I Hear America Singing

Aria412 presents a New Mercury Collective Production
I Hear America Singing
Book and Lyrics by Daron Hagen
Daron Hagen, director
Music Director: Robert Frankenberry

Featuring Robert Frankenberry, Christopher Scott & Desirée Soteres

Three middle-aged Juilliard grads rehearse numbers from the revival of a musical revue called I Hear America Singing prior to a backers’ audition. Is it a dream, a mid-life crisis, a reunion, or an intervention? Love, the unreliability of memory, and personal reinvention intertwine as they swap old and new songs — from pop song to art song, Victorian parlor tune to operatic aria, agitprop to jingle — compulsively recontextualized by Robbie, a becalmed middle aged commercial composer striving to regain his self-confidence and sense of identity by obsessively revising the show that launched his career on Broadway twenty years earlier.