NYMF Review: Freedom Riders, A Civil Rights Musical

John Lewis (Anthony Chatmon II ) being attacked by a thug (Mike Nigro)

Congressman John Lewis, on his way to see “Freedom Riders”

Freedom Riders

Michael Nigro, Meaghan Flint, Deon’te Goodman and Nygel Deville Robinson

Freedom Riders

Anthony Chatmon II, Scot Redmond, Nygel Deville-Robinson

I ran into Congressman John Lewis, one of the heroes of the Civil Rights Movement, on my way to see “Freedom Riders,” the inspiring gospel and soul-flavored musical about the courageous efforts by black and white activists in 1961 to desegregate interstate travel in the South. Rep. Lewis was going to the same show, as it turns out, and he was also in the show – one of the characters.

For two hours, the actual John Lewis watched Anthony Chatmon II as John Lewis persist in the face of beatings and jailings; arguments over strategy with Martin Luther King Jr. (Guy Lockard) and Stokely Carmichael and other movement leaders; temporary setbacks and ultimate triumph. And he sings …many songs, with lyrics like:

We choose today to make history,

If you’re not willing to die for this, what good is life if not living for it?

I focus on John Lewis because the real person was in the audience at Theatre Row. But the character of John Lewis is far from the only focus of “Freedom Riders,” written by Richard Allen and composer Taran Gray. Fourteen performers portray some three dozen characters over 30 short scenes, from May 3, 1961 — a non-violent training session in Washington D.C. for those who will be riding the buses down South – to November 1, 1961, at a bus station in Birmingham, Alabama, newly integrated by order of the Interstate Commerce Commission. Alternating with scenes of the civil rights activists are those with federal officials, primarily Robert Kennedy (Barry Anderson), the Attorney General of the United States, who at first is simply indifferent to the Freedom Rides, then worried about the potential for violence and bad publicity for the nation, and then finally embraces the cause.

It is not surprising, given the many short scenes full of incident and huge cast of characters, that Allen writes primarily for film and television.

But the musical must make room as well for Taran Gray’s songs, 15 of them (some sung twice.) They are rousing soul, gospel, r&b, pop…and the performers deliver them like a major gale force rarely below a category 3.

Indeed, each and every one of the singers are such powerhouse talents that it can seem almost amusing: Even white actor Mike Nigro (!), whose characters include a convincingly thuggish white bigot and a nebbishy student activist, lets loose like a star soloist in a gospel choir.

They all sound like soloists, even when the entire cast is singing together. The result is intense, and exciting, but the experience as a whole feels largely…. unmodulated. (The most noticeable exception is Brynn Williams as movement leader Diane Nash, who besides the powerhouse songs is also given some lovely ballads.)

This musical is running for just a few performances through Saturday, August 5, as part of the New York Musical Festival. It may be worth it for the creative team to consult a dramaturge, and consider working on focus and pacing in the next production. And “Freedom Riders” is sure to have another production. It deserves an audience.

 Photographs by Mia Winston, except the photograph of (the real) John Lewis, by Jonathan Mandell.

NYMF Review: The Goree All Girl String Band. Prisoners Fiddling Their Way to Freedom.

Six women inmates, in a Texas jail for crimes ranging from cattle rustling to murder, form a country music band in order to get on the radio, get famous, and get pardoned by the governor. That is what happens in this show at the New York Musical Festival, a musical so tunefully entertaining that one could make allowances for such an outlandish plot. But we don’t have to: “The Goree All Girl String Band” is based on a true story.

Click on any photograph by Shira Friedman to see it enlarged

Ruby Wolf and the company

Lauren Patten and Ruby

Lauren Patten, Ruby Wolf and The Goree

Lauren Patten

Ruby Wolf

izzie Hagstedt, Kendra JoBrook, Ruby Wolf, Lauren Patten, Lauren J.Thomas and Chanel Karimkhani(L-R)

Chanel Karimkhani,Kendra JoBrook, Lauren Patten, Ruby Wolf, Lizzie Hagstedt,andLauren J.Thomas (L-R)

Inmates at the Goree State Farm for Women learned to sing and play string instruments well enough in 1940 to land on “Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls,” a surreal but real weekly program on WBAP that featured musical performances by Texas prisoners. The Goree group became famous throughout Texas – and, yes, the governor eventually pardoned them.

