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Trumpet and Organ Summits Top Jazz Week at Savannah Music Festival

Review:  Savannah Music Festival

By Perry Tannenbaum

Jazz is always prominent when the Savannah Music Festival cranks up its eclectic springtime assortment of classical, country, Americana, rock, folk, and world music vibes. But diehard jazz fans will want to land at the festival during Jazz Week, culminating in the epic Swing Central Finale celebration and concert at Lucas Theatre of the Arts. Before the top three ensembles lead off the festivities, 12 high school bands play for a panel of jazz notables, once at the Lucas and once along the Savannah riverfront.

Workshops and clinics make Swing Central as much an educational experience as a competitive one. In the second half of the Finale, the awesome array of mentoring musicians gets to come out – after the winners’ placings are announced and the supersized checks presented – and strut their stuff. With the likes of Marcus Roberts, Ted Nash, Terrell Stafford, Stephen Riley, Ron Westray, Jason Marsalis, and Marcus Printup in their number, you can bet it’s a glorious march.

Celebrating the centenaries of both Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie, Swing Central 2017 was particularly splendid.

Until that culmination happened, the Charles H. Morris Center was the workhorse venue for jazz concerts. On successive nights, SMF executive and artistic director Rob Gibson pleasurably introduced a pair of organ and trumpet aces. Ike Stubblefield and Joey DeFrancesco presided over the rare sight of two vintage Hammond B-3 organs on the same stage. Next night, on the eve of the Swing Central Finale, Rodney Whitaker and MSU Professors of Jazz showcased the estimable Etienne Charles blowing his horn after Printup teamed up with a quintet of Youngbloods.

Festivalgoers could choose between pairs of sets beginning at 5:30 or 8:30. If you missed the back-to-back organists at night, you could partially atone with a set by the Ike Stubblefield Trio the following afternoon at 12:30, while Printup & Youngbloods did the afternoon honors the following day. With a little creativity – and a media pass – I was able to negotiate a 6pm classical piano recital on organ night, stop out for dinner, and arrive at the Morris Center just before intermission so I could scope out empty seats for my wife Sue and me when Joey DeFrancisco took over the stage.

DeFrancesco isn’t a shy or contemplative personality, and I first heard how he wails in live performance shortly after his first Columbia recording, at the tender age of 17, in 1989. So I thought I knew what to expect from him and The People who back him up. But Joey has piled an electronic keyboard on top of his B-3 console, and he brings a trumpet with him these days when he comes onstage.

A new electronic bent manifested itself immediately in DeFrancesco’s percolating intro to “So Near, So Far,” nodding to the middle acoustic and later electronic periods of Miles Davis at the same time. Yet that track remains fairly mellow on the new Project Freedom recording, while here Troy Roberts signaled on tenor sax that it was time to fasten our seatbelts as he finished playing the line. DeFrancesco turned up the heat to a temperature that surpassed the studio version, and Troy kept the flame high – while Joey and drummer Jason Brown became very busy underneath. For anybody who might be sleeping on Roberts: he is not your generic sideman, and both of his most recent recordings as a leader are well worth checking out. Dan Wilson was also a treat on guitar taking his choruses, never distorting his silky tone, and Roberts roughened his outro with a pedal I hadn’t noticed on the floor near his mic.

There was no reprise of the floor pedal as the quartet reverted to the trad grooves usually heard at the Morris. “Bluz ‘n’ 3” brought to mind the funky flavoring Cannonball Adderley brought to hard bop when Bobby Timmons played with him – except on the opening solo when Wilson’s crystalline work on guitar conjured up Kenny Burrell. Roberts took us into rough turbulence with his solo, though there was a calm eye to the storm at its center where he quoted Monk. DeFrancesco seemed to relish the challenge of following in the wake of this bravura, prudently dialing back the intensity as he began. As he reached what seemed to be full throttle, Joey snuck in a sustained bass chord to play over, so he could take his two-fisted attack to an even greater sizzle. Brown quieted things down at the start of his solo, ably shuttling from sticks to brushes in the ebb and flow of his solo.

Compared to this eruption, the next two selections were relatively light – but with plenty of fresh colors. “Better Than Yesterday,” another track from the new CD, also shed its studio mellowness, taking on a “Parisian Thoroughfare” élan in live performance with more rim work from Brown at the kit, more intense crosstalk between Joey and Troy, and more quirky rhythms all around. Then a DeFrancesco spot like none I’d seen live before: he sang “Around the World” in a surprisingly effective hipster style and, after the choruses by Wilson and Roberts, returned with a trumpet solo, the first half of which he played with a mute. Not content with these novelties, Joey D traded fours with Troy, firing scat lines on all his vocal salvos.

As caught in the studio, the intro and outro of the righteous “Lift Every Voice and Sing” caught in the studio were very much like what we heard live, with Wilson and Roberts splitting the opening chorus. Roberts and Brown added a little extra lift to the release into the solos and there was more real blowing in the middle. Toward the end, just before the last gospel explosion, Wilson drew a little more space to clear the way with an unaccompanied rumination. Enough funk was added to the live version of “Karma” for DeFrancesco to solicit audience hand claps behind his own solo and those by Wilson and Roberts.

We seemed to be building to a predictable finale, but DeFrancesco surprised us by calling Ike Stubblefield back onto the stage to join in on the second B-3. Two organ giants then paid tribute to a third as the ensemble dug into Jimmy Smith’s “The Sermon.” Things became loose and joyous like a jam session when Stubblefield’s drummer, Herlin Riley, slid into Brown’s chair midway through the tune. Yet there was additional polish to the backup behind Ike as Joey picked up his trumpet for a second time and formed a horn section with Roberts, playing harmonized riffs.

A longtime sideman who has gigged with storied rock and R&B bands, Stubblefield is equally comfortable in backup or take-charge modes. Like the earth before an earthquake, he is always there, with no compelling need for finger-busting displays, but always capable of them. In his afternoon gig at the Morris, Ike broke loose most memorably on Richard “Groove” Holmes’s “Groove’s Groove,” a tune very much in the vein of “The Sermon” with perhaps a little more hop in its step. First his guitarist, Detroit Brooks, worked the tune from a relaxed groove to such a lather that, for the one time in the entire set, he felt compelled to stand up while he played. Stubblefield also stirred the line upwards from a simmer, until he was wailing, clawing at the sky before an abrupt halt giving way to Riley.

Like Holmes and Jimmy Smith, Stubblefield has a winning way with pop tunes whose tempos might seem set in stone. Back in 2011, he put some extra jump in “Misty,” as Holmes was fond of doing, but this time he took on Little Willie John’s “Fever,” which has resisted loudness, speed, and even instrumentation since Peggy Lee waxed her chart-topping cover in 1959. After Ike grooved on it, Detroit showed there’s plenty to be done with this line at a peppy pace. Then Ike proved there’s joy at the very heart of it.

Excitement always peaks for the second set on Thursday night of Jazz Week, because the house is filled to overflowing with an influx of Swing Central high schoolers – most of them enthusiastic jazz fans – on the eve of their final competition. With two sextets crammed with instruments you actually find teens playing (no B-3’s here), the festival was definitely keeping their audience in mind. Featuring arrangements with heads that always blended two or three horns, Marcus Printup & Youngbloods served up music the young crowd could identify with.

“Peace in the Abstract” kicked off jubilantly, featuring entirely different personnel behind Printup from those behind him in his 2006 CD with that same title. Nor were there any holdovers from Printup’s 2015 Young Bloods recording on Steeplechase. The group label lingers, but the personnel move on, a la Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. Printup roared into his opening solo as if this were the first time he was playing on this tune, and young trombonist Corey Wilcox brought equal fire to his follow-up. Alto saxophonist Mercedes Beckman dialed it back a little before rapidly ramping up, but pianist Michael King aimed unerringly for a change of pace, almost Monkish in his initial relaxation. Yet drummer Henry Conerway III implacably picked up the intensity underneath King’s action, and the pianist’s solo soon swelled to rhapsodic density. This in turn was a perfect launching pad for Conerway’s pyrotechnics.

“Soul Vamp” was another trip back to 2006, but Printup gave the catchy tune a choppier, more energetic arrangement and added some vocal call-and-response to the out chorus. I was beginning to wonder whether the leader would be promoting his newer work when the next two selections, Printup’s own “The Bishop” and Dave Brubeck’s “In Your Own Sweet Way,” were plucked from the Young Bloods disc. Of all the tunes on this set, “The Bishop” probably showed off the whole group best, with Beckman blowing her finest solo and King unveiling a tasty Basie quality, again acting as a mellowing agent. Yet King was most distinctive, pointedly not Brubeck, in his freaky solo on “Your Own Sweet Way.”

With the finale, “The New Boogaloo,” the tune became something of a family heirloom as Wilcox had one more chance to shine in taking the first solo after the three-horn head. Wilcox’s father, Wycliffe Gordon, was the trombone sideman on the 2002 CD that was named after this Printup composition. Hidden in plain view for the last two years among the Swing Central mentors, Wilcox announced he was a force to contend with at the 2016 latenight jam, dueling with his dad and other greats. He’s be at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola for a five-night stint – also latenight – on April 18-22 if you care to judge for yourself.

Printup and Beckham would follow the same basic path as the 2002 arrangement, soloing over a shuffle pattern laid down by Conerway until he provided a stop-time break for them to blow on. It was Wilcox – with King’s spikier accompaniment – who actually cooked up something new for “New Boogaloo.” After the horns, King took a modest but tasty solo, revving up his momentum with the first stop-time break and yielding gracefully on the second to bassist Eric Wheeler, who knew exactly what to do. Wheeler got into such a compelling groove that the audience spontaneously joined in clapping it out.

I loved the way that Rodney Whitaker and his drummer, Dana Hall, casually took the stage for the MSU Professors set, jamming quietly together as if they were doing a soundcheck. Before we knew it, Etienne Charles and tenor saxophonist Diego Rivera were in place, wailing out the melody of “In Walked Bud.” Twenty-four hours ahead of schedule, the Monk celebration had begun with an all-Thelonious songlist.

Unlike most of the Monk selections announced for the following evening, none of these were rarities, and all of Whitaker’s colleagues proved to be able professors of the repertoire. Randy Napoleon broke out on “Bud” with the first solo on guitar, pianist Bruce Barth demonstrated that the line could turn in a barrelhouse direction, and Hall returned with a series of explosions from the drum set before the horns took the out chorus.

Charles was no doubt the most powerful of the frontliners, but he didn’t really start firing off his arsenal until the ensuing “Monk’s Dream.” Rivera charged hard in his solo, but Charles’s had more arc and build, ending with an elegant handover to Napoleon. Solos by Whitaker and Hall established a similar mold, regularly marking each measure – until Hall broke that mold, mixing things up and splattering them like a textbook Max Roach fireworks display.

You couldn’t ignore Charles on the final three tunes, each of his stints halved in a different way. Quieting things down after a Rivera roar on “Evidence,” Charles meandered softly for a while before abruptly turning up the burners. On “Ask Me Now,” he took two pieces of the opening chorus, one muted after Rivera kicked things off and another wide open after Barth handled the bridge. Not only did Charles play quite tenderly in his solo, but Rivera also proved to have an affecting soft side to complement his hard-charging mode – underscored later when he delivered a mellow coda.

The two sides of Charles in the closing “Blue Monk” were both irresistibly ebullient as the trumpet ace started off with a mute plunger, expostulating the line in tandem with Rivera. Napoleon delivered his most burning work of the set and Rivera reverted to his leonine mode before Charles cooled the bluesy blowing down, fanning the low flame with his plunger. The plunger work became progressively louder and more playful until the time was ripe to Charles to discard the rubber and go all-exclamatory in Dizzy Gillespie style.

