The African-American experience in different decades of the 20th Century is explored with ingenuity and passion in two new Off-Broadway musicals. Both feature eclectic and captivating scores, but whereas the operatic Intimate Apparel succeeds in telling a relatable story, Black No More, produced by The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center, pushes too hard to make its valid points. A rap-hip-hop stage adaptation of George S. Schuyler’s 1931 satiric novel, Black No More imagines a machine that transforms black people into whites. Subtitled, “Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free AD 1933-1940,” George S. Schuyler’s source novel takes a Swiftian sword to America’s fractured race relations.
The show starts with the wily Dr. Junius Crookman (played with an arched eyebrow by Tariq Trotter who also wrote the sharp lyrics and collaborated on the diverse music) addressing the audience with news of his miraculous invention, a process to change African-Americans’s skin tone to become indistinguishable from that of Caucasians. The procedure devastates the newly thriving Harlem community and changes the opportunistic Max Disher (Brandon Victor Dixon in a captivatingly funny performance) from a street con man into a leader of a white racist movement.
The premise is a potentially fascinating one. Melvin van Peebles created a reversal of the idea in his cult film “Watermelon Man,” and Douglas Turner Ward made a variation on it in his one-act play Day of Absence, with black actors in white face. While its intentions are honorable and its claims are perfectly valid, John Ridley’s book for Black no More is too broad and the characters too narrow for the musical to be entirely effective. It’s more like an “SNL” sketch stretched out to a full evening.
The score written by Trotter, Anthony Tidd, James Poyser, and Daryl Waters (who also is credited with musical supervision, orchestrations, and vocal arrangements) seamlessly combines hip-hop, rap, rock, reggae, soul, and even country-western for a smorgasbord of delights. Scott Elliott’s direction is well-paced, but Bill T. Jones’s choreography is truly outstanding with elaborate and intricate movement indicating character and social status.
Brandon Victor Dixon is a riot as he conveys Max’s metamorphosis into how he would imagine privileged white people would move. He’s equally captivating when the masquerade ends and he must confront the raw face of bigotry.
Tamika Lawrence infuses her supporting role of Buni, Max’s friend who attempts to rescue him from a Southern Klan community, with compassion and grit. The talented Ephraim Sykes, a highlight of Broadway’s Ain’t Too Proud, is unfortunately wasted in a functional part, while Lilias White makes the most of the no-nonsense hair salon proprietor who realizes her hair-straightening and skin-lightening techniques have contributed to black self-hatred. Jennifer Damiano also infuses depth in her role of the white Southerner who falls in love with Max, but Howard McGillin, Tracy Shayne, and Theo Stockman are stuck in stereotypes as her racist relatives.
The musical has many valid observations and intriguing staging and dancing, but its themes are too obvious and broadly presented.
