The Shaw Festival Theatre Review: Blues for an Alabama Sky
By Ross
With nerves to spare, the Shaw Festival red-lights the deep sharpness of the play, Blues for an Alabama Sky by Pearl Cleage (What I Learned in Paris) onto the Jackie Maxwell Studio Theatre stage. I remember seeing this play back in the day, off-Broadway in New York City. But the intricacies of this well-crafted deconstruction of 1930s politics and their aftermath had grown hazy – much like Angel’s memory of the night the electric firebrand of a singer was unceremoniously dismissed at the Cotton Club.
The play opens all tangled up in that night’s aftermath, as Angel stumbles home in a drunken stupor, assisted by her flamboyant and assured best friend, Guy Jacobs, ferociously portrayed by Stewart Adam McKensy (Shaw’s Brigadoon), and a kindly stranger from the street “that took pity“. Fired “like you stole something,” we are told, but it’s that handsome stranger that is really the trigger of this play, and it is he, Leland, strongly portrayed by JJ Gerber (Shaw’s Wait Until Dark), who shifts their world far more than a firing ever could.
In many ways, this is a play about the singer Angel Allen, usually portrayed by the vibrant actor, Virgilia Griffith (Crow’s Rosmersholm). But in the performance I attended, the part was bravely embodied by Kiera Sangster (Shaw’s One Man, Two Guvnors) with a script in hand and a fierceness in her heart. Holding as tightly to dreams against an avalanche of social change that isn’t coming fast enough for many in these adjoining rooms, the play strides forward with power and determination. It’s difficult to fully take in how this production would feel with the intended lead occupying the central figure of Angel. Sangster is definitely sharp and defiant, forging forward with guts and determination in her vivid framing, but holding a script does slow down the rhythm of Cleage’s words, leaving the Harlem rhythms hanging just out of reach.
Given the circumstances, I’ll refrain from a detailed critique of the acting, especially since the lead was an understudy, holding on to her script firmly. That fact inevitably affected the fluidity of her performance and the whole play’s unfolding. So writing a review of the production presents some obstacles, as it feels cut and sewn off balance and somewhat slowed down. And there is not a performing soul to find fault for that.
Directed well by Kimberley Rampersad (Stratford’s King Lear), the play is a complex story of this family of friends, richly painted in the air around them. We watch them unpack the difficulties of being themselves, finding financial hardship heaped in the corner alongside the seemingly fairytale hopes of Paris, love, and salvation. They come together, forging a caring union of differences that are tighter than the loss that lives just outside the door. It’s a thoroughly compelling union, sizzling with conflict but based somewhat in respect and honor.
But it’s Angel’s hazy, complicated love of her friends that is combustible and at stake, as she pines for a saviour who can make all her troubles disappear. And in a way, she finds one, though not in the figure she expected or with the outcome she hoped for. Her white knight does arrive, when push comes to shove, and that’s when the Southern ways come slamming up hard against a more liberated way of being. But it’s in that family of four, including her next-door neighbour, the social worker Delia, portrayed by Mary Antonini (Shaw’s Anything Goes), and her own version of a knight, the brilliantly crafted Doc Sam Thomas, performed beautifully by Allan Louis (Shaw’s Gypsy), that ends up being the most fractured and forfeited by the invited in Southern hospitality.
The cast works magnificently hard to be there for the very game Sangster, and thanks to her powerful determination, the framing is surprisingly strong. It’s sometimes hard to stay as deeply tuned in to the poetry, dreams, and music of the piece. And the space, created by set and costume designer Ting-Huan 挺歡 Christine Urquhart (Tarragon’s Cockroach), doesn’t help. It’s overcrowded with clutter in tightly stuffed awkward angles, often trapping the actors in tight quarters too small for their large personalities. All the while, other square footage remains empty, unused, and casually wasted. Even the doorframes obstinately get in the way without adding any context. There doesn’t need to be such a purposefully realistic remedy to the room, as the sharpness of the light, designed by Chris Malkowski (HOUSE + BODY’s Measure For Measure), could have played a stronger role in that orientation, along with the actor’s strong centering.
Yet, it’s all there, in the words and the wisdom of these finely crafted characters. Their internal clutter is enough to tell the dynamic story of Blues for an Alabama Sky. I give huge kudos to the cast, particularly Sangster, for driving this exhilarating drama through its transformative paces, lifted by the original music and sound design by Miquelon Rodriguez (Buddies’ Reina), but too tightly cramped for its own good. Yet even in those overwrought quarters, Blues for an Alabama Sky burns hot with resilience, thanks to the tight cast determined to carry its poetry and pain forward, while supporting the bravery of an understudy with supreme love and care.
