For the last month, Glenn Beck has been heaping praise upon the Broadway play “Amazing Grace,” which tells the story of the former trader who eventually penned the title hymn. After seeing a preview of the show in July, Beck couldn’t praise it highly enough, calling it “profound and personal wake up call” and “a miracle”:
What was happening was something far greater than a really special broadway show. We were being transformed, our hearts were softened and there was a spiritual healing that was happening. When, in the end, Amazing Grace was sung, I and others apparently, felt pulled out of our seats. It felt almost wrong to sit and I, for one, could not. Half of the audience stood up almost together, weeping. The other half leaped to their feet the minute the song was over. I have seen 100’s of Broadway’s shows over the years but I do not recall one where people were as fast to give a standing ovation as this show. It was the original cast of Les Miserable except the storyline was more powerful and the timing was only as God could time it. That is saying something I know. I never stay for the end of shows as we always leave on the last line. We stood for the 8 minute ovation. On the way out white and black were crying and some of us even hugged each other. “Oh, if everyone in the country could experience this show, many of our problems would fall away.” I thought and heard others say.
Audiences and critics, on the other hand, have been less enraptured and the play is struggling at the box office and so Beck brought the play’s writer on to his radio show yesterday in an effort to promote the show and encourage his audience to buy tickets in order to keep it afloat, saying that if everyone in America would just see this play, it would immediately put an end to the #BlackLivesMatter movement.
“There is something special about this,” Beck said. “There’s something happening with this show. I mean, if every American could see this show, you wouldn’t be having people say, ‘Black lives matter and you can’t dare say white lives do … All lives matter? You don’t dare say all lives matter; it’s black lives matter!’ We would have an end of that conversation, literally.”
