As the audience files into the Atlantic Theater Company’s main performance space for The Secret Life of Bees, the stage is visible and mostly bare. There are musicians tuning up around its periphery, and votive candles flickering on ledges and sills. When the action starts, announced by an African-American woman entering and banging a drum, suggesting that we’re entering a somewhat ritualized storytelling space, the lights rise, bathing the players in an amber glow. The candles, the musicians’ music lights, the stage lighting, they’re coordinated, and warm. This, you realize, is a piece of theater bathed in honey.
On one hand, of course it is. The musical version of a best-selling coming of age novel (which also became a less-successful Queen Latifah vehicle), set against the Civil Rights struggle in the American South, the story concerns a group of women whose buzzing apiaries yield a legendarily good honey.
On the other hand, it is perhaps the final subtle moment in the show.
[Read Elysa Gardner’s ★★★★ review here.]
The Secret Life of Bees, which is beautifully staged by Sam Gold and gorgeously sung by a talented, big-voiced cast, suffers from a malady all too common to musicals based on teen-focused novels: Its messages are billboarded, its plot points are signposted, and its characters are largely unidimensional. The script, by the multi-Pulitzer-winning Lynn Nottage, ably delivers a warm-hearted story of predictable uplift, but it doesn’t succeed in making Bees dramatically compelling.
It’s 1964 in rural South Carolina, and we know it’s 1964 in the South because the first spoken line in the play comes from a radio announcer informing us that LBJ has just signed the Civil Rights Act, and that “local activists vow to test the new provisions.” Our heroine is a sweet young motherless very white girl actually named Lily (Elizabeth Teeter, in a role that mostly requires her to scowl), and she must contend with her abusive, widowed father, a man universally called T-Ray (a snarling Manoel Felciano), who actually tells her that her “sass just earned” her a punishment.
At the same time, the black housekeeper who has raised Lily in her mother’s absence, Rosaleen (Saycon Sengbloh, duly saintly), is determined to heed Johnson’s call and register to vote. Local racists interfere, and she ends up bloodied and in jail, likely to be killed. Lily breaks Rosaleen out of jail with a simple plan: Among the few keepsakes she has to remind her of her mother is a card with a black Virgin Mary on the front and the words “Tiburon, S.C.” on the back. And so the two are on the lam, on foot, to Tiburon.
All of this is transpiring, of course, in a musical. It has a score by Duncan Sheik, whose wonderful Spring Awakening debuted on the same stage, and lyrics by the vet Susan Birkenhead, probably best known for Jelly’s Last Jam. The score is a mix of searching ballads and rollicking, full-company celebrations; it nicely mixes soul and R&B, gospel and spirituals. It’s bouncy, clever and fun. (The lyrics are not; they’re as leaden as the plot.)
When Lily and Rosaleen get to Tiburon, they almost immediately discover that the black Mary is the logo of Black Madonna honey, and then the find the honeymakers, at what seems to be almost a lesbian hippie commune. In fact, it’s the home of a trio of three educated, unmarried black women, sisters, who earn their living from their bees and practice a sort of ecstatic Catholicism, based around worship of the Black Madonna. The two runaways are welcomed wholeheartedly, they’ve found a safe haven. Here, too, Bees finds its groove: Sheik’s music and Gold’s staging—including Chris Walker’s choreography, Mimi Lien’s sets, and that honeyed light from Jane Cox—are the best parts of the musical, and celebratory numbers at that homestead, and in praise of the Madonna, let those aspects shine.
It also gives the performers a chance to show off their pipes. The inimitable LaChanze overwhelms as August, the eldest sister and the leader of this benevolent quasi-cult. Her sisters are equally excellent: Anastacia McCleskey as the sad May, who has never gotten over the suicide of her twin, April, and Eisa Davis as the stern June. There’s also young Zachary (Brett Gray), the beekeeping assistant, who gets to sing a love song to his car, and who develops a very much requited crush on Lily.
That interracial crush, of course, leads to trouble. This being an obvious story with a happy ending, the trouble is fairly quickly resolved.
And of course it is: The Secret Life of Bees is a musical about a horrible time in our country’s history. It’s got great music and strong performances, but it’s a feel-good story determined not to sting.
The Secret Life of Bees opened June 13, 2019, at the Linda Gross Theater and runs through July 21. Tickets and information: atlantictheater.org
