Naval Academy Halloween concert is a spectacle and an arts outlet for midshipmen

ANNAPOLIS — There are no words to adequately describe what happens on Halloween weekend in the chapel of the United States Naval Academy.

But let’s try some out: Bizarre. Bonkers. Bananas. Transfixing. Transcendent.

Underneath the chapel’s majestic red-lighted dome and between ramparts of darkened stained glass, dozens of midshipmen perform their Halloween/All Saints’ Day concert as if directed by a tag team of Liberace, Milton, Twyla Tharp, Admiral Farragut and the pope. The mids are backed by nearly 16,000 gut-throttling organ pipes and splashed with 127,000 watts of spinning rock-concert lighting.

At the top of the variety-show spectacle, chanting midshipmen dressed as monks carry the organist up the aisle. In a casket.

What follows for the next 80 minutes is like a Meat Loaf music video, except when it’s like a glee club pageant. It’s Grand Guignol and Gershwin. Scripture is quoted. Jim Henson is invoked. Phantoms of the opera sing and swish from crevices and catwalks. A spotlight follows a giant fake bat as it zip-lines the entire height and length of the chapel. A barbershop quartet sings the theme to “The Addams Family” as Cousin It staggers from the altar to the nave.

Over its 16 years, the Naval Academy’s Halloween concert has become a spine-tingling, jaw-dropping, head-spinning, cringe-inducing, heart-soaring tradition of camp and kitsch and patriotism and piety that draws a rapturous sold-out crowd of 4,000 over one weekend.

It’s — well, what is this show? And why do the good people of Annapolis flock to it?

Says Ashleigh Share, a senior engineering major from Sun Valley, Idaho, “It’s the triumph of good over evil, light over darkness, with ‘Be Our Guest’ as a transitional song.”

There you have it. During the concert, Share, 21, dances through the pitch-black chapel in a black bodysuit twined with battery-powered neon wire as the fingers of organist Monte Maxwell somersault through Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.

Did we mention that this concert is also like a Pink Floyd laser show, except when it’s like a baroque Mardi Gras (except when it’s like a somber Changing of the Guard)?

All performing arts on the Yard are extracurricular, so the concert draws mids who enjoy exercising both their left and right brains outside the parameters of academics and military duties, Share says. It’s been this way on the Yard since 1997, when Maxwell, the director of chapel music, performed one organ-and-light show for 300 people using 20 midshipmen, 14 colored lights and a fog machine. The next year, 3,000 people crammed into the chapel. The year after that, a second show was added, with Maxwell providing all the musical accompaniment (from memory) through the organ’s various audio functions. The spectacle, which is funded by ticket sales (in the tens of thousands of dollars), has ballooned under Maxwell’s guidance — “It really is a journey that carries you through the gamut of emotion,” he says — and has succeeded by virtue of the midshipmen’s commitment and skill.

A half-hour before Friday’s show, the shadowy crypt of American Revolution hero John Paul Jones echoes with the warm-up scales of golden-voiced sopranos and baritones. The crypt, underneath the chapel, doubles as a green room and backstage area, and for this past weekend is hazed with hairspray and stocked with costume racks and makeup vanities. Caped midshipmen sing and sashay their way down marble staircases and through catacomb-y corridors.