MSU’s rhythm section was a constant delight. Barth was the most chameleonic among them, channeling Dave McKenna in “Bud,” Thelonious in “Monk’s Dream,” and Horace Silver in “Evidence” before coolly quoting a mess of Monk in the bluesy closer. Aside from their stellar work on “Monk’s Dream,” Whitaker and Hall asserted themselves most memorably on their intros, whether it was Hall clunking on wood blocks leading us into “Evidence” or Whitaker misdirecting us at the top of “Blue Monk,” invoking the familiar bass-line of “A Love Supreme.”

Nothing was routine or hackneyed about the big band performances by Swing Central finalists Byron Center Jazz Orchestra (Byron Center, MI), Agoura High School (Agoura Hills, CA), and Douglas Anderson School of the Arts (Jacksonville, FL) – not when the titles included “Easy Money,” “Buddha,” and the winning Douglas Anderson’s “At the House, In Da Pocket” by Jason Marsalis. So I didn’t grow impatient for the all-star team to take the stage after the winners’ checks were distributed. The playing was consistently precocious and the vibe at Lucas Theatre, with so many young musicians and their families in attendance, was special.

The Monk-Diz centennial celebration lifted the evening even higher. Music directors Marcus Roberts and Ted Nash, both of whom with longtime links to Wynton Marsalis and Jazz at Lincoln Center, split emceeing chores while their set list took a singular approach to each of the honorees. Long acknowledged as a bandleader, showman, and innovative instrumentalist, Gillespie hasn’t gotten nearly as much recognition as a composer. So it’s altogether fitting that the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra is taking a compendium of Diz’s greatest hits on the road and making the case at selected concerts.

On the other hand, albums by younger artists devoted completely to Monk’s works are not so hard to find. It makes sense, then, to reprise Monk pieces we hear too rarely or to unearth new gems – expanding our appreciation of his compositional range. While shuttling between familiar and unfamiliar tunes, we also zigzagged between big band charts and tight combo presentations, always with plenty of space for band members to blow.

Signaling that this would all be fun, the band started out with Diz’s “Oop Bop Sh’ Bam,” a pretty grand display of the composer’s exuberance and the musicians’ firepower. You couldn’t say it was the full orchestra because there were two rhythm sections, starting out with pianist Bill Peterson, bassist Whitaker, and drummer Bryan. When we shifted to small combo mode for Gillespie’s “Groovin’ High,” the Marcus Roberts Trio took over the rhythm, Rodney Jordon on bass and Jason Marsalis on drums, while David L. Harris on trombone, Ricardo Pascal on tenor, and Terrell Stafford on trumpet stepped forward to form an impromptu horn section. With the flare and assurance of his solo, Stafford gave us our first indication that he would be the designated stand-in for Diz on this night.

Nash returned, alto in hand, with trumpeter Alphonso Horne and the Peterson rhythm to do “Con Alma.” From this third iconic Diz title, we switched to lesser-known Monk and big band format as the Roberts Trio took its first turn with the full ensemble on “Blues Five Spot.” While it isn’t Monk’s most familiar work, “Five Spot” is obviously a Roberts fave, since he has now played it three years in a row in Savannah. The piece certainly distills Monk’s essence and lent itself to nice round of blowing, with Roberts, Stafford, and trombonist Ron Westray standing out.

Roberts and his rhythm stayed aboard for the next two Monk morsels, “Coming on the Hudson” and the delicious “Little Rootie Tootie.” Two of my favorite Gillespie compositions followed as we reverted to combo format: “Manteca,” the fine co-composition with Chano Pozo, and “Woody ‘n’ You.” As Peterson returned to the keyboard, Marsalis switched to vibes on “Manteca,” making for an interesting new palette when altoist Joe Goldberg and trumpeter Jim Ketch came down to join them. Perhaps because the Cuban percussion and vocal shouts were missing from “Manteca,” I was more pleased when Wilcox, trumpeter Randall Haywood, and tenorist Stephen Riley lit into “Woody ‘n’ You.”

They found two more opportunities to put four rhythm players onstage at the same time, featuring both of the bassists on Monk’s “Light Blue” and fielding Marsalis on vibes once more for “Ugly Beauty,” a pretty ballad that served nicely to clear the way for a rousing finish. That one-two-three punch began with “Two Bass Hit,” Gillespie’s collaboration with John Lewis, with Printup and his plunger mute making a punchy cameo.

Monk’s “We See,” and “A Night in Tunisia,” Diz’s most familiar piece, closed things out. “Tunisia” was particularly potent on this night. One by one, the solos poured forth from the band members, a effervescent anthology of bebop. Surprisingly, we were able to scale one more pinnacle. After all the glorious blowing, after the whole band had repeated the anthemic theme, Stafford launched into a lonely cadenza, working it until he ended on a long, jubilant high note that could make a grown man weep.

It was emblematic of all that jazz can say and do.

Art and Business Clash in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”

Review: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

By Perry Tannenbaum

Few playwrights, black or white, would write a line so richly laden with poignancy as “Somewhere the moon has fallen through a window and broken into thirty pieces of silver” only to bury it in the silent text of his prologue. Just to ensure that such a line would be spoken out loud, Tennessee Williams would have temporarily deputized one of his characters as his mouthpiece so that this line would have a life in our ears.

Yet somehow, the “Somewhere” line dropped into the intro of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom perfectly describes the setting of August Wilson’s 1984 drama. Ma Rainey, her entourage, and her jazz quartet gather at a one o’clock rendezvous with Ma’s nervous manager, Irwin, and record studio boss Sturdyvant. While Irwin is careful not to rouse Ma’s mighty temperament and ego, Sturdyvant’s regard for Ma extends no further than to the pieces of silver her recordings can stream into his coffers.

So I can think of a personal as well as an artistic reason why Wilson elected to inter his telling line. A man who conceives of a ten-play series of plays that will chronicle the history of his people through every decade of the 20th century probably wouldn’t preserve, shepherd, and showcase a 30-pieces line like that with the same urgent care that we might. Or frankly, surveying the crew he assembles for this 1927 studio session, Wilson could have soberly concluded that none of these folk, black or white, had the discernment or eloquence to deliver such a lyrical line.

What comes out of Ma’s mouth is almost always salty, bitter, and infused with rage, while her nephew Sylvester, a stutterer, struggles to say anything at all – even as Ma, laying on more pressure, insists that he deliver the spoken intro to her “Black Bottom” recording. These are the two people who present the most daunting challenges for the whites in the recording studio.

But as the split layout of the Pease Auditorium stage faithfully discloses in Jennifer O‘Kelly’s shambling set design, this CPCC Theatre production of Ma Rainey is very much an upstairs-downstairs story. We spend as much time downstairs in the musicians’ rehearsal room – Cutler on trombone, Toledo on piano, Slow Drag on bass, and Levee on trumpet – and the latter half of the tragic denouement unfolds there.

Needless to say, there is as much tension downstairs between the musicians as there is between Ma, the truculent Sturdyvant, and the ever-appeasing Irvin. Cutler seems to run the show downstairs from a business standpoint, accountable for getting the band to show up on time, distributing the pay, and counting out the downbeats. Levee is the young buck with the big ideas, confident that his arrangements of Ma’s tunes will be preferred to her own, and planning to sign on independently with Sturdyvant so he can record his own songs with his own band.

Although the inevitability of a clash between Ma and Levee isn’t exactly trumpeted when we first meet them, it is deep-set into the structure of the script. Both Ma and Levee arrive significantly later to the gig than Sturdyvant or Cutler expect – though Ma’s arrival is later, louder, and more tumultuous. So the outcome of these prima donnas’ collision is also fairly predictable.

Since at least 1998, Corlis Hayes has been involved in several August Wilson plays around town, including The Piano Lesson, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, and Fences as both a player and a director. Although line problems cropped up occasionally in the rehearsal room, lengthening the production to a running time of nearly 2:20 plus intermission, Hayes directs with a sure feel for Ma Rainey’s moody, spasmodic pacing, and Tony Wright’s fight choreography aptly points up the climaxes.

Jonavan Adams first teamed up with Hayes in 2008, when I felt that The Piano Lesson should have been more forte. As Levee, there are welcome times when Adams goes fortissimo on us, particularly in his mighty monologues and crises. Yet there are still a few moments when we’re getting to know Levee that Hayes should whisking Adams downstage so that we can hear him better and other moments that Adams zips through unclearly. More forgivable toward the end are the moments when Levee is desperately talking to himself.

Clearly, this is a man who is haunted by his childhood and partially imprisoned by it – very emblematic of his people.

Pitted against Adams as Ma is Shar Marlin, who made her first splash on the local scene six years ago as the matriarch in George C. Wolfe’s “Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play” and hasn’t looked back. With both Bessie Smith and Zora Neale Hurston’s Blues Speak Woman in her rearview mirror, Marlin takes on another outsized personality with perfect aplomb. Called upon to sing Rainey’s signature blues, Marlin delivers ornery volume laced with gutsy growls. And believe me, the force of her first entrance is worth waiting for.

With trombonist Tyrone Jefferson tackling the roles of Cutler and this production’s musical director, the jazz behind Rainey – and behind the scenes downstairs – has a unique authenticity. When Cutler gives his oft-repeated “One… Two…You know what to do” cue, three musicians respond from somewhere offstage while he himself delivers the trombone fills. Jefferson, the arranger and musical director behind numerous recent productions, proves to be quite capable as an actor.

Gagan Hunter turns pianist Toledo into a slightly starchy back-porch philosopher, which seems about right, and soft-spoken Willie Stratford – who really needs to be brought downstage – brings an abundance of cool to Slow Drag. In real life, Ma Rainey was indeed the Mother of the Blues, and there was also a notable New Orleans bassist named Slow Drag Pavageau who got his nickname from his dancing prowess.

The white folk are both exploiters, but it’s Tom Scott as Sturdyvant who is far and away the more cruel and noxious. His presence is so toxic that we can easily forget the looming clash between Ma and Levee. Scott always seems to be close to boiling over when he considers Ma’s sense of majesty and entitlement. Hank West as Irvin is the conciliator, but just when he verges on becoming sympathetic, a thin steely mean streak appears in a very nuanced portrayal.

No such subtlety beclouds Carol J. McKIenith’s wantonness as Dussie Mae, Ma’s companion. But there’s an interesting combination of meekness and determination, pride and shame, in Danius Jones’s portrayal of the stuttering Sylvester that makes him unexpectedly rewarding.

In another burst of unheard poetry, Wilson quotes blues great Blind Lemon Jefferson in his epigraph. Because “they tore the railroad down,” sings Jefferson, “the Sunshine Special can’t run.” Confronting this catastrophe, Jefferson plans to “build me a railroad of my own.” Ma and Levee have the same yearnings deep in their bones, to break away and blaze their own musical trails. But it’s still 1927, the traditional tracks are still sturdy, and their people don’t own them.

“Stupid F@#%ing Bird” Mashes Chekhov With Giddy Modernism

Review: Stupid F@#%ing Bird

By Perry Tannenbaum

If you’re looking for clear outspoken themes and messages onstage, there are better places to look than the aching comedies of Anton Chekhov. Among his contemporaries, Count Leo Tolstoy found the best works of Chekhov difficult to grasp yet full of insights into “the inner workings of the human soul.” Chekhov’s mix of clinical objectivity and soul-searching empathy would become touchstones of modern drama and modern acting technique.

