Choral Cause: Andrew Lippa on “I Am Anne Hutchinson/I Am Harvey Milk”
Strathmore premieres a pair of choral works about two persecuted civil rights pioneers
Composer Andrew Lippa wasn’t exactly confident about the longevity of I Am Harvey Milk, his one-hour choral work about the slain gay rights pioneer from San Francisco. “My expectation was that we’d have seven productions of it, and it would be something nice to publish and record,” he says.
But the show — written in 2013 as a co-commission by the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus and six other gay choruses — became a massive hit. “We’re heading into almost our 20th production,” the composer of the Broadway musicals The Addams Family and Big Fish says with pride.
Next weekend, Strathmore will present a fully staged, World Premiere “concept opera,” tying the Milk piece with a new one-act companion, I Am Anne Hutchinson. Lippa views Hutchinson as a kind of progenitor to Milk. “Her story is remarkably similar to Milk’s in the civil libertarian sense,” he says. “This woman stood up for something she believed in even though she knew she was going to be persecuted for it.”
Just as Milk didn’t let the stigma, pressures and risks associated with being openly gay in the 1970s keep him from public office and the public eye, so too Hutchinson didn’t let gender keep her from becoming a kind of self-made religious leader, and one ballsy enough to take on theocrats in 17th century New England. Both pushed, to one degree or another, for greater rights and freedoms — for women and gays, and in religion and politics, to cite the most obvious. They were also both progressive thinkers, ahead of their time — and both paid a price for that.
Hutchinson’s particular focus was on religion, obviously something passed down from her father, an Anglican priest. Hutchinson couldn’t follow in his footsteps even if she wanted to since women weren’t allowed behind the pulpit in her day. (And barely ours: It’s been just 26 years since the first female Anglican priest.) Nonetheless, as an adult Hutchinson became a kind of de-facto preacher, leading a flock of fellow Puritans in opposing the leaders of the new Massachusetts Bay Colony. At regularly held public forums, Hutchinson would lead criticism of these leaders’ Puritan practices she disagreed with as well as advocate for alternative ideals more empowering to women — not incidentally, women were her target audience. For these brazen actions fomenting dissent — led by someone of the quote-unquote fairer sex, no less — the theocrats excommunicated and banished Hutchinson and many of her supporters from the colony.
Hutchinson isn’t widely known — Lippa first heard about her plight in a book about forgotten American stories. He hopes to change that, and has enlisted his friend of 20 years, Kristin Chenoweth, for the cause. “I wrote this with her in mind,” he says. “It’s ideal for her to premiere it.”
I Am Anne Hutchinson/I Am Harvey Milk is Saturday, April 23, at 8 p.m., and Sunday, April 24, at 4 p.m. Music Center at Strathmore, 5301 Tuckerman Lane, North Bethesda. Tickets are $39 to $99. Call 301-581-5100 or visit strathmore.org.
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