The Piano Lesson Broadway Reviews

And yet even among Wilson's outstanding and occasionally surreal plays, 'The Piano Lesson,' both a family drama and a ghost story, stands out as one of the odder works. It's a mix of themes and tones, both concrete and ethereal, ghoulish and comedic, but the imbalanced direction here, by LaTanya Richardson Jackson, overemphasizes the horror too literally; it works best on a metaphorical level.

This is a straightforward, well-acted, richly-designed, enjoyable revival that accentuates the competing passions exhibited by Washington and Brooks and the sincere, warmhearted personalities surrounding both of them, including Jackson, Ray Fisher, Trai Byers, and Michael Potts.

How to both honor history and move beyond it is the overriding theme of 'The Piano Lesson,' one of August Wilson's finest plays. The new Broadway revival, featuring Samuel L. Jackson and directed by LaTanya Richardson Jackson (a noted actor who is married to Mr. Jackson), certainly does an honorable job of breathing new life into the work, which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1990. Wilson's plays are so dense with vividly felt experience-not to mention language that is simultaneously earthy and lyrical-that they always captivate.

Wilson clearly loves his characters and gives each one a big solo moment in the spotlight. Even the ghosts of the dead make themselves heard - chiefly Sutter, who manages to spook everyone by chasing bad-boy Willie Boy all the way north to Pittsburgh to plague him. Designers Beowulf Boritt (set), Japhy Weideman (lighting), and Scott Lehrer (sound) have given the dead man a good welcome, and he seems to get along with all the other haunts in the house.

Between Boy Willie and Berniece, their uncle Doaker plays peacemaker. It's something of a shock here to see Samuel L. Jackson (husband of LaTanya) put aside his alpha-male persona, honed not only in the movies but in that original 1987 production of 'The Piano Lesson,' in which he played Boy Willie. Our memories of those past, very different performances go a long way toward making this Doaker a most effective referee, even though he consistently agrees with his niece. More visceral is the slow onstage collapse delivered by Michael Potts in the role of the dissolute uncle, Wining Boy. By nearly matching the size and intensity of Washington's performance, Potts shows that his character's inebriated present is more likely to be Boy Willie's future than anything represented by the level-headed Doaker.

Whether or not to preserve the legacy of the past, however horrific, is the compelling theme of this elemental drama which showcases Wilson's prodigious gifts for poetical dialogue and richly drawn characterizations. It's filled with emotionally resonant moments, the quieter of which are the best rendered in this production. Perhaps the highlight is the scene in which the eager Lymon, newly clad in a resplendent if far too small silk suit and fancy shoes that he's purchased from Doaker's comically blustery brother Wining Boy (Michael Potts, terrific), nearly manages to break down Berniece's emotional defenses by gifting her with a bottle of fancy perfume. Brooks and Fisher play the delicate scene perfectly, thoroughly winning over the audience which practically swoons. Unfortunately, the production falters in its more explosive moments, with Washington, apparently making his stage acting debut, maintaining such a high energy and decibel level throughout that his unmodulated performance becomes monotonous. Boy Willie is supposed to be the volcanic center of the drama, but here he comes across as more irritating than a force of nature.

Boy Willie is, by definition, insolent and impetuous, and Washington-so captivating as an undercover cop in Spike Lee's Oscar-winning drama BlacKkKlansman-captures both with ease, and has presence to spare. Unfortunately, he's also pretty much at full volume, and full speed, from the jump. To be fair, Charles S. Dutton's performance at Yale Rep and on Broadway received some of the same criticism-too big, too loud, too fast. And if Boy Willie didn't drive at 55 mph, the play could easily be 20 minutes longer. That's how massive the part is. One suspects, however, that Washington will be dynamite in the Netflix Piano Lesson adaptation.