So it’s no surprise that Aaron Posner’s adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull, irreverently retitled Stupid F@#%ing Bird, is so willfully modernistic. Conrad Arkadina, nee Konstantine Gavrolovich Trepleff in the original, doesn’t merely write the bad script we see performed early in Act 1. He’s also the author of this play that we’re watching and will pause to tell us about it from time to time. But that doesn’t mean his mom, film producer Emma Arkadina, or his Uncle Eugene – a dying doctor – won’t also address us and lay bare their ostensibly fictional souls.

We can almost go around the complete cast in this Actor’s Theatre of Charlotte production simply by cataloguing their unrequited loves. Mash, who is madly in love with Conrad, is desperately beloved by Dev. But Conrad burns for the beautiful Nina, who offers body and soul to the famous writer Trigorin, who is in a committed relationship with Emma – until he isn’t. Passion for other people or for art is the essence of futility among this crowd, often leading to self-loathing. Even Trigorin, slightly weary with his own fame, has restless longings that go unfulfilled.

If you already know The Seagull well, the idea of Conrad being our author is more than slightly absurd, for in the denouement, his spiraling depression begins with his ripping up all his manuscripts when he realizes he can never have Nina. Compounding the absurdity, Conrad frankly tells us of the catastrophe to come.

Assuming that you can find the Hadley Theater on the Queens University campus near Myers Park Traditional School, you’ll find that director Chip Decker – with his own fantastical set design and Hallie Gray’s lighting – has grasped the zany bittersweetness of this script remarkably well. The mixture of wholesomeness, naïveté, candor, and earnestness that Chester Shepherd brings to Conrad further ensures success. Somehow, in this blizzard of fiction and reality, where Conrad is both the playwright and his protagonist, Shepherd can come to his audience for advice and handle our spontaneous feedback.

He realizes that Nina, a rather bad actress who sustains a career, is not particularly worthy of his love. Hell, Mariana Bracciale as Nina is well aware of her shortcomings as an actress, with a slight Julia Louis-Dreyfus charm wrapped into her maddening flightiness. Scott A. Miller as Trigorin realizes Nina’s shallowness as well as anyone, his mind at odds with his loins in his struggle to decide what to do about her, yet he also grasps that his rascality is as much of his charm as his talent.

Emma suffers in her relationship with Trigorin and in her lack of aptitude for parenting Conrad, yet Becca Worthington is most disarming in her acknowledgement to us that she’s the meanie in this story, unlikely to redeem herself. Every one else lurks on the periphery, adding to the impression that our main characters are living in a teeming world. I was fairly smitten with the comedy of Carmen A. Lawrence as Mash, for she mopes so hopelessly – and needlessly, since the loving, patient, and wise Dev is crazy about her.

Peripheral or not, Jeremy DeCarlos as Dev combines with Lawrence to give their scenes a Midsummer Night’s Dream giddiness, for neither of them is among our gifted characters. Yet DeCarlos, more goofball here than I’ve ever seen him before, seems to have the knowledge that his waiting game – and his faith that Mash will come to her senses – will be rewarded. It’s a part of his calm wisdom, which occasionally reminds Conrad (and us) what an unbalanced, disturbingly normal hysteric he is.

Hope Prevails With Quatuor Ébène at Savannah

Ébène and Daniel Hope at Savanah Music Festival

By Perry Tannenbaum

Celebrated for their recordings of Fauré, Debussy, and Ravel, the Quatuor Ébène have shown themselves to be equally comfortable in repertoire by Haydn, Mozart, Bartók, the Mendelssohn siblings, Jobim, Piazzola, Sting, and Erroll Garner. The string quartet is currently touring the US with new infusions of Beethoven, culminating with an all-Beethoven program at Carnegie Hall on March 31 and a Beethoven-Debussy mix at the Kimmel Center six nights later.

Yet Savannah Music Festival artistic director Rob Gibson and violin colossus Daniel Hope, the festival’s associate artistic director for classical programming, could legitimately claim a coup for the Ébène’s return to Savannah, where they had played an all-French program in 2011. Wowed by their performance of the Ravel, Hope had prevailed upon the quartet to join him and pianist Simon Crawford-Phillips in Ernest Chausson’s Concert in D Major for Violin, Piano and String Quartet.

Prior to intermission, the program foreshadowed what New Yorkers will hear on Friday at Carnegie: the String Quartet in B-flat, Opus 18, No. 6, followed by the String Quartet No. 11 in F Minor, Opus 95, “Serioso.” Based on the performances we heard down in Savannah, New York concertgoers need only fear that what follows after intermission might be anticlimactic.

Having listened to the great recorded Beethoven traversals of the past by the Takács, Tokyo, Guarneri, Juilliard, Italiano, Alban Berg, and Budapest quartets, I still found the live performances by the Quatuor Ébène at Trinity United Methodist Church astonishing. Part of the wonder, no doubt, was the church’s acoustics, even friendlier to strings than to either vocal or keyboard performances – though I’ve never heard its gilded organ pipes in action.

More decisive were the ensemble’s creamy approach to the harmonized sections of the score, the conversational interplay of the musicians, and the sheer excellence of first violinist Pierre Colombet. Of the recent surveys I’ve listened to, only the Belcea Quartet comes close in their recording of the B-flat Quartet No. 6 to matching the relish that Ébène took in the harmonious ritardandos of the opening Allegro con brio movement, which usually sound like lulls between the fireworks. That same attention to detail was also evident within those fireworks as the quartet zestfully leapt upon the opening exposition, varying tempos and dynamics with restless precision.

What surprised me most, from musicians making their first forays into Beethoven’s quartets, was the liveliness of their interplay. Adrien Boisseau sounded buoyant when he peeped in on viola, and the dialogue between Colombet and cellist Raphaël Merlin was even richer, the first responses by the cello playful and the last answer delivered with abrupt, prankish ferocity. Colombet’s artistry was more exquisite in the ensuing Adagio, as he floated lyrically above the soft accompanying trio before gracefully landing with a couple of delicate pizzicato chords.

In the bubbly Scherzo, Colombet and second violinist Gabriel La Magadure drove the music, darting around unpredictably while the lower strings were restrained. Any worries that the Ébènes might not be up to the demands of heavier Beethoven were largely dispelled in the “Malinconia” section of the final movement. Slow, and darkly harmonized, Merlin’s cello was especially morose as the instrumental lines diverged, until Colombet ignited a quicker, folksier tempo.

While no one questions the position of Quartet No. 6 as the last of Beethoven’s early Opus 18 period, offering tantalizing hints of the more turbulent middle period ahead, the No. 11 “Serioso” seems to lie slightly on the cusp. Nearly all quartets group the F Minor Opus 95 with their Rasumovsky and “Harp” recordings from the middle period, but a few let it lead off their compilations of the Late Quartets.

With the onset of the opening Allegro con brio, the Quatuor Ébène emphatically let us know, in a stunning wave of collective turbulence, that their most intense ferocity and flame throwing still lay ahead. Not immediately, of course, for middle Beethoven is ever mercurial, and we’re never sure if he’s wickedly mischievous with his surprises or divinely deranged. The opening storm soon gives way to reflective unrest, enabling a second onrushing wave to be more ferocious – cycling back and forth to a quiescent close.

Quiet returned throughout mournful Allegretto, beginning with Merlin’s lachrymose intro on cello, transitioning to a fugal section launched by Boisseau’s viola, and growing exquisitely slow and eerie with Colombet softly ascending the treble. Now came the time for peak ferocity, a final fury somehow kept in reserve, as we moved without pausing into the signature Allegro assai vivace ma serioso movement.

Diabolically, the pause missing at the start of this movement gets transferred to the middle – more than once after comparative lulls. Even when I knew another sforzando was coming after the second pause, it came with a jolt. Lacking the same fury as the Serioso movement, the concluding Larghett0-Allegretto might have been sorely anticlimactic if it weren’t so melodious and joyful, the contagious tune handed to each of the musicians as part of the jocund farewell.

It isn’t the last we’ll be hearing of Beethoven’s music at the Savannah Music Festival this year. The special Ébène event came between two “Beethoven and Beyond” concerts fronted by violinists Hope and Benny Kim with pianists Crawford-Phillips and Sebastian Knauer, backed by a quartet festival regulars. Each of those concerts had a Beethoven piece paired with works by his musical contemporaries or descendants – before and after intermission. My deadline for this review strikes in the middle of another mammoth Beethoven event, Stewart Goodyear’s three-concert “Sonatathon,” presenting all 32 piano sonatas in a single morning, afternoon, and evening.

A kind of closure with Beethoven will happen this Saturday when the Dover Quartet follows the latest of Mozart’s “Prussian” quartets with two late Beethovens, No. 13 in B-flat and the Grosse Fuge. Cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han add a charming coda next week when they perform the 12 Variations on Handel’s “See the Conqu’ring Hero” in the middle of a program that includes pieces by Bach, Shostakovich, and Rachmaninov.

Amid a 17-day festival that also embraces jazz, blues, bluegrass, country, pop, and world music, the aforementioned are barely half of the classical offerings. Tops among other headliners include pianists Jan Lisiecki and Knauer, violist Lawrence Power, and the Atlanta Symphony under the direction of Robert Spano, presenting an all-Rachmaninov program with Stephen Hough playing the Piano Concerto No. 1.

All of these will struggle to eclipse the éclat of Hope, Crawford-Phillips, and the Quatuor Ébène in Chausson’s Concert in D. After three harsh opening chords from Crawford-Phillips, the quartet’s entry was happily ominous, still restless when the piano part suddenly became rhapsodic. Hope soared above this conflict, and while the quartet – individually and collectively – continued to make telling contributions, it was Hope and Crawford-Phillips, playing off each other, who built to a climax of resounding joy, ecstatic joy, yearning joy, fulfilled joy, and purely sweet joy. That was merely the epic Décidé, Animé movement, with three more to come.

In the splendor that followed, the Quatuor Ébène ran the gamut from orchestral might to mute passivity. These extremes were crystalized in the final Très animé. After some galvanic fireworks from the keyboard, the sliding ensemble work with looping crescendos and decrescendos made me think that Chausson could have easily added a extra o to his title, for here his Concert seemed to have the fullness of a piano concerto. Moments later, the quartet wasn’t playing at all during an extended episode that was a fiery Hope/Crawford-Phillips violin sonata. None of the Quatuor members bothered to hide their frank awe of the violinist standing before them.

Joining in after this violin sonata eruption, the quartet played with a richness that made me wish to hear them taking on Dvořák’s quartets. Then a pizzicato shower as Hope and Crawford-Phillips crested to peak intensity again. No, there was one more detonation from the keyboard – and yet another before the final satisfying chords.

Thrilling was almost an adequate description of the first Chausson Concert that I heard at Spoleto Festival in 2002 and two others that followed, most notably with Chee-Yun and Anne-Marie McDermott in 2009. With Quatuor Ébène behind them, Hope and Crawford-Phillips set the bar even higher.

Last night at “Beethoven and Beyond, Part II,” Hope and Crawford-Phillips came perilously close to topping themselves – with Keith Robinson playing cello – in Shostakovich’s harrowing Piano Concerto No. 2. Prior to the concert, Gibson revealed that the festival’s 2018 slate had been set. He divulged only two tantalizing bookings: Pinchas Zukerman is on the guest list, and (after taking over the reins of leadership from Sir Roger Norrington) Daniel Hope is bringing the Zurich Chamber Orchestra to Savannah.

Everything I’ve heard at Savannah Music Festival this year has been encouraging, especially the music. That’s why I’m filing this review early and making sure I don’t miss a note of Goodyear’s “Sonatathon.”

A New “Raisin” Is Set to Explode

Review: Raisin in the Sun

By Perry Tannenbaum

At a distance of 58 years, people who read Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and its familiar epigraph, “A Dream Deferred,” may get the idea that the playwright was exhuming a poem written by Langston Hughes back in his heyday during the Harlem Renaissance. Truth is, Hughes published this poem as part of his Montage of a Dream Deferred in 1951, a quarter of a century after his first book of poetry appeared.

