“One of the charms of our shows is that they don’t exactly fit the usual categories,” said Jan Carpman, referring to the local group The Choral Connection, of which she is president.

The ensemble’s 18 members will perform the 90-minute revue “Music Makes Me … Do the Things I Never Should Do!” Saturday evening in the Morris Lawrence Building at Washtenaw Community College.

After the main part of the show, the audience will move into the lobby atrium, which will be set up as a jazz club, for swing dancing or just listening to the hot sounds of the 17-piece Saline Big Band.

“The show’s tagline is ‘a celebration of all things musical, edible, and occasionally regrettable,’ and the songs are organized by those themes—music, food, and love gone awry,” Carpman added.

The music generally falls under the umbrella of the Great American Songbook, spanning a variety of genres, but many songs will be new to audience members, she said. The group will be accompanied by piano, bass, and percussion.

“It’s a very ambitious project,” said Carolyn Tjon Burnstein, the group’s artistic director.

“It’s a show, not a concert,” Burnstein added. “We are a stage group that does musical revues, that’s probably the best way to describe it. This is 45 numbers, a whole show of chorus songs with singing, dancing, staging and set pieces.”

The show features all original arrangements that she’s done specifically for the group.

“I tried to create little scenes within each song, so the songs become little musicals within themselves,” Burnstein added. “We’ve a lot of humor and lots of surprises that people won’t expect.”

The title of the show is from the 1930s Ginger Rogers - Fred Astaire movie “Flying Down to Rio,” she explained, adding that some of the less familiar tunes on the program were unearthed via research on the Internet, plus browsing old sheet music in antique stores.

“We start with the Bugs Bunny theme song,” Burnstein said of the “musical” part of the program, “and it’s attached to a couple of Cole Porter numbers, then we do ‘In the Mood.’ Few people know the words to ‘In the Mood’ … We do (Dave Brubeck’s classic) ‘Take Five,’ and again that’s a song people hear as an instrumental but rarely do they hear the words.”

As far as the “edible” part of the show’s tagline goes, “there’s ‘The Chiquita Banana Song’ … We do an Andrews Sisters song I found in an antique store (called) ‘Soup Wouldn’t Be Soup’ … we do ‘Java Jive’ and a great song called ‘Moonlight Cocktail,’ which was a Glenn Miller song from 1941.

The program will also view relationship issues, more specifically when relationships go awry. “We do a whole medley of breaking up songs, start with ‘Breaking Up Is Hard to Do,’” Burnstein said. Some of the lesser-known songs in that segment will include “Flushed From the Bathroom of Your Heart” and “Every Time You Go Outside I Hope it Rains.”

Burnstein has been the group’s artistic director since the beginning in 1994, and “each year we’ve upped the ante a little bit,” she said of their shows. Plans call for taking The Choral Connection on the road for bookings outside of Ann Arbor. A recording is also in the works.

“There’s a lot of little theaters around the area—it would be fun to take it to other audiences,” Burnstein added.