Chicken and Biscuits Broadway Reviews

We all know-don't we?-the phrase Goin' to Church, which means letting religious fervor flow no matter what the context. Dramatist Lyons has written a play about literally goin' to church. He's gotten the church bells reverberantly chiming. If theater lovers are smart, they'll heed the call and go straight to Chicken & Biscuits church.

The cast is dynamic together, making it nearly impossible to single out any one of them. Mizzelle, however, does an extraordinary job at playing the going-on-16-year-old La'Trice Franklin, a character that could easily be portrayed as a Black female caricature. She's loud, she's bold and she says whatever is on her mind; Mizzelle's performance gives nuance to the young Black woman screaming to be seen, included and understood. Urie, who plays Kenny Mabry's white Jewish boyfriend, also does a phenomenal job of conveying how out of place his character feels. At no point does his performance feel forced.   

Representation matters. I see many great and necessary new works about the problem of Blackness in a racist society - or rather, the problem of whiteness. They are filled with anguish and unfunny funerals. What I rarely get to see are works about Black American life that are defiantly not problem plays. Their sunniness is just as necessary, however garish the aquamarine and pimped-out the corpse.

Going to Chicken & Biscuits does feel like being fed by loving but overweening relatives. There's a bit too much of it - the published running time notwithstanding, this show lasts more than two hours with no intermission - but it's a meal full of comfort dishes, difficulties resolved, and love requited. It turns the nearly in-the-round space at Circle in the Square into a church with stained-glass windows behind the audience and the great Norm Lewis in the pulpit.

A fun night out reminding us of the importance of familial love, tolerance and forgiveness. Lyons' play, which stars Cleo King, Norm Lewis and Michael Urie, and features Alana Raquel Bowers, Ebony Marshall-Oliver, Aigner Mizzelle, Devere Rogers and Natasha Yvette Williams, is filled with warm-centered performances and broad but entertaining characters.

Lifting every last detail from Tyler Perry's recipe book, this family comedy is brimming with stock characters, creaky jokes, tired references and easy, feel-good sermonizing. Bickering relatives speechifying with exposition and put-downs? Family secrets guessable even by the most distant outsider? Characters that can be summed up in one-word signifiers? Check, check and check.

Lifting every last detail from Tyler Perry's recipe book, this family comedy is brimming with stock characters, creaky jokes, tired references and easy, feel-good sermonizing. Bickering relatives speechifying with exposition and put-downs? Family secrets guessable even by the most distant outsider? Characters that can be summed up in one-word signifiers? Check, check and check.

The production (staged by Zhailon Levingston, who is now the youngest Black director in Broadway history) relies heavily on mugging from the actors, especially Urie, who does his standard shtick of exaggerated facial expressions and manic reactions. It works best during the funeral sequence, at which point theatergoers are made to feel as if they are part of the church service. At my performance, quite a few people responded to the funeral speeches in a call and response style.

The forced hilarity is never given a chance to build before Lyons hits us with some terribly sincere moment of reflection, whether its comes between two sisters (Cleo King and Ebony Marshall-Oliver), who can't stand each other, or two same-sex lovers (Michael Urie and Devere Rogers), one of whom prefers the word 'friend' to 'partner,' much to the other guy's dismay.

The performers, several of them new to Broadway, strive mightily to mine the broad humor for all its worth and generally succeed. The standouts are Mizzelle, a hoot as the precocious teen, and Urie, who gets laughs with every nervous twitch, although he's playing the sort of role from which he should have graduated by now. For more than a few, Chicken & Biscuits will live up to its name by being enjoyable theatrical comfort food. But you can't ignore the fact that it simply isn't very nutritious.

Chicken & Biscuits clearly has its heart in the right place, and the cast and creative team include more than two dozen people making their Broadway debuts. But their lack of seasoning shows: the writing is blobby, much of the design is unpolished, and young director Zhailon Levingston sometimes seems lost in dealing with the challenging three-quarters thrust stage at Circle in the Square.