Let Down By "Lights Out: Nat 'King' Cole"

Several years ago, I reported a piece on the Smithsonian's "American Popular Song" album, which was intended to be a collection of the best rendition of each song in the Great American Songbook. But the head curator told me that so many of the songs were best sung by Nat King Cole that they had to go with the second-best rendition for many of those tunes or they'd have ended up with an entire Nat King Cole album. So that was one of several reasons that I was looking forward to seeing Lights Out: Nat "King" Cole, the new musical that opened this week at New York Theatre Workshop.

Another reason was that the show is a passion project of Colman Domingo, who we theater lovers have claimed as one of our faves long before he became the twice Oscar-nominated actor that he now is. One other reason was that it stars Dulé Hill, a triple-threat performer—can act, can sing, can really dance—returning to the New York stage for the first time in a decade. 

And yet another reason—sadly relevant in this historical moment—is that the show focuses on the final episode of Cole’s pioneering TV show which ran for just one year between 1956 and 1957 because national advertisers wouldn't sponsor a show starring a black entertainer because they were afraid that doing that might alienate their white southern customers.

So I think you will understand how much it pains me to have to say how disappointed I was by Lights Out. Domingo has recruited Patricia McGregor, the artistic director at NYTW and one of the few black women to lead a major theater company, to co-write and direct the show (click here to read about their collaboration). But despite years of workshops and tryouts (earlier versions were done in Pennsylvania and L.A.) the show remains a work in progress.

Domingo and McGregor have imagined Lights Out as a fever dream that Cole has in the minutes before he goes on air for his final episode and is trying to decide whether he should bow out with the elegant graciousness that has become his trademark or let loose all the anger and frustration he's felt at both the major slights and micro-aggressions he’s had to endure throughout his career.

The subject of how black celebrities were mistreated in mid-century America—selling out at nightclubs around the country but only allowed to enter them through the back door—is a fascinating one and the idea of framing that experience as a fever dream is terrifically intriguing. But the storytelling here is convoluted and McGregor’s direction is so additionally muddled that it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on. 

And there is a lot going on in the show's 90-minutes of running time. Cole’s celebrity friends Eartha Kitt and Peggy Lee pop up to duet with him. Parodies of period commercials are performed. Ghosts from the singer’s past, including his mother, appear to give him advice. Openly racist versions of his white agents and producers turn up to harass him, even hurling the n-word at him.  And all of this is set, juke-box-musical style, to a playlist of Cole’s greatest hits, from “Mona Lisa” to “Unforgettable.”

The actors do what they can. Hill deftly mimics Cole’s smooth vocal stylings and as a former Tap Dance Kid, he brings both the noise and the funk during a dance battle (tap choreography by Jared Grimes) that is a true showstopper. The other challenger in that battle is Daniel J. Watts, who plays Sammy Davis Jr. as the mischievous trickster orchestrating Cole’s fever dream, daring him to stand up for himself and for black people as a whole.  

Cole and Davis were friends in real life (click here to watch them make fun of one another)  but the show never makes clear why Davis, who proudly allied himself with the otherwise all-white Rat Pack lead by Frank Sinatra and later endorsed Richard Nixon for president, has been assigned the role of Cole’s black conscience. 

Still, I’m very glad they gave him that role because Watts runs with it and is hands down the best part of the show. He not only mimics Davis perfectly but brings both a much needed energy to the antics he’s called to perform and a sharp edge to the questions about race that I had hoped the entire production would more ably explore.    

Why Just About Everyone Loves Kara Young

This is a slightly different post than I use write but maybe like me, you have wondered why the nominators for so many different theater awards seem to love the actress Kara Young so much that they keep nominating her for their awards. Over the past four years, Young has picked up more than two dozen nominations, including four consecutive Tony nods for best featured actress in a play. And she won that one last year for her performance in the much celebrated revival of Ossie Davis’ Purlie Victorious. 

The short answer to that “why” question is probably that Young is just good. But I think there’s something more to it than that. Young is one of those rare actors who has the ability to infuse each character she plays with her own personality (click here to read a bit more about her) and at the same time is able to fulfill the vision that the playwright intended for the character: so her performances are simultaneously comfortably familiar and reliably surprising. 

Part of that is casting her in the right roles. But a larger part of it is simply Young’s innate artistry. I remember the first time I saw her back in 2018 in a small off-Broadway production. I wasn’t crazy about the play but I was fascinated by the young actress at the center of it and I kept asking myself—and probably annoyingly my companion—“who is she?” 

Young popped up in a stream of productions after that, usually playing a streetwise teen and I started worrying that directors were just hiring her to do the same thing over and over again. But then I realized that she was coloring each character slightly differently, layering in the nuances that allowed her to sidestep the stereotype.

