A NIGHT WITH JANIS JOPLIN ROCKS THE BLUES....a review

 

Erich McMillan-McCall
Founder/CEO

www.Project1VOICE.org

 

 

 

 

Janis Joplin first rose to fame in the late 1960s as the lead singer of the psychedelic-acid rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company and later as a solo artist with her own backing groups.  She was dubbed the "Queen of Rock."  She was known for her electric stage presence. She was rough around the edges, charismatic and vulnerable paving the way for countless women in rock.  Who knew that she was inspired by the blues?  The new  musical biography “A Night With Janis Joplin”  which just opened at the Lyceum Theater tries to tell us the story of how four African American blues singers influenced her musical styling.

 

Janet Joplin loved the blues.  However, the book written, by Randy Johnson, who also serves as director does not quite take us on that journey but does set the stage for an  incredibly  memorable musical concert.  The book lightly touches on the unmistakably emotional raw voiced singer's Texas childhood and her person life but not the booze and drugs that cut her life short at only 27 from a heroine overdose.  Although we do see her gulping lots of Southern Comfort as the evening goes by.  But what this "bio musical" lacks in its book it makes up  as a musical concert journey that celebrates the legendary singer and her biggest musical influences--Bessie Smith, Etta James, Nina Simone and Aretha Franklin.

 

The stage at the Lyceum Theater is set with  table lamps of all shapes and sizes all over the stage, dynamic concert lighting,  Persian rugs, bell bottoms, long hair, amazing sound, projections, fantastic choreography by Patti Wilcox, lots of Southern Comfort and a real live rock band.  And did I say lots of Southern Comfort? We are magically  transported back to the days of free love and protests. This is a musical concert that you do not want to miss!  Amazing does not begin to describe the talent that pummels you with vocal gymnastics number after number.  I saw Kaycee Clanton as Joplin.  She alternates in the role of Janice Joplin with Mary Bridget Davies.  Clanton bears a strikingly eerie physical resemblance to Joplin.  She also has the chops as well as Joplin's exuberance.  She serves up, with great ease I might add, the emotional raspy wailings that made Joplin a blues and soul legend. Her renditions of Joplin classics like "Piece of My Heart," "Cry Baby,"  "Me and Bobby McGee" and  "Ball and Chain" will have you wanting more of that back in throat singing Joplin was known for.  I loved that the show ends with "Mercedes Benz," one of my personal favs!  The evening was quite special in ways I did not imagine. The audience was instantly up on its feet at the end with thunderous applause.

 

Clanton shares the stage with an awesome rock band and four spectacularly gifted women Taprena Michelle Augustine,  De' Adre Aziza, Allison Blackwell, Nikki Kimbrough.   They play Joplin's back up singers, the Joplinaires, as well as, her four biggest musical influences.  Blackwell is a particular standout as the "Queen of Soul," Aretha Franklin.   

 

What you don't learn about Joplin's tortured life from the show's book you can Google.  Through this musical concert  journey I was reminded  of how original Janis Joplin was an artist.  She was truly electric!  In her voice you can hear young voices refusing to be a part of the status quo.  Hers was a voice of inspiration and empowerment for so many who found themselves protesting in some way in the late sixties and early seventies for change.  Nobody sings like she sang.   

 

 

Lyceum Theater; 674 seats; $140 top.  Opened Oct. 10, 2013.. Running time:  TWO HOURS, 20 MIN.

 

Production

A presentation by Daniel Chilewich, Todd Gershwin, Michael Cohl, Jeffrey Jampol, TCG Entertainment, Stephen Tenenbaum, Richard Winkler, Michael J. Moritz, Jr. / Brunish & Trinchero, Ginger Productions, Bill Ham, Claudio Loureiro, Keith Mardak, Ragovoy Entertainment, Bob & Laurie Wolfe / Neil Kahanovitz, Mike Stoller & Corky Hale Stoller, Darren P. DeVerna, Susan DuBow, Tanya Grubich, Jeremiah H. Harris, Jerry Rosenberg / AJ Michaels, and Herb Spivak, in association with the Estate of Janis Joplin and Jeffrey Jampol for JAM, Inc., of a musical in two acts written and directed by Randy Johnson.  Originally produced by Arena Stage and also by the Cleveland Play House.