When Hansberry seized upon it, “A Dream Deferred” could hardly have been anthologized more than a couple of times, let alone become an acknowledged part of America’s literary heritage. Hansberry’s script and the performances by Claudia McNeil and Sidney Poitier as Lena and Walter Lee Younger – in both the 1959 Broadway production and the 1961 Hollywood adaptation – were almost surely the bridge that carried Hughes’s poem across that gulf.

And was Raisin perhaps the key link between Langston’s “Dream” poem and a certain speech by the Rev. Martin Luther King?

The questions of how prescient or pivotal the works of Hughes and Hansberry were in anticipating or sparking the Civil Rights advances that followed are temptingly open to conjecture. What the current Theatre Charlotte production shows us to be indisputable is Hansberry’s intention to show us all of the possible answers Hughes offers to his poem’s opening question, “What happens to a dream deferred?” She clearly opts for the idea that the right answer to Hughes’s multiple choices is all of the above.

Yes, we see all that is festering and rotting within the Younger family in Walter Lee’s deteriorating relationships with his mom Lena and his wife Ruth. But thanks to Natasha T. Wall as Lena and Jermaine Gamble as Walter Lee, we see the most compelling and decisive turns that deferred dreams take. It’s Lena who is most sensitive when the dreams of her family, including her own, begin to dry up like that raisin, and it’s Walter Lee who personifies the explosions that can occur after a lifetime of being thwarted and disrespected.

In her Theatre Charlotte debut, director Kim Parati wisely scales down these two titans to less mythic, more human dimensions. With Wall, there’s also a subtle update: this matriarch isn’t crossing the stage to slap her daughter Beneatha when the spirited collegian implies that God no longer resides in the Younger household. But this Lena does take firm hold of her daughter and give her a firm shaking.

So okay, maybe Parati has discreetly tossed the sagging “like a heavy load” aspect of deferred dreams off the shoulders of the elder Youngers. The less-burdened Gamble becomes a less monumentally whiney Walter Lee than we usually see, more of a victim and less of a screw-up. I noted with surprise that this Walter Lee actually seems to have given some thought to his liquor store scheme. I find more in Gamble’s failure that makes me think that Walter Lee feels like he let his father down as much as his mother.

Of course, we never see dad, though set designer Tim Parati hangs a strategic photograph near the Younger front door that must be him. It’s the $10,000 from his life insurance that fuels the newborn hopes and storm clouds that besiege the Youngers in their undersized apartment, where Walter Lee’s son Travis conspicuously sleeps on the couch. If that merely seems cute, then there’s also the spectacle of the family racing out the front door to snare the bathroom that they share with their neighbors.

A real newborn threatens to make the living situation worse as the family waits for the big insurance check to come in the mail – Ruth is pregnant with a second child that she dreads telling Walter Lee about. There’s a dark conspiratorial tone to the way Hadassah McGill as Ruth talks about the prospect of abortion, reminding us of the prehistoric life-of-the-mother era before Roe v. Wade.

Now I can’t defend Hansberry from the charge that she neglects the “stink like rotten meat” line in Hughes’s poem. Yet Parati seems very keen on giving new emphasis to the most cryptic outcome of deferred dreams – if “crust and sugar over Like a syrupy sweet” is the bluesy, jazzy sublimation I think it is. When Beneatha puts her newfound African music on the phonograph and starts dancing in the African garb that her Nigerian beau Asagai has given her, the temperature is already pretty warm because costume designer Tiffany Eck has done her work in sparkling fashion.

More importantly, Silka Salih El Bey as Beneatha knows exactly how to shake what needs to be shook. Layer on Walter Lee staggering into the apartment after a daylong bender he’s been on since Mama’s rejection and Ruth’s news, and you have a virtual orgy. For Walter quickly imagines himself as one of the warriors that Beneatha’s folk dance is welcoming back to the village, joining his sister in her primitive dance – before exiting to puke. The joy and the warrior spirit merged here like I’d never seen it before.

El Bey is a stunning actress for her age (a senior at Northwest School of the Arts), but she gets plenty to play off of. Not only is there rawness and seething fury from Gamble – as a sibling, a son, and a husband – there is also charming equipoise and bemused detachment from Gerard Hazelton as Asagai, most pointedly when he chides Beneatha for her assimilationist dress and her straightened hair.

There’s a visible age difference between Hazelton and El Bey, so her eagerness to make herself over to his liking still plays credibly. But the takeaway between this Beneatha and Walter Lee doesn’t sustain itself so easily. When El Bey is backing down against Mama about God still residing in their home, there’s too much vivacity in her to think she’s crushed. And when Walter Lee so memorably comes into his manhood in the final scene, his assumption that Beneatha must get his permission before following Asagai back to Nigeria no longer seems to have the weight it had when Poitier laid down the law in 1961.

Among the many satisfactions of this Theatre Charlotte Raisin is its clear vision. Parati and her cast know what still holds strong, what parts can stand stronger emphasis, and where to mute some attitudes that would soon lapse after Hansberry’s time. There’s even a character we’ve never seen before, neighbor lady Mrs. Johnson (an intrusive, snoopy, and hint-dropping Eryn Victoria), who drops by and quickly overstays her welcome.

The scene, discarded from the show before it originally opened on Broadway, doesn’t add to the power of Hansberry’s script. But it ensures that this Raisin is like none you’ve ever seen before

Steinway Concert Injects Jazzy New Notes Into Aging NC Bach Fest

Review: NC Bach Festival

By Perry Tannenbaum

Now concluding its 38th season, the North Carolina Bach Festival has a big name and a rich history. But when its new artistic director, Dr. Roman Placzek, asked his Charlotte audience at the Steinway Piano Gallery whether anyone had ever heard of the festival before, he confidently expected no hands to be raised. That’s because the festival, previously staged exclusively in Raleigh, hasn’t run long or traveled far until this year’s edition. Consisting of one featured artist concert and a small youth concert, the NC Bach was barely larger than the BachFest at St. Alban’s Church in Davidson or Charlotte Symphony’s Bachtoberfest, neither of which sport statewide pretensions.

Placzek fixed that in 2017, for there had been two guest artist concerts in Raleigh after the February 26 youth concert, with each of these subsequent concerts spotlighting another award-winning young instrumentalist chosen by the Festival. Featured artists were Placzek and guitarist José Manuel Lezcano on March 4 after pianist William Wolfram had been featured the previous evening. Placzek and his cello, along with NC Bach Festival youth program director Elena Nezhdanova, proceeded with the most notable trailblazing, spreading the good news of the Bach Festival to the Steinway Gallery in Greensboro on March 5 and to the Steinway Gallery in Charlotte the following Saturday. Above the duo’s names in the program booklet, pianist John Salmon appeared. That began to make very good sense when Dr. Salmon took over most of the hosting chores.

The ensemble offered the same all-Bach program at both Steinway Galleries – but most of the offerings were boldly rearranged by Salmon. You don’t expect jazz to predominate at a Bach festival, and perhaps not at a Steinway gallery. Many of the hour-long concerts in Steinway Piano Gallery Live series have, in fact, featured jazz artists, and the mingling of jazz improvisation with works by Bach dates back to the Swingle Singers’ landmark Bach’s Greatest Hits album that won two Grammy Awards in 1963. If you’re tempted to check the Swingles out on Spotify, the Jazz Classical Crossings channel will stream more of the same. As for Salmon, he’s been jazzing up Bach for a few years, too. On the faculty at the UNC Greensboro’s School of Music since 1989, Salmon has published Jazz Up the Sinfonias, Jazz Up the Inventions, as well as a more varied Add on Bach. At the Steinway concerts, Salmon targeted the Sinfonias seven times and the Inventions five.

Whetting our appetites and barely hinting at the mayhem to follow, Salmon began with the Partita in B-flat, BWV 825. Contrapuntal lines in the opening Praeludium came through with admirable clarity, and Salmon had no problem at all dramatically quickening the pace of the Allemande and keeping tempo brisk in the Courante. We began to see what Salmon would be about in the elegant Sarabande where the pianist subtly modulated that halting tempo. But it was in the two Menuets and the concluding Gigue that Salmon’s playing became noticeably freer.

Tempo modulated more openly in the first Minuet and there was an interesting mix of freedom and rigidity in the second, but as he accelerated gleefully into the Gigue, there was an even more daring concept. In addition to the tempo modulations, Salmon overlaid a long decrescendo followed by an equally long crescendo, adding new drama. Next he played the Invention No. 1 in relatively traditional fashion, adding ornamentation that would probably not have scandalized 18th Century listeners. Only at the end did Salmon add an extra coda, finishing with a faintly bluesy chord – one that became bluesier after he confessed his crime to the audience and gave a brief demonstration.

Prelude No. 1 from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1, wasn’t appreciably jazzier, but here Salmon added a bass-line for the cello that was a nice introduction to the warm tones that Placzek can coax from his instrument. Next came a before-and-after pairing of two arrangements that Salmon has done for Invention No. 8, both of them calling for two pianos. With the first No. 8, done for the second piano in a Baroque continuo style, Nezhdanova appeared totally relaxed and unchallenged, but the second arrangement was a radical change that noticeably increased her alertness and involvement.

Subtitled “Great Bach’s Afire,” Salmon swept from Baroque and past jazz, landing firmly in the rock-and-roll style of Jerry Lee Lewis, though I didn’t actually catch the melodic link between Jerry Lee’s “Great Balls of Fire” and this Bach standby. But goodness gracious, the Lewis fire was definitely in evidence, so much so that, as Salmon was clanking the keyboard at the end, I signaled to him that he needed to sweep the keys with his elbow. That’s what Lewis, nicknamed “The Killer” in his rowdiest heydays, would do at the keyboard before his signature finish, lifting a leg and pounding the last treble notes with his heel.

Invention No. 6, scored for all three players in the style of a Baroque trio, was more than a little anticlimactic after these fireworks, for Nezhdanova didn’t even need to raise her left hand to play her part. So the last Invention on the program, the same No. 6 turned into “There’s A Banjo in the House,” turned out to be the jazziest so far, with Salmon tossing off some pleasurable improvisation and the ensemble sounding more like a jazz trio than a bluegrass ensemble. Moving forward into Salmon’s Sinfonia arrangements, the music stayed jazzier with no more relatively ancient and tame variants preceding the arranger’s quirkily titled ones.

The Steinway Gallery was best acoustically when one of the pianists played and/or Placzek gushed forth his mellow sounds. The two dovetailed Steinways looked so perfect together that I needed to assure my wife that they were two separate pianos (even though I wasn’t absolutely sure). But while Salmon’s keyboard was further away from my front row seat to my right, his soundboard was closer. That made a difference when he and Nezhdanova played together.

With his jazz and rock proclivities, Salmon was already the more gregarious player, but the placement of the two pianos double-underlined the difference. Nezhdanova was fairly buried in the C-Major Sinfonia No. 1, renamed “A Rush of Happiness Is Here and Makes Me Want to Spread the Joy.” She had better chances to show her mettle in the introductory portions of the “Ray Brown, Come Lay It Down” reincarnation of Sinfonia No. 2 in C Minor, and in the “You Are So Nice” remake of Sinfonia No. 3 in D, where Salmon divided the melody line into call-and-response form.

The Nezhdanova-Placzek duo shone brightest in the final piece, Salmon’s charming transformation of Sinfonia 10 in G into “Scamper ‘Round and Make Some Sound.” Here the pianist and cellist were allowed to languish in their accustomed classical mode while playing the long introductory episode. In a sense, by giving his accompanists this space before he roared in with his improvisatory licks, Salmon was observing a longtime tradition in the jazz world. As often as not, the leader of a combo at a club date will allow every member of the band to solo during the final tune.

