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THE HARDER THEY COME

Ivan (Natey Jones, far left) arrives in the city seeking fame and fortune in The Harder They Come (photo by Joan Marcus)

THE HARDER THEY COME
Newman Theater, the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. at Astor Pl.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 9, $105
publictheater.org

There’s a big difference between a show or movie with music and a fully fledged musical, in which original songs help propel the narrative. That divergence is one of the central flaws in the world premiere of The Harder They Come, at the Public’s Newman Theater through April 9.

The 1972 movie is a Jamaican cult favorite that recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary; it follows a country boy named Ivanhoe Martin, portrayed by reggae legend Jimmy Cliff in his first and only starring role as an actor, who arrives in Kingston with little more than a guitar and the dream of making a hit record. The soundtrack is one of the all-time greats, consisting of genre-defining tunes by the Maytals (“Sweet and Dandy,” “Pressure Drop”), the Slickers (“Johnny Too Bad”), Desmond Dekker (“007 [Shanty Town]”), the Melodians (“Rivers of Babylon”), Scotty (“Draw Your Brakes”), and Cliff himself, who contributed six songs, including the title track, the only one written specifically for the film.

In her book, Public writer-in-residence and Tony and Pulitzer Prize winner Suzan-Lori Parks, who has written such hard-hitting plays as Topdog/Underdog, Fucking A, and Father Comes Home from the Wars . . . , squeezes too many songs that were background and incidental in the film into the show’s narrative, forcing them into the plot.

An accomplished singer-songwriter, as evidenced by her terrific Plays for the Plague Year, a three-hour intimate performance piece about the pandemic that reopens at Joe’s Pub on April 5, Parks adds several new songs to The Harder They Come, including “Hero Don’t Never Die,” “Please Tell Me Why,” and “Better Days,” expanding, and sometimes changing, the motivations of various characters as Parks attempts to smooth out the bumps and choppiness of the film.

Alas, that is part of its charm. And I’m still trying to understand why the second act opens with Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now,” which Cliff recorded in 1993 for the film Cool Runnings about the 1988 Jamaican Olympic bobsled team. The song was part of Reggae Hit the Town: Crucial Reggae 1968-1972, a bonus disc added to the soundtrack album years later; Dekker’s “Israelites” also is in the show from the same collection.

Preacher (J. Bernard Calloway) has a tight hold on his congregation in world premiere at the Public (photo by Joan Marcus)

The story is a rough and violent drama that begins with Ivan traveling to the big city to give his mother, Daisy (Jeannette Bayardelle), her pittance of an inheritance. She wants him to return to the country, but Ivan (Natey Jones) is determined to stay and become a star. With no place to go, he hooks up with the Holy Redeemer Church after meeting and instantly falling for the young and innocent Elsa (Meecah), the orphan ward of the church’s well-connected Preacher (J. Bernard Calloway).

Desperate to make a record, Ivan ultimately signs a terrible contract with local music mogul Hilton (Ken Robinson), a wealthy man who controls what gets played when and where. With no money, Ivan starts working for ganja dealer Jose (Dominique Johnson), who is in cahoots with a plainclothes cop named Ray (Dudney Joseph Jr). Everywhere he goes, Ivan creates conflict with the avaricious men of Kingston, battling religion, drug lords, law enforcement, and corporate greed in his determination to get what he believes he deserves. “You can get it if you really want it / But you must try, try and try, try and try,” he sings.

Instead of laying low like his best friend, Pedro (Jacob Ming-Trent), who also sells for Jose, Ivan can’t stop speaking his mind. After an altercation with a policeman, Ivan is on the run, attempting to hold things together while also reveling in his newfound fame.