 

Creative

Sets & lighting, Justin Townsend; costumes, Amy Clark; sound, Carl Casella; projections, Darrel Maloney; hair & makeup, Leah J. Loukas; choreography, Patricia Wilcox; music director & conductor, Ross Seligman; original music, arrangements & direction, Len Rhodes; music coordinator, Howard Joines. 

 

Cast

Mary Bridget Davies, Taprena Michelle Augustine, De'Adre Aziza, Allison Blackwell, Nikki Kimbrough, Alison Cusano, Emmy Raver-Lampman, Kaycee Clanton.


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FOUR LITTLE GIRLS: Birmingham 1963

Directed by Phylicia Rashaad
watch it on the Kennedy Center Website NOW
http://www.kennedy-center.org/explorer/videos/?id=M5581
 

The "Trip" is more "Bountiful" than ever!

by Erich McMillan-McCall
Project1VOICE
erich@project1voice.org

       

The Trip to Bountiful  starring Tony winner Cicely Tyson, Cuba Gooding Jr. and Vanessa Williams continues its sentimental bittersweet journey on Broadway through October 9.   Directed by Michael Wilson, the Broadway revival of Horton Foote’s classic drama was originally scheduled to play through September 1 at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre. The production opened on April 23.

In addition to Tyson, Gooding and Williams, The Trip to Bountiful stars Tom Wopat and the newest addition of Adepero Oduye replacing Tony nominee Condola Rashad. The play also features Devon Abner, Curtis Billings, Pat Bowie, Leon Addison Brown, Arthur French, Susan Heyward, Bill Kux, Linda Powell and Charles Turner.

The Trip to Bountiful tells the story of Carrie Watts (Tyson), an elderly woman who longs to see her hometown of Bountiful, Texas, one final time. Meanwhile, her overprotective son (Gooding Jr.) and domineering daughter-in-law (Williams) try to make her stay home.

This is my second time seeing the play. Even though I knew what was going to happen, I still found myself  rooting for Carrie to pack that suitcase and escape to Bountiful. When she pleads to her son Ludie (Gooding) "I want to go home." your heart just aches." Miss Tyson is nothing less than radiant as Carrie. The dirty looks she throws Williams' Jessie Mae behind her back is perfect comic relief than deservedly hateful.

The cast is as fresh as it was opening night.  Williams is superb as the bored gorgon of a  daughter in law  obsessed with coca cola, getting her hair done and going to the picture show.  While Gooding is amusing as Carrie's sweet, underachieving and overprotective son caught in the middle of two determined women with endless needs and demands.  They both do such an amazing job that it not easy to loathe her or hate him for not standing up for himself or Carrie.

The supporting cast is also just as powerfully wonderful with Tom Wopat as the Sheriff, Arthur French as the station worker and Adepero Oduye as Carrie's friend on the bus. 

As "Trips" go, this is most certainly a "Trip" I could make over and over again, as long as Cicely Tyson is somewhere in the mix.

 "The Trip to Bountiful"
 Sondheim Theatre, 124 W. 43rd St.
$37-$142; 212-239-6200 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting  FREE 212-239-6200 end_of_the_skype_highlighting;
 thetriptobountifulbroadway.com

 

DETROIT 67 is Comin' Uptown....FINALLY!

The play “Detroit ‘67” by two-time NAACP Image Award recipient, Dominique Morisseau will begin its highly anticipated Harlem run at the National Black Theatre on Saturday, March 23.
                                                
Detroit ’67,” which was developed through the Public Theatre’s Emerging Writers Group, a co-production with the Classical Theatre of Harlem and the National Black Theatre, will play the Public through March 17, prior to transferring to the CTH March 23 – April 14.
                                
