When the Cy Coleman/Ira Gasman musical The Life premiered off-Broadway back in 1990, Times Square had yet to make its transition into a glitzy theme park. By the time the show arrived at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, seven years later, the network of working girls and pimps, drug addicts and dealers and other desperate hustlers at its center had gone further underground as the local and national economy continued to thrive—for the fortunate, at least.
A quarter century on, the theater district may look even shinier and more banal on the surface, but the inequality that has festered since before Coleman, Gasman and their collaborating librettist David Newman put pen to paper has become still more pronounced—and the country more bitterly divided about how to deal with the have-nots and social castoffs who populate The Life. In adapting and directing the musical for a new concert staging, as part of this season’s Encores! series, the multi-tasking stage and screen star Billy Porter is, predictably, not shy about pointing that out.
Porter has crafted a production that is defiantly, exuberantly inclusive, from its casting to certain revisions made in the book. The Life is framed in the present, as the narrator, Old JoJo, a former hustler who now runs his own publicity firm on the West Coast, establishes when he lists reality stars and social media influencers among his clients. As played by Destan Owens (who doesn’t look old enough to have started working the streets in 1975, as JoJo did, at this point, but no matter), the character carries an air of refined, controlled authority—posing a sharp contrast to Young JoJo, a role assigned here to the singer/songwriter/actor Mykal Kilgore, whose gleaming tenor and playful stage presence prove an ideal fit.
Alexandra Grey turns in a drier, subtler performance as Queen, a prostitute who has moved north with her beau, Fleetwood, a military vet who manages his PTSD by staying stoned most of the time, though Ken Robinson’s haunted performance makes his despair obvious. The king of their community is Mephistopheles—um, that is, Memphis, a pimp who dresses entirely in red and wields a cane resembling a pitchfork; Antwayn Hopper invests him with a silky baritone and a searing menace that is by turns spooky and comical.
Indeed, while there’s certainly nothing funny about the struggles documented here, Porter and his actors mine the humor that is surely in part a survival mechanism for these characters. If the production sometimes threatens to veer into melodrama—or proselytizing, towards the end—it’s this combination of knowing wit and open-heartedness that keeps it on course.
Guest music director James Sampliner proves an equally valuable player, delivering new arrangements and orchestrations that bring stronger funk and disco accents to Coleman’s jazz-and-blues-inflected score. Michael McElroy’s vocal arrangements provide similarly soulful (if at times overly melismatic) showcases for the principals, who also include Erika Olson as an ambitious runaway, Jelani Alladin as an aspirational john, and the Grammy Award-winning R&B and theater veteran Ledisi as Mephisto’s long-suffering main squeeze, Sonja. Ledisi’s glistening, piercing take on Sonja’s eleven-o-clock number, “The Oldest Profession,” stopped the show cold, earning a sustained standing ovation at the opening night performance.
With the support of AC Ciulla’s spirited choreography, the ensemble also shines, incorporating a greater variety of body shapes and sizes than a typical chorus line does, even today. The suffering and resilience of marginalized women in particular is prominent in Porter’s rendering, whether in urgent, exhilarating production numbers such as “My Body” or in the bittersweet bond forged between two leading characters—one of whom, we eventually learn, is now transgender. If The Life remains one of Coleman’s less memorable achievements as a composer, Porter and Sampliner have infused it with enough fresh blood to merit another look and listen.
The Life opened March 16, 2022, at City Center and runs through March 20. Tickets and information: nycitycenter.org
