Blue Tony Howell & Co. Blue Tony Howell & Co.

“Polished and silky-smooth… uniformly at ease”

The New York Times

-Bruce Weber, The New York Times

 
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“A Pop-Tune Counterpoint To a Family’s Wisecracks”

The Clarks, who own a successful funeral home, are the richest black family in the fictional town of Kent, S.C. But they're just ordinary folks, at least if you believe what you see on television.

As the focus of ''Blue,'' an amiable featherweight of a play by Charles Randolph-Wright that opened yesterday at the Gramercy Theater, they are a clan built to prime-time specifications: Peggy, an overbearing mom; Samuel Jr., a forbearing Dad; Tillie, a crusty grandma; and two sons, Samuel III, a renegade 17-year-old, and Reuben, an observant 12-year-old.

Their individual quirks and conflicts are more genially tickling than poignant, drawing on the comforts of pop culture. A dinner-table scene in the opening act, which is set in the 1970's, is exemplary. In it, Peggy (Phylicia Rashad) pompously introduces each course of an Italian meal in Italian; her elder son, Samuel (Howard W. Overshown), complains after his coiffure is jostled, ''You made me mess up my 'fro,'' recalling John Travolta's declaration ''You hit my hair'' in ''Saturday Night Fever''; and much is made of the contrast between Peggy's presumption to worldliness and the lack of sophistication of Samuel's girlfriend, LaTonya (Messeret Stroman), an excitable, loud-voiced young woman with a country accent and a penchant for hot pants.

The play, which has the enlivening feature of original music by the pop composer Nona Hendryx, is far more class- than race-conscious. Its title character, Blue Williams (Michael McElroy), a Luther Vandross-like pop crooner, does give the show a soulful soundtrack. Blue floats in and out, invisible to the cast but not to the audience, performing Ms. Hendryx's songs as a kind of haunting spirit. Peggy, it turns out, is obsessed with him.

But the affluent Clarks -- like the Huxtables, the television family of ''The Cosby Show,'' of which Ms. Rashad was famously a part -- have little to say about black culture as opposed to white culture, or about race relations in general. Of course they don't say anything about Jewish culture, either, which you may feel, given Mr. Randolph-Wright's penchant for wisecracking dialogue, is the main difference between the Clarks and one of Neil Simon's families.

The story, which takes place over about two decades, is standard family evolution stuff, narrated in retrospect by the elder version of Reuben (Hill Harper). And though there is a scandal that waits until near the end to be unveiled, the play is so thoroughly infused with middle-brow and middle-class wishful thinking that the Clarks end up the stronger for it. By the end you feel as if the pilot were over and the weekly series were about to begin.

Still and all, as presented by the Roundabout Theater Company and directed by Sheldon Epps, this is a polished and silky-smooth production, one that takes a largely familiar recipe and prepares it with élan. It's visually handsome but not fancy. The interior of the Clarks' home is rendered by the set designer, James Leonard Joy, as an airy two stories structured around an atrium, and the costumes, by Debra Bauer, are snazzy and particularly amusing in the first act with their depiction of 70's chic. And Ms. Hendryx's lush and melodic original songs are layered onto the narrative seamlessly.

Mr. Epps has guided the show to an unruffled pace; its two and half hours go down without impatience. And the cast (which includes Randall Shepperd as Samuel Jr., Peggy's husband; Chad Tucker as the young Reuben; and Jewell Robinson as Grandma Tillie) is uniformly at ease, which makes the ensemble work appealing. Ms. Rashad, as the play's late-emerging central figure, is quite deft in walking the line between Peggy's heavy-handed pretensions to cultural sophistication and societal stature and her self-conscious amusement at her own princesslike affect.

At Peggy's first entrance she's carrying two fur coats that she just bought, having been unable to decide between them, and Ms. Rashad, chuckling at her own folly, begins the process of letting us see in Peggy what her husband does; she's willful and controlling, yes, but needy, loving and unpredictable as well.

The most unusual feature of the play is Blue himself, whose role in the Clark family turns out to be more than mere musical inspiration. But for the better part of the story, Blue is something of a specter in a slick blue suit. He wanders the set, a dapper ghost, singing along with recordings of his music.

