There are only two men onstage, but there’s an awfully big crowd populating Lackawanna Blues. Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s autobiographical one-man play (plus musician) paying loving tribute to the woman who raised him features such a gallery of colorful characters that it’s no wonder it was adapted into a cable television movie featuring a large ensemble. But the piece works best as it was originally conceived—the actor narrating the tale and portraying some two dozen other characters in a virtuoso demonstration of solo storytelling.
The show, first seen at the Public Theater in 2001, revolves around its writer/director/star’s recollections of his childhood in the titular upstate New York town, which was thriving in the 1950s thanks to the booming steel industry. He grew up in a boardinghouse run by the enterprising Miss Rachel, mostly referred to as Nanny, who looked after him when it became clear that his neglectful parents weren’t up to the task.
Performing in front of a reproduction of the house’s brick façade, the actor regales us with anecdotes from his youth featuring such eccentric local denizens as Numb Finger Pete, Small Paul, Sweet Tooth Sam, and Bill, Miss Rachel’s romantic partner, who was also, unfortunately, an inveterate ladies’ man.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★★★ review here.]
The star’s delivery of the material feels musical, not only because his vocal rhythms are often redolent of jazz and hip-hop, but also because he’s accompanied onstage by the excellent guitarist Junior Mack, performing the blues music composed by Bill Sims Jr., Santiago-Hudson’s original collaborator on the show. (The actor, who clearly knows how to express gratitude, pays loving tribute to him in the program.) Occasionally, Santiago-Hudson also contributes blues harmonica solos, eliciting appreciative cheers from the audience.
Santiago-Hudson is such a dynamic, charismatic performer that it’s easy to overlook the fact that the piece, more an assemblage of vignettes than a compelling narrative, is sometimes difficult to follow. Although he entertainingly shifts among the many personas, expertly adjusting his voice and body language to portray the multitude of variously aged male and female characters, as well as himself as a child, you sometimes feel as if you need a scorecard to keep track of who’s who.
But if the storyline is occasionally confusing, one thing comes through loud and clear: his adoration of his beloved Nanny, who comes across as a strong, complex and nurturing maternal figure. “Nanny was like the government if it really worked,” he tells us about the woman who opened her boarding house to numerous species of animals as well as many of the town’s down-on-their-luck denizens. One of the funniest stories involves a self-entitled raccoon who showed up in her kitchen every morning for a home-cooked breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast.
There are times when the material feels overly broad. Portraying some of the more eccentric elderly characters, Santiago-Hudson relies too often on cheap, malaprop-driven humor. We hear about such New York City landmarks as the “Statue of Delivery” and “The Entire State Building,” that someone is suffering from “roaches of the liver,” and that “beauty is in the behind of the holder.” A little of that sort of thing goes a long way.
It’s when the performer settles down, getting to the heart of his tale, that the show most resonates. Particularly moving is his account of being anguished as a child when he realized that his beloved Nanny would die before him, a memory that becomes all the more poignant in the scene when he visits her on her deathbed in the hospital.
Lackawanna Blues provides stirring evidence of how much Nanny did for Santiago-Hudson. It also shows that with this adoring tribute, he’s movingly returned the favor.
