“Blues in My Soul: The Legend and Legacy of Lonnie Johnson,” at Trenton’s Passage Theatre through Sunday, has a secret weapon.
David Robson’s script is pleasant but standard, more into exposition and explanation than anything that grabs or fascinates. Its story keeps you interested, especially when it goes into music history and the experiences the title character undergoes while forging a career as a blues singer and guitarist in the nascent days of jazz. David Ross (Lonnie) and Jonathan Jacobs (Chris) give solid performances that make you sympathetic to each of their sometimes at-odds characters. Ozzie Jones’ production goes along steadily and swimmingly with few grand high points and no dull lows. The show leaves nothing to complain about and nothing to love.
Until, and this a big “until,” Ross and Jacobs, remaining in character, brandish guitars and give examples of what made Lonnie Johnson great enough to be the subject of a play and, more, a blues pioneer who should be remembered.
The music changes everything. It brightens the atmosphere of the Mill Hill Playhouse, where Passage performs. It snaps Robson’s piece to immediate and compelling life. It provides something wonderful to hear and take in. Suddenly, amiable satisfaction turns into rapt attention and a desire for more.
During his welcome to the audience, Passage managing director, Brishen Miller, says “Blues in My Soul” is a mostly a concert we should sit back and enjoy.
He is right in part. A quarter of the show’s 85 minutes has Ross doing some stylish picking, fingering, sliding, and chord gymnastics as he demonstrates the invention and artistry of the man credited for bringing the guitar to the fore as a lead instrument. Half of the time Ross is joined by the equally gifted Jacobs.
When these guys are in concert, there’s nothing you can do but enjoy. (It’s the sitting back part that might be impossible. Johnson’s rhythms, as played by Ross and Jacobs, carry you with them and cause heads to bob, toes to tap, and a strong connection to the grand sounds coming from the stage.)
The music leavens a straightforward piece that strives to inform and educate in addition to entertaining. As said, nothing about the non-musical passages is objectionable. It’s interesting to hear about Johnson’s life and his contribution to music. Robson’s script presents in a way that smacks of “matter of fact” or “did you know?” rather than anything that gets dramatically deep. The dialogue is more like a plot device to move along the tale of Johnson’s achievements and Chris’s ideas for how he might create new ones than anything that moves you or engrosses.
Even when Lonnie speaks of how he was cheated by slick promoters who stole rights to his work and left him with no royalties or remuneration, how those promoters would give his tunes to white performers who would make hits of them — Elvis Presley covered his 1947 composition, “Tomorrow Night,” for Sun Records — or how African-American performers were forbidden to work with their white counterparts, the plays makes you think, “Uh-huh, that’s terrible,” rather than stirring passion or indignation.
What Jones, Ross, and Jacobs provide is fine. Throughout the production, I was happy to learn more about Lonnie Johnson and enjoyed the glimpse back into the early days of the blues, a time which that it is daunting to realize goes back more than 100 years. “Blues in My Soul” is never boring and holds concentration throughout. It graduates from being pleasant to being exciting when the guitars come out, and Johnson’s music becomes the focus.
Robson sets his play in Philadelphia, where at age 60 in 1959, Johnson is essentially finished with show business and working as a janitor for the Benjamin Franklin Hotel. His custodial routine is interrupted by Chris’s appearance in the fourth floor storage room where Johnson preps the mops, buckets, paint, cleaning fluids, and other material he needs for his daily assignments.
Chris is a deejay at a local radio station, WHAT, which in 1959 was a top outlet for hearing new releases and some classics from African-American performers ranging from Dinah Washington to James Brown or The Coasters.
Chris is also a jazz historian. Perhaps he can more accurately be called an aficionado. He knows Lonnie Johnson’s music, how Johnson revolutionized aspects of blues performance, how Johnson knew all of the great artists of his time such as Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith, and how difficult it is to obtain some of Johnson’s older but out-of-print recordings.
Chris risks his job at WHAT by playing forgotten pieces, including Johnson’s, in lieu of the contemporary disks favored by his station’s programmers. One day he plays some works by Johnson and is informed about his position at the Ben Franklin. Chris is particularly intrigued, and convinced he’s found Johnson, when his informant mentions the black gloves Johnson wears to protect his guitar-playing hands. He makes it a mission to persuade the contented janitor to make himself known and perform again.
Robson’s play chronicles the give and take of that persuasion while making plain Johnson’s contributions to the blues.
The music Ross and Jacobs play is convincing enough. The lyrics to Johnson’s songs are not all that remarkable, but the guitar arrangements are sensational, a reward in themselves. Hearing them is enough for me to make some time to listen to Johnson’s work, and him playing it, or YouTube or other internet outlets.
David Ross, whose biography lists him as David Brandon Ross, in a consummate musician with degrees from prestigious schools (in addition to being an actor and having an engineering degree). His renditions of Johnson’s tunes are clean and lively. Ross can elicit joy or pain — we are talking about the blues — with the subtlest of musical expression.
His acting is also fine. You believe him when, as Johnson, he says he prefers to be a family man and earn a modest but steady living rather than returning to the world of music, a world that disappointed and disillusioned him as much as thrilling him.
Jonathan Jacobs is an unusual kind of triple threat. “Blues in My Soul” doesn’t call on Jacobs to dance, but he catches the urgency as Chris tries to convince Johnson to perform, plays an excellent guitar, and sings well.
Ross and Jacobs are a seamless ensemble. Their dialogue doesn’t always sound conversational, but their demeanors are natural and give the impression the 1959 meeting we’re witnessing is totally real and progresses as the actors portray it.
The hotel storeroom designed by Marie Laster accents that sense of reality with its rough shelves filled with tools, paint, and items a janitor would use. Tiffany Bacon’s costumes convey the Eisenhower era, especially the bowling shirt and porkpie hat Chris dons. I don’t see a credit for the projections Ozzie Jones uses to give a documentary touch to some of the times and places Johnson mentions, but they were quite good and added to the show.
Blues in My Soul, Passage Theatre, Mill Hill Playhouse, 205 East Front Street, Trenton. Through Sunday, October 30, Friday and Saturday, 7:30 p.m.; and Saturday and Sunday, 3 p.m. $30. 609-392-0766 or www.passagetheatre.org.