It adds a rather sodden layer of metaphor: ''Music is memory,'' declares the adult Reuben, looking back as the play begins. But it also adds a pleasing layer of entertainment. Even if ''Blue'' isn't a play that sends you out thinking, you might leave whistling.

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Blue Tony Howell & Co. Blue Tony Howell & Co.

“Beautifully performed… funny, poignant, sad, and honest”

Curtain Up

-Les Gutman, Curtain Up

 
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Written by Charles Randolph-Wright
Directed by Charles Randolph-Wright
Produced by Arena Stage and Roundabout Theatre Company

Tillie Clark (Jewell Robinson) can't believe her son is married to that woman. Neither can the woman's sons. Peggy Clark (Phylicia Rashad) is a duck out of water: she's miserable, and seems to relish spreading her infelicity around. On a visit to Chicago in the 1960's, Samuel Clark, Jr. (Randall Shepperd) swept Peggy off the Ebony Fashion Fair runway, brought her home to Kent, S. C., and married her. It's the late seventies now and her antics seem to roll off his back. 

Only two things assuage Peggy: Samuel's money -- he runs the family's successful funeral home and never chafes at her credit card bills -- and the music of Blue Williams (Michael McElroy), to which she listens incessantly. She's a proud snob, a lousy homemaker and we might as well go ahead and etch her name into the record books at the Motherhood Hall of Shame. Growing up, her older son, Sam (Howard W. Overshown), is a rebellious teen she's always putting down, while her younger son, Reuben (Chad Tucker), is a sensitive Mama's Boy she dotes over. Peggy is trying to mold Reuben into a musician like her idol. Sam accidentally gets on his mother's good side at one point, when he starts dating LaTonya Dinkins (Messeret Stroman), a hick chick Peggy can barely look at until she discovers the girl shares her obsession with Blue. Peggy takes LaTonya under her wing, but it won't last long.

Blue opens as a memory play centering on Reuben as a grown man (Hill Harper), roughly today. In the first act, Harper shadows his younger colleague, sometimes reciting lines in unison with him, sometimes engaging in conversation with him (but never with anyone else). In the second act, set fifteen years after the first, Harper takes over the role, with Tucker sometimes looming as the younger self. In the intervening time, we discover that Sam has traded in his oversized Afro for a Brooks Brothers look -- he's running the family business in his father's footsteps -- while Reuben, having never succeeded as a musician, is living in Seattle, sporting dreadlocks and trying to get something going as a music producer. He returns home, angry, and discovers something about himself much of the audience probably had guessed already.

Randolph-Wright's framing device doesn't add much to this play, and truth be told, the show would probably be better off without it. It's shortcomings are compounded by the way in which Blue's character is handled. Throughout the show, he appears, onstage or above it, singing (music by Nona Hendryx) to Peggy but not actually there. So we end up with dueling "visions". This takes nothing away from McElroy's performance -- he is an engaging singer who does a fine job of evoking the sort of soft jazz/"quiet storm" sensibility into which Blue's music has evolved.

Stripped of these elements, Blue is a finely written, well-directed, and beautifully performed piece. Randolph-Wright has a nicely honed ear for these characters' dialogue, rendering it funny, poignant, sad, and honest. The actors, many of whom are reprising their roles from the original production of Blue at DC's Arena Stage and whose work here shows the patina of their sustained effort, work well together as an ensemble and individually. Especially noteworthy are the efforts of Phylicia Rashad, best known as Claire Huxtable on The Cosby Show, but just as worthy of attention for her subtle portrayal of Peggy; Jewell Robinson, who makes the strong-willed and tongued grandmother a highlight of the play's comedy without overstepping; and, less circumscribed but no less appealing, Messeret Stroman. Randall Shepperd and Howard Overshown (in the second act) do remarkably well conveying the polished agreeability of the successful undertaker -- a discrete gregariousness -- along the father-son continuum.

