Five years ago, a thoroughly satisfying musical with a rock/gospel score received its world premiere at MetroStage. It was a big hit, with ticket demand causing an extension of its planned five-week run to almost three months.
Now MetroStage brings the show back for a planned six-week run with one of the three original stars.
The show has been reworked somewhat with a revised script, a different set, new costumes and quite a few of the songs either cut, revised, replaced or relocated within the story.
The changes seem to work against the strengths of the original piece ,which was marked by a sense of restraint and subtlety. Subtle is certainly not a word that would apply to this new version.
Still, many of the words we used to describe the piece back then still apply. Our review in 2002 said: "...The setting is Washington at the peak of the civil rights/anti-war turmoil of 1969. (Lyricist and director Thomas W.) Jones and composer William Hubbard create a musical with songs sounding very much at home in the time and place, the middle class black neighborhoods where passions were heightened by issues of both national and personal importance."
We also said "three talented actress/singers portray the sisters who seem only to gather at times of family grief. The play is set on the evening after the third funeral in as many years. Having lost first their mother and then their father, they have now lost their only brother to the carnage in South East Asia."
ONE OF THOSE talented performers was Bernadette Mitchell, who again contributes her rich voice, her strong stage presence and a sense of dignity that might have been termed "gravitas" when that word was in such vogue during the Clinton years.
She plays the oldest "Sistah," a proud woman who has built a career at a local college but who is still single and unsatisfied.
Mitchell is now joined by strong-voiced Crystal Fox in the part of the strong-willed middle sister who has married and moved to Cincinnati, where her suburban life is less satisfying than she had expected it to be; and by a trim and muscular Felicia Curry as the youngest sister, a flower-child in tie-dyed tee shirt and full, fluffed afro.
Curry has the strongest voice of the three but neither of the others are lacking in the ability to raise the roof of the relatively small theater on North Royal Street. Why each is amplified through a wireless microphone is puzzling, especially when strange echo effects are
layered on their clear, clean singing.
Strangely for a musical so rooted in a single time and place, this version doesn't say in its program, as the original did, "Time: Autumn, 1969. Place:
Washington, DC." It takes a while for this information to be delivered and that is time that the audience's attention is focused on details that could
well have been dispensed with in advance.
What is even stranger is that this piece, which originally was billed as "inspired by 'Three Sisters' by Anton Chekhov" and which had a director's note about "Chekhovian rhythms," is now presented simply as "Story by Janet Pryce, Book and Lyrics by Thomas W. Jones II." The inspiration is still there, as each of the three sisters characters reflect those in Chekhov's
play. Now, however, the credit is not shared.
With Hubbard accompanying the cast on keyboard, music fills the hall for most of the evening. Even if the storytelling aspects of the musical aren't quite as subtly effective, the songs remain strong material for the trio of Mitchell, Fox and Curry, who certainly take full advantage of the opportunity. As a result, audiences have a chance to hear these three great voices raised in solos, duets and trios that truly soar.
Brad Hathaway reviews theater in Virginia, Washington and Maryland as well as Broadway, and edits Potomac Stages, a Web site covering theater in the
region (www.PotomacStages.com). He can be reached at Brad@PotomacStages.com.