Yet the jazziest collaboration of this trio happened in the penultimate arrangement of Sinfonia No. 8 in F, newly minted as “Double Time Times Two.” Both the title and the arranger warned us that this would be fast, and it was. Even after the second concert with Salmon, NC Bach artistic director Placzek seemed to be marveling as much as we were, cooling down behind his cello – but for a different reason. “Every one of the notes I just played was what Bach wrote!” he told us. So he can return to Raleigh with another new idea. While Wolfram playing the complete Goldbergs and even Lezcano playing Fernando Sor’s Fantasie in D are what we should expect at a Bach Festival, it might not be amiss to look for fresh new ways our state’s annual Bach celebration could be more celebratory. More festive! With Salmon and Nezhdanova at his Steinway concerts, Placzek certainly hit the right notes.

Broadway Enters a New Age

Reviews: Broadway – Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812; Hamilton; A Bronx Tale; In Transit; Cirque du Soleil’s Paramour; On Your Feet! Off-Broadway – The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart, Spamilton, Cagney

By Perry Tannenbaum

Our new POTUS was already impacting Broadway before he took the oath of office, and it’s quite possible that he’ll have further impact during his coming years in the Oval Office, either as the Tweeter-in-Chief on new and controversial shows or as their subject. In the wake of President-elect Trump’s salvos against Hamilton and its cast, Broadway capped a record year with an all-time record week to close 2016, and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s megahit became the first Broadway show to top $4 million in ticket sales for a single week – not counting the scalpers’ profits.

If President Obama’s imprimatur, Michelle’s extravagant praise, and 11 Tony Awards hadn’t already made it abundantly clear, the Pence-Trump flap and its aftermath engraved it in stone: we can now talk of the Age of Hamilton on Broadway with the same casual assurance that we speak of the Age of Trump in Washington. But The Donald brings up a valid question. While the importance of Hamilton is beyond dispute, how good is it really?

My wife Sue and I went up to New York, as we do every year for my roundup of Broadway and off-Broadway shows, with the intent of bringing the answer back to Charlotte. Miracle of miracles, I actually landed press seats for Hamilton! Something really had changed since the days I’d been routinely spurned by producers of Book of Mormon, Wicked, and Lion King, blockbusters of bygone seasons.

Since I found a pair of new musicals that I enjoyed as much or more than Hamilton, I’m sure that my verdicts will be received back home as “alternative” truths. But now that the era of alternative facts has arrived, there’s no reason for me to be shy.

Broadway

Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 (♥♥♥3/4 out of four) – Hailed as the best American musical since Hamilton, Dave Malloy’s adaptation of Part 8 of War and Peace actually preceded Miranda’s work to the off-Broadway stage by over two years. The Great Comet was a hot ticket back in 2013 when it was restaged as a uniquely immersive experience in the meatpacking district of Manhattan’s Lower West Side – under a massive tent with a full Russian dinner included in the ticket price.

There’s no denying that Hamilton is the more American musical, but unless rap has been your lifelong backbeat, you’ll likely find The Great Comet to be far more musical. On the other hand, transferring the uniqueness of the dinner experience from a big top to Broadway must have been far more daunting for Malloy’s production team.

The response to the Imperial Theatre’s proscenium has been anything but timid. What normally serves as the stage has been built up to a soaring five-level supper club with three pairs of staircases and four onstage seating sections, outfitted with tables and banquettes. Two runways bring the action out into the audience, where additional tables and lamps are strewn, and two additional staircases bring the actors – and the musicians – up into the balcony. A whole galaxy of starburst chandeliers hovers above, the largest of which will transform into the Great Comet when its moment comes.

Two hundred seats have been reportedly removed from the Imperial’s orchestra section to make all this happen.

If you’ve read War and Peace from cover to cover, you come in knowing that Natasha Rostova and Pierre Bezukhov are destined for each other, but that’s over 700 pages after Pierre has his comet epiphany. So that part of Leo Tolstoy’s original story is only faintly budding where Malloy concludes. When we first meet Pierre, he’s imprisoned in a humiliating marriage to Hélène. Natasha is deeply in love – and betrothed to – the dashing Prince Andrey Bolkonsky. We only get fleeting glimpses of Andrey here, for he is away in the battlefield defending Mother Russia against Napoleon, while Natasha is partying in Moscow and bewitching all who see her youthful vibrancy.

112858 Josh Groban and Denée Benton in NATASHA, PIERRE & THE GREAT COMET OF 1812 - Photo by Chad Batka

Denée Benton is a dazzling comet in her own right as Natasha, and Josh Groban is sensationally woebegone as the clumsy, contemplative Pierre. But their intersecting fates are set in motion by the wicked machinations of the wanton Hélène and her charismatic, libertine brother, Prince Anatole Kuryagin. Being secretly married doesn’t inhibit Anatole’s roving, salacious eyes, and Hélène gets him to train them on Natasha. So these sibling schemers are enormously juicy roles – and unquestionable triumphs – for Amber Gray and Lucas Steele.

Hélène’s cynicism and Anatole’s conceited recklessness ultimately bring out in what we treasure most in Natasha and Pierre: her vulnerability and innocence and his moral outrage and empathy for his brother-in-law’s victim. So Gray and Steele actually enable Benton and Groban to raise their levels. Malloy’s music also allows the protagonists’ emotions to grow in depth as they’re dinged by experience. In style, Malloy’s music seems at times to be the kind of pastiche Andrew Lloyd Weber created, but the precision and wit of his lyrics are more in Stephen Sondheim’s realm.

A few times during this enchanting work, I found myself feeling that The Great Comet was far more like what contemporary opera should be than it usually is. Yet the piece is not at all old fashioned. At the outset in his “Prologue,” Malloy acknowledges that the number of characters and their triple Russian names can be daunting, so he fortifies the synopsis and “Family Tree” printed in the playbill with individual intros of all the major players. Malloy and director Rachel Chavkin also play loose with polite decorum as we move along. The handsome Anatole, for example, isn’t merely a villain. Steele’s strut and platinum-spiked hair mark him as a rockstar.

Hamilton (♥♥♥1/2) – Whether you swallowed the hype and waited for months, impulsively paid through the nose to scalpers, or simply won the daily $10 ticket lottery, you will likely be thrilled to find yourself at the Richard Rodgers Theatre awaiting the start of Miranda’s megahit. Fueled by the aura of Obama approval and the notoriety of the Pence controversy, enthusiasm for this show is like nothing I’ve ever witnessed at a Broadway theater. Likewise, the buzz: Sue and I overheard people who had returned three or four times to see various Burrs and Hamiltons. Knowing a friend who could compare one Burr’s performance to another’s was reason enough to brag.

Expectant electricity was so hot that when Jevon McFerrin made his first entrance as Alexander Hamilton, there was a thunderous response. Now McFerrin isn’t the actor who succeeded Miranda in the title role or the former alternate, Javier Muñoz, who is starring now – or even his alternate. No, McFerrin was actually the standby for Miranda’s replacement’s replacement and his current alternate (on Sundays), Michael Luwoye. Yet the ovation that greeted McFerrin would have satisfied Miranda himself, a response traditionally reserved for established stars and Tony winners.

Don’t get me wrong: McFerrin was wonderful, bringing a Jimmy Smits manliness to our nearly-forgotten Founding Father – not unlike what I read about Muñoz back when he was doing Sundays. The ladies’ man aspect of Hamilton sits well on McFerrin’s shoulders, and there’s a faint physical resemblance to the man on the $10 bill.

That could hold him back from taking over the lead full-time on Broadway or on tour. Hamilton is so resolutely against the grain in its hip-hop score and ethnically diverse casting that McFerrin may not shake things up enough for Miranda and director Thomas Kail. In this fresh retelling of the birth of our nation, Thomas Jefferson is portrayed as a dandified dilettante, John Adams is reduced to a non-entity, and Aaron Burr becomes a wily fence-straddler with no real principles of his own.

Of course, our hero stands out amid such preening jive turkeys. While David Korins’ set design takes some of the starch out of colonial times with its fluid warehouse-loft cool, Paul Tazewell’s costumes leave plenty of retro frilliness in place. Yet Hamilton’s concept of our treasury and monetary system prevails over Jefferson’s in a cabinet meeting that is nothing more than a two-minute poetry slam.

We hear so much about Miranda’s inclusion of the Schuyler Sisters in his script, but the women in Hamilton’s life don’t really impact upon his political fortunes until his extramarital affair with Maria Reynolds becomes a torrid scandal. So I valued Syndee Winters’ turn (subbing for Alysha Deslorieux) as the abused and seductive Maria more than her prior appearances as Peggy Schuyler – and certainly more than Lexi Lawson as the perpetually deluded Eliza, the Schuyler that Hamilton married, or Mandy Gonzalez’s stoical Angelica, the sister Hamilton truly preferred. For me, Hamilton doesn’t become exciting until the Schuylers stop dominating the stage.

What we don’t hear so much about is Miranda’s towering portrait of George Washington – as leader of the Continental Army and as our first President. Nicholas Christopher gives such a monumental portrait of Washington that he largely upstaged the other George in our nativity story, King George, ably played for laughs by Rory O’Malley with patrician foppery. The momentous stamp that Christopher puts on “History Has Its Eyes on You” certainly outshines O’Malley’s comic relief. After mucking around, Hamilton gets its drive and substantiality from Christopher’s solo.

After his light sprinkling of Gallic charm as the Marquis de Lafayette, it’s certainly fitting that Seth Stewart returns as Jefferson. There’s both humor and pizzazz in Stewart’s jazzy “What’d I Miss” to start Act 2, but Brandon Victor Dixon as Burr is more conniving than commanding. Dixon’s big showpiece, “The Room Where It Happens,” comes to a spectacular froth with Andy Blankenbuehler’s choreography, but we should be getting a more vivid sense of Burr’s incipient menace.

At a certain point, the sheer energy of the cast meshes with the rising drama of Hamilton’s sex scandal and his fatal feud. Combine that with the white-hot electricity that crackles through the house and the experience of Hamilton is still unique and unforgettable.

A Bronx Tale (♥♥♥1/2) – Full disclosure: through kindergarten, I grew up in the Bronx, so the mean streets of New York’s grubbiest borough are a key reason why this Chazz Palminteri story resonates with me especially deeply. Miranda’s In the Heights had almost the same effect on me when I saw it, the 181st Street subway station and the distant George Washington Bridge taking me back to my daily high school commute into upper Manhattan. Palmentari’s story takes us further back, beginning in childhood and further deepening my response.

Young Calogero (which is Palminteri’s real given name) is the Bronx kid whose life changes in the blink of an eye. I mean that literally, since everybody blinks – and winces – in response to the first gunshot they ever hear, particularly when it kills someone ten feet away from you and the front steps of your tenement home. The killer is Sonny, equivalent to a precinct captain in the mobster world, feared throughout the neighborhood. Calogero’s father, Lorenzo, is a strong and principled city bus driver, but he knows full well who Sonny is and how to play by the neighborhood rules.

When the police come to investigate, Lorenzo wants to protect his son and keep him out of it, but Calogero boldly insists he is a witness. In a tense scene at the police station, Calogero walks in front of an imposing lineup of thugs, clearing them all until he reaches Sonny. It’s almost comical when tall, menacing Nick Cordero as Sonny and Hudson Loverro as the nine-year-old Calogero stand toe-to-toe looking each other in the eye. Calogero turns calmly to the cops and, instead of fingering Sonny, clears him. A bond is formed between Sonny and Calogero – one that his straight-arrow dad absolutely disapproves of.

