Saturday, March 23, 2024

Jeremy Strong and Michael Imperioli headline 'An Enemy of the People' revival

 


Playwright Amy Herzog has once again taken a beloved Henrik Ibsen classic and made it more accessible — and shorter — without cheapening its worth.  This time it’s An Enemy of the People at Circle in the Square, tautly directed by Sam Gold and wonderfully acted by Jeremy Strong and Michael Imperioli.


I had high expectations having enjoyed Herzog’s adaptation of A Doll’s House last year and I was not disappointed.  I’ve liked both plays since I first read them in college.  Ibsen was a revolutionary.  Many people were outraged to see a wife and mother leave her family in A Doll’s House.  I understood Nora’s need for independence and loved that a man from that time had created her.   But Ibsen was writing for long 19th century Norwegian nights.  Enemy, especially, can drag at times and come off as didactic.  Herzog and Gold’s production is well paced throughout, reducing the five act play to two hours with no intermission.  They are wife and husband collaborating on their first stage production together. 


It’s a story of greed and political self-interest that, unfortunately, is as timely as 2020.  Dr. Thomas Stockmann (Strong) is a small town doctor who discovers that the town’s water is toxic and warns of a pandemic if the situation isn’t addressed.  He could be a fictional Dr. Anthony Fauci.  All we have to do is think back four years to the fierce divide between red states and blue over COVID restrictions and we can understand Stockmann’s plight.  Fortunately Fauci wasn’t stoned as Stockmann is but had he been in a small southern town he could have faced a violent attack. 


When the play opens Stockmann has returned to his hometown on the coast with his grown daughter, Petra (Victoria Pedretti), after living in a remote region until his wife died.  This is one of Herzog’s changes, cutting out the character of the wife who in the original play is a shrill opponent of her husband’s principled stand.  I didn’t miss her.


The town had always attracted, on a small scale, people suffering from various ailments because of the healing power of its hot springs.  In Stockmann’s absence, under the direction of his brother, Peter, who is mayor (Imperioli), big plans to turn the town into a major resort and spa are well under way, creating an abundance of jobs and the promise of wealth to all who invest.


At first the doctor is esteemed for discovering the contamination.  But when he calls for all plans for the resort to be stopped while an expensive, years long rebuilding of the water system is undertaken, the townsfolk turn on him swiftly.


Ibsen, considered the father of modern drama, was a moralist. Arthur Miller said he was greatly influenced by Ibsen’s plays.  Herzog has said the same.  In Miller’s case this is most obvious in his 1948 drama All My Sons in which Joe Keller, a self-made industrialist in World War II, discovers that a plane part at his manufacturing plant is defective but allows production to continue rather than face a costly work stoppage.  When a plane crashes and kills all onboard Keller frames his business partner.  Like Ibsen, Miller knew that when taking the moral road has a high price tag many people will leave their morals on the roadside and keep going. 


The action in Enemy is well served by the scenic design  company dots, as well as the theatre itself, which is in-the-round.  In the first act simple furnishings, in keeping with Norwegian sensibilities, create a dining room, living room and newspaper office.  I was thrown at first by what turned out to be the most unusual set change I’ve seen in a long time.  Before I realized what was happening the furnished rooms gave way to a pub and the audience was invited onstage for a drink in what we were told would be a five minute break.  It turned out to be more like 20 minutes to serve the lines of people waiting.  Some audience members had been asked to take seats onstage to represent the people at what becomes a town meeting.  I didn’t see how that contributed to the scene.  They were incongruous in their sneakers and casual clothes against David Zinn’s evocative period costumes.


But the set allows Stockmann to climb onto the bar to try in vain to make his case.  It highlights him as the solitary crusader he has become, who has now been deemed an enemy of the people.  Luckily he survives their stoning and tells Petra they will go to America where things like that don’t happen.  This draws laugher and applause.  He’s probably right about not being stoned.  We used bullets now instead.


