'30 Rock,' 'Kimmy Schmidt' star and Emmy nominee Tituss Burgess joining DSO for Pride show

The Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO) will celebrate the LGBTQ+ community this weekend with its first official Pride concert, headlined by screen and stage star Tituss Burgess.

The veteran Broadway performer, who made big splashes on Tina Fey sitcoms “30 Rock” and “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” will bring his dynamic stage presence and meaty high tenor voice to Orchestra Hall’s stage on Saturday at 8 p.m. He’ll join Principal Pops Conductor Designate Enrico Lopez-Yañez for an evening of songs from stage and film.

“I’ll be doing some Broadway hits, some jazz standards and a few pop tunes,” Burgess told the Free Press, “and telling a bunch of stories of me and my youth growing up on a farm as a little queer boy in Lexington, Georgia, 20 minutes from Athens, where I spent the majority of my life. Going to get the eggs out of the barn, the whole thing.

“It was wonderful, (but) I had nothing to compare it to. It was everything. It was me, my mom, my grandparents. I’ll tell the rest of that story at the show, but it’s the truth.”

Burgess is a five-time Emmy nominee; he received four consecutive nods for playing the outrageous Titus Andromedon on "Kimmy Schmidt." Known for playing live-wire, high-energy characters, he is quite the opposite in private life, referring to himself as “very, very introverted.”

“I hang out with my dogs and I take lots of naps, and I cook, and that’s my happy place,” he said. “I cook Southern cuisine – anything with fat and lard? Yes!

“I don’t quite enjoy being in crowds. I don’t. I’m very easily overstimulated, and I get overwhelmed very, very easily. So, I’m not the ‘jolly’ person people think I am. It’s funny when they encounter me; I know what they’re expecting."

Burgess recently wrote the score for a stage musical based on 1996 Whitney Houston/Denzel Washington film “The Preacher’s Wife.” Last month, the show had a highly successful tryout in Burgess’ home state.

“We had an out-of-town tryout at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia, which is where I saw my first musical as a kid,” he said. “We (had) the highest-grossing box office of any show in their entire history. We are planning for a future commercial life (for the show) … that’s about as far as I should speak towards it.”

In Detroit this weekend, Burgess’ tune selection will run a wide gamut, from “Porgy and Bess” to Disney classics and beyond.

“I’ll be doing some Shirley Bassey, some Bette Midler, some Lena Horne and a few crooners that people don’t visit very often,” he said.

“Pride is year-round,” he asserted. “Just like Black history, just like women’s history, just like any other sort of cultural thing that you identify with. And I feel like, with rights and such being taken away left and right, every group (should be in) staunch support of the other group, because it’s going to take all of us to keep what we have … when we cast our votes.

“It’s important right now; it’s not just fun in the streets and parades. It’s quite literally a matter of life and death. So, me showing up as the intersection of queerness and Blackness, being a male who is culturally Christian – that is walking activism. This side of me is fighting back. And I hope people walk away (from the concert) feeling a sense of empowerment, self-love and love for their neighbor.”

Tickets for Tituss Burgess with the DSO start at $29 and can be purchased at dso.org.

Contact Free Press arts and culture reporter Duante Beddingfield at dbeddingfield@freepress.com.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: '30 Rock,' 'Kimmy Schmidt' star Tituss Burgess joining DSO for Pride