Raisin

The 1974 Tony Award for Best Musical went to Raisin, an adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. Never seen it? Well now is your chance!

Astoria Performing Arts Center--which has revived other overlooked musicals like Stephen Sondheim and George Furth's Merrily We Roll Along--is currently performing the first fully staged New York revival of Raisin since... well... ever!

Dev Bondarin directed the piece, and it has a wonderful cast, including Warren Nolan Jr. as Walter Lee Younger, Ebony Marshall-Oliver as his mother Lena, Brandi Knox as his wife Ruth, and Sarita Amani Nash as his little sister Beneatha.

The musical streamlines the story, eliminating the whole plot line concerning Ruth's pregnancy, and getting rid of Beneath's boyfriend George Murchison. We don't miss him one bit, though, since that gives more time for Beneatha's other love interest, Joseph Asagai, played winningly by Cartreze Tucker. His song "Alaiyo" is one of the highlights of the show.

While the musical strips down the plot of the original, it also expands the cast, giving us a chorus of neighborhood regulars who provide transitional numbers like "Runnin' to Meet the Man" and "Booze." We also get to meet the offstage scoundrel Willie Harris, played in all is dodgey grandeur by Billy Lowrimore. Tony Perry plays a pastor who embodies Lena's deep faith in the number that begins Act II, "He Come Down This Morning."

Finding songs in pre-existing plays can be challenging. Hansberry's classic has one memorable moment with music where Walter Lee dances on a table to the sounds of a record playing traditional African music. As Hansberry describes in the stage directions: "He sees what we cannot, that he is a leader of his people, a great chief, a descendant of Chaka, and that the hour to march has come." In the number "African Dance," Raisin allows the audience to see this, too, with the chorus coming on dressed in traditional African clothes provided by costume designer Jeannipher Pacheco.

The best song in the show, though, is the satirical "Not Anymore" in which Walter, Ruth, and Beneatha recount the visit they received from the "welcoming committee" of the new neighborhood where they hope to move. Alas, the depiction of barely beneath the surface racism is all too topical now in 2017.

If you're interested in seeing the show, get your tickets soon. Raisin runs only through May 27. For more information check out:

Astoria Performing Arts Center

Our Time

When Merrily We Roll Along opened on Broadway in 1981, audiences didn't know what to make of it. The play's structure, moving backward from a cynical and depressing present to a time in the past filled with hope and optimism, must have seemed horribly pessimistic, as if the show's creators only wanted to twist the knife in the gut of America, reminding it of all it could have been and had failed to be.

Seeing the show last night, in the wonderful production Dev Bondarin directed at the Astoria Performing Arts Center, I felt the opposite. This beautifully written play refuses to take away the charm and joy of youth, and the reverse chronological order makes the piece oddly optimistic. That might not have been apparent in 1981, but in a society surfeited on cynicism, wary from experience, but longing for something pure and true, perhaps this play can finally find a home.

Collaborators Stephen Sondheim and George Furth based the musical on a 1934 play of the same name by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. When that show opened, almost 50 years before the premiere of the musical, the Great Depression was still raging. I imagine audiences must have been inclined to think harshly of the play's sell-out protagonist, whose path is traced back to the time he graduated from college, spouting self-confidently, "To thine own self be true."

But the musical adds something vital... music! No matter how the audience might think about the play rationally, the music exerts an emotional force that resists the impulse toward cynicism. Traditionally, a musical will have a bright, happy version of a song in the first act, then a sad, melancholy reprise in the second. Merrily We Roll Along famously reverses this order. For instance, the character Beth (played wonderfully in this production by Rachel Rhodes-Devey) sings a horribly depressing version of "Not a Day Goes By" in Act I as she's going through a nasty divorce. Then in Act II, she sings the same song filled with love and joy on her wedding day.

What is the effect of this device? One might be tempted to laugh at poor Beth, to deride her as a fool for ever having dreams. However, Sondheim's music won't let you. Watching the show at APAC, it wasn't as though I didn't feel the joy of Beth's wedding day. Instead, I felt the joy of her wedding day AND the pain of her divorce at the same time. I couldn't dismiss the joy, but rather wanted to hold on to it all the tighter.

That goes double for the play's final scene, as the three friends who ultimately will tear each other apart share a magical moment on a rooftop watching the world's first satellite fly overhead. A moment in the past is not any less real, any less meaningful for having gone by. The emotions the characters feel, and that we feel, are still valid, even if they are doomed to dissipate and die.

Merrily We Roll Along is playing at APAC until May 23rd, so be sure you get a chance to see it. The central trio of composer Franklin Shepard, lyricist Charley Kringas, and novelist Mary Flynn are portrayed with pathos by Jack Mosbacher, Nicholas Park, and Ally Bonino respectively.

Just be warned: You won't be able to get the score out of your head. In spite of what a certain producer in the play says, this show has plenty you can hum.

For more information, go to:

Astoria Performing Arts Center