National Memorial Day Concert (Michael Colbert Productions, WETA, PBS, aired May 29, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched the 33rd annual Memorial Day concert on KPBS, and with the pandemic more or less over (at least people are pretending tt’s over even though the SARS-CoV-2 virus is continually evolving new “varnants” and “sub-variants” and the case rate, at least as measured by PCR tests of viral sequences, is going up again), this year’s event was once again held in public on the Capitol mall. The “concert” was the usual mix of musical selections and extended tributes to various members of the U.S. armed services, portrayed by actors even though the original people, if still alive, were there – and if they weren’t, they had surviving descendants or other family members representing them. The most moving story told during the program was the lives of Mark and Carol Graham and their three children, sons Jeffrey and Kevin and daughter Melanie. With the show’s regular co-host, Joe Mantegna, playing Mark and actress Jean Smart playing Carol, the show told the story of two lifelong military careerists who met, fell in love, married and had children while part of the Army, moving as ordered from one barracks community to another. When their kids were grown up, naturally they enlisted too – only Kevin was diagnosed with clinical depression, went off his medications and committed suicide. Eight months later, their other son, Jeffrey, was blown up when his unit in Iraq hit an improvised explosive device and he was almost literally blown to bits. The explosion severed both his legs and one hand, and though the medics did the best they could he didn’t make it. The Graham parents at least got some comfort in that he’d saved the lives of the other members of his unit – Jeffrey and one either servicemember took the brunt of the explosion so the others in the unit survived and eventually got home safely.

The concert actually led off with one of its most impressive and inspiring musical segments: “The Star-Spangled Banner” as sung by recording artist Pia Toscano, who placed ninth in the 2016 season of American Idol. Most singers who get called on to sing the national anthem on shows like this pretty much plod through it. Not Toscano: she ornamented this song in the style of a gospel singer and added extra high notes to a song that’s already notoriously difficult to sing – and she treated the closing number, Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” the same way. The next selection was “This Is Our Country,” performed by the National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Jack Everly (who’s been the conductor of these concerts ever since the first one, Erich Kunzel, died in 2009) while the show’s hosts, Mantegna and Gary Sinise, were introduced. The next segment was a tribute to the late General Colin Powell – a “regular” on this show since its inception in 1991 – delivered by Black actor Dennis Haysbert, who fortunately narrated the tribute in third person and didn’t actually try to play Powell. (There were certainly enough film clips of the real Colin Powell, so he was present virtually.)

The next musical selection was, olf all things, “The Impossible Dream” from the Don Quixote musical, Man of La Mancha, sung by Alfie Bowe, who was billed as a tenor but whose voice sounded like it was on the cusp between tenor and baritone to me; only his upper-register flourishes towards the end really sounded “tenorish.” After that we got actress Mary McCormick – considerably, shall we say, stouter than she was when she played the lead federal witness-protection agent on the show In Plain Sight – delivering a heartfelt and needed tribute to the women who served in World War II, bvoth as defense workers and actual enlistees in the WAC’s and WAVE’s. McCormick’s segment was followed by one of the reasons I wanted to watch this, singer Rhiannon Giddens (who’s part African-American, part Native American and part white) doing a song whose title appeared to be “You Can Count on Me.” Rhiannon Giddens is one of my favorite currently active singers, and I fell in love with her ever since she did a rewrite of the Johnny Cash-Johnny Horton song “The Vanishing Race” for Look Again to the Wind, the multi-artist tribute to Cash’s 1964 LP Bitter Tears, his concept album about the oppression of NIative Americans. The original song had lamented the passing of the American Indian (actually America’s Native populations were subjected to systematic genocide that Adolf Hitler actually cited as a model for what he was doing to the Jews), but Giddens added powerful new verses that defiantly said that Native Amercans haven’t gone anywhere, that they are still very much a part of this country’s body politic despite the best efforts of white Americans to destroy them. Though Giddens’ contribution to this show wasn’t at the level of some of the songs she’s recorded on her own, it was welcome.

The next segment was a tribute to Abraham Lincoln occasioned by the 100th anniversary of the Lincoln Memorial, and an acknowledgment of nine past recipients of the Medal of Honor’ America’s highest military decoration. The song that followed was a rather stentorian ballad by country singer Norm Lewis called “He’s My Hero. After that Gary Sinise narrated a tribute to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 and the resulting wars in Afghanistan ahd Iraq, which led into the Joe Mantegna/Jean Smart tribute to Mark and Carol Graham and their bravery in the face of the loss of both their sons. This was followed by another country ballad, this one by Craig Morgan called “The Father, My Son and the Holy Ghost.” (Notice the pronoun instead of the article before “Son”) After that a member of the U.S. Army Herald Trumpets played “Taps,: and I noticed that though he was playing a standard trumpet with valves, he was playing it bugle-style and not touching the valves at all. The next singer was Broadway star Lea Salonga, who performed “Our Prayer” and sang it considerably better than the person who had the hit on it, Andrea Bocelli; her interpretation was refreshingly free of all Bocelli’s lachrymose affectations.

Then it was time for the obligatory medley of all the U.S. Armed Forces’ songs, which made an interesting contrast to the version I’d heard “live” earlier that afternoon by organist Alison Luedecke and singer Amy Mein at the Organ Pavilion in San Diego’s Balboa Park: the Navy was represented by the familiar “Anchors Aweigh” iknstead of the less well known Navy hymn “Eternal Father,” and the Army song was sung with the revised lyrlc, “The Army goes rolling along,” instead of the original “The caissons go rolling along” (caissons, which the Army doesn’t use anymore, were small wagons used to transport cannonballs to artillery gunners so they could use them). The show closed with a speecy by General Mark A. Milley, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (who probably performed his greatest service to America when, after he was tricked into marching along with then-President Donald Trump through a park that had been deliberately cleared of protesters to participate in Trump’s photo-op holding a Bible in front of a church whose pastor hadn’t wanted him there, heroically resisted Trump’s later attempts to get the U.S. military involved in subverting the 2020 election), and Pia Toscano’s stellar version of “God Bless America.” Overall the National Memorial Day Concert is a lumbering beast of a show, half concert and half tribute – my husband Charles described the tribute segments as essentially commercials for war – and it’s not surprising that its list of sponsors includes major defense contractors like Boeing and General Dynamics who have a vested interest in keeping America at war. But the parts of it that do work are exalting and moving, and that’s why I keep watching it year after year even though I remain discomfited by the fact that this country needs a military (albeit one considerably smaller than the one we’ve got!).