Set in 1967 in Detroit, where Motown music is getting the party started, the play follows Chelle and her brother Lank, who are making ends meet by turning their basement into an after-hours joint. Always at odds, they fight over the future of the family trade. But when a mysterious white woman finds her way into their care and string of raids increases police brutality around the city, the siblings become divided over much more than business. Suddenly, they find themselves caught in the middle of the ’67 riots.
                                                                                

DETROIT '67...it blew me away!

by Erich McMillan-McCall

 

The 1967 Detroit riot, also known as the 12th Street riot, was a civil disturbance in Detroit, Michigan, that began in the early morning hours of Sunday, July 23, 1967. The precipitating event was a police ...raid of an unlicensed, after-hours bar then known as a blind pig, on the corner of 12th (today Rosa Parks Boulevard) and Clairmount streets on the city's Near West Side. Police confrontations with patrons and observers on the street evolved into one of the deadliest and most destructive riots in United States history, lasting five days and surpassing the violence and property destruction of Detroit's 1943 race riot. Sounds like an unlikely scenario to use as backdrop for a play about family but in Dominique Morriseau's DETROIT '67 family is most certainly the tie that binds.

DETROIT '67 is a spellbindingly perfect theatrical event arising from a powerful combined effect of a unique set of circumstances: superb acting, extraordinary direction and a mesmerizingly powerful play! Humor, ferocity and keen feeling are abound in all three. There is not a weak link. Rarely do we see such strong vivid portrayals of African Americans with an undeniably deeply-rooted familial bond, on stage, screen or television, especially today.

Tolstoy tells us, "All happy families are alike, and each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." So is the case with the Poindexter family and their friends in Detroit in 1967--they are truly unhappy and happy in their own way. This family is fiercely funny and bitingly sad. DETROIT '67 is a turbocharged family drama about survival in the extreme circumstances of racial discord and riots in Detroit in 1967. What a combination! It will blow you away! It is sensationally entertaining! This is theater that will keep you hooked with shocks, surprises, delights, with a heart moving core. It is a must see American theater game changer.

I am so thrilled and proud that this American story is coming to the National Black Theater in Harlem! Dominique Morisseau is letting her 1VOICE be heard and the pen is her sword. How will your 1VOICE be heard?  I hope it will be heard buying a ticket(s) to this must see Harlem theatrical event!

Erich McMillan-McCall
Founder/Executive Director of Project1VOICE, Inc
www.project1voice.org
erich@project1voice.org

 

 

The Show Schedule
March 23 through April 14

 

@ The National Black Theatre – 2033 Fifth Avenue at 125^th Street in Harlem. Performance will take place Tuesday through Sunday at 7:30pm, with matinees on Saturday at 1 pm. Tickets are $25 for adjusts and $20 for students and seniors may be purchased online at www.classicaltheatreofharlem.org or by calling 866-811-4111.

LOOK UPON OUR LOWLINESS
Be sure to check out Harrison David Rivers' LOOK UPON OUR LOWLINESS beginning April 4th at the Harlem School of the Arts produced by the Movement Theatre Company in association with Radical Evolution beginning April 4 for more information and tickets go to http://www.themovementtheatrecompany.org/07/home.html#!lowliness/c9hq

Upcoming Project1VOICE Events

The 3rd Annual 1VOICE! 1PLAY! 1DAY!  presents a benefit stage reading of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama A SOLDIER's PLAY by Charles Fuller at partcipating Project1VOICE network theaters simultaneously on June 17, 2013.  This year we are international!

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the events of  the 1963 American Civil Rights Movement, Project1VOICE in association with over 50 international venues will present simultaneous staged readings of  FOUR LITTLE GIRLS: Birmingham 1963 by Christina Ham. This unprecedented international event will take place on Sunday September 15, 2013, the 50th anniversary of the fatal bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham Alabama that killed four unoffending Sunday School pupils:  Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carol Robertson and Cynthia Wesley.  www.project1voice.org

AUNT ESTHER'S CHILDREN: A century on stage by August Wilson

This essay, which serves as the preface to King Hedley II (TCG Books), was written in the spring of 2000, before the playwright had begun the final two plays in his 20th-century cycle. It first appeared in the New York Times (April 23, 2000).


In 1975 I wrote a short story titled "The Greatest Blues Singer in the World." As it turned out, the text of the story was very short. I began, "The streets that Balboa walked were his own private ocean, and Balboa was drowning." That seemed to communicate the idea with more clarity than I could hope to gain by adding to it, so I stopped and typed "The End."

I had conceived a much longer story that spoke to the social context of the artist and how one's private ocean is inextricably linked to the tributary streams that gave rise to, and occasioned, the impulse to song.

