43rd Annual A Capitol Fourth (Michael Colbert Productions, WETA, PBS-TV, aired July 4, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the dominance of rap and EDM on the Macy’s Fourth of July Fireworks show, the 43rd annual A Capitol Fourth was a breath of fresh air. It opened with Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds performing “America, the Beautiful,” singing and playing an electric guitar made to look like the U.S. flag. After that Broadway star Ruthie Ann Miles did “The Star-Spangled Banner” and managed to make that treacherous song’s most difficult section – the high leap on the words “the rocket’s red glare” (or “voice, fiddle and flute,” as they were in the song’s original version, “To Anacreon in Heaven”) – sound actually easy. There were a few unfunny segments between host Alfonso Ribero (a Black man despite his Latino-sounding name) and Muppets Elmo and the Cookie Monster from Sesame Street, though at least producer Michael Colbert didn’t have the Muppets conduct. Belinda Carlisle of The Go-Go’s, who were announced as the best-selling all-women band of all time (I can believe that, though there might be another that’s out-sold them), sang two of the Go-Go’s’ most iconic hits, “We Got the Beat” and “Vacation,” and later returned for her best and most beautiful solo song, “Heaven Is a Place on Earth.” Boyz II Men did a song apparently called “East Coast Rules” and later came back for something that may have been called “Smile Easy” or “I Want to Be Free.”

Then there were two excerpts from the relatively new genre in musical theatre, the pop-musical bio of a legendary music star. First was Adrienne Warren, paying tribute to the late Tina Turner with a medley of three Tina Turner songs from her hit musical, Tina! (which won Turner herself a Tony Award as one of the show’s producers): “Simply the Best,” “Nutbush City Limits” and “Proud Mary.” Warren’s voice doesn’t have the magnificent edge of Turner’s own – whose could? – but she’s still a more than credible soul singer. She certainly did a better job than whoever played Neil Diamond in the segment immediately following, a tribute to Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical. The Beautiful Noise segment included five songs (alas, not “Beautiful Noise” itself!): “Cracklin’ Rosie,” “Cherry, Cherry,” “Forever in Blue Jeans” (sung by a woman clad in, you guessed it, skin-tight blue jeans; I wondered how she managed to get them off when she needed to use the restroom), “America” and “Sweet Caroline.” But whoever played Neil Diamond in the four out of five songs he sang was hardly at the level of the real one!

Then Babyface came back with a song called “Change the World” (a title I can be sure of since it was announced) and a country duo called Maddie & Tae (those are their real first names, by the way; their Wikipedia page gives them each two last names, with Maddie having the maiden name Marlow and the married name Font, while Tae started out as Dye and is now Kerr) doing Woody Guthrie’s classic “This Land Is Your Land.” They did a quite bland version, alas, with none of the power and soul Lauren Alaina brought to this song on the 2000 A Capitol Fourth (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLAVn-sKfEY). I remember being astonished by Alaina’s performance, buying all the Alaina CD’s I could get my hands on, and posting a comment on the YouTube post reading, “Please, Lauren, do a record of this song and perform ALL of it, including the radical verses Woody Guthrie wrote that get censored on occasions like A Capitol Fourth!” (If you want to hear it uncensored, check out Bruce Springsteen’s version from the 2009 documentary film The People Speak, based on Howard Zinn’s book A People’s History of the United States, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bL34HXegnT0.)

The next song was “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” from the 1960 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music, performed by over-the-hill opera star Renée Fleming. (It’s become a vehicle for elderly former opera singers, including Eileen Farrell, who sang it stunningly on a 1988 The Sound of Music recording on Telarc, featuring mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade as Maria von Trapp.) Then we got the three American crew members on the seven-person mission of the International Space Station, Frank Rubio, Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg, horse-playing with a cordless microphone drifting back and forth between them in their weightless environment. After that and the return performances by Belinda Carlisle and Babyface, we got an engaging medley by the Northwell Nurses’ Choir of Bill Withers’ “Lean on Me,” Ben E. King’s gospel-derived hit “Stand by Me,” and “Arise Up.” Then came the big attraction of the evening, an aging rock band trotted out for the still-remaining baby boomers in the audience (including me). In this case the band was Chicago, or rather what’s left of them after their ranks have been decimated over the years (lead guitarist and co-lead singer Terry Kath killed himself accidentally on January 23, 1978 as he was cleaning out his gun – sorry, NRA, but sometimes guns kill people even when the people handling them don’t intend them to). Chicago performed songs from various stages of their career, including “Saturday in the Park” (which was almost inevitable given that its lyrics reference the Fourth of July), “Feeling Stronger Every Day” and “25 or 6 to 4,” during the last of which producer Michael Colbert decided to start the fireworks display.

The fireworks continued through the rest of the program: the obligatory snippet of the last five minutes or so of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture (nothing says “Happy birthday, America!” like a Russian composer’s tribute to his country’s victory in a war against France!) with cannon shots, bells and a chorus singing the Tsarist national anthem when Tchaikovsky quotes it; the U.S. Army Band playing a medley of “The Caissons Go Rolling Along,” George M. Cohan’s “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” and “Yankee Doodle”; Renée Fleming returning to belt out “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee”; an appropriately stentorian singer named Charles Esten singing “Let Freedom Ring”; and the National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Jack Everly (who’s been in charge of these concerts since the death of their founder, Erich Kunzel, in 2009), playing John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.” While Chicago’s performance was hardly as much fun as the Beach Boys were on the 2017 and 2018 A Capitol Fourth concerts, at least it drew in the PBS audience and provided a fitting capstone to a fun occasion that wore the patriotic breast-beating lightly and wasn’t oppressive about “celebrating America.”