“Memphis” Brings “Music of
the Soul” to Broward
Center
By Skip Sheffield
Imagine if you will a world without rock ‘n’ roll music.
That was mainstream America
in the early 1950s.
“Memphis The Musical,” the rafter-raising Best Musical
Tony Award-winner 2010 musical at Broward
Center through March 9,
imagines the events that changed that situation and brought black rhythm and blues and
blues music to a larger white audience.
Joe DiPietro (book and lyrics) and David Bryan (music and
lyrics) have crafted a musical fable about a white Memphis disc jockey who introduced black
rhythm and blues to what had been a segregated radio market.
The prototypical wild and crazy disc jockey Huey Calhoun is
loosely based on the real-life radio and television personality Dewey Phillips.
The fable has elements of history, romance, changing
attitudes on racial segregation and a whole lot of gospel-fused and blues-based music.
Huey Calhoun (Joey Elrose) is a high school dropout living
with his mother (Pat Sibley) and working a menial job as stockboy at a Memphis department store.
Clumsy Huey quickly loses that job, but talks his angry boss
into letting him spin some records in the store to promote greater sales. Huey
spins a record from his own collection of rhythm and blues (“Scratch My Itch”) and
celebrates the genre in the song “The Music of My Soul.” Despite selling a
record 29 records at his first attempt, Huey gets fired anyway because his boss
doesn’t like “race music.”
Huey loves “race music” so much he ventures into an
all-black nightclub on Beale
Street (“Underground”). The owner, Delray (RaMond
Thomas) doesn’t cotton to white boys coming around, especially when they show a
special interest in his little sister Felicia (Jasmin Richardson), who sings at
the club.
A word about Jasmine Richardson: Fabulous. She is tall,
gorgeous and svelte, and she has a voice as powerful as a locomotive.
It is no wonder that Huey thinks he can make Felicia a star,
and no wonder he becomes smitten with her. This is a time when inter-racial
romance is taboo and thereby lies the conflict of this romance.
Other cast standouts are hefty but agile janitor-turned-announcer
Bobby (Jerrial T. Young), who is a significant gospel belter himself; and
Avionce Hoyles as bartender Gator, who is mute through most of Act One then
reveals an angelic tenor voice.
There is a crack band onstage to liven things up even more.
If you aren’t moved by this music of the soul, you better check your pulse.
Tickets are $34.50 and up. Call 954-462-0222 or go to www.browardcenter.org.
No comments:
Post a Comment