Jagged Little Pill at Jefferson Performing Arts Center
There’s not much to say about the recent Jefferson Performing Arts (JPA) production of Jagged Little Pill other than “Bravo!” for presenting this new, challenging musical and doing such a fine job with it.
Using songs from Alanis Morissette’s catalog, including two newly written ones, Jagged Little Pill tells the story of an upper class suburban white family in Connecticut that includes a son about to graduate from high school and an adopted African-American teenage daughter. Taking her cue from Morissette’s songs, Diablo Cody’s book touches on rape culture, racism, addiction, adoption issues, homophobia, teen alienation, overparenting and underparenting. (Side note: Given that Pill debuted in 2019, much of the drama in it seems positively quaint compared to today’s headlines.)
I hadn’t seen Jagged Little Pill on Broadway and was aware only of its broad outlines. To its credit, it never feels soap opera-y or melodramatic and it’s invigorating to hear Morissette’s hits in a new context. That said, after 2 hours of unrelieved heavy drama (and many of Morissette’s non-hits which are just meh), I wanted to go running out of the theater screaming “Enough!” Though Pill ends with a more or less happy ending, I couldn’t help wondering “Whatever happened to comic secondary characters like Ado Annie or Officer Krupke?”
Still, I’m glad JPA gave us the opportunity to see Jagged Little Pill, especially in a production as worthy as Director Jack Lampert’s. If certain elements of his staging seem similar to Diane Paulus’ Broadway production (I googled the number done on the Tony Awards), so be it; one expects that to some degree in an initial regional production. Plus, I was told, there were more bells and whistles in New York (which, I suspect, were probably unnecessary anyway).
Aided by Monica Ordoñez’s expressionistic just-right-for-this-tale choreography, Lampert kept the story moving forward, the cast in motion, and the various storylines clear. Antoinette de Alteriis’ costumes individualized the characters. Grant Vicknair’s moody lighting created the proper angsty mood. And Music Director Brandon Banks delivered the requisite rock propulsiveness from his nine member orchestra.
Only Kage Laney’s sound design, which didn’t allow us to hear all of Morissette’s evocative lyrics, was subpar. Granted, I don’t always catch all the lyrics at most rock musicals, but here, where they propel the story and reveal character, it’s an especial shame to have missed most of them.
JPA fielded a very impressive cast for this production. The men–Michael Smith (concerned father Steve), Colin Richard (conflicted son Nick) and Ty Robbins (new kid in school Phoenix)–were all topnotch. Perhaps not surprisingly from a (mostly) female creative team (Glen Ballard did some of the music), the women had the richer roles and did full justice to them: Candence Hebert as Bella, the eventually resilient victim of a sexual attack; Amber Lemelle as bisexual, yearning-to-be-independent daughter Frankie (tho she did have a tendency to sing flat occasionally); and especially, Adrienne Simmons as Jo, Frankie’s decent, passionate girlfriend…until Phoenix comes along. Simmons’ rendition of You Oughta Know, one of Morissette’s biggest hits, was a highlight of the show.
Adrienne Simmons, Amber Lemelle, and Candence Hebert in Jagged Little Pill
I have mixed feelings only about Katie Harrison as Mary Jane, the mother around whom all the other characters orbit. I first saw Harrison two years ago in Slidell Little Theatre’s Next to Normal where she was superb as the mother. Here, playing another mother with drug challenges, she sang fantastically. Yet for a character who says “I’m really good at hiding things”, her overdone manner of delivering lines too often betrayed what Mary Jane was trying to conceal; to be sure, Lampert must take some of the blame for not guiding her to a more nuanced performance. Nevertheless, her final number, Uninvited, with magnificent choreography by Ordoñez, was gripping.
So I’m grateful to JPA for presenting Jagged Little Pill and congratulate them on a job extremely well done. That said, I don’t think I need to see this Little Pill again.
Last Night at the Rue Bayou at Storyville Music Hall through May 3
Your ticket to Last Night at the Rue Bayou comes with two drinks and gumbo. I never did determine who was responsible for the gumbo [I’ve been informed that it was from “Mirepoix catering/Copelands”] but, man, was it good. Velvety of texture, filled with crawfish and sausage, spicy but not too spicy, it delighted my palate. In fact, I took advantage of its “unlimited” nature and had three helpings of the yumminess.
If only this new musical, having its world premiere at Storyville Music Hall through May 3, was as good as the gumbo.
First the good news.