This was the most satisfying production of An Enemy of the People I’ve ever experienced.  I’m looking forward to seeing what Herzog has in store for us next.  Hedda Gabler, please. 

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Watching Amy Ryan. Missing Tyne Daly

 


The main question I came away with from the revival of Doubt: A Parable at the Todd Haimes Theatre wasn’t the one the plot is intended to raise, whether a popular parish priest molested a boy who is a student in the parish school.  I questioned whether one cast member change could turn a play I found riveting in its original production into one that fell flat for me. 


Veteran theatre and television actress Tyne Daly was to star as Sr. Aloysius Beauvier, the principal of St. Nicholas School in the Bronx who is convinced that Fr. Brendan Flynn is guilty.  Daly had to bow out after being hospitalized on the day of the first preview performance.  Amy Ryan, another veteran performer, was cast and had the unenviable task of having to get up to speed to take on the role of the lead character. 


The question I will never know the answer to was would Daly have given the production the power it deserves as a fascinating exploration of the often elusiveness of truth.  The 2004 play, by John Patrick Shanley, won a Pulitzer and Tony.


Under Scott Ellis’s direction Sr. Aloysius isn’t just the angry woman she was written to be.  She is shrill and full of rage.  Her rapid fire judgments and accusations deserve to be spoken but would be more effective with some nuance in tone and volume.  She is loud and delivers like a machine gun.  Anger can be just as well expressed, and more dramatically presented, when the sharp words are alternately spoken in lower, pointed tones, with pauses for them to sink in.


This affected how I reacted to her fiery exchanges with Fr. Flynn, played by Liev Schreiber.  In the 2005 Broadway production, starring Cherry Jones and Brian F. O’Byrne, and the movie with Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman, I felt I was attending a verbal tennis match.  When the ball was in Sister’s court, I believed her.  When it bounced back to Fr. Flynn, I believed him.


This isn’t entirely Ryan’s fault.  Schreiber seems too nice, and genuinely committed to the Church’s reforms being implement at that time, 1964, to bring the Catholic tradition out of the rigidity St. Aloysius clings to.  The previous actors, especially Hoffman, had an aura of sleaziness about them.  Only for a moment, after Sister tells him she has investigated his tenure at a past parish, did Schreiber’s Fr. Flynn make me think he could be guilty.  He had a worried expression but only for a flicker.


The richest performance is given by Zoe Kazan as Sr. James, the young nun filled with joy and a love of teaching, especially history.  Her Sr. James at first seems girlish and intimidated by her principal but she proves to be strong-minded and concerned about not rushing to judgment.  I wish Sr. Aloysius and Fr. Flynn had been portrayed with the depth she brought to her role.  


Shanley’s play makes for great theatre for at least two reasons.  We watch it with the knowledge of the horrendous number of children who had been sexually abused by priests for years while being transferred by their superiors from parish to parish.


The play is also strengthened by the time in which it is set, especially for those like Shanley and me who were in Catholic elementary schools in the 1960s or anyone else who was observing the changes of the Second Vatican Council.  The Mass went from Latin to English so we could finally understand the words of the service we were obligated to attend each Sunday.  Sisters either gave up their habits entirely or shortened their skirts and simplified their veils. As a child I could feel the excitement even if I didn’t understand the significance of the changes.


Not everyone was happy with the new ways.  Sr. Aloysius rings true to me because she reminds me of my Uncle Mick who also was a stern, rigid individual.  As the president of the seminary in Seattle he was the same type of authoritarian ruler and was opposed to the changes in the Church.  He was the wrong person at that time, or any time for that matter, to be in charge of training future priests.  The Sulpicians, the order to which he belonged, recognized this and retired him to Hawaii, which he hated and where he died of a heart attack at 57 in 1969.


I have a personal connection to this play in another way.  The nuns are Sisters of Charity of New York.  I have been an Associate member since 2001.  Associates don’t take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience but we share in the Sisters’s lives through being welcomed in their congregational gathering and in spreading their charism of charity. 