In the retelling of this history, we are first introduced to inmate Mozelle McDaniel (Ruby Wolf), just 17 years old and new to Goree, which allows the audience to get to know the jail along with her. Her fellow prisoners describe their crimes in a jaunty song, “Did It Cuz I Had To,” We meet Captain Marcus Heath (Nick Plakias) and his wife Clyde (Tamra Hayden), who run the jail. Clyde is warm-hearted; the Captain initially seems stiffer but fair and well meaning. When rowdy inmate “Cocaine” Nora Harris (Miche Braden) acts up, however, Heath has a guard force her to the infirmary for what the inmates call a “Mississippi Appendectomy” – an operation that makes her sterile. “Don’t want no more deviants; they think we’re deviants,” inmate Bonnie (Lizzie Hagstedt) explains.

But “Goree” is not gory; this is no Caged. The misery is played down. The music is what matters, 16 original songs composed by Artie Sievers, orchestrated by Max Gordon, and sung by all 13 members of the cast, who also play the musical instruments. Theatergoers are likely to remember Nora’s off-stage sterilization much less than Braden’s later bring-down-the-house blues solo, “How They Leave You.” Hers is just one of several memorable solos, most of them by performers portraying characters who are not among the six members of the Goree band – besides Braden’s, Hayden’s lovely “Great Big World” and Nattalyee Randall’s powerhouse “I Don’t Mind.”

The six-member band gets most of the attention. Reable Childs (Lauren Patten, veteran of “Fun Home” on Broadway and “The Wolves”) is the central character, the inmate who comes up with the idea of forming the band, after listening to Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls. Then Clyde the warden’s wife teaches the women how to play the musical instruments. By the end of Act I, they’ve made it to the radio show. By the beginning of Act II, they’ve become celebrities.

There are faint and feint stabs here and there at character development and complications and subplots; these are no more fleshed out than the set, which uses wooden ladders to suggest jail cells, and different color lights to mark a change of location. Michael Bradley’s book and lyrics play second fiddle to the fiddles …and the voices, guitar, banjo, drum, mandolin, cello and bass, as well as accordion, saw, spoons, and washboard — and to the musician/actors who play them.  I would be remiss not to single out Hagstedt’s masterful bass playing. Ensemble member Titus Tompkins is the most spectacular player of a washboard that I’ve ever heard. That’s in the number called “Daddy Wore Boots,” when all stops are out, the entire cast is playing or singing, and the instruments and instrumentalists both seem to be flying in the air.  These musical numbers are so damn fun that, while “The Goree All Girl String Band” may have its flaws, like the governor of Texas, I pardon them.

The Goree All-Girl String Band
Theatre Row
Book and lyrics by Michael Bradley, music by Artie Sievers
Directed by Ashley Brooke Monroe
Music direction by Max Gordon, choreography by Brandon Powers, scenic design by Brett J. Banakis, costume design by Tina McCartney, lighting design by Isabella Byrd

Cast: Lauren Patten, Elizabeth Hagstedt, Kendra Jo Brook, Ruby Wolf ,Titus Tompkins, Lauren J. Thomas, Robert Ariza, Tamra Hayden,Luke Darnell, Nattalyee Randall ,Chanel Karimkhani, Nick Plakias,and Miche Braden

Running time: Two hours including an intermission
Tickets: $29.75
The Goree All Girl String Band is on stage through Saturday, July 29, 2017

To The End of the Land Review: An Israeli Love Triangle Defined By War

A love triangle that lasts 35 years is at the heart of “To The End of the Land,” but the lives of the three main characters of this Israeli play, being presented in Hebrew with English supertitles at the Lincoln Center Festival, are less defined by love than by war.

This stage adaptation of David Grossman’s celebrated novel begins when Ora and her two eventual lovers, Avram and Ilan, are all 16 years old and meet in a hospital during the Six Day War in 1967.

In the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Avram is captured and tortured, and, after he’s rescued, he wants nothing more to do with Ora nor Ilan; when he finds out Ora is pregnant with his child, he wants nothing to do with his son either. Ilan marries Ora and raises the son, Ofer, as his own.

Then, in 2002, the grown-up Ofer is now in the Israeli army, and decides to re-enlist. An anxious Ora comes up with a unique and cockamamie way to keep her son safe. She decides to leave her home and hike to Galilee (“the end of the land” of Israel), so that nobody can come to her door to deliver the official news if her son has been killed.

