I’m not saying that either Midnight, which is now running off-Broadway at the Daryl Roth Theatre; or Wanted, which opened this week at the James Earl Jones Theatre, will be similarly successful. And to be honest, I had reservations about each show. But it does seem that they’re being held to a higher standard than others.
For it's often not enough for shows like Midnight or Wanted to just be entertaining, they’re also expected to be true to the black experience and to the black theatergoers who want to see themselves onstage, but to do those things without alienating white audiences or white critics who may not be as attuned to the cultural nuances of these shows.
Midnight, as a recorded pre-show announcement by Whoopi Goldberg makes clear, is a black gay musical fantasia about interracial lovers in the Confederate South that's written by Todrick Hall, an American Idol semi-finalist and YouTube star who’s also appeared on Broadway. Wanted is inspired by the real-life story of book writer Angelica Chéri’s great-great aunts whose ability to pass for white allowed them, according to her family's lore, to become successful gun-toting outlaws during the Reconstruction era.
A lot of the criticism of both shows has revolved around the question of whether these scenarios really could have happened. Well maybe not in the way the shows portray them, but the real-life Von Trapps didn’t climb any mountains to escape as they did in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music and the real Annie Oakley didn’t lose a shooting contest just to win her love Frank Butler as she does in Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun.
Those of us who love musicals are used to suspending belief and accepting characters who may be only thinly fleshed out. So I wish similar license had been extended to Midnight and Wanted because despite their shortcomings, there’s a lot to appreciate in both. And if nothing else, we should be applauding the fact that these are wholly original stories with wholly original scores.
Along the way, there’s a lot of singing (there are about three dozen songs, including operatic arias, gospel and blues bangers and soulful ballads, some of them quite good) and a succession of dynamic dance numbers, all of it brilliantly lit by Jake DeGroot. This is an unabashedly big show. There are over 20 people in the cast, multiple subplots, a zillion costume changes (designer Beck Jones fully uses what seems to have been an extravagant budget) and the running time clocks in around three hours.
That’s too long. In fact, there is a too muchness about the whole enterprise that might have been reigned in if Hall had hooked up with a collaborator. Still, he’s a really talented guy (click here to read a bit more about him), he’s cast some fantastic singers, even if several of them do indulge in some over belting, and he deserves credit for creating a really unique experience.
Wanted wrestles with the subject of race too. It focuses on light-skinned twin sisters born to a black mother and a French father who’s abandoned the family. When their landlord threatens to evict mother and daughters from the land they’ve been sharecropping, the girls set off to pose as white women, which will allow them to more easily earn money so that they can buy the land. But when a run-in with some unruly white men causes them to pull out the gun their mother gave them for protection, they discover that it’s easier to pose as outlaws and steal the money from white people who had been taking advantage of them and other black people.
The sisters’ notoriety grows but the bond between them is tested when one falls for a white man who doesn’t know that she is black and so offers a future where she won’t be confined by her race while the other falls for a black man which allows her to stay true to their heritage and their original mission to go back home. Stories about passing often fall back on the tragic mulatto trope but having the sisters pulled in different directions allows for a fuller sense of what the choice of denying one’s race can mean.
Chéri and her collaborator composer Ross Baum, who is white but thoroughly comfortable with black musical idioms, have been working on this show for over a decade (click here to read more about its development) and I wish I had seen earlier versions of it because it seems that the efforts to please various constituencies may have caused some edges to be filed down in the process.
What remains is a tuneful show and some terrific performances by Solea Pfieffer and Liisi LaFontaine as the twins and the Grammy-winning singer Ledisi as their mom. And Chéri has folded in some delightful bits of black culture as expressed by two all-knowing and constantly-wisecracking black maids the sisters encounter, played to the hilt by Aurelia Williams and Awa Sal Secka.
Meanwhile, director Stevie Walker-Webb stages all of it as though pulling the tale out of some black mythology book, complete with a Greek chorus called the Kinfolk who swoop in to provide some narrative background, sing gospel-esque anthems and perform choreographer Chelsea Arce’s high-spirited dance routines. And although I will admit that I would have liked some rougher edges, I found myself smiling throughout and cheering on what is at root a feel-good story about sisterhood and the joys of being black.
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