In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two important shows about different aspects of the black experience in America, the world premiere of John Guare’s A Free Man of Color and the Arizona Theatre Company’s revival of August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Here’s an excerpt.
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To call a play “sprawling” is not necessarily a bad thing. Some canvases are naturally larger than others, and critics who (like me) have a built-in bias in favor of careful craftsmanship must always be on guard lest it cause them to underrate a work of genius whose corners aren’t tucked in. If neatness is what you expect from John Guare’s “A Free Man of Color,” you’ll be doomed to disappointment. Mr. Guare’s ambitious new play, which tells the fantastic tale of Jacques Cornet (Jeffrey Wright), a 19th-century millionaire playboy from New Orleans who happens to be black, has a cast of 33 and runs for two and a half crowded hours. Yes, it sprawls, but for all its hectic messiness, “A Free Man of Color” is one of the three or four most stirring new plays I’ve seen since I started writing this column seven years ago.
Set in 1801, just before the Louisiana Purchase brought New Orleans under the thumb of Washington, “A Free Man of Color” starts out as a bawdy Restoration-style comedy of bad manners in which the Big Easy is portrayed as a prelapsarian Eden to whose richer citizens the concept of racial prejudice is as alien as the shadow of sexual guilt. Even though he’s black, Jacques Cornet is well-heeled enough to have slaves of his own, and the fact that he is so wealthy and attractive (Mr. Guare describes him as “a dazzling piece of work”) insulates him from the common plight of his fellow blacks. The first act, in which his sexual misadventures are catalogued in frenzied detail, plays like a 10-door farce salted with so many laughs that you won’t have time to catch your breath.
In the second act, history catches up with Monsieur Cornet. No sooner does Thomas Jefferson (John McMartin) approve the purchase of the Louisiana Territory than his status as a “free man of color” is revoked, and New Orleans’ gaudiest peacock is shorn of his feathers and sold into slavery, a terrible denouement described by Mr. Guare in language that approaches the condition of poetry…
The Arizona Theatre Company, whose shows are seen in Phoenix and Tucson, is currently doing “Ma Rainey” as well as I can imagine it being done. The staging is by Lou Bellamy, the artistic director of St. Paul’s Penumbra Theatre Company, whose magnificent Off-Broadway revival of Wilson’s “Two Trains Running” was one of the highlights of the 2006-07 season. Like that well-remembered production, it is earthily direct, wholly to the point and impeccably cast, with Jevetta Steele hitting the center of the bull’s-eye as the bisexual blues shouter whose sidemen are at murderous odds with one another. Vicki Smith’s three-level recording-studio set is a model of smell-the-coffee realism….
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Read the whole thing here.

“The blues help you get out of bed in the morning. You get up knowing you ain’t alone. There’s something else in the world. Something’s been added by that song. This be an empty world without the blues. I take that emptiness and try to fill it up with something.”
August Wilson, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

Kenny Burrell, Bob Magnusson, and Sherman Ferguson play “All Blues”:

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

• Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (musical, PG-13/R, reviewed here)

• La Cage aux Folles (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Driving Miss Daisy * (drama, G, possible for smart children, closes Jan. 29, reviewed here)

• Fela! (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)

• Lombardi (drama, G/PG-13, a modest amount of adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• The Merchant of Venice * (Shakespeare, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 9, reviewed here)

• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

• The Pee-wee Herman Show (comic revue, G/PG-13, heavily larded with double entendres, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)

• The Pitmen Painters (serious comedy, G, too demanding for children, closes Dec. 12, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, closes Jan. 16, original Broadway production reviewed here)

• Angels in America (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Feb. 20, reviewed here)

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

• Play Dead (theatrical spook show, PG-13, utterly unsuitable for easily frightened children or adults, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:

• A Life in the Theatre (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Nov. 28, reviewed here)

“Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.”
H.L. Mencken, A Little Book in C Major

An excerpt from Laurel and Hardy’s “The Music Box”:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)
UPDATE: Courtesy of Mr. Anecdotal Evidence, Samuel Beckett on Laurel and Hardy.

“A man who can laugh, if only at himself, is never really miserable.”
H.L. Mencken, Minority Report: H.L. Mencken’s Notebooks

Jimmy Rushing sings “Goin’ to Chicago Blues” on a 1958 episode of The Subject Is Jazz, accompanied by an all-star band led by Buck Clayton: