Center seemed particularly interested in letting her stay gone.
The applause continued until she returned.
There was one more song.
This time, she didn’t want a microphone.
“That’s what this hall was designed for,” she told the audience.
Mary-Mitchell Campbell began playing “Smile.”
Chenoweth stood on the stage of an opera house built more than a century ago and simply sang.
No microphone.
No amplification.
No tricks.
For those few minutes, there were really two performers: Kristin Chenoweth and the room itself.
Her voice traveled effortlessly through the theater, reaching every corner of the hall and proving the point she had made earlier about its remarkable acoustics.
As she approached the final lyric, she stopped.
“You’ll find that life is still worthwhile, if you just…”
The audience knew its cue.
“Smile.”
One word, sung together by hundreds of people.
Chenoweth smiled, took her bow with Campbell and left the stage.
The audience rose again.
Twenty years ago, Meridian brought this opera house back to life.
Saturday night, a Broadway star walked onto its stage wearing a Mississippi State T-shirt, rang a cowbell far more times than anyone could reasonably count, made us laugh, talked about faith, sang songs that meant something to her and reminded a room full of people why places like this still matter.
Earlier in the night, Chenoweth told us the arts have the power to change lives and that she could see that power all over our city.
Maybe that’s what I wanted my friend to see, too.
A city doesn’t come alive because someone declares that it’s having a renaissance. It happens in smaller moments.
A new shop opens. An old building gets another chance. People come downtown again. Someone who isn’t from here begins to understand why those of us who are care so much about this place.
Sometimes, it happens on a Saturday night in Meridian, Mississippi, when Kristin Chenoweth stands in a 19th-century opera house without a microphone and asks an entire room to finish the song for her.
We did.
We smiled.
