Review - The Scottsboro Boys & Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson

Although Broadway has a history of great artistic success from adapting existing sources for the musical stage (My Fair Lady, Show Boat, Gypsy...) the past decade's ever-increasing trend of turning popular films, novels that inspired popular films and songwriter's catalogues into musicals has, in many minds, elevated the status of the completely original musical; particularly original musicals by American authors.

Thus far, the 2010-11 Broadway season boasts two new tuners with original books and scores; both transfers from Off-Broadway and, while they don't seem all that similar on the surface, each uses a type of Stage Entertainment (one we would hope to be dead and buried and another very much alive) to tell a tale of racism and public outcry from a troubled time in American history.

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson comes to Broadway a bit larger, but largely unchanged from last season's Public Theater production, so my review below is also largely unchanged. While I admired the ambition of The Scottsboro Boys in its Vineyard Theatre premiere, I found the production, aside from its score, disappointing. While I can't tell you from just two viewings what tweaks and changes were made between then and now, the material and staging seem to have benefited greatly from a more focused tone and hits the Lyceum as the kind of challenging, intelligent and passionate theatre piece its subject deserves.

It is, of course, the final collaboration of composer John Kander and his late lyricist Fred Ebb, who, throughout their Broadway careers, have specialized in musicals that tell stories of corruption, murder, hatred and personal tragedy through the guise of a popular entertainment. Collaborating with some of the top musical theatre dramatists of their time (Harold Prince and Bob Fosse leading the impressive pack) they've lured audiences in with the sexy hi-jinks of a Berlin cabaret, the cynical humor of a Chicago vaudeville house, the starry glitz of a Las Vegas floor show and the storytelling traditions of a Greek Bouzouki circle, only to turn the inviting settings into a vehicles for darker themes.

In this one, the scoresmiths (Kander completed the lyrics after the passing of his longtime partner) and their collaborators (David Thompson on book with Susan Stroman directing and choreographing) tackle what might be their most difficult combination of story and stage show. The plot is taken from a 1931 case where nine black teenage boys were falsely accused of raping two white women while riding a train that had stopped in Scottsboro, Alabama. The choice to play out their saga through the conventions of a minstrel show is daring, immensely theatrical, and ripe for social commentary.

While many would argue that minstrelsy did, in its own particular way, help popularize the music of American blacks of the 1800s, it's better remembered nowadays as a stage show where whites in blackface played offensive racist stereotypes. Black minstrel troupes did exist, but they portrayed the same lazy, buffoonish, happy-go-lucky caricatures as their white counterparts.

In The Scottsboro Boys we're presented with an (almost) all-black minstrel troupe. But here the lead clowns traditionally known as Mr. Bones (Colman Domingo) and Mr. Tambo (Forrest McClendon) save their broad stereotyping for when they and their cohorts portray brutally racist white police officers, lying white prostitutes claiming rape and corrupt and incompetent white representatives of the American legal system; a neat little twist that would never have occurred in real-life minstrelsy and suggests a parallel to the more modern practice of "taking back the word." The tricky side of their roles is that they're doing racist comedy routines similar to the bits that surely were a riot when minstrel shows were popular, but are (intentionally) not funny to a modern Broadway audience. That element seems to have been trimmed and is played at a brisker pace than it was downtown, better to gloss over the fits of non-laughter.

Musical theatre treasure John Cullum, the only white member of the cast, displays his usual gracious elegance as the interlocutor; the traditional name for the master of ceremonies. As played Off-Broadway his relatively small role did little more than represent the romanticizEd White south usually glorified in such pageants, seeming oblivious to the horrors being acted out around him and more concerned with skipping ahead to the crowd-pleasing cakewalk. Now there's more tension between the interlocutor and his cast-mates. He can smell the rebellion that's to come as his smiling ensemble of singers and dancers grow more angry and sarcastic with each happy darkie routine.

