GILL — For Chloe Castro-Santos, a Gill resident and member of the Northfield Mount Hermon School Class of 2017, the opportunity to perform alongside Leslie Odom Jr. is a dream come true and a testament to her hard work.
Castro-Santos will be performing with Odom Jr. at a Boston Pops concert at the city’s Symphony Hall on Tuesday, June 6. She won this opportunity through the Fidelity Investments Young Artists Competition, which selects four students from across the state from hundreds of applicants.
She will be performing the song “Everything I Know” from the musical “In the Heights” by famed “Hamilton” star Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Odom Jr. is another “Hamilton” star and a Tony award winner. Castro-Santos said she looks up to him as a performer and that it is a dream come true to be able to meet him. She said the experience has been very surreal.
Castro-Santos has been honing her musical theater talents in the area and beyond since she was little. She plans to attend the University of Michigan in the fall, one of the best schools in the country to study musical theater.
Her mother, Jocelyn Castro-Santos, said Chloe began playing piano around 7 and started performing around 10. She participated in various theater companies and programs around the area, including the Starlight Youth Theater, Amherst Theater and the Marina Civic Theater.
Jocelyn Castro-Santos said her daughter took singing lessons with faculty at NMH before she attended the school, which helped expand her range.
She decided what she wanted to do at a young age, and started researching the best schools, her mother said. She is one of 24 in the incoming class at Michigan’s musical theater program.
Both mother and daughter attributed Castro-Santos’s success to the environment she’s been in and the people she’s worked with.
“There are so many people in the community that have been so helpful and supportive,” Jocelyn Castro-Santos said.
“I owe this community a lot, I’ve always had such a supportive base,” Chloe Castro-Santos said.
Her long-term goal is Broadway, but also to just be a working actress in regional and national tours. As for the show, she’s been practicing for the show in Boston on Saturdays with professors from the Boston Conservatory.
“Personally for me it’s such a big a deal because I grew up watching the Boston Pops at my grandmother’s house so to see Chloe perform with them is amazing,” her mother said.
The show Tuesday is at 8 p.m. at Symphony Hall in Boston.
Reach Miranda Davis
at 413-772-0261, ext. 280
or mdavis@recorder.com.