Late in this rousing musical, Eugene Fleming, as "Professor," the loyal piano player in Madame Mary's New Orleans Bordello, concludes, "I'll finish my opera, got lots of material now" and, indeed, there is almost too much material in the late Thomas Babe's over-ambitious "libretto" for Call the Children Home. However, while the book reeks of operatic-style melodrama, it serves the music, and luckily so. Composer/lyricist Mildred Kayden has infused the production with a versatile score, from lilting romantic waltzes to bawdy blues, ballads from tempting to tortured, sprinkled with toe-tapping, foot-stompin' old-time rags delivered by a talented ensemble cast whose exuberance and bravado strains the confines of their tiny stage. The convoluted plot weaves a slim thread tying the twenty plus musical numbers together.
The eight talented players try mightily to handle an unwieldy book which starts out happily enough (well, how happy can it be when it follows a murder as a patron is shot?) and, at its end, encompasses two murders, a suicide, sadomasochism and all sorts of corruption! A vengeful, whip-wielding customer at Mary's St. Louis bordello is shot while threatening to kill her. The Madame (the aptly named Tamara Tunie), along with her two cheery prostitutes, Pia (Angela Robinson) and Blondie (Sophia Salguero) and their piano player (Eugene Fleming) blithely leave town and set up their house in New Orleans with a loan and "guidance" from the town "administrator," Anderson (Julian Gamble). A deceptively innocent young woman (Christiane Noll) is led to the establishment by a mischievous hanger-on, photographer Papa (Caesar Samayoa) where she joins her mother's (shhhh, don't tell, she's the abandoned daughter) establishment to save her and, in the process, cohabitates with her mother's new lover (Sean McDermott), marries her mother's benefactor and ultimately destroys her.
The story is told through joyous ensemble numbers, sensitive solos, deeply touching duets, with emotions from pain to ecstasy. There is so much music, it is practically sung through, and that is a blessing. Where the book falters, William Grant's lighting fills in the spaces lending drama where needed, creating marvelous tableaux (especially the jail scene) as staged by director Kent Gash, setting off Austin Sanderson's limited but effective costumes and Tanya Gibson-Clark's evocative choreography.
The production needs space, and, above all, editing but its pleasing to the eye and, especially, to the ear.
