Music to Inspire Voter Registration

Among the many events that commemorated the bicentennial of the United States of America, one of the less successful was the Broadway musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Leonard Bernstein provided the music for the book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, and both of them had more successes than can be easily enumerated. By 1976 Bernstein had established himself as a world-famous conductor and a composer that had excelled not only in the concert hall but also on Broadway. Lerner, in turn, was a leading figure in musicals, perhaps best known for My Fair Lady on Broadway and the film Gigi. Working together, the two of them should have been a “dynamic duo;” but, following thirteen preview performances, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue opened at the Mark Hellinger Theatre on May 4, 1976 and closed the following May 8.

The idea was to survey the occupants of the White House (at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue) between 1800 and 1900 with one actor (Ken Howard) playing all the presidents and one actress (Patricia Routledge) playing all the First Ladies. It begins with Thomas Jefferson moving in while his predecessor, John Adams and his wife Abigail sing to him the song “Take Care of This House.” We now find ourselves in a time when the occupancy of “This House” may be more contentious than any of us can recall, meaning that the results of the coming Election Day may be the most crucial that any of us have experienced.

This past Tuesday was Voter Registration Day, singled out by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to recognize the need to “protect our health and our civil liberties at the same time, including our fundamental right to vote.” To this end the ACLU created a Web page with separate hyperlinks for each of the fifty states, providing information about the different ways in which a vote may be safely cast. To encourage visiting that Web page, pianist Lara Downes created a video of a performance of “Take Care of This House.”

Members of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus singing from the windows of the White House (courtesy of Crossover Media)

In this video each performer appears in a window of the White House. First we encounter Downes playing in a window with cellist Yo-Yo Ma at the next window. Other instrumentalists include guitarist Conor Padmanabhan and another cellist, Ifetayo Ali-Landing. There is also an impressive number of contributing vocalists with line-by-line accounts taken by Thomas Hampson, Isabel Leonard, Ailyn Pérez, Lawrence Brownlee, Anthony Ross Costanzo, Julia Bullock, and J’Nai Bridges. Finally, all the windows are filled by the members of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, after which Judy Collins provides a spoken epilog on why this musical journey was so important.

The resulting video makes for a refreshingly imaginative approach to media, but what matters the most is that we all react to the message behind the media!