If necessity is the mother, maybe expectation is the grim reaper. Rescued from a slush pile of literary agency manuscripts, Nicholas Sparks’ THE NOTEBOOK became a #1 New York Times bestseller in 1996, the first of more than a dozen, and adapted for the big screen in 2004 – with such established and future marquee stars as James Garner, Gena Rowlands, Rachel McAdams, and Brian Gosling.
When Bekah Brunstetter adapted the novel for the stage in 2022, she was collaborating with composer/lyricist Ingrid Michaelson and the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. So when this Chicago manuscript hit my desk that same year, in judging for the Steinberg Awards (given to the best play premiered outside Broadway), I could presume that Brunstetter and Michaelson were thinking that their work was small and intimate.
It had been five years since I’d seen Fun Home at Circle in the Square in New York, and three years since it had toured here in Charlotte with our own Corrigan as Middle Allison at Knight Theater. That musical and that scale seemed to be the template for The Notebook, which sports three Allies and tacks on three Noahs. The script delighted me as I mentally restaged it at Circle in the Square, where Fun Home had smitten me.
My enjoyment of the script was enhanced by my unfamiliarity with Sparks’ novel and Nick Cassavetes’ film. Call it snobbery, but I’d devoutly avoided both of them. So the simplicities of the script were actually charming, though I’ve since learned that the flavorings of the novel, grounding it specifically in the Carolinas, were neutered to “A Coastal American Town.”
By the time The Notebook The Musical opened at Belk Theater earlier this week, all memory of Brunstetter’s book had also vanished, leaving me as I was when it first flashed onto my computer monitor: vaguely averse to what little I knew about the Sparks novel and the Hollywood film. Recognition only peeped in when we reached the scene where Allie sees Noah’s photo in a newspaper, standing proudly in front of the old house he had promised to renovate for her.
At that point, I had the advantage of not knowing how the story would end, though I did care. What do doctors know, right?
But I was still vaguely floating around mentally amid the non-specific David Zinn & Brett J. Benakis – and feeling more and more irritated that the story hadn’t touched down in the Carolinas or any other identifiable location. The triple Noahs and Allies, reminding me of Fun Home, didn’t help either.
Notwithstanding the vertical fluorescent lights shuttling up and down from the fly loft to chandelier height, or the repeated, random scurryings and mimed replays of previous scenes, The Notebook kept looking like a charming little musical trying so, so hard to balloon into Broadway-extravaganza dimensions. In reality, even our Knight Theater isn’t quite as small as the Broadway theater where it was staged. The Yard at Chicago Shakespeare was even smaller.
While the pretensions and non-specifics of The Notebook were deflating, threatening to snuff itself out, directors Michael Greif & Schele Williams worked their chief wonders with their finely selected cast. Beau Gravitte was the essence of avuncular as Older Noah, our narrator, even though his own medical tribulations were inexplicably minimized. Opposite him, Sharon Catherine Brown was a noli me tangere termagant, hard-wired to the brink of explosion – and if Gena Rowlands was half as dislikable, good for her!
As pleasant as Michaelson’s songs were, they never lifted the story. This was especially telling when the moment demanded a soaring, searing climax for Brown, but only yielded her an “I Know” duo with Gravitte.
The youthful energy and chemistry between Chloe Cheers and Kyle Mangold were nearly as powerful and volatile as their ultimate evolutions. You can see what they see in each other and why they might last: Mangold’s persistence and healthy self-image presage the crusty, battle-scarred man whose steadfastness we’ll mildly admire later. More importantly, Cheers’ caprice and spontaneity fill in the blanks to the mystery of why Old Noah still adores Old Allie.
In playing time, Ken Wulf Clark and Alysha Deslorieux draw the short straws among our protagonists as the Middles. Yet in teaming together for Allie and Noah’s epic reunion – and splashing around the stage in the iconic downpour scene that fronts the movie’s PR and DVD cover – they are undeniably gifted with the juiciest bits.
Clark even gets to receive Anne Tolpegin’s lukewarm apology for all the patrician prejudice and underhandedness of Allie’s Mother towards him. Jerome Harmann-Hardeman portrays Allie’s dad with equal hauteur and greater honesty.
Call me back when a local company decides to mount this musical at an appropriate scale. We can match the talent. No slights intended.
May 1, 2026, Charlotte, NC – It may be an inborn genetic trait, as eternal as gender: you either love the music of Queen or, if you can, you shun it. Coming from the latter camp to Queen City Concerts’ latest conquest, We Will Rock You at Booth Playhouse, I could boast a near-total ignorance of the mighty metal band. To the distress of true believers, I was able to positively identify nothing in the Queen realm beyond Freddie Mercury, the twin trademarks of stadium rock – “We Are the Champions” and “We Will Rock You” – and the twin incarnations of “Bohemian Rhapsody”: as the apex of heavy metal pretension and as a motion picture.
Deciding to review Queen City’s new production was a cruel test of how far this wondrous company, with its breathtaking range, could take me out of my comfort zone. Beginning as a streamed series of Quarantine Concerts during the COVID pandemic in 2020, founder Zachary Tarlton rechristened his enterprise in 2022 when it went live with Tick, Tick…BOOM! – and remained true to its concert format and its exclusive devotion to relatively small and obscure Off-Broadway musicals for little more than a year.
With Kinky Boots and Titanic, they gradually discarded their music stands and playscripts, along with their disdain for lighting, costumes, and choreography. By sticking with their Concerts branding, they likely stunted the growth of their audience and community awareness of what they were really about. “Concerts” became truly obsolete as a description of the company in 2023, when QC Concerts presented Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Parts 1 and 2, in May and a rather dazzling Sunset Boulevard in November. Like special concert revivals up in New York, the typical non-Angels runs were preciously short, three performances at most, so you still left with that concert feeling of having experienced something unique, live, and never to be replicated.
By 2026, events at Booth Playhouse or the Stage Door at Blumenthal Performing Arts seem to have developed a cult following. At We Will Rock You, only the front-and-center seats were strangely vacant, either bought up by plutocrat subscribers who hate Queen or avoided by people like me who were wary of the sound pressure levels likely to be generated by a seven-piece electric band and a cast of more than twenty.
Notwithstanding the trendiness of the 2018 biopic title set the revert to live concert form, my opening night audience was older than the demographic you might expect. Occasional outbreaks of leather and glitter were to be found, but more prevalent was my own impulse in readying myself for the music of Queen: dressing down and casual. Torn between getting decked out in a T-shirt and a golf shirt, I had opted for the more conservative apparel, yet I found the rest of the audience similarly torn. Nobody was confusing this concert with a Charlotte Symphony event.
So there was a palpable, cult-like fellowship in the packed orchestra seats, even before the slacker musicians sauntered in and Tarlton took his conductor position behind one of the two keyboards. A key part of the test, for me, was going to be how empathetic Tarlton was intending to be in reasonably taming those fearsome high decibel levels. Seeing drummer Michael Charlton behind a plexiglass enclosure was not reassuring.
As it turned out, Tarlton was even kinder to my aging eardrums than I’d hoped. This was like middleweight metal behind reasonably amped vocalists, preeminently Patrick Stepp as Galileo, the far-in-the-future rebel/prophet reincarnation of Freddie Mercury in Ben Elton’s delightfully silly script. Until we reached the dreaded “Champions” and the stultifying title song (or is it rap?), Stepp was inevitably paired with Ally Teeples as Scaramouche, played with Gothic stolidity. Scaramouche, it seemed rather early, was fated to do Galileo and the fandango.