Directed by Tony Taccone (Bridge & Tunnel, Wishful Drinking) with codirector Sergio Trujillo, who is best known for his choreography for jukebox bio-musicals (Summer: The Donna Summer Musical, A Bronx Tale), The Harder They Come contains numerous wonderful scenes with fabulous music, performed by a strong cast (Ming-Trent stands out, his character providing comic relief and an honest perspective) and an excellent six-piece band; Kenny Seymour’s orchestrations and arrangements do justice to the originals, although some snippets are too much of a tease and a few of Parks’s new songs are overly melodramatic. In addition, you never get to hear the title track in full; as a kind of encore, it is performed at the very end, but one stanza is curiously left out.

Local music mogul Hilton (Ken Robinson) offers Ivan (Natey Jones) a bad deal in The Harder They Come (photo by Joan Marcus)

Choreographer Edgar Godineaux makes sure the movement never gets out of hand on Clint Ramos and Diggle’s two-level shanty town set, strewn with garbage drums, used tires, multiple old TV sets and speakers on the walls, bamboo, palm leaves, and muted greens and yellows inspired by the Jamaican flag (found also on the railings near the stage), along with earth-toned colors that are also prominent in Emilio Sosa’s costumes. The sound is by Walter Trarbach, with lighting by Japhy Weideman.

In the film, directed by Perry Henzell and cowritten with Trevor Rhone, Cliff’s Ivan already had a hard edge, a willingness to become an outlaw to fight for what he thinks is fair. But in Parks’s version, Jones (Get Up Stand Up, Tina: The Tina Turner Musical) portrays a far more naive and good-natured Ivan, more sensitive to Elsa’s needs and not as inherently dangerous. Cliff’s Ivan is proud of what he did to the policeman and glories in becoming a hero-villain who cheats on his wife and smokes big spleefs, while Jones’s Ivan claims the incident was accidental and never fully inhabits the character’s bad side.

The show has been stripped of its nuance, too easily pitting good vs. evil amid hierarchical, colonialist power structures. While a lot has changed since the film came out half a century ago, a lot hasn’t. This theatrical iteration — Henzell oversaw the script for a 2005 British adaptation — ends up caught somewhere in between.

[Note: The Public is hosting the “Wheel & Come Again” art auction on the mezzanine level, with more than a dozen works available, from $300 to $1000, inspired by the film and musical, raising funds to benefit scholarships at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston.]

BAD CINDERELLA

Bad Cinderella (Linedy Genao) rises up in Andrew Lloyd Webber Broadway musical (photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)

BAD CINDERELLA
Imperial Theatre
249 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 4, $48-$298
badcinderellabroadway.com

At last Friday night’s performance of Bad Cinderella at the Imperial, a boisterous trio of big men sat behind us, their belly laughs and rousing cheers shaking our row throughout the first act. During intermission, I turned to my friend and said, “I want to watch what they’re watching.”

Indeed, what show were they watching?

I am not going to jump on the bandwagon and take advantage of the American retitling of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cinderella, which has added the word Bad, but it’s hard not to. I found the two-and-a-half-hour musical more insulting and embarrassing than downright bad; I knew we were in trouble when my musical-loving friend wasn’t giving even perfunctory applause after songs. “You’ve ruined theater for me forever,” she told me outside at intermission, as if it was my fault for taking her. “I might never see another show.”

Bad Cinderella is everything you’ve heard and worse.

Lloyd Webber, whose composer son Nick tragically died from gastric cancer on March 25 at the age of forty-three, has some fierce competition in the alt-fairy-tale Broadway musical realm. Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman’s Wicked has been packing them in on the Great White Way since 2003. The recent limited-run revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods was spectacular. And musical minions are still kvelling over Douglas Carter Beane’s 2013 family-friendly adaptation of Rodgers + Hammerstein’s more traditional Cinderella.

Bad Cinderella is ostensibly about being proud of one’s personal identity and defying the populist adherence to conventional ideas of beauty and success. But in its attempts to be clever, unpredictable, and, dare I say, woke, it steps all over itself, fumbling its themes and confusing its basic principles.