And then came Purlie Victorious. Ossie Davis had originally written the role of the naïve by spunky Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins for his wife Ruby Dee, a tough act to follow.  Then Melba Moore put her Tony-winning spin on Lutiebelle in the musical Purlie, another tough act to follow.  But Young proved more than up to the challenge. Her Lutiebelle was uniquely hers: loopy, sexy, altogether endearing and yes, Tony worthy.

Last summer, Young took on what struck me as her first fully adult role as a woman contemplating getting back together with an ex in Douglas Lyons' romcom Table 17 and she aced that one too. 

But now she’s being praised for her performance in Purpose, Branden Jacobs-Jenkin’s newly-anointed Pulitzer Prize winner about the dysfunctional family of a Civil Rights icon who bears more than a passing resemblance to Jesse Jackson. 

Young plays the outsider whose presence forces the family to confront the cost their public lives have exerted on their private ones. And hitting all the notes—hilarious and heartbreaking—that Jacobs-Jenkins has crafted for the character has made Young a frontrunner for yet another Tony win.

The Angry Young Women in "John Proctor is the Villain" and "Five Models in Ruins, 1981"

A new genre has been developing over the past few years, one that in tribute to the post-war change in British theater I’ve been calling “angry young women plays.”  

These new works more or less follow a certain formula: a group of women get together to engage in an activity as in Clare Barron’s 2018 Pulitzer finalist Dance Nation, then they start noting how society has misunderstood or mistreated them as in Liliana Padilla’s How To Defend Yourself which ran at New York Theatre Workshop a couple of years ago and finally they perform some kind of ritual to exorcise their frustrations and rally their abilities to deal with them as they do in Alexis Scheer’s Our Dear Dead Drug Lord.   

Intentionally tapping into both comedy and tragedy, these plays give lots of young actresses a chance to show off the full range of what they can do. And they give those of us in the audience fair warning that young women are tired of taking shit and ready to do something about it. Or at least that’s how I felt after recently seeing two shows that hewed to the angry young women formula—one doing it smartly, the other doing it messily.

The smart one is John Proctor is the Villain, playwright Kimberly Belflower’s sharp response to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and it has been nominated as best play of the season by the Tony, Outer Critics Circle and Drama Desk awards.  

Miller used the Salem Witch Trials that began in 1692 to comment on the McCarthyism of the 1950s. His protagonist John Proctor has an affair with his teenage servant girl but Miller casts him as the play's noble hero for refusing to name his neighbors or himself as being—as the surrounding hysteria charges—allies of Satan.

Belflower focuses her play on a group of high school students in a small Georgia town as they read Miller’s play, debate all of John Proctor’s behavior and try to figure out what to do with the men in their own lives—boyfriends, fathers, teachers—during the height of the #MeToo revelations.

And so Belflower has crafted both a literary critique of one of the most popular classics in the midcentury canon and a social commentary on the ways in which today's young women are dealing with toxic masculinity.

She’s aided by a terrific cast of young actresses. Sadie Sink, one of the stars in the Netflix series “Stranger Things,” has picked up a Tony nomination (click here to read more about her) but under the surehanded direction of Danya Taymor, they’re all giving kickass performances. Their characters’ moment of catharsis, set to one of the best playlists of the season, left me with a big grin on my face.

More messy is the production of Five Models in Ruins, 1981 that opened this week in LCT3’s Clair Tow theater. Its conceit is that a group of models have been hired for a Vogue magazine fashion shoot that will photograph them in a dilapidated English country house wearing the also-ran bridal gowns that Diana Spencer rejected for her wedding (costume designer Vasilija Zivanic’s dresses are not only witty imitations of some name-brand designers but also say a lot about each of the characters wearing them).

Playwright Caitlin Saylor Stephens has assembled the expected crew of twentysomething models—an eager newbie, a drug-addled prima donna, a jaded old-timer, a wisecracking outsider—but she doesn’t know what to do with them. And so they just stand around griping for most of the play’s 100-minute. running time.

Some of what they say about what they've experienced in the business is truly disturbing, justifying any anger they might have. But the models are more often treated as superficial twits and too much of what they say is just blather.

The play’s most potentially interesting character is the female photographer who is finally getting the chance to shoot a cover for the magazine. Although that could be because she’s played by the always watch-worthy Elizabeth Marvel (if you get to the theater early you’ll be treated to a silent pre-show of Marvel moving the set’s furniture around while fully in character). 

But even Marvel has a tough time with the storyline about how the photographer’s failing love affair is inhibiting her work. And there’s more than a hint that she may have gotten the job because she was sleeping with someone influential. I mean what the hell kind of feminism is that supposed to be representing? 

And even worse is director Morgan Green’s decision to let the climactic scene go on and on and on and on for almost four minutes, sending the audience out of the theater feeling exhausted instead of exhilarated.