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Reviewed November 1
Running time 1:20 - no intermission
A jazz concert by the Broadway star
Price $40 - $60

Lineup: Backed by a jazz trio, Brian Stokes Mitchell sings and scats his way through over a dozen songs from the standard repertoire of great American pop songs and a few lesser-known items drawn from theater pieces.

The pop song catalogue provides the bulk of Mitchell's set with "The Best Is Yet To Come," "Love For Sale," "How Long Has This Been Going On," "Embraceable You" and "I'm Beginning To See The Light" forming a solid survey of the form. Mitchell's love for the genre and for the small-club jazz form comes through along with proof of his well trained skills at using his marvelous voice. The deep baritone that has made him unique in musical theater is in fine shape while the higher register material comes through cleanly. The sound system tends to flatten out some of the highs, however.

Theater music doesn't get ignored, just dealt with in a jazz format. "Make Someone Happy" which Mitchell made so memorable in the Encores! concert staging of Do Re Me is given a bright up-tempo treatment. Using the jazz arrangements of John Williams for a My Fair Lady jazz album, Mitchell gives strong reading of "I'm An Ordinary Man" and "Show Me." He turns Maury Yeston's "New Words" into a mini-play as he tells the audience about his own astonishment at his twenty-two month old son's burgeoning vocabulary. Some in the audience must have been disappointed not to have heard any of his famous material from Ragtime, but he certainly met the expectations of those who came to hear him deliver Man of La Mancha's "The Impossible Dream" one more time. He merged it nicely with Leonard Bernstein's "Some Other Time" from On The Town and then, as he reached the final "to reach the unreachable stars," he lowered his hand-held microphone and let his voice soar to the ceiling unaided.

The trio backing Mitchell is a solid jazz group. Gerard D'Angelo leads the group from the piano and adds a flourish here and there. He occasionally draws attention away from Mitchell at just the wrong moment on some of the gentler material, but he adds depth and excitement to much of the up-tempo material. Harold Mann's drumming is solid and reliable at all tempos. 

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Reviewed September 17
Running time 2:30 - 1 Intermission
Solid melodrama with an intriguing historical theme
Click here to buy the script

Storyline: After the Civil War but before the end of the nineteenth century, the migration of former slaves out of the South wasn't confined to travel northward. Some went west. In Kansas, four African American women use the provisions of the Homestead Act to build new lives for themselves in a united family effort to overcome racial prejudice, natural hardships and the corrosive effect of at least one bad marriage.

Pat Bowie is the elder in the household, a woman who can recall the pain of seeing her children sold and sent away. She makes that memory the basis for her perspective on life -- her belief that you do whatever it takes to survive and keep your family together in the post-slavery world. Crystal Fox is the tomboyish frontier woman who strides on stage with rifle in hand determined to make a go of a community on the prairie for black people. Her more traditionally feminine sisters are Dawn Ursula and single-named actress Kinnik.

The show includes a reunion of J Paul Nicholas and Ursula who were so fine in the Everyman Theatre's production of Yellowman earlier this year. However, this time out, they are not a couple. Here he's the villain of the piece, a mulatto slick to the extent of being slimy. He's trapped in a marriage to a woman darker than he, which prevents him from passing as white. He hates her for it. Nicholas doesn't attempt to make the character believable, for in the tradition of melodrama, his part is a plot device, not a person. His wife is played by Kinnik, who brings a firm enough backbone to the part to make her emergence from the status of victim in an abusive relationship feel honest. Ursula's character, on the other hand, is being courted by a plainsman, played with a sort of gee-wiz enthusiasm by E. Roger Mitchell. Together, they make a handsome and believable couple.

There's just enough feel of reality in the design of the production to keep the focus on the time and place of the Kansas prairie in 1898/99. The handsome skeletal structure of the prairie house is backed by a cyclorama on which the big sky of the middle of the continent catches the blue of mid day and the golden red of sunset. The feeling of another time and place is enhanced by Reggie Ray's period and character specific costumes.

Written by Pearl Cleage. Directed by Andrea Frye. Design: R. Paul Thomason (set) Reggie Ray (costumes) Ken Yunker (lights) Ashley Turner (sound) Horace Henry (photography) Lisa Watson (stage manager). Cast: Pat Bowie, Crystal Fox, Kinnik, E. Roger Mitchell, J Paul Nicholas, Dawn Ursula.

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Reviewed June 16
Running time 3:00 - one intermission
A bio-musical with a gospel infused score
Click here to buy the book

Storyline: The life of Dr. Dorothy I. Height, leader in the civil rights movements of the twentieth century, President of the National Council of Negro Women for 40 years, and  "the only woman in the room" at the meetings of the six leaders of the march on Washington that featured Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, is told through a series of flashbacks from the that march and then a series of scenes moving forward to the riots following the assassination of Dr. King.

Heading the large cast are the big-voiced pair of Julia Garrison and Carol Dennis-Dylan as the younger and older Dr. Height herself, and the hefty Ebony Jo Ann as Dr. Height's mentor, Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune. They provide a sense of presence and carry the story over two-thirds of a century. Many of the historical figures in Height's story are not so much brought to life as they are represented in vignettes giving glimpses of her relations with others important to her life (Bertilla Baker as Eleanor Roosevelt) or the sweep of history (Todd Davis as NAACP Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins). Only Dr. King is given much emotional depth, and this is partially due to the fact that the script gives him more stage time and partially due to the powerful performance of Maurice Lauchner, who not only delivers key segments of some of his famous speeches but sings gloriously.

The show is based on Dr. Height's memoirs, "Open Wide the Freedom Gates." The score is by Joe Coleman, a long time lead vocalist for "The Platters" in the Las Vegas iteration of that historic group. (Coleman also plays civil rights labor leader A. Philip Randolph in the show.) Dr. George Faison, the well known choreographer (The Wiz) has turned the book into a pageant with plenty of music. He wrote the book and choreographed and directed the staging. Surprisingly, given his skills at choreography, the show doesn't move as well as you would expect with very little actual dance. Nor does it have a particularly impressive look to it as it is staged on a wide set of platforms beneath three projection screens.

It may be that at the start of the two week run the projection system is not yet in full operation, for the night we reviewed the show there were lengthy periods when the screens were blank (and one time when the computer system flashed an error message on the screen). When the system was working, however, the projections alternated between enhancing the scenes on stage (the looming presence of Abraham Lincoln's seated statue gave Dr. King's speech greater impact) and distracting attention from key points. The painful visuals of lynchings and beatings carry important messages but often distract from live action events at just the wrong moments.

Music and Lyrics by Joe Coleman. Written, directed and choreographed by Dr. George Faison. Based on the book by Dr. Dorothy I. Height. Concept by Dr. Vanessa Weaver. Music direction by Stacy Penson. Design: George Corrin (set) Kim Glennon (costumes) Scott Pegg (stage manager). Cast: Derrick Alton, Ebony Jo Ann, Bertilla Baker, Paul Blakenship, Joe Coleman, Todd Davis, Carol Dennis-Dylan, Lee Dobson, Daphne Epps, Gregg Gardner, Julia Garrison, Anthony Grant, Alltrinna Grayson, Frankie Keane, Maurice Lauchner, Marsha Lawson, Marshall Titus, Richard Ugino.