I LOVE CONTENT! All the Thoughts/Things/Theatre I've Been Having/Doing/Watchingby Randi / May 22, 2020At the time when everyone is (hopefully) sharing information on how to support black voices, I thought it might be nice to celebrate black artists and stories in the theatre. People much more knowledgeable than I am have shared lists of books to read, shows to watch, documentaries to find, places to donate, and I’ve tried to absorb all of that and do what I can, and I hope you have too. So what do I have to recommend except theatre. I thought I’d share some great shows we can watch to maybe open our minds and show some support. The theatre community has always prided itself on including and welcoming everyone from every background, and it really is a special place, especially compared to other communities. But it has a long way to go before the range of voices heard in the theatre reflect the world around us, and before true equality exists in the representation of stories and voices and talent in the theatre.
So I thought I would offer you a list of some shows that promote black voices, actors, and stories that we can all watch this weekend. We have time now that Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “The Show Must Go On” YouTube series took this opportunity to cancel this weekend’s planned stream! (I don’t know what it was intended to be, but I bet it wasn’t an ALW joint since he stopped sharing his work and instead started sharing…NBC live musicals, woof.) The YouTube channel’s statement said they weren’t sharing a show this weekend in ‘support of Black Lives Matter’. It’s not for me to say whether this is an effective show of support or an empty statement that lets them be lazy and uncreative while maybe saving face, but I would rather the channel share theatre with, say, black creative teams or all-black casts, something to support black voices and stories in theatre and promote them instead of keeping silent. Enormous platforms failing to support such voices when they have the ability to amplify them to millions isssss not my favorite.
Last week’s release was actually a fitting one (albeit a version that’s mediocre) – the NBC live version of the musical Hairspray! Okay, I know, it’s a very white-centered show that treats racism like a lil plot twist and is very, very guilty of the white-savior trope. But it’s bubbly and fun and with a clear message that handles racism in a way that’s accessible to e.g. young kids or impressionable (republican) adults. It’s one of my faves and it happens to be important. Come at me all you want but the Nikki Blonsky (oh she cray)-John Travolta-Queen Latifah-endless amazing names movie version from 2007 is the best. Anyway, ALDubs could have just extended the release window for this one! It also has a mostly impressive cast (Jennifer Hudson singing “I Know Where I’ve Been”?? yes please!) providing the messaging.
Another ‘easy’ but powerful and enjoyable show – and another Best New Musical Tony winner – that deals with racism in America is Memphis, the 2010 show starring Montego Glover, an amazing singer playing an amazing singer, and Chad Kimball as a fictionalized character inspired by Dewey Phillips, one of the first white DJs to play black music on the radio in the 1950s. Fun fact, one day after the matinee of the 2015 revival of ‘The Color Purple’ (see below) I left the theatre speaking with actor Isaiah Johnson about the incredible 104% perfect show and all kinds of things and we were talking and walking down 8th Ave. and we bumped into Montego Glover and they hugged and were catching up and I was just there because we were still talking so that was the gd coolest. (After a few minutes I politely said I would take my leave so they could catch up properly but they were like oh okay cool bye, not like ‘wtf get out of here’ it was awesome.) You can find Memphis on Amazon Prime and BroadwayHD.
A problem with these shows is that their creators are white, so the stories are made palatable and play into white people’s ideals of how to solve racism. As time moves forward, I believe, and hope, that creators and audiences alike realize and accept the need for representation on- and offstage of those whose stories are being told, to make sure the right voices have input. (This was the problem with London’s Falsettos fiasco.)
A wonderfully different show springing from the brilliance of one black man is the 2008 musical Passing Strange, written by the artist Stew (who also starred in it). This unique musical was sort of like a rock concert, sort of like performance art, and a completely different feel from everything around it on Broadway. It tells the story of a young man from LA who tries to figure himself out in Europe, where he encounters all sorts of characters but is often the token black guy. It’s a more personal journey and story than the all-encompassing ‘let’s discuss racism’ shows, and that’s what makes it so effective and moving – especially since so much of it comes from Stew himself. Stew won a Tony for the book, beating In the Heights, and I’m like very happy for him. The show is on YouTube for a small fee.
A Raisin in the Sun, the seminal play about a black family’s experiences, might be a cliche to include on such a list as its the pinnacle of black theatre, but cliches exist because they’re true. You all know this play, right, like you wouldn’t be reading my shit if you hadn’t already read A Raisin in the Sun, right? To watch: the Sidney Poitier/Ruby Dee movie is on Amazon, while the movie version of the 2008 Broadway revival production is on YouTube, with the same Broadway cast including Phylicia Rashad (who won a Tony for it), Audra McDonald (who won a Tony for it), and Sean Combs (that’s right).