At the Sisters’s invitation, the cast, Ellis, the understudies and any member of the creative team were invited to meet with a group of Sisters at their headquarters at the University of Mount Saint Vincent in Riverdale to discuss their way of life.  (I don’t know if Ryan had the time to get up there.)  Schreiber also met with Fr. Christopher Keenan who is an Associate. 


I’m assuming costume designer Linda Cho visited, or at least she found a way to be true to the Sisters’s habit, a black bonnet cap and floor-length black dress/robe first worn by their founder, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton.  The former Associates director, the late Sr. Mary Gallagher, told me to get back the skirt’s pleats after a long day she’d fold the pleats back into place and put the garment under her mattress.  When she got up in the morning the pleats were restored.  I bet Cho didn’t hear that story.


These are the order of nuns who educated Shanley.  Sr. Margaret McEntee taught him in the first grade at Sr. Anthony’s School in the Bronx.  She was his muse for Sr. James and she maintains a friendship with him.  He dedicated his play “to the many orders of Catholic nuns who devoted their lives to serving others in hospitals, schools and retirement homes.  Though they have [been] much maligned and ridiculed, who among us has been so generous?”


Sr. Aloysius doesn’t resemble any Sister of Charity I’ve ever met.  We aren’t given any reason for why she has the disposition she has.  We learn that she had been married but her husband died in World War II.  She doesn’t seem to find joy in her vowed vocation or in education.  She tells Sr. James she’s glad the children are terrified of her.


Her anger seems to come from her resentment of the male dominated Church.  From the beginning she makes comments about not being permitted to enter the rectory or be in close quarters unattended with a priest, even the 79-year-old Monsignor.  She knows well the male control of the Roman Church, as any Sister would. Men rule everything, she says to Sr. James. It festers in her and so she sets her anger toward the male authority figure closest to her.  “I’ll bring him down.  With or without your help.”


But Fr. Flynn holds the power.  When Sr. Aloysius, against the rules, meets with him in her office alone, he puts her in her place.  “You have no right to act on your own,” he tells her.  “You are a member of a religious order.  You have taken vows, obedience being one.  You answer to us.  You have no right to step outside the Church.”


She, by the power of her personality, and he, by the power of his authority, are not easily stopped.  This tension should have been more convincing than it was.  Perhaps Ryan needed more time to inhabit her role.  Perhaps Schreiber had a stronger edge when he sparred with Daly.  It must have been hard for the cast to spend so much time rehearsing and preparing and then have that chemistry disrupted right at the start of public performances.  Those are two more things I won’t know.  


Unfortunately all of this spoiled what is usually a climatic ending.  This time it felt more like a conclusion than a revelation. 

Tuesday, March 5, 2024

Jason Robert Brown's new musical fails to connect

 


The plot of The Connector, the new Jason Robert Brown musical at MCC Theater’s Newman Mills Theater, is more promising than its execution.  The story of a gifted and ambitious young writer who shoots to stardom at his magazine by fabricating much of the content of his feature stories was inspired by real journalists.  The fictional reporter and the editor he deceives are both so unlikable, though, that I was getting bored waiting for their inevitable downfall. The show is too black and white.

Robin Martinez (Hannah Cruz) serves as narrator and a young assistant copy editor focused on getting published in the esteemed journal.  She introduces the story in the opening number, “A Young Man Dreams,” about a 25-year-old man in 1944 who envisioned a monthly magazine that would speak to his generation through deep investigative reporting.   Two years later, from a townhouse in Hell’s Kitchen, The Connector was born, she sings.  “And the whole world changed, and everything stayed the same,” the ensemble chimes in.

The magazine becomes revered.  In 1981 a new editor, Conrad O’Brien (Scott Bakula), takes over after a stint reporting from Saigon.  He is introduced with Robin singing the same song but geared toward him: “A young man dreamed, in his room up at Harvard, that he’d someday write for his favorite publication.”