Before one can become an artist one must first be. It is being in all facets, its many definitions, that endows the artist with an immutable sense of himself that is necessary for the accomplishment of his task. Simply put, art is beholden to the kiln in which the artist was fired.

Before I am anything, a man or a playwright, I am an African American. The tributary streams of culture, history and experience have provided me with the materials out of which I make my art. As an African-American playwright, I have many forebears who have pioneered and hacked out of the underbrush an aesthetic that embraced and elevated the cultural values of black Americans to a level equal to those of their European counterparts.

Out of their experiences, the sacred and the profane, was made a record of their traverse and the many points of epiphany and redemption. They have hallowed the ground and provided a tradition gained by will and daring. I count it a privilege to stand at the edge of the art, with the gift of their triumphs and failures, as well as the playwrights down through the ages who found within the turbulent history of human thought and action an ennobling conduct worthy of art. The culture of black America, forged in the cotton fields of the South and tested by the hard pavements of the industrial North, has been the ladder by which we have climbed into the New World. The field of manners and rituals of social intercourse—the music, speech, rhythms, eating habits, religious beliefs, gestures, notions of common sense, attitudes toward sex, concepts of beauty and justice, and the responses to pleasure and pain—have enabled us to survive the loss of our political will and the disruption of our history. The culture's moral codes and sanction of conduct offer clear instructions as to the value of community, and make clear that the preservation and promotion, the propagation and rehearsal of the value of one's ancestors is the surest way to a full and productive life.

The cycle of plays I have been writing since 1979 is my attempt to represent that culture in dramatic art. From the beginning, I decided not to write about historical events or the pathologies of the black community. The details of our struggle to survive and prosper, in what has been a difficult and sometimes bitter relationship with a system of laws and practices that deny us access to the tools necessary for productive and industrious life, are available to any serious student of history or sociology.

Instead, I wanted to present the unique particulars of black American culture as the transformation of impulse and sensibility into codes of conduct and response, into cultural rituals that defined and celebrated ourselves as men and women of high purpose. I wanted to place this culture on stage in all its richness and fullness and to demonstrate its ability to sustain us in all areas of human life and endeavor and through profound moments of our history in which the larger society has thought less of us than we have thought of ourselves.

From Joe Turner's Come and Gone  (which is set in 1911) to King Hedley II (set in 1985), the cycle covers almost 80 years of American history. The plays are peopled with characters whose ancestors have been in the United States since the early 17th century.

They were brought across an ocean, chained in the hulls of 350-ton vessels. In the southern part of the United States, they were made to labor in the vast agricultural plantations. They made do without surnames and lived in dirt-floor cabins. They labored without pay. They were bought and sold and traded for money and gold and diamonds and molasses and horses and cows. They were fed the barest of subsistence diets. When they tried to escape, they were tracked down by dogs and men on horseback. They existed as an appendage to the body of society. They had no moral personality and no moral status in civic or church law.

After 200-odd years, as a political expediency, they were granted freedom from being the property of other men. During the next hundred years they were disenfranchised, their houses were burned, they were hung from trees, forced into separate and inferior houses, schools and public facilities. They were granted status in law and denied it in practice.

Yet the characters in the plays still place their faith in America's willingness to live up to the meaning of her creed so as not to make a mockery of her ideals. It is this belief in America's honor that allows them to pursue the American Dream even as it remains elusive. The conflicts with the larger society are cultural conflicts. Conflicts over ways of being and doing things. The characters are all continually negotiating for a position, the high ground of the battlefield, from where they might best shout an affirmation of the value and worth of their being in the face of a many-million-voice chorus that seeks to deafen and obliterate it.

They shout, they argue, they wrestle with love, honor, duty, betrayal; they have loud voices and big hearts; they demand justice, they love, they laugh, they cry, they murder, and they embrace life with zest and vigor. Despite the fact that the material conditions of their lives are meager. Despite the fact that they have no relationship with banking capital and their communities lack the twin pillars of commerce and industry. Despite the fact that their relationship to the larger society is one of servitude and marked neglect. In all the plays, the characters remain pointed toward the future, their pockets lined with fresh hope and an abiding faith in their own abilities and their own heroics.