The Queen (Grace McLean) and the Stepmother (Carolee Carmello) do battle in Bad Cinderella (photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)

The show opens with the innocuous “Buns ’n’ Roses / Beauty Is Our Duty,” in which random characters at the Belleville Market revel in their hotness amid garish sexual innuendo. “Hot buns! Check out my hot buns!” the hunky baker declares. “True, there are not buns / Equal to mine.”

Various townspeople blast out, “Our town Belleville is a place so picturesque, / Makes every other town jealous. / So exquisite, every other seems grotesque. . . . Every single citizen’s a cut and chiseled god, / Beauty is our duty. / Everyone among us has a ripped and rockin’ bod. . . . We’re quite shallow, / We’re obsessed with how we look. / It’s quite OK if you’re dumb here. / Every lawn is manicured / As well as every hand.”

“Wrinkles are not tolerated, torsos must be tanned. / Acne is a misdemeanor, / Cellulite is banned. . . . So what if we’re a bit snooty” is about as sophisticated as Tony winner David Zippel’s lyrics gets.

The book, by Oscar winner Emerald Fennell and adapted by playwright Alexis Scheer for the Broadway run, is a “hot mess,” which is what the townspeople call Cinderella. Cinderella is ripe for interpretation; the Brothers Grimm and Rodgers & Hammerstein are only two of thousands who have told a similar tale going back two millennia. The most famous version was written in 1697 by Charles Perrault, the basis for the 1950 animated film by Walt Disney, a rags-to-riches story of magic, abuse, discrimination, misogyny, and outmoded ideals of what makes a person attractive and desired.

Director Laurence Connor and choreographer JoAnn M. Hunter hit a brick wall just a few minutes in, after the unveiling of a statue in honor of the missing Prince Charming (Cameron Loyal) reveals that Cinderella (Linedy Genao) has defaced it with a graffiti-esque banner declaring, “Beauty Sucks.” The townspeople call her a “psychopath” who “should be arrested,” but a moment later the hunky men are lifting her up as if she’s a hero, not a villain, and she proudly proclaims, “I’m a loner, I’m a freak, a rebel. . . . a girl from the gutter, unpleasant peasant, no one, a nutter, unwelcome present.”

Cinderella is badly mistreated by her stepmother (Carolee Carmello) and two gorgeous but hollow and dimwitted stepsisters, Adele (Sami Gayle) and Marie (Morgan Higgins). Her only friend is Prince Sebastian (Jordan Dobson), now heir to the throne, a shy young man with no kingly aspirations who the women in the town deride, complaining, “What a disappointment is this prince! / Look at him! My heart can’t help but wince! / He’s not the type on which girls set their sights.”

It doesn’t help that Sebastian is handsome, even in his militaristic outfit, even if he is dour, unhappy to be thrust into the limelight, while Cinderella, in her long black leather jacket, tight-fitting shirt, and maroon pants, is not only cool but hot, at least to the audience if not to the vain citizens of Belleville. “I’m the opposite of ev’rthing you are!” she sings. So why, about halfway through the show, does she go to Godmother (Christina Acosta Robinson), a nasty plastic surgeon, wanting her to transform her into a beauty, to be just like everyone else so the prince will choose her for his bride at the ball?

“The damsel wants to save the prince in distress. How very modern
of you,” Godmother says, but there’s nothing modern about it. No longer a fairy, Godmother doesn’t work magic, so her assertion that Cinderella’s makeover will last only until midnight is absurd, as is Sebastian’s inability to recognize Cinderella at the dance.

Bad Cinderella is laden with huge plot holes and incongruities galore; while there’s no need to stick close to any of the familiar versions, it feels like Connor (Les Misérables, School of Rock), Lloyd Webber (Jesus Christ Superstar, Cats, The Phantom of the Opera), Fennell (Promising Young Woman, Killing Eve), Scheer (Our Dear Dead Drug Lord, Laughs in Spanish), and Zippel (City of Angels, The Woman in White) choose the least reasonable turn at each crossroad as they teeter back and forth between old-fashioned values and contemporary mores.

