A Rose for the Doughboys: Melissa Errico Brings World War I to New York

World War I has a strange place in our collective memory. It changed our collective history and the world, but it doesn’t always get the attention it deserves. On Tuesday, Jan. 13, that “forgotten war” gets the spotlight in Midtown, not through a lecture or a timeline, but through music, story, and a genuinely close-up, personal story. New World Stages hosts The Story of a Rose: A Musical Reverie on the Great War, a one-night-only presentation created by and starring Melissa Errico, produced by The Doughboy Foundation. It starts at 7:00 p.m., and it’s designed as a lush, theatrical one-woman concert: orchestral sound, evocative visuals, period costumes, and an all-star jazz ensemble that pulls you into the era before you even realize you’re “learning” anything.

Errico’s style has always lived in the space between beautiful singing and sharp, intelligent talk. Here, she’s using that gift to walk audiences through World War I in all its many-sided American complexity: the immigrants arriving before the war, the cultural shift at home, the pull of Europe, and then the moment America is suddenly in the war. The show moves through the world that shaped the conflict and the people who carried it, with one through-line above all: the music.

Between career-defining roles in musical comedy, Melissa Errico whips up concerts that tell deeply researched stories, one of which is of her Aunt Rose.

Melissa Errico Brings World War I to Life in The Story of a Rose

At the center is Rose, Errico’s own great-aunt, a family figure who becomes an avatar for a whole lost time. Rose’s connection to the Ziegfeld Follies gives the piece its frame, and from there Errico recreates the songs, the hopes, the flirtation and fear, the private lives that existed right alongside the headlines. It’s history, yes, but it’s also family legend: mischievous in places, melancholy in others, and unexpectedly intimate.

Melissa Errico takes the stage in a silver dress, belting hits to memorialize her great-aunt Rose.

The Music of World War I, From Irving Berlin to Jazz on the Front Lines

Musically, the show leans into the era’s sound, guided by jazz pianist and musical director Tedd Firth and his big-band ensemble. The song list spans the full emotional spectrum of wartime America: patriotism and protest, loss and longing, humor and heartbreak. You might hear “Oh, How I Hate To Get Up In The Morning!” and then find yourself in the bite of “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.” You’ll travel through early American standards like “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” land in the romance of “They Didn’t Believe Me,” and end in a rousing “God Bless America,” a song Irving Berlin originally wrote with World War I in mind.

Under the musical direction of jazz pianist Tedd Firth, The Story of a Rose features wartime songs of patriotism, protest, loss, and longing.

How American Song and Jazz Emerged During World War I

And Berlin isn’t the only presence here. The show touches on the nascent glories of Jerome Kern and the birth of distinctly American song during the war years. It also brings in one of the most important and too-often-skipped chapters of that story: the Harlem Hellfighters, who carried American jazz to France, introducing a sound that would help define the century, even as the war tried to break it.

Broadway actor and musician George Abud joins the evening in a variety of onstage roles, adding texture and movement to what is ultimately a one-woman concert shaped by character, memory, and address.

What gives the piece its emotional weight isn’t just the history. It’s Errico’s vantage point. She’s approaching these stories not only as a performer, but as a mother of three teenagers, the same age today as many of the soldiers whose lives she’s singing about. That detail lands. It collapses the distance. It makes it harder to keep the war filed away as “long ago.”

⇒ Read the entire article on the Military.com website.
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