This just in from Melissa Errico. “Awful facts, right? I know all about it. But I was as shocked as you.” We’ve been trading emails about the 369th Infantry Regiment, known as the Harlem Hellfighters, who served in W.W. I under the Tricolore in French uniform, because the segregated U.S. Army barred Black units from mixing with whites. Those Hellfighters lived up to their name. One of them, a former rail station porter from Albany, New York, was the first American honored with the Croix de Guerre.
On May 7, Errico premiered The Story of A Rose: A Musical Reverie on the Great War at the Rachel M. Schlesinger Concert Hall and Arts Center in Alexandria. Luckily, anyone who missed the single live performance will shortly be able to catch it online, on demand.
A chockablock list of songs the world only half remembers or has forgotten completely runs the emotional gamut from the plucky “Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kit Bag” to Irving Berlin’s alternate national anthem “God Bless America” by way of “Roses of Picardy,” “Funiculi, Funicula,” “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier,” “Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,” the heartbreaker “My Buddy,” and the novelty number “How Ya Gonna Keep ‘em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree?).”
And who is Rose? A great aunt of Errico’s who immigrated to the United States from Italy just as war was overwhelming Europe. Fresh off the boat Rose got work at the Brooklyn Navy Yard sewing uniforms. When peace came, Rose broke into the Ziegfeld Follies, paving the way for Melissa, whose credits include Cosette on the first national tour of Les Misérables, Eliza Doolittle opposite Richard Chamberlain’s Henry Higgins, Sunday In the Park With George at the Kennedy Center, a Tony nomination for the short-lived Amour, and the CD Sondheim Sublime, hailed in the Wall Street Journal as “the best all-Sondheim album ever recorded.” Last year came the encore Sondheim In the City.
In between those billboard projects, Errico creates free-form theatrical concerts she thinks of as “palimpsests,” a layering of song on narrative and commentary assembled through research bordering on the obsessive. The Story of A Rose promises to be her smartest, most resonant, and substantial palimpsest yet.
In addition to history books and encyclopedic documentation from the U.S. World War I Centennial Commission (created by an Act of Congress in 2013), Errico has been poring over pertinent family heirlooms: a box of letters, a crystal dish with century-old buttons in it (“my great aunt and my grandmother were seamstresses”), sheet music, her grandmother’s piano, a portrait of a showgirl, even a massive sword that belonged to her grandfather, who, like many another new arrival from Europe, went back in short order to fight as new Americans.
And how do all the pieces fit together? “The show is a concert,” Errico says. “It’s a reverie. I narrate the immigrant experience, the history of American song, family treasures. All of it.”
The live video of The Story of a Rose is in preparation for on-demand streaming. Watch for details
Matthew Gurewitsch writes about opera and classical music for AIR MAIL. He lives in Hawaii
