After Cosette, Eliza Doolittle, and Sondheim’s Dot, Melissa Errico channels her great aunt Rose

This just in from Melissa Errico. “Awful facts, right? I know all about it. But I was as shocked as you.” We’ve been trading emails about the 369th Infantry Regiment, known as the Harlem Hellfighters, who served in W.W. I under the Tricolore in French uniform, because the segregated U.S. Army barred Black units from mixing with whites. Those Hellfighters lived up to their name. One of them, a former rail station porter from Albany, New York, was the first American honored with the Croix de Guerre.

On May 7, Errico premiered The Story of A Rose: A Musical Reverie on the Great War at the Rachel M. Schlesinger Concert Hall and Arts Center in Alexandria. Luckily, anyone who missed the single live performance will shortly be able to catch it online, on demand.

A chockablock list of songs the world only half remembers or has forgotten completely runs the emotional gamut from the plucky “Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kit Bag” to Irving Berlin’s alternate national anthem “God Bless America” by way of “Roses of Picardy,” “Funiculi, Funicula,” “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier,” “Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,” the heartbreaker “My Buddy,” and the novelty number “How Ya Gonna Keep ‘em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree?).”