All is well until Robin has a third young man with a dream to introduce.  This one dreamed from his bedroom in New Jersey of his name on a byline in The Connector.  Ethan Dobson (Ben Levi Ross) is hastily hired based on his writing in the Princetonian, which O’Brien’s wife had read and admired.  O’Brien thinks he’s found a genius and approves story after story despite the concerns of Muriel (Jessica Molaskey), head of the magazine’s fact checking-department whose zeal for accuracy is legendary.

Big mistake.  Those two overbearing, egotistical men will be brought down by those two smart women.  No surprise.  As I said, black and white.

The idea for the show came to director Daisy Prince nearly two decades ago, inspired by the rapid rise and fall of young journalists like Jayson Blair, a New York Times reporter at that time who disgraced the paper and the editors who failed to scrutinize his work, which played loose with facts.  The idea seemed ripe now that charges of “fake news” bring into question just what information can be trusted.

Prince conceived and directs the show, with a book by Jonathan Marc Sherman and Brown’s music and lyrics.  Beowulf Boritt designed the minimalistic set and Tom Murray directs the elevated onstage and unseen orchestra.

The most dramatic – and unexpected – action of the show happens at the end, in the minute before the lights go out.  It takes an hour and 44 minutes to get there.

Friday, February 23, 2024

A welcome escape to the 1960s

 


Don’t look for much character or plot development in the York Theatre Company’s production of A Sign of the Times, which opened last night at New World Stages.  They aren’t what this refreshing new musical, directed with gusto by Gabriel Barre, are about.  This show is about fun, two and a half hours of it.  At a time when we are witness to so much suffering around the world and a frightening presidential campaign here, it’s nice to take a break from shows about dysfunctional families or dangerous political situations.  


The oft-told story — book by Lindsey Hope Pearlman and concept by Richard J. Robin — of a young woman with a dream coming to New York from a provincial town was my story too.  The reason I like this one so much is that it is set in 1965, in the most exciting decade in which I’ve lived, even though I spent it in a suburban Catholic elementary school so I didn’t get to experience it the way I would have if I’d been in college or new to the big city and a career.  I observed it, though, and the two things I loved most were the music and the clothes.  This show serves them up in big measure, although not all of costume designer Johanna Pan’s creations suggest the 60s.


But the music does. That is the true heart of this show, 25 hits from the decade that had the best music of my lifetime, presented one after another with choreographer JoAnn M. Hunter’s lively dance numbers.  The story is woven lightly in between.


I’m not going to list all 25 songs, although I could sing all of them because I listened to them on my little AM transistor radio that went everywhere with me.  Here are a few: “A Sign of the Times,” naturally, “I Only Want to Be with You,” “Rescue Me,” “Call Me,” “Gimme Some Lovin’,” “The In Crowd,” “Five O’Clock World” and “Eve of Destruction.”  They are performed, under Joseph Church’s direction, by an elevated onstage band that appears from time to time as the panels with Brad Peterson’s projects part.  Evan Adamson is the scenic designer, with lighting by Ken Billington. 


The story begins on New Year’s Eve 1964 in Centerville, Ohio, as Cindy (Chilina Kennedy), our delightful ingenue, announces to her friends that she is heading to New York to pursue a career as a photographer.  After losing out on apartment after apartment she finds a roommate in Harlem who becomes her best friend, Tanya (Crystal Lucas-Perry).  They are two young women high on the thrill of being on their own in New York City.


Cindy becomes awakened to two key elements of the 1960s.  Tanya’s boyfriend, Cody (Akron Lanier Watson), is involved with the Civil Rights Movement and her Ohio boyfriend, Matt (Justin Matthew Sargent) is drafted into the Vietnam War.  In keeping with the tone of the story, these are resolved, with Cody enthusiastically leading Black power demonstrations and Matt discovering an unexpected love that grew out of his war experience. 