Gabriela Tylesova’s sets, dominated by the forest’s ominous tree branches, serve their purpose, although her costumes leave something to be desired, specifically, men’s shirts, as several male dancers are bare-chested every step of the way. Luc Verschueren’s hair and wigs are fun, Bruno Poet’s lights are bright, and Gareth Owen’s sound is loud. The title song might stick with you for a while, but you’ll try hard to get it out of your head; the British show earned a Grammy nomination for Best Musical Theater Album, naming Andrew, Nick, and Greg Wells as producers.

Carmello (Scandalous, Lestat) and McLean (Cyrano, Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812) go too far over the top, especially in what should have been a classic duet in which they battle each other (“I Know You”). Dobson (Hadestown, West Side Story) lacks style and energy as Sebastian but is still likable, while Genao (On Your Feet, Dear Evan Hansen) fares well as Cinderella despite the inconsistencies built into the character.

Ultimately, Bad Cinderella is unable to figure out what story it wants to tell and who its audience is. The creative team should talk to those three men sitting behind me, even if they did quiet down significantly in the second act.

PATTIE BOYD PRESENTS MY LIFE IN PICTURES

Pattie Boyd will be discussing and signing copies of her new book at Rizzoli (photo courtesy Reel Art Press)

Who: Pattie Boyd, Dave Brolan
What: Book talk and signing
Where: Rizzoli Bookstore, 1133 Broadway at 26th St., 212-759-2424
When: Monday, April 3, $59.87 (includes admission, signing line access, and book), 6:00
Why: “I decided very early on that there never needed to be a dull moment in life. If you find yourself feeling dull, just change your mind,” model, photographer, and muse Pattie Boyd proffers in her new book, My Life in Pictures (Reel Art Press, December 2022, $49.95).

Born in England in March 1944, Boyd has not had a very boring life. She went to boarding school in Nairobi, began modeling as a teenager, and married and divorced George Harrison and Eric Clapton. She was the muse behind Harrison’s “Something” and Clapton’s “Layla” and “Wonderful Tonight” and appeared on an endless stream of magazine covers. But all the while she was dazzling people in front of the camera, she was also taking her own photographs.

On April 3 at 6:00, Boyd will be at Rizzoli to discuss her life and career, joined by photo editor, curator, and archivist Dave Brolan from Reel Art Press. My Life in Pictures features photographs of Boyd by such lensmen as David Bailey, Eric Swayne, Norman Parkinson, Terence Donovan, Robert Freeman, and Robert Whitaker; photos by Boyd of Twiggy, Mick Jagger, Billy Preston, and the Beatles; and diary entries, artifacts, artworks, and other memorabilia, including letters from John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Tickets are still available with a copy of the book and come with access to the signing line. (Boyd will only be signing books purchased at Rizzoli.)

“I liked the idea of being independent and working but not all the time,” Boyd, who married real estate developer Rod Weston in 2015, writes in the book. “I wasn’t pinned down to anything nine to five. I thought that would be an incredibly boring thing to do.”

ROBYN HITCHCOCK AT BOWERY BALLROOM

Who: Robyn Hitchcock
What: Live concert with full band
Where: Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St. between Bowery & Chrystie St., 212-260-4700
When: Saturday, April 1, $25, 8:00
Why: Throughout a long career that has included leading the Soft Boys, the Egyptians, and the Venus 3 in addition to extensive solo work, Paddington-born singer-songwriter and raconteur Robyn Hitchcock has regaled concertgoers with hilarious stories about the music business and wry views on the human condition while putting out a bevy of terrific albums and memorable songs. During the pandemic, Hitchcock took to Facebook in a big way, posting memories, promoting new material, and suddenly going live, playing short, impromptu online gigs from his hotel room or at home. On the Mandolin streaming platform, which lets performers get paid by fans, Hitchcock has also been performing longer living room concerts, known as “Live from Tubby’s House,” named after one of his beloved Scottish Fold cats, Tubby Vincent, who often makes an appearance, along with Ringo M. Stardust the cat, Perry the lobster, and Hitchcock’s partner, fellow singer-songwriter Emma Swift.

