Serenade puts the front line on center stage
NEW YORK — It’s a stunning sound, emerging amid the clanging and the whooping and the banging and the honking at 7 each night as New Yorkers cheer front-line workers: the velvety baritone of Brian Stokes Mitchell.
For decades, Mitchell’s voice has been one of the most celebrated in the Broadway theater, evoking goosebumps in musicals like “Kiss Me, Kate,” for which he won a Tony, and “Man of La Mancha,” in which he played Don Quixote.
Now, with Broadway’s houses shuttered due to the coronavirus, the voice rings out from a fifth-floor apartment on the Upper West Side — fittingly on Broadway, a couple miles from the theater district.
“This is my quest,” Mitchell sings, leaning precariously out his window, launching directly into the meatiest part of “The Impossible Dream.” — “To follow that star. No matter how hopeless, no matter how far.”
Mitchell, 62, is looking to serenade crews of ambulances, fire engines, police cars, or medical workers. When they stop and listen, Mitchell sings directly to them. And when people clap, he sweeps his arms as if to say: “Not me. Them.”
Mitchell’s gratitude stems from a personal ordeal. He is a survivor of the coronavirus, falling ill in late March. One night, he had a fever nearing 105 degrees, and almost was hospitalized. He’s been symptom-free for several weeks.
“I’d been going to the window to applaud for the health care workers like everybody else in New York,” he says. “Then one night I spontaneously thought, ‘Oh, I think my lungs feel like I can sing now.’ ”
He thought it would be a one-night gig. But people kept coming.
For now, Mitchell keeps busy with his unpaid gig. “Broadway’s closed, but someone’s still singing on Broadway!” he quips.