PLAYBILL ON OPENING NIGHT: Memphis — Playing the Race…Music
By Harry Haun
October 20, 2009
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."
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"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."
Another six-year-veteran of the show is J. Bernard Calloway, who rode it to a Broadway debut. He plays the heroine's overly protective big brother and supplies plenty of friction for the course of true love. "The thing that I love about my character is his integrity," Calloway said. "He brings so much sustenance and essence to the piece. As a black man, he knows the reality of what is going on in those times as far as the racism that was there and knowing how to go about taking the right steps to get what you want."
Glover originated her leading-lady slot six years ago as well and makes a powerhouse entrance — yes, it's her favorite moment. "My character's entrance is, like, such a wonderful invitation to come into the world of the play," she said.
"Our creatives have spent such an amazing time creating such a definite era like Delray's bar and Beale Street. That's such a definite place that coming into that bar is like entering into a time capsule, and I don't come out for two and a half hours.
"I like that my character, Felicia, is a lot like me, but she allows me to grow and to reach. She lives in a time that I didn't grow up in — only my parents and their parents know a lot about it — so she gives me an opportunity to really learn about my roots and learn about our country in that time and what our lives were like."
By the curtain call, Glover was aglow with triumph. "It was like flying, like being completely free to run as far and as fast as we want it to go. It was fantastic!"
Kimball's off-centered comedic talent wears well on his quirky character, a loose-cannon who shoots from the lip more than he should but is usually coming from the right place. "The familiar part of him is that people see a little bit of themselves in him, in that he's off-beat, he doesn't say the right things at the right times — but who does?
"I think Huey has softened, getting to Broadway. Joe and David and Chris Ashley have really been trying to find an avenue for Huey to be a triumph to himself, and I think they've gotten there. There have been drafts of the story where it hasn't gone so well for him, even at the end — or has gone too well. It's finding that nice medium, a middle-ground of triumphant sorrow. I think we've found the right place for him."
The character is a composite of a number of pioneering rock deejays — notably, Dewey Phillips in Memphis and Alan Freed in Cleveland, "deejays of the time who were the first to do what they did and had these kinds of magnanimous voices on the radio. I recall listening to Dewey Phillips once. I heard 20 seconds of him, and I stopped it and never heard him again. I didn't want to get his sound in my ear and mimic him." There is also a dangerous touch of Huey Long in Huey Calhoun — and a smattering of "Lonesome" Rhodes, who made the same radio-to-TV-to-social power rise in the Budd Shulberg-Elia Kazan movie, "A Face in the Crowd." Andy Griffith played the part. Kimball saw the film and admitted there might be a connection.
"People ask me what part of the South are you from, and I say, 'I'm not from the South. I'm from Seattle.' They say, 'Where'd you get the accent?' And I had to think about it. I think it's because I watched 'The Andy Griffith Show' when I was a kid."
The actor still has designs on a designing career, despite his success on stage. "My brother and I own what we now call 'Obvious Clothing,' and we just launched our cashmere line called 'Lolly Cashmere,' and we're in about 200 boutiques across the country — Bloomingdale's, Macy's, et cetera. We're doing pretty well. It's kinda taken off."
Rock seems to be the operative word for theatre these days. For the second Broadway show in a row, Hard Rock Café was the after-party site. Memphis' immediate predecessor was Bye Bye Birdie, which showed a deeper invasion of the American household by the sound Memphis celebrates.
Four weeks away from tying the knot, Will Chase and lusciously blonde Stephanie Gibson made a particularly glowing entrance at the theatre (all that lit-from-within magic, no doubt). Said he: "It's my night off from Billy Elliot, and I go to the theatre. Can't get enough of it. Actually, I came for my bud, Chad. Can't wait to see him. (They were, ever so briefly, Lennon co-stars.)
The future Mrs. Chase is a former "Lady of the Lake" who inhabited the Shubert in Spamalot. Right now, "I'm working on Dreamgirls. I'm one of the white girls in the white version of 'Cadillac Car,' which we're filming in New York next week. I don't have to go out on the road because I'm just in the film portion."
Danger Danger rocker Steve West confessed an early, heretofore unsuspected affinity for Broadway: "I used to go see plays in the '60s when I was a kid. My parents took me to see Hair when it opened up. It screwed up my life. When they went naked at the end of that first act, my life was forever changed."
But it didn't — and won't — make him want to become Broadway tunesmith. "I have a hard enough time writing songs for my band," he said. "To write a whole Broadway score — naw, I'm not gonna do it. I leave it up to my good friend, David Bryan. I'll just write songs, that's all. I've already seen the show — I have to be honest with you — and it's amazing. I was blown away by it so I'm really excited to see it again."
Also excited, sight unseen, were two of Bryan's Bon Jovi-mates, Richie Sambora and Tico Torres. Said the latter, "I'm excited to see it. I haven't seen it. It's like I told David, 'When you hit Broadway, I'm coming,' so I'm here, here with bells on. We're very excited for him. I know he's worked very hard."
Danny Aiello, who made his Broadway debut across the street from the Shubert at the Helen Hayes (nee the Little Theatre) in 1975's Lamppost Reunion, was talking comeback. "We plan on being back here relatively soon," he admitted. "If God's willing, we might be there within six months. The play is called Al Capone. It was written by Robert Mitchell. It's a one-man show, a musical. It's him in a hallucinatory state. We're in a workshop situation."
Others in attendance: Gina Gershon, Gina and Patrick Neely of The Food Network, Marilyn Maye with entertainment lawyer Mark Sendroff, Jack Noseworthy, who goes out in quite literal flames in the Bruce Willis flick, "Surrogates" ("Look, see, a blue burning makes you look good!") Judith Light of "Ugly Betty" with The Royal Family's John Glover, Michael Urie also of "Ugly Betty," Sutton Foster, and Justin Bohon and Patrick Wilson, both from Broadway's last Oklahoma!.
"I should be out there on that red carpet, having my picture taken," opted reality-TV diva Jill Zarin of Bravo's "The Real Housewives of New York City," on arriving with hubby Bobby. One of the theatre's treasurers, Craig Bowley, directed her to the starting point, and she was off to share generously and liberally to any microphone or tape-recorder that was thrust in front of her.
It wasn't until the opening-night party when Debra Monk arrived with Cass Morgan, a Memphis standout as Kimball's bigoted-but-bending mom, that Bowley realized he had ushered for Pump Boys and Dinettes in which they were the original Dinettes portion of the program. Monk was with her most recent co-star, also a Tony winner, Harriet Harris. They have just finished It Should Be You, which created the biggest buzz at this year's National Alliance for Musical Theatre two-day bill of 45-minute musical samplers.
Harris, for one, was hopeful it would have a future life. "It 's a very funny story, very sweet," she said. "I really enjoyed working on it. It was great I had so many friends in it [like Joe Grifasi, Nick Wyman, Michael Tucker, et al]."
As for Memphis' future, Stephen Ivejia was optimistic. "Well, I have a lot invested in it because I need to work for five years," qualified the slick-domed stalwart who tears your ticket at the Shubert, "but audiences love it. I've never worked a show where audiences, from Day One, have loved and just embraced it."