Ah, but the fringe benefits of Sonny’s favor are irresistible, including instant respect and deference from schoolmates and stacks of easy money. When we flash forward to Calogero’s teen years, Bobby Conte Thornton eases his way from his stint as our narrator into the conflicted, sensitive tough guy our protagonist – nicknamed C by Sonny – has become. Both Lorenzo and Sonny dislike the gang of friends that C is prowling the neighborhood with. Otherwise, the two paths personified by Lorenzo and Sonny diverge, the father modeling a respectability that’s steady, traditional, but unsatisfying, Sonny offering an attractive pragmatism drenched in danger.

C’s path becomes even more perilous in Act 2 when he ranges outside his Italian Belmont Avenue turf and tries to date a black schoolmate from the Webster Avenue neighborhood, because she might be “one of the great ones.” With both Jane’s and C’s friends and families against the liaison, the situation quickly mushrooms into West Side Story explosiveness, since Jane’s brother also runs with a gang.

There’s definitely an all-star team behind the scenes, beginning with the co-directors: Robert De Niro, who directed the 1993 film adaptation of Palminteri’s 1989 one-man show, co-starring with the playwright/screenwriter (who snagged the plum role of Sonny); and four-time Tony Award winner Jerry Zaks, who piloted the 2007 Broadway premiere of the play. Helping Palminteri to flesh out his solo vehicle to Tony contender proportions are hall-of-fame songwriter Alan Menken and his frequent collaborator, lyricist Glenn Slater.

They’re savvy enough to give the best songs to Sonny, and Cordero cashes in on both of them. First he imparts his sage “Nicky Machiavelli” advice, comically backed by his colorful public enemy flunkeys. Then he tugs at our heartstrings with “One of the Great Ones,” passed along later in Act 2 to Thornton, who proves to us that this advice is in good hands. Richard H. Blake also gets to sing some valuable words to his son in the opening act as Lorenzo before his influence wanes. What deepens the counsel of both these father figures is the tinge of regret that colors their ballads. Ultimately, that threat of missing lost opportunities looms larger than the dangers of the mean streets.

In Transit (♥♥♥1/4) – The first a cappella musical to run on Broadway, this isn’t the follow-up you would expect from Kristen Anderson-Lopez after co-creating Disney’s Frozen and writing its songs. She and three other co-writers interweave four stories about New York subway commuters. All of the key characters are fast-paced Millennials: Judy, an aspiring actress; Trent, her gay agent; Nate, recently let go by a Wall Street firm; and his sister Ali, newly arrived in the city after a breakup.

My trepidations about a full evening of a cappella quickly evaporated when, after a pre-show advisory that all sounds would be produced by human voice, Chesney Snow added his to the mix as Boxman. From the opening “Deep Beneath the City,” we knew that Snow would supply ample percussion. Electronics are definitely not verboten, and he is a wizard behind his mic. Arrangements by Deke Sharon, of Pitch Perfect fame, further assured that instrumentation wasn’t sorely missed.

Filling in for Margo Seibert as Jane, Laurel Harris almost delivered star quality to her lead vocals bookending the show, but the bigger hurdle for me was Jane herself, wrestling with the dilemma of whether to chuck her job after nailing her big audition. Deserving actresses who suddenly catch a break aren’t exactly a novelty in Broadway musicals – and of course they go for it! And a gay guy struggling to come out to his Red State mom was groundbreaking back when these lovebirds were toddlers.

So while Justin Guarini as Trent and Steven Robinson as his understanding boyfriend were quite winsome, I found myself more drawn to the fumbling and bumbling of James Snyder as Nate. Hurrying to get to an interview on time, he inadvertently swipes his MetroCard wrong, emptying its remaining balance before clearing the turnstiles at his subway station. Moya Angela is pure New York as the lady in the cash booth who issues or replenishes MetroCards – no empathy whatsoever and certainly no mercy.

Angela moonlights as Trent’s impassive Texas mom and as Jane’s boss, singing perhaps the catchiest song in the show, “A Little Friendly Advice,” encouraging her to quit. So Angela’s scene-stealing abilities get repeated play. I warmed up to Jane largely because she opened herself up to the floundering Nate, and Erin Mackey became more than two dimensional for me as Ali when David Abeles as her old boyfriend Dave bumped into her. Underground, of course. For them – and for Nate and Jane – MetroCards are tickets to romance, rightfully replicated in the logo and the costuming of In Transit.

Cirque du Soleil Paramour (♥♥1/2) – Disney and Oprah have done it and, critics be damned, Marvel Comics has done it no less spectacularly. So after flirting with tent shows across the Hudson in the Meadowlands and tailoring shows for Madison Square Garden, it was inevitable that Montreal entertainment juggernaut Cirque du Soleil would make their own assault on Broadway, in hopes of a long-running megahit. Looking at what Marvel had done before their abortive leap and what they hadn’t done – music and Vegas – Cirque must have felt that producers of Spiderman had snuck ahead in line.

What I’d never seen Cirque do before, though I’d seen theatrical characters and singing in their shows, is either story or language. Interspersed with acrobatics and clowning in Cirque-taculars I’d seen were the most heartfelt gibberish ballads you’ll ever hear. Those gaps Cirque needed to leap over to land in the frontier of a genuine Broadway musical figured to be miniscule when Paramour opened for previews last April, but they’ve proven to be a chasm.

The show’s e-program lists Philippe Decouflé as director and conceiver of the show, but despite assurances that Paramour is “written with the utmost respect for the traditions of Broadway, by way of Busby Berkeley,” there’s no professional writer aboard a production team that includes four creatives and 11 designers. Small wonder that the three-character story is fairly well buried in its circus derring-do and Golden Age of Hollywood designs.

The most interesting speaking character we encounter is our narrator, AJ, a driven Hollywood producer/director who prowls LA in search of new talent. Jeremy Kushnier attains a sleazy carnival charisma as our mogul host after he finds inspiration at an outré nightclub where he is captivated by Indigo, a chanteuse who performs with her songwriting partner – surrounded by a flying flurry of acrobats.

Ruby Lewis as Indigo absorbs some of the exotic allure of her glittery surroundings, and Kushnier’s leering adoration pushes her up another notch as he promises to make her a movie star. Keeping the topics of love and marriage on the back burner, AJ brings the piano player, Joey, along for the ride so Indigo will believe that his motives are purely commercial and artistic. Trouble is, Lewis finds it impossible to shine when saddled with the music by Bob and Bill (forgettable lyrics by Andreas Carlsson), either at the club or in front of the camera.

Ryan Vona’s predicament as Joey actually becomes laughable as AJ keeps prying his partner away, making her a star while he languishes in obscurity. The presumption is that Indigo’s true love must be a songwriting genius that AJ is cruelly holding back, telling him over and over that nothing he has written is good enough. But it’s obvious that Cirque’s team couldn’t write a breakthrough song for Joey if they tried.

With the story sputtering into clichés on loan from 42nd Street and other showbiz sagas, we find ourselves longing for those famed Cirque acrobats to return and obliterate our principals all they wish. Swinging out from the stage and over the audience, identical twins Andrew and Kevin Atherton are the most compelling of the aerialists, their choreography combining sensuousness, skill, daring, and grace.

But they don’t exemplify best what Paramour could be if circus and story and music were truly integrated. That happens near the end when Indigo eludes AJ’s clutches and runs away with Joey – implausibly to the roof of a hotel. Suddenly a chase fantasia breaks out with the reprise of “Everything (The Lovers’ Theme).” Both the hunters and the hunted bounce prodigiously up and down in a dizzying blur. Sometimes they’re perching on the surrounding rooftops, and sometimes they’re walking on the walls in their upward trajectory before plunging down to unseen trampolines. Spectacular, exhilarating silliness.

The follow-up text message to the one that links to the e-program rightly asks, “Head still spinning?” before seeking a 1-10 rating. Mine was 6. (Through April 16)

On Your Feet! (♥♥1/4) – So intense was my aversion for Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons that it took my wife almost four seasons before she could coax me into seeing Jersey Boys. And guess what? While I didn’t totally warm up to the falsetto of Frankie’s Broadway clone or the music written for him by Bob Gaudio, I unexpectedly found myself very impressed with the show.

After assuming that it had closed months before, I stumbled upon this musical not knowing a tenth as much about the pop oeuvre of Emilio & Gloria Estefan & Miami Sound Machine. If Alexander Dinelaris, winner of the Oscar for his Birdman screenplay, could deliver an equally fine book for this jukebox musical, then it might soar far above Jersey Boys, which somehow navigated “Sherry” and “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” the Scylla and Charybdis of bubblegum music.

I was counting on the Estefans to have produced something else among their hits as infectious as their “Conga,” and I was expecting Dinelaris to bring out some moving conflict, compelling drama, or fascinating characteristics in telling their story. Neither hope was fulfilled. Christie Prades filled in for Ana Villafañe on the Friday night we attended, so we may have missed the maximum voltage of the Estefans’ sizzle when Ektor Rivera as Emilio beholds his usual leading lady.

With nothing but endless tepid love from the leads – only occasionally amped up by the Estefans’ spicy Latin orchestrations – the drama mostly comes from the strife in Gloria’s childhood household. Both her mom and her grandma perceive Emilio’s talent and appeal, but Doreen Montalvo (subbing for Andrea Burns) as Mom wants to protect her daughter from this Don Juan while the wiser Alma Cuervo as Consuelo appreciates Emilio’s potential and cojones. She rightly sees Emilio as sincere in his affections and helps Gloria in getting up the nerve to audition for him.

The eventual estrangement between Gloria and her mom is as heavy as things get, the only aspect of our heroine’s life that threatens not to work out. Flashy, sassy choreography from Sergio Trijillo seemed sufficient to work the throngs of true fans in the house to orgiastic enthusiasm despite the drama deficit, but the magic was lost upon non-believers like me who had seen genuine Broadway pizzazz before.

My post-show Spotify search for what I was missing about Estefan’s allure only cemented my indifference. But I did find one other Miami Sound Machine hit that I was familiar with: “Bad Boy.” It isn’t in the show, but if Dinelaris had worked that song dramatically into his storyline, he might have discovered the path to riveting my attention. Yes, Mom was wrong about Emilio and Gloria – too wrong. If their chemistry was more like that song – and less like Barbi and Ken – I wouldn’t have come away thinking that maybe the image-conscious Estefans simply tied Dinelaris’s hands.

Off-Broadway

The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart (♥♥♥1/2) – Since the opening of Sleep No More in 2011, the reclaimed McKittrick Hotel has established itself as a hip nightlife destination, with theatre and music as its main calling cards. Multiple events are staged every night in this spooky old building, and I’m not sure I’ve detected any previous European imports on the McKittrick’s weekly mailings. But this National Theater of Scotland production is certainly a winner, far outshining McKittrick’s staple Scottish Play fantasia.

There are whiffs of the supernatural in Prudencia, too, combined with a down-to-earth presentation style and a winsome mockery of academicians. David Grieg and Wils Wilson, both mainstays at Theatre of Scotland, conceived this cosmic yarn of a frumpy academic whose ideas about folkloric ballads don’t square with the notions of her stodgy colleagues at a scholarly symposium – in a wintry wilderness where Sir Walter Scott and his forbears may have set fictions.

Living in more modern times, Prudencia seeks solace at a karaoke bar near a Costco parking lot. But in a fierce blizzard, she loses the true path in a very old-fashioned way, finding shelter at a B&B that turns out to be the eternal house of Beelzebub. Satan is very welcoming, with a handsome library and a liberal lending policy, but he’s also very possessive. After the calendar flips to the year 3816, the next cue card has the simple mathematical sign for infinity.

