A musical reverie on the Great War conceived and performed by Broadway star Melissa Errico.

https://www.kennedy-center.org/whats-on/explore-by-genre/theater/2024-2025/story-of-a-rose/

With her trademark smarts and sublime singing, Melissa Errico tells the story of her own great Aunt Rose and her grandmother as they came over from Italy by boat during WW1 and immediately took up work as seamstresses at the Brooklyn Navy Yard making uniforms for the war. A musical memoir full of early jazz ragtime flair & elegant storytelling, Melissa pieces together love letters, authentic songs, stories of friendships, and scraps of the memories of lovers & sons to bring another time back into focus. She will stir our hearts to recall how life, for an entire generation, would never be the same again. This Rose becomes a memorial for many.

Songs include wartime tunes of both love and protest: “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier” “Heart of my Hearts (The Story of A Rose) and “If He Can fight Like He Can Love,” Broadway songs set in the time period, French art songs of the time, and popular music such as The Beatles “Honey Pie,” tied together with Melissa’s real-life family history of a woman who emerged from wartime and became a Ziegfeld Follies favorite.