That tension helps fuse the mistral scenes to Thompson's realistically played book scenes, as does the clever staging which has all settings created by re-assembling the ensemble's chairs (minstrel performers were traditionally seated on stage) to suggest a train, a prison cell, a courtroom, etc. The brief outline of a plot (there's a trial... the Supreme Court finds that trial unconstitutional... there are a bunch of other trials) then becomes less important than the way we see black people as a group becoming more in control of how they're represented to the country through literature and popular culture. (Yes, I realize I'm making that observation regarding a musical with an all-white creative team.) At the Vineyard, the press was asked not to mention that the silent woman observing all the action (Sharon Washington) turns out to be Rosa Parks, but now it's made fairly obvious from the start and her inclusion becomes symbolic of watching her read the book, Scottsboro Boy, which was written by the man who is the musical's central character, Haywood Patterson, and was one of the influences that encouraged her not to give up her seat on the bus.

Patterson, the determined system-fighter who refuses to admit guilt for a chance to save his life, is played with gritty tenacity by Joshua Henry, a new addition to the company. His singing voice is beautifully powerful but his most memorable moment, one that helps define the evening early on, comes when he pleads his innocence with the Bert Williams-style "Nothin'" (a song that will undoubtedly be grabbed by character men who are tired of auditioning with "Mr. Cellophane"), where he alternates between being his own weary self with struttin' and grinnin' for the enjoyment of the white folks.

That moment, and several others in the score, is exemplary of what puts Kander and Ebb among musical theatre's elite. Not only is the piece filled with interesting and catchy melodies and lyrics boasting cleverness that extends beyond rhyming and wordplay, the duo provides songs that demand to be staged and frequently suggest their own staging. The rousing opener "Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey!" is patterned after the way minstrel troupes would parade through the streets of a town to announce their arrival. "Southern Days" is a sentimental anthem that sneaks in an alternate view of the scenes described in the classic, "Strange Fruit" and one lovely ballad, "Go Back Home," gives the evening its tragic heart.

While, in context, it can be a bit unsettling just to watch the very talented ensemble strutting, high stepping and flashing their feet with great exuberance, the musical's angrier tone now greatly strengthens Stroman's staging for two of the score's more daring numbers. One has the youngest prisoner, 12-year-old Eugene Williams (Jeremy Gumbs) having nightmare visions of two electrocuted convicts (KendRick Jones and Julius Thomas III) doing a Nicholas Brothers-style tap routine; the kind of frenzied tapping that makes one think of sparks emitting from their shoes. Horrifically conceived and excitingly performed, it's the kind of moment that dares you to be so heartless as to be entertained by it. The same kind of discomforting theatricality is present when Domingo turns on the razzle dazzle for a number that's critical of the northern "Jew money" that paid for a high-powered defense attorney. (McClendon plays lawyer Samuel Leibowitz with a cartoony New York Jewish accent, and a vaudevillian flair for self-promotion.)

Cabaret succeeded by suggesting parallels between Nazi Germany and 1960s America. Chicago gained a new life by reflecting back at us how the nation has changed since the OJ trial. By comparison, The Scottsboro Boys may make us want to pat ourselves on the back for how far we've gone. Then again, the protesters who have been demonstrating outside the theatre may tell you differently. You can't be challenging without being challenged in return.

Photos by Paul Kolnik: Top: Rodney Hicks and Joshua Henry; Bottom: Colman Domingo, Forrest McClendon with John Cullum and Company.

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Nearly eighty years ago the firm of Kaufman, Ryskind, Gershwin & Gershwin had the novel idea to infuse that stodgy old music/theatre entertainment, the Broadway operetta, with the jauntiness of showtune and a chaotic mixture of comedic highbrow and lowbrow to tell the tale of an unqualified but charismatic American politician who rides a wave of popular support for his questionable platform to the United States presidency.

And while political musical satire has had its moments on and off Broadway since Of Thee I Sing hit town, with some shows even running way past Saturday night, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, which infuses that stodgy old music/theatre entertainment, the Broadway rock musical, with the jauntiness of straight-faced mimicry and a chaotic mixture of vaudeville and wit, might very well be the best to hit town since that Pulitzer winner.

Director/bookwriter Alex Timbers pulled a similar stunt as co-creator of A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant, which used a deadpan delivery to question the teachings of Scientology with a text lifted entirely from that church's literature. Here, along with composer/lyricist Michael Friedman, writer of playfully irreverent songs for The Civilians, the deadpan is overflowing with the conventions followed by so-called unconventional musicals where writers and composers with little or no background in musical theatre find their loose dramaturgy, near-rhyming and foggy symbolism hailed as a reinvention of the art form. And in using their ninety minute freestyle as a biography of the man many have called "America's Hitler" (though never to his face) they draw parallels between empty, populist theatre and empty populist political movements.

