Musicals typically depend on acquainted patterns — a patter track right here, an “I would like” quantity there — and biographical musicals may properly be essentially the most predictable of all. The songs are blended with sufficient again story to make the viewers really feel as in the event that they haven’t simply paid some huge cash to look at a canopy act, and there may be historically a juicy, awards-baiting tour de power for the lead performer.
And so it has gone, efficiently so within the case of such hits as “The Boy From Oz” (Hugh Jackman as Peter Allen), “Stunning” (Jessie Mueller as Carole King) and “Tina” (Adrienne Warren as Tina Turner).
Laiona Michelle’s tribute to Nina Simone, “Little Woman Blue,” which just lately opened at New World Levels, matches the overall format, with some attention-grabbing, if not all the time efficiently applied, idiosyncratic touches. The present’s most distinctive attribute is its try to eschew linear storytelling and its refusal to provide the anticipated touchstones. This strategy befits Simone, who hardly ever adopted predetermined paths, however the ensuing impressionistic portrait advantages from a viewer’s familiarity with the essential benchmarks of the topic’s artwork, persona and life.
Every of the night’s two acts takes place at a live performance from a key interval in Simone’s profession: The primary was in Westbury, N.Y., in April 1968, a number of days after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; the second was on the Montreux Jazz Competition in Switzerland, in July 1976. Backed by a quick onstage trio led by the music director and pianist Mark Fifer, Michelle portrays Simone with a fiery dedication to the musician’s temper swings, prickliness and arch stylings. She emulates among the banter and the set lists, however not that a lot. And because the rights to “Mississippi Goddam” couldn’t be secured for this present, she and Fifer wrote the unique “Offended Black Lady” as a type of conceptual homage.
Principally these historic concert events act as springboards for snapshots of an typically tormented, all the time looking artist, similar to songs have been springboards in Simone’s freewheeling reside act. (It isn’t a coincidence that Justin Vivian Bond and Taylor Mac, whose performances may go from erratic to sensible and again once more in a second, are each excellent Simone interpreters.)
If there’s a thread, it’s the fury of Simone combating towards the expectations positioned upon her as a Black feminine artist. She disliked being labeled jazz, for instance. “That may be a time period invented by white individuals to establish Black individuals,” she says within the present. “I. Am. Classical.” However her genius rested in utilizing one to feed the opposite, resulting in some impressed musical juxtapositions by Michelle (who wrote the script with further materials from the director Devanand Janki).
At one level, Simone’s piano instructor Muriel Mazzanovich, a.okay.a. Miss Mazzy, says, utilizing her younger pupil’s actual title: “Eunice Kathleen Waymon, I’d like so that you can meet Johann Sebastian Bach.” Michelle’s Simone instantly goes into the road “Ooh-oo baby, issues are gonna get simpler,” from the 5 Stairsteps’ “O-o-h Youngster,” and that beat may properly be essentially the most hopeful second within the present.
“Little Woman Blue” loses focus throughout the Montreux live performance, because the push and pull between Simone’s expertise and her demons, her activism and the world round her, turns into more durable to pin down — it feels as if Michelle was someway bedeviled by her topic. Then once more, she isn’t the primary, nor the final: Liz Garbus’s Oscar-nominated documentary is tellingly titled “What Occurred, Miss Simone?”
Little Woman Blue
At New World Levels, Manhattan; littlegirlblue.nyc. Operating time: 2 hours.
