Play On! at the Lyric Hammersmith review: Twelfth Night relocated to Harlem's Cotton Club
This sassy American jazz musical relocates Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night to Harlem’s Cotton Club in the 1940s and sets it to the irresistible songs of Duke Ellington.
The story is simplified to remove several levels of confusion – the identical brother of heroine Viola and other characters are written out – and some of its cruelty is softened. The sense of carnivalesque revelry undercut by romantic yearning remains.
The show was originally created by director Sheldon Epps and writer Cheryl L. West in 1997, transferring from San Diego to Broadway.
In Michael Buffong’s stripped-back revival for Talawa and various co-producers, a talented ensemble tear through Ellington classics – Mood Indigo, Don’t Get Around Much Any More – and some deeper cuts that were a revelation to me.
A storming, gospel-inflected rendering of Rocks in My Bed, in which three men passionately testify to their romantic woes, is a case in point. All in all, it’s terrific, powerfully-voiced fun, even if the script borders at times on the silly and the stereotypical.
Here country girl Viola (Tsemaye Bob-Egbe) dresses as a man to break into the sexist world of songwriting. She inveigles herself with handsome crooner-composer The Duke (Earl Gregory), who’s creatively blocked after breaking up with stroppy chanteuse Lady Liv (KoKo Alexandra).
Shakespeare’s clown Feste is transformed into womanising dancer Jester (Lewellyn Jamal), and the puritan steward Malvolio becomes the amusingly buttoned-down manager Rev (Cameron Bernard Jones), alert to any impropriety or misbehaviour that might upset the club’s white owners and audience.
Yet he accepts an offer from the rascally Jester and his cohorts to teach him to be cool enough to woo Lady Liv. His makeover, in a nice nod to the original, includes a fabulous canary-yellow zoot suit.
And that’s about it, plot-wise. The set is a basic proscenium framing the band, with a sketched in dressing room to one side and a bar to the other. The choreography for the young supporting troupe by Kenrick H2O Sandy MBE is sinewy but loose. What powers the show forward are the songs and the charm of the leads.
Bob-Egbe is captivating as the open-faced Viola, aka Vyman, constantly forgetting to deepen her voice and jut her pelvis while swooning for The Duke. She formerly played Katherine Howard in SIX the musical, which has become the prime forcing-ground for female musical talent.
Gregory finds the right blend of suavity, smugness and vulnerability as The Duke, dapper in two-tone shoes and a razored parting. Their late duet on Prelude to a Kiss is gorgeous.
Lady Liv’s character isn’t much more than a simmering tantrum wrapped in sequins but Alexandra has a rich and powerful soul-gospel voice. We gain more human insight into the lives of her dresser (and second rank singer) Miss Mary and her bandleader husband Sweets, which is a nicely democratic touch.
Where characters are divided by social rank in Twelfth Night, it’s talent that matters here. It falls to Jones’s Rev to remind us now and again of the real structural power-imbalance, represented by the white overclass offstage. This adds a little salt to an exuberant show which, like Ellington’s music and lyrics, is more sophisticated than it seems.
To 22 Feb, lyric.co.uk.
