What’s not to love about a musical crafted by a multi-racial, multi-generational creative team that traces an African-American family’s journey over decades from adversity to hope? Add to that Broadbend, Arkansas‘s production pedigree—the world-premiere work is being staged by the famously innovative Transport Group, in association with the Public Theater—and it’s easy to approach this world-premiere work with high expectations. Or at least, to really, really want to like it.
Alas, you might still leave the Duke on 42nd Street, where Broadbend recently opened, feeling like you’ve been there longer than the show’s 100-minute running time (with an intermission). That includes two short acts; in the first, “Just One Q,” we meet Benny, a black orderly dealing with “two ornery white women” at a nursing home in the early 1960s—his patient, Bertha, and his boss, Julynne, whose shared history has made their relationship fraught, to put it mildly. Benny, meanwhile, nurses his own dreams and frustrations, fed by news reports of the Freedom Riders’ struggle against racial injustice.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★★ review here.]
The second act, “Ruby,” is set 30 years later, and introduces us to one of Benny’s now-grown twin daughters as she grapples with lingering bigotry, made freshly painful by police brutality committed against her 15-year-old son. Like Benny, Ruby relays her story in spoken word and song—that is, if you can define any of the musical phrases that composer Ted Shen strings together as song. As written by Shen, who also provides some lyrics, with librettists Ellen Fitzhugh (“Just One Q”) and Harrison David Rivers (“Ruby”), Broadbend suggests an operetta with no arias, just recitative; Shen, an obvious Sondheim junkie, lays on the dissonance, but lacks the melodic invention to make his passages really fly.
The show is nonetheless beautifully orchestrated by Michael Starobin, who highlights Shen’s affinity for jazzy touches and culls a lush, haunting sound from the five-piece orchestra, consisting of strings and reeds and conducted by pianist and music director Deborah Abramson. The actors, too, are savvy musicians, though as guided by Transport Group co-founder and artistic director Jack Cummings III, their performances can seem mannered at times. Justin Cunningham is an immensely likable Benny, bringing a sense of gentle good humor and fundamental decency to the role, but there’s an exaggerated delicacy to much of his singing. It doesn’t help that he’s tasked with essentially voicing Julynne and Bertha, while bouncing between three chairs on the virtually bare set provided by scenic consultant Dane Laffrey.
As Ruby, Danyel Fulton also veers between holding back and lunging forward to express her character’s desperation and anguish. If Fulton’s voice isn’t as warm or limpid as Cunningham’s, it’s a sharply expressive instrument, by turns shivery and shrill, with a lyric tone embellished by a heavy vibrato. Fulton embraces the jazz nuances in Shen’s score, sometimes playfully, so that her delivery is more consistently engrossing. Rivers keeps Ruby’s story more focused as well, so that her suffering and defiance are more tangible—though both librettists establish a moving link between Ruby and Benny’s trials and their personal growth.
Cunningham and Fulton appear together only once, briefly; I’ll say nothing about the moment that unites them, except that it made me grateful for sticking through Broadbend‘s slower moments—and sent me home wanting to hold my own daughter a little closer. I suppose that’s reason enough to like any show, even a flawed one.
Broadbend, Arkansas opened November 10, 2019, at the Duke on 42nd Street and runs through November 23. Tickets and information: transportgroup.org
