It took the audience a while to warm up to the final show of the season at Riverside Theatre. “Memphis,” a musical about an oddball 1950s white DJ who has more success going public with his love of black music than for a black singer on his radio show.
But by 20 minutes in, the laughter was rocking the place.
This show, like “How to Succeed in Business…“ last year and “Grease” in 2013, was co-produced with Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia, where it will run this summer.
It is said to be loosely based on Dewey Phillips, the Memphis speed-fueled DJ who played up his hillbilly roots and pioneered mixing both black music and white music on his radio show.
In the musical, the DJ’s name is Huey Calhoun. A cute-mistake kind of guy, he’s a cross between Jerry Lewis and a Huckleberry Hound Dog. He’s played by Christopher Sutton who, while he doesn’t try hard to recoup the Southern accent, gives us enough “ain’t”s to qualify for a rube. His bungling loser of a character somehow manages to appeal to Kimber Sprawl’s stunning and strong Felicia, the singer Huey falls for when he stumbles into an all-black underground club one night, drawn in by the soulful music he has always loved.
In his hapless way, he vows to deliver her music to the world, dodging her fiercely protective brother, Delray, played powerfully and plausibly by Philip Michael Baskerville. He also has to circumvent his own racist mother, with whom he lives in a pitiful shack – worse than the houses of black folks, Felicia notes.
Huey’s foray into music begins when he finagles a sales job at a department store record counter. Despite nearly losing his stock boy position after dropping a box of china, the boss says he’ll keep him on if he can sell five records during the boss’s break. Huey sells 29 by playing a rockabilly soul music single that causes a near-riot of white kids rushing in to hear it.
For his dangerous taste in tunes, Huey gets canned, and moves on to try a series of radio stations. Finally, he sneaks into a DJ booth, locks the door and fires up the contraband sound. Suddenly heads pop out of windows in all the surrounding buildings, and phones start ringing in requests. Goofy Huey’s response? “Huckadoo!” which becomes his rallying cry. (His skeptical mean white boss inserts the F-bomb in that, once Huey starts making him a pile of money.)
When Felicia finally makes a record for Huey to play on his station, Huey’s awful mom smashes it. Undaunted, Huey drags poor Felicia to a stand mic, and the back-up boys from the club appear like magic to perform the song on the air.
Needless to say, her career is launched. The decision then becomes whether she should follow her ambition and move to New York City or stay in Memphis with Huey – though they could never openly be together there; that’s made clear after the two suffer a violent beating by a gang of whites.
That is the one scene of real horror in this segregation-era piece, though the dramatic moment gives Delray’s friend Gator, mute since witnessing his father’s lynching, his voice back: Good thing. The voice belongs to actor Travis Keith Battle, and it’s one of the most beautiful in a talented cast. (The only voice that strained to keep up was Sutton’s, but that almost fit his character – his falsetto sounded like a kitten mewing.)
As for humor, there is really only one belly-laughable song, and it’s absurdly set up: Huey’s mama Gladys (Mary Martello) does a one-eighty that only the Lawd Awmighty could pull off, after she drops in – by herself – on an all-black church and gets a good dose of its righteous pastor.
OK, so this isn’t Selma the Musical. It’s supposed to be light. But I hate losing some degree of authenticity when the integration of the radio dial was momentous in American popular music history. There is little “roots”- like in this show. Written by two white guys from New Jersey, Joe Dipietro, a Phi Betta Kappa English major at Rutgers, who also wrote “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change”; and David Bryan, the keyboard player for Bon Jovi, the show won four Tony awards including Best Musical, though it only ran on Broadway from 2009 to 2012.
YouTube clips from Broadway’s “Memphis” show a lot of similarity with Riverside’s show, directed and choreographed by Richard Stafford, a veteran regional theater director.
The show’s original choreography was by Colombian-born Sergio Trujillo, who also choreographed “Jersey Boys” and “Flashdance: The Musical.”
And flashy dance is what we get. I would have liked to have sensed more visceral rhythm and grit in the style of the “down-down-underground” club performers. I came away thinking Rockettes meet MGM Grand, and not so much African-American dance vernacular. Those gracefully executed kicks could have used a hint of, say, Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers in “Hellzapoppin“ and the very few shimmies and hip thrusts needed the rawness of the frenzied moves in “Fela!”
The black ensemble’s male dancers had a bit more going on, particularly the pants-enhanced Bobby (Nichalas Parker) who moved in the somewhat cliché big flappy way of overweight men that gets big laughs. The women, though, seemed more uptown than downtown, and certainly less underground than what likely would have played out in real time in the 1950s.
As for their Caucasian ensemble counterparts, they were somewhat less dorky that Huey. Watch some old 1950s dance clip – that seems to be the look guys were after. Amazing the baby boom ever happened.
While the score offered decent facsimiles of early rhythm-and-blues, rock and soul, the lyrics completely gave their white authors away, written in the sort of sung-through style where plot elements and dialogue are contained in the lyrics – in many cases, awkwardly.
From Felicia’s opening song, performing at the nightclub: “My brother runs my life, my brother owns this bar. He won’t let me alone till he makes me a star.”
Or from Huey in the finale, “Steal Your Rock ‘n Roll”, where the lyrics have him rhyming “ignored,” “adored” and “deplored.” Deplored? Hear that lately from a (self-declared) hillbilly idiot? I would have implored Bryan and Dipetrio to explore that thesaurus.
They are not hummable tunes, one audience member complained later. I would add, they could have come from any of a dozen other Broadway musicals.
That shouldn’t be. “Memphis” has a clear premise: Difference drove rock ‘n roll, and rebellion took it public. Yet the music in “Memphis” seemed derived not of black culture but the conformist culture of Broadway.
Despite the creators of “Memphis” resorting to focus groups to increase its black Broadway audience, there were very few blacks in the audience at Riverside.
As for the white audience, I had a focus group of one next to me: an older white man who remarked to his friend at intermission: “I have to say, I’ve had it up to here with this race thing. But I like this more than I thought I would.”