All of this unfolds around us in a space that conjures up a Scottish pub, flanked by a whisky bar on one side and a staging area on the other, where cast members pick up their instruments and find their props. Of course, there’s plenty balladeering as the story unfolds, but the intimacy and friendliness of the atmosphere is enhanced by the actors mingling with the audience, standing on our tables, maybe sitting in our laps, picking on the bald guy, and giving us homework. We all get little sheafs of paper to shred into snowflakes for the great blizzard.

Inevitably, centuries and centuries hence, Prudencia will have her awakening, so the autumnal quality that Melody Grove bestows on her is a thing of beauty, Sleeping Beauty in its fairytale rightness. There’s a sybaritic likability mixed into Peter Hannah’s Satan, as if the Prince of Darkness were actually Sebastian Cabot playing the Ghost of Christmas Present. The free shot of Scotch doled out at the beginning of festivities – plus assorted beverages you can fetch from the bar at any time – may help to lubricate this unique McKittrick experience. Even cold sober, I found this five-person troupe utterly charming. (Through March 26)

Spamilton (♥♥♥1/4) – No doubt about it, Gerard Alessandrini, perpetrator of many fine Forbidden Broadway revues, is on-target once again as he skewers Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and the whole mania surrounding his megahit. Even the cheap shots land solidly – if that’s the right category for “Can you believe you paid 800 bucks for this?”

But it turns out that Spamilton is also a revue, unable to keep the show everyone is talking about in its crosshairs for a full 80 minutes. Instead, we wander off to Lion King, Avenue Q, and Book of Mormon, blockbusters that were demolished by Alessandrini in previous Forbiddens, along with his penchant for using puppets to mock shows that use puppets. Or he wanders further off with guest diva Gina Kreiezmar reprising her priceless send-ups of Bernadette Peters, Liza Minnelli, Patti LuPone and either Carol Channing or Angela Lansbury begging on the street for Hamilton tickets.

Dan Rosales maintains quite a bit of Miranda’s I-can’t-believe-all-this-is-happening charm, even as he mercilessly roasts him and his hero. Cameron Amandus stood in for Chris Anthony Giles as Burr, and Lauren Villegas did fine work taking us off-track to J-Lo, Gloria Estefan, Beyoncé, and beyond – obliquely proving that all three Schuyler Sisters in Hamilton put together provide too little meat to pick apart.

Alessandrini remains the king of on- and off-Broadway parodists when he has Miranda insisting “I will not throw away my pot,” when Burr speculates on who’s “gonna be in the film when it happens,” or when he turns “Aaron Burr, Sir” into this choice barb: “Be terser with your verse, sir – you ain’t no Johnny Mercer.” But there is one big lesson that Alessandrini could have taken from his victim. Beginning with the famed mini-sample performed at the White House, Miranda built up his full-length blockbuster gradually, giving the public cumulative glances before the final reveal.

That’s what Alessandrini should do. As a Dickens hero once begged, “More, please!” (Through April 30)

Cagney (♥♥♥) – Even after he showed his aptitude for comedy One, Two, Three, it was difficult for me to comprehend how universally James Cagney was beloved in Hollywood, affectionately called Jimmy by all who spoke of him. From the beginning of his career, when he made his splash in a series of gangster films, his barking machine-gun delivery marked him as a gangster on speed.

Ah, but then I caught up with Yankee Doodle Dandy, where Cagney played patriotic showman George M. Cohan. The man could dance! Still maintaining his famed “you dirty rat” cadence, he could also sell a song. And though I only recently learned that Cagney spoke a fluent Yiddish, when he accepted the Congressional Gold Medal in the closing sequence, he reminded me of my dear departed zayde – except when, in an inspired flourish, he danced down the stairs on his way out.

There’s no denying that Robert Creighton has made a thorough study of Cagney, for he not only takes on the role of the Tinseltown terror, he chips in three of the songs and lyrics. Christopher McGovern has written most of the functional score, and a Cohan classic brings the curtain down on each of the two acts. Curiously, no photo or video I’ve seen captures how thoroughly Creighton has mastered his subject. Seen live, he has the sound of Cagney’s voice, the scornful curl of his upper lip, and – most important for me – the stiff, forward-leaning marionette style of his dancing.

Peter Colley’s book starts out like a biography, but it isn’t long before the chronological cavalcade coalesces into Cagney’s longtime artistic relationship and antagonism with studio chieftain Jack Warner. Colley makes it quite clear that Cagney had already become a solid and versatile leading man on Broadway before Warner gave him a call. Close up and in person, Warner isn’t nearly as impressed with Cagney’s presence as he was with his clippings. It’s only when the mogul sees the rushes of Cagney’s first film that he grudgingly elevates him to a leading role.

Bruce Sabath slickly personifies Warner’s autocratic arrogance and shrewd, cocksure intelligence from his initial faceoff with Cagney. There’s plenty of friction to come. Cagney not only chafes against being typecast as a gangster, he also champions the cause of actors and studio professionals who were exploited by execs who reaped the profits of their labors. And he was a staunch supporter of labor unions, which landed Cagney in hot water with both the studio and Congress.

Ding! That must be the real reason Jimmy was so beloved in Hollywood.

All the major signposts are touched: the famed grapefruit scene in The Public Enemy, “Top of the world!” in White Heat, and the climactic Yankee Doodle Dandy tap dance. To Colley’s credit, it’s not all black-and-white between Cagney and Warner. After decades of squabbles, breakups, and reunions, Cagney can acknowledge his boss’s business acumen and Warner can respect Cagney’s talent and pugnacity. They reach a somewhat sullen détente at the end when Warner performs the honors in presenting Cagney with a Lifetime Achievement Award – from the Screen Actors Guild!

So what’s missing? In a word, scale. Everything I witnessed at the upstairs West Side Theatre – the cast, the scenery, the instrumental arrangements, and the choreography – cried out for bigger Broadway dimensions to fit Cagney’s outsized talents and personality. If you’re taking on a whole industry, the stage should be more than 18 feet wide. Warner, Cohan and Cagney were entertainment giants, but in a little upstairs venue, they’re more like sideshow hustlers. Hire more actors, an orchestrator, and let the great work begin.

Photo Credits: Chad Batka, Joan Marcus, Richard Termine, Matthew Murphy, Jenny Anderson, Carol Rosegg

 

Sizzling Satire and Seething Inner Turmoil

Review:  Bootycandy

By Perry Tannenbaum

Weird black mothers roam the Mint Museum stage at the Actor’s Theatre of Charlotte’s latest migratory production. One mamma refers to her son’s genitalia as bootycandy, while another mamma actually names her daughter Genitalia. The weirdness of Robert O’Hara’s Bootycandy only begins there, for I don’t think either of these mothers – or their children – ever meet, though the bootycandy boy emerges as our antihero, Sutter. Presumably, this mildly sadistic gay man was messed up by his mom.

Perhaps all of the above have fallen under the influence under the flamboyant influence of Reverend Benson who strides to his pulpit in priestly black robes and exits in a flaming red formal dress and white high-heeled shoes. Or perhaps none of the others knows him, because Rev. Benson preaches directly to us, not at all happy about the intolerance and homophobia we’re spreading around the neighborhood.

Late in Act 1, we get a delightfully specious explanation for all this disconnection. The only white person in the cast seats himself on a chair upstage, seemingly prepared to lead a group therapy session. No, he is actually moderating a symposium where three of the four black cast members have gathered – excluding Sutter. After their previous trashy or swishy turns, they are now the three different playwrights who have written all the action we’ve seen so far. Sophisticated, intellectual, and artsy, they give the Moderator a really hard time.

That veiled hostility toward white people is the underbelly of what mostly seems to be a sharply satirical look at black folk. Mostly we’re looking at hilarious set pieces. Friends try to dissuade Genitalia’s expectant mom from committing her folly while gossiping lustily about it. Or years later, we see Sutter’s mom absolutely putting her foot down on his participation in a sissy high school musical, insisting that he take up a sport while his disengaged stepdad mostly buries himself behind a newspaper.

And of course, the remedy for somebody repeatedly stalking Sutter on the way home from the library isn’t to call the cops – it’s to stop reading those damn Jackie Collins books. The Michael Jackson Thriller jacket continues to fly under Mom’s radar.

More bizarre and surreal is the grownup Genitalia, in a white bridal gown, un- or dis-marrying Intifada in a formal ceremony, complete with increasingly antagonistic vows, ending with bitch slaps from both lesbians. So when Sutter and his boyfriend Larry agree on an assignation with a lonely white guy, what could go wrong?

Kevin Aoussou, who has played a variety of dark roles for Shakespeare Carolina, including Dorian Gray a couple of years ago, mixes it up a little bit more for us here as Sutter. He’s in much lighter scenes now as the younger Sutter, subjected to the bootycandy and compulsory sports indignities inflicted upon him by his mom, more vulnerable and less arrogant. He’s also capable of insight and regret here, delivering a more fully rounded portrayal here than we’ve seen from him before.

Yet the show largely belongs to Jeremy DeCarlos from the moment he tosses off Reverend Benson’s black robes and applies his lipstick. Equally satisfying after his low-key and sympathetic episodes as Step Dad and Larry (the boyfriend), he reappears as Old Granny at an old age home, where she serves up solace to Sutter (and flashbacks for us) when he visits her. All this wisdom and warm reminiscence are bartered for contraband edible eats.

Lydia Williamson and Ericka Ross sinuously intertwine throughout the two-hour evening as mothers, daughters, and playwrights. As the immature mom insisting on naming her daughter Genitalia and later as the more butch daughter Intifada, Williamson certainly lays down a credible case for being the more incorrigible of the two. But while Ross is purposely overmatched as Genitalia, her insensitivity and homophobia as Sutter’s mom are as chilling as they are hilarious.

Directing the show, Martin Damien Wilkins gives all his black performers license to take it far enough over-the-top to remind us occasionally of The Colored Museum, George C. Wolfe’s hilarious 1986 subversion of honored black theatre traditions. Relying primarily on projections, set designer Chip Decker comes fairly close to convincing us that The Mint is Actor’s Theatre’s permanent home. Certainly the acoustics here are far more hospitable than the disastrous holiday sojourn at Charlotte Ballet’s McBride-Bonnefoux studio for The Great American Trailer Park Christmas Musical.

Maybe the niftiest touch from Wilkins, restoring some of the distance between Colored Museum and this 2011 satire, is the consistently natural work he calls forth from Chaz Pofahl in five different roles. Except as the fulsome officiator at the Genitalia-Intifada breakup, Pofahl is consistently life-sized and somewhat pitiful as our white guy – even when he turns up as the pervert stalking the teen-aged Sutter from the library. Instead of shocking me as Sutter and Larry’s victim later on, when he came out to the hallway outside his hotel room completely naked, he broke my heart a little bit.

Arguably, he’s the only player who bares body or soul all evening long.

Wild as it is, Bootycandy is an autobiographical piece by a black gay playwright with an incongruously Irish name. A portion of O’Hara’s animus is directed intellectually toward his own black community, and another more visceral portion is directed reflexively toward white people. Most poignant of all is the remaining scrutiny that O’Hara directs toward himself and his own shortcomings.

The Ghost of “(I Hate) Hamlet” Returns – With a Vengeance

Review: Women Playing Hamlet

By Perry Tannenbaum

Written and premiered in an era when only men could perform on stage, Hamlet has been performed many times with the finest actresses of their day in the title role. Poetic justice, playwright William Missouri Downs will tell you in his Women Playing Hamlet, since Shakespeare’s magnum opus is a revenge tragedy. Compounding this revenge – and attracting the notice of Charlotte’s Chickspeare banditas and Donna Scott Productions – Downs has decreed that all roles in his comedy, regardless of gender, shall be played by women.

