by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last Thursday I watched back-to-back broadcasts of TV
concerts for the Fourth of July. One was the Macy’s Fourth of July Fireworks
Spectacular on NBC and the next was A
Capitol Fourth on PBS. To get one thing out
of the way first, A Capitol Fourth
didn’t contain any of the bizarre military spectacle President Trump gave
himself earlier in the day, nor did it show any of his speech. (Previous
Presidents have steered clear of big public celebrations of the Fourth of July,
though it’s been customary for them to make silent appearances at the Memorial
Day commemorations, also broadcast on PBS.) While NBC’s talent list focused
mostly on veteran country singers and relatively young current pop artists,
PBS’s was skewed both older and
younger, mixing veteran performers like the O’Jays (they came out dressed
cleverly in colored suits — one red, one white, one blue — and though I’m not
sure if they were all the original O’Jays they certainly looked old enough to be them) with younger artists, many of
them contestants on American Idol, America’s Got Talent or The Voice. The show was hosted by actor John Stamos, whose 15 minutes expired
about 20 years ago, who did a long and unfunny running gag about how he was
trying to get to sing with the Muppets — PBS stalwarts whose voice actors
croaked out “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” the Sesame Street theme, “This Land Is Your Land” (the “safe” verses
only, of course!), “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “Happy Birthday” — the last a
tribute to America’s putative birthday on the Fourth of July. The musical
backing was provided as usual by the National Symphony Orchestra with Jack
Everly conducting (he’s handled the “pops” tasks for the National Symphony
since the founder of these concerts, Erich Kunzel, died) and it began with
someone named Maelin Jarman (at least that’s the best I can make out from my hastily
scribbled notes on the show) singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and doing quite
well with this troublesome song that has felled many a major musical talent
called on to sing it at a ballgame or such.
The O’Jays were up next and they
were followed by Laine Hardy, a young white rocker who did a credible cover of
Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.” Then came a 12-year-old girl named Angelica
Hale who delivered by far the best and most searing performance all night, a
song called “Get On Your Feet.” Though it was modern dance-pop, Hale herself
reminded me of the young Judy Garland; like Judy, she’s a 12-year-old girl who
sings with all the power, passion, emotion and depth of an adult woman — and
all the volume of one as well: I wish she has just as illustrious a public
career as Judy and a far happier
private life! That would have been a hard act for anyone to follow, but fortunately the next performer was
gospel star Yolanda Adams, called on to do a tribute to the late Aretha
Franklin (who herself had graced the Capitol Fourth stage more than once). Instead of doing a medley of
snippets of various Aretha hits, Adams picked out one song — Aretha’s electrifying rewrite/cover of Otis
Redding’s “Respect” — and did it to the nines. I’ve faulted her before for
overdoing the “soul” devices, but this time around she belted the song while at
the same time treating it with, dare I say it, respect. Then came an O.K.
country singer named Lee Brice doing an O.K. country song called “American
Nights,” and after that a group of disabled veterans (including one in a
wheelchair and one visibly using an artificial leg) called the MusiCorps
Wounded Warriors, which seems to be a quasi-official project of the Veterans’
Administration. They did a country song I’ve heard before but can’t place the
title of — it’s the one about fried chicken on a Friday night that segues into
a tribute to our veterans and the sacrifices they’ve made to preserve our
freedom — and, aside from their obvious appeal to the heartstrings, they’re
also quite good on their own musical merits and I hope to hear more from them.
Alas, they were followed by that dreary and unfunny segment about John Stamos
and his continually frustrated desire to sing with the Sesame Street Muppets, and then the National Symphony Orchestra
played a medley of appropriately “spacey” themes (including the opening of
Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra) for a montage of clips paying tribute to the 50th
anniversary of the first human landing on the moon. (The fact that no
one has attempted a personned lunar flight
since the last Apollo mission in 1972 is one of the most bizarre chapters in
human history — it’s as if Queen Isabella had received Christopher Columbus at
court after his first voyage and said, “Thanks, but we’re not ever going to do that again.”) Then the concert reached another high point
with Keala Settle from the cast of the 2017 film The Greatest Showman belting out her big song from the film, “This Is Me”
— and while she wasn’t bearded on the Capitol Fourth program she is clearly a “woman of size,” and the part of me that loves Adele and
Susan Boyle for appearing live on stage with their natural body shapes also
makes me appreciate Settle for the strength of her character as well as the
awesome strength of her voice. The next performer was 15-year-old pop violinist
Lindsay Stirling, and though I liked her, quite frankly I’d rather hear her
unplug her violin and take on the classics. Then came one of the featured
tributes of the night — both the real Carole King and Vanessa Carlton, the
current actor playing her in the bio-musical Beautiful on Broadway, doing a medley of some of those great
songs King wrote with her first husband, Gerry Goffin: “On Broadway,” “The
Loco-Motion” and “One Fine Day.” Then came the fireworks — literally and
figuratively — with the National Symphony Orchestra playing the last four
minutes of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture in a typically over-the-top version with cannon fire, bells and a
chorus singing the words of the national anthem of Tsarist Russia where
Tchaikovsky quotes it in the score.
My husband Charles had come home well
before this segment, and he had a lot of fun with the idea that a celebration
of American independence in the Trump era would feature the Russian national anthem — along with the use of the French
one, “La Marseillaise,” as the song of the bad guys. He joked about wanting to grab the baton à
la Paul Henried in Casablanca and get the orchestra to play “La Marseillaise” as a
symbol of democracy’s superiority to dictatorship, and I joked that when Donald
Trump and Vladimir Putin get together and the Russian anthem is played, Trump
probably looks doe-eyed at Putin and says, “Hey, Vlad! They’re playing our
song!” Broadway star Laura Osnes and the U.S. Army Band (called “Pershing’s Own”
to distinguish it from the U.S. Marine Band, which is “The President’s Own”) joined the orchestra for a
patriotic medley of “It’s a Great Country” and “I Like to Hear a Yankee Doodle
Tune” (quite frankly, I’d have liked to hear “Yankee Doodle” itself!) and “76
Trombones” — which Charles once again irreverently commented was fully
appropriate for the program, since it’s from a musical about a con man and a
con man is currently running the country. The U.S. Army Band played “The
Caisson Song” — as an instrumental, which at least kept me from obsessing about
the removal of caissons from the current lyrics — and Vanessa Williams emerged
to sing a nice version of “America, the Beautiful” before the concert wrapped
up with John Philip Sousa’s two greatest hits, “Stars and Stripes Forever” and
“Washington Post March” — the last cut off early and most of it heard over the
credits. The fireworks display wasn’t as big or extravagant as the preceding
one on NBC, but precisely for that reason it made better television, and as
many weirdly mixed feelings as I have about my country — loving the stated
ideals on which it was founded and ruing our all too frequent failures to live
up to them — it was still fun to join the national celebration, even
vicariously on TV.