Emma Swift and Robyn Hitchcock are psyched to be back out on the road and not just dreaming of trains (photo by Kelley Stolz)

But live audiences are irreplaceable, and Hitchcock is beyond thrilled to be touring again, traveling the world in support of his latest record, the fabulous Shufflemania! (Tiny Ghost Records, October 2022), and sharing his journey every day on Facebook. The album is a jangly mélange of pure pop psychedelia, highlighted by such songs as “The Shuffle Man,” “Socrates in Thin Air,” “The Sir Tommy Shovell,” and “The Raging Muse.” Hitchcock explains on Bandcamp, “What is Shufflemania!? It’s surfing fate, trusting your intuition, and bullfighting with destiny. It’s embracing the random and dancing with it, even when it needs to clean its teeth. It’s probably the most consistent album I’ve made. It’s a party record, with a few solemn moments, as parties are wont to supply. Groove on, groovers!” (On April 23, Hitchcock will release the all-instrumental Life After Infinity, boasting such titles as “Plesiosaurs in the Desert,” “Tubby Among the Nightingales,” and “Mr Ringerson’s Picnic.”)

On the tour, he has played solo acoustic and electric and with different band configurations depending on where he is and which friends of his are available; on April 1, he was supposed to be joined by Kelley Stolz and Bart Davenport at Bowery Ballroom, but they both have just contracted Covid. Instead, he’ll be accompanied by Kurt Bloch (Fastbacks, the Young Fresh Fellows) on guitar, Julia Rydholm (Ladybug Transistor, Essex Green) on bass, and Patrick Berkery (the War on Drugs, the Pernice Brothers) on drums, promising that “the show will start quietly and finish loud. . . . We’ll condense forty-five years of music into ninety minutes as best we can.” In addition to Hitchcock gems, be on the lookout for witty repartee and classic covers, from Dylan, the Beatles, the Psychedelic Furs, and unexpected surprises, especially because it will be April Fools’ Day.

THE DOWNTOWN SEDER

Who: David Broza, BETTY, Bettye LaVette, Paul Shapiro’s Ribs & Brisket, Basya and Saadya Schechter, Mark Vincent, Gary Lucas and the Golem, Modi, Resistance Revival Chorus, Dr. Ruth, Mayor Eric Adams, Congressman Max Rose, Terrance Floyd, Vince Warren, Jason Flom, Lorenzo Johnson, more
What: Downtown Seder 2023
Where: City Winery, 25 Eleventh Ave. at Fifteenth St.
When: Sunday, April 2, $85-$125 (livestream free), 1:00
Why: For more than three decades, Michael Dorf has been hosting all-star seders to celebrate Passover, concentrating on freedom and justice. The latest iteration takes place on Sunday afternoon, April 2, at City Winery, which Dorf opened on Varick St. in 2008 and moved to Hudson River Park’s Pier 57 in 2020. Attendees will be seated at long, communal tables and have a vegetarian meal with four glasses of wine as they go through the Haggadah, the illustrated text that tells the story of the Jewish people’s exodus from Egypt. This year’s participants include musicians David Broza, BETTY, Paul Shapiro’s Ribs & Brisket, Basya and Saadya Schechter, Mark Vincent, Resistance Revival Chorus, and Gary Lucas and the Golem, comedian Modi, Dr. Ruth, Mayor Eric Adams, Congressman Max Rose, Vince Warren of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Jason Flom and Lorenzo Johnson of the Innocence Project. Terrance Floyd, George Floyd’s brother, will be asking “The Four Questions”; the setlist is also likely to include “Dayenu,” “Chad Gadya,” “Go Down Moses,” and “The Ten Plagues.”