Debra Bauer's costumes are particularly good -- from the frighteningly accurate 70's wear of the first act to the more reasonable clothing of the recent past. She gives Peggy a series of lovely outfits that exemplify her taste, shows LaTonya's transition from "common" to pseudo-sophisticate and back again and installs Blue in a sharkskin suit that simmers in just the right way. Michael Gilliam's lighting is also first rate, which brings us to James Leonard Joy's set design which, although eliciting threshold satisfaction, proves to be particularly annoying. He chose to solve the show's many scene changes by means of motorized shifting of backdrops and furniture which unpardonably and noisily interferes with stage action, to the point of drawing focus.

This is, I believe, the first show to transfer to New York from Arena Stage (which commissioned the work and where Randolph-Wright is now officially associated) since The Great White Hope in 1968. While it might not quite rise to the level of that play, it's a most worthwhile addition to the theatrical literature.

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Blue Tony Howell & Co. Blue Tony Howell & Co.

"Vibrant... priceless comic timing"

Washington City Paper

-Bob Mondello, Washington City Paper

 
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Lady Hears the Blues

Last week, when Julie Harris arrived in Arena Stage's Papa, this week, it's Phylicia Rashad in Blue. If one more TV star comes to town in a stage sitcom, I'm going to have to stop congratulating myself on having a better rig than television critics.

After all, having sat through Charles Randolph-Wright's cute but almost bel-canto-free dramaturgy in domestic drama-dy Blue, at Arena Stage, I now have to spend several hundred words talking not about the Clarks, the funeral-home-owning South Carolina family who will reside for the next six weeks in the house the Tyrones and the Vanderhoffs built with all those long day's journeys you can't take with you.

The Clarks are blacker from their orchestrated theatrical predecessors in two significant ways: they're African-American, and they're populating a script that really belongs on the Fox network. TV must bloom on Fridays, which is evidently the day Samuel Clark Jr. (Randall Shepperd) always invites his cranky mother, Tillie (Jewell Robinson), over so she can complain about his wife's cooking. They both know that Peggy Clark (Rashad) doesn't actually touch the food she serves until after some local Italian has prepared it—she's too busy listening to her favorite jazz vocalist. But the truth is, they're a pretty tranquil family, playing so safe takes them on supposedly home-cooked journeys to a different country each week.

So do her sons, Sam III (Randall Shepperd), whose puffed-up Afro and platform shoes (it's the '70s) give him a 6-inch height advantage when he kisses his parents, and Reuben (Desmond Newsom), who converses intermittently with his operatic jazz-singer father (Michael Warren), who isn't actually known to the playwright. There's one other spectral presence on the premises, singer Blue Williams (Arnold McCuller), a honey-voiced, Al Green-like crooner who materializes in an azure spotlight whenever Peggy puts one of his records on the turntable.

The cuisine on this particular Friday is Italian, but the word "country" is uttered only as a reference to the less-than-affluent girlfriend young Sam has brought home to dinner. Peggy thinks sweet but gawky LaTonya (played with a broad, character-defining drawl by Messeret Stroman) is way too country for her son, and she asserts in a line that pretty much sets the tone for the evening that "someone must de-tramp this family." But when LaTonya turns out to have every Blue Williams album ever released, the two instead become bosom buddies, with Peggy guiding the younger woman in a sort of pet project and showing her how to class up her act. Later they have a falling-out for reasons it would be unfair to reveal, because so much of this sitcom's com is sit-dependent. Suffice it to say that Act 2 leaps forward 15 years and explains everything in a series of confrontations between the adult Reuben and his mother.

Randolph-Wright has been saying in interviews that he wrote Blue in response to a fairly specific challenge from his manager—"you need to write the Neil Simon black family"—and I suppose he's met that challenge, if what his manager meant was the cardboard-thin family in Barefoot in the Park.

I'm not sure, however, why ersatz-Simon should appeal to Arena's powers that be. The theater—which was founded 50 years ago to provide an alternative to the commercial drivel Broadway sent on tour, while Simon was cutting his teeth as a playwright—has never offered to raise the curtain on Simon plays. The theory has always been that such shows as The Odd Couple and Come Blow Your Horn are perfectly appropriate in commercial theaters, but that audiences go to regional stages looking for something a tad more substantial.

