"Betsey Brown," produced by Crossroads Theater Company, 7 Livingston Avenue, New Brunswick. The letdown is a discursive series of rifts and reconciliations, with no musical matter to give it moment. Wanting to break through, wanting to conform, the show is stuck between what it means to say and what it wants to be. Unlike its heroine, "Betsey Brown," the musical, suffers identity problems that might be diagnosed more as retrogression than relapse. McKnight sweetly plays Betsey's 5-year-old brother, whose need to throw lighted matches into the garbage bin is a mere bothersome detail mentioned, rather than incorporated into the fabric of a family. Miss Leach does it conscientiously, if not transcendently.ĭonovan Ian H. To Nicole Leach (Betsey Brown) falls the daunting task of summing up everyone's point of view and getting it all together. Cheek is a gale force whose character lapses into a digressive figure. Feebly placed and awkwardly staged, they pop up as out of context sparring matches. When the mother returns, the face-offs between the two women - one has been on the front lines the other has been keeping house - have the raw ingredients to whip up an audience. Cheek out-sasses everyone, as prescribed. Mann more than a year and a half ago, the even more rambling direction by Ricardo Khan, sometimes resembling adolescent theater, is bewildering. Jeff, a gardener (Lawrence Clayton), a concession to musical comedy convention that has nothing to do with organic musical theater.Īfter the rambling direction of Ms. Witness, for example, an aimless romance between Carrie (Jean Cheek), who suddenly materializes to take charge of the Brown household when the mother leaves, and Mr. Shange's and Emily Mann's book, with its dawdling first act and lugubrious second, drifts from pontification to obligatory scenes of confrontation to instant, unbelievable moments of accommodation and compromise, without approaching cohesion. A teacher in whiteface downgrades the poetry of Dunbar, and Betsey is beaten up by her white classmates - all this in the wake of the Supreme Court decision on newly desegregated schooling. Then there's Regina, Betsey's friend, who is led astray by Roscoe, her boyfriend. Jane is returning to her Charleston roots for "a bit of independence time," and to play her active part, as opposed to her husband's pedantic one, in the civil rights movement.īetsey has to contend with the fuddy-duddy ways of her grandmother, Vida, a hapless role for Clarice Taylor, who calls her Miss Elizabeth Brown and would like her to curtsey. ![]() Meanwhile, inside the house, Betsey and her three siblings are being quizzed on black history by their father, Greer, a doctor (Robert Jason Jackson) while their mother, Jane (Alisa Gyse-Dickens), walks out. The current Crossroads Theater Company production has devolved from the 1991 McCarter Theater version.Īn omnipresent sign of the show's disoriented state is that the significant tree, the retreat where Betsey is perched, reading and writing poetry and watching battling, hurtful grown-ups make a mess of things, appears more to be an encumbrance than a symbolic necessity. Other song and dance treatments of Ntozake Shange's work - published as a story in 1974, as a novel in 1985 - expired in workshop. The search began even before the musical had a premiere in 1989 at the American Musical Theater Festival in Philadelphia. Louis in 1959.Īs a musical, "Betsey Brown" is still wandering in search of form, focus and a reason for being. AS a character, the 13-year-old Betsey Brown comes home free, having sorted her way through racially charged confrontations, ideological differences, family crises, sexual awakenings, educational reactionism and misleading peer influences - all that - amid tension and change in St.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |