Ruth Leon recommends… Let Freedom Ring! – Audra McDonald and Brian Stokes Mitchell
Ruth Leon recommendsLet Freedom Ring! – Audra Macdonald and Brian Stokes Mitchell
“Summertime”, (yesterday’s Slippedisc) is an excerpt from this live television programme at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC honouring the memory of Dr Martin Luther King.
This programme, Let Freedom Ring!, which is highly political and won’t be to everyone’s taste, has several more treats buried within it including “Make Someone Happy” and “Climb Every Mountain” from Macdonald and “I’m Feeling Good” and “The Impossible Dream (The Quest”) from that other great musical star Brian Stokes Mitchell.
If you have time to dig for their fine performances of these and other songs, watch the whole programme. It’s not just the perfection of their singing, nor just the musicality of their presentation, just pay particular attention to the absolute conviction they each give to every line of every lyric.
They finish this concert with their great duet from Ragtime “On The Wheels of a Dream”.
No more need be said. Goosebumps all round.
Once more misspelling her name, which is Audra _McDonald_.
Two fantastic performers!
Saw them in Shuffle Along in one of the previews and they were terrific and so was the entire ensemble. Later, during the official run of the show, Audra had to leave the cast because she was expecting and without her star power there would be fewer people in the seats, so management decided to close the show. The cast didn’t deserve such a fate. Free market forces where the theater is concerned, be damned!