“How fantastic to see you all glistening within the solar,” Phylicia Rashad mentioned in Instances Sq., accepting this 12 months’s Legacy Award from the Broadway League as a part of the fourth annual Broadway Celebrates Juneteenth, a 90 minute live performance that includes some three dozen Broadway performers from the casts of fifteen present reveals delivering some dozen musical numbers and medleys. As well as, the singing group “Younger Gifted and Broadway” carried out “Seize the Day” from Newsies: The Musical. William Rhem Jr., at present within the solid of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Baby,” recited as soon as once more his Juneteenth-specific spoken phrase piece, “On this Day of Freedom”
And Deborah Cox, at present in The Wiz, serenaded Rashad.
Beneath are movies providing moments from the occasion, together with snippets of performances, and one full one (NaTasha Yvette Williams sings Nina Simone) as nicely Rashad, Dorian Harewood, host Michael James Scott, Deborah Cox and others briefly reflecting on the day. Juneteenth commemorates the emancipation of enslaved African People, and have become an official federal vacation in 2021. It marks the day – June 19, 1865, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation – when Main Basic Gordon Granger proclaimed freedom for enslaved individuals in Texas.
“For these of you who could not know. I’m from Houston, Texas,” Rashad informed the gang, “and Juneteenth resonates in Texas as a result of that is the place it begins. And yearly on June 10, my father and his associates, all the opposite dentists in Houston, hosted a picnic. It was superb. They serve barbecue and beans and potato salad and watermelon and purple soda. It was a time of celebration of household neighborhood. And that’s what I see right this moment…”
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