http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/09/arts/music/music-review-andrew-lippas-i-am-harvey-milk.html 2014-10-08 17:36:48 Music Review: Andrew Lippa's ‘I Am Harvey Milk’ Andrew Lippa’s oratorio “I Am Harvey Milk” broadens its gay rights message to include other persecuted groups. === “Hello, family!” That warm salutation by Whoopi Goldberg set the triumphal mood for the New York premiere on Monday evening at Avery Fisher Hall of the Broadway composer Andrew Lippa’s stirring oratorio Semiformal and semiclassical, and lasting one hour, it eulogizes But to a degree it was a one-man show. The forces surrounding Mr. Lippa, included the 120-voice All-Star Broadway Men’s Chorus, and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s conducted by Joel Fram. The chorus’s processional choreography had a ceremonial precision but stopped mercifully short of puffed-chest militaristic pomp. The sound was impeccably focused. Mr. Lippa’s accessible, melodic score is devoid of highbrow pretension and dissonance, but it couldn’t quite be called pop. His words are an exhortatory public poetry with the expected rhetorical flourishes. Two of the strongest songs are a disco number, “Friday Night at the Castro,” in which chorus members became dancers and a mirror ball whirled, and “Sticks and Stones,” in which the chorus reiterated anti-gay epithets and slogans, then extended the list to include racial and ethnic slurs. The blunt message: “Sticks and Stones can break my bones/Names can really hurt me.” The song was a kind of ritual exorcism of pain. The most touching number, near the end of the piece, was the slow waltz, “San Francisco,” a yearning lullaby in which the city is envisioned as a mystical sanctuary: the Emerald City, if you will. A boy from Iowa calls out, “San Francisco/I am broken/But you welcome the broken/to come and heal.” The sheer size of the chorus singing in hushed tones gave it the feeling of a mass prayer. In the climactic anthem “Tired of the Silence,” which used words from a speech Milk gave shortly before his death, Mr. Lippa and the chorus joined voices in a militant plea for everyone within earshot to “Come Out!” More than 35 years after Milk’s death, its message still applies.