“It says in the beginning of the Haggadah that one should recount and retell the story of the exodus from Egypt in the language that you understand. The ancient Israelites didn’t know Hebrew, so they told the story in Armenian. Americans read it in English,” Dorf said in a statement. “Our interpretation is to tell the story in the language of the arts, in ways we can relate and truly empathize with what it would be like to be in bondage, to be emancipated, and the universal civil rights we need to continually remind ourselves.” During the pandemic, City Winery livestreamed its Downtown Seders; you can check out the 2021 virtual event above. And it was just announced that the 2023 seder will be streamed live for free here.

black odyssey

Ulysses Lincoln (Sean Boyce Johnson) searches for a way back to Harlem in black odyssey (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

black odyssey
Classic Stage Company, Lynn F. Angelson Theater
136 East 13th St. between Third & Fourth Aves.
Through March 26, $77
classicstage.org

Marcus Gardley’s black odyssey is one of those genius ideas you hope will pay off. It turns out to be a mixed bag, as poet, playwright, assistant professor, actor, and screenwriter Gardley and director Stevie Walker-Webb have so many takes on the story that it sometimes feels like they’ve thrown everything but the kitchen sink at the audience, and the message feels clogged in the end.

A reimagining of Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey through the lens of African American history, the play premiered in Denver in 2014 and was revised three years later for the California Shakespeare Theater. Revised again for its New York premiere, it is now completing a run at Classic Stage, taking place on David Goldstein’s minimalist set, a glossy black rectangular platform, the only props two halves of a wooden boat.

The 150-minute show (with intermission) opens with a chorus, representing chess pieces, delivering a fourth-wall-breaking prologue.

“Let us begin at the beginning so we may end at the end / Shake off the cares of this day, my friend. Close your eyes / Breathe in the perfume of mother nature: her still waters run deep / As do her blue skies. There is no griot greater. / And like her, we have come to sow and season and play/ But don’t get too excited, this part here is just . . . foreplay,” they announce with a Shakespearean touch.

“You are the true star in our galaxy. / Only you can guide our ship through this tale we call ‘black odyssey.’ / It is by the light of your smile, the sparkle in your eyes / That we compass our way to the end. So, hold on tight, my friend. / Yet get loose: let the music move you some. Sing if you feel like singing / And if you can’t hold a tune then baby hold a hum. Sway. / Dance if your feet can’t stand you. Clap or stomp even if it scares you. / Shout out when the spirit gets in your bones. But please, for the love of the gods turn off your beeping cellphones.”

Harriett D. Foy brings the house down as Aunt Tee in black odyssey at Classic Stage (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Deus (James T. Alfred), the god of the sky, and Paw Sidin (Jimonn Cole), the god of the sea, are playing chess with mortals’ bodies. Paw Sidin is determined to exact revenge on Ulysses Lincoln (Sean Boyce Johnson), who killed Paw Sidin’s son, Poly’famous (Marcus Gladney Jr.), in battle. Aunt Tee (Harriett D. Foy), the goddess of war who is Deus’s daughter and Ulysses’s aunt, is ready to do whatever is necessary to protect her nephew.

In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus endures many trials as he attempts to return to his wife, Penelope, and son, Telemachus, in Ithaca after the Trojan War; here, Ulysses is struggling to get home to his wife, Nella P. (D. Woods), and son, Malachai (Gladney Jr.), in Harlem after fighting overseas. “I went to war to make a better life for myself,” he explains. “I wasn’t supposed to serve. I signed up during peacetime but then 9/11 happened, the World Trade Center came down, and before I knew it . . . I was in Afghanistan.”

When Ulysses joined the navy, Nella P. was eight months pregnant. Sixteen years later, Nella refuses to believe that her still-missing husband is dead while she raises Malachai and is beguiled by a suitor (Cole). Over the years, Paw Sidin has put on disguises to trick Nella, punishing her and Malachai. “Revenge is a meal best served raw,” the sea god declares with relish.

