by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched the latest so-called Memorial Day
Concert special on PBS — an annual event that’s now in its 24th year
and has long since shed any illusions of being a concert in the usual sense of
the word. This morning I was looking at my comments on it from three years ago,
when I watched the 2010 edition and there were still star performers on it
singing songs that weren’t about the
military, patriotism or public service. As the concerts have gone on the
segments of people simply singing songs have shrunk to the point where they’ve
virtually disappeared, and the parts that specifically pay tribute to the
military, to the heroism of individual servicemembers and the dramatics of war
have grown. The show was hosted by the usual crew — the MC’s were Joe Mantegna
and Gary Sinise, and Ed Harris also appeared — as, via a film clip from the
2004 event, did Charles Durning, who if he’d lived in the 1930’s probably would
have become a star on the level of Edward G. Robinson. Alas, he came of age as
a performer in the 1960’s and 1970’s, long after the day when character actors
could become major stars. The big tearjerking veterans’ story was a fairly
recent one, of two brothers, Eric and Joe Grenville from Cumberland,
Pennsylvania, both of whom signed up for the National Guard and had the bad
luck to enlist just two weeks before 9/11 and suddenly found themselves
confronted with the fact that they were actually going to have to go out and
fight real wars. Eric lost his leg in Iraq protecting other servicemembers from
an IED; Joe made it through Afghanistan but then was turned down for a fourth
tour and got so upset that he committed suicide. This was a fascinating story
to be hearing on a show ostensibly devoted to a patriotic salute to the
selflessness of America’s veterans and the nobility of their service — it was
incredible that the show’s producers were acknowledging the reality both of
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) itself and the fact that many veterans
suffering from it don’t seek treatment because they think it would be
dishonorable or somehow un-“manly” to do so. It’s also incredible that this
show acknowledged that more veterans of the (second) Iraq war have killed
themselves after they got home than have died in actual combat.
The remarkable
soprano Katherine Jenkins returned (she did a duet with Andrea Bocelli on the
2010 show and totally out-sang him) for the “Pie Jesú” and a version of “You’ll
Never Walk Alone” — a song Charles thought was very ironic because in its original context, the Rodgers
and Hammerstein musical Carousel,
it’s sung about a man who abused his wife, got killed committing a crime and
returned from the grave to haunt her. It’s become a sort of monument to
sappiness — at the height of the AIDS epidemic it became de rigueur at all the big benefits — and it’s probably
indicative of how sugary Hammerstein’s lyrics are that my favorite version of
all time was the first I ever heard, pianist Roger Williams’ instrumental of it. The most recent American Idol winner, Candace Glover, sang the national anthem,
and she was followed up by Jessica Sanchez singing “God Bless America.” Alfie
Bove sang “Bring Him Home” from Les Misérables — at last! Someone singing this music who actually
has a voice instead of a
non-singing movie star aimed in the general direction of the correct pitches by
AutoTune! — and the rest of the songs were all themed around service and loss,
including Chris Mann’s “There Are Roads” and “You Raise Me Up” and tenor Roland
Tynen’s “To Fallen Soldiers” (I’d like to hear him do something else sometime —
like maybe the tenor part in Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, a far better piece of music on the same general
theme) along with the usual medleys of marches and service songs. Jack Eberle,
or whatever his name is — the person who took over conducting the concerts
after their creator, Erich Kunzel, died after the one in 2009 — did a decent
enough job in a program that mostly relegated the National Symphony to a backup
band for the military melodramas (in the word’s literal meaning: a dramatic
monologue accompanied by music) and the vocalists. It was an all too often
bathetic but sometimes genuinely moving program.