There's abundant magic still in The Piano Lesson, August Wilson's grand, 1987 Pulitzer Prize winning tale of a Black family torn between legacy and ambition, the past and the future, and, it's not an overstatement to note, between life and death.In the new beautifully performed production opening on Broadway tonight at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, first-time Broadway director LaTanya Richardson Jackson unveils a great deal of that magic - and not always in the places you'd expect. Yes, there are the flashes of the supernatural visitations and omens that the playwright mined from Blues mythology and African American folklore, but the magic Jackson conjures from her cast is one of the most impressive displays currently on Broadway

Jackson savors every morsel of Wilson's glorious language, whether he's outlining a complicated grocery order; ruminating on the wonders of train travel and its dependability in an unreliable world; or ironing a shirt while singing an old railroad song. His characterization as Doaker - the chief living repository of memory for the fractured family, in whose home the play unfolds - is vibrantly inhabited, his every line delivered with a balance of weary experience and wry wisdom.

The famous ending, involving the aforementioned ghoul, is also bungled. This time it combines a screen and less-than-adequate projection, the shoddiness of which distracts from the finale's power and purpose. If you're sitting even slightly off center, you can barely discern what's going on. It could be an iPhone flashlight or the aurora borealis. The windup, however, is rich and sublimely acted. When Washington snarled and stared at Brooks and Jackson with unrelenting intensity, I was reminded of his father Denzel's explosive Troy in Wilson's 'Fences' that he performed 12 years ago just two blocks away. In a play very much about legacy, that felt right.

It may be true that those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it, but what about those who know it and choose to ignore it? What fate befalls them? That question looms large in August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, 'The Piano Lesson' - the fourth play in his 'Pittsburgh Cycle' -- which is now receiving a high-octane Broadway revival at the Barrymore Theatre.

Of the three well-known performers, Danielle Brooks stands out the most, her face an expressive journey, angry and grief-stricken at the death of her husband three years earlier, which she blames on Boy Willie. She is devastating when she tells what the piano meant to her, how her mother 'polished this piano with her tears for seventeen years. For seventeen years she rubbed on it till her hands bled. Then she rubbed the blood in... mixed it up with the rest of the blood on it.' But she is also exquisite - touching, warm and funny - in a scene with Boy Willie's friend Lyman, her very posture revealing the years of loneliness as Lyman tests out a bottle of perfume that he bought for a dollar from a man who said it was from Paris 'This is the same kind of perfume the Queen of France wear.'

The cast is uniformly wonderful. The three leads blend and harmonize, while adding individual grace notes. Brooks speaks volumes with just a glance, Washington adds spirited bluster, and Jackson's distinct voice was made for Wilson's words. I lost count of how many times Doaker deadpans, 'Berniece ain't gonna sell that piano' - but he made it fresh each time. (Jackson understudied Boy Willie in the 1990 Broadway run.) In their supporting roles, Fisher makes dim Lymon lovable, while Potts radiates gleeful charisma. Watching Wining Boy sell Lymon an absurdly ill-fitting suit is like taking a whiff of theatrical laughing gas. As Grace, a wise-to-the-world woman Boy Willie and Lymon try to romance, April Matthis gives a lesson in how to make a big impact with a small role. The production team also delivers. Beowulf Boritt's set leaves room for an eerie showdown enhanced by Jeff Sugg's projections, Toni-Leslie James's costumes evoke mid-1930s style, and Japhy Weideman's lighting lends warmth and chill as needed.

If they don't all conjure the play's majestic rhythmicity with equal force and fluidity, they are able, under Ms. Richardson Jackson's robust and unapologetically reverent guidance, to do justice to the sheer beauty of Wilson's language and to his uncompromising humaneness.

Ray Fisher comes through as a stealth MVP, playing Boy Willie's dim-witted sidekick Lymon. Fisher understands the universal imperative that all anyone ever wanted was a tall, handsome man, slightly dumb but naturally kind. A scene left alone with Brooks shows what the production could've been, had it leaned into one-on-one relations all the way instead of merely dipping into archetypes. April Matthis and Trai Byers are very fun as a would-be preacher and a good-time gal, respectively, both mixing horniness and passes at respectability to great comic effect. But this winds up being Michael Potts' show, despite what his role as the family drunkle Wining Boy might try to lock him into. A rowdy jumble of amiability, liquor, and exhaustion, it's impossible to take your eyes off him, or wonder what he's doing whenever not around.