Angels Will Be Singing at The Kent Stage on Friday

Angels will be singing at on Friday during a fundraiser designed to improve literacy skills in elementary students .

Kent Rotary Club has chosen The Singing Angels of Cleveland as the draw for its Music on Main Street VIII event, set for 7:30 p.m. Friday at the downtown venue. Tickets are $10 each and can be purchased from any Rotary member or at the door that night.

Tom Hatch, Rotary president, said the club’s annual Music on Main Street program – showcasing different performers each year – is always well attended.

“We just about fill the venue every year. It’s proven to be a very entertaining evening and it’s a great way to support literacy in our community through Rotary,” he said.

Charles Eversole, artistic director of The Singing Angels, said more than 350 children ages 6 to 18 take part in three Singing Angel choruses and small groups which perform as many as 90 concerts a year.

The concerts feature a wide variety of music, including Broadway, pop, gospel, patriotic, barbershop harmony, light classical, and good old-fashioned sing-a-long.

Cleveland’s Singing Angels have toured the world for more than 40 years, visiting over 30 countries. Command performances have included five trips to the White House, the Great Hall of the People of China, and three performances at the Vatican.

Eversole said he’s heard from several recent Singing Angels alums who are now students that they are planning to attend Friday’s concert in Kent. He said there are currently not any Kent youth in the group.

Dr. Joe Giancola, superintendent of Kent Schools, is chair of the Rotary music program founded eight years ago by club member Dr. Walter Watson, retired director of the Hugh A. Glauser School of Music at Kent State.

Giancola, event chair the past four or five years, said he chose The Singing Angels for the 2012 Music on Main Street program based on a suggestion from Portage County Municipal Court Judge Barbara Oswick, a fellow Rotarian. “She had a neighbor whose daughter was in The Singing Angels,” he explained.

Giancola said concert proceeds will go toward the purchase of a dictionary-atlas for every third-grader in the Kent school district. The remaining proceeds will be used to buy books to be awarded to children who read the most during Ohio Right to Read Week, which is May 7-11.

To further demonstrate their commitment to literacy, Kent Rotarians will be reading to children in Kent classrooms during Right to Read Week, Giancola said.