Take their all-important mood-establishing first five minutes. The attractive, young cast - clad by Emily Rebholz in hot variations of 19th Century American garb - assemble on set designer Donyale Werle's rustic saloon that looks converted into a 21st Century garage band dive bar and stare out at the audience with contemporary attitudes and looks of glazed sexuality before the thin, pretty guy with thick, dark hair (Benjamin Walker as Andrew Jackson) announces, "I'm wearing some tight, tight jeans and tonight we're delving into some serious, serious shit."

Next, an 1800s emo rocker dude asks the musical question, "Why wouldn't you / Ever go out with me in school? / You always went out / With those guys / Who thought they were so cool." An emo rocker frontiersman reassures him that, "It's the early Nineteenth Century / And we're gonna take this country back," and soon the whole cast is performing simple, repetitive dance moves to the catchy anthem, "Populism, Yea, Yea!" while Justin Townsend's concert lighting makes periodic attempts to blind as many viewers as possible.

And though an overly perky, wheelchair-bound, quadriplegic lesbian narrator with a goofy sweater tries to act as an objective story-teller (Kristine Nielsen) she is handily detained so that our hero can attempt to author the way history will remember him through a raucous rock star theatre entertainment that Timbers and Friedman use to spoof raucous rock star theatre entertainments.

The practice of having period characters singing in vulgar contemporary vernacular (a technique that goes at least as far back as Rodger and Hart's rebellious A Connecticut Yankee) is mocked to its over-analytical extremes as the sensitive Jackson sings, "Life sucks / And my life sucks in particular." (a line that echoes the irreverence of Ira Gershwin's controversial, "Of thee I sing, baby.") Vague symbolism is kicked in the pants in a scene where our future president bonds with his future wife (Maria Elena Ramirez) as he teaches her the pleasures of self-inflicted bleeding. The song, which alludes to Susan Sontag's Illness As Metaphor, has two other characters commenting, "It's not blood. / It's a metaphor for love. / These aren't veins, / Just the beating of my heart. / The fever isn't real. / It represents how I feel. / My pain transformed into art," as the couple splash each other with the red stuff while furiously making out.

Underneath it all, of course, is the story of the first American president not to come out of Virginian wealth or Massachusetts intelligentsia (a/k/a being an Adams); elected on the strength of his campaign's obtuse logic of kicking out the "Injuns" and giving America back to the people. (His intense hatred of the British, the Spanish and George Washington serve as subplots.) While there are scattered references made to Reagan, Clinton, Obama and the Bushes, Jackson doesn't seem to represent anything more than the all-too-frequent emergence of a populist symbol of hope who is terrific at getting elected but lacking when it comes to actual service. While he has no problem exercising his authority to order a pair of hot babes to make out at his whim, when it comes to deciding what to do about violent conflicts between white settlers and Indians who refuse to budge from their own land, the confused new leader turns to asking random citizens on White House tours for advice, only to find the voters to be as uninvolved with the issues as he was naïve about them. ("I wasn't really listening but I like you so much.") Walker is great fun as a callow, sexy, empty-headed jingoist driven by hated who sees no choice but to turn tyrannical in order to survive the realities of politics.

Timbers has a very appealing company working with knockabout comedy fury with especially fine supporting turns by Jeff Hiller, playing John Quincy Adams as a privileged nerd with an annoyingly winy mannerisms, Darren Goldstein as a diabolical John Calhoun and Bryce Pinkham, who provides discomforting moments as the president's cool, but indignant Indian right hand man, Black Hawk, who assists in the betrayal of his people.

With the elitist Washington insiders portrayed as comical bad guys and Walker's charismatic performance as an anti-establishment rebel, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson proves its point by creating empathy for its central character, despite his policies. Don't be surprised if shortly after your exit onto 45th Street you suddenly realize you were feeling sympathy pangs for this genocidal brute, justifying the show's warnings of the dangerous power of politics as entertainment.

Photos by Joan Marcus: Top: Benjamin Walker and Company; Bottom: Darren Goldstein, Bryce Pinkham, Ben Steinfeld, Jeff Hiller and Lucas Near-Verbrugghe.

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