The cast, some familiar faces (Keith Claverie, Donald Jones, Jr., Queen Shereen, and Rayshaughn Armant who recently starred in The N OLA Project’s Fat Ham), most new to me (Andrew Michael Antoine, Madison Margaret Clark, Tim Davis, Kadejah Oné Higdon, Melana Lloyd, Reggie McNeil, Deri’Andra Tucker, Caldrick Williams) is uniformly excellent. I especially appreciated Williams as a short order cook expressing tender emotions for the first time.
The cast of Last Night at the Rue Bayou
Martee LeBow’s music, a pastiche of various Louisiana genres, pleases the ear as it captures the various forms she emulates; it’s clearly the work of an accomplished musician. If none of the songs are particularly memorable, a drag number with coy lyrics by Michael Meth was cute and entertaining. Music Director Seth Farber and his band do the score full justice.
Director Tracey Conyer Lee keeps things moving so that Last Night feels shorter than its approximately 2½ hour running time. If only she had worked with Meth on his book, about a small music club that’s threatened by developers with government connections, to try to get it slimmed down and have it make some sense.
According to Meth’s bio, when “work took him to New Orleans, it was love at first sight (and taste), and it was obvious to Mike that a stage story simply “set” in New Orleans couldn’t adequately capture the unique feeling of the culture. Instead, he created a participatory “experience” of New Orleans,” Last Night at the Rue Bayou.
That’s all well and good but one should first understand a culture before appropriating it. For Last Night is, to employ one of the scripts’ overused words, a “gumbo” in which every possible cliche about New Orleans has been tossed into the pot.
Where to begin?
First of all, I’m still not sure when Last Night takes place. (The program says “The hours between Last Night and who can remember?” whatever that means.) Maybe the 1950s? No because there’s a “Google” reference in it. Today? Maybe but why would people then raise their eyes about “boys with boys” and “unmarried couples” dancing together, and call the eponymous club “a den of iniquity” if it’s in New Orleans. The 1990s? Maybe. Who knows?
As for where it takes place, the program says “A small juke joint in a nearly forgotten corner of New Orleans”. Fair enough, but where? The show doesn’t have the feel of New Orleans East or the West Bank, so I’m guessing maybe it takes place in either the Hollygrove or Leonidas area. If that’s the case, the club’s ethos “where black & white, gay & straight” all get together, seems false, cause I don’t know of any gay folks hanging out in clubs in those areas.
If Meth had spent a little more time in Louisiana, he might’ve set his script in one of the outlying parishes where such a “gumbo” would be more likely to occur, taking for inspiration, perhaps, the Intracoastal Club in Houma. Such a location would’ve then made more sense for the play’s moustache-twirling villains to be white. Cause with its NOLA setting, Meth could’ve had his government/development/gentrifying bad guys (who have a long history going back to childhood with the family of the club’s owners) be Black which might’ve been more interesting. (Come to think of it, it might’ve also been more interesting if one of them was a woman. But I digress.)
As presented, however, Rue Bayou feels more like some slick entertainment you’d see in some similarly named Bourbon Street venue of today.
One might’ve been able to overlook all of the foregoing if Rue Bayou had offered a worthy story compellingly told. But not only do we get lotsa exposition (the whole middle section of the first act is a meandering flashback), but Meth writes leaden dialog that’s filled with cliches. “The spirits came acalling like the Mardi Gras.” “Why don’t we get this bon temps roulez?” If Meth thinks people talk like that here, maybe he should spend more time in small juke joints.
If he had, he might’ve discovered that it would be preposterous for anyone in such a place to do a “Mardi Gras” number (Join The Krewe) out of Carnival season. Or a fais do-do ditty outside of Acadiana.
Even that might’ve been forgiven if we cared about these characters. But so much story is shoehorned into the plot that they come off as two-dimensional, manipulated by the author. And this is the first time I’ve meant that literally as, just at the point when you think everything has been resolved, Meth & Lee have their cast actually move in reverse motion so that they can unwind their happy ending and propose another even wackier finale involving Haitian voodoo spirits and a hurricane inside the club (I’m not making this up) which feels wholly inauthentic, and comes off as ludicrous.
What isn’t preposterous is Meth appropriating not only the life story but even the look of the late great Ernie K-Doe to be part of his tale. Did he license K-Doe’s image from his estate? Does K-Doe’s estate get any royalties from Last Night? I couldn’t help wondering these things as we were bon temps roulezing.
