With movie theater attendance decreasing yearly, and younger audience members thinking it’s OK to watch movies on their phones, something should be done to remind people why it is that movies were able to lift people’s spirits during the Great Depression, or inspired them to keep fighting during World War II. On Saturday February 7, at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, such a thing happened, with a presentation of the 1952 classic Singin’ in the Rain accompanied by the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra.

Led by the extraordinary Constantine Kitsopoulos the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra created what can only be called “magic” as they isolated the dialogues and voices, in order to allow the live music to breathe new life into a beloved classic. The film was projected on an overhead screen suspended above the musicians, who seemed as bewitched by the Technicolor magic as audience members were, you could see them laughing along with the film when they weren’t playing.

Watching Gene Kelly’s Don Lockwood jump from puddle to puddle in the title number, as the musicians below joined the fun was simply breathtaking, and during the famous Broadway ballet number, which goes on for more than fourteen minutes, the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra showed its prowess by highlighting the fact that we sometimes forget how stunning the incidental music in the film is.

On another level, it was quite delightful to be part of such a meta experience, since the plot of Singin’ in the Rain deals with the process of dubbing and filling in for “original” sound. While the NJSO never tried to steal the film’s “thunder”, they were obviously aware of how tongue-in-cheek the evening would be for those who noticed the similarities between the movie and the event. Unsurprisingly, the night went on smoothly, with the film reaching out to audience members, many lucky of them who were encountering it for the first time, while reminding others of why we already love it so. What a glorious feeling, indeed!