The duo introduced me pleasantly enough to “I Want to Break Free,” “Intuition,” “Headlong,” and “Hammer to Fall.” Yet Galileo and Scaramouche’s internet cloud oppressors, Vanessa Robinson as Killer Queen and Lamar Davis as Khashogi, were another vocal power couple, together on “A Kind of Magic” or apart: Robinson most notably on “Don’t Stop Me Now” and her namesake song, Davis on “Seven Seas of Rhye.” Really, the epic length of We Will Rock You nearly sped by with Kacy Connon’s stage direction (and uncredited choreography?), Kel Wright’s rockin’ lighting design, and Sarah Deutsch’s kaleidoscope of costumes: glad rags, punk, militant glitter, and breakouts of Bowie androgyny and leather. Boots, vests, and pants.
Most people will be amused by Elton’s futureworld, where Globalsoft, presumably a metastasizing Microsoft, has basically uploaded all life and soul to the cloud and banned music worldwide to the robotic humans below. Only a distant colony of Bohemians is a threat to rediscover the lone remaining musical instrument left on the planet and revive whatever rock once was. Like Buddy, Galileo and Scaramouche are almost totally clueless. But in his dreams, Galileo receives emanations from the dead, usually in the form of lame and hackneyed lyrics we all readily recognize.
In addition to not-bad-at-all discoveries like “Seven Seas” and “Under Pressure,” there was a new reason for me to harbor affection for Queen when “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” closed Act 1. Never knew it was theirs. And Darren Spencer, as Buddy, a Buddy Holly soulmate, caught me by surprise with “These Are the Days of Our Lives,” never on my radar before. On the other hand, when Robinson reached “Another One Bites the Dust” and Kasie Patlove as Oz exhumed “No One But You (Only the Good Die Young),” my reasons for despising Queen took on fresh fuel. Overall, QC Concerts’ journey through their songbook was quite worth taking and delightful, thanks to Elton’s whimsy, Connon’s dynamic theatricality, and Tarlton’s spirited, unerring musicianship.
For those of you who love those Brits, do not hesitate!
May 7, 2026, Charlotte, NC – Amid the war and surging gasoline prices, you’ve probably heard: it’s time to celebrate! Our semi-quincentennial is just around the corner, and when Charlotte Ballet artistic director Alejandro Cerrudo went about crafting his troupe’s 2025-26 season, he had no idea that his quite appropriate celebration – and his first evening-length choreography to be presented in the Queen City – would be clouded by blood, smoke, anguish, and official federal lies and hypocrisies. Or maybe he had a brilliant premonition about the eerie July 4th now looming before us, to be glorified by a leader who openly flouts the US Constitution. For Cerrudo’s One Thousand Pieces, first unveiled in Chicago when the Spanish-American artist was the resident choreographer at the prestigious Hubbard Street Dance in 2012,is unexpectedly dark, monochromatic, and hypnotic.
Credit the darkness and monochromaticity to Thomas Mika’s costume design, and to the dark background of his scenic design, which, at its liveliest, obscures or reflects the 24 dancers shuttling on and offstage, with numerous 8-foot-tall mirrored windows sliding along the floor. Redeployed after a curtain drop, three of these windows are suspended in air, gently swaying and revolving. All of this moving glass is eminently suited to the minimalist music of Philip Glass, whose famously repetitive arpeggios produce the hypnotic effect, though Cerrudo has curated his choices discerningly into a delicious mixtape of what sounded like a couple of dozen different Glassworks.
But it wasn’t a tape. We were treated to the Charlotte Symphony performing live, led by resident conductor Christopher James Lee, who mirrored Cerrudo’s enthusiasm for Glass through the zest of his players. Whether or not Glass grabs you, his music definitely attacks in Lee’s hands. Nor was the texture unflaggingly orchestral as guest pianist Phillip Bush fronted a string quartet of Symphony worthies, including first violinist Kari Giles, second violinist Kathleen Jarrell, violist Benjamin Geller, and cellist Jon Lewis.
Glass will be celebrating his 90th birthday next January, so One Thousand Pieces is nearly as appropriate as a celebration of his music as it is of America. Maybe more so, depending on how successfully you feel Cerrudo’s choreography evokes his original inspiration, Marc Chagall’s America Windows. The 2012 debut of One Thousand Pieces coincided with the 25th anniversary of Chagall’s work, unveiled a year after America’s bicentennial as a gift to the Art Institute of Chicago. Though there is dispute about exactly how to interpret the windows, AIC’s official description says that the three window panels, measuring a total of 258 square feet, “merge symbols of US history, the Chicago skyline, and the arts; read from left to right, the panels represent music, painting, literature, architecture, theater, and dance.”
If Cerrudo’s choreography seems surprisingly dark, so do Chagall’s Windows, notwithstanding their Chicago skyline, New York’s Statue of Liberty, assorted birds, musical instruments, and flying people. It was a must-see for me and my wife, Sue, when we visited Chicago, coincidentally in 2012.We were not disappointed, but we were certainly not overwhelmed. In terms of brightness, cheer, and scale, Claude Monet’s epic Water Lilies painting at MOMA is brighter-hued and marginally larger, while each of Chagall’s two murals at opposite ends of the Met Opera lobby, one in rosy red and the other in sunny yellow, is more than four times the size of his America, visible across the Lincoln Center campus from distant Columbus Avenue.
Celebrating a stained-glass masterwork with music by Philip Glass seems like a natural impulse, no matter how dark the original and the tribute may be. Yet there are unforgettable moments of whimsy, joy, and wonder lurking within Cerrudo’s staging and choreography that break free of the prevalent darkness and monochrome.The first of these comes promptly at curtain rise when the lower lip of the curtain lifts one of the dancers off the floor. He lets go before Charlotte Ballet needs to worry about hiking their insurance payments, destined to reappear from an even loftier perch between Scene 1 and Scene 2 before intermission. Lowered from the ceiling of the orchestra section of the hall, he will tell us a brief tale of eternal love – wearing a harness that enables him to float without worry.
The last curtain rise before intermission revealed Cerrudo’s most joyous scene as three sections of streaming mists formed behind the dancers, lit in multiple shades of green, blue, purple, and white, merging and remixing in midair as they fell to the floor. Matching this sudden shower of color, the style of the choreography also perked up. Until now, the default mode of partnering lowered the dancers’ bodies toward the floor as they tugged at each other or slinged one another, without jumps or lifts. Adding the water to the stage floor, Cerrudo certainly didn’t risk sending his dancers airborne over the damp, but he freed his troupers to frolic in the water, sending gleaming dewdrops merrily into the air as they splashed around the floor. Occasional kicking motions jubilantly affirmed that there was nothing incidental or accidental about the waterdrops flying across the stage.
It could have been my imagination, but Glass’s music grew jazzier here, especially when played by Bush and his quintet. The catchy curlicues of melody that erupted here were certainly not a mirage.
Everybody has a story, but the cruel truth is that an overwhelming majority of them, whether factual or fictional, will be forgotten. So the story of Oedipus, immortalized by the Greek dramatist Sophocles in his Theban Trilogy – and perhaps the cruelest of all stories – is an awesome exception. Not only has this story survived for more than 2450 years, but it has also stood as the Aristotelian model for storytelling.
So part of the wonder of Luis Alfaro’s Oedipus el Rey, now playing at the Arts Factory in a graphic and gripping production from Three Bone Theatre, is how this contemporary Chicano playwright retells the age-old tragedy. The better you know the original Oedipus Rex, the more audaciously you’ll see Alfaro flouting Sophocles’ storyline and Aristotle’s principles of storytelling.
