PLAYBILL ON OPENING NIGHT: Memphis — Playing the Race…Music
By Harry Haun
20 Oct 2009
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Memphis creator David Bryan and stars Montego Glover and Chad Kimball; bookwriter Joe DiPietro and guests Patick Wilson and Gina Gershon
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| photo by Aubrey Reuben | Meet the first-nighters at the opening of the new Broadway musical, Memphis.
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"Rock 'n' roll is just Negro blues sped up," declares our dusky leading lady in Memphis, the musical that opened Oct. 19 at the Shubert and gets at those black roots. Before that sound turned to rock, it was called "race music," and it was played at your peril below the Mason-Dixon line. But that was then (the '50s), and this — if you'll ignore that Louisiana judge of last week — is now.
By any other name, Memphis would be Integration: The Love Story, its main order of business being the erratic romance of the black chanteuse above, Felicity (Montego Glover), and an undereducated fast-talking cracker, Huey Calhoun (Chad Kimball), who brings the sound screaming into the American mainstream — against the turbulent backdrop of great social change.
Ironically, the triumvirate in charge is Caucasian. Book writer Joe DiPietro and director Christopher Ashley used that black-and-white color scheme before on Broadway when they stitched a string of Elvis Presley song hits into All Shook Up, an affable '50s spoof that didn't skirt racial issues. Memphis is far more frontal.
The hard-driving score was composed by Bon Jovi's David Bryan, who shares lyric credit with DiPietro, and their labors convincingly echo the '50s.
"It wasn't research," Bryan said when asked about the sounds of the times that he came up with. "In my first band, I played that anyway without knowing it was a sound — things like 'Knock on Wood' and 'Hold On, I'm Coming.' It was just in me."
It took eight years, 47 producers and 147 investors to put Memphis on the Broadway map, and The Shubert Organization was impressed enough to turn over its flagship theatre to the show. When he arrived at the theatre on opening night, the grateful Bryan kneeled down and kissed the pavement in front of The Shubert, setting off a paparazzi frenzy. One photographer showed him the shot, and Bryan exclaimed, pointing to the marquee, "I want that blown up and put there."
He smoothly moved through the opening-night chaos. "It doesn't really get any better than this. I'm a very fortunate man. The Man Upstairs is smiling on me."
No less delighted with the theatre booking were Ashley and DiPietro, both of whom visited The Shubert for the first time as early teenagers during the epical run of A Chorus Line. "The Shubert is where I saw my first Broadway show when I was 12," recalled Ashley. "When we were doing the theatre surveys, I couldn't quite believe we were getting to be in The Shubert." DiPietro seconded that: "Like, you would never have dreamed as a kid that you actually would have a show at the Shubert Theatre. It's awesome. It's not even worth dreaming. It's off the map."
DiPietro made his Broadway debut in 2005 with All Shook Up, but he was already at work on Memphis before that. "When I got the call about the Elvis show, I told them, 'This is a big coincidence because I'm a kid from Jersey, but I'm writing another show about Memphis.' All Shook Up just moved a little quicker, but here we are, so I'm really happy about the way things turned out.
"On and off, David and I worked eight years on Memphis. Really eight years. There was a point in the middle where it was stalled because the producer who owned it wasn't doing anything with it." Their second collaboration got to market first — The Toxic Avenger, "now playing at New World Stages," DiPietro helpfully pointed out, "and opening on Halloween in Toronto with Louise Pitre. She was in my show, I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change, in Toronto years ago."
The pulsating, high-energy musical passages of the show are aggressively animated by choreographer Sergio Trujillo, with an assist from Rock of Ages' Kelly Devine. "It was really, really important to me to hire the best dancers I could get for this show because I had specific ideas about how I wanted the show to move," said Trujillo, who even translated the integration motif into dance steps.
At one point, he pulls a stunning jump-rope trick. "It's called 'double dutch.' I was walking down the street one time in Harlem, and I saw these African-American girls really 'double dutch-ing.' I thought, 'Bingo! That's how I want to start that number.'
"I thought it was important for the story. It was about young kids being attracted to the music. If I were to make an analogy to today, it's white kids listening to rap. That started with African-Americanism. It started with the black music. All the kids all over the world are doing hip-hop. It starts with the music, and then with the dance. That's, basically, what I did. I started with the music, and I carried on into dance."
Period proved to be no problem for Trujillo. "I have actually done Peggy Sue Got Married, Jersey Boys, All Shook Up and now this show. They're all set in the 1950s so I have a plethora of research. I just let myself go and experience the music for what it was."
James Monroe Iglehart, The Cowardly Lion in last summer's Encore of The Wiz, makes some moves in Memphis that are surprising for someone in his age (35) and weight (280 pounds) divisions, spiking them into place with a startled bug-eyed expression that seems to say "I'm as amazed as you are!"
"That's exactly what I am," he laughed. "I was a hip-hop dancer when I was a kid, so I guess the fact that my body is used to moving my big self around, I can still do it."
Derrick Baskin's big moment comes at the climax of Act I. Rendered mute by a childhood trauma, his character finds his voice after a new trauma and he lifts it — all the way to the roof of the Shubert — in a blistering showstopper, "Say a Prayer."
"I can't complain at all," he dirt-kicked with mock modesty. "It's such a moving part of the show. To be such an integral part of that moment — I feel so blessed just to be in that scene. I live for that moment. I want to say it is probably the most challenging role I've done on Broadway. It requires more acting than singing, which is what I love about it — especially in musical theatre. It's hard to find roles where you can just really dig in and really act. That's what the creative team is asking of me."
He certainly grinned up a storm at the curtain call. "I know. I had to take it all in. This is my baby. I've been with the show for six years. We were in Boston for our first production of it. To see it grow, to still be a part of it — it's just so heartwarming." Continued...
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