One of my favorite numbers features projections of the exterior of Cindy and Tanya’s apartment building on a rainy night as couples in bright yellow, red and blue slickers dance with black umbrellas held high as Tanya sings “Don’t Sleep in the Subway.”  


The second to the last number set the already enthusiastic audience cheering with just the first two notes.  Cindy has just quite her job as a secretary in an advertising firm after the firm’s president, Brian (Ryan Silverman), whom she has been dating, takes credit for an ad campaign she created.  No better song to accompany that than “You Don’t Own Me.”  Here, and in every scene she’s in, Kennedy makes a winning Cindy.  


The story ends on New Year’s Eve 1965 as a now triumphant Cindy and her New York friends celebrate in an apartment high over Times Square where they all perform a buoyant “Downtown.” 


It was a quick road to success.  Sounds like a faery tale, right?  Yes, which is why it left me in high spirits.  We need some old-fashion escapism now, and escapism with well-loved songs is the best kind.

Sunday, January 21, 2024

Beverly Johnson: In Vogue



 Beverly Johnson: In Vogue is moving, fascinating, funny and empowering.  That’s a lot of adjectives but it and The Gardens of Anuncia are the two shows that have meant the most to me during the 2023-24 season that began in June, and are the only two that left me in tears.

I didn’t receive a press invitation for the show, at 59E59 Theaters, but I pursued one because I’m a contemporary of Johnson — she’s 71; I’m 68 — and, being a lifelong lover of fashion magazines, I remember well her appearances on cover after cover of Glamour, which led to her history-making achievement as the first Black model to grace the cover of American Vogue in August 1974.  As 30 of her 500 magazine covers were  projected on the screen behind her I felt I was seeing old friends.


I was curious to see how she looked now and to hear her story.  I’m sure that was the motivating factor that drew the largely older Black female audience.  Probably anticipating this interest in her appearance, she and possibly her director and co-script writer, Josh Ravetch, downplayed it.  She actually looked almost like a crone or a witch sitting in a black director’s chair on the right side of the minimally lit empty stage, with waist-length stringy black wavy hair and her face hidden behind enormous black glasses.  The only concession to her glamorous past was her black cocktail dress slit high up the front and stilettos.


If this was intentional to put the focus on her story, it worked beautifully.  I was engrossed for the entire 70 minutes.  Enhancing her story is the way it’s presented, especially at the start and the conclusion.  When we entered the theatre a large color photo of Johnson at her heyday of success was on the screen.  Then the light went out and projections (also by Ravetch) began a montage of black and white photos of mostly famous Black women, from Harriet Tubman to Michelle Obama, as the song “It Goes As It Goes”played.  This nicely placed Johnson in the company of strong, groundbreaking Black women.


And then she tells her story, which she related earlier in her 2015 memoir, Beverly Johnson: The Face That Changed It All.  With all that familiarity and with her model’s poise and experience being interviewed on television I was surprised that she read the script for the entire show, looking intently at the music stand and rarely at the audience to whom she was telling the story.  This didn’t distract me for long.


Johnson was raised in Buffalo, the middle child of five whose father was a steel worker and mother a nurse.  As a student studying law at Northeastern University she was often told she should be a model so she headed to New York and presented herself to Eileen Ford, the owner of the most prestigious modeling agency at the time.  Ford booked her and she began appearing on Glamour covers.  Not content with that she told Ford she wanted to be the first Black model on American Vogue.  Ford laughed and said, “You’ll never be on the cover of Vogue.  Who do you think you are, Cleopatra?” to which she replied under her breath, “That’s exactly who I think I am.”  She then did the unthinkable.  She wrote a polite letter to Ford telling her she was leaving for the Wilhelmina Modeling Agency.   