The basic Freudian elements are intact, and Alfaro delightfully retains a Greco-style chorus – but a more shapeshifting group. Even Oedipus is part of the chorus in the prologue, wearing the same orange prison outfit as the other men in our prologue. But the other five guys shuttle in and out of their prison garb, three of them moonlighting in the roles of the prime figures of the Greek myth.
As Alfaro’s tale takes us from prison to LA, from prison across the desert to Vegas and back again to LA, we’ll meet up with King Laius, Oedipus’s dad, and Creon, the king’s brother-in-law. The blind seer, Tiresias, we see from almost the very beginning, elegantly compresses all three of the men to whom Oedipus has been handed off shortly after his birth.
He is a mentor to Oedipus – his father, for all he knows. Hanging out in the prison library, Tiresias is a seer in more ways than one. And if you know how Oedipus winds up, you know that his proving to be King Oedipus’s role model is a fiendish joke.
Now if you know your Poetics, you’ve already deduced that Alfaro has blown Aristotle’s precious unities of time and place to smithereens. This Oedipus doesn’t simply offer us a devastating replay of those final moments when he unravels his own mystery and history, realizing that he has already fulfilled the fate that the oracle has predicted.
In a minor miracle of conciseness that only takes about 90 minutes of stage time – with dollops of Greek chorus, Parliament-of-Owls phantasmagoria, and Chicano voodoo thrown in – Alfaro cleverly dramatizes all the key plot points rather than simply narrating them. The horrible catastrophe of Oedipus fulfilling the fate he has so diligently avoided is once again our crowning moment, but only after we’ve been along for every key step in his story.
The nativity, the abduction, the patricide, the Sphinx riddle, the incest, and the bloody denouement are all part of the action, no less thrilling or shocking than Sophocles of old. Because there is so much more action, so swiftly.
And yet Alfaro compresses some of the tale. The intimate bond between Oedipus and his queenly mother Jocasta happens at the speed of sight, and the new king’s downfall rushes upon him shortly after their wedding. In the Sophocles storyline, there’s a plague afflicting Thebes. He and his queen have two daughters. When the Roman playwright Seneca took up the tale, his timeline was even slacker: the Theban royals had sons and daughters by the time he sent Creon off to consult the oracles.
Vis-à-vis Sophocles, the gains outnumber the losses as Alfaro takes these daring tacks, even if they don’t outweigh them. You get to empathize a little with the monstrous ganglord Laius as the fatal prophecy is delivered to him with the birth of his son. More than two millennia after the Theban royal reigned, there is enough earthiness and superstition to this career bully, crook, and barrio king for him to give credence to the wild prophecy.
And Tiresius, now blindly caught in the merciless net of fate, is doing his best to alter Oedipus’s destiny! Meanwhile, we get to see an earlier phase of Creon, when resentment and jealousy bedevil him as Oedipus makes inroads on his sister and his turf. He doesn’t go forth trying to get info that will help dispel any plague. He’s out there digging for dirt on Oedipus.
Three Bone’s earlier plunges into Alfaro’s Greek Trilogy, Mojada and Electricidad, resolutely distanced themselves from their Ionic roots, embracing the mystic squalor of the modern-day barrio. But here, the playwright sets us down at Kern County’s California State Prison, and the full Coro sextet enters and forms a square-shaped lineup, where Alfaro calls for “An empty stage stripped of decoration – hollow and hallowed – its emptiness feels religious.”
What director Rod Oden and set designer Jennifer O’Kelly do to capture this ambiance is to stand Ionic pillars along all four walls of the Arts Factory and stage their Oedipus in the round. These are enhanced by projections that O’Kelly deploys to fill the spaces between the ancient columns, beginning with the names of our key players projected vertically on the pillars during the opening Prologue.
Not to complain, but I wish Oden and O’Kelly had also projected Alfaro’s scene titles. Some are spicy and humorous, offering further links to the ancient tragedy.
The performances are as classy as the scenery, but without classical pretensions. Never a part of the ritualized action, except when she dons her wedding dress, Stacy Fernandez charms us as Jocasta from the moment we first see her chiding her unborn son, who is kicking her inside the womb. What Alfaro titled “Soliloquy” comes off like a world-weary wisecrack. No less engaging, Fernandez gets to fill us in on Jocasta’s backstory, something Sophocles and Seneca never bothered with.
In another auspicious Three Bone debut, Kelvin Jones-Fernandez as Oedipus contrasts nicely with Fernandez’s street-wise worldliness. With a studly innocence and a winsome, toothy smile, Jones-Fernandez had me thinking LaMelo Ball all evening. Less than half as much ink on him as the Hornets star, but enough tats for Laius to instantly recognize him as an ex-con at their fateful nocturnal meeting on a one-lane highway.
Jones-Fernandez brings a big personality to his monologue when Oedipus subsequently tours his dad’s royal territory, reasserting sovereignty and letting former debtors know they’re still on his account book and announcing that the “free trade” days are over when they could do business outside his turf. Yet he’s genuinely wowed by Jocasta, green enough to convincingly ignite their copulation scene by crying out, “Teach me!”
You’re more than warned that this scene is coming when you first enter the space. Ushers will apply stickers to all your cellphone camera lenses to protect the actors.
Sipping on a horchata the livelong day, Eduardo Sanchez stylishly delivers Alfaro’s weaselly makeover of Creon, whom Lauis regards as a pretend prince. He’s intimidating as well as sleazy toward Oedipus when he arrives in town, won over easily enough, but obviously a sneaky, underhanded threat. That Oedipus resists his initial overtures to go crooked says something for his character: he’ll succumb because society is rigged against Chicanos and ex-cons.
You may remember that Sanchez was also a bit of a softie – and a bit comical – as Orestes in Three Bone’s flaming Electricidad.Two other standouts from previous 3B installments of the trilogy show their mettle again. Luis Medina, who was Orestes’ mentor and tattoo artist last August, plays a bigger, yet similar role as Tiresias. Laius’s former right-hand man turned prison sage, now masquerading as Oedipus’s dad. Accessorized with dark glasses and a slick fold-up navigation cane.
Although we haven’t seen him since his starring role as Jason in Mojada (based on Euripides’ Medea), Christian Serna brings some of that same swagger to King Laius. After all, Jason was also a bit of a cad, going for the gold, just not as malign as this mobster. It’s fun to get a more intimate look at this character who is usually offed before the action begins.
And it’s newly satisfying to watch his predicted fate come full circle and overtake him. The only big mistake Oden made in directing came at the moment when Laius recognizes who his killer is, how the gods and fate have triumphed. It needs to be bigger, far more emphatic.
Yes, Alfaro’s Oedipus and Laius don’t rise to the royal grandeur of their Theban namesakes, so their falls are not as precipitous. That’s probably why Alfaro leans so hard into amplifying his hero’s hubris. This one doesn’t believe in any God, tears a Bible into shreds, and deifies himself.
It’s excessive rage and arrogance for an ex-con, but not if you accept Oedipus’s underlying anguish as the voice of his people. Three Bone Theatre is the first company anywhere to present all of Alfaro’s Greek Trilogy and give vent to his full anger. Groundbreaking may be an understatement in the presence of such power.
Across the span of nearly 40 years of reviewing, reporting, and pontificating on the performing arts, quite a few events and performances have etched themselves into my mind. On rarer instances, an audience response will be equally unforgettable, such as press night on April 10, 2008, at Ovens Auditorium, the first time Wicked came to town, greeted by a series of deafening ovations that have never been matched.