Another important play with an accessible movie version is Fences, with stars Denzel Washington and Viola Davis recreating their Tony-winning Broadway roles. I like this one because honestly Denzel’s character seems kind of awful, and it’s necessary that white audiences don’t just get to enjoy happy charming black characters and that black actors get to portray the full expanse of humanity.
For a newer play that more directly reflects the current situation, Pass Over is currently streaming on Amazon. This film version, directed by Spike Lee, of Antoinette Nwandu’s superb, tragic 2018 play, will probably have the same emotional impact as the stage version, which means you will feel awful. The play was written as a sort-of response to the killing of Trayvon Martin, so it feels awfully, depressingly relevant now. Of all the ones on this list, this is the one that we should all watch if we are trying to learn about what is happening.
There’s also the 2017 Lincoln Center Theatre production of the play Pipeline, about inequality in education. The mother of a black inner-city teenager works at a public school, but she decides to send her son to private school, and thus has to grapple with this decision as well as the realization that a whiter school won’t protect him. We are planning to watch it this weekend; it sounds great…and upsetting (given how education is indeed unbelievably unequal) which is fine because we all should be upset right now! especially white people! It’s currently on BroadwayHd for free so hurry up.
After those plays, you’re going to need some more musical spirit-lifting. I know I just said white people all should be upset but if you educate yourself on Black Lives Matter and talk to white friends about it and stand up for injustice and challenge the ideas we’re fed about police being helpful and donate if you can then maybe you can have a musical, as a treat.
If you want a fun one to watch with kids, you can’t go wrong with The Wiz, the classic reimagining of The Wizard of Oz with an all-black cast. You can rent the original film on YouTube, Google play, and I’m sure lots of other places, since it’s old and awesome. Starring Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, forking Lena Horne and Richard Pryor?? I mean drop what you are doing and watch it now if you’ve never seen it. For goodness sake, I just realized this was another recent NBC live musical production! WTF! Given that ALW and his “The Show Must Go On” have turned to showing NBC live musicals, it’s kind of ridiculous that they aren’t showing this one. I wonder if it was supposed to be this weekend’s offering; if so, that’s pretty shirty to cancel. If not, why not! It’s easy to acquire and share given that it’s morphed into a platform solely for American televised live stuff. This one had Mary J. Blige! It was awesome! Promote black artists Andrew!
On Netflix, there’s the movie musical Been So Long, starring UK fave Michaela Coel, about a black single mother and a man she falls for. It’s based on a 2009 Young Vic musical, but that’s before my time so I can’t say how it compares. I can say it has 92% on the old tomato meter, so it probably did a good job.
I wish I could find the Broadway musical version of The Color Purple, any version of it, and share it like I had wanted to. This show is so forking good. LIKE A BLAAAADE OF COOOORN, like a hooooooneyyy beeeeee. like a waaaater falllll, all a part of meeee! LIKE THE COLOR PURPLE! omg I FORKING LOVE THIS SHOW. It’s so good. Listen to the 2015 Broadway revival recording with the unmatched Cynthia Erivo, watch the Oprah movie, read Alice Walker’s novel. Do all three. Luckily, there’s a movie version of this musical in the works, so we can enjoy that sometime in the future, if there’s a future, and enjoy the fun of a book-to-movie-to-musical-to-movie musical journey.
I also can’t find any trace of the 2016 Broadway musical Shuffle Along, or, The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed, or even the original 1921 sensation of the same name (well the first two words). The original Shuffle Along was musical by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake that enjoyed a surprising long run in New York in 1921 and introduced the world to Josephine Baker, Florence Mills, Paul Robeson, and more. In 2016, George C. Wolfe helmed a new show telling the tale of that original event, with the most exciting cast of stellar black luminaries imaginable, including Audra McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Billy Porter, and more. It was a flawed retelling but its importance and heart were undeniable. It’s worth listening to the cast recording for Audra’s, well, being Audra, and for Adrienne Warren’s take on Florence Mills. You can also take a half hour and watch this interview with Wolfe and stars about the show.
Is it bad that I want a production of Fiddler on the Roof (one of the best and most enduring classics for dern good reason) that amplifies its message of prejudice by having black actors play the Jews while keeping the Russians white? WOULD BE INTERESTING.