Estranged though not divorced from Ilan, Ora locates Avram, and takes him on the hike, where they go over their lives, their past, the waxing and waning of their relationship. They reveal secrets they’ve kept from one another.

That is more or less the essence of this two and a half hour play, boiled down from Grossman’s 2008 novel, which runs 674 pages in its English translation. Director Hanan Snir, who wrote the adaptation, chops this story into pieces, and presents the pieces in an order that makes it more dramatic, and at times less than clear. He also spices it with an anti-naturalistic theatricality, harnessing the dozen cast members to populate the various scenes and even depict the sundry landscapes using minimal props, their own bodies, and occasional musical instruments. Although the creative team makes apparent attempts to help the audience — sometimes a character speaks directly to us, narrating – the play often feels geared to people who’ve read the novel, with short scenes inserted that feel shorn of the context the novel might provide them (or at least deprived of the extra time the readers get to figure out these eerie, lyrical scenes.)

Yet, there are enough moments in “To The End of the Land” that hit hard enough to compensate for the confusion, such as an effective combat scene and what one can call an anti-combat scene – when Ora (standout Efrat Ben Zur) lets out her frustration at leaders, both Arab and Israeli, while chopping a salad, calling out a different name with each angry chop of her knife.

“To The End of the Land” is produced by two Israeli theater companies, the Ha’Bima National Theatre and The Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv.

To The End of the Land

Based on David Grossman’s novel

Adaptation and Direction Hanan Snir

Set Design Roni Toren

Music Ori Vidislavski

Movement Miri Lazar

Costume Design Polina Adamov

Dramaturg Noga Ashkenazi

Lighting Design Roni Cohen

Cast: Efrat Ben Zur as Ora, Dror Keren as Avram, Amnon Wolf as Ilan,  Daniel Sabbag as Ofer, David Bilenca as Akiva, Guy Messika, Rinat Matatov, Amos Boaron, Harel Murad, Nir Barak, Eldar Brantman, Vitaly Podolsky

Running Time: 2 hours 45 minutes, including intermission

To The End of the Land runs through July 27, 2017

NYMF Review: The Fourth Messenger. Buddha as a 21st Century Woman

The Fourth Messenger

The story of the Buddha informs this intriguing and well-produced musical at the New York Musical Festival about a modern-day female spiritual leader. But it’s not until the last fifth of the show that we realize what aspect of the Buddha’s life most struck Tanya Shaffer, who wrote the earnest script, and Vienna Teng, who composed the delightfully eclectic score. It was when future Buddha, Prince Siddhartha Gautama, who had been sheltered from the world by his father the king, left his home and family behind to help alleviate suffering in the world.
How would we feel if a 21st century Buddha sacrificed their connections to their loved ones for the sake of strangers? And would we feel differently if that Buddha were a woman?
Is it possible, the authors ask in a program note, for someone to be both enlightened and flawed? “And how can we integrate the Buddha’s principle that attachment causes suffering with the intuitive notion that it is those very attachments that give meaning to our lives?”
All of these are substantive and provocative questions. The challenge is how to address them in a musical.
In “The Fourth Messenger,” Raina (Samia Mounts), an intern at “Debunk Nation Magazine,” convinces her editor Sam (Alan Gillespie) to let her investigate the spiritual teacher, Mama Sid (a terrific Nancy Anderson.)
“What do you have on her?” Sam asks
“A hunch.” Raina says of Mama Sid “she’s hiding something.”
And so she is, as we learn after Raina becomes ensconced with Mama Sid and her followers.  I won’t say more except that the big revelation definitely took me by surprise, but doesn’t pass the plausibility test.
If the twist makes the plot of “The Fourth Messenger” less sturdy than its themes, the musical is very nearly redeemed by its musical numbers. Director Matt August and choreographer Natalie Malotke put the show’s talented nine-member cast to good use, and musical director Jesse Lozano makes the most of Vienna Teng’s music, a pleasing mix of heavenly hymns, folk, rock, jazz, ballads and delicious touches: When there’s a flashback to an old flame, he sings a song tinged with tango; when the singer is remembering a young child, the song sounds like a nursery rhyme.

There is enough beauty here that my hope is “The Fourth Messenger” lives on past the New York Musical Festival — after extensive rewrites.

video from a rehearsal:

The Fourth Messenger is on stage at Theatre Row through Sunday, July 23, 2017
—