On Wednesday, November 26, 2025 at The Victoria Theater, more than 25 of Dayton’s most talented musicians gather to celebrate the music of The Band. Such a Night: The Last Waltz Live! has been a Dayton Thanksgiving tradition for over a decade and is one of the must see concerts of the season.
Proceeds from the performance benefit WYSO, and station Music Director Juliet Fromholt offered up the details on WYSO Weekend with Jerry Kenney.
Kenney: You're listening to WYSO Weekend on 91.3 WYSO. Thanks for sharing your weekend with WYSO. And sharing some studio space with us this weekend is WYSO Music Director Juliet Fromholt. Welcome.
Fromholt: Thanks for having me, Jerry.
Kenney: Juliet, what time of year is it?
Fromholt: It's Last Waltz time, everybody! Every fall, we start to talk about Such a Night: The Last Waltz Live! So if you're unfamiliar with this Thanksgiving tradition, it is our yearly benefit concert for WYSO. It happens the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. So this year, it will be on Nov. 26 at Victoria Theater, and the show is over 25 local musicians, some of our best and brightest in local music, recreating The Band's Last Waltz concert, which originally happened in 1976. It was The Band farewell concert, featured a cavalcade of guests, of star-studded guests, including Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris, Dr. John, and on and on and on.
We do kind of the same thing. We have a core band on stage and then different guests appear throughout the night to sing or play along and it is just a beautiful night of music. It's a great way to get ready for the holiday.
Kenney: So the film of that event features, you know, all kinds of interesting interviews with the artists who are participating, but we focus on the music. It's a really nice, solid event and usually very well attended.
Fromholt: Yeah, this is our third year at Victoria Theater, and I have to say tickets are selling faster than ever. The floor at the Victoria is nearly full. We've still got a lot of great seats in the balcony of the beautiful historic theater. There's really not a bad seat in that house and we've been very, very grateful for Dayton Live becoming our new home for this performance. Like I said, it’s the third year there. We absolutely love being on that historic stage and working with their team.
Kenney: Can you give us a little bit of a behind-the-scenes of how the organizers, and the artists put this together? Is there kind of 'Hey, I did this number last year, but I'd really like to do this number.' Or maybe 'You want to try this number this year?' Does that happen?
Fromholt: It does, and for those who might have seen the show in an earlier iteration, perhaps you were at the very first one at Gilly's, perhaps you've gone to the show's pre-pandemic that we're at the Dayton Art Institute, the cast does change periodically. You know, folks move on from the show, folks leave the area, people are traveling for the holiday, and so people have to sub in. Over the past, I would say, four years since we've been back from the pandemic. There's our core band, which they're on stage the entire time. And then, you'll have some shuffling around. More recent additions. We've had Amber Hart, Heather Redmond, and Chris Blank. They originally guested on individual songs, and they still do that. But they also show up as a trio performing harmonies and a couple of key moments in the show. And those vocals just add so much to the overall sound of the show.
Kenney: Yeah, that's great. And you mentioned that this is a benefit for WISO and so I think that's an important point to hit this year with what we're dealing with funding challenges
Fromholt: Absolutely, yeah. This is a yearly fundraiser. The show originally was just a community fundraiser and the organizers, Jeff Opt, is the lead organizer of this. This was a crazy dream he had many years ago and decided to make it a reality and now it's become a tradition in our community. But he approached us about a year or so into the show's duration and said, 'Hey, could we make it a benefit for WYSO?' And so the Thanksgiving show has always been a benefit us, and so the really nice thing about this is you're going to go with your family, you're going to enjoy a great night of music and your ticket purchase goes back to WYSO and we then turn that in to more great music throughout the year. These musicians are on stage supporting us you know giving up their part of their holiday to perform for us and then we get to turn around and play their music all year long so it's a really beautiful cyclical thing that happens every year with this show and I love that it's around thanksgiving time because we have so much gratitude for our local musicians for this year after year. They have so much gratitude for the WYSO being important in the local music community. It's just always a really beautiful night. It's a lot of like good feeling a whole night at that show.
Kenney: And it's really become a pretty well-established tradition for many residents.
Fromholt: There are lots of folks who make this a part of their Thanksgiving holiday every year. You know, historically, the night before Thanksgiving is a night where a lot of people are coming into town and gathering with family and friends they haven't seen all year. And this show has become a part that tradition. We have groups that make sure that they kind of get the same seats every year, we have a big group of loyal supporters. I hear there are up to 30 people now coming to the show this year. So whether you're just a small group of friends or a whole family that wants to come join us, you'll be in great company. And I should say, this is at the historic Victoria Theater, but this is not like a 'sit with your hands in your lap situation.' Like people are dancing, they're singing along. It's really a fun, raucous concert experience.
Kenney: Awesome. So let's do the business of where people can pick up tickets.
Fromholt: Yeah, you can order them online at www.daytonlive.org if you just scroll right through their events listing. There's a listing for Such a Night: The Last Waltz Live. You can also go to the Schuster Center box office and pick them up there. And there are links on our website, www.wyso.org/events for more information, all the times, the address of the theater and a ticket link there too.
Kenney: It's a great music event with a lot of local artists, something, Julia, you have always supported through your efforts here as music director and as host of Kaleidoscope.
Fromholt: Yeah, absolutely. We are so honored to be able to continue to shine a light on the great music in our local community. The Dayton area, the Yellow Springs area, the Springfield area, all of Southwest Ohio is really rich in terms of musical talent, and we're so pleased to be to be able play some of that talent for you each and every day and to showcase them on stages like this.
Kenney: A quick shout out before we leave, a quick shout-out to the website and you have a section called Studio Sessions there with a lot of great artists that you feature on your show.
Fromholt: Absolutely. If you go to the music tab on www.wyso.org or you go Novaphonic.fm or in the Novaphonic app, there are studio sessions there. Those are the artists that come perform live on the air on shows like Kaleidoscope and Midday Music among others. And you can listen back to any of those. We record all of them and archive them. And we love to share them out. We're looking forward to doing more of that when we move into our new home next year in Union Schoolhouse.
