Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, May 29, 1993 TAG: 9305290716
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: 11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PATRICIA BRENNAN THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
In part, it reads: "I will stay with you, and I will touch your face . . . I will hold your hand, and watch your life flow through my fingers into my soul. I will stay with you until you stay with me. I'm the last person you will see, I'm the last person you will touch, I'm the last person who will love you. Who will give me something for my pain?"
The real-life nurse will not be in the audience, producer Jerry Colbert said. She served in Vietnam from 1966 to 1968, but she declined Colbert's invitation, telling him the memories were still too strong.
Her words will be read by Oscar-winner Kathy Bates, who replaces the earlier announced Dana Delany (Army nurse Colleen McMurphy on "China Beach").
It's heartstrings and patriotism that Colbert hopes to touch during his annual 90-minute concert, staged on the west lawn of the U.S. Capitol and airing live at 7:30 p.m. on PBS (WBRA-Channel 15).
He's combining documentary footage and highly evocative musical selections to create "a three-hanky show, maybe even four. I think this is the most powerful (Memorial Day) show ever."
The concert will include tributes not only to Vietnam veterans, but to those Americans who died in wars dating back to the nation's bloodiest, the Civil War. Memorial Day is rooted in its aftermath, but like the war, its history is divided.
In the North, residents of Waterloo, N.Y., began the custom of placing flowers on the graves of war dead in 1866. About the same time, Southern women laid flowers on both Confederate and Union graves as a gesture of reconciliation. Both claim to have originated the holiday.
Most of the on-stage talent will be familiar to television viewers: actors James Earl Jones, James Whitmore and E.G. Marshall and singers Gladys Knight, Judy Collins and Mac Davis.
Those who have seen past Memorial Day or Fourth of July concerts, either live or on television, may recognize the Cincinnati Pops's Erich Kunzel, guest conductor for the National Symphony Orchestra.
This year's concert also includes New Orleans jazz clarinetist Pete Fountain and the Boys Choir of Harlem.
Even some of the music has roots in television: the haunting "Ashokan Farewell," the theme from PBS's mini-series "The Civil War."
Another selection is the theme from a theatrical movie, "Glory," sung by the Boys Choir of Harlem. The music will underscore Whitmore's reading of Maj. Sullivan Ballou's poignant letter to his wife on the eve of a battle from which he did not return. The letter was part of the narrative of "The Civil War."
There also will be music with spiritual overtones: "Amazing Grace," written by a repentant former slave trader named John Newton; "Battle Hymn of the Republic"; and two songs traditional to New Orleans funerals, "Just a Closer Walk With Thee" and "When the Saints Go Marching In."
There will be lighter notes too. The concert will begin with Davis's renditions of "I Believe in Music," "Stop and Smell the Roses" and "Memories," accompanied by what Colbert calls film "postcards" of Operation Desert Storm.
This year is the 40th anniversary of the end of the Korean War, which took 54,000 American lives in three years (1950-53), nearly as many as died in Vietnam (58,000) from 1963 to 1973.
Korea became known as "the forgotten war," because its veterans returned without public thanks. Jones will read a tribute to them set against Dvorak's "New World Symphony," with television footage that Colbert called "very powerful."
This is also the 10th anniversary of the Vietnam Memorial. The NSO will play Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings" while the television audience sees footage of the war in Vietnam, the wounded and the nurses who tended them.
The concert will end on an optimistic note, with scenes of American soldiers carrying out a different role, that of the humanitarian, in Somalia. Knight and the Boys Choir will offer "Let There Be Peace on Earth," a tribute to the United Nations.
by CNB