Every time my Apple Watch notifies me that an audience topped the 100dB mark the previous evening, I wish I’d had one at Ovens that night to know what the highwater mark is.
Even more unique was the night of September 15, 2012, at Dale F. Halton Theater. There, the student actors and musicians of Northwest School of the Arts performed The Color Purple. My wife Sue and I went with a bit of trepidation.
We had already seen this musical on Broadway and in its touring reincarnation at Belk Theater. More to the point, we knew the pitfalls of an all-youth cast colliding with roles that demanded fully mature players. At the Halton, we were already reminded of how wrong that could go when the recent college grads who recruited for CPCC Summer Theatre clashed with the likes of Fiddler or Spamalot.
Of course, we had already built up considerable trust in Corey Mitchell as a stage director nearly three years before he snagged the first Tony Award given to a theatre educator. But there are tough hombres in Alice Walker’s Purple, including poor Celie’s abusive father and husband, Pa and Mister.
And if you remember either the film or the Oprah-produced musical, there are two certifiable divas besides Celie, our tormented protagonist: the hard-headed Sofia and the glamorous Shug Avery. Could Mitchell find all the outsized talents he needed enrolled at Northwest to fill all these roles?
Sure did. And he had more: scenery on loan from the original Broadway production.
But the audience! When Northwest junior Keston Steele, starring as Celie, had finished singing her “What About Love?” solo, Sue turned to me and asked, “Have you ever seen anything like this?”
For the entire audience, it seemed, had sprung to its feet – a standing ovation in the middle of a show! And the answer to Sue’s question is still no.
So you can imagine that when we walked into the old Queens Road Barn on opening night of the current Purple and received my playbill, I was pre-sold. Our Tony Award winner was back directing Theatre Charlotte’s new version, and the name of Keston Gary topped his cast list as Celie.
Had to be the same Keston, right? That’s honestly the only name I had remembered.
While I wasn’t the only person in the Queens Road Barn who remembered Gary’s pre-marital, pre-motherhood exploits at CP, it’s unlikely that anyone else in the crowd was in the same suspense: would history repeat itself?
So there was that unique suspense for me, especially when Gary belted out “What About Love?” as zestfully as Steele. Would the audience rise? Would the Barn’s roof blow off? That same silly suspense struck me once again when Gary followed up with the musical’s supreme affirmation, “I’m Here.”
While Gary’s singing merely equaled Steele’s, her acting – seasoned by marriage and multiple motherhoods – markedly surpasses it. At their depths, Gary’s servility and submissiveness as Celie are borderline cringeworthy. Maybe a few notches beyond what a white director would dare.
It’s a grim reminder, to be sure, that feminism was a more central concern for Walker here than racism, which only affects Sofia’s story. As a result, we can revel more in the light and inspiration that Shug and Sofia bring to Celie with their special brands of savvy and sass. This Celie needed to travel a longer road, in my eyes, to straighten up her hunched shoulders and stand up for herself.
Twenty years after I saw The Color Purple on Broadway, it’s nice to see Mitchell leaning harder into the story’s demeaning subjugation. But it’s harder for me to be sure whether Mitchell is seeing Celie’s sexual awakening as more overtly lesbian than ever before, or if I am.
The rousing “Miss Celie’s Pants” certainly hadn’t landed on me in nearly the same way as it did on Queens Road. Sung by Gary with her mentor Shug, Sofia, and a bevy of other women, you can take this eye-popping number partly as a gay pride celebration or as a proto-Hillary rally.
K. Alana Jones as Shug sports a free-thinking saloon singer’s confidence, seemingly at home with anybody’s body of her choosing. In that respect, Shug’s bisexuality aligned more closely with Walker’s. Shug always got the kind of delayed runway entrance traditionally reserved for Broadway legends, so costume designer Justin Hall, with assistant Beth Killion, needed to be sure that Shug’s rigs radiated class.
With all the fine tunes crafted by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis, and Stephen Bray, the book by Marsha Norman doesn’t get enough space to make the connection between Shug’s fashion sense and Celie’s eventual emergence as a dressmaker. At Theatre Charlotte, we can infer that Shug is Celie’s dressmaking muse.
Once Jones does enter as the blues singer, she scores well in the uplifting “Too Beautiful for Words” and the raunchy “Push Da Button.” One can only smile at the thought of high schoolers rehearsing that latter gem.
As Sofia, Germôna Sharp gives Celie – and any other wallflower in town – a more militant brand of inspiration with her “Hell No!” [my italics]. Fortunately, I had somehow forgotten the battered Sofia’s marvelous dinner-table reawakening, so I could take fresh delight in Sharp’s hallelujah suddenness. Not long afterwards, Sharp gets to team up with Nehemiah Lawson as Harpo, her genially clueless husband, in their raunchy “Any Little Thing” reconciliation.
After his bravura psycho dentist in Little Shop of Horrors, it was nice to see Lawson less crazy and cocksure. Harps is more befuddled and human, actually evolving with the times. Watching this character arc, from “Brown Betty” to “Any Little Thing,” amid more toxic excesses of testosterone was a nice reassurance that not all men are monsters. Or at least, beyond redemption.
You could say Harpo’s leavening presence gives Arnold Grevious as Pa and
as Mister more license to be as monstrous as possible. Yes, there are moments at the beginning of Purple when Walker seems to be taunting us: “You think white patriarchy and misogyny are bad? Come over to my place!”
Neither Grevious nor Williams gives any hint of mellowing toward Celie for a long time. Meanwhile, Mister needs to be appealing to Shug in some way that might surface in his bossy “Big Dog” showcase with his field hands. More to the point, he ought to appreciate Shug’s strength as well as her beauty and talent, so Williams can give promise of evolving as he lays out Walker’s red carpet for her diva in “Shug Avery Comin’ to Town.”
Williams also gets the luxury of penitence, beginning with “Celie’s Curse.” No such epiphanies happen for Pa: we just watch Grevious becoming older and feebler. So don’t give that old rattlesnake a single vocal and see if I care!
No, Tim Parati’s scenic design for Purple, the first we’ve had in Charlotte that was totally missing its Broadway lineage, won’t floor anyone, though J.P. Woodey’s lighting helps us not to mind. But Keston Gary is far from the only onstage luminary capable of knocking you onto your butt.
Apart from Chicago and New York, I’ve been maintaining for years that Charlotte has the vastest store of Black theatre talent around. Purple at the Barn proves me right once again. Call yourself fortunate if there are still seats available.
Midway into its sixth decade, Title IX seems to be limping a little, not as top-of-mind as it once was. Among the half million emails still undeleted from my various accounts over the past decade, including those religiously saved from more than a dozen news sources, 145 mentioned the landmark legislation, and just six so far this year.
So when Anna Ziegler’s Actually was first staged in 2017, looking back on a sexual harassment complaint lodged by one Princeton freshman against another in 2015 or 2016, neither of her protagonists, Amber Cohen or Thomas Anthony, could have known much about Title IX that would apply to them. Nor would they have been schooled on implicit consent or what a preponderance of evidence might mean.
Both were born after the legislation went into effect in 1972, outlawing sexual discrimination at federally funded academic institutions, and even after playwright David Mamet probed the consequences and shortcomings of Title IX in his Oleanna twenty years later. That was a combustible two-hander pitting a male professor against his female student. Here, both students are niche admissions at the Ivy League school. We have a young Jewish woman, sufficiently adept at squash to make the University team, filing an action against a Black student who aced his SAT’s and shows considerable prowess at the piano.
