Review Roundup: BLUES FOR AN ALABAMA SKY starring Giles Terera

Last night saw the delayed press night for Pearl Cleage's Blues For An Alabama Sky, directed by Lynette Linton.

Set in 1930s Harlem, the story follows a group of friends living in a world of hardship and dwindling opportunity, When a stranger comes into their lives, the explosive effects resonate further than the group could have ever thought possible.

The play marks the UK debut of Samira Wiley, alongside a cast that includes Ronkẹ Adékoluẹjo, Osy Ikhile, Sule Rimi and Giles Terera. So what did the critics think?

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Abbie Grundy: BroadwayWorld: This production, directed by Lynette Linton is nothing short of mesmerising - combining music, movement, and powerful performances to create a production that evokes truly visceral reactions within the audience. Linton's direction is sensitive and purposeful, generating a sense of tension that is razor-sharp, slicing through the comfort that the onstage comradery creates.

Nick Curtis: Evening Standard: Samira Wiley, mainstay of the Handmaid's Tale and Orange is the New Black, makes an auspicious London debut in Pearl Cleage's all-black American tragicomedy, written in 1995 and set during New York's Harlem Renaissance in 1930. This is no star vehicle, though, but a bittersweet ensemble study of hopes largely dashed, where superb homegrown talents Giles Terera, Sule Rimi and Ronkẹ Adékoluẹjo also shine. It's given a beautiful, light-footed production by director Lynette Linton.

Alice Saville: Time Out: Between scenes, the cast show off their formidable vocal chops in bluesy settings of Hughes's poems. It's a lovely idea but perhaps it doesn't do enough to lift the slow-paced first act of Cleage's talk-heavy, action-light play. Lynette Linton's production is stronger on atmosphere than energy, not quite capturing the messy, bustling, moonshine-fuelled Harlem nightclub world that makes Angel live for the moment, rather than the future.

Sarah Crompton: WhatsOnStage: I've rarely seen a play in which the imprint of identification and affection for the protagonists is so strong and so involving. It's a work that makes you want to lean in, holding your breath as their fortunes shift and stir, hoping for the best but somehow always fearing the worst.

Claire Armistead: The Guardian: Cleage isn't afraid to wear her theatre geekery on her sleeve, stuffing an old-fashioned melodrama with sly winks to Ibsen and Tennessee Williams, but the issues she addresses are freshly resonant in a new depression rife with social conservatism. When a gentleman caller Leland produces a gun in the first act, it is certain to end up firing a bullet not just through flesh but through decency and kindness and social idealism. But there's such fun, while it lasts, in Lynette Linton's beautifully cast, restrainedly musical production, which holds you both transfixed by the social shenanigans within the house while yearning for more of the dangerous glamour outside the window.

Clive Davis: The Times: Vintage songs and music composed by Benjamin Kwasi Burrell are an integral part of Lynette Linton's handsome production. A chorus of apartment dwellers breaks into mournful gospel cadences from time to time, while the lead actors Samira Wiley and Giles Terera have moments where they channel emotion into fragments of song and dance. Those brief interludes galvanise a play which, over the course of nearly three hours, is prone to drift along in sub-Tennessee Williams mode.

Blues For An Alabama Sky is at National Theatre until 5 November

Photo Credit: Marc Brenner

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