Principal is in a class by herself at Pops

June 25, 2005|Globe Staff

POPSearch 2005 has a winner. Last night Frances Botelho-Hoeg sang ''When You're Good to Mama" from ''Chicago," brought down the house, and won the opportunity to sing with Keith Lockhart and the Pops on the Fourth of July and on tour.

Botelho-Hoeg, 56, is an elementary school principal from Kingston. She strutted onstage in a hot-mama bugle-beaded lavender number that she said afterward she has never worn to school. Completely at ease with herself and with the public, she knows exactly what her voice can do, and she did it. She played the mildly risque lyrics for laughs, but there was something triumphant in the way she shifted her basically light voice into high gear at the end. And she's a survivor. Last year she entered POPSearch and was eliminated in the second round. ''I got canceled at Copley Square," she said good-naturedly at intermission.

The other two finalists were also talented and likable, and shame on the Pops for leaving them just standing there -- there should be some kind of prize for anyone who has emerged as one of the top three contestants out of a field of nearly 300. Botelho-Hoeg showed her class by taking the mike to congratulate her ''phenomenal" colleagues and to say that she was for the first time in her life at a loss for words. ''Ask my husband."

Ellen O'Brien, a 40-year-old sales representative and bartender from Winthrop, has personal charisma and a striking voice. She began ''God Bless the Child" in a Peggy Lee-style whisper, but then opened it up impressively. She'd probably be a superb stylist in an intimate, club-like setting, but sounded a little out of her element accompanied by a symphony orchestra; the song got a little lost in the process. Joseph Rucker Jr., 32, has potentially the best voice of the lot, but seemed a little stiff in ''Make Them Hear You" from ''Ragtime," and wasn't at ease with the microphone, stationed at the wrong height -- he arrived at the climax off-mike.

The rest of the program was loud and pop-oriented, and it was a mistake to turn the last part over to Broadway belter Sam Harris. He's got a tireless tenor that doesn't shirk from high C and beyond, but somewhere in the process of putting every song into a baroque frame, he's lost his connection to what he's singing about. In this respect all the finalists were preferable; the songs boomeranged and came back to hit him in the face.