When she first met Wilhelmina that formidable woman had a cigarette in one hand and a slice of pizza in the other.  Johnson told her she had her sights on American Vogue.  Wilhelmina sized her up, took a drag on her cigarette and said, “We’ll get it.” Six months later, she did. 


Johnson fell into the usual model traps, including constant anxiety that someone younger would replace her and dependency of cocaine to keep the railing thin body she needed to meet industry standards.  Cocaine suppresses the appetite so it became the drug of choice for models who feared even water would make them gain weight.  


“As a model, you had to be a hanger.  You could be 90 pounds and chiseled to the bone, and they worshiped you for it.  You could not get too thin.”


Johnson became addicted but now, even though she is still railing thin, she says she has been sober for 40 years.


She shares her heartbreak when Arthur Ashe ended their relationship and details of her turbulent two-year marriage to Danny Sims, who brought reggae music to the United States in the 1960s and who she says was the first Black man to get “made” by the Mafia.  He took her money and her home and, for many years, her beloved daughter, Anansa, who in photo projections is a dead ringer for her mother in her modeling years.  Anansa hold an M.B.A. and has six children with whom Johnson is close.  And Johnson found happiness more than a decade ago with Brian Maillian, an investment banker with whom she lives in Palm Springs.  She said he was in the audience.


But the big thunder of her story involved Bill Cosby.  She tells of the day in 2014 when she was at her daughter’s house with the TV on mute and saw her close friend of 35 years, model Janice Dickenson.  Turning on the volume she heard Dickenson claim Cosby had drugged and sexually assaulted her and was shocked for two reasons: Dickenson had never spoken of it to her and she could look at the TV and hear her story coming out of Dickenson’s mouth.


In Johnson’s case, she had been invited to a taping of “The Cosby Show” and two days later the star invited her to his brownstone.  He handed her a cappuccino.  Not a coffee drinker she tried to decline but he encouraged her to take a sip and then another.


“Almost immediately the room starts spinning.”


He told her to put her hand on his shoulder and read a scene and she realized she had been drugged.  She started saying “mother-fucker” over and over, louder and louder until he dragged her down the stairs and put her in a taxi.


After witnessing Dickenson’s courage, she chose to speak out in Vanity Fair, resulting in death threats, rage from the Black community that saw Cosby as a leader and questions about why it took her 40 years to come forth.  She said the time wouldn’t have been right.  He was America’s father, she said, “NBC gold.”  But as what came to be known as the #MeToo Movement strengthened she spoke out.  Cosby sued her for defamation but withdrew his case as more accusations came out against him. 


A projection behind her of a New York Magazine cover shows rows of women sitting in straight chairs with one left empty, representing, Johnson says, all the women who are not yet able to come forth.  The headline reads, Cosby: The Women.  I don’t know how I missed this jarring cover at the time.


Johnson said the first defining moment of her life was the Vogue cover.  Speaking out was the second..


“When I was 21 I was on the cover of Vogue and became a face.  When I was 61 I found my voice.”


She says she now tells her grandchildren the future is theirs to build on from the courageous women seen at the opening.  She says they were once children too.


Then another moving montage begins.  We see pictures of those famous women as babies or children followed by their adult selves.  And then precious photos of contemporary little Black girls, one after the other, with the header: THE FUTURE. 

Wednesday, November 29, 2023

Alisha Keys and her songs form the latest jukebox musical

 


The songs are good and the performances first rate, but as with so many biographical jukebox musicals the book for Hell’s Kitchen (by Kristoffer Diaz) is weak, making for another disappointing show in this genre, this one at The Public Theater, which has given us great musicals such as Hair, A Chorus Line and, most recently, Hamilton.  The difference is that those three shows were original musicals.

Jukebox musicals by their nature are contrived.  Instead of starting with a fresh story and having composers and lyricists write songs to further it, jukeboxes start with familiar songs and build a story around them.  The latest, Hell’s Kitchen, directed by Michael Greif, uses Alicia Keys’ songs to tell her story of growing up in that Manhattan neighborhood on the western edge of the Theatre District.

