"A Wonderful World" isn't Wonderful Enough

People have been trying to put Louis Armstrong’s life onstage ever since that master jazzman died in 1971. My BFF Phil took me to a backers’ audition for one attempt to build a musical around Armstrong back in the ‘80s. That one never got made. Then there was Satchmo: America’s Musical Legend, which played at the Kennedy Center in Washington for two weeks in 1987 but it was described by The Washington Post as “a textbook example of how not to write a musical.”  

Satchmo at the Waldorf, the one-man play by my friend the late theater critic Terry Teachout also used one of Armstrong’s many nicknames in its title but it fared better with a tight dramatic focus on Armstrong’s later years. John Douglas Thompson’s much celebrated dual portrayals of Armstrong and his white manager Joe Glasser ran for four months at the Westside Theatre in 2014 and the play, which Terry drew from his excellent biography “Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong,” has been produced around the country.  

But no effort has been as ambitious as A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical, which after pre-Broadway stops in Armstrong's early stomping grounds of New Orleans and Chicago, opened at Studio 54 this week, with James Monroe Iglehart in the title role. Yet the reception for this one has been less wonderful than those involved surely hoped it would be.

A Wonderful World tells the story of Armstrong’s life through his marriages to four women who represent the phases of his career as he developed from a young innovator of the new art form of jazz at the beginning of the last century to his role as an established and somewhat old-fashioned entertainment figure by its midpoint. 

That's a lot of territory to cover but the show’s real problem is that it doesn’t say anything about those events. It might have helped if each of the women had been used to reveal a different aspect of Armstrong’s personality, letting us in on something about the man that we didn’t already know. Instead the show just chugs along from one incident to the next. 

That may reflect the fact that there were too many competing ideas for what A Wonderful World should be. For while Aurin Squire gets the credit for the show's book, both Christopher Renshaw and Andrew Delaplaine are credited as its co-conceivers. 

Meanwhile Renshaw also shares co-directing credit with Christina Sajous and the show’s star Iglehart (click here to read more about all of that). There’s no indication of who, if anyone, had what they call in the movie business final cut. So what we get are likely to be the bland compromises that were least objectionable to all of them.

There are a few attempts to add some oomph by noting some of the racism that Armstrong experienced—one of his band members is lynched; he and the actor Lincoln Perry, whose professional alter ego was the slow-witted character Stepin Fetchit, commiserate over the demeaning ways black men had to behave to survive in the Hollywood of their day; Armstrong’s trademark geniality is tested when four girls are killed in the 1963 bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church—but after each incident is cited the show rushes on to squeeze in another song and dance number.

The music presents its own problems. Like most jukebox musicals—this one’s score is composed of more than two dozen tunes Armstrong played and sang throughout his career— A Wonderful World strains to find songs that tap into the inner lives of its characters. And since nearly all of the songs come out of the midcentury American Songbook, it seems unlikely that audience members under 60 are going to receive them the way they do the more recent pop hits in & Juliet, Moulin Rouge or MJ the Musical.

But perhaps the biggest challenge for this show is that like any bio-musical it needs to present its subject in a way that people can easily recognize him while also going beyond simply mimicking him. Iglehart has totally captured Armstrong’s distinctively raspy voice. And he has his mannerisms down too: the rolling eyes, the waving handkerchief and, of course, his big toothy grin. 

What’s missing is the disarming sweetness that Armstrong brought to his public personae. He always seemed so intent on making people happy that it was almost rude to respond any other way. Of course Iglehart, a Tony winner for his ingratiating performance as the Genie in Aladdin, has his own winning ways but they’re more effortful. And here, you can see how hard he’s working. You root for him.  But you, or at least I, worry about him too, so much so—will all that vocal fry hurt his own voice? will all that running around onstage wear him out?—that it took me outside the show itself.

Still, there are pleasures to be had in A Wonderful World. The actors playing the four wives—Dionne Higgins, Jennie Harney-Fleming, Kim Exum and Darlesia Clearcy— are all terrific singers, even if each overindulges in the now-standard practice of holding a note hostage until the audience whoops in support of the feat. 

Meanwhile, Toni-Leslie James’ period-perfect costumes are colorful and plentiful.  And choreographer Rickey Tripp has not only devised more novel variations on the familiar dance moves of the 1920s and ‘30s than I thought possible but has been blessed with a talented and seemingly tireless ensemble that knows how to put those moves over too.

So A Wonderful World isn’t a bad show. In fact, there was a time when loosely-plotted revues built around the songbooks of black musical icons like Fats Waller (Ain’t Misbehavin) and Duke Ellington (Sophisticated Ladies) were hot tickets that enjoyed long runs. But that was now a long time ago.