Programming Highlights | October 2021

Echoing An American Pageant for the Arts, the 1962 event conducted by Leonard Bernstein, this special celebration and re-launch of live, in-person performing arts in America is hosted by six-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald with special guest Caroline Kennedy and featuring the National Symphony Orchestra (NSO). The concert will be directed and choreographed by Emmy Award® winner and Tony Award nominee Joshua Bergasse and feature newly announced conductors JoAnn Falletta, Steven Reineke and Thomas Wilkins.
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Despite the complications and uncertainties of the global COVID pandemic, and without confirmed dates, the band made the decision to spend the time and money so they would be prepared once the world returned to normal. The film follows the creative and emotional processes involved and features band interviews and live performances from the spectacular yet-to-be-seen show.
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In The Roads Most Traveled, Pulitzer prize-winning photojournalist Don Bartletti shares heart-wrenching stories from his 40-year career documenting history as it unfolds. Internationally recognized for his commitment to photographing the migration of Central Americans to the United States, Bartletti’s images reveal the never-ending saga of illegal immigration.
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Isabel Leonard joins Nadine Sierra and Ailyn Pérez to perform timeless selections.
Sopranos Ailyn Pérez and Nadine Sierra join forces with mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, as well as pianist Vlad Iftinca and guitarist Pablo Sáinz-Villegas, for a program of favorite arias and scenes, transmitted live from the Royal Opera of Versailles in France.
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When homosexuality was considered a mental illness to be “cured," cruel treatments like electroshock, castration and hysterectomies were employed. LGBTQ+ activists fought a powerful psychiatry establishment that had things dangerously backwards, including a key demand to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
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When homosexuality was considered an illness to be “cured," LGBTQ activists fought back.
PBS NewsHour introduces: "Raising the Future, The Child Care Crisis"
PBS NewsHour reports on America's broken childcare system, communities on the front lines and new political momentum for major reform in the post-COVID era.
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In 1925, Mrs. Mary Carson Breckinridge led a team of spirited women to Leslie County, Kentucky, and established a demonstration of unprecedented health care to rural Appalachia. Frontier Nursing Service was the resulting organization that utilized horses as transportation over mountainous terrain and foreign nurse-midwives as caregivers. Angels on Horseback: Midwives in the Mountains explores the driving force, trials, triumphs and harrowing tales of the dedicated women of the Frontier Nursing Service.
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Revisit Helen Keller’s rich career and explore how she perpetually put her celebrity to use to advocate for human rights in the pursuit of social justice for all, particularly women, the poor and people with disabilities.
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The Bob Ross® Experience is a new documentary that goes behind-the-scenes of the making of a one-of-a-kind interactive museum exhibit devoted to Bob Ross, the beloved artist and host of The Joy of Painting ®.
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