Anyway, there are lots of black stories to appreciate and black talent to celebrate – there’s the Dreamgirls movie (with J-Hud in top form, Beyonce killing it, and Tony-winner Anika Noni Rose) which is I believe is on Netflix; there’s Audra’s exquisite Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill on BroadwayHD. And yet there’s obviously not enough, since I am just shooting out a quick list like this. And while of course this list is way incomplete, clearly if such a list can even be made, it means these sorts of works are the exceptions and not the rule. The fact that I can specifically point to all of these examples, leaving off maybe a dozen or so, proves in itself what a dearth there is. Theatre, like all institutions and areas and arts and parts of the universe, has a long way to go before inclusion, colorblind casting, and promotion of minority voices is the norm and not the lauded exception. Make demand for this heard, and maybe start by enjoying some of what we already have.
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The Rage of Narcissus: Provocative & Disturbing New Work at the Pleasance
With all the theatre we see (it’s a lot), there are only a few times when all we can say to each other at the end of a show is ‘well, shit.’ But that’s exactly what we said after the new production of The Rage of Narcissus by Sergio Blanco, a thrilling, frightening, too gory, captivating performance that’s powerful in its elusiveness and its vague metaphors but also will leave you thinking wait…what? and HOW? The dreamy abstractions were somehow effective in making us feel what we were supposed to feel (horrified?) while simultaneously being unclear in what exactly they were and why. The show is a hazy whirlwind that mixes reality and fantasy and fiction and biography into a cautionary tale of some sort. However, what it’s cautioning against is unclear, partly in the good artsy way and partly in a bit of an unsatisfying way.
The Rage of Narcissus tells the story of how Sam Crane, the adept actor, came to play Sergio Blanco, the writer, but a character version of Sergio in this not-all-true (I mean obvs) autobiographical-but-fictionalized account of his time at an academic conference in Ljubljana, which is a horribly fun word to try to type accurately. It’s an extremely meta show, with Sam-the-actor-but-also-a-characterized-version-of-himself playing Sergio-the-writer-but-fictionalized and repeatedly breaking the fourth wall to tell us the ‘truth’ about the story’s events outside how he’s presenting it that there are really no remnants of a fourth wall to be found once the show begins. The construction of this production, with its great use of video and lighting, is one of the most distinguishing aspects of it, intriguing and mind-bending and ensuring that what’s happening onstage is never boring, often super funny, and always interesting.
And while clearly, in a show of this title (it’s a good title, as we’re told in the meta discussion of how Sam and Sergio came to land on it), you’d assume it’s about the pitfalls of narcissistic tendencies, they didn’t add up to enough to demand the action that occurs. That vagueness of what the what and huh why is fun for the artistic experience, but not so fun to wrap your head around afterwards. In a show that ostensibly deals with narcissism, vanity, ego, selfishness, something along those lines, the punishment for these traits is neither justified nor doled out to the representation of those traits. That would be the character Igor, the clear narcissist in the story, though he’s not the victim of it. Is he even real? (What’s GOING ON.) To punish the more obvious narcissist may be too easy, sure, and it is interesting to reflect on how Sam’s Sergio and Sam himself showed flickers of the ego-driven behaviors to be warned against, but it feels like a bit of a stretch to rely on that for the result and/or whatever message we’re to take from it. There are also the jabs at the selfishness of our society at large, represented by the few and far between but still jarring interjections about genuine global tragedies, which seemed too fragmentary to be meaningful.
And so the representation of the punishment just seems wrong, and disturbing, and disturbance just for its own sake and not for any good reason isn’t good enough. The particular scene where we find out what actually happened in Sergio’s hotel room in excruciating detail is unnecessarily gory. It added nothing and risked cheapening the work from being a sophisticated thriller to being akin to a low-grade snuff film.
Aside from that part (and the fact that if you had to drink every time you heard the line “and then we began to f*&k”, you would die from alcohol poisoning), it was still an enjoyably riveting show, with Crane giving a pretty fantastic performance. This show raises a bunch of interesting questions, throwing threads of ideas into the ether, although not fully holding on to one. I appreciate when good art is more about emotions than facts, but this started to veer a little too far into “don’t think about it too hard, too too hard” territory for me. However, it was never boring, and it’s very provocative, which is a great accomplishment for new weird theatre.
INFORMATION
The one act show is about 100 minutes (not the 90 billed). The lobby and bar were so packed I had trouble leaving the building, which isn’t a great feeling. Seats are unreserved so get there early for an aisle, but there are no bad seats. Bathrooms are gender neutral with about 3-5 stalls/cubicles each, downstairs in the bar area.
