Bitter Laurel
A Staged Reading World Premiere Performance
Music by Margaret Bonds
Lyrics by Janice Lovoos and Edmund Penney Book by Demetrios Vilan
Edited by John Michael Cooper
Piano Leads realized by Christopher Washington and John Michael Cooper, with Althea Waites
Orchestrations by Christopher Washington and John Michael Cooper
Directed by Margarette Joyner
Music Directed by Justin Smith
Vocal Direction by Sequina DuBose
Saturday, April 18th at 7:30 pm Sunday, April 19th at 3:30 pm
This is the story of
ELIZABETH KECKLEY (1820-1901)
A former slave who became the modiste, friend, and confidante of Mrs. Abraham Lincoln
As is often the case with world premiere performances of new stage works, this is a staged workshop production, presented with minimal staging, no props or costumes, and a narrator to provide stage directions.
The audience is advised that this production includes racially derogatory language, including the use of the “n-word,” and historically reflective dialect. These elements are integral to portraying the lived experiences and historical realities depicted in the work and may be unsettling to some viewers.
Act One: Washington, D.C.
Scene 1 - Pennsylvania Avenue
We Want Douglas - Chorus
What a Big World This Is - Keckley, Chorus
Scene 2 - Elizabeth Keckley's Shop
When I Meet Mrs. Lincoln - Keckley, Sarah
Scene 3 - Mrs. Lincoln's Sitting Room
Scene 4 - The Ballroom
(If it’s a Waltz) Let it be Mine - Stoddard
Scene 5 - Mrs. Lincoln's Sitting Room
I Wish My Boy Could See Me Now - Keckley
Scene 6 - Elizabeth Keckley's Shop
The Best Dressed Private in the Army - Keckley, George
Scene 7 - Elizabeth Keckley's Shop
Oh, Black Moon Shining - Keckley
Old Enough to Know - Keckley
Scene 8 - Pennsylvania Avenue
We Got a Moses - Chorus
Scene 9 - Mrs. Lincoln's Sitting Room
Scene 10 - Mrs. Lincoln's Sitting Room
Who Does He Think He Is? - Mary Todd Lincoln
Prosperity’s Smiling - Mary Todd Lincoln, Keckley
Bitter Laurel - Keckley
Scene 11 - Elizabeth Keckley's Shop
What a Big World This Is (Reprise) - Keckley, Chorus
Act Two: New York City
Scene 1 - Lower Broadway
In New York - Chorus
Scene 2 - Lobby of the St Denis Hotel
Scene 3 - Entrance to Wm. H. Brady and Co
Barker’s Song: Step Right Up - Keyes
Scene 4 - Parlor Suite, Brandeth House
Many Little Things - Mary Todd Lincoln
Prosperity’s Smiling - Mary Todd Lincoln, Keckley
Scene 5 - A Garret Room
Friends - Keckley
What a Big World This Is - Company
The Place: Washington, D, C, and New York City
The Time: The Years Between 1860 and 1868
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Elizabeth Keckley - Kellie Williams
Mary Todd Lincoln - Casey Lee Adams, Andrea Parrone
Sarah Bond - Lechetze Adnan Qayyum, Cornelia Cooper
George Keckley - Roberto Gutierrez
Jim Keckley - Daniel Burston
Aaron Potter - Omari Emmanuel
Mrs. Cruishank/Woman - Gianna Mars, Lily Newcomb
Marian Ringold/Mrs. Stokes - Victoria Gonzales
Katherine Lee/Mrs. Ninian Enwards - Cassidy Zollinger
Ms. Bessie MacLean - Gabi MacDuffie
Mrs. Elizabeth Grimsley - Piper Barnes
Mrs. Margaret Kellogg - Tabitha Turner
Mrs. Stoddard - Crystal Stroupe
Mr. Calvin Keyes - Ron Buesser
Monsieur Jeanotte/Clerk - Devin Potts
Speaker/Bellhop/Hamilton Busbey - Tanjiam Manan
Ms. Amelia Lancaster/Aunt Mary - Eyram Dogbe
Young Woman - Emily McKelroy
Queens Choral Union
Piper Barnes, Janie Best, Martin Best, Ron Buesser, Lois Buesser, Micah Burkheimer, Lily Chuman, Eyram Dogbe, Nour Eddine, Ruthye Cooley, Deb
Cutler, Mary Len Cutter, Omari Emmanuel, Rocio Gonzalez, Victoria
Gonzales, Zach Hugo, Gabi McDuffie, Karen Lanham, Alexandra Liambos, Pilar Long, Kiera Madix, Gianna Mars, Lily Newcomb, Emily McKelroy, Amelia
Meena, Annalise Murphy, Greg Pipkin, Jack Smith, Phillip Tate, Tabitha Turner, Margaret Tyler, Matt Winslow, Cassidy Zollinger
Orchestra
Jen Dior, flute Katherine Surber, oboe
Donovan Perkins, clarinet Asaun Mebane, alto sax Nicholas Ritter, bassoon
Josh Westbrook and Richard Garafolo, trumpets Micah Burkheimer, trombone
Peter deVries and Aria Loreto, violins
Oksana McCarthy, cello Jason Mcneel, bass
Chaela Lewis and Garrett Guion, percussion
Yoon Sun Song, piano
This production of Bitter Laurel is made possible by: A Queens University of Charlotte Noble Fellowship Award, A UNC Charlotte Faculty Research Grant, And a generous anonymous donor.