This Metrolina premiere, directed by Amy Wada, opened at Armour Street Theatre this past Sunday evening – rather unusual scheduling – just a few hours after The Lifespan of a Fact, Davidson Community Players’ previous production, completed its run. So there was already a rule-breaking ambiance hovering onstage as the lights went up on the two drunken frosh.
Both are blending into Princeton life via alcohol. Pre-date, we later hear, Tom had already knocked down five drinks. By the time we hear this, we’ve learned that reveling at keggers with free beer has been a nightly ritual for Amber, who is also toting a flask of tequila on that fateful first date, both gifted to her by her glamorous mentor, Heather.
Since this is another two-hander, you can rightly presume that Ziegler doesn’t mess with the formality and architecture of Tom’s hearing, adjudicated by three faculty deciding in whose favor the preponderance of evidence – “50% plus a feather” – weighs. Nor do we meet Heather, the rich kid who, in Amber’s telling, comes off like a reprise of the toxic queens of Mean Girls. Or, obviously, Heathers.
Ziegler begins – and ends – with the key moment when Amber may or may not be issuing her implied consent. But she not only dissects the drunken date from first kiss to the condom hitting the floor in Tom’s dorm room (with his roommate in the upper bunk!), she also carefully traces, in confidential monologues, the sexual histories of both players in this disputed escapade.
On Amber’s side (Wada keeps her leads on opposite sides of the stage for most of the action), we learn of a sexual encounter, similarly fueled by drink, after a second Passover seder earlier in the year. We also hear about her insecurities about her body and her tendency to yield to others when she is ambivalent or seeking approval – most crucially when she adopts Heather’s view on whether she was raped.
We get to understand that the attentions of an already notorious campus playboy are more of what Amber truly needs while she’s still unsure, within a more sober self that’s AWOL on a beer-tequila binge, about what she truly wants. At the same time, even more endearing to us, Amber is instinctively aware that something is troubling Tom and wishes to cheer him up.
Tom has been in therapy during his high school days as a result of responding, naturally enough, to the come-ons of his piano teacher sitting beside him on the music room piano bench. Sounds a little trivial compared with Amber’s impulsiveness and insecurity, on view all evening. The guy reveres Mozart and Bartok, for heaven’s sake!
But then Ziegler abruptly swings the scales toward equilibrium. We learn what was troubling Tom before meeting Amber on their date – and his capacities for rage and violence.
Quite worthy of being labelled “foxy,” Luna Mackie isn’t exactly what Ziegler envisioned as Amber, whose self-image as “pretty enough” seems to have stuck since the moment her mom said it. Mackie compensates with her posturing, mostly slouched forward wallflower-style, but occasionally, she goes with oddly arching backwards, as if she’s forgotten to exhale after taking a deep breath.
With admirable ease, Mackie delivers blushing smile after blushing smile, often scrunching her shoulders. It’s only when she straightens up past vertical that we might see those shoulders as belonging to an athlete, one who wields a squash racquet – or if you saw her in She Kills Monsters, a sword. More challenging, Mackie conquers Amber’s neurotic motormouth trait.
But perhaps too decisively. Many are the times when, for me, intelligibility was sacrificed on the altar of speed. Yet living up to Ziegler’s capsule description of her as “charmingly neurotic” is never a prob.
Dionte Darko, on the other hand, tips the unbalanced gulf between Amber’s attractiveness and Tom’s toward equity. He’s also not the quintessence of slickness or arrogance in his demeanor. When he tells us how dearly he loves his mom or how he broke down and cried in the dean’s office, it’s easy to believe every word.
That subtle nonchalance seems to be Wada’s style. For the contrasts in her characters’ looks have been as smoothed out as the differences in their behavior when drunkenly dating or soberly addressing us, or the invisible faculty judging their actions and possible punishment.
Ultimately, this did not seem like laxity on Wada’s part or her actors’. We needed to exercise our imaginations a bit to see this young Don Juan and this charming weirdo in their drunken states as much as we strained to see any big difference in how attractive they were. Once we get past the misalignments of what we see and what we hear, we find ourselves listening more objectively to Tom and Amber’s confessional monologues as testimonies: as evidence we’re weighing and judging.
Yes, saying “actually…” is not the same as saying no. Nor is tacit consent given at 8 pm at a kegger party a contract that is still binding in real life in a dorm bedroom at midnight after a couple has made out all over the Princeton campus.
The more Ziegler piles on complexities, the more we realize that the 37 words that birthed Title IX are ill-equipped to deal with them. That appears more important to the playwright than officially arriving at a verdict up in a New Jersey faculty lounge or library.
Title IX is mostly famed for leveling the playing field in women’s collegiate sports with existing men’s programs, increasing women’s participation tenfold during its first 40 years. At the same time, it stratified procedures for dealing with nuanced interactions between faculty and students, and between male and female students, erecting quasi-judicial architectures and machinery from coast-to-coast, usually manned by people without a jot of legal training.
Guilt could be determined by a feather! As Ziegler points out, the “preponderance of evidence” standard held firm during the time period she addresses – and afterwards until the end of the Obama Administration. It was only in 2017 that the next administration allowed schools to alter their standards to align more closely with civil and criminal courts.
April 24, 2026, Charlotte, NC – An evening of music by George Gershwin or Leonard Bernstein can be many things: pop, opera, orchestral, cinema, or a good old Broadway musical. Gershwin wrote a staggering 18 musicals, though he only lived 38 years, twice as many as Bernstein, and most of them are forgotten. Programming these giants at Charlotte Symphony, with musical director Kwamé Ryan at the podium, certainly narrows the options, especially for Gershwin, since Ryan usually confines himself to Symphony’s Classics series and special events. Bernstein is credited with more than twice as many orchestral works as Gershwin, and among his choral works, a genre Gershwin never touched, are numerous sacred options for Ryan and the Charlotte Master Chorale to choose from.
The unifying theme Ryan chose at Belk Theater for his Gershwin-Bernstein pairing was star-crossed lovers, allowing Symphony to dig into the composers’ most-acclaimed works, Porgy and Bess and West Side Story, respectively, at a deeper level than a greatest-hits medley. But first, Symphony set the theme in a most intriguing manner, with a Fantasia for Orchestra, Romeo and Juliet, by Johan Severin Svendsen (1840-1911), a Norwegian composer I’d never heard of. Editions of NPR’s and Gramophone Magazine’s guides to classical music on my shelves omit him, while three others – Oxford, Penguin, the DK Eyewitness, and my ancient International Cyclopedia of Music and Musicians – all give him a paragraph.
Finding this piece would have been a waste if Ryan and his ensemble hadn’t given it such punctilious rehearsal. The prep to me was as impressive as the performance. Not only were there sudden or gradual shifts in dynamics as the piece flowed between lyrical and turbulent episodes, but there were numerous gradual shifts within the turbulent episodes where both the string and woodwind sections remained tightly in sync. There were at least four quiet sections, which didn’t seem to be sketching a narrative concept.
Was the end of the dreamy, opaque first episode, a gentle series of pizzicatos, an evocation of the famed balcony scene? As the slow-fast shuttling continued, with turbulent episodes marked by a sudden braking with a brief French horn lament, a repeated whimpering of strings, and finally a weary bleat of pizzicatos from the double basses, it was possible to entertain the idea that Svendsen was offering a dialogue between his protagonists, or back-and-forth character sketches.
