I was dropped right smack in the middle of the 1950s last week and bathed in soul music. It wasn’t the R&B music of Booker T. & the M.G.’s or Sam and Dave or my man and home-boy Otis Redding.
It didn’t have the soul of “Green Onions.” Or “Hold On, I’m Coming.” Or “Knock on Wood.” Or any of Otis’ songs – even if these were from the 1960s.
It was music created by Bon Jovi co-founder David Bryan in the Broadway musical “Memphis,” which I attended last week in New York with some friends. The play won a Tony Award this month as the best new musical, beating out “Fela”and others. It also won Tonys for best original score, best orchestration and best book of a musical.
The music was more rock ‘n roll than R&B, but it was fantastic. I patted my feet to it, swayed my body to it and clapped in applause to it. On stage, the company grooved to it, their transistor radios shoulder high and up against their ears. Those radios – similar to ones I’ve picked up at auction – were their connections to the voice of the lead female character in the play, a woman named Felicia and played to the utmost by Montego Glover.
The play is about love and the fulfillment of dreams against a backdrop of a 1950s segregationist culture aimed at thwarting them. It’s about a white man who loves both R&B music and the black woman who sings it in her brother’s nightclub. He wants to put her and the music on records and on the radio. Her brother, though, isn’t buying it: He accused the white man of “stealing my music.”
Some critics have called the musical simplistic, and I can’t argue with that – it is not original but it is a lot of fun. There are moments of lightheartedness and laughter. And the play, along with other black-themed ones, appear to be drawing African American audiences to Broadway, according to the New York Times.
But for me it’s always the music. Huey, one of the main characters, says that “this music is my calling,” but the brother can’t see how a white man from across the tracks in Memphis can love a music he hasn’t lived. R&B music, like the blues, is lived music. The play could have been called “Memphis Blues,” because that’s the way it felt: the pain, joy, hopefulness and hopelessness that you hear in the blues.
Whatever you call it, Huey, Felicia and company sang and acted their hearts out. And Bryan’s music and lyrics made it oh-so-easy for them, with titles like “Scratch My Itch,” “Everybody Wants to Be Black on a Saturday Night,” “Colored Woman,” “She’s My Sister” and “Make Me Stronger.”
While I found the musical thoroughly enjoyable, my friend did not – unsophisticated, she said. Nor did a man seated in front of us at the theater, who had come with a Bible study group of men from his Brooklyn church. He called the play “hokey.” Said he could not imagine his daughters being involved with a white man. I’ll have to admit that that part of the play seemed a little contrived, primarily because Huey was so goofy and Felicia was too dignified for him.
My theater-buddy did enjoy a second play we saw – “Come Fly Away,” a Twyla Tharp homage to Frank Sinatra at the Marquis Theater. It features Sinatra singing along with a live big band. I’m not much of a Sinatra fan, but I do know some of his music and like some of his movies (“The Manchurian Candidate,” “Pal Joey”). Also, I had never seen a Tharp play and was curious.
It was not the raucous “Memphis.” The choreography was largely fluid, noiseless, quiet. But for me, the story was muddled. Unless you had read the reviews, it was hard to figure out what the heck was going on.
It’s apparently a story about different aspects of love, with the focus on four couples in a nightclub that Sinatra may have crooned in at some point in his life. Sinatra’s voice – from such songs as “I’ve Got the World on a String” to “My Way” to “One For My Baby” – was omnipresent, except when interrupted with the live singing of a featured vocalist. I even recognized a few of the songs. There’s also an orgy scene that bordered on embarrassing.
My biggest issue was the role played by the only black woman – the character Kate played by Karine Plantadit (who was raised in Cameroon and trained in West Africa and France). Every time she danced, I kept getting this stereotypical image of black woman as an exotic, sexual, untamed Jezebel – an image perpetrated by others against us.
Her dancing didn’t jibe with Sinatra’s soft-song sound. Her dancing was both eruptive and distracting. She prowled the stage, her hair a lion’s mane. She flung herself through the air into her partner’s arms. My friend called her moves “acrobatic,” I called them exceedingly violent. Maybe that’s what her role called for; it seemed so combative to me. Contrast that with the other female actors, who were lifted and glided and twirled in movements compatible with Sinatra’s smoothness.
This play didn’t work for me. But it was worth seeing.