Directed by Margarette Joyner Musically Directed by Justin Smith
Vocal Direction by Sequina DuBose
Kristof Leopold, Gambrell technical director
Yoon Sun Song and Brenda Fernandez, rehearsal pianists
Special Thanks to Professor Lora Smith and COM 495 for their work to promote this production
Reanna Bloomer Mya Chavis Jett Coetzee
Nasir Mann Alanah Payne Maggie Sweeney Karter Wong
Program Notes
This weekend’s performances at Queens University of Charlotte offer the world premiere of a musical about the dramatic, inspiring, and unlikely intersections of the lives and works of three remarkable women. Its main subject, Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley (1818-1907), born into enslavement by the Burwell family whose name formerly adorned the main administration building at Queens, developed exceptional skills in dressmaking and great business savvy during her enslavement. With these she was able to purchase her own freedom and that of her son. Once free, she became a sought-after modiste in Washington, D.C., an activist on behalf of African Americans, an author, and evidently the guiding spirit in an unlikely friendship with none other than Mary Todd Lincoln (1818-82), First Lady of the United States during the presidency of Abraham Lincoln.
To this unlikely friendship was joined another a century later: the friendship of composer, pianist, and intrepid activist Margaret Bonds (191372). With a distinguished career as social-justice advocate who not only championed the poor and downtrodden at every turn but also created visionary large-scale musical compositions that celebrated historical Black notables as role models for contemporary African Americans, Bonds in 1968 assembled a team of literary collaborators who worked with her in setting Keckley’s story to music: artist, critic, and lyricist Janice Lovoos (1903-2007), actor, director, and author Edmund Penney (1926-2008), and Turkish-born
playwright Demetrios Vilan (1909-2000). Elizabeth Keckley and Mary Todd Lincoln were both dead before Bonds’s creative team set about their project. But in the resulting work – titled Bitter Laurel – their voices joined together with those of Bonds and her team to create a new and brilliantly original musical drama that not only tells the story of the Keckley-Lincoln friendship, but also draws powerful connections between the issues and themes of their lives and those of the late 1960s and early 1970s – connections that, in many cases, resonate startlingly with those of our own world today.
Act I (Washington, D.C., 1860-66). As the musical begins, we see a gathering of white citizens celebrating the presidential candidacy of Abraham Lincoln’s rival in the 1860 presidential election, Stephen A. Douglas, drawing particular attention to Douglas’s pledge to defend and uphold the “domestic institution” of enslavement. Elizabeth Keckley, now a free woman and newly arrived in Washington, enters and, awed by the grandeur of the Capitol, sings the anthem “What a Big World This Is” – whose words “What a big world this is! There must be room for all of us; though it grieves us and deceives us, Hope will still burn bright – it’s for the big and small of us” are a hymn to equality, inclusion, and freedom: “Long as we are free, we’ll find a way of sharing it.” Having obtained the special license required of Black folk, Keckley opens her own tailoring shop and hires an assistant, Sarah Bond, who will provide valuable support as she builds her life. She also becomes the founding president of the “Contraband Relief Society,” aimed at helping formerly enslaved Black folk find their way in the free world.
Over the course of the act, Keckley wins a position as modiste for Mary Todd Lincoln, and a bond of friendship takes root between the two. Keckley wishes that her son, George, conceived of rape during her enslavement and raised by Elizabeth Keckley and an informal stepfather, Jim, could see her now. As it happens, George pays her a surprise visit in her shop. But he also tells her that he has set aside his education at Wilberforce University to enlist in the Union Army’s fight against the enslavement of his people. Keckley, though distressed at her son’s having entered the looming “white man’s war,” tries to be supportive – but her worries prove tragically correct: George Keckley is killed in the Battle of Wilson’s Creek, leading to the searing pathos
of Keckley’s number “Oh, Black Moon Shining,” with its climactic lines of “where is the freedom in this land of the free? And what good’s my freedom without my son?” In the ensuing scene Keckley, immersing herself in her work to drown her sorrow, is approached by a conniving author who wants to be introduced into the Lincoln White House, but she rebuffs her in a powerful display of loyalty to the First Lady. A poignant reminiscence of her romance with Jim Keckley (“Old Enough to Know”) is followed by the heartening news of Abraham Lincoln’s reelection and African Americans’ joyous celebration of that news (the rollicking gospel number “We Got a Moses”), but the growing optimism attendant to that event is shattered by Lincoln’s tragic assassination, which leads to Keckley’s bleak songful meditation “Bitter Laurel,” from which the musical takes its name. The remainder of the act shows Keckley’s and Mary Todd’s friendship growing as they worry about how to build a new future together and address the former First Lady’s mountain of debt. The act closes with a reprise of “What a Big World This Is.” That number’s closing lines – “gotta look ahead in this fine new world of the free!” – offer a prophecy of sorts, for although the war is over and the forces of enslavement have finally been defeated, they have been succeeded by other frightful concerns that require more forward-looking resolve.
