`Tick, Tick…BOOM’

Corrections or additions?

These reviews by Simon Saltzman were prepared for the July 18,

2001 edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.

Broadway Review: `Blue’

Nona Hendryx’s R&B songs weave seductively and

evocatively

throughout Charles Randolph-Wright’s memory play, "Blue."

Although Wright’s play is not technically a musical, it is buoyed

by the composer’s lush melodic contributions (with some lyrics

contributed

by Wright). Hendryx, who began her career with the group Labelle

(culminating

with their No. 1 record, "Lady Marmalade"), provides songs

that frame the episodic play with honest and persuasive emotions that

are more superficially exercised in the text.

If the songs are terrific (and well sung by a very handsome Michael

McElroy, as a ghostly infiltrator), the play, about a prominent and

successful black family in South Carolina, is not hard to like given

its oddball one of a kind central character. Despite many good

performances

and a plot to keep you amused and attentive, it drives an uneasy path

between patent artificiality and bittersweet sentimentality. While

it is a clever conceit to have music play such an important role,

especially as it impacts on the plot, the song bridges also tend to

bring dramatic scenes to a halt.

To the author’s credit, the play mostly avoids the issues of race

and social alienation. Instead it centers on Wright’s own privileged,

dysfunctional (is there any other kind?) family, and most specifically

on his mother, a matriarch characterized as an unbridled spirit of

fabricated superiority. The factual York, South Carolina, setting

(the actual Wright Funeral Home is still a fixture there), however,

has been curiously changed to Kent. For whatever reasons the author

has for changing the town’s name, it is a moot point in the context

of the almost all true (according to the author himself) story he

is telling, with perhaps a little more contrivance and courage. The

play, in fact, often feels like a hybrid of sitcom comedy and

realistic

drama, neither outrageously funny enough for the one, nor compelling

enough for the other.

Phylicia Rashad plays Peggy Clark, the domineering, relentlessly

up-scaling

mother and wife. Sashaying around her domain (more abstractly than

accurately conceived by designer James Leonard Joy), Peggy takes her

role as the wife of a hugely successful undertaker very seriously.

She has resolved to make Samuel Clark III (Howard W. Overshown), her

cow-towing husband, and their two sons, reflections of her own ideals

and exemplars of the cultural pursuits she has immersed herself in

since giving up her modeling career up north. At home, she is

possessed

and empowered by the songs of Blue Williams, whose records she plays

incessantly.

Peggy has pinned her hopes and dreams on making her youngest son,

Reuben (Chad Tucker, as a youth, and Reuben Clark, as an adult), a

professional trumpet player. She is also busy guiding and grooming

the oldest, Samuel Jr. (Randall Shepperd), for marriage to a girl

of good social standing and for a future career alongside dad. You

would think that the family would see Peggy’s continuous obsessing

over Blue, the constraints she puts on everyone’s conduct, her

unrestrained

passion for purchasing fur coats (until it becomes politically

incorrect),

and her lack of interest in cooking (she has exotic dinners delivered

to the house, a most incredible feat, if you know the Carolinas),

as simply outlandish and eccentric. Their response, however, is mainly

tolerant, loving, and conciliatory. More mercifully down to earth

is their outspoken, nobody’s-fool grandma, warmly played by Jewell

Robinson.

The plot, rather than going for the effects of psychological damage

done to children by their parents, goes for plot twists that test

credibility. When her oldest son brings home LaTonya (a wonderfully

exuberant and funny Messeret Stroman), a girl from the wrong side

of the tracks, Peggy gives her the cold shoulder until she discovers

that LaTonya shares her passion for Blue. Their bonding is undone

when LaTonya runs off with Blue and Peggy is betrayed.

Fifteen years later, when the estranged Reuben, now a successful

record

producer, returns home for a visit, family secrets are unearthed with

remarkable swiftness. Under Sheldon Epp’s sheltering direction, the

deeply affected victims of a misguided mother ultimately appear less

psychologically crippled than they are committed to forging a way

to forgiveness. Not an unhealthy idea. Wright is a good writer with

promise, who has chosen, not without a few lapses, to exorcise his

bete noir with tenderness and understanding. Three stars. You won’t

feel cheated.

— Simon Saltzman