Introduction:

“The Great Pretender,” released by The Platters in 1955, reached No. 1 on the U.S. charts at a historical moment that coincided with the early stirrings of the Civil Rights Movement.
Though it is often heard as a song about masking heartbreak—about pretending to be fine—its portrayal of the split between who one is and how one is seen also evokes the broader condition of navigating multiple identities.

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In my 2015 performance The Great Pretender, two women—one in Brazil and one in Japan—matched in age and dressed identically, sing the song in English, a language that is not their own.

As globalization accelerated, English seeped into daily life across the world, sometimes more deeply than people’s native languages. Meanwhile, music and cultural forms from the United States circulated globally, often through processes of translation, imitation, and recontextualization.

What is it that they are pretending to be?