'Family Guy' Creator Seth MacFarlane to Sing at London Celebration of Broadway Sound

Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane will be among the performers singing along with the John Wilson Orchestra at London’s Royal Albert Hall Monday night in a celebration of the sound of Broadway.

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MacFarlane's performance, along with a group of other singers, will be part of the BBC's annual Proms - an event that organizers call "the world's greatest classical music festival."

The Proms, which run from mid-July through early September, last year celebrated the Hollywood screen musical. This year, they will offer what the event's web site calls "a tribute to the composers and arrangers responsible for creating the Broadway Sound." Among them are the likes of Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Vincent Youmans, Richard Rodgers and Frank Loesser.

Among the music they will perform are songs from Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story, Loesser's Guys and Dolls, Porter's Kiss Me, Kate and George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. MacFarlane is listed as the baritone.

“I’m somebody who would be pretty restless if I confined myself to one discipline, no matter what it may be,” Radio Times quoted MacFarlane as saying about his interest in music. The creative made his movie directing debut with the recently released Ted, starring Mark Wahlberg.

And he emphasized that a key part of his plans for Family Guy from the beginning was that  the score would always be fully orchestrated. “There’s a purity to the vocal style of that era that we were trying to shoot for,” he told Radio Times.

MacFarlane also lauded British comedy troupe Monty Python as role models and trailblazers that combined edgy humor with good music, as he tries to do now. "I view Monty Python as the great originator of that combination," he said. "The Meaning of Life in particular comes to mind, and my favorite example is Every Sperm Is Sacred. It’s so beautifully written, it’s musically and lyrically legit, the orchestrations are fantastic, the choreography and the presentation are very, very complex – it’s treated seriously."

He added: “It was clearly made by people who had a genuine love for show music. If there’s one cultural reference that I can point to that has been a total influence on what I do, it’s that piece in that movie.”

Email: Georg.Szalai@thr.com

Twitter: @georgszalai