This works in the first act, which is the oft-told story of a teenage girl longing to break away from home and be heard.  It’s nothing great but it’s cute.  Its power to entertain is in Maleah Joi Moon’s performance as Ali, portraying Keys growing up with a single white mother (Jersey, played by Shoshana Bean) and an absent Black father.  Her voice is strong and clear, her dancing natural and rhythmic and her acting holds such presence and timing that I was shocked to learn from the program that this is her first professional performance.  She is completely at home onstage and in that role as a restless teenager rebelling against her mother.  She is a joy to watch.

A nice scene has Ali heading out minutes after her mother has left for work after telling her to eat dinner and finish her homework.  A typical boy-crazy 17-year-old, Ali wants to be partying on the street with her friends and checking out the boys who play buckets as drums. 

Riding down in the elevator, she addresses the audience to explain that she and her mother live in “a one-bedroom apartment on the 42nd floor of a 44-story building on 43rd Street. . .  Manhattan Plaza is affordable housing for artists, which means almost everyone who lives here is an artist, which means you never know what you’re going to hear when these elevator doors open up.”

To prove this, she announces what will be happening on each floor before the doors open.  The onstage band plays out each scenario, starting with a jazz trumpet.  It’s fun.

“That’s Mr. Gordone playing his trumpet.  Thirty-second floor.”

The doors close and she descends.

“And, ooh, I hope the Piniero sisters’ dance class is going on on 27.”

The doors open to an up-tempo merengue.  “There they go.”

Doors close.  “You’re gonna love 17.  Seventeen’s always good.”

The doors open on an operatic duet.  “I got no idea who that is or what they’re saying but I think they’re in love.”

Doors close.  “And then 9 is the poets, 8 is the painters, we got a whole string section on 7, 6, 5 and 4.  And then you hit that ground floor.”

Act One pretty much plays out in this lighthearted way until the end when it turns unexpectedly serious.  Miss Liza Jane (Kecia Lewis) who has been teaching Ali to play the piano in the building’s community room discloses in the song “Perfect Way to Die” that her son was gunned down while walking to the corner store and another dream was lost.  It’s a somber ending that seems to be inserting a contemporary Black Lives Matter moment into a play set in the 1990s.  Yes, young men were gunned down then too – Amadou Diallo, an unarmed Guinean student shot 19 times by 41 rounds fired by police officers, comes to mind – but the sensibility is different now that there have been so many Amadous.  We’re more aware so it would fit better in a play set in the present.

Then there’s Act Two, which is more or less a mess.  Ali’s father, Davis (Brandon Victor Dixon), is suddenly in the plot, reminiscing about the good times he had with Jersey and Ali.  He and Jersey sing a duet of “Fallin’” that is followed by a duet of Davis and Ali singing “If I Ain’t Got You” and I thought, Where did that come from?  It’s sweet but appears to have been a manufactured way to use the songs.  There’s no indication in the first act that Jersey and Davis had a relationship beyond the night they met and “couldn’t put the brakes on,” resulting in Ali’s appearance nine months later.  I also had no inkling that Ali and her father had had a relationship.  I assumed that she never knew him and that he might never even have known he had a child.  Then suddenly warm memories of times together.

This is why these jukebox musicals are so lame.  The creators are determined to use good songs so the credibility or comprehensiveness of the story takes a back seat.

An Alisha Keys musical wouldn’t be complete without her biggest hit, “Empire State of Mind.”  Moon is the embodiment of Keys and presents a powerhouse finish, which unfortunately is spoiled by choreographer Camille A. Brown’s intrusive choice to send a troop of dancers to jump manically around the stage, taking away the focus on the song as an appropriate ending.

Keys has been developing this show for 12 years.  I wish she had had a better creative team.  She’s a gifted singer/songwriter.  She deserves a better reflection of her life and talent.