| Billy Porter injects life into “The Life” and Ledisi stops the show | |
| Posted by: Singapore/Fling 11:24 pm EDT 03/18/22 | |
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| Can “The Life” ever work as a musical? Probably not. This shallow melodrama debuted in the late 90s unsure of what it wanted to be, an odd marriage of wan showbiz razzmatazz, familiar sitcom rhythms, and gritty (though campy) portrayals of sex workers in a tawdry Times Square fondly remembered through rose tinted glasses. Assembled on stage, it was a mess that lurched through its plot points and never settled on a consistent tone, occasionally inspiring but often embarrassing, which perhaps explains why it’s rarely been performed since. For everything Billy Porter does to the show - and Oh, Lord, he does a lot - he succeeds where the original couldn’t, fashioning a mostly cohesive vision of “The Life” as a stylish, sexy, thoroughly campy and always audacious melodrama with a Blacksploitation pulse and stank for days. This approach delivers a version that is in many ways true to the original production, but improved: while the highs of the show are unchanged from twenty-five years ago - “My Body”, “The Oldest Profession” and The Hooker’s Ball continue to deliver the sizzle when the rest of the show tends to fizzle - the lows don’t sting so bad as they once did. Yes, the story is dull and some of those lyrics are groaners, but Porter’s version moves quickly through its paces as plot lines pop up and drift away, montage of songs whirl across the stage, and the new book drops pretty much every trans slur it can remember from the 1980s and a few it might have made up. I came to tonight’s show expecting Porter to be the star, but he has fashioned “The Life” into a platform for the virtuosic cast to sell their wares for a few hours, and they are the reason to drop your dough on a ticket. Mykal Kilgore, Antwayn Hopper, and Alexandra Grey deliver ferocious, often electric performances; the women in the ensemble lift us up when they devour their newly funky numbers (big props to Michael McElroy’s stunning vocal arrangements); and Ledisi takes us to church with a soulful rendition of the once-comic “Oldest Profession”, turning the song into a cri-de-couer that had the audience in the balcony shouting and shaking and snapping and swaying and beating the furniture - and one dude down in the orchestra covering a speaker with his coat - until we were on our feet and the show was stopped and people out on 55th Street knew that something was going on inside the City Center. That moment, one of the most thrilling I’ve had at the theater, makes the best argument I could imagine for Encores! producing the play in this form. It doesn’t all work, of course. Aside from the inherent problems of the material, some of Porter’s additions are awkwardly shoehorned into the evening, and he would have been wise to bring in a real playwright to write better dialogue. Much has been made of the politicizing added to the night, and while some of the additions are deliciously camp - who doesn’t want the fever dream of a kick line of Trumps and Reagan’s explaining the evils of capitalism? - too often they land leadenly on the stage, and a sudden turn to Brechtian self-seriousness struck me as so silly that it was camp. But here’s the thing: I was there for that. In a way, these were my favorite parts of the night, an unintentional homage to the original’s awkward tonal shifts that also mark the willingness of Encores! to try something new, even if it falls on its face. Whatever its faults, this Life throws a fabulous party and attempts to shake up our generally conservative mainstream theater culture. And while they didn’t deliver quite the music that Cy Coleman imagined, they gave us something I liked better: a chance to celebrate a score that was always better than the show it was attached to but lacked the grit, the funk, and the Blackness it aspired to. For a few days, “The Life” has found some life, as glorious as it is bizarre, a bumpy ride whose highs make the lows so down sweeter, with a shattering star turn that reminds us why theater exists in the first place: so we can witness human excellence and shout to the gods that something unforgettable just passed before our eyes. |
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| Previous: | re: MORE LIZA 1997 @ THE LIFE: TAKE TWO - shocktheatre 04:11 pm EDT 03/19/22 |
| Next: | "The Oldest Profession" as an act 2 11 o'clock number... hmm - Chazwaza 12:55 pm EDT 03/19/22 |
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