To celebrate jazz great Duke Ellington and his orchestra, as well as the 1923-heyday of the Cotton Club, Wynton Marsalis has handpicked a 17-piece big band and 25 performers to recreate the era in After Midnightat the Brooks Atkinson Theater.
TV’s Dule Hill (“Psych,” “The West Wing”) serves as emcee and quotes poetry from Langston Hughes. Sometimes he is the transition from one act into the next with his pleasant manner, smiling face and tap dancing.
The Cotton Club often had “Celebrity Nights” on Sunday and, similarly, After Midnight features celebrities in each performance. The first in a series of name performers is American Idol winner, Fantasia, last seen on Broadway in The Color Purple. Fantasia is excellent, performing four familiar songs, including “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love” and “Stormy Weather.” The most enjoyable is the spirited Cab Calloway number, “Zaz Zuh Zaz” that she sings with four of the male cast performers seated in the box seats.
Although all the performers are wonderful, Adriane Lenox, winner of the Tony and Drama Desk Award for Doubt, stands out. Not only is she a fine actress, but here she proves how well she can deliver a song. Looking knowing, she sings “Women Be Wise” and later, reminiscent of Ella Fitzgerald, she performs “Go Back Where You Stayed Last Night,” a song written by Sydney Easton and Ethel Waters.
The Cotton Club had an illustrious history of dance. In fact, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, earned $3500 a week, the highest salary of any black perfomer in a Broadway production when he performed at The Cotton Club. After Midnight features Jared Grimes performing one of the last numbers in the show with his expert tap dancing to an Ellington number, “Tap Mathematician “/”It Don’t Mean A Thing.”
The Jazz at Lincoln Center All Stars, conducted by Daryl Waters, are 17 incredible musicians who accompany the singers and dancers and then get to play independently. On stage the entire time, they are not only consummate professionals but actually enjoy what they are doing. Some of them smile throughout the show.
I had feared that After Midnight would be a mediocre jukebox musical with performers imitating famous singers and telling a story that bogs down the music. Happily, I was wrong, and finally this season there’s a musical that’s all music. The only dialogue is a few lines of poetry, but we don’t need any more words. One woman in the audience near us commented about how much more she liked this musical than Motown. I agree.
