Broadway Stars Line Up at DNC to Belt Out “What the World Needs Now Is Love” to Honor Victims of Gun Violence

The performance came after harrowing speeches by survivors.


On Wednesday night, Broadway stars including Idina Menzel and Darren Criss, took to the Wells Fargo Center stage in Philadelphia to belt out “What the World Needs Now Is Love,” the Burt Bacharach classic.

The crowd rose to its feet, swayed, and sang along energetically as the performers swapped microphones throughout the song and harmonized.

The performance came after harrowing speeches from survivors of gun violence,and relatives of shooting victims, including Christine Leinonen, the mother of 32-year-old Christopher “Drew” Leinonen, who was shot and killed at Pulse, an Orlando nightclub, in June.

“The weapon that murdered my son fires 30 rounds in one minute,” Leinonen said. “An Orlando city commissioner pointed out the terrible math. One minute per gun to fire so many shots, five minutes per bell to honor so many lives.”

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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