From Herald Loomis's vision of the bones rising out of the Atlantic Ocean (the largest unmarked graveyard in the world) in Joe Turner's Come and Gone, to the pantheon of vengeful gods ("The Ghosts of the Yellow Dog") in The Piano Lesson, to Aunt Ester, the then 349-year-old conjure woman who first surfaced in Two Trains Running—the metaphysical presence of a spirit world has become increasingly important to my work. It is the world that the characters turn to when they are most in need.

Aunt Ester has emerged for me as the most significant persona of the cycle. The characters, after all, are her children. The wisdom and tradition she embodies are valuable tools for the reconstruction of their personality and for dealing with a society in which the contradictions, over the decades, have grown more fierce, and for exposing all the places it is lacking in virtue.

Theatre, as a powerful conveyer of human values, has often led us through the impossible landscape of American class, regional and racial conflicts, providing fresh insights and fragile but enduring bridges of fruitful dialogue. It has provided us with a mirror that forces us to face personal truths and enables us to discover within ourselves an indomitable spirit that recognizes, sometimes across wide social barriers, those common concerns that make possible genuine cultural fusion.

With the completion of my latest play, King Hedley II, I have only the "bookends," the first and last decades of the twentieth century, remaining. As I approach the cycle's end, I find myself a different person than when I started. The experience of writing plays has altered me in ways I cannot yet fully articulate.

As with any journey, the only real question is: "Is the port worthy of the cruise?" The answer is a resounding "Yes." I often remark that I am a struggling playwright. I'm struggling to get the next play on the page. Eight down and counting. The struggle continues.

June 17, 2013  Project1VOICE presents the 3rd Annual 1VOICE! 1PLAY! 1DAY! with Charles Fuller's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama A SOLDIER's PLAY

September 15, 2013 Project1VOICE in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the events of 1963 presents FOUR LITTLE GIRLS:  Birmingham 1963 by Christina Ham
at over 50 venues around the world simultaneously in 1DAY!

DETROIT '67...it blew me AWAY!

 The 1967 Detroit riot, also known as the 12th Street riot, was a civil disturbance in Detroit, Michigan, that began in the early morning hours of Sunday, July 23, 1967. The precipitating event was a police ...raid of an unlicensed, after-hours bar then known as a blind pig, on the corner of 12th (today Rosa Parks Boulevard) and Clairmount streets on the city's Near West Side. Police confrontations with patrons and observers on the street evolved into one of the deadliest and most destructive riots in United States history, lasting five days and surpassing the violence and property destruction of Detroit's 1943 race riot. Sounds like an unlikely scenario to use as backdrop for a play about family but in Dominique Morriseau's DETROIT '67 family is most certainly the tie that binds.

Last nights performance at the Public of DETROIT '67 was a spellbindingly perfect theatrical event arising from a powerful combined effect of a unique set of circumstances: superb acting, extraordinary direction and a mesmerizingly powerful play! Humor, ferocity and keen feeling are abound in all three. There was not a weak link. Rarely do we see such strong vivid portrayals of African Americans with an undeniably deeply-rooted familial bond, on stage, screen or television, especially today.


Tolstoy told us, "All happy families are alike, and each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." So is the case with the Poindexter family and their friends in Detroit in 1967--they are truly unhappy and happy in their own way. This family is fiercely funny and bitingly sad. DETROIT '67 is a turbocharged family drama about survival in the extreme circumstances of racial discord and riots in Detroit in 1967. What a combination! It will blow you away! It is sensationally entertaining! This is theater that will keep you hooked with shocks, surprises, delights with a heart moving core. It is a must see American theater game changer.

I am so thrilled and proud that this American story is coming to the National Black Theater in Harlem!  Dominique Morisseau is letting her 1VOICE be heard and the pen is her sword. How will your 1VOICE be heard?

Erich McMillan-McCall
Founder/CEO/Executive Director of Project1VOICE, Inc
www.project1voice.org
erich@project1voice.org


3rd Annual 1VOICE! 1PLAY! 1DAY!  6/17/13  A SOLDIER's PLAY by Charles Fuller
1st Annual Project Young Voice  4 LITTLE GIRLS: Birmingham 1963 by Christina Ham 9/15/13
SAVE THE DATES!



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