Some of our favorite Glee cast members joined the masses flooding into Washington, D.C. this weekend for the second-term inauguration of Barack Obama. Amber Riley, Naya Rivera and Darren Criss joined Katy Perry, Usher and other stars to perform at Saturday’s Kids’ Inaugural Concert, hosted by the First Lady and thrown for the children of the nation’s military families.
Naya Rivera and Darren Criss came on to perform an acoustic duet of “Valerie,” a song which Naya sang in Glee‘s season 2 episode “Special Education,” and which she has performed with Darren at one of his solo concerts. Amber Riley then took center stage for “Beautiful,” the Christina Aguilera single that Glee covered in season 1. To round out the Glee stars’ set, Darren returned to the stage to play piano and sing his original song “Not Alone,” backed up by the Soul Children of Chicago choir. You can watch the performance below:
The Glee cast have quite the history when it comes to supporting Obama – the entire cast of season 1 was invited to the White House to perform at 2010’s Easter Egg Roll, where, along with the cast’s regular performance, Amber Riley joined the Obama family on the White House balcony to sing the National Anthem. More recently, Darren Criss performed for the president at a Los Angeles fundraiser prior to the election.
It’s unknown which other inauguration events the Glee stars will be attending, but based on Amber Riley’s tweet below, we can expect to see – or at least hear about – some more performances over the course of the celebrations!
One performance down, three more to go! #InauguralWeekend
— Amber Patrice Riley (@MsAmberPRiley) January 20, 2013
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We also found a little behind-the-scenes content from the event floating around – someone managed to grab this cool video of Darren doing a sound check for “Valerie.” Naya was not present and Darren ad-libs “she’s going to sing it so much better than me!” while practising the song.
The cast also shared a few pictures on Instagram, as did a member of the Soul Children who was excited to rehearse “Not Alone” with Darren.
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