The story goes back and forth between the present and flashbacks of Ulysses’s adventures, in which he encounters characters revamped from Homer’s original, including sea creatures Scylla (Foy) and Carib’diss (Adrienne C. Moore), Ulysses’s grandmother Calypso (Foy), the Soul Siren (Lance Coadie Williams), Circe (Moore), Benevolence Nausicca Sabine (Tẹmídayọ Amay), and shagadelic prophet Super Fly Tireseas (Alfred).

A Black family fights for survival in New York premiere at Classic Stage (photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Ulysses’s adventures range from a powerful section in which he joins a Black family floating on their roof in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to being serenaded by Carib’diss, Scylla, and the Soul Siren channeling some of the greatest Black stars of the 1960s and ’70s.

Although the show has several fine performances and terrific individual scenes, Gardley overstuffs the narrative with too many historical and contemporary references, from comical to serious, dating between 1619 and 2017, as Ulysses battles four hundred years of racial injustice. Among the kaleidoscopic references are Sylvia’s Restaurant, Rosa Parks, the Studio Museum in Harlem, James Baldwin, the Schomburg Center, Jay Z, the Hamptons, the subway, Langston Hughes, Famous Fish Market, Malcolm X, JFK, MLK Jr., and The Color Purple.

The play works best when it focuses on the undying love between Ulysses and Nella and Ulysses’s desperate attempts to rejoin his family. Otherwise, it’s all over the place, as are the performances. The standouts are Woods, who gives heart to Nella; Cole as the ever-evil Paw Sidin; Foy as the scene-stealing Aunt Tee; and Johnson, who is marvelous as Ulysses, who represents four centuries of continuing suffering and oppression as well as the unconquerable spirit of Blacks in America.

Gardley (The House That Will Not Stand) and Walker-Webb (one in two, Ain’t No Mo’) try too hard to make black odyssey epic; the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts, as captivating and powerful as some of those parts are.

EVERY OCEAN HUGHES: RIVER

Every Ocean Hughes’s River will be performed March 24–26 in conjunction with photography exhibit (photo courtesy Every Ocean Hughes)

Who: Every Ocean Hughes
What: Live performance
Where: Whitney Museum of American Art, the Susan and John Hess Family Theater, 99 Gansevoort St.
When: March 24, 7:00; March 25, 4:00 & 7:00; March 26, 4:00, $25; exhibition continues through April 2
Why: Multidisciplinary artist Every Ocean Hughes activates her Whitney photography exhibition “Every Ocean Hughes: Alive Side” with four live performances this weekend in the Susan and John Hess Family Theater. Formerly known as Emily Roysdon, Hughes investigates legacy, loss, and inheritance in “Alive Side,” consisting of photographs of the west side piers right outside the Whitney; Hughes calls them “unmarked memorials, found monuments to the lives that needed that unregulated space. To those who died living queerly. Those who died of neglect, poverty, AIDS, violence, and politics. And to those seeking life by crossing West Street.” The black-and-white photos of the dilapidated wooden piers sticking out of the water, some works sliced diagonally in half, are framed in bright pastel colors that evoke the rainbow pride flag. The exhibit also features the forty-minute video One Big Bag, in which a death doula portrayed by Lindsay Rico describes and enacts rituals surrounding the end of life; “the whole process is a creative process,” she says.

Every Ocean Hughes, The Piers Untitled (#12 collaged, #9, #14 collaged, #4), 2009-23 (photo by Ron Amstutz)

On March 24–26, the Maryland-born Hughes, who lives and works in her home state and Stockholm, will present River, a thirty-minute live performance incorporating song, text, choreographed movement, and set design exploring the crossing that takes place at death, the descent into the underworld. The cast includes Rico, Geo WyeX, Æirrinn, and Nora Brown, with movement direction by Monica Mirabile, costumes by Montana Levi Blanco, and lighting by Timothy Johnson. Tickets are $25; it is recommended they be purchased in advance.