Manchester Chorus Gets Its Juke Box Hero Moment With Foreigner

HOLMDEL, NJ — It was a 1-minute video, a 1-minute go. It earned them a ticket to a nearly sold-out show.

And at the end of their 4 minutes on stage at the PNC Bank Arts Center on Sunday night, after nearly four months of practice, the Manchester Township Middle School Chorus not only felt like juke box heroes, they knew what love is from the cheers of the standing-room-only audience who got to hear them sing with Foreigner.

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"It was electric!" Ava F. said. "It was amazing!" Mia said. "It was the coolest thing ever," Gavin L. said.

Lily held up a pair of drumsticks.

"Where did you get those?" Manchester chorus teacher Katie Sherman asked.

"He (drummer Chris Frazier) just handed them to me as we left the stage," Lily said.

"How do we ever top this?" Sherman said.

The 25 members of the chorus had earned their place in the spotlight in April, when their 1-minute video of them performing Foreigner's 1984 hit "I Want To Know What Love Is" was chosen as the winning entry in a contest the band hosts at its performances around the country. The youth chorus performances are part of an effort to promote music and arts education in schools.

"There's a lot of art and music programs that are going away in the States," said Luis Maldonado, the band's current lead singer. "We need to keep music and art alive in the schools. Period. It matters."

"These are our future singers, our future bands, our future songwriters," he said, pointing to the Manchester students. "You guys gave them a place to express themselves. So thank you for that. And don't stop believing in the arts and these kids. They are our future."

The group arrived at the Arts Center about 5 p.m. on Sunday for their performance with Foreigner, which was part of the Double Vision, Double Trouble Tour with Lynyrd Skynyrd. They were ushered inside and met with one of the band's crew, Kyle Jastremski, who explained how the evening would go.

Then it was time to wait.

The concert kicked off shortly after 6 p.m. with a performance by Six Gun Sally, a band from Pittsburgh. Foreigner took the stage shortly after 7 p.m. for an 11-song set that hit on several of its biggest hits, including "Double Vision," "Head Games," "Cold As Ice," "Waiting For A Girl Like You," and "Feels Like The First Time."

They did a cover of Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water," then moved on to "Juke Box Hero," with Maldonado introducing the rest of the band — Jeff Pilson on bass, Michael Bluestein on keyboards, John Roth and Bruce Watson on guitar and Frazier on drums — before moving on to the three-song encore and the moment the Manchester chorus and their widespread supporters, clad in matching T-shirts, had been waiting for.

After performing "Long, Long Way From Home," Maldonado began singing the first verse of "I Want To Know What Love Is" as Manchester's students filed onto the stage, sending up cheers in the crowd.

From the get-go, the students looked at ease and sang loudly, swaying with the music and grinning with smiles as wide as the stage.

The sound was pure and the air was indeed electric. (You can watch the video of the performance taken by the Manchester Township Schools below.)

"Listen, make some noise for these guys on their way out," Maldonado said as the students left the stage. "And don't you stop clapping!"

"Don't Stop Clapping!" he shouted, as the audience roared.

"You know what you guys did? You guys gave them a memory for life!" he said.

"I was crying," Sherman said afterward.

As the students talked excitedly about their experience, Michelle Murray and Deb Whelchel approached the group.

"We just wanted to congratulate you and tell you what a great job you did," the women told the students and Sherman and some of the parents.

Murray and Whelchel, who had driven from Rockaway, New York, to come to the concert, said they had seen Foreigner bring other student choruses on stage so they were anticipating the performance.

The Manchester kids, they said, had been outstanding and they wanted to make sure they told them.

"Just chef's kiss," Whelchel said.

"It's so great to see the support for music education," Murray said. It's personal to them, the women noted, as both have children who are teachers — one is a music teacher.

Sherman was visibly awestruck by the praise, and she and her students thanked the women for sharing it.

It was certainly an evening that left them all with stars in their eyes.