The mournful edge to the concluding section swayed me back toward hearing Svendsen’s intentions as narrative, but we would need to hear the whole piece again to appreciate how well the last turbulent section had evoked the climactic double suicide of the newlyweds. By comparison, the Porgy and Bess: A Symphonic Picture, arranged by Robert Russell Bennett, is easily perceived as an extended overture in medley form. Depending on how well you know the opera, you will likely be able to identify the next song as it clears the distant horizon. These include “Summertime,” “I Got Plenty o’ Nothin’,” “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” “Oh Lord, I’m on My Way,” “There’s a Boat That’s Leaving Soon for New York,” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”
For those already familiar with Gershwin’s own P&B suite, Catfish Row, you may be doubly reassured. It was unquestionably Bennet’s starting point, recycling the percussive opening and preserving a winsome banjo interlude. The piano cadenza, likely reserved for the composer’s hands, is gone, but Bennett is more conscientious in including audience faves, though “I Loves You Porgy,” “A Woman Is a Sometime Thing,” “It Takes a Long Pull to Get There,” “A Red-Headed Woman,” and “My Man’s Gone Now” are still MIA.
Like many others in the house, I presumed that the Porgy and Bess would be the evening’s highlight, since so many jazz greats have covered both the entire opera and the golden songs embedded within. But even though Bernstein put even fewer of his hits in his Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, it seemed that Ryan and the Symphony, no doubt buoyed by the phalanx of six percussionists across the upstage wall, played the Spanish Harlem classic with even more zest than the music rooted in the Carolinas.
Of course, with the opportunities for finger snaps, the whole orchestra could join in on the percussion orgy, and in the Suite’s fourth movement, “Mambo,” they got to shout out the title on multiple occasions. The ration of signature melodies was severely restricted, leaving “America,” “Tonight,” “I Feel Pretty,” “Something’s Coming,” and “A Boy Like That” off the menu. “Somewhere,” a little ballet to begin with, and the finger-popping “Cool,” promoted here to a Fugue, got fuller treatments to make up for the omissions. And the glorious “Maria”! We got to hear a full rhapsodic version and the deliciously delicate Cha-Cha version. With softer finger snaps.
Then the surprise from our maestro, who had every right to be fatigued after busting out so many moves leading the Bernstein. Reasoning that a funeral isn’t a good way to send us home, even at the tail end of an evening devoted to tragic lovers, Ryan announced a more festive Jamaican encore. Eleanor Alberga’s “Celebration Dance” from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was a danceable dessert.
Pressure and deadlines are good for creatives. Or as Duke Ellington famously put it, “Necessity is the mother.” What David Adjmi’s Stereophonic explores – at excruciating length – are the consequences of no time pressure at all. Adjmi’s band, not named and not quite historical, closely tracks with Fleetwood Mac in the 1970s as they returned to their studio to cut what would become their megahit Rumours.
With music by Will Butler worthy of a supergroup, Stereophonic was a megahit in its own right, scoring a record number of Tony Award nominations and winning the top prize. For the ensuing national tour, now at Knight Theater for a rare second week, Adjmi and director Daniel Auken have cut into the show’s notorious four-act, four-hour bulk, so that the tourismo model arrives at a trim, but still overweight, 2:45 running time.
The group’s first album climbs to the top of the charts as they go deeper into hibernation, rehearsing, refining, composing, and crafting their more and more eagerly awaited sequel as expectations climb. But producer and lead singer Peter has no deadline to answer to, no set limit on whether the new release will be a single or double album, so new songs can be added on the fly while others, recorded earlier, can be shelved.
For the 1970’s, that was fairly outré. Such highly produced CTI jazz albums as Milt Jackson’s Sunflower, Airto’s Fingers, Ron Carter’s All Blues, and Hubert Laws’ In the Beginning (a double album), all recorded at the famed Van Gelder Studio, were produced in four days or less. Not enough time for an epic Fleetwood Mac soap opera, though no less music was released.
In line with the Sonny & Cher/Ike and Tina Turner/Lindsey Buckingham-Stevie Nicks template, lead singer – and Peter’s life partner – Diana is about to emerge as an industry supernova. That seems to fluster the not-so-subtly controlling Peter, a taskmaster and a perfectionist. Nor is perfectionism confined to the glamor couple. Band manager Simon can obsess for days over a phantom rattle in his drum kit after buck engineer Grover first detects it. And days more after Grover stops hearing it.
We can see that the claustrophobia of a group recording gig that goes on for over a year can wear on Diana and Peter’s already patched-up relationship. Naturally enough, Simon’s ongoing separation from his family pitches him gradually toward depression and moodiness. Less overtly, we can watch Grover’s growing confidence at the control board and his burgeoning influence over the band.
So yes, songs and takes can grow in polish and cohesion while they wane in energy and spontaneity. Compound that natural entropy with a souring romantic chemistry between two lead singers.
That’s when Grover’s new influence is crucial to the process. After numerous rehearsals and fine-tunings, the engineer at the control board notices that energy, spontaneity, and tempo have all sagged on one of the best tunes. Now Grover, previously a hanger-on who has falsified his resume to land this prestigious gig, grabs the driver’s seat and keeps prodding the band, through retake after retake, towards more authentic fire.
Animosity can be an obstacle or a creative trigger at this point.
By default, another lead singer composer, ace keyboardist Holly, becomes the most stable band member when Simon and his British cool unravel. Her emergence becomes all the more marked as she deals with her husband Reg’s increasing alcoholism, a drag to the whole band since he’s the bassist.
Holly’s relative stability enables Emilie Kouatchou to seize the dubious distinction of being the most consistently under-projecting actor on the Knight stage. Intimate conversations between the women, warmly spotlit by lighting designer Jiyoun Chang, were particularly difficult for me to decipher.
That sets up a bit of a paradox, for the control room/lounge area of the studio is closest to the audience, while the glassed-in recording studio is elevated a third of a flight up behind it. And of course, this actor band is really playing, simulating the 1976-1977 studio conditions, so the music is presumed to be recorded on real 3M reel tape, with multiple tracks mixed down to piddly two-track stereophonic.
Obviously, sound reaching us from that the more distant, highly-controlled electronic environment is cleaner – and more immediate – than the more mundane sound that’s closer to us downstage. You get the feel, since musicians gather there far less frequently than for their more casual, personal, technical, and candid conversations below, that dazzlingly brighter, hazier studio space is a loftier place in every way.
Foremost, because we sense that history is unfolding there.
Leaving the studio for a private argument offstage, Peter and Diana inadvertently demo the improved audibility of the hallowed ground when they leave their mikes on. Not only can Grover and fellow sound engineer Charlie hang on the power couple’s every word, so can we, adding a patina of hilarity to the backstage drama.
Drug use might be considered another bugbear threatening the group’s enterprise, but nobody in the band seems to be worried about the pigs busting in on a raid, despite the readily visible gallon-sized bag of cocaine. The dust makes it inside the studio, where Diana and her bandmates take a snort or three to perk themselves up, but no joints are lit up there. These are professionals.
We wait long enough for this supergroup-in-the-making to begin recording extensively in the studio to be starving for the serious rock we’ll hear – and that enhances the already rich gratification when we finally do. This is one very tight band, both vocally and instrumentally. A slight overlay of suspense when the women began their vocals. With both Kouatchou as Holly and Claire DeJean as Diane facing their respective studio mics in profile, I couldn’t detect whose solo led the take off.
I was more comfortable with the other key undetectables, knowing that virtually all other audience members were equally clueless: about cuts to the script and the playlist that happened in transit from Broadway to the road, and maybe along the road to Charlotte. Neither of the two scripts was available from Blumenthal Arts, so I couldn’t begin to weigh how much Adjmi and Butler’s “Radio Edit” strengthened or weakened the Broadway version that won five of the possible 10 Tony Awards it was up for.
No less than five members of that were nominated for the two Featured Actor laurels, so the record total of nominations was 13.
