REVIEW: 'The Lafayette Musical' Brings Enlightenment Swagger & Suspense to D.C.'s Kennedy Center.

There's still time to catch the final performance, in Pennsylvania, too.

The Lafayette Musical, an “Immersive Bicentennial Tour,“ concludes Sunday in Easton, Pennsylvania, at the aptly chosen Lafayette College. Having also played in Charleston, New Orleans, West Point, and Washington, D.C.’s recently politically tumultuous Kennedy Center, the show serves as a reminder of the leap from trite political adages to lasting cultural adagios. Governance is scarcely about the here and now. Politics, as with accomplished art, is almost always a battle for tomorrow–a small-p ‘progressive’ theme (think Jefferson, not Jeffries), which gently underpins the performances by conductor Thomas Zehetmair and his 25-piece French National Orchestra of Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes.

The performance featured Joseph Bologne, also known as the ‘Black Mozart’; Ruth Crawford Seeger; Mozart; Zehetmair; and Beethoven. Interspersed between the pieces were five chapters of an on-screen, animated tale of Lafayette’s revolutionary life, commemorated in 2025 to mark two hundred years since the Major General toured the America he had helped to free almost fifty years prior.

Lafayette, at just nineteen, had decided upon vengeance on the British for his nation’s humiliation during the Seven Years’ War and, more crucially, for the death of his father when Lafayette was just two.

Having served as honorably as any Frenchman could, Lafayette returned to America, having watched his own nation’s attempt at political enlightenment result in the Reign of Terror and the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte.

This is the journey the production team at HolyMage, alongside Zehetmair and his orchestra, embarks upon with the audience. A narrator, often humorous, tells of Lafayette’s accomplishments, with stunning visuals projected as a backdrop.

The choice of Bologne, also known as the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, and his Anonymous Lover is as obvious as elegant. Bologne, the illegitimate, mixed-race son of an accused murderer, lived as wild a life as Lafayette. A composer, soldier, and champion fencer–all against the backdrop of a French society in turmoil and an establishment often baffled by Bologne’s race. When the Anonymous Lover was released, Bologne was fighting for control of the Paris Opera, while Lafayette was fighting the British in Virginia. Both men lived in high society and, at times, as scapegoats and exiles.

Seeger’s Andante for Strings presents a jarring pivot–ominous, haunting, and tortured. A horror-movie jump-scare could come any moment, but never arrives. Instead, simply awe-inducing discomfort from the counterpoint, something for which Seeger was partly famed. As Lafayette may have felt while attempting to cross the Atlantic westward, or indeed as he would have endured during his stint in prison, Seeger’s piece feels never-ending for being so brief, and in the end, exits on its back foot. Like the promise of an early, grisly death that never befell the Frenchman in all his battles.

Mozart’s K. 219 arrives on cue. A gentle palate cleanser at first, but then a blast of maturity, as Lafayette grows from fiery rebel to beloved statesman. The piece builds to majesty, like Handel’s Zadok, and brings plenty of foreign influence, just like the Marquis in America.

Zehetmair took his chance to show off at the Kennedy Center, airing his recently premiered Passacaglia, Burlesque, and Chorale, which, almost through passion alone, bridges the traditional-contemporary divide that typified the performance. Closing on Beethoven’s Great Fugue, another (small-p) progressive masterpiece, the theme arrives home. The piece was composed a year before America’s 50th birthday and, much like an independent America, especially to the surrendering Brits, was hardly well received.

Confusing and challenging, Russia’s Igor Stravinsky called the Great Fugue “an absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary forever,” which, on the precipice of America’s 250th anniversary, feels exceptionally apt–not just as a bridge between past and present, but a reassurance between present and future.

As America arrives at its semiquincentennial, the political tug-of-war between the progressive and the traditional is not best highlighted by political adages, but by the adagios. Zehetmair, HolyMage, and the Orchestra of Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes do Lafayette and the enduring ideals an immense justice.