Play On! is a Duke Ellington jukebox musical based on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night with a book by Cheryl L West. The show had a short run on Broadway in 1997, and this UK production is directed by Talawa’s Artistic Director, Michael Buffong. It opened in Coventry this week before heading out on tour until February 2025.
The action has been relocated from Illyria to The Cotton Club in 1940s Harlem. There is no reference to the date in the show itself, we only know it is the 1940s because it says so in the programme, but The Cotton Club moved from Harlem to Broadway in 1936 and it closed in 1940, so by the 1940s it no longer existed. That’s fine, The Cotton Club setting is only there to provide a pretext to sing a lot of Duke Ellington’s songs, so a little artistic licence is permissible.
The lead character, Viola (Tsemaye Bob-Egbe), is a talented young jazz musician who comes to New York to make it as a songwriter. She goes to The Cotton Club where she meets her uncle, Jester (Llewellyn Jamal). He tells her songwriting is a man’s world, so she decides to disguise herself as a man and she calls herself Vyman. Jester introduces her to The Duke (Earl Gregory), the band leader at The Cotton Club, who is in love with The Cotton Club’s star singer, Lady Liv (Koko Alexandra). She is his muse, but since she rejected his advances, he has been suffering from writer’s block. He likes Vyman’s music, so he sends her to present her song to Lady Liv in the hope that it will win her round and he can write again.
So far, so Twelfth Night. If you know your Shakespeare, there is a certain trainspottery fun in watching the show. The Duke is Orsino, obviously, Viola is Viola and Lady Liv is Olivia. Jester / Feste is part of a comic trio with Sweets / Sir Toby Belch (Lifford Shillingford) and Miss Mary / Maria (Tanya Edwards), who all gang up on the pompous club manager, Rev / Malvolio (Cameron Bernard Jones), who has a crush on Lady Liv. I kept waiting for Sir Andrew Aguecheek to turn up, but he’s not in this version, neither is Viola’s brother, Sebastian.
This is a thoroughly enjoyable show with an emphasis on the music—there are 24 musical numbers in a little over two hours—rather than the plot. A five-piece band is on stage at all times, and the sound is well-balanced with a cast of sixteen actors and dancers performing on a simple, versatile red proscenium arch set.
The first half leans most heavily on its source material, and at times it felt as if the dialogue was having to do a lot of heavy lifting to manoeuvre the story into the next number. Act 1 ends on a gorgeous quartet, "(Be My) Solitude", sung by Vyman, Lady Liv, The Duke and Rev, which sets up a stronger second half.
Act 2 kicks off with a knockout version of "I Ain’t Got Nothin’ But The Blues", sung by Lady Liv. That leads into the Malvolio yellow stockings scene, which consists here of Rev singing "I’m Beginning To See The Light" to Lady Liv in a fabulous Jim Carrey / The Mask yellow suit. He looks and sounds sensational—he can dance, too—so this is a long way from the humiliation Malvolio suffers in Twelfth Night. In fact, the further the show gets from its Shakespearean source, the better it gets.
Act 2 continues with a series of terrific duets. When Jester and Sweets get dumped by their respective partners, Ceecee (Gleanne Purcell-Brown) and Miss Mary, they get drunk together and deliver a show-stopping number, "Rocks In My Bed". Rev and Lady Liv reconcile over "Something To Live For", Sweets and Miss Mary have a very Nathan Detroit / Miss Adelaide number in "Love You Madly", and when Vyman reveals her true identity to The Duke, they sing "Prelude To A Kiss" together.
There is one, brief, reference to the history of The Cotton Club when Rev tells Lady Liv about the emasculating humiliation of being a black man having to serve a segregated, white-only audience. It hints at a more dramatic storyline and the sense that, with a better book, this could have been a better show. As it is, it’s a great night out. The band is good, Kenrick H2O Sandy’s choreography is slick and energetic and the cast sells every number, so it is well worth catching in Coventry or on tour.