Marian Anderson had a life worth singing about. The contralto's classical concert career broke down all sorts of barriers: A major star on both sides of the Atlantic in the first half of the 20th century, she was the first African-American woman to sing at New York's Metropolitan Opera.
But her greatest fame came on the steps of Washington, D.C.'s Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday of 1939. That's where she performed a concert arranged in reaction to her being barred from the city's foremost concert hall, which had a "whites only" policy. In addition to the 75,000 people lining the mall, millions more listened on the radio, another significant step in America's long slog toward equality.
On Sunday, Feb. 17, local choral group VocalEssence paid tribute to Anderson at its annual "Witness" African-American History Month concert at St. Paul's Ordway Center. But this was less a choral concert than a theatrical presentation with songs performed by Marlissa Hudson, who was wonderful at conveying Anderson's strong voice and regal demeanor.
Unfortunately, there wasn't enough of Hudson giving a sense of Anderson's extraordinary gifts and too much time spent on a clunky script by Jon Cranney that delivered several facts about Anderson but offered very little insight into her. While Greta Oglesby made for a graceful, believable Anderson, she was handicapped by a text that took every dramatic shortcut available.
The action took place within an intriguing frame: Anderson preparing to sing at the 1963 march on Washington where Martin Luther King gave his historic "I Have a Dream" speech on the same Lincoln Memorial steps of her earlier triumph. But Cranney's unfortunate choices soon emerged: An extended setup from Anderson's unseen hotel room TV featured a newsman unrealistically conferring tremendous historical import upon an event that had yet to happen.
Soon, Oglesby's Anderson was finding awkward avenues toward giving lots of information about her life to a hotel maid squealing and starstruck when she learned that Anderson knew both Dr. King and Aretha Franklin (who was still a pretty minor musical figure in 1963). As the facts of her thumbnail biography tumbled out, it became clear that Anderson had a very interesting life that could have been told far more compellingly.
Thankfully, the scenes were intercut with Hudson singing signature arias and spirituals, her strength of voice and stage presence giving a sense of what was so exceptional about Anderson. But having two women fill the central role never allowed the audience to deeply invest in one performance or the other.
Far more involving texts were available in the concert's first half, when conductor Philip Brunelle and the VocalEssence Chorus performed settings of poetry by Mari Evans, Rita Dove and Langston Hughes. While the five composers met with mixed success in fitting the writers' unique styles into their own, there was plenty to inspire an audience member to head to the library and check out some Dove and Hughes. And maybe a good biography of Marian Anderson that fleshes out more of what this concert merely touched upon.
Rob Hubbard can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.org.