A remarkable new music-theater work of significance and disturbing beauty, The Black Clown illuminates 300 years of the black experience within white America in a mere 70 minutes.
Presented for only four performances in Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart festival, The Black Clown and its stunning production deserve a longer stint in the metropolitan area.
Drawn from a same-named poem by Harlem Renaissance great Langston Hughes, The Black Clown both entertains and confronts the audience as it peers behind the Uncle Tom masks that African-Americans were forced to wear in order to survive.
Hughes’ 1931 work, which he described as a dramatic monologue, is helpfully printed in the show’s accompanying Playbill: Its format juxtaposes two parallel texts that stack “Poem” against “Mood” columns that mutually describe African-American existence.
Davóne Tines, a terrific bass-baritone singer who portrays the title figure, collaborated with composer Michael Schachter in crafting this musical adaptation of the poem, previously staged last fall by and at American Repertory Theater.
[Read Bob Verini’s ★★★★★ review of the 2018 ART production here.]
Neither a song cycle nor an oratorio but a theatrical melding of the forms, The Black Clown involves a lead singer, an ensemble of a dozen singer-dancers, and an 11-member chamber orchestra. They wend their musical way through ceaselessly shifting moods, styles, and rhythms that mirror the fluctuations occurring within the poem.
Tines, a young, statuesque man clad in a sleeveless black T-shirt, dress pants, and suspenders, first speaks and then sings the opening lines directly at the audience: “You laugh/ Because I’m poor and black and funny—/ Not the same as you….” Tines is gradually joined by the ensemble, initially attired in formal black and white, whose voices echo and interplay with his.
These grave beginnings soon explode into a bright, raucous evocation of a 1930s honky-tonk world in which blazing music and frenetic dance routines evoke the gala likes of Fats Waller, Josephine Baker, the Nicholas Brothers, and similar showbiz icons. This “Strike Up the Music” episode then dramatically shifts into a somber “Three Hundred Years” sequence as back-lit screens project looming Kara Walker-like silhouettes of people who are depicted in motion repetitive or random.
Everything looks strangely lovely except that it’s obvious these figures are slaves being abused and exploited in the plantation fields. The music meanwhile turns bleak and deeply bluesy, punctuated by dull clangs repeating in the percussion, suggesting a chain gang’s sledge hammers.
So the show rolls out, its emotions swiftly rocking back and forth between exhilaration and oppression, determination and defeat. Schachter’s melodic score is a hot melting pot that pours out early jazz, gospel, classic R&B, swing, and operatic styles of music, augmented by classic spirituals such as “Nobody Knows” and “Motherless Child” that are beautifully arranged and hauntingly sung. The score is resonant and dramatic, yet old-school in flavor, since the poem deals out pre-hip-hop history.
The expressive choreography by Chanel DaSilva is eclectic and electrifying, perhaps most startlingly during the cartoonish “Freedom!” sequence: An Abraham Lincoln on stilts materializes, waving an Emancipation Proclamation banner as everybody sings and dances like mad. Amid the jubilation, complete with jazz hands, soft-shoe breaks, and even a cakewalk, shackles are sported like feather boas by women and a noose transforms into a jumping rope. Such song-and-dance satire is disquieting, especially when this giddiness evaporates into the wintry “Black in a White World” bleakness of the Jim Crow years that follow.
A jazzy slow-mo New Orleans-style funeral procession and a symbolic white ladder present other meaningful moments that are inventively deployed by director Zack Winokur in his fast and fluent staging of the production. Heightened by John Torres’ rich lighting, the ever-shifting white walls and elegant era-spanning fashions designed by Carlos Soto effectively support the work.
Surrounded by a splendid ensemble whose individual and collective voices enforce the music, Davóne Tines delivers a charismatic performance as the chief storyteller whose sonorous bass-baritone easily drives through the others’ assembled sound.
While The Black Clown is purposefully unsettling in its depiction of the injustices and mockeries black lives have suffered in America, it concludes on an affirmative note, as does the poem. Tines and Schachter and their fine collaborators have faithfully transfigured an obscure piece written way back when into genuinely epic musical theater for today.
The Black Clown opened July 25, 2019, at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater Space and runs through July 27. Tickets and information: lincolncenter.org
