There’s still time to catch the final performance, in Pennsylvania, too.
The Lafayette Musical, an “Immersive Bicentennial Tour,“ concludes Sunday in Easton, Pennsylvania, at the aptly chosen Lafayette College. Having also played in Charleston, New Orleans, West Point, and Washington, D.C.’s recently politically tumultuous Kennedy Center, the show serves as a reminder of the leap from trite political adages to lasting cultural adagios. Governance is scarcely about the here and now. Politics, as with accomplished art, is almost always a battle for tomorrow–a small-p ‘progressive’ theme (think Jefferson, not Jeffries), which gently unpins the performances by conductor Thomas Zehetmair and his 25-piece French National Orchestra of Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes.
The performance featured Joseph Bologne, also known as the ‘Black Mozart’; Ruth Crawford Seeger; Mozart; Zehetmair; and Beethoven. Interspersed between the pieces were five chapters of an on-screen, animated tale of Lafayette’s revolutionary life, commemorated in 2025 to mark two hundred years since the Major General toured the America he had helped to free almost fifty years prior.
Lafayette, at just nineteen, had decided upon vengeance on the British for his nation’s humiliation during the Seven Years’ War and, more crucially, for the death of his father when Lafayette was just two.
Having served as honorably