The show runs at the Pleasance Theatre (near Caledonian Road station) until March 8.
Barber Shop Chronicles at the Roundhouse: Uneven but Enjoyable
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show is Barber Shop Chronicles, at London’s Roundhouse theatre until August 24.
Last weekend, we trekked up to Camden to see the latest production of Barber Shop Chronicles (hard for me to remember that it is three words but one is not ‘the’), Inua Ellams 2017 play about the important role barbershops play in black male communities the world over. It makes sense, giving this location the theatrical treatment, considering that barbershops in certain neighborhoods can play the role of community center, home, church, public square, political stage, and more. The entertainment factor of the wide-ranging conversations is built-in; the challenge is putting these conversations together into a cohesive work, which Barber Shop struggles with. Making quick stops in London’s Peckham neighborhood and locations all over Africa, all on the same day, this cheery ensemble piece gives glimpses of what these community centers share despite their distance.
It sounds like a slam-dunk idea, and for most of the audience it was. The actors are entertaining and energetic, and the set design is wonderful – there’s a wire globe that (patchily) lights up with the action’s current location as it spins, and all the international hair salon ads hanging from the ceiling are also lit depending on which city we’re currently in. And, great for audience members with shorter attention spans, the fast pace from location to location keeps the material from getting bogged down. But, that rapid anecdotes-only pace also keeps it from developing into something more meaningful, a story you can sink into. And it would be one thing if the anecdotal set-up were trusted, but the creators tried that for the first half and then tried to dramatize the non-story for the second half, resulting in an inconsistent outcome.
That first half, where we dropped in on Peckham, Lagos, Accra, and more to briefly listen to what the men were discussing today, showcased brief anecdotes and easy jokes – exclamations, silly voices, the stuff that audiences eat up. Although they did cleverly establish that this was all happening on the same day, by having everyone discuss a big football match, the focus was clearly more on joking around. And the jokes felt cheap, if not offensive. I mean, clearly this show wasn’t written for me and I’m okay with that, but I’m not okay with jokes about every other group of people that felt more mean-spirited than not. One of the longer (still not long, but longer) bits in this first half has a guy tell the others about his friend with an autistic child who tends to make scenes in public, and how they were told to beat the autism out of her – and everyone, onstage and off, erupts into insane laughter. Is…is that funny? There are also lots of macho jokes about gay men and wearing down women who reject you, which felt very troubling. Again, I’m not the target demographic here, but I don’t think that matters when you’re joking about these topics. And if the excuse is that this was just showing how normal men talk in these places – you know, ‘locker-room’ talk – well then that’s definitely a problem.
Soon, the cheap jokes gave way to a sort of late-stage attempt to create dedicated characters and narrative, and by that point it felt unearned. We had a young Peckham man angry at his boss because he thinks he put his dad in jail for no reason, when obviously, you could guess from a mile away the father actually committed the crime and we were going to find out about with the boy, obviously, and then he was going to forgive the boss, obviously, and we were going to all witness the emotional ‘reconciliation’ that honestly would have been emotional if the rest of the show built towards any kind of emotion, but as is, it felt out of left field and the emotion was unwarranted. There’s another cross-continental emotional bridge they try to build between another Peckham youth and a man we met in one of the African shops, but again, with no such foundation established, no emotional groundwork laid with all the time they had, it’s a last-minute bridge to nowhere, an attempt at an emotional punch that doesn’t land.
Despite all my problems with the story, or lack thereof, the show still remains a decent time, an interesting look at this crucial hub of black communities. And even when the action onstage is negative, the show itself still feels imbued with an overall sense of optimism, which is valuable. That’s definitely helped by the pre-show dance party happening with the cast and any audience members wanting to join in the fun, establishing a jovial high that’s hard to bring down, for most of the audience.
INFORMATION
Barber Shop Chronicles plays at the Roundhouse Theatre in Camden until August 24.
The show began at 8:05pm and ended at 9:55pm. There is no interval.
The ushers made a big deal pre-show of telling each and every person (hence a suuuper slow entry to the theatre) that there was no readmission during the show, and if you got up from your seat you’d be resat further back, because it’s performed in the round and you’d be a spectacle. Despite this warning, people came in super late and walked up and down the aisles right to the stage level the entire time, so, I guess do what you want. Also be prepared for people doing whatever they want regarding phone use, as in, everyone is on their phones the entire time and you just have to accept it. We knew going in to just breathe and accept all the phones and not say anything to anyone nearby, but we were surprised at the constancy of full-volume conversations. So, if you go you have to let go of any qualms about theatre etiquette.
