Brian Stokes Mitchell is just like us. A couple years ago, the Tony Award winner was feeling anxious about the state of the world, and admittedly consuming too much cable news. "With all the things that are just going on in the world, it seems to keep getting crazier and crazier. And I thought, what do I need for me?" says Mitchell. What he needed was a reminder that better days are ahead.
He came across a song by Jason Robert Brown called "Hope" that the composer wrote in 2016. The lyrics included "When life is crazy and impossible to bear / It must be there / Fear never wins / That’s what I hope." The song resonated with Mitchell so much that he's now created a music video, where he sings the song, accompanied by Brown on the piano. The video is now available on Mitchell's official YouTube channel (produced by Dori Bernstein, mixed by Isaiah Abolin, and filmed in the home of Playbill's CEO Philip S. Birsh).
As Mitchell told Playbill: "This should be something I would love for everybody to have and to pass on to people that need it—whether their problems are macro (like looking at all of the dysfunction happening in the world with politics and governments), or on a micro scale (they might have personal trials or tribulations that they're dealing with, family illnesses or something else that they're going through). And I think hope is something that we all need right now."
The "Hope" music video was shot in 2022 and is finally out.
"Hope" is part of an ongoing mission for Mitchell to spread positivity and optimism through his work. It all started during the height of the COVID-19 lockdown, where Mitchell sang from the windows of his apartment on the Upper West Side. Before long, crowds of onlookers gathered where (spaced six feet apart), they took in the Broadway star performing his ad hoc concert.
"A neighbor from across the street stopped me as I was going into a store, and he tapped me on the shoulder and said, 'You don't know me. I'm your neighbor across the street.' And he started getting emotional. And he said, 'I just wanted to tell you, thank you. We come out every night to clap for the essential workers. But I also come out with my wife and my two sons, we come out to hear you sing. It's the one time in my day I feel joy,'" Mitchell recalls. "And I thought, Oh, wow, this is why people are gathering. And also, we didn't have live theatre happening at that point, everybody was out of work. And I realized what people needed in that moment was to feel joy, to feel hope, to feel connection. And that's what gave me the inspiration—not only for this video, but also, everything that I'm doing now is really focused on that."
That includes a TED Talk that Mitchell gave earlier this year with director Lear deBessonet, at the annual TED Conference. There, he sang "The Impossible Dream," accompanied by the audience and a marching band, while deBessonet talked about the ability of theatre to build community in an increasingly isolated world. That video was also just released July 22 and can be viewed here.
For Mitchell, he found his spirits buoyed after attending that conference, not just because he performed in it. The TED Conference usually attracts experts in a myriad of fields—science, technology, business, entertainment—who all gather to share ideas.
"What happens at a TED conference is you're looking at people who are solving problems—they are solving problems with disease, with global warming, with how do we bring peace to the Middle East?" explains Mitchell. "I'm hearing all these lectures of people that are problem solvers. We get lost in all of the negativity that we see in the world and all the dysfunction in the world. But I do believe there are more good people than bad people in the world, it's just the bad ones get all the publicity." He says he left the TED Conference with a "great feeling of hope."
And now the actor is trying to spread that feeling doing what he does best: singing. He's included "Hope" in the current setlist for his concerts. His future projects includes singing on Aaron Lazar's Impossible Dream album, to benefit ALS research (Lazar was diagnosed with the disease in 2022). Mitchell is still working on getting last year's Ragtime benefit concert released for streaming, along with an accompanying documentary: "Hopefully we'll have some answer pretty soon about when everybody will be able to see that concert, because it was taped and edited and put together. And now it's the matter of how to get it out to the people."
Though Mitchell is not going to star in the upcoming Ragtime revival at New York City Center, he isn't leaving turn-of-the-century New York behind. He starts filming season 3 of The Gilded Age in August. In the period drama, which is filled to the brim with Broadway stars, Mitchell plays a member of the Black elite of Brooklyn (his wife is played by Phylicia Rashad). Though Mitchell has to stay mum on details, he does reveal that season 3 will cover the wealthy Black families who were "helping lift up everybody around them" following the Civil War and the abolishment of slavery.
Explains Mitchell: "It was also a time of great hope and optimism. And as always, there were factions working against that that said, 'No, we don't want that to happen.' But there are people that are trying to move ahead and do things for the good, and trying to be positive forces in the in the world, as well. And one of the things that I love about that show is you see that both of the forces working with each other. And that's life. That was then, that's now, it will be the future."
And speaking of the future, musical theatre fans can expect Mitchell to take to the stage in a new musical very soon. The performer couldn't say much, except that the show is of a piece with his current artistic mission.
"I feel like I'm in alignment with the universe—with just who I am and what I believe and what I love and what my talents are able to offer," he says. "And I just feel really blessed at this point that that all of these things are happening."
All of this work, and no longer following the news 24/7, has helped ease Mitchell's anxiety. And when he performs in front of a crowd, he is reminded of all the goodness that's in the world. "Most of the powers that be in the world, it's advantageous for them when people feel disconnected from each other," says Mitchell, passionately. "So I want people to feel like we're all connected, we're all in the same boat together. Everybody wants to live peacefully. And if they have children, they want to raise their children to be successful and and have more opportunity than they did. I think those are things that everybody across the planet seems to to want. We don't want strife. We don't want war. We don't want to live with hatred or paranoia or fear of other people. So when I do a concert, I just want to give people a gentle reminder of the part of them that used to believe that."
