35th Annual National Memorial Day Concert (Michael Colbert Productions, WETA, PBS, aired May 26, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, May 26) my husband Charles and I watched the 35th annual National Memorial Day Concert on PBS. Actually, “Concert” in connection with this event is something of a misnomer, since it’s long since evolved into a bizarre and sometimes unwieldy mash-up of a traditional concert and a memorial service – though most of the people being paid tribute to aren’t dead, actually. The concert is held annually on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. (though during 2020 and 2021 they did makeshift versions to comply with the COVID-19 lockdown, including peppering it with clips of previous concerts and having the live performances done remotely) and is always accompanied by the National Symphony Orchestra under its “pops” conductor, Jack Everly (who took over after the previous “pops” conductor, Erich Kunzel, died in 2009). This year’s show opened with a spectacular performance of the song “Hero” (as in, “And then a hero comes along … ”) by Patina Miller, and then an even more spectacular performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” by Ruthie Ann Miles. What amazed me about her rendition of this famously difficult song is that she picked a high key to start with that rendered the high notes even higher – but she nailed every last one of them. Then the National Symphony played a tribute to World War II veterans, including a montage of still photos and film clips from the Battle of the Bulge, Adolf Hitler’s last-ditch offensive to try to turn around the course of the war.

As the National Symphony played the “Adagietto” slow movement from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, actor Bryan Cranston read a memoir from a veteran of that battle, Jack Moran, who recalled feeling a bullet whiz by him and strike down his best friend who was in the line of march behind him. One of the things I liked about this year’s concert was the sheer power and emotional impact of the servicemembers’ testimonials as read by various actors. Another thing I liked was that they didn’t do any of the traditional patriotic songs other than the national anthem and, as a finale, Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” Instead the singers got to do songs from their own repertoire that expressed the values the concert was trying to promote, including “God Bless the Broken Road” by country singer Gary LaVox; a song called either “There Can Be Miracles” or “When You Believe” sung searingly by Cynthia Erivo; the Hawai’ian remembrance song “Aloha Oe” by Ruthie Ann Miles; another country singer, Jamey Johnson, doing an understated song of his own called “Job Well Done” (his plaintive delivery reminded me of Red-Headed Stranger-era Willie Nelson); an unidentified bugler playing “Taps” quite eloquently; and another Gary LaVox song called either “I Will Stand By You” or “I Won’t Let You Go” (a more powerful piece of music than you’d guess from those anodyne putative titles – there were no chyrons to tell us what the various pieces were actually called, so as so often with PBS shows I’m guessing at the titles). For once some of the actors’ readings were more powerful than the music, especially Jenna Malone’s recitation of the memoirs of Kristie Ennis, a U.S. servicewoman who enlisted in the wake of 9/11 because both her parents had served; and B. D. Wong’s speech playing Allen Hoe, a Hawai’ian who served in Viet Nam and then suffered the death of his son fighting another one of America’s wars in Iraq in 2005. (I particularly chuckled when I heard the openly Gay B. D. Wong recall Hoe’s past chasing women before he married one and fathered two sons by her, one of whom became a war casualty.)

Jack Everly and the National Symphony provided appropriate accompaniments to the narrations, playing the Adagietto second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony behind Bryan Cranston’s World War II monologue and Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” under the Viet Nam tribute – almost inevitably after its use by director Oliver Stone in the Viet Nam War movie Platoon (1986). The concert moved quickly to its standard closing: a short speech by General Charles Q. Brown of the Army, current chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (and I believe the second African-American to hold that position, after Colin Powell); a short parade of the Joint Chiefs themselves (including a woman, Navy Admiral Lisa Franchetti: just one more glass ceiling broken!); a medley of all six service-branch anthems (including one for the Space Force, unilaterally created by former and quite likely future President Donald Trump even though America’s other military branches were created by acts of Congress; I’d long assumed they’d press the theme from John Williams’ Star Wars score for the Space Force, but it was a fresh and unfamiliar piece of music); Cynthia Erivo bringing her huge gospel-soul voice to the banal “Reach Out and Touch Somebody’s Hand”; and a joint performance of “God Bless America” to close the event. For me the most depressing thing about this program was the number of people for whom military service has been a tradition that ran in their families; you can read that either as a positive statement that the tradition of service has carried through from one generation to the next (and during all the tributes to the ethic of service I couldn’t help but recall Donald Trump’s comment as he toured the D-Day cemetery to mark the 75th anniversary of the invasion in 2019; he looked at all the crosses and said, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”) or a profoundly negative one that for every generation there will always be a new war and lives needlessly sacrificed for one damned cause or another.