When my daughter was about three, we took a ferry around the Statue of Liberty. From the window of the boat, she looked out at the gigantic green woman hovering over her, and she was visibly disappointed. Why, she asked me, wasn’t the statue singing?
This was not an early sign of schizophrenia or her budding genius with metaphor. She asked the question because she had seen first-hand the development of my musical LIBERTY, where the title character is a walking, talking immigrant herself, with dreams and obstacles and… an incredible voice. It IS, after all, a musical.
Now my daughter is twelve, and liberty means a cell phone and a gmail account. But I still think that when she hears the famous words of the Emma Lazarus poem, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” she also hears the melody that those words are sung to in my show. And those words aren’t just couplets on a page, written by a stranger, over a hundred years ago. She imagines them sung by LIBERTY herself, as she opens her arms to the millions who helped build and strengthen this complicated country. “Give me your tired, your poor…” are the words of Emma Lazarus’ poem, but they’re also a promise, embodied by the statue, and whether you can hear it or not, they are what LIBERTY is singing. To everyone who sees her.
Dana Leslie Goldstein
Book and Lyrics