Sometimes, more is more. At no time would I agree with the NY Times assessment that Stereophonic is “a fiery family drama, as electrifying as any since Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Ironic for a drama that dramatizes the pitfalls of an open-ended incubation process, Stereophonic may feel longer because, with so many microaggressions redlined, the “Radio Edit” may never have had the potential of rising to the heights – or rage – of Edward Albee’s masterwork. Or Tracey Letts’ more recent August: Osage County.
Other than their sonic dropouts, a serious matter for me, I couldn’t find any fault with the “Travelin’ Light” cast. They played and sang flawlessly, even on the outtakes. Maybe a blinking metronome, hidden from us, guides those oh-so-gradual increases in tempo. Only the enthusiasm level notches up noticeably when they find the true groove.
As Diana’s confidence, independence, and star power grew, it became more and more difficult to take my eyes off DeJean’s performance. Intermittently, thanks to costume designer Enver Chakartash’s alternating flair and reserve, Diana goes from fretting over the onset of her fame to wearing it. In the studio, there’s a parallel transformation (it may have been more correctly called an evolution in the longer version).
She seemed comparatively glued to the microphone during the first extended studio take. By Act 3 (after the only intermission), Diana roams the studio like the rock diva she has become, deigning to approach the microphone only when she sings. Ascending to rock royalty, she no longer asks Peter what she can do with her hands, no longer pleads with him to pick up a tambourine.
She just does it. From demure to diva, DeJean alluringly navigates all the curves and all the romantic bumps on the road to superstardom as the artistic flame within her burns more and more brightly and defiantly.
To be clear, Peter isn’t nearly as toxic as Ike Turner was in The Tina Turner Musical, so Denver Milord gets to play a far more nuanced role here. Yes, he is more than a little peacock-ish, but from the early moments, if you take notice of his reactions toward the debut album’s continued ascent on the pop charts, he is ambivalent about the band’s success.
This is partly to his credit, though we have more reason to detest Peter’s jealousy. Like Ike, we have to acknowledge that he’s a shrewd judge of talent who fiercely follows his instincts. So that male ambivalence that Milord plays, distasteful as it might be, also stems from his inability to even imagine resorting to Ike-like violence to keep Diana with him.
Ultimately, he sings like a god, she reigns like a goddess, and they produce a masterwork together. We are right to cut Peter some slack, particularly when Milord reveals his ability to earnestly apologize.
Extra kudos go to Milord and Kouatchou, both of whom understudied their touring roles on Broadway. It had to be brain-busting to unlearn so much of the original version while learning the new script and song arrangements.
Otherwise, it’s Christopher Mowod as Reg who garners the most attention, half amusing and half annoying. His pre- and post-alcoholic manifestations were remarkably balanced in drawing my delight and disdain, yet radically different. Even the concept of his character arc had a clever mirror-like reversal.
When he was most boisterous and boozy in the control room, Reg was literally self-effacing in the studio, devoutly facing away from his bandmates and the audience. Flip to the serene Reg 2, with a simplified wardrobe from Chakartash, he’s almost Maharishi-like outside the studio, but much more of a gregarious animal when he straps on his axe.
That’s another advantage of recording a new album within the time pressure of a single week: the same people play on all of it.
April 8, 2026, Charlotte, NC – Wynton Marsalis has more than a couple of things in common with me. But two stand out. We both spent an ill-fated October evening in his dressing room at Belk Theater watching the 2001 Derek Jeter-Andy Pettitte-Jorge Posada-Roger Clemens-Mariano Rivera New York Yankees inexplicably lose the World Series to a team of Arizona snakes. More pleasurably, we both adore the quirky music of Thelonious Monk.
Our cult includes musicians and critics of all stripes. The 1984 tribute album, That’s the Way I Feel, issued two years after the pianist/composer’s death, not only featured usual jazz suspects such as saxophonists Charlie Rouse and Johnny Griffin, but also rockers and blues greats including Todd Rundgren, Donald Fagen, Peter Frampton, Dr. John, Was (Not Was), and NRBQ.
So when I saw Middle C Jazz’s listing of “Tim Scott Presents Thelonious Monk at the Village Vanguard,” it went straight to my April wish list, partly out of love and partly out of curiosity. I’d heard of Tom Scott, the jazz saxophonist who crossed over to Joni Mitchell and came back to the luxury Jazz Cruises, but Tim did not ring a bell. Nor did the Blackhawk Quintet, though I have more than a couple of CDs recorded in live performance at San Francisco’s famed Blackhawk jazz club – including groups led by Monk and Miles Davis. My suspicion, notwithstanding the Village Vanguard listing, was that the quintet had been named after the San Fran club, and my curiosity, sharpened by the reliable imprimatur of a booking at Middle C, centered on how these upstarts would handle Monk’s music.
Very respectfully, as it turned out. Although the Vanguard was never referenced during the Quintet’s 6 o’clock set, both the West Coast club and Monk’s At the Blackhawk album drew frequent nods. In fact, the first two titles that the latter-day Blackhawks played, “Let’s Call This” and then “Four in One,” were the same as those that launched the 1960 recording. Combined, they provided fine showcases for all the band members, especially the frontliners: tenor saxophonist Elijah Freeman, trumpeter Ariel Mejia, and pianist Phillip Howe.
Appropriately enough, Howe played the intros on both of these pieces, not striving too much to emulate Monk’s signature style – he recalled asking at rehearsals, “How Monk do you want me to be?” – before the full ensemble reprised the themes. Mejia plunged into the release for his opening solo piercingly, sustaining his thrust with a rich tone before Freeman came powering in with his solo, his tenor tone sometimes a bit boozy like Rouse’s, at others defiant and declamatory like Monk’s most famous bandmate, fellow North Carolinian John Coltrane.
Howe’s creativity and touch were stellar when he weighed in with his solo, calming things down between expostulations, at times coaxing the Middle C’s Yamaha into sounding like an electric keyboard. Yet there was space left for bassist Burns to show his mettle in a comparatively cameo role. Imagine if Symphony musicians were allowed to play on such bright, grainy, and colorful instruments!
As brilliant as before, Howe was more Monkish on the more familiar “Four in One,” second only to “Blue Monk” among my personal favorites, only holding back a little on punctuating the spiraling tune with Thelonious’s deliciously dissonant chords. Somehow, Howe managed to make the melody even weirder than normal, making up for his block chord omissions.
The melody’s spiraling sound invites more virtuosity, so Freeman’s work veered away more from Rouse toward Coltrane’s more swashbuckling approach, and Mejia followed with a solo that had emphatic flashes of Dizzy Gillespie splash and charisma, conjuring up one of Monk’s bebop mentors. Completing the arrangement with even more flair, drummer Tim Scott checked in thunderously, trading eight-bar solos with Mejia and Howe before Freeman fronted the outchorus.
Among the remaining five tunes in the Quintet’s set, two more were from Monk’s Blackhawk album, the beloved “’Round Midnight” and the inimitable pianist’s hypnotic theme song, “Epistrophy.” Not surprisingly, since the most famous arrangements of the tune are by trumpeters Gillespie and Davis, “’Round Midnight” became a showcase for Mejia, with Freeman sitting out and Howe limiting himself to a respectful half-chorus intro. Without referencing either of the trumpet immortals who have imprinted the piece, Mejia’s entrance at the bridge and his ensuing solo were impactful and lyrical.