What makes Blue an appropriate choice for Arena, according to the troupe's program notes (which mention Randolph-Wright in the same breath as Shakespeare, Molière, and Ibsen, incidentally), is that the thriving family being depicted is clearly African-American. This fact, says the program, makes the play "a lesson in cultural preservation" in a dramatic landscape where Americans of color are rarely depicted as prosperous or as being at the center of a community's life.

Point taken. That premise is undeniably valid, even if it seems undercut somewhat by the stat's familiarity to millions as the matriarch of a prosperous black family on TV. Not that the existence of The Cosby Show in any way diminishes the underlying culturally adaptive efforts made to bring a dearth of films, TV shows, and theater plays reflecting the lives of African-Americans to an audience that a case could be made has nothing that attempts to do so deserves production.

Still, ideas and content matter, and Blue isn't what most Arena patrons probably expect from the nation's most prominent regional theater in terms of quality. It's a commercial comedy at heart and in execution, two steps up from Your Mother's Butt but several steps back to the playwriting of the early Neil Simon. By the beginning of the '70s, he had stopped writing joke-strewn displays of the sort criticked in here, and I don't recall that there was ever a point in his career when he would have stooped to picking on an elderly character say "lock" in front of her grandchild to get a laugh.

I would be remiss if I didn't note that a substantial portion of Blue's opening-night crowd guffawed at granny's cussing and behaved throughout the evening as if it were auditioning to record a laugh track. On occasion, this raucous response seemed justified by the events on stage, but not as often as one might have wished, and almost never by granny's drop-in-the-bucket lines. Fortunately, Randolph-Wright has a director's sense of situation: he staged Arena's sharp, motivator-savvy Guys and Dolls earlier this season, so the quandaries in which his characters find themselves are frequently funny even when his writing isn't.

Blue's actual director, Sheldon Epps, likes to keep things moving, including the turntable that whisks the characters from living to dining room and from front steps to funeral parlor. He has encouraged his actors to give polished performances—which is perfectly appropriate, however lessis being precisely what the material calls for (at least until the grown-up Reuben has a second-act crisis, which Wiggins is required to play as a full-fledged emotional meltdown).

Epps doesn't, however, make much sense of the spectral character who is the play's trickiest conceit. Their presence doesn't affect the action in dramatically useful way, and his staging doesn't help matters by literally being easy-show biz rather than greedily blue.

Even after you realize that the guy no one but the 12-year-old Reuben sees is the older Reuben, he never tells his younger self anything terribly important. Frankly, if he did, it's hard to know what we could make of it. Similarly, the title character's abrupt switching whenever Peggy's stylus touches vinyl functions as a mere staging device. Blue's songs (written by Nona Hendryx and Randolph-Wright) are pleasant enough, but if their lyrics connect with the dilemmas the characters are facing, their relevance slipped right by me.

On the other hand, McCuller sells them to the rafters in a voice that's as sexy as it is assured, and he's equally persuasive when allowed to interact with another character in the second act. Rashad's level-headedness is quite naturally vibrant, and has priceless comic timing. Newsom's "country" interjects is really vibrant, and has precise comic timing. Warren's "country" interjects is really and vibrant, and has precise comic timing. But their scenes together are brief, and Shepperd's patriarchal befuddlement anchors the evening, and the cast's work is pretty sharp as well.

Friday evening is going to be a letdown for another man who thinks he's in a bid, cranking outward of $30-ticket crediles them to people whose intellectual content even in light comedies. And although dissenters from the standing ovation on opening night appeared to be in the minority, they were definitely present.

Still, it's a certainty that the best and least disputable line of the evening was uttered not by an actor, but by an elderly Arena subscriber at intermission: He had plenty of soft drinks and juice at the high-fabled locale just back of the auditorium, but the counter in front of him was littered with empty one-shot bottles, and he had to apologize for being one clearly out of bourbon.

"It's a real hard-liquor night," he explained, inadvertently summing up the whole experience in six words.

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