Reviews 2011
Reviews 2011
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music by David Bryan, lyrics by David Bryan and Joe DiPietro, book by Joe DiPietro, directed by Christopher Ashley
Dancap Productions, Toronto Centre for the Arts, Toronto
December 7-24, 2011
“Change Don’t Come Easy”
Dancap Productions has brought the tour of Memphis, the 2010 Tony Award winner for Best Musical, to Toronto for its only Canadian stop. Set against the advent of rock ‘n’ roll in the segregated American South of the 1950s, the show has an inventive score by Bon Jovi keyboardist David Bryan, fantastic dancing choreographed by Canada’s own Sergio Trujillo and powerhouse performances from the entire cast. If you’re looking for a non-kiddie musical this holiday season, look no further.
Memphis is a fictionalized account of the rise and fall of a white, illiterate stockroom boy from nothing to stardom as a radio DJ and host of his own TV dance show. The character of Huey Calhoun is based partly on the crazy on-air personality of Dewey Phillips (1926-68), a DJ in Memphis, Tennessee, who was one of the first white DJs to play music by black performers on the radio. Huey’s career, however, has more in common with that of another pioneering DJ, Cleveland’s Alan Freed (1921-65), who is credited with the coining the term “rock and roll” for this new type of music in the early ‘50s.
The musical follows Huey (Bryan Fenkart) as he is simultaneously attracted to all genres of black music--blues, soul and gospel--and to Felicia (Felicia Boswell), a black singer at underground nightclub owned by her brother Delray (Quentin Earl Darrington). Huey’s relationship with Felicia serves as a physical embodiment of Huey’s love for music that he says captures his soul. It also has nothing to do with Huey’s historical models.
The show’s main difficulty is Joe DiPietro’s book which is repetitive and formulaic. Beginning with Huey’s entrance into Delray’s club, DiPietro establishes the following pattern: Huey’s ideas are mocked, someone finally gives him a chance, Huey takes pulls an outrageous stunt, everyone fears the worse but it turns out to be a success and Huey moves up the line to a higher position. Thus, Huey plays “race music”, as it was called, for the first time in a department store, creates an outcry among the management but sells more records than the department has ever sold. Similarly, he moves on to DJ and TV show host. The problem is that DiPietro’s use of the same formula lends predictability to a character who is supposed to be famous for his unpredictability.
A different problem creeps into the second act and a plot-line modelled on A Star is Born. Huey helps make Felicia a star by promoting her music on the radio, but her future as a singer lies in leaving Memphis as does their future together as a couple. We can see why Huey might sabotage his audition for a major network producer, but it’s hard to see why he would endanger the career of Felicia through an on-air stunt. Why the upshot of the stunt hurts him and not her is never clear.
Fortunately, David Bryan’s music is far more subtle than the book. He is great at recreating the sounds of jazz, blues, soul and gospel and especially good at showing how each of these genres gradually becomes part of rock and roll. In a clever scene, he juxtaposes the prayer of Huey’s Mama (Julie Johnson) “Make Me Stronger” with the similar song sung by a gospel choir. Gradually, Mama’s individual song becomes fully integrated into the choir’s chorus as she strives to overcome her prejudice. The song “Someday” that Bryan composes as Felicia’s hit song sounds like one of the Supremes’ tunes that got away. Meanwhile, for the music that expresses the characters’ emotions and is not meant to imitate period songs, Bryan uses more speech-based rhythms and more unusual chord progressions to distinguish the one from the other.
Sergio Trujillo follows Bryan’s model in creating a show where the dancing hardly ever stops. He, too, is a master at recreating period style and gestures--from Diana Ross-like gestures for Felicia when she sings her hit to reflections of all the various dances crazes of the early 1950s. Like Bryan, he distinguishes period dances from dance as expression by giving the latter a Bob Fosse-influenced angularity. The dancing itself is so exciting you could enjoy Memphis for that reason alone.
What really makes the show succeed, however, is its amazingly talented cast. Both Bryan Fenkart and Felicia Boswell were covers for the respective roles on Broadway, but seeing them on stage it’s impossible to think how anyone could portray their characters with more commitment and intensity. Fenkart sports a dopey tone of voice that perfectly suits an uneducated white guy in the South who is a bit of a clown. He sings his songs, no matter how passionate, with this tone and thus makes clear that country and western music also went into the mix that became rock and roll. Until the not-quite-credible climax of Act 2, he makes all of Huey’s stunts seem perfectly natural, with his wildly improvised beer commercial in Act 1 a particular highlight.
Boswell has a strong voice, not at all like Diana Ross, but she does make herself sound uncannily like her when she sings “Someday”. From the very beginning she has more poise that the live Raggedy Andy doll that is Huey. He may seem too wacky a guy for someone like her to love, but Boswell makes us see how she loves the rebelliousness in him and understands the lack of love that it springs from.
Darrington is excellent as Felicia’s protective brother Delray and impresses with his deeply resonant voice. The personably chubby Will Mann repeatedly surprises you with his athletic dance moves, and Rhett George’s heartfelt rendition of “Say a Prayer” brings Act 1 to a moving close. While DiPietro hasn’t really sorted out the conflicts within Huey’s Mama, Julie Johnson wows the audience with an all-stops-out delivery of “Change Don’t Come Easy” that proves that you don’t have to be black to sing gospel if you’ve got the voice and the lung-power to do it.
Director Christopher Ashley makes good use of David Gallo’s split-level set design. Especially effective are the scenes during Huey’s TV show where the images the TV cameras are recording are projected on a screen on the upper level so that we see both what is happening in the studio and what the audience at home are seeing. His pacing is snappy but he knows when to pause to allow the main characters’ emotions to resonate. DiPietro wants to give the show an upbeat ending uniting the main characters, and so it seems as long as you don’t think about it to closely. At the end Huey, whose pioneering work has been forgotten and whose beloved has moved on to greater fame, has very little to sing and shout about. It’s a pity that DiPietro or Ashley could not think of a way to present simultaneously both Felicia’s success and the inner turmoil Huey must feel.
Just this month a small church in Tomahawk, Kentucky, voted to ban interracial couples from church membership and worship activities. Though the ban was later overturned after a firestorm of criticism, the mere fact that a community would make such a decision shows that the suspicion, if not hatred, Huey and Felicia experienced as a couple has not died out even in the 21st century. Memphis points out the irony of a culture that comes to accept the music of a particular group but not the people themselves who make the music. For its still relevant message, for its depiction of the roots of rock and roll, for his imaginative score, fantastic dancing and passionate performances, Memphis is a show no lover of musicals will want to miss.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Felicia Boswell and Bryan Fenkart. ©2011 Paul Kolnik.
For tickets, visit www.dancaptickets.com.
2011-12-09
Memphis