STORRS, Conn. (AP) – When Boston Pops conductor Keith Lockhart asked the University of Connecticut to provide a guest narrator to read “A Visit From St. Nicholas” during a 2014 holiday concert at the school, he was expecting to get UConn’s president or perhaps a distinguished professor.
Instead, the school provided an orange puppet named Skip Toumalou, dressed in a Santa hat, to read the famous poem.
“We had not known that the university has one of the best puppetry programs in the entire world,” Lockhart said. “The result was so professional, and the puppet and the student who voiced the puppet were one of the best narrators we’ve ever had.”
That concert led to a bigger collaboration, which will culminate Saturday when students from UConn’s Puppet Arts Program perform two shows with the world-famous Boston Pops at the city’s Symphony Hall. “Puppets Take the Pops” also will be performed Tuesday when the orchestra celebrates Arthur Fiedler Night, named for the former conductor who made the Pops a household name.
The puppets will act out Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” and provide visual accompaniment to a suite of several short pieces by composer Leroy Anderson, who arranged music for the Pops. It will include a virtual tour of Boston performed to Anderson’s best known piece, “Sleigh Ride.”