Act II: New York, 1966-67. With only sparse provisions for widows and no reasonably dignified sources of income for women, Mary Todd’s debts have become a major concern. To address them, Keckley has suggested they travel to New York and take advantage of the city’s bustling diversity to sell some of them; this change of scene is joyously depicted in the expansive chorus “In New York.” To avoid the appearance of impropriety, they insist that the sale be anonymous. Unfortunately, the firm hired to sell the clothes instead makes a circus of the event, publicizing the fact that the clothes on sale are those of the widow of the slain President. The attention produces what came to be known as “the old clothes scandal.” Tensions arising from that controversy lead to the musical’s first and only falling-out between Elizabeth Keckley and Mary Todd, and this, in turn, leads to Mary Todd’s melancholy reflection, “Many Little Things.” But when the former First Lady comes close to a nervous breakdown and, distraught, cries out for Keckley, her friend once again comes to her aid –
a reconciliation that leads to a reprise of the duet “Prosperity’s Smiling,” its earlier boisterous waltz now replaced by music of a glowing and exquisitely tender intimacy.
The musical closes in Keckley’s garret room in Greenwich Village. A warm exchange with her friend Amelia is followed by “Friends” – a musical reflection, at turns poignant and joyous, on the numerous intersecting friendships of Keckley’s journey up to that point – and as Amelia leaves a new visitor arrives: Hamilton Busby, come to solicit Elizabeth Keckley to write and publish what would become her bestselling memoir of her White House Years (Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House). Keckley’s bewilderment at this invitation is interrupted by the return of her friend and former assistant Sarah, who brings the bright news that her professor at Wilberforce University wants Keckley to join the faculty there. Sarah’s beau, Aaron, arrives and inadvertently leaks the news that Jim, Keckley’s old lover (about whom she reminisced in “Old Enough to Know”), is in town and that the younger couple has arranged the older couple’s reunion –and as the group leaves for Keckley to be reunited with her long-lost love the anthem “What a Big World This Is,” with its closing assertion to always “look ahead in this fine new world of the free” returns.
Bitter Laurel is the magnum opus of Margaret Bonds’s final years, but she never saw it performed. The most likely reasons are distressingly prosaic. First, she and her team did most of their work on it in 1968-69, before she assumed her position as musical director of the Repertory Theater at the newly founded Inner City Cultural Center of Los Angeles – a position that, coupled with the large piano studio she developed, took most of Bonds’s time and energy and left little room for the massive amount of work involved in bringing a musical to the stage. Additionally, librettist Demetrios Vilan was on an extended trip to his native Turkey and Greece when Bonds died suddenly on April 26, 1972. News of her death shocked much of the musical world and left the unperformed musical in limbo – complete in all its essentials but never performed, its book and scores soon lost in the mass of papers that Margaret Bonds left behind.
Those circumstances doomed Margaret Bonds’s late masterpiece to obscurity for more than half a century. But that period of oblivion is now reaching its end thanks to the determination of Queens University, which formerly honored the very family that enslaved Elizabeth Keckley, to do right where so much wrong was done before. And as Bitter Laurel finally makes its way into the world there is good reason for all involved to do what the musical’s book – and indeed the lives of Keckley and Bonds alike– urge us to do: to “look ahead” and continue our strivings to do better in the intersecting causes of addressing injustice and advancing freedom in “this fine new world of the free.”
John Michael Cooper
(Southwestern University)
The Music and Music Therapy programs in the Department of Art, Design, and Music at Queens prepare its students to think critically and excel professionally as performers, scholars, music therapists, and instructors. These programs are housed in the newly constructed Gambrell Center for the Arts and Civic Engagement, which features the 1,000-seat Sandra Levine Theatre and the intimate Greenhoot Recital Hall. Our two choirs, comprising over 60 singers, host a spring opera program and have developed an international reputation for excellence, placing first at competitions in Canada (2023) and Greece (2024).
We have a choir for you, regardless of your major or whether or not you attend Queens. For information on our offerings, contact Dr. Justin Smith at smithj11@queens.edu. For more information, please visit www.queens.edu/admissions or email adm@queens.edu.
Music
& Music Therapy Events
Composition Factory Royal Voices Senior Showcase 7:30pm 7:30pm 5:00pm Greenhoot Belk Chapel Salvin Atrium Wed Friday Sun 04/22/26 04/24/26 05/03/26
Music at Queens