Julio Agustin provides perfunctory choreography that becomes repetitious after a while; I’ve seen better moves at Jazzfest’s Fais Do-Do Stage. Perhaps because of the acoustics of Storyville Music Hall, it was sometimes hard to hear the lyrics, but Tyler Kieffer’s sound design didn’t help. Raquel M. Jackson’s set seems to have been inspired by Storyville chic, which is fine, but comes off as wildly out of place for “a small juke joint”. Even the costumes by the usually reliable Shauna Leone seem incongruous with the Rue Bayou’s staff wearing seemingly new, silk-screened, Caribbean hued t-shirts that don’t have a single sweat or gumbo stain on them.
Now maybe I’m being overly critical. The audience I saw Last Night with seemed to be enjoying themselves (tho others I’ve spoken to did agree with my assessment). And I know how challenging it is to put on an original musical. But one strand of the show simply did not make sense.
LaFonda Garcia, played appealingly by Tucker, is a server in the Rue Bayou and the object of the cook’s affections. She says that she came here from Cuba and refers to herself as “fresh off the boat”, a term that generally implies that one arrived as a teenager or young adult, not an infant. That Tucker is a Black actress is fine; Afro-Cubans have a long history in New Orleans (as could be seen in another original musical this season, Goat in the Road’s Carlota). But wouldn’t she have an accent and/or sprinkle her dialog with Spanish (as Elsa the beloved Cuban lesbian grandmother cook I worked with at St. Ann’s Deli did)? And wouldn’t it make more sense for her to sing her lines in Spanish, rather than French, in the song Tend the Flame?
It’s that kind of sloppy writing, in addition to all the other nonsense, that dooms Last Night at the Rue Bayou to the dustbin of plays and musicals about New Orleans written by well-meaning carpetbaggers unless Meth plans to do extensive rewrites.
But, damn, that gumbo was good!
[For more information and tickets, go to https://ruebayoumusical.com/]
Cinderella at The Orpheum Theater, May 9-10
[New Orleans Ballet Theatre’s production of Cinderella returns to The Orpheum Theater May 9-10. Here are excerpts from my review of 2019’s production. I suspect this year’s presentation will feature a different cast, but I expect they will be just as good as the one reviewed below.]
With new choreography by Gregory Schramel, Carlos Guerra, and Marjorie Schramel to Sergei Prokofiev’s gorgeous music, New Orleans Ballet Theatre’s glorious production of Cinderella was consistently beautiful to look at and, in its retelling of this classic fairy tale, even touching as we observed its heroine’s liberation from her oppressive home life. The choreographers employed clear staging to advance the story while filling it out with elegant dance.
Gabriela Mesa, as Cinderella, seemed lighter than air; her amazing extensions only added to her innate gracefulness. Partnered with Marjorie Schramel as her dignified but sadistic Stepmother, the two sizzled in a thrilling duet.
Gabriela Mesa and Fabian Morales in the 2019 production of Cinderella
As the princess-seeking Prince, Fabian Morales, engaged to Mesa in real life, proved a sensitive partner and provided some awesome leaps of his own. With his boyish mien, Kevin Hernandez’s Squire, however, nearly stole the show as his scissor-like legs displayed outstanding technique.
You have to be very talented to dance “badly”; as the Stepsisters, Gregory Schramel and Carlos Guerra made it clear that they are, as they brought comical ugliness to their roles and made each Sister funny in her own way. Despite the instruction of Trey Mauldwin’s superb Dance Master, these “ladies” remained magnificently klutzy.
Felicia McPhee marvelously metamorphosed from a mysterious old crone into the Fairy Godmother and then led a dance of the Fairies with apt choreography for each season. Shayna Skal’s coltish Spring Fairy contrasted with Mei-Ling Murray’s more refined Summer one. Lisa Keller McCurdy was an exquisite Autumn Fairy while Claudia Lezcano’s Winter Fairy epitomized joyous holiday celebrations. These five dancers then came together for a ravishing finale.
Sophie Coudrain, Mazzy Hansel, Victoria Nelson and Giselle “Gigi” Thomas were adorable as the Mice who would soon be transformed into Coachmen. Summer Fairy Attendants Lucy Brown, Simone Brown, Grace Crain, and Anna Gordillo demonstrated clearly budding talents. And Sunny Benziger shined in her few moments as the lead Firefly. It truly was heartwarming to see these and all the other youngsters perform at such a high level. The Schramels deserve our appreciation for training so wonderfully, through their Conservatory of Dance, the next generation.
[For tickets and further information, go to https://www.neworleansballettheatre.com/season-glance#Cinderella]