Braininess and silliness play well together at Charlotte Art League, where Donna Scott Productions previously mustered the oddball Civil War re-enactors of Shiloh Rules and the eccentric Amish of The Book of Liz. Most of the cast gathered by director Tonya Bludsworth have performed with both Donna Scott and the Chix before.

Oddballs abound here as well. The most stressed, conflicted, and self-doubting of these is Jessica Ostergaard, who has had the awesome role of Hamlet unexpectedly thrust upon her – despite a résumé that includes a killed-off character in the Young and the Restless and a flicker of a cameo in a Tarantino film (also dying). Everyone in New York who advises Jessica on this prodigious undertaking, whether the advice is solicited or not, tells her that she is too young to play Hamlet. And every one of these opinions has a certain amount of credibility, since everyone on Manhattan Island has an MFA in Acting, from your lowly Starbucks barkeep on up to your legendary acting guru.

Glynnis O’Donoghue has always had a look that mixes determined pluckiness and confused vulnerability, so she is always as perfect a Jessica as director Bludsworth could hope for. She soaks up the pithy pointers with the eagerness of a puppy and absorbs discouraging words with the most endearing and pathetic pout, one that still retains a glint of chin-up determination.

Downs layers on interesting reasons why Jessica should identify with the brooding Danish Prince. At her father’s funeral, we learn that Jessica’s mom announced her intent to marry her uncle. Somehow that doesn’t sound quite so sinister when the announcement is made in a folksy Minnesota accent, don’t-you-know.

That tawdry revelation allows Sheila Snow Proctor, as Minnesota Mother, to steal one scene from O’Donoghue in a flashback. More often, Proctor regally sports a turban, à la Norma Desmond, as Jessica’s acting guru. This imperious Gwen terrifies Jessica with her frank appraisals and such rigid dogmas as “Hamlet is the ‘Mona Lisa’ of plays.” If this formula reminds you of the TV actor haunted by John Barrymore in Paul Rudnick’s I Hate Hamlet, a very popular comedy in the early 1990’s, then you have the gist.

Nonetheless, Snow gets maximum mileage out of her scenes with the cringing O’Donoghue, because she maintains a stony hauteur that defies contradiction. And she is far from Jessica’s only tormentor. Tania Kelly, Vivian T Howell, and Andrea King all play five different roles along Jessica’s bumbling odyssey – with at least two apiece that are standouts. Howell is best as the Starbucks know-it-all and as Gwen’s other student, a ditzy model content to be patronized.

King and Kelly draw more eccentric assignments. As Jessica’s young niece Emily, a very immature Pippi Longstocking-ish Minnesotan, King unwillingly accompanies Jessica to the theater and gets the aspiring actress in trouble with Patrick Stewart during the movie star’s attempt at Hamlet. After disrupting the performance, damage control doesn’t go so well for Jessica at first, compounding Stewart’s rage against texting and tweeting. King’s other triumph is Lord Derby, a renowned Shakespearean scholar in his dotage.

Kelly hardly needs to do more than walk onstage to draw laughs, but she is especially memorable as a more shambling and déclassé academic, Jessica’s Humanities Professor, a veritable fount of dubious information. But Kelly surpasses herself as the Gravedigger, a scene where Downs gives us glints of Shakespearean depth. For a brief moment, we’re outside the hustle and bustle of Broadway and the ephemera of actors’ pretensions.

Chuck Bludworth’s projection slides underscore the web-based slickness and superficiality of the city. With no lack of self-esteem whatsoever, Gwen and the two academics manage to amuse us while educating us about the melancholy Dane and the women who have played him. But the dimly lit graveyard scene is something different. In this wilderness, Downs’s comedy and Shakespeare’s tragedy intermingle, for the two gravediggers in the Bard’s script were actually called Clowns in the dramatis personae. Somehow, Kelly’s portrayal makes me wish to see her tossing Yorick’s skull one day.

 

Sex, Drugs, Homophobia, and HIV Keep Today’s Youth in Turmoil

Review: Jermaine Nakia Lee’s A Walk in My Shoes

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By Perry Tannenbaum

After the Afro-American Cultural Center moved to Uptown Charlotte and became the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture, I wondered whether I’d ever review a show at the old Attic Theatre again. In my early years on the job, I might climb the stairs at 401 Myers Street as many as three times each season to see such works as Bubbling Brown Sugar, Salomé, A Raisin in the Sun, or To Be Young, Gifted, and Black staged by Defoy Glenn and his GM Productions.

Nowadays, the old Afro-Am building functions as the Little Rock Community Development Center, taking advantage of a block-long entrance to their parking lot to change their address to 401 N. McDowell Street. As far as I know, Little Rock’s portfolio still doesn’t include theatre, so it’s fortunate for me that Jermaine Nakia Lee and the Johnson C Smith University C.H.I.P. Project decided to stage the premiere of Lee’s new A Walk in My Shoes at the Attic – especially since a workshop version of the musical had previously been presented on the JCSU campus in 2013.

Just walking up the flights of stairs to the Attic – and then, once inside the theater, walking down the steeply sloped orchestra section to the front row – brought back memories of Glenn and the stellar actors who once graced the Attic: Margaret Freeman, Wayne DeHart, Sandra Beckham Lewis, and Michael D. Lowe. The house was packed to near-capacity when I arrived, and it was instantly apparent, from the activity of the light booth to the functionality of the narrow seats, that Little Rock has kept the Attic in fine repair.

Still, fine repair and state-of-the-art are not the same. There is no roof in sight looking up, so there is no fly loft. Entrances must all come from backstage since there are no wings, and it’s obvious that the Attic wasn’t conceived with musicals in mind. The trio led by musical director Kevin Staley was lined up against the right-hand wall of the stage, visible to audience and actors alike throughout the performance. Staley’s other option, to camp upstage behind the Attic’s curtain, would have required a video setup to cue the cast, with one or more monitors facing the stage. Reality presumably collided with that possibility and quashed it.

Yet the budgetary constraints of the Lee/JCSU collaboration were still apparent from the moment the core members of the cast began to sing. To be heard above the band, all of them needed to be singing in the sweet spots of their range, so body mics wound up as the actual necessities that the budget couldn’t cover. Notwithstanding the artistic merits of Marius James’s freestanding mural, split and separated to opposite thirds of the stage, scenery was fairly rudimentary, usually rolled onstage by the crew and the players themselves. When the trouble-prone addict Maceo was hospitalized early in Act 2, they didn’t dare wheel him onstage already in the bed, sparking some unintended laughter from the crowd as he carefully climbed on.

Played by newcomer Quinn Marques, Maceo personifies the population that JCSU wanted to address when they first approached Lee and sought his help in applying for a federal grant: substance abusers who engage in risky sexual encounters. Before he climbed into that hospital bed, various scenes of A Walk in My Shoes gave ample evidence of Maceo snorting, shooting up, and drinking to excess. Maceo says that he would like to be up-close and sexual with longtime buddy Bonnie, but the effects of various drugs seemed to be tamping down his libido when it came time to take action, which enabled Bonnie to keep pushing him away. Bonnie, portrayed by newcomer Tiffanie McCall, hasn’t been straightforward with her friends, hiding the fact that she was born HIV-positive. Keeping her distance from Maceo was a responsible thing for Bonnie to do while she kept her HIV secret, but as the action unfolded, she learned another reason for maintaining restraint.

So it’s the transvestite Ms. Kara, portrayed with queenly gusto by newcomer Tara Anderson, who wound up drawing Maceo into dangerous sexual activity. She’s the member of the crew who is always flush with cash, earning it by running a escorting service online and on her handy cell phone. After taking a call from Marques (an unseen baddie, not the actor), Kara gets a warning from Travis, the supervisor at the LGBT center, that she shouldn’t be making assignations with this Marques. But divulging the fact that he was actually raped by Marques and his cronies would cost Travis his job, so he left that info out. As a result, Kara had no idea of what the full consequences would be when she cut Maceo into the action.

Completing the crew is Keon Sunkins as the local preacher’s closeted son, O’Neal. His troubled relationship with his homophobic dad and mom, Bishop Rutherford and First Lady Shirley Rutherford, was the first of four tableaus in the opening title song, but there really wasn’t any meaningful sequel until deep into Act 2. So Lee, who wrote the book as well as the music and score, missed an opportunity to fully develop what could have been his most significant character. As Lee said in his genial curtain speech, this is a “long-ass” show, so audience members may give up on ever returning to the church – or wonder why O’Neal doesn’t hang out with a secret boyfriend instead of refereeing Bonnie and Maceo’s squabbles.

Fortunately, Lee has made some important progress as both a writer and as a composer. Dialogue between Maceo, Bonnie, Kara, and O’Neal is far more natural than Lee’s previous musical, For the Love of Harlem, which introduced us to Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and other notables of the Harlem Renaissance. A former program director at the PowerHouse Project, where he counseled HIV-positive youth and other at-risk populations, Lee doesn’t always resist the impulse to giftwrap teachable moments for us or to double-underline the fact that the four besties and Travis are an ongoing support group for each other. He’s at his best when he keeps it real between the friends – and when his songs usher us into his musical world. Too often, Lee gave in to his penchant for writing soul ballads in For the Love of Harlem. There is more variety in A Walk in My Shoes – jazz, hip-hop, R&B, and gospel all get their turn – and more consistent quality. “I Will Never Leave Your Side,” closing Act 1, was the only letdown.

Stage directing isn’t Lee’s forte, and an inexperienced cast might have sustained more compelling dramatic tension in between songs with more detailed, nuanced, and polished guidance. In casting his production, Lee clearly got what he was looking for from a vocal perspective. Anderson and Marques scorched their “Trouble” duet at the LGBT. With co-composer Tyrone Jefferson, Lee has written a cluster of memorable songs for his more peripheral characters. Shuffling around with a teeming shopping cart, Kyran McShaw as the homeless Mr. Jimmy teaches the young folk a different beat with “Jazz,” scatting along the way.

After serving mostly as comic relief with her irresistible cooking, Gail Ford (an oasis of splendor when I last wrote her up at the Attic in the 1997 edition of Bubbling Brown Sugar) gets to cut loose at Maseo’s bedside with “Ms. Wynetta’s Lullaby” before blushingly receiving some rusty romantic moves from Mr. Jimmy. Among the younger players, Elijah Ali stands out as Travis, as a singer and an actor – a good thing, since he was charged with bringing Lee’s most moribund character to life.

When we finally return to the church, there’s plenty to see and hear. Following up her rousing sermon as the church’s First Lady Rutherford, Myrna J. Key-Parker struck up the most infectious song of the evening, “Wait Don’t Mean No.” I finished worrying whether Key-Parker’s bravura could be equaled, let alone topped, when the Bishop stood up to deliver his sermon, for Clifford Matthews, Jr., left no doubt. A gay senior pastor at the St. Luke’s Missionary Baptist Church in real life, Matthews spits fire and stomps thunder as the Bishop, quoting ominous Scripture into his son’s face after O’Neal has had the nerve to answer his father’s altar call for all those in the congregation suffering from the “affliction” of homosexuality.

Although it’s more compartmentalized than in most musicals I’ve seen, the dancing in A Walk was consistently topnotch. In addition to a trio of voguers, one of whom danced in high heels, there were two hip-hop artists to wow us. The Reliable Brothers, identical twins who were featured at the prestigious Breakin’ Convention dance festival, danced to poetry by L’Monique King. Although they are identical twins, the Reliables didn’t always dance identically, occasionally going their separate ways and occasionally partnering as they choreographed their own spots. The fascinating part was watching each the Brothers as they expressed King’s words with their bodies and gestures. There could be no doubt that Lee and King had plenty to say.