Yet it’s necessary to mention that the Quintet’s most overt nod to a trumpeter was to my fellow Yankee fan, Marsalis: “Green Chimneys” from Wynton’s Live at the House of Tribes album from 2023, a mere 13 albums ago. Mejia led off with the melody and the first solo, and Freeman, Howe, and Burns all followed with their best playing so far, but perhaps the arrangement upstaged the playing. The first half of Mejia’s solo was unusually hushed until Scott, at the drumkit, pounced on the beginning of a new chorus while the trumpeter ignited to a higher intensity, a pattern that repeated in subsequent solos.
After sitting out “’Round Midnight,” Freeman took off his knitted cap and bestowed it on Howe so that he could more fully get into character and emulate Monk’s most famous eccentricities in the band’s “Epistrophy” tribute. Back in my college days, I could hardly believe that Monk stood up and away from the keyboard during performances and danced to the music while his bandmates soloed. Then he came to Queens College to play with his quartet and proved those reports to be true.
Howe also leaned over his piano bench, still standing, and began to play, a Monk shtick I had never witnessed live. Of course, Howe’s musical style here followed suit, and Freeman, perhaps aware that Monk danced most when Rouse was his chief sideman, veered toward that tenor – with a couple of glints of Griffin – and away from Coltrane.
Naturally, the last Monk piece, “Blue Monk,” was the most blissful for me. Howe’s approach, disdaining his prior Monk emulations, also pleased me greatly with hints of Bud Powell and Oscar Peterson. The set concluded with a tune from the band’s 2025 Englewood album, “Stretch,” with a nice intro from Scott. Freeman lavished his mellowest playing here before shifting into a full Coltrane rant.
When Blackhawk Quintet releases their next album, my radar will try to pick up on it. The group will be cutting it at the historic Rudy Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. Freeman seemed quite proud of that, and rightly so.
With over 3,300 No Kings protests popping up across the USA and on three other continents last weekend, you can go ahead and call BNS Productions’ local premiere of August Wilson’s King Hedley II an example of serendipitous or awkward timing. But you couldn’t deny that Wilson’s tragedy, the first BNS piece to be staged at the Arts Factory, was timely.
While a record eight million US citizens took to the streets, many reclaiming turf that was only recently terrorized by ICE G-Men chasing down an imaginary alien threat, basic living conditions of the 1980s, shown vividly by Wilson in all their wildness and squalor, still plague our inner cities. Religion, magic, and honest hard work offer no surer cure than guns, crime, and hopelessness.
Wilson’s clear vision and wisdom targeted the Hill District of Pittsburgh, illuminating each of the decades in the 20th century from a distinctively African-American perspective, forming an incomparably epic ten-play Century Cycle. In some ways, The Century (or Pittsburgh) Cycle is also incomparably complex. Some characters appear in multiple decades, while others mentioned in one of the dramas appear onstage in another.
In achieving his Cycle, to further complicate matters, Wilson did not move through the decades of his Century chronologically. Amid this seeming haphazardness, King Hedley II, commemorating the 1980s when it opened in 1999, anchors the most cohesive trio of plays in the whole series.
King’s father appears in Seven Guitars,the 1995 play that Wilson wrote immediately before Hedley II, along with Ruby and Elmore – but we see them four decades earlier in the 1940s, when King Jr is in embryo. Prominently mentioned in Hedley II, Aunt Ester will finally be seen, some 81 years younger, in Gem of the Ocean, the first play in the overall Cycle, premiering unforgettably on Broadway in 2003, starring Phylicia Rashad, depicting the 1900s decade.
If, as Wilson has said, Aunt Ester is a folk priestess who symbolizes the weighty history of African American tragedy and triumph, then her death at age 366 during Hedley II marks an unmistakable low point in the Cycle. The tempest of contention that breaks out at her home in Radio Golf, both the final play in the Pittsburgh Cycle (depicting the 1990s) and Wilson’s final work, can be viewed as piling insult onto injury or as a kind rebirth.
Like Hedley I, King would take it badly if anyone didn’t call him by his regal name. In fact, when we first see him, he is returning home from a seven-year stretch in prison for killing a man named Pernell, who not only slashed King’s face, leaving a permanent scar, but also insisted on calling him Champ. Hedley Sr. also committed murder for the same reason, so if you caught the Charlotte premiere of Seven Guitars in 2015, you would assume, like father, like son, that Hedley II has no regrets.
Not yet.
There’s another side to King that promises a fresh start, for he states concrete ambitions of opening a video store, a venture that cannot fail, and begins planting a garden in his front yard. Both Tonya and Ruby, the wife and mother who have held down this rundown fortress for seven years, are skeptical: they can’t believe King can follow a straight path to success. As sure as that bad dirt in their front yard won’t grow anything, King is bound to take the crooked way and land back in jail.
Hearkening back to Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, Wilson sets up a similar situation in the ‘80s to the one the Younger family encountered in the ‘50s. Only Wilson’s is a far bleaker view. Walter Younger held down a job, started a family, and his little sister had middle-class dreams and prospects.
King is more primal and dangerous than Walter, no less easily swayed and played. You’d better not stomp on those seeds King planted, though he sees the common sense of fencing off his little plot to prevent accidental incursions. Barbed wire, a bit aggressive, is his choice for fencing.
We can hope that the GE refrigerators that King and his best friend, Mister, are selling around town came from a legitimate source, but Tonya knows her man better than we do and presumes they’re stolen. An additional reason to trust Tonya’s misgivings comes when Mister proposes a heist at a jewelry store that he has cased.
Meanwhile, smooth-talking gambler Elmore is back in town with an eye toward reclaiming Ruby, getting married, and settling down. Proof of his wiliness comes after he talks King into letting him in on the GE scheme. Smooth operator, but he’s playing with fire. Even Mister knows better than to shoot dice with Elmore until he can bring a crooked set to the game.
Toi Aquila R.J., who also portrays Tonya, has a secure grasp of the costume designs that give each of the major characters his or her own distinctive style. There is black menace for King, a Sporting Life hipness for Elmore, and a diva flair for Ruby, the former big band vocalist. These core four are the strongest performers in director Rory Sheriff’s shrewdly chosen cast.
Much of the power that Jonathan Caldwell generates as King comes from those moments when he is open to reason, yet still seething somehow in these calmer moments. Explosions seem impending and inevitable. Tim Bradley as Elmore, on the other hand, sports a weaponized smile that conquers the ladies and confounds the men. As Ruby, Myneesha King gets to impress by belting a few bars, yet there’s no less sass in how her Ruby sees through both her son’s and her lover’s lies while succumbing to them.
For all that he packs into each of his plays, Wilson is anything but concise. Aquila’s anger as Tonya is as towering as her husband’s, and her monologue arguably encapsulates the passions and grievances that the playwright expresses most powerfully.
Yet there are ancient Greek elements artfully woven into Wilson’s script. Not knowing who you or your parents really are goes all the way back to Sophocles, most famously in Oedipus Rex, but the more overt thread in Hedley, the true prophet cursed with never being believed, goes back to Aeschylus and his pitiful Cassandra. Here in Pittsburgh this time, it’s Stool Pigeon, with Tone X laying heaps of Scripture on us all – and Wilson’s most delicious line:
“God’s a bad motherfucker.”
Now there’s some Greek attitude! Rounding out the cast is Andrew Monroe as Mister, appropriately the most inexperienced actor playing the most ordinary character. Not only does Mister bring King’s plight down to earth and help universalize it, but he also fails to move King with his pleadings – and to match his uncontrollable machismo when the heist goes down.
Deadly conflict between King and Elmore seems as foreordained as a dark storm first viewed on the far horizon. The best and zestiest view is at the Arts Factory through this weekend.
Art on My Sleeve 