Review - Life, Death and the Blues - Theatre Passe Muraille, Toronto

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by Raoul Bhaneja, directed by Eda Holmes

Theatre Passe Muraille with Hope and Hell Theatre Co., Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace, Toronto

September 30-October 19, 2014

Brown: “Without roots you can’t have music”

Written by the fine actor Raoul Bhaneja and featuring the sultry, sassy Juno Award-winning singer Divine Brown, Life, Death and The Blues has the potential to be a hugely enjoyable show. Theatre Passe Muraille’s Artistic Director says on the TPM website that the show “argues for us to see The Blues as an international art form that belongs to all of us; an art form that we all need to keep alive”. If only that were true the show would be fine. Unfortunately, Bhaneja has made the two-hour show all about him and his perceived difficulties as a non-black man playing the blues.

Bhaneja, born in Manchester, England, to a Canadian diplomat of Indian heritage and an Irish mother, has loved the blues since childhood. Though primarily an actor, last seen at TPM in 2006 performing all of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a one-man show, he even has his own blues band, The Big Time, which forms the backup group to the show. All that time, however, he has apparently been tortured by the fear that he has somehow appropriated the music of another culture. Perhaps Bhaneja feels this way because grew up during the 1980s and ‘90s at the height of political correctness. But now, when the world has seen a famous black golfer, a famous Chinese basketball player and a famous white rapper, not to mention a black president, it’s exasperating to be dragged back two decades into arguments about what is or is not appropriate to a certain race after examples of individual excellence have shattered those stereotypes.

Bhaneja puts forward his argument in a particularly annoying way. He, playing himself, tells Divine Brown, playing herself, that he is a “natural-born blues man” to which she objects because Bhanjea-as-author has her claim that he doesn’t have the authentic black experience of a history of racial prejudice that led to the blues. Brown herself says that she is interested in pop music, not in reclaiming the blues. Bhaneja nevertheless sets her up as the mouthpiece for his own insecurities about performing the blues. The show consists primarily of his refutation of “her” position that it is background not feeling that determines who can play the blues. It’s bizarre that in a show about appropriation of voice, Bhaneja has no qualms about writing dialogue for a black speaker about what the black point of view is supposed to be.

During the course of the show, Bhaneja gives short bios of his idols and mentors. He starts and ends with Montreal hip-hop artist Paul Frappier known as Bad News Brown (1977-2011), a Haitian immigrant who rose stardom from busking in the subway playing his harmonica. This example follows on Bhaneja’s performance of “Bad Leroy Brown” and the notion that male blues singers adopt a stance of being “bad” to counter their otherwise low status in society.

Another hero is the German Alfred Lion (1908-97), who like Bhaneja fell in love with the blues from the moment he first heard it. Lion organized the first recording of American blues artists in Germany before they were recorded in the US. Eventually, Lion emigrated to the US where in 1939 he became the co-founder of The Blue Note, the blues record label from the 1940s to ‘60s. Bhaneja does not mention it, but Lion is great example of a German who did not agree with the view of the Nazi regime that blues and jazz were entartete Musik (“degenerate music”).

An idol close to Bhaneja’s heart is Paul Oscher (born 1950), a harmonica player who became the first white player ever chosen by Muddy Waters to be a member of his legendary Muddy Waters Blues Band. While it’s an interesting story, Bhaneja is overstating his case in trying to show that white people, or even “beige” people like himself, can be accepted as “natural born blues players”.

Indeed, in a bit of self-promotion, Bhaneja tells the story about how he was himself chosen to join a blues band in Montreal when a blues busker asked him to join his band on stage.

Bhaneja’s final hero is James “Super Chikan” Johnson (born 1951) of Clarksdale, Mississippi, who makes blues instruments from recycled materials. Following a film clip of Johnson, Bhaneja proudly produces one of his instruments called a “bojo” and plays it during a number.

Since Bhaneja’s show is so much about him, he unconscionably leaves the wonderful Divine Brown mostly sitting on the sidelines through the first Act of the show. He may give her lines to speak but he the one doing most of the singing. The dialogue Bhaneja has written for them is like the artificial banter one hears from hosts at awards ceremonies.

Luckily, by Act 2 he manages to integrate her talent more fully into his story. Indeed, the two highlights of the show are both performances by her – one a Negro work chant, that clearly points to the origins of the blues, the second a fantastic gospel hymn sung in memory of Bad News Brown, whose murder has never been solved.

Bhaneja leaves Brown alone in the first of these numbers, but in the second, it is incredibly annoying that he feels he has to undercut the emotion of the hymn by commenting on how sexy he finds female gospel singers and how he’d like to feel them up. Can Bhaneja not stand letting someone else be in the spotlight? Is he too embarrassed by the music’s emotion that he has to make such inappropriate comments? If so, then perhaps that proves he is not a “natural born blues man” he thinks he is.

Bhaneja’s own performances, both vocal and on the harmonica, are excellent, but when compared to those of Divine Brown, he comes off as a very talented amateur. Every evening the show closes with a set from a celebrated blues artist. The night I attended it was Paul James, who has played with Bob Dylan and Bo Diddley. James is both white and a renowned blues musician, his mere presence making nonsense of all of Bhaneja’s agonizing over appropriation of voice. His performance, like Brown’s, had a spark in it lacking in Bhaneja’s, making one wonder whether Bhaneja’s hyper-self-consciousness inhibits him from giving his all as professional blues artists do.

Bhaneja’s own blues band, The Big Time – consisting of Jake Chisholm on guitar, Tom Bona on drums and Chris Banks on bass – is a tight, vibrant ensemble. Bonnie Beecher’s lighting helps fade into and out of Cameron Davis’s projections of archival footage that fill the whole back wall. If Bhaneja could only have framed the show as his love letter to the blues rather than as an exploration of his own uptightness, the show would have the sense of celebration its acquires only when Brown or the guest artist performs. The show has been gestating for 15 years. Sometimes after such long period, it’s best just to start afresh.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This is a Stage Door exclusive.

For tickets, visit http://passemuraille.ca.

2014-10-02

Life, Death and The Blues