Play On

Conceived by Sheldon Epps, book by Cheryl L West, music by Duke Ellington
Lyric Hammersmith Theatre, Talawa Theatre Company, Belgrade Theatre, Birmingham Hippodrome, Bristol Old Vic, Liverpool Everyman & Playhouse and Wiltshire Creative
Lyric Hammersmith, London

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Tsemaye Bob-Egbe as Viola Credit: Ciara Hillyer Production
KoKo Alexandra as Lady Liv Credit: Ciara Hillyer Production
Tsemaye Bob-Egbe as Viola and Earl Gregory as Duke Credit: Ciara Hillyer Production
The ensemble Credit: Ciara Hillyer Production

Play On instantly transports us to the exciting rhythms of Duke Ellington’s music with ten brilliant, fast-moving performers dancing centre stage. No wonder Viola (Tsemaye Bob-Egbe) wants to develop her songwriting talents in this reimagining of the Harlem Cotton Club set sometime in the 1940s.

The trouble is, as Viola’s uncle Jester (Llewellyn Jamal) explains, this is a man’s world, and women can certainly sing men’s songs but it’s not their place to write them. This prompts Viola to declare, “if it’s a man’s world, I’ll just have to make myself into a man”.

Changing into a suit and tie, she names herself Vyman. What follows in the Epps and West 1996 romantic musical version of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night sees Vyman impressing the suave bandleader Duke (Earl Gregory), who is suffering a bit of writer's block. Liking the upbeat melody of Vyman’s song, he gets Vyman to deliver it to the popular nightclub singer Lady Liv (KoKo Alexandra), who is also impressed by this new man.

In the second half of the show, Liv explains to Vyman that she “is just an illusion… I’m Elizabeth. I wanted someone to love me for who I really am.” That is a trigger for Vyman to almost instantly reveal her own identity.

Meanwhile, Liv’s dresser, the singer Mary (Tanya Edwards), is getting fed up with her boyfriend Sweets (Lifford Shillingford) and the moodiness of Liv. To pass the time, with the help of Jester, they persuade the straight-laced club manager Rev (Cameron Bernard Jones) to bring a bit of rhythm to his movements and bright colours to his clothes, much to the stunned horror of Liv, the woman he has fallen in love with.

Anyone who has seen Twelfth Night will recognise the sequence, but this version of Rev, the Malvolio figure, is treated more kindly with no traumatic mockery or confinement. His austere behaviour is also in part explained by the club operating in the context of a white, racist, Jim Crow society that is suspicious of the activities of black people. As he briefly explains to Liv late in the play, to protect the black performers, he had to be a “flunky” to the club's white owners.

This is an important glimpse of the history of the Cotton Club, which was for most of its existence a place where black people performed for a white segregationist audience, something Duke Ellington had been part of a campaign to end. It’s a story that ought to have been in the programme, even though it’s not in the musical, perhaps for fear it might cast a shadow over the fun.

In contrast, the gender aspects of the performance remain a focus. By the second half, the women in the show have all fallen out with their admirers, a useful plot development for the twenty Ellington songs plus four others in the same style which, despite the uplifting mood of the show, are lyrically mostly about having the blues for a lost woman.

The women the philandering Jester has courted have all walked away from him, prompting him to sing with Sweet an amusingly raucous version of Ellington’s “Rocks in My Bed”.

However, the musical is too upbeat for us not to be surprised that every character is matched up with a partner by the show's end.

The performance is always entertaining, even if the music and the exciting ensemble street-dance style choreography never progress the plot or really explore character. The story rests on its engaging, gentle humour of, for instance, Jester and the clear gender sympathies of its recognition of women’s